Sabine (11 page)

She has summoned up enough energy now to take
the volume from me, and is scrabbling through the section labelled ‘Etiology'. I'm not quite sure what this is, but I reckon it must be causes. Ectopic pregnancy, she announces with another snort. Well, it can't be that.

I don't know what ectopic means either and have to ask.

Means extra-uterine. Means outside the uterus. Means outside the womb,
bête.
Means the fertilised ovum is in your tubes, up your nostrils, wherever you like but not in the womb. Anyway, it can't be that. Leukaemia neither, or there'd be hypochromia, and the blood test rules that out. A bust vein in the digestive tract, then? Impossible – where would all the blood go? It'd still be around somewhere, causing trouble; at the very least I'd have indigestion and that's one thing I haven't got. What about ulcers? A duodenal, for instance, that somehow they've missed? Oh, it's crazy, if only I could dip my insides in a bowl of water, like the inner chamber of a bicycle tyre, I'd see straight away where the puncture is.
Merde,
this book is heavy …

And off she goes again, drifting into her private stratosphere, the effort of concentration has been too much for her. The book slips to the floor, the skin turns ashen, the eyes tilt, the breath comes faster and faster and lighter and lighter – little puppy breaths. Where is she? Where does she go when she wafts away like this? Where is she bound for? Warmth, she needs warmth. Maybe one of Dr
la Forge's special emergency injections. This fit looks like it's a bad one. I start rubbing her hands and call urgently for Ghislaine, who is sewing in the next room.

She is beside me in an instant – catapulted by anxiety – and together, silently, we go through our usual routine. Extra blankets, hot-water bottles for the feet (there is a stove in the room with a pan of water on it, kept constantly at the boil). Sal volatile. Under the nose. On the wrists. Prop the feet higher. Chafe the hands, force the blood back into them by friction. Will it back. Will her back. Words are seldom necessary between us in these straits, we share the same thoughts and the same fears and work in tandem as deftly as a trapeze duo, each trusting to the precision of the other's moves.

We don't talk much outside the sickroom either. What is there to say, and in what tone? Cheerfulness rings hollow, sadness rings too full, like a knell. Besides, for all our harmony where nursing is concerned, there is one fundamental thing we disagree on almost to fighting point: him. Yes, Roland. I want him nowhere near Sabine, I want him, basically, in Antarctica, preferably frozen into an iceberg. Although I'd settle for the Arctic as a second choice. I am convinced that his visits are bad for her, and I've actually begun to keep a kind of chart or logbook, noting the visits and seeing if and how far they correspond to the changes in the course of the disease. Already, after only three recorded visits, I
am beginning to see a pattern: he comes, she worsens; he stays away, she rallies. The trouble started with him, the night of that gruesome fancy-dress ball, and continues with him: he is its cause and its aggravant. He is noxious, perilous, deadly, the worst news ever reported. But how can I possibly get Ghislaine to accept this, when all she does is smile a forgiving smile and put my judgement down to jealousy? His company seems important to Sabine in some way, Viola,
tu comprends?
Seems to soothe her. When he has been gone a few days she starts to fret so. You have noticed that, no, you must have? Oh, I know it's you she cares for most, and you she wants constantly beside her, but you must understand that too. Can't you be generous? Make a little space for another friend? Do it for Sabine's sake. Tension round the sickbed is the one thing we want to avoid.

I
am
jealous, of course, I'm as green as Sabine almost, and not at all sure that Ghislaine has got it right about the order of her daughter's affections. But she is right enough on the first point: extraordinary, hurtful, inexplicable though it is, Sabine needs Roland's presence, craves it, and pines for it when it is denied her. Ghislaine is right about the tension as well: nothing more excruciating when you are fighting for your life than to have healthy people round you, squabbling over futilities. Who do you love best, and who most do you want with you? Blithering idiots: it's life itself, can't you see?
It's life I love best, and life I want with me. Go hang yourselves, all of you, you're only sapping my strength when most I need it. Leave me in peace and let me grapple.

