Repeat It Today With Tears (20 page)

I do not attempt to envisage Julian; he was that boy I used to know. For a time I think I had another friend, a woman that once played cards with me.

‘I don’t have any friends just now. You mustn’t think I mind though, because I don’t.’

What an irony, what a pity that you didn’t do that. It is Derrick Hearn, muscling in again with his dreams of rural Suffolk and its pre-lapsarian vegetable gardens. He should have heard what the women at the Nine Elms wash baths used to say about certain perpendicular vegetables. But what a pity, he persists. Do you not wish it had all turned out differently?

What a pity, Dr Derrick Mr Hearn the Hunter, what a pity it is that that you are so stupid that you miss my point. Did I not say, right at the beginning, that in none of this did I ever know any doubt? I knew what I was doing, you can be sure of that.

‘Susie, I will try and come again, before the move. There are some more books, if you would like them.’

It was during the night that I realised what was confusing me. Perhaps not that night, it could have been later in the week or month. My father Jack was a kind man and, in talking to me of his death, his widow had seemed to be a kind woman. Actually I would not have objected if she had presumed to hug me. Almost, I wish that she had. If Olive had hugged me we would have formed some kind of human chain, reaching back to Jack alive and the last time he had held each of us in his arms. I wonder when that was, for her.

I know well the very last time that Jack held me in his arms. It was during and after making love to me on the morning of the day he died. When he was done with gasps and moans he trailed his fingers over me at his leisure and called me his sweet thing and his dear girl and his beloved. Some in my circumstances – I mean only other lovers – might say that if only they had known it was to be the last time they would have been more ardent, more generous, more tender. I, of course, have no need to say any such thing. If I seem arrogant then I maintain that it is
permissible and perfectly excusable. For I know that my responses to my father-lover could not have been bettered, ever.

Anyway, the point is, that I should try to remember her exact words: was Olive sorry he was dead or was she sorry to tell me that he was dead because if it was the second she could not know that I had known him, at the end?

I have begun to wait for the post to come, in case Olive should send me something else. I know that it is always one of the grey coated porters who distributes internal and external mail around this institution; sometimes you can see them crossing the car park with a whole trolley full. Once I was misguidedly excited by the arrival of a large envelope for me. I should have known immediately that the backward sloping blue biro could not be from Olive but I wondered if someone had done the address on her behalf and so I worried that she had been taken ill with her heart. Then I recognised the handwriting as Ron’s. Bizarrely, he must have included me on the mailing list for the new venture which he and my mother had launched, a driving school of their own. They had called it the Abba School of Motoring; presumably that was in order to be the first entry in the telephone book listings. They had had printed promotional desk calendars in red and black. It was amusing for me to imagine the earnest efforts of Ron over his list, detailing the addresses of other trades people, innocuous, decent and honest premises – wallpaper shops and repairs garages and post offices, then me, wayward deviant daughter of his co-habitee woman friend, c/o the mental hospital.

On another occasion I made a grave error of judgment; while the porter had sloped off for a smoke I went into the corridor to scan his abandoned post trolley but Herne the Hunter, unbeknown
to me, was lurking in the ward office. ‘What do you need, Susanna?’ he asked me.

‘Nothing from you, at any rate,’ I said and returned to my room but my heart was beating fantastically fast in case he had guessed the object of my interest. I lay down and hid my face under the cover, fearing that he would follow me. I knew that he had seen me startled by his sudden appearance and he might think that thereby he had gained some advantage, some Achilles chink in my protective armour. I shut my eyes inside the dark warm tent of the blanket.

‘Look at the picture on the wall behind her,’ I sit at the painting desk and Jack leans over me, pointing at the Vermeer on the page. On his breath I can smell the Demerara sugar, two spoonsful, that I stirred into his coffee for him.

‘There are symbols in that picture; the sea is said to represent love and the ship is the lover, therefore we can suppose that the letter she is reading is from her sweetheart or husband who is a sailor away at sea.’

