A Book at Bedtime

by Barrie Shore

  My heart aches with a weight of care,

  With a sorrowing pain too great it to bear…

  De-de-dum, di-dah, di-dah…

  As often as not he was interrupted by her cries of distress, as if she knew what was he doing and trying to prevent him. On a rare day, she thundered downstairs and, like the Person from Porlock interrupting his muse, burst into the shop. And what did it matter? Because…

  I do not write,

  I cannot write,

  I am not a person who writes.

  Repeat it again.

  I do not write,

  I cannot write…

  She wore her clothes upside down by now. A grubby petticoat over her dress, tied round at the middle with a pair of blue tights, and a jacket on top that was buttoned up wrong; the old fur hat that she never took off, with a safety pin hooked into the brim; and a scatter of beads round her neck, half a dozen brooches pinned to her sleeves. And a frightened face.

  ‘Who are you?’

  Sometimes she knew him and sometimes she didn’t. Today she didn’t.

  ‘Jack. I’m Jack.’

  ‘No, you’re not, Jack’s upstairs, he’s making my bed.’

  ‘Eva, darling…’ He made a move towards her, stopped as she flinched away, raising her arm across her face to protect herself.

  He took a deep breath and managed a smile. ‘Oh, so that’s where Jack is, I was beginning to wonder.’

  ‘He thinks I don’t know what he’s up to, but I do.’ She put her finger to her lips and tiptoed to his side. ‘He’s looking for my marbles.’

  ‘Is he?’

  ‘Yes, but he’s looking in all the wrong places. He’ll never find them because… do you want to know why because?’

  ‘Yes, I do. Very much.’

  ‘How much?’

  ‘This much.’ He spread his arms wide.

  ‘That’s too much.’

  ‘Is it?’

  ‘Much too much. Try again.’

  He brought his arms closer together. ‘This much?’

  ‘Oh, yes, that’s much better, betterly much.’

  ‘Good.’

  ‘What’s good?’

  What indeed. ‘It’s good that you’ve hidden your marbles…’ Slowly, slowly working it out. ‘Because now Jack won’t know where to find them.’

  ‘I haven’t hidden them anywhere. That was Jack, he’s hidden them in the back of his mind.’

  ‘Has he?’

  ‘Yes. He thinks I don’t know, but I do because I watched him when my eyes were shut.’

  ‘How clever you are.’

  ‘That’s what Jack says. How clever you are, that’s what he says. Do you agree with him?’

  ‘Yes, I do.’

  ‘Good, I’ll tell him next time I see him. The only trouble is, I don’t know where he is. Do you?’

  ‘I thought he was making your bed.’

  ‘No, he wouldn’t do that, he doesn’t know where the keys are kept.’

  ‘Oh, I see.’

  ‘No, you don’t.’

  ‘You’re right, I don’t.’

  ‘Do you know what I think? Jack stole my marbles and now he’s absconded.’

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘It’s the only logical explanation. You see, I had them only this morning, I checked especially and there they all were, rolling around in the right channels. There were twenty-six, you know, like teeth, twenty-seven, if you count the one that went missing during the war, and now they’ve gone and so has he, it’s most mysteriousity.’ She caught sight of his notebook and bent by his side, so close he could smell her stale clothes and unwashed hair. ‘Oh, you’re writing, how lovely. Are you writing about me?’

  ‘Yes.’ Yes, I’m writing about you, my dearest love.

  ‘How perfectly splendid. Will you write about my marbles? Will you ask them where they are?’

  ‘Yes, I will, I’ll ask them straight away.’ Dear Marbles, he wrote.

  She watched him closely. ‘Dear Marbles,’ she said, filled with admiration. ‘That’s a very good beginning, that’ll mightily please them.’ She leaned closer and whispered in his ear. ‘They can be very troublesome those marbles of mine, they take offence most easily.’

  ‘Do they?’

  ‘Oh, yes, they’re very devious. Don’t let them hear you.’

