Authors: Claire Rayner
In the facing armchair Lee too was staring at the glow of the fire, also immersed in her own thoughts. Peter, she was thinking. Peter who had been so kind to her, who had helped her so much on that long frightening journey they had shared through Europe as the threat of war had grown darker and heavier. Peter who had taught her to find her peace of mind, who had found her beloved Michael for her, had helped her to bring him home. Peter who had loved her so much. More than Harry does, she thought then, more than Harry does. Maybe Peter still does want me, or maybe he could again? And then there would be someone to care for me, to hold me as though I mattered to him and not just because he wanted to please himself, who would look at me as though he saw me and not just a dull wife, who -
‘Please, Letty,’ she said then, not appealingly, not coaxingly, but very directly. ‘Please, will you do it for Peter? He needs help so much. Whatever else comes of it, do it for Peter.’
And if the whatever else that comes of it is some sort of happiness for me then I’ll take it, I won’t turn my back on it. I’ll learn to be reckless and live for me and think of what I want, just for once.
‘If he says he wants to, then I’ll have to,’ Letty said after a long moment. ‘But it will be for him and not for the hospital. Understand that. If he refuses then so do I.’
And if working with Peter again makes me feel better, less hollow, makes the pains go away for a while, then I suppose
it’s worth it. Even though I know I ought to tell someone at Nellie’s about how I hurt and get something done about it, I won’t, because I know damned well what it is and I don’t want to be meddled with. But working again with Peter will make me well again. And absurd though she knew the notion was, she felt better, suddenly, as a little surge of unfamiliar energy rose in her.
‘Come on then,’ she said, and got to her feet. ‘The sooner we ask him the better.’
Lee stared. ‘You mean - go and see him now? But why not phone? Or even write to him?’ She was frightened, suddenly, of the thought of actually seeing him, frightened and excited too.
‘That would be stupid,’ Letty said brusquely but not unkindly. ‘He’d not talk, or he’d tear the letter up, the way he is. The way I’ve been told he is, that is. If we’re there, sitting there in front of him, he won’t be able to say no, will he?’ She laughed then. ‘Any more than I managed to say no to you, sitting there, you wretch. Come on. Let’s see if we can find a cab. It might be our lucky day. You never know.’
The last three games of Patience had come out as easily as melted butter oozing through hot toast, and he stared down at the piles of playing-cards on the table in front of him and thought - maybe if the next one does it as well it will be all right? Maybe then I’ll find the courage to get up, go to the door, take my hat and call out to old Jenny in the kitchen that I’m just going for a stroll, to have dinner at a restaurant, go to a play, tell my father I’ll see him at breakfast? And he reached for the cards to pile them together again, to shuffle them and relay them for a new game. And then pulled back.
And suppose it doesn’t come out? Will I see that as yet another reminder that I have no right to be here, that I ought to be dead like all of them? I can’t go on setting myself these stupid targets, I can’t - it makes it worse, not better; and he got to his feet sharply, moving so quickly that he sent the table tipping and the cards spilling all over the carpet, but he made no attempt to pick them up. There would have been a time, long ago, when such untidiness would have offended his fastidious eye, when he would have had, willy-nilly, to get to his knees to collect them all together again. But now he paid
no attention to such trifles. Now he didn’t care what his surroundings were like. They could be as ill kept as he was himself, with his unshaven hollow face and his staring eyes and his hair ill-cut and straggling over his collar. His trousers, old flannels which had been worn out even before the War and which were now sagging and threadbare, hung on his thin shanks like rags and the old cardigan he wore had torn elbows, and he didn’t give a damn. He almost seemed to revel in his own squalor, resisting fiercely any attempt by old Jenny to take his clothes to mend and press them and glaring at his father with those hot deep-set eyes when he said anything about getting him something better to wear.
He went to stand at the window as he so often did, staring out onto the street below, looking slightly to his left so that he could see the traffic of the Bayswater Road. Below him the stucco of the house front was peeling a little in the driving rain and he thought for a moment - Mamma. She would have been mortified to see her house in such a sad state, Mamma who had been so particular about details, who had been so warm and so dimpled and so altogether Mamma-ish, and he tried to conjure up a picture of her in his mind’s eye, tried to see the round face and even rounder body that had been Miriam, the softness of her and the sweetness of her - but it failed of course, as did every attempt to think of anything other than that which he had to think of.