That is almost the skipping rhyme and the singing game, blown on the breeze up and over the high wall of the infants’ playground between the Commons:
A sailor went to sea sea sea to see what he could see see see but all that he could see see see was the bottom of the deep blue sea sea sea…

You never wrote me a letter, Jack. You told it all into my ear instead. I wish you had written me something, even if you had just left me a note pinned to the door. Some scrap for me to hold on to. Gone to deliver drawings, back soon, please wait. Love Jack. Gone to fFitch’s for more inks. Love and kisses Jack. Susie, I love you so much that you cannot and will not live without me, signed Jack. Like some Renaissance polymath you have stripped my veins and turned them inside out but you never recorded it on paper. You did not even leave me so much as a scribble in a
margin. Nothing.

If I had left you for a while, if I had agreed to go to Oxford would you have written to me then, I wonder? And what would we have said to each other, in the mails? Would you have repeated on paper what you murmured to me in all the sweet long nights and vowed in the aching early mornings when sometimes, to draw out that exquisite anticipation, you stilled yourself in the action of entering me, like someone paused to listen. And how would I have replied to you? Cramming into a small blue envelope what huge words of love to be carried like an eggshell across Oxford’s hard cobbles to the pillar box.

It is not fair that he left me no testament. He should have known to do so, he was older and he had seen far more than I have seen. If we had been allowed to go together it would not have mattered but the greatest unfairness is that I must stay such a long time in a waiting place, knowing that the evidence of he and I will be lost forever. With pity for myself and state a lump swells in my throat. Jack used to nearly choke me sometimes, when he came into my mouth. I never got to like that very much but to see my father in his ecstasies was thrill enough for me… And this now, this waiting place, it is my punishment of course. I knew, when I sealed this bargain, that I would have to make atonement. For now there is nothing to do; I must keep silent and suffer.

Y

Before she went home she gave me a pink pill and made me take it with Bournvita. It was only four o’clock in the afternoon but she said that it would be better if I could settle myself down early. For a while I did but then I had dreams and the elderly man from the next wing was very disturbed. Before I saw him I always used to imagine that his appearance must be fantastical and melodramatic, as poor howling Mrs Rochester is envisaged; but then I did see him one day and he was just an ordinary old London man in a vest. He might once have been a boxer. In a second year English class we debated who was the most frightening, everyone else said the wife, that it was obvious, I was the only one who thought that pipe-smoking Grace Poole was worse.

It was a long time before anyone came, I had the light on but it was very harsh each time when I opened my eyes between banging my head on the metal bed end. It was a man that came;
more often it is men at night. They have a highly developed technique of making you swallow medication when they are in a hurry. Farm animals are handled like that. His colleague was shouting at him from beyond the swing doors at the end of the corridor. I lay down because I knew that he needed me to do so, as he backed hurriedly out of the room, he lifted his hand in a halting gesture, ‘Stay where you are,’ he said, ‘just stay where you are.’

I tried but the howling of the Bertha Rochester man was like a wild animal and I could not block out the indignity of the situation that he – who had once been fearless and strong, a bragger and a brawler – must now be enduring.

Perhaps there was a change of shifts because next time it seemed to be two different orderlies. One said, ‘Jesus Christ, she’s blacked her bloody eyes now.’

They brought more medication, this time in a syringe. I knew that it would be responsible of me to explain that I had had something earlier but my tongue was woolly and my throat was sore from weeping or some such that I had done. Anyway, to me rehearsal for oblivion is always welcome.

Knock-out one combined with knock-out two proved most efficacious. I was unconscious for I do not know how many hours or even days. Subsequently I was in a state where I could hear but not speak and feel. I could not move at all, I could not even lift my eyelids, though these may have been made the heavier by the bruising of them. At one point someone said, ‘Check her signs for me, will you? I’m not sure what I can find.’