  ‘No, I won’t.’

  She tiptoed away round the counter, patting the till that she used to call the Malignant Dwarf, and stopped, looked about in confusion. ‘Is this a shop?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘What sort of shop?’

  ‘A bookshop.’

  ‘Whose is it?

  ‘Yours and mine, this is our shop.’

  ‘No it isn’t, that was another shop. What was it called?’

  ‘Swan & Edgar, in Piccadilly.’

  ‘That wasn’t me. I wouldn’t go anywhere near a swan, they’ll bite your arm off if you get too close to the babies.’ She changed in a trice from frowning to beaming. ‘A shop. Well, that solves the problem, doesn’t it?’ She approached the counter, all business and muddle. ‘I’ll have a pound, please.’

  ‘A pound of what?’

  ‘A pound of marbles, my good man. Look, I’ve got plenty of money.’ She emptied her pockets onto the counter: a motley collection of buttons, beads, hair pins, Scrabble tiles, elastic bands, a teaspoon, a tea bag, ribbons, string, old postage stamps.

  ‘So you have.’ He opened a drawer under the counter, shuffled about for the marbles he knew weren’t there and produced a box of paper clips, offered them for inspection. ‘Are these the kind of marbles you have in mind, madam?’

  She examined the box. ‘Oh, yes, they’re very fine marbles, so sweet and thin and shining at me.’

  He counted paper clips into a bag, flipped it round into ears and handed it over.

  She was troubled by the bag. ‘What does the writing say?’

  ‘Bob’s Books.’

  ‘What does that mean?’

  ‘Bob was an old friend of mine, this was his shop.’

  ‘You said it was our shop a minute ago. Yours and mine,’

  ‘Yes, it is. It is now.’

  ‘Then we must call it something else. We must call it the Marble Shop because that’s what we sell.’

  ‘So we do. Wait a minute, I’ve got a better idea, we’ll call it Eva’s Marbles. Is that a good name?’

  ‘Who’s Eva?’

  Who’s Eva.

  ‘She’s a beautiful woman I used to know.’

  ‘A beautiful woman you used to know. It sounds like a poem.’

  ‘It is.’ He took her money, two buttons, a Kirby grip and a used sticking plaster, put them in the till, and gave her a penny. ‘Your change, madam.’

  ‘How kind you are.’ She kissed the penny and squirrelled it away up her sleeve. ‘I should have married a man like you, I would have been happy then.’ And she wafted away, singing to herself. ‘My baby has gone down the plughole, my baby has gone down the drain; my baby has gone down the plughole, I’ll never see baby again.’

  She could sing the same song for hours, sometimes days, on end: hymns, nursery rhymes, television jingles, every one of them stabbing his heart.

  ‘Bring back, oh, bring back…’

  ‘Oh, bring back my baby to me, to me…’ The Great Man joins in the chorus with a nod of his head and a tap to his foot. ‘A catchy little tune, popular in the music halls at one time. One of my wives, the second probably – she could be very prickly on the subject of procreation and its ramifications – reprimanded me most roundly on one occasion for singing it in my bath, associated as the lyrics were, or so she claimed, with the disposal of an accidental embryo by means of boiling water and a bottle of gin.’

  Jack is in a fid
get at the turn the Great Man’s reminiscence has taken. He glances at Eva uneasily, but she is sucking the teddy bear’s nose, smacking her lips and humming a hum, ‘Hum, hum, humpety hum…’ so he holds his peace.

  ‘Mind you,’ says the Great Man, oblivious to solecism, or maybe indulging it, deliberately provoking, ‘my second wife was perfectly rational in every other respect, unlike my first who began to display signs of mental fragility in late middle age. One didn’t speak of such things in those days, of course, and she kept decently to her room as her disturbance increased so that explanation to visitors was seldom required.’ He gazes at Eva with disparaging eyebrows. ‘She certainly never made a public spectacle of herself.’