It's strange, so strange, how nearly the whole of this early period of sickness comes back to me now as a happy one. It can't have been, it wasn't, it was anything but, and yet my memory stubbornly goes on telling me that it was. Perhaps, due to the fact that the main setting was Sabine's bedroom, which I shared with her in that magical Easter break, I am kind of blending it in my mind with the other illness – our joint one. Perhaps over the silence I have recorded the sound of Ghislaine's voice reading aloud to us about Milady's perfidy and Athos's devotion. Perhaps instead of medicine I smell the bouquet of spices in the delicious
pain d'épice
and creamy junket that she brought us up at night. Perhaps that is what it is: a mnemonic fakery, a
trompe l'oreille
and
trompe nez
and
trompe mémoire
that my unconscious mind has devised as a shield. Or maybe it's my daft mother fixation at work again: Sabine in the grip of a deathly disease, OK, and me helpless to save her, but a pair of maternal wings still spread over us both – safety even on the brink of death. Or maybe, simplest of all, it is just because Sabine was still alive and I still innocent and the worst had yet to happen.

My days were so neat, so structured. Anguish must have been there but I didn't let it set foot over
the threshold, not so much as a toe. I would wake to the rasp of Tessa's lighter igniting her morning fag. I would lie there for a second, wondering what it was that gave me this sinking feeling in my stomach, and then, without waiting for the answer, I would get up and dress, have my breakfast, sit through whatever lessons were on the schedule, make a note of the homework, grab my books, jump on a bike and be off.

Ghislaine would have food ready for me, but often as not I didn't eat it. Not until I was sure
he
wasn't there to spike my appetite. If he was – though this would usually happen only at weekends – I would wait in Martha meekness for my rival to leave, filling in the time by doing some housework for Ghislaine: cleaning the bathroom for her, for example, or making sandwiches for the boys' tea. Fear had made me humble and patient. Enemy number one was now the disease. It had a presence as solid as that of a person – I think all serious illnesses do. Its comings and goings were even more pressing to keep track of than Roland's. Where was it today? Was it in the corridor, shuffling off a little bit, ashamed at the ravages it had wrought? Or was it in a corner of the room, flexing its muscles for another pounce? Or was it right at the bedside, bent over Sabine already, its sleeves rolled up for work?

One look in Ghislaine's eyes when she came to fetch me from whatever task I was busy with, and I
would know the answer. Worry literally altered their colour: sea-green, and the disease had backed off, at least temporarily; pond-green or mud, and it was present and rampant. I wonder what this colour change was due to: perhaps the lids contracted under pressure and let less light in? And I wonder whether mine did the same? Ghislaine, at this stage, would sometimes train back on me the same swift but enquiring gaze, as if searching for some knowledge in my eyes that I, their owner, was unaware of possessing.

Later, of course, the day I did have the knowledge and was all too aware of it, I would shun her glance deliberately, to prevent her from reading anything, and thus spare her the extra offence. It's bad enough nursing a desperately sick daughter, you don't need a demented assistant by your side, registering panic at the sight of a stain on a sheet or goggling in horror at skin-punctures. One or two more injections that you can't account for, what does it matter?

It was during a respite in Sabine's illness, while we were washing her hair for her – she longed for clean hair again; after health, I think a shampoo came top of her wish-list – that I first noticed them, these injection marks. Two angry little dark round holes on the side of her neck, just below the hairline.

I pointed them out to Ghislaine, a mute query on my face: the less Sabine knew about worsening signs of her disease the better. It seemed such an odd place
to choose for an injection. Painful. Unnecessarily cruel.

Ghislaine looked mystified and shook her head. She mouthed,
Moustique?
at me and looked up at the ceiling, searching for a possible culprit.

I tutted a denial and mouthed back, La Forge.

We were entering another patch of disagreement territory here. Sabine didn't trust Dr la Forge, and I didn't trust him either, not since the day – about a couple of weeks earlier – that Aimée had lined us all up and got him to examine us.

On the face of it, it had been a routine check-up requested, or at any rate agreed to, by our parents. Or so Aimée said, and, in my father's case at least, she was probably telling the truth. This
maladie
of poor Sabine's is so worrying for all of us, I know my little bunnies will understand. (Yeah, what if we are little myxie bunnies, is what you mean.) Dr la Forge assures us it is not catching but,
tout de même
… A good, thorough examination, maybe a blood test if there is any doubt, would set all our minds at rest.