And now there they were again, marching past against the background of the Bayswater Road and its splashing pedestrians hunched against the driving rain and its swishing vans and lumbering red buses; the endless parade of figures that never left him. Skeletal, with dead eyes and shaven heads, shuffling along on their almost thread-like limbs, fragile inside the black and grey stripes of their cotton uniforms, looking at him as they went past him, their mouths open in silent shrieks, telling him, begging him, demanding that he do something, get them out, take them home again to real life where people ate food and lay in real beds and could sleep in the sure knowledge that they would wake next morning to live another day, instead of being dragged to a gas chamber to -
‘No!’ he shouted aloud and turned away from the window to look round the big room, at the familiar old furniture, massive in its Victorian rightness, the thick carpet, dusty in the
corners now where old Jenny couldn’t deal with it as the only servant left to care for the vast old house, at the huge dull mirror over the mantelpiece and the portraits of his mother and Johanna on her wedding day and the faded photograph of Tim, taken the day before he went off to France and -
‘This is real, this is real, this is real.’ He whispered it aloud the way he had taught himself to do. Somewhere deep inside himself he had known when he had come home that not until he could stop seeing everything around him as a wraith, not until he could reinvest the world with the solidity that he knew was still in it if he could only find it, not until then could he eradicate the visions that accompanied him all day as well as all night, the memories of Belsen at Celle in Germany and the months he had spent there in the last year of the War. And eradicate them he must, because if he didn’t he would go completely and utterly mad instead of hovering on the brink as he now was.
‘This is real,’ he said again, and this time it seemed to work for a moment. The furniture in the room became more solid, stopped looking almost translucent so that the visions of the parade of shuffling figures that accompanied him all the time faded and almost vanished behind the glow of dusty polished mahogany and silver and crystal ornaments. ‘This is real -’
So real that the door opened and creaked as it did so, and there was Jenny peering round it, pugnacious in her fear of alarming him, as she always was these days, never knowing how he would be or how he would react to her.
‘Mr Peter?’ she quavered, and he peered at her, almost startled, and said, ‘Jenny?’ as though he wasn’t sure he recognized her, and her mouth drooped at that; she who had been a young nursery maid in this house when he had been born, who had known him all his life, to be greeted so!
But she made no comment, and just gave a little jerk of the head to indicate that there was someone behind her.
‘Here’s Miss Letty and Mrs Lee to see you,’ she said, her old voice sharp and shrill. ‘So you mind your manners and talk to them proper and I’ll go and make them a nice cup of tea. Come away in, now, my dears, and I’ll see if I can’t find a bit of shortcake or something of that. I’ve been saving up Sir Lewis’s butter ration this three weeks to make it, but I don’t suppose he’d grudge it you, good soul that he is -’ And she went
creaking away, her back bent and her head poking forwards, as Lee and Letty came into the drawing-room together.
Lee stood and stared at him and felt tears prick her eyelids and she said nothing, not trusting herself to speak. But Letty stood there, her old Burberry coat tied firmly round her middle and her rain hat pulled down ferociously over her eyes, staring at him with her chin up challengingly and then she said, her voice loud in the dim and over-furnished room. ‘Peter? Ye gods, man, but you look ghastly! What have you been doing with yourself? Whatever it is, it’s high time you bloody well stopped!’
‘Well, you’re tenacious enough, I’ll give you that,’ he said, and shot a sharp glance at her from behind the heavy rims of his owlish spectacles and then grinned. ‘Clearly a lady who prefers not to take no for an answer - I should have realized you weren’t English, but American. No Englishwoman would push at me this way. And I should know. I worked in the States. I was at the Mayo Clinic.’
Her face lit up. ‘Really? I was born in Rochester, but the family went to live in Baltimore. I used to think of going to Rochester to train at the Mayo and then decided to go to our own Johns Hopkins. And then in the end I came here and trained at Nellie’s, after all. It’s odd how things work out, sometimes -’
‘You’re damned right it’s odd. I was born in Dunedin in New Zealand and here I am working in a tuppeny ha’penny country hospital in Sussex.’
