The Meddlers (18 page)

“If I get a good piece, then I’m prepared to wait,” Sir Daniel said. “But it had better be good, remember that. And…”

Mike looked back at Sir Daniel’s heavy figure silhouetted against the big window.

“… and it will be worth your while. I’m not niggardly when it comes to recognizing achievement. And you can achieve.”

“That’s good to know,” Mike said harshly, carefully not looking at Graham, and closed the door behind him with a savage tug.

  Miriam sat rigidly in a corner of the shabby waiting room, her head aching with a sick throb, her eyes hot and sandy. Last night had been the worst ever; if she’d had as much as two hours’ sleep, she’d be surprised. A horrible night. The thoughts had come to overtake her again, the sick imaginings she couldn’t control, that swept her mind away in a revolting welter of feeling; the thoughts that filled not only her mind but her whole body, until she had been unable to stop it happening, that childish behavior that should have been left behind with the other miseries of adolescence, and even that hadn’t brought the comfort of sleep.

She tried to wrench her thinking straight, to stop the treadmill progression of memory and shame, looking at the other people in the room with her. A slatternly woman in a shabby blue coat, holding a baby on her lap, bouncing it from side to side and talking at it in strings of babbling syllables, trying to make it repeat them. “Da, da, da, den. Kutchie, kutchie, kutchie. Da, da, da.”

Even from her place in the corner, Miriam could smell the child,
the thick sour milkiness of it, the heavy miasma of urine-soaked diapers, and her stomach heaved and tightened. It’s just as well I couldn’t eat breakfast. If I had, I’d be sick.

The receptionist on the other side of the scarred desk in the corner had her head down over a pile of buff-colored cards, radiating dislike at Miriam from every line of her posture. I shouldn’t have been so unpleasant to her, Miriam thought. She wasn’t to know I wasn’t one of the ordinary patients. I made her look a fool in front of other people, it wasn’t right of me. Not like me, really. God, I feel rotten.

The woman with the baby heaved to her feet in response to a pealing bell, collected a couple of bags and paper-wrapped parcels and went out, talking to the baby as she moved. “Come on then, my lovey, Doctor’s ready for you now. Come on then.”

Outside, Miriam could hear the rumbling traffic, and she began to count each extra crescendo of sound that came as individual vehicles passed the tall windows of the waiting room. Three, four, five—that was a big one, a lorry, count it as two—eight, nine. God, why am I sitting here? I should have told her I’d moved and then hung up—eleven, twelve…

The woman behind the desk stood up and, pointedly ignoring Miriam in her corner, went out, slamming the door behind her, and Miriam sat on, alone in the room, still counting. Anything to keep her mind occupied. She closed her eyes and counted on in a sort of desperation: seventeen, eighteen…

“Miriam! Come on in and sit down. My girl’s making us some tea. I hope she won’t be too long. She’s got the sulks over something this morning.”

Miriam opened her eyes and stared at the figure by the door, a square figure with short curly hair standing up untidily over a smoothly plump face, a white coat buttoned strainingly over the big abdomen. My God, did I look like that when I was pregnant? I hope not. Why not? What would it matter if I had?

“Hello, Norma,” she said, her voice surprisingly even. The way she was feeling, it should have sounded different. “You look… very well.”

“More than I can say for you,” Norma said bluntly. “I’m glad you came. You obviously need to.”

“Do I?” Miriam essayed and managed a light laugh. “You always did jump to conclusions, Norma. It must make you a great diagnostician sometimes. This time, though, you’re wrong. I’m not in the least ill, I promise you.”

“No? Then why aren’t you sleeping?” Norma led the way out of the room and into the cluttered overheated surgery next door to it. She pulled a chair forward for Miriam and sat herself in the shabbily cushioned one in front of an old roll-top desk. “People who are well sleep well. I do.”

Miriam shrugged. “I’m working hard, that’s all. On a thesis for my doctorate. I’ve a lot of complex material to think about.”

“Meaning I haven’t? Don’t you believe it. When you’ve got a three thousand GP list heavily overloaded with children and geriatrics, a house to run, a difficult husband and a couple of energetic kids,
and
you’re pregnant into the bargain, you’ll see how complex thinking can get.” But her voice was equable. “No, my dear girl. There’s more to this problem of yours than you realize. Now don’t sit there looking so buttoned up! This is Norma, remember? We’ve known each other since we were in third form together. I know more about you than you know yourself, in some ways. So don’t come the dignified iceberg over me. I won’t wear it. Now, we’ll start at the beginning, shall we? When did the sleeplessness start?”