  Jack’s chest is aching with the effort of keeping his agitation in check, and when he speaks his voice is tight with suppressed anger. ‘What do you mean by a spectacle?’

  ‘My dear boy, you can’t have forgotten that frightful morning? Your wife discovered on the steps to the library? Semi-naked, half-dead with cold? All Hallows too – that fellow who found her must have thought he was seeing a ghost. Funny little chap, eyes set too close together. What was his name?’

  ‘I have no idea.’

  ‘You surprise me, I thought the incident would have been set in stone in your memory. After all, however unfortunate the set of his eyes, he undoubtedly saved your wife’s life.’ He watches Eva as she tucks the teddy bear headfirst down the neck of her blouse. ‘Although one might conclude that that was a dubious blessing.’

  CASTLEBRIDGE GENERAL HOSPITAL

  Wednesday, 1st November, 1995

  He remembers in bits and pieces, like a jigsaw puzzle only just begun. The corners in place and surrounding walls, stark white, hospital white; scattered pieces round and about waiting to be slotted into place: the wheel of a trolley, a temperature chart, a calloused heel poking out from under a sheet, a bandaged head on an anonymous pillow; and a high bed islanded in the middle, two figures perched on either side, Jack and the doctor, Eva in a hospital gown sitting between them, nodding wisely from one to the other as if she was chairing a meeting. And was there a distant baby crying? Or was that another ward, at another time? Another puzzle waiting to be finished.

  The impossibly young Old Age Psychiatrist had a tight little smile and tired eyes, frowning at her notes as if she’d forgotten where she was and what she must say. Eva, noticing the frown, sorry for it, patting her hand, getting up out of bed, smoothing the pillow. ‘You must sleep now, my dear, you’ll be better in a soon.’ She pottered away, intent and inscrutable, Jack watching with a pain in his heart. As the baby cried.

  The psychiatrist’s verdict was crisply delivered but kindly meant. She defined dementia in simple terms, its unknown causes, its proteins and plaques, its torture and tangles; the structure of the brain, cerebellum, spinal cord, destruction of cells, unknown cause, Alzheimer’s disease; further tests, unstoppable progress, retarding drugs, care and support, counselling, community nurse.

  He couldn’t take anything in, as if she were speaking a foreign language that he had yet to learn. Her words buzzed in his ears and flew away like busy flies finding nowhere to rest. He stared, not at her face where he might have found some clue to the alien syntax of what she was saying, but at the identity tag strung round her neck, at her photograph and her name printed underneath, Hinxman, Dr J.D., and found himself anxiously wondering what her name was, as if this was the first question he must answer in an oral examination before he could move on to question two. Jennifer, Joan, Jocelyn, Joss.

  ‘I was at school with a lad called Hinxman. Joss Hinxman. I haven’t seen him for years.’

  ‘No well, you wouldn’t, he was killed at Dunkirk. He was my husband’s grandfather.’ She glanced at her watch surreptitiously and started bundling her notes together, too tired, too busy, too jaded to pursue a personal connection, stopping for just a moment before she went in search of her next patient, to offer the bleakest of comfort. ‘It’s a cruel disease, Mr Carter. Not for your wife, for you. There’ll be times, believe me, when you want to kill her. Just try and remember that even as she deteriorates, however difficult she becomes, she has a life of her own that we don’t begin to understand, an inner life that will sustain her. You’re the one who will suffer, she won’t.’

  As if to prove her prediction, pandemonium broke out in the ward, the jigsaw puzzle upended, its pieces scattered, a nurse running, a woman screaming, a baby crying. And Eva with a bundle in her arms, radiating Madonna-like calm in the middle of chaos.

  ‘Have you seen the baby, Jack? He’s beautiful. He looks exactly like you.’

  Sunday, 3rd December, 2006

  The Great Man fetches a sigh so deep it seems to be dragged from the very soles of his boots. ‘Ah, me the tragedies of worthy lives, encompassed as they are by the inevitability of fate.’