‘Not so tuppenny ha’penny,’ she said, almost shocked, and he laughed and nodded, pleased with himself.
‘Of course it isn’t. It was, but it isn’t now. Famous all over the world, now, they tell me. And it’ll be even more famous. Just you wait and see.’
‘I’ve no doubt of it,’ she said and looked consideringly at him as he sat there on the other side of his desk, his heavy squared-off fingers playing with a paperknife, and marvelled a little. He was such a heavy stocky sort of man, with his bullet head with its cap of smooth greying hair, neatly parted in the middle and slicked down with some sort of brilliantine, and his air of self-satisfaction. She had more sense than to expect surgeons to conform to any kind of physical pattern; the idea they were all thin and ascetic with long sensitive fingers and suffering eyes was a figment of romantic imagination, and she had always lacked that, but all the same he was rather
unexpected.
‘And that’s why I can’t take your chap,’ he said. ‘Because fame brings its problems, as you’ll find out when your time comes.’
‘I don’t think that’s very likely. -’ she murmured and he shook his head, jovial and more self-satisfied than ever.
‘If you never try, then of course you won’t. But if you want to be good then believe me, you can do well. Most people, especially in this country, are so damned lazy and so unambitious you really have to be very wet not to overtake ’em. But be that as it may - I’m overwhelmed with work. Or very nearly. And I’m not taking any but the sort of cases that other chaps can’t handle properly. I studied the photographs you sent me of your patient, and his injury isn’t one that needs me. Find another plastic surgeon to look after him. There are plenty of people who could do a good enough job. It’s not so bad a scar -’
‘But they wouldn’t do as good a job as you can,’ she said and lifted her chin at him challengingly.
He accepted the compliment comfortably as though it were no more than his due. ‘No, that’s true. But they’ll do it well enough. It’s a simple enough operation, after all.’
‘He’s an actor. His face is too precious to allow for someone who’ll only do it well enough. It’s got to be done superbly well. And that means you.’
‘And I’ve told you. I’ve got too much pressure on my ward to take such a patient. My guinea-pigs need every bed there is available. They’re airmen, every one of them - or bloody nearly. If I brought in a civilian and that blocked a bed for one of these chaps, my name’d be mud. They’d have my guts for garters -’
She lifted her brows at that, and he laughed again. ‘Don’t look surprised. We run the place on very democratic lines, you know. None of your usual hospital spit and polish. These boys of mine - they have to face the prospect of a lot of surgery. Thirty, forty, fifty operations, some of ’em. And then I’m still having to tidy ’em up from time to time. You can’t treat chaps like that as so much bed fodder. They’re people who have lives to live while we try to give ’em back some sort of semblance of faces and hands. So, we run the place in a way you’d find a bit odd. Come and see.’
‘I beg your pardon?’
‘I said, come and see. You’re obviously a stubborn girl, not going to take no for an answer easily - and I like that. Can’t be doing with namby-pambies who grizzle and whine and don’t stand up for what they want - but you can’t get your own way this time. I’ll show you why. When can you come and see?’
‘To East Grinstead?’
‘To East Grinstead. I’ll be down there later today. Take a train from Victoria - they’re pretty good these days - and anyone’ll direct you to the Queen Victoria. It’s the most important place in the town now - put it on the map, after all. Get there around four and I’ll show you round, introduce you to my guinea-pigs -’
‘You said that before - are they all being used for research, these patients?’
‘None of ’em and all of ’em,’ he said and got to his feet. ‘Every patient I operate on is a one-off. I learn something for the next fella for each one I put a knife to. But I’m not one of these wallahs who are panting to get their names in print in the
Lancet
or the BMJ. None of that so-called research-paper writing for me, thank you very much. I’ve got far more important things to do. No, I didn’t label them guinea-pigs. They did that themselves. Got a club - I’m the president - and a pretty good one it is. Good drinking, good yarning and good care taken of each other. You’ll see. Four o’clock this afternoon. And now you’ve got to be on your way. I’ve got others waiting to see me -’ And he stood up and nodded at her and she had perforce to get to her own feet.