There but for The (22 page)

But then, the next moment, she breathed in again fine with no problem at all.

Out. Then in again.

There was nothing wrong with her breathing.

She wasn’t gone anywhere at all.

I’m dead but I won’t lie down. Ha ha!

May felt immediately better. She opened her eyes fully. She looked all round. There was no man in a suit anywhere in the room. There was just a girl. Right then the door of May’s room began to open. A nurse! Quick! May sank back on to the pillows. She hung her arm over the edge of the bed so that the juice was near-spilling just in time. Irish-Liverpool came in. May Young was taking no chances. But the girl had seen. She’d reached to catch the tumbler. She’d watched as the nurse came in, and now she gave May a sly look.

May, you’ve a visitor this morning it seems! the nurse said. Another of the grandchildren.

The girl grinned at May. May looked at the Kleenex with the medicine in it, balled on the blanket. The girl saw her looking, turned to the nurse and smiled.

Yeah, she said. Just visiting Gran.

How are you doing today, May? the nurse shouted.

The girl reached forward as if to fold the blanket more neatly. She picked up the Kleenex. She used it to mop the little bit of juice that had spilled when May had slumped for the nurse’s benefit, then she stood up and opened the big bin with her foot on the footpedal and threw it in. She sat down again.

What day is it today, May? Ah, is she still not talking to us? the nurse said. It’s a pity. And isn’t that lovely now, May. Just when you think you’ve met them all, there’s more. Isn’t life just a wonder of children and more children.

Lose your calm and you lose all. May let her head stay sagged and her eyes half shut. She made to nod like a person who had swallowed what she was supposed to would nod.

How was the bus, was it bus you came by? the nurse said to the girl.

She meant the snow.

The girl didn’t say anything.

Not as bad as it looks out there, the nurse said.

She sat May forward and sorted the pillows behind her. She checked her for accidents. She announced to the room that May was clean, and that May was exceptionally good at keeping herself clean, and that it wasn’t at all an easy thing to, and that May should be proud. She checked the clipboard at the end of the bed. She turned to the girl.

See if you can get her to talk, she said. We’re all missing hearing her. I tell her all the time. We’re all missing her wit about the place. And if you’d like to take her for a turn about the ward, or out and down to the café, just give me the nod. She’s not been out of this room since Sunday. Do her good to see some different walls. Give me a shout and I’ll sort out a chair and we’ll lift her in and you can take her for a spin.

She was a kind nurse, Irish-Liverpool. She had the measure of the spirit of things. She knew there was more to an old body than an old body. But even so, May Young kept the sag in her jaw. She kept her head on its side. She kept her eyes half closed until the nurse, in a blur of uniform, went through the door and the door shut with a click. Then she waited another moment in case of anyone looking back through the little window in the door and seeing anything they shouldn’t.

No, the nurse was gone, she could hear her, cheery down the corridor.

She shunted herself up the bed as best she could.

The girl watched her do it.

My grandad, the girl said. He had two strokes, one after the other, in six months. The second one affected his eyes, his seeing. So they said he wasn’t to drive any more. We went to his house and my mum and dad took his car keys and they took the car out of his garage to our house, my mum drove our car home and my dad drove my grandad’s car. Then my grandad was always on the phone shouting about how they’d stolen his car, sometimes in the middle of the night too he phoned about it. Then one day my grandad came down from where he lived in Bedford to where we live, we live in like Greenwich, he came by himself on trains and tubes and that, though he still wasn’t supposed to be very well, I mean he walked with a stick and that, and he turned up banging on our front door with his fist though it’s not like there isn’t a bell, but he was like really angry, and he wouldn’t come in, he stood on the doorstep all out of breath and held up this letter that said on it that he’d sat a test and passed it and he could drive if he wanted, and he put his hand out like this and demanded his car and his keys, and my dad just gave him them, there and then, and off he went in his car. And he drove it till he died.