It felt as though I was bound to the bed and also weighted down so I knew that I was unable to respond. Once I wished that I could reassure Bonnie Jean for she sounded most anxious. The next time I was aware of voices it was her again but she was saying, ‘Our Susanna’s not with us today, I’m afraid, such a pity,
when you’ve come all this way again.’

‘What has happened to her face?’ asks Olive.

‘She hurts herself, my dear, they do that, sometimes, bang their heads, cut themselves, you can’t always get to them in time.’

Sounds went in and out like tuning the old wooden wireless we once had; I liked the names on the dial, Hilversum, Budapest, Eireann…

‘Will she get better?’

… Munich, Moscow, Allouis, Luxembourg…

‘Who’s to say, my dear? Not you or I, anyway. Would you like to stay a while, sometimes it will bring them round, if they’re aware of someone in the room with them. Here, take this chair and I’ll fetch us some tea, I was going to sit with her anyway.’

Olive must have been sitting watching me. Her same eyes would have watched Jack many times. In physics they explained about sight with pinhole cameras but I did not understand. She would have looked at him without even seeing him, because she expected him to be there. I always saw him. Ever faithful I watched and learned and I knew every nuance of his expression, not even the smallest muscle of his face would tic without me recognising immediately whether it was bliss or close to bliss, fatigue, concentration, anxiety or memory, or that transcendental, contemplative state of perfect love which I, blessed one, was able to induce.

I heard the cups and saucers. ‘It’s a good thing, I think, that my husband never saw this,’ said Olive.

‘So you’re a widow then, is that right?’

Bonnie Jean has been married for twenty-six years. Her husband’s name is Leo; they are very content. Sometimes when she is changing the dressing on my arm she talks of their home life and I glimpse it as though through the yellow lighted windows of houses seen from a train. The worst row they have ever had
was over the subject of trade union membership. Their two children are grown up and making their own way. On Friday afternoons Leo comes to meet her after work to help with the heavy shopping.

Now, the vicarious shiver indulged from the place of safety, Bonnie Jean wants to know how someone else’s husband was taken away. ‘What happened, had he been ill?’

‘No, not at all, it wasn’t that.’

There is a tone in women’s voices, even solid women, which comes when they are talking about something which is difficult for them; it is querulous, almost, but paradoxically that querulousness is an indication that they are being brave, rather than timorous.

‘There was some sort of accident; at the inquest the possibility that he… that he had killed himself arose… Suicide, you know, suicide is the ultimate form of violence. I hadn’t realised that before, it was just a word, albeit with dreadful connotations for those concerned. But when it was being said, about my own husband, I could see then that it is the most extreme form of violence…’

I still cannot speak or move but going through the motions of attempting either action is so effortful that it renders me unable to hear. It acts upon my ears like being underwater. When I next can listen I know that they are looking at me, with my funny bits of doll hair and my damaged eyes. I had a doll once, bought for me unexpectedly by that Clapham landlord. I called her Marigold and to my great regret I cut off her lovely yellow nylon hair during a dressing game; I tried to fix it back again by plaiting it in but it was not a success.

‘I must say I’ve wondered if there was always some flaw, something wrong, and if so, whether it could have been passed on to Susie.’

‘Did he show any signs before, of being disturbed?’

‘None. He was in a bad way when we first met, but that was alcohol, mainly. Once we got through that, no, not at all. Not the easiest of men, he had his dark side, but nothing untoward.’

‘And were you happy?’

‘Yes, well I thought so, most of the time. He liked to be alone a lot; I stayed in our house in Suffolk…’

I expect that one of the first things that the father of the new family will do is fix up a swing, on one of the apple trees.

‘He used to live and work in London, during the week. In that last year of his life, that’s when things changed.’

‘Why so?’

‘Another woman, inevitably; entirely unoriginal, I know, but my goodness, he had it bad. I used to watch him when he came home at weekends, when he didn’t know I was looking, and I used to think my God, Jack, one of us is headed for a fall. I tried warning him, gently, but it didn’t make any difference.’