Would it? Did it? Like hell it did. I have never much taken to doctors, which is odd in a way, coming from me, and Dr la Forge was no exception. He examined us in the main sitting room, which Aimée had transformed for the occasion into a consulting room by means of one of her ash-grey sheets draped across the versatile sofa that had been the scene of Matty's tussle with the soldier. Aimée
also stood in as nurse. I've never liked nurses much either.

Christopher went in first. I went second, Serena third and Matty fourth. Which in fact meant she was the last because Tessa didn't go in at all: her parents had got wind of something serious and were driving over from England especially to collect her and cart her off to Harley Street; they were due to arrive sometime over the next few days. Her looming departure saddened me more than I would have thought possible: it was the beginning of our diaspora. I would even miss the morning fag-fog.

Dr la Forge had one of those homely male faces. A family solicitor's face – epicene, rosy and well-shaven – that you instinctively felt you could rely on. Coming from a man like that, prurience is all the more jarring. Aimée's presence didn't help either: our nudity, our embarrassment, the doctor's sticky little hands running caressingly into all the crannies – you could see she was lapping it all up.

Là, derrière,
Viola, she beamed at me when my turn came, pointing to her cherished Venetian screen with the gold-leaf flaking off it like dandruff. Take off your clothes and then come back here and lie down. Yes, yes, all of them, naturally, this is a medical examination.
C'est bien sérieux.

Why is youth so docile? Inside I was seething with the indignity – we'd been told we were to have a blood test, for goodness' sake; a rolled-up sleeve was surely sufficient for that – but I did exactly as I
was told. And, of course, once you're naked, that's it; no one can rebel successfully without at least a loincloth.

Now, legs bent,
c'est ça,
Aimée instructed me, propping my heels on the armrest of the sofa. Wide, a little wider. And she draped a grey towel across my knees, which hung there like a curtain, separating me from my nether parts. All I could see was my chest and ribs, drastically foreshortened like those of Masaccio's laid-out Christ, and then, peering over the curtain, the two adult faces, exchanging glances that I tried hard to read but couldn't.

Dr la Forge's hands scuttled over me like warmblooded reptiles, probing here and there into my flesh, as if in search of a likely place to burrow. This seems all right.
Bon.
Nothing here. Abdomen quite in order. Good muscle tone; nice clear skin. Now, if Madame would be so good as to just stand aside for a minute –
voilà, merci
– he could have a little listen to the lungs …

And now it was his head that intruded on me. First the hands, tap-tap-tapping their brazen way right up to the hummocks of my breasts and over, and then the pink, cologne-smelling head, laid on one side so that the eyes stared right into mine, coming closer and closer. Listening, I suppose, to the tom-tom beat of the fingers, but also looking, looking. Contemplating my shame and relishing it with a connoisseur's relish. I could see a tuft of hair poking out of one of the nostrils: it quivered.

I felt disgust, and tried to show it by turning
my
head to one side. Straight away a scented forefinger flicked out and swivelled it back again, and then hooked one of my eyelids and pulled it downwards. All in one movement. Let us just check for anaemia here. No, no signs at all. Ruby red, a lovely colour.

Did you also check …? Aimée was flapping the towel around to attract the doctor's attention. Once she'd got it she fired off another set of cryptic messages via the pencilled eyebrows. Up and down, up and down, it was a wonder the colour didn't run.

Pas encore.
One thing at a time. Dr la Forge stood straight again and gestured to Aimée to take up her earlier nurse's stance. Then, with the divide back in place, he retreated once more behind its cover – totally this time, not even the top of his head showing – and I heard the squeak of rubber as he snapped on what I guessed was a pair of surgical gloves and, without warning, moved his fingers to quite a different spot from those they had so far examined. His touch sent a shock of pleasure through me that I hated myself for feeling. How dare my body react like that to a stimulus from this repulsive man, how dare it? I'm not sure I didn't hear a little chuckle coming from behind the towel. Although, when his head rose again above it, Dr la Forge's expression was professional and blank.