And then after he died—this was like two years ago, by the way—we eventually found out he’d got this boy who’s really good on computers to make up a letter, make it look like it was the kind of letter you’d get if you sat the test that said you could drive again. Like a really excellent forgery. The only reason we found out is because the boy came to my grandad’s house when we were all there having the sandwiches and that, after the funeral. He lives across the road from where my grandad lived. He said my grandad paid him fifty quid which was ten pounds more than he’d asked for, and that my grandad had also said that if he died the boy could have his car for nothing for doing that letter. Then the boy put his hand out and asked my dad could he have the car keys. And my dad just went straight into the kitchen and took them off the hook and came back to the door and gave him them. There and then. And my mother was like furious. Don’t suppose I can smoke in here, can I.

The girl stood up and went and had a look at the smoke alarm in the ceiling.

Could maybe get the cover off, she said. If it’s worked by a battery.

She dragged the big visitor’s chair over until it was directly under the smoke alarm. She climbed up on to it and balanced with one foot in the seat and another up on top of the edge of the high back. But because she was wearing boots the heels of which were like daggers, when one of the heels slid sideways on the cover of the shiny seat she lost her balance and toppled sideways off the chair, over the arm of it and on to the floor with her thin legs and the boots in the air.

How are the fallen mighty! May nearly said it out loud. She nearly laughed out loud. She pursed her mouth. She stopped herself. But the girl was a fine one, laughed at herself. She got herself up, dusted herself off, straightened what little there was of the daft little skirt and sat on the edge of the seat to unzip her boots. She was clearly going to give it a try again. She caught May looking at her.

A fall from grace, the girl said.

May liked that. She gave the girl a wink.

(May Winch is off-shift from the Mail Office and is at the Palace with some of the girls. They’re watching the accompanying feature, a Gracie Fields. It’s an old one, and people boo it to begin with since Gracie’s recently taken herself off to America and people aren’t very impressed with that. But it’s a funny one, and soon people are laughing along regardless of the fact that Gracie’s a bit of a runner-away.

In it Gracie is younger and wearing a big historical-looking hat. She throws an orange and it hits royalty by mistake. Then she argues with the policeman who arrests her, and she says to the policeman,
if you keep on talking to me like that I’ll have to call a policeman.
Then the judge in court asks her did she think it was appropriate behaviour, throwing an orange at a person of royal blood. And Gracie says,
well, it was a blood orange.

There’s a dog somewhere in the theatre. It must have been smuggled in; dogs aren’t permitted in the pictures. When Gracie starts singing a song and reaches a particularly high note this dog starts up singing along. ArooooooOOOooo. Pretty soon the whole stalls is a riot every time Gracie hits the note and the dog joins in. Pretty soon it sounds like the people up in the balcony are rioting too.

The sound slows down suddenly and then stops. The film stops. Everybody shouts. The houselights come on. People are waving their arms about and shouting. The manager and the doormen walk up and down the aisles. There’s a scuffle down at the front, then one of the doormen walks back up dragging two boys, one on either side of him, one by the ear, one by the back of the neck, then the other doorman carrying at arm’s length a small wiry black and white Heinz 57 varieties mongrel, its tail going in circles like a propeller. The manager paces behind, ignoring all the eyes.

The place goes crazy with whistles and cat-calls. The chap sitting in front of May has turned to watch the parade go past up the aisle. Then his eye falls on May and her friends sitting there. He’s in Air Force uniform, he’s young. He’s not bad-looking. He’s with a girl but even though he is he still has a good look at all three of them and it’s May that catches his eye.

His girlfriend looks none-too-pleased.

The film starts up again but not in the right place. The audience shouts and boos then settles down to the story anyway, a load of silliness about the prince of a made-up country giving up his kingdom to have a love affair with a barmaid who’s a good singer. Gracie starts singing again and goodness knows what comes over May. It’s as if she can’t help herself. She knows she’s about to do it, and she knows she’s doing it only so as to annoy the snooty girlfriend. No other reason. No other time in her life so far has she ever been so bold and bad as she’s about to be right now when Gracie does it, hits that high note, and May starts up a howl, making it sound as much like that little dog sounded as she can.