Miriam sat staring at her hands in her lap, the fingers interlocked in an intricate pattern.

“It is a long time, isn’t it?” she said abruptly. “Third form. I’d forgotten.”

“I haven’t.” Norma leaned back in her chair and looked at her with her face twisted in a half-grin. “I thought the sun shone out of you, do you know that?”

Miriam looked up at her and frowned. “What?”

“I did. You were so bloody clever, and so gorgeous to look at. I envied you like hell. Until we got to college. Then I felt sorry for you.”

“Oh?”

“Perhaps I shouldn’t say it, but”—Norma shook her head—“oh, it was an odd life, yours. Just you and your father. And after he died, just after we started at college, I remember it so well. I cried more than you did. You seemed to get even more brilliant, even more gorgeous. And even more shut up inside yourself. Plain run-of-the-mill me went to the parties, had all the fun, and you sat in your room—”

“I was concentrating on work, at college,” Miriam said stiffly. “And really, Norma, I don’t see that—”

“This has anything to do with me? That I have any right to dig out past history? But I think it may be relevant, in fact, to the reason you’re here this morning. But we’ll get back to that—oh, tea. Thanks a lot, m’dear.”

With a cup of tea steaming beside her, Miriam found it easier to answer Norma’s questions, and as the other woman scribbled busily on a buff card, she gradually relaxed and answered her questions almost without thinking.

“It started about, about a fortnight ago. But it’s been very marked. I estimate I get about, oh, three hours’ sleep a night, at most. And it’s very restless sleep.”

“Appetite?”

“I don’t really care much about food at the best of times, but I suppose it is less.”

“Menstrual pattern?”

“What?”

Norma looked up and said patiently, “Your menstrual cycle. Have you noticed any changes?”

Miriam felt her face redden, and as she saw the faint surprise and then the look of sudden comprehension on the other’s face, reddened even more.

“I, I don’t … I can’t, I…” she floundered and then stopped.

“Oh, my dear girl!” Norma put down her pen. “Why on earth didn’t you tell me sooner? Knowing you, it never entered my head that-for heaven’s sake, I was convinced you were in the middle of a clinical endogenous depression! The more I looked back on the way I remembered you, the more likely it seemed. And all the time
—you silly girl! Honestly, you make me feel like your grandmother, for all we’re the same age. How far on are you?”

“What?” Miriam was bewildered. She hadn’t expected any questioning that might, in the answering, reveal her involvement in the Briant project, hadn’t expected to be asked to give any sort of medical history, and in trying to sort out an answer had lost the thread of what Norma was saying. “What do you mean?”

“Look, Miriam,” Norma said patiently, “are you or are you not pregnant? Is that really what you want my help with?”

Miriam stared at her for a long moment and then shakily started to laugh, and went on laughing until her hot eyes ran tears.

“Oh, my God. Oh, my God! Is that what—” She shook her head and scrubbed at her face with shaking fingers. And then she took a deep breath.

“I am not pregnant. Very far from it. I can assure you that… that there is not the remotest possibility of it. I am simply sleeping very badly at present and need some help to get over it. That’s all. As for depresssion, why on earth should you think that? Did I sound depressed on the telephone?”

“I wasn’t using the word to describe a change in mood.” Norma spoke almost absently, staring at her under faintly frowning brows. “Clinical depression is a mental illness, and I thought, if you’re not pregnant, why the confusion when I asked about your menstrual cycle?”

“Why should you think I had a mental illness? After five minutes’ talk on the phone?”

“Waking in the early hours, and not sleeping again—almost specifically diagnostic. And you didn’t deny the other symptoms—inability to concentrate, loss of appetite, confused thinking. Miriam,
why
did you get so bothered when I asked about your menstrual cycle? I can’t possibly understand what’s the matter with you if you aren’t honest with me.”

“There’s nothing the matter with me.” Miriam stood up and started to pull on her gloves with sharp angry tugs. “Except I was stupid enough to ask you to help me with a script for sleeping pills. I should have known you wouldn’t be able to resist probing at me.”