It’s a split second before the roar of laughter shakes the whole place. Then everyone joins in. Soon the place is nothing but howling and yelping and laughter. May’s friends are black-affronted. The girl in front is black-affronted. But the chap in front has turned again and had a long look, in the brightness that comes off Gracie on the screen, at May, who sits in silence at the centre of all the noise and roaring and whistling, smiles her pretty smile, then winks her pretty eye with all the knowing she has, at the silhouette of the boy who, she’ll find out two nights later when she puts on her best dress, the blue and white one with the African trees and gazelles on it, and he’s waiting there for her outside the Palace with the tickets for This Happy Breed already bought in his hand, is Philip Young, halfway through ten days’ leave.)

There’s an old song in May’s head for some reason now. Sally, Sally, pride of our alley. That was what was her name, Gracie, Gracie Fields. And that was the thing about Gracie Fields, she defied belief, and then she showed you you’d been wrong ever to doubt her. You never believed she’d be able to hit that high a note. You could sense the note that was coming, the note that was meant to come, and you’d think to yourself there’s just no way she’ll ever reach that high, there’s no way anyone could. And then she’d go and hit a note so much higher than the one you’d expected, like a whole ladder of notes higher, and you’d be left scoured like a clean sink by the highness of it. She was a classy one. She could sing like the women in the operas can. And she was funny too. There was the song she sang about the fly that washed its legs in a jug of beer and dried itself on a man’s moustache, it was the fly’s birthday in the song, and it took its lady friend to the Grand Hotel for a birthday treat. Oh, it was a funny one. There was a song about a clock that fell in love with a wristwatch and the wristwatch told him he was fast.

Sally, Sally up the alley, and there was Walter, Walter, lead me to the altar and I’ll show you where I’m tattooed. We had fun, that was the difference between then and now. That was the intimate all right. I don’t think I ever saw their father with his clothes completely off, and I don’t think he saw me neither with mine, but we had the intimate all right, and we had fun. I don’t see that there’s so much fun in it, what I see of it now, May said in the confines of her head, not out loud, looking at that girl sitting there with the skirt that was barely worth the wearing. The girl was gloomy-looking now, for the alarm in the ceiling had defeated her. She picked at her purple nails. She got her little machine out again and picked at something on it. Oh they all think they’re the first to discover it, they all thought, they were all convinced nobody’d known about it till
they
did, nobody could possibly know about it but them, with their flower-power, their nineteen-sixties with the flowers in the guns and their summers of love, as if all we’d had was winter, all we’d had was rations. Just very good at keeping it quiet, is what we were. We had to be. It was the way. Them with their jet-age.

There was Patrick, when it happened to him, coming home all doe-eyed and staring into mid-air over his sausages, then always in the shower and trailing the smell of that godawful aftershave all down the stairs, and going and standing breaking the rose off the stem out in the garden when he thought I wasn’t watching, tucking the bloom inside his leather jacket for some girl and off he went to town, and Eleanor I knew about because she came home from college that time and she gave me such a warm cuddle, and it wasn’t like her to take me in her arms like that, and I had a secret look at her and she had a shine to her so I knew immediately, and I
was
pleased for her, not that we could say any of it out loud, and not that I dared tell her father.

Not Jennifer, though.

Though what about him, that boy, that boy all along, the boy May couldn’t look in the eye.

Even with all the years of that boy coming to see her and growing into a man before her eyes, she could still see the boy in him.

But him turning up at the door every year couldn’t help but mean another year had passed that May’s own girl hadn’t had.

The first year the knock had come at the door May hadn’t let him in. The next year he did it again, same boy. That time May did let him in. She gave him a cup of tea. He always brought something. Chocolates, flowers, bulbs for the ground. Once he brought a little china figurine of a chaffinch. He’d noticed, maybe, how she liked them of birds, from the ones already in the cabinet. After he’d gone May had put it on the ledge at the back of the Hoover cupboard where she wouldn’t have to look at it. Loyal as January. When he first came he had long hair, and a look about him of that boy who’d been in the film about Oliver, the artful one, not the little prissy one. They sat opposite each other, May and the boy, every year. He grew up, like her girl would have, before her eyes. One year he missed the day, but he sent a card from Canada written on in neat handwriting. Sorry I can’t be there, kind of thing. It was the kind of postcard a man would choose, not pretty at all. On the front it said Toronto, above a colour photo of people walking in sleet, a snowy street of shops. Shops were the same the world over. But he’d paid for it so it would arrive at the house on the exact right date. It was nice of him.