“It’s all so
uncharacteristic
,” Norma said, seeming unaware of the insulting tone in Miriam’s voice. “I’ve known you since we were
twelve
-year-olds—more than half our lifetimes—and in less than a year you’ve changed so much you look awful. You’re—”

“I have not changed! I’m just not sleeping well, that’s all! How often must I—” And to her own horror, Miriam felt her eyes fill with tears, her throat constrict with them, and stopped.

“But you have! Look at you now! You’re shaking, and crying. Ye gods, Miriam, you
never
cried! Oh, look, come over here.”

She pulled Miriam by the arm over to the red-blanketed couch in the corner and, grunting a little with the effort, pushed her onto it and made her swing her legs up until she was lying down, and then she sat on the edge of it beside her.

“Look, you’ll have to do something about the state you’re in, can’t you see that? You’re an intelligent girl, a brilliant one, but you don’t seem able to understand that there is something more the matter with you than mere insomnia. Won’t you try and tell me? Just talking it out will help.”

“Oh, Norma, do stop all this amateur psychiatry, will you? I’ve little enough use for the people who are supposed to be good at it, but when GPs start—”

“I’ve got a thick skin. And the more aggressive you are towards the idea, the more convinced I am you need help. I wonder.” She looked consideringly at the face on the pillow and then said slowly, “Miriam, look at me. I’m pregnant, you see? Very obvious, isn’t it? How does it make you feel, seeing me like this?”

“Feel? Indifferent. What concern is it of mine?”

“No jealousy? Or disgust?”

There was a short silence and then Miriam said, “Why should I feel either? I told you, it’s no concern of mine.”

“But of course it is! You’re a women too. You’re capable of being pregnant, just as I am. And the way you respond to the fact of pregnancy reveals a lot about the way you feel about your own femininity.”

“Femininity, femininity?” Miriam sat up so suddenly that she almost toppled Norma off the edge of the couch. “I’ll tell you this much, I hate it. Hate it, you hear me? All I want is to do a worth-
while job of work without any of this—this
boring
business about being a woman. Who cares what my sex is? Where do you get the crazy idea that I’m sleeping badly because of the way I feel about your blasted pregnancy! I’m sick to death of pregnancy and women and… and…”

She put her hands to her face and took a deep breath and said, “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to—look, maybe you’re right. I mean, maybe this, the way I’m not sleeping, has something to do with… with my… with being a female. I’m researching hormone balances for my thesis, you know? And, er…” She began to improvise wildly. “I’ve been experimenting with myself. Taking various hormone preparations to see what sort of effect they’d have. I, well, I’ve obviously got some results. I mean, I’ve got myself so unbalanced it’s not only interfering with my sleep, it’s interfering with my general, my general ability to think clearly. You see? But if I could have some help with sleep, I could complete my investigations and then I’ll be fine again. And, er, that’s why I got so bothered when you asked about my menstrual pattern, because of course I’ve made it go haywire.”

Norma was looking at her with her face creased with indecision. “Oh, Lord. I don’t know. If you are doing something so, so stupid—and it
is
stupid to use yourself for experimental material—it might account for, oh, I don’t
know
. Look, I’m not calling you a liar, Miriam, but
do
people use themselves to get data for theses? It’s a while since I did any real science, but it seems to me unusual?”

“Oh, yes, yes,” Miriam said swiftly. “People working on antibiotics have given themselves injections of strains of certain pathogens, and—”

“Yes, that’s true, but isn’t that because it’s a dangerous thing to do to anyone else? Hormone balances—surely you can get all the material you want from working on menstruating women, or postpartum ones? Why mess about with your own health? I can’t help feeling, still, that there’s more than you’ve told me. I’ve known you so long, you see.”

For a moment Miriam felt an intense desire to tell her the whole story, to pour out into this familiar ear a full account of the way
she had spent the past year, to ask whether the way she was feeling was a normal response to having a baby. After all, Norma had had two.

But how could she? One of the reasons Briant had found her of such value to the project was her freedom from personal ties. “With no one to question what you’re doing,” he’d said, “it will obviously be much easier to maintain your anonymity, and that is ideal for many reasons. Not least because you’ll be left in peace if no one apart from myself and of course one or two other people concerned with your care during pregnancy and confinement know your identity.”