  He allows a short pause for his audience to admire, even applaud his statement, but on receiving no response continues somewhat maliciously.

  ‘Mind you, to look on the bright side, her diagnosis must have come as a blessed relief. After all, the great consolation of dementia must surely be the dawning of each new day with only the future lying in store, the slate of memory wiped clean, the remembrance of yesterday’s misdemeanours consigned to oblivion.’

  Oh, such a great man, but how little he knew. To be told that Eva would slowly and surely deteriorate; that her mind would gradually shut down and that she would lose control of her bodily functions; that a time would come when she wouldn’t be able to walk or talk, to communicate in any way; that she would forget who he was, forget herself; that she would remember nothing at all. And the unkindest cut of all, that there was no cure. He would give his heart, sell his soul, to have Eva witting again, the Eva that used to be, Eva with either a baby or a teddy bear and knowing the difference.

  ‘Shocking indeed, truly shocking,’ says the Great Man, shaking his benevolent head. ‘But to pursue my point, however painful it was to witness her disintegration, you were released at last from her relentless pursuit.’

  How weary he’s growing of the Great Man’s pontifications. How much he would like to escort the Great Man to his bicycle, to send him home to his wife or wives, but how much his habit of good behaviour prevents him. How feebly he sighs instead and says, ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

  ‘My dear boy, it pains me to remind you, but you can’t have forgotten your wife’s terrible rages after the baby’s death? The way she disrupted your life? Subverted the shop? Drove customers away with her manic behaviour? Poor Mrs Baines, for example, what about her? You couldn’t want that all over again.’

  That name again.

  Baines… Baines…

  Friday, 3rd September, 1965

  There is a snapshot hidden away in the back of Jack’s mind that he’s never looked at since that terrible day. A photograph of a shop with three people in it, frozen in time, the figures out of focus, their faces fuzzy, as if the photographer’s hand had been trembling as he snapped the shutter. Dominant in front of the counter, is a tall woman whose beauty is ruined by the bitter triumph on her face. A small woman cowers at her side, and although her face is a little blurred, it can clearly be seen that one of her eyes is tightly closed, the left eye, her mouth wide open with shock. The third figure is a man on a ladder with a book in his hand; his back is to the camera and he’s looking round and down at the women, over his shoulder, with an expression of unrelieved sorrow on his face. On the counter behind them, a book lies open, a book that turns out, on closer inspection, perhaps with the aid of a magnifying glass, to be a leather-bound copy of The Book of Common Prayer, from which the pages containing ‘The Order of Service for the Solemnization of Matrimony’ have been torn to shreds in a tempest of anger and strewn like redundant confetti over the counter.

  She always began in the same way. ‘I say, Jack…’

  And he always
made the same reply. ‘Yes, hello?’ Hoping for the best, expecting the worst.

  ‘I say, Jack, I’m sorry to be the bearer of bad tidings, but you’re going bald.’

  ‘What?’ Jack was by no means a vain man but he was pleased with his hair that was still as thick and springy as ever. He was kneeling in front of the counter, sorting through a boxful of books, and he knelt up, felt his head, half dismissive, half believing her. ‘I admit to many defects,’ he said, in the pompous way that one does when meaning nothing of the sort, ‘but I am not bald.’

  ‘I’m afraid you’re mistaken, my innocent friend.’ She leaned over the counter, parted his hair this way and that, like a chimpanzee looking for nits. ‘Yes, there’s a definite thinning, almost a tonsure, small, but certainly visible to the naked eye. Perhaps you’re developing alopecia.’

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous.’

  ‘I do not jest, oh, husband of mine. Alopecia is an insidious condition, often triggered by shock, I believe. Have you had any shocks just lately, Jack?’

  ‘No, not for a while.’

  ‘Dear me, we must rectify that as soon as possible, it’s not good for the psyche to become too complacent.’

  He bent back to his box, waiting for the next line of attack, still unprepared when it came.

  ‘What exactly are you doing down there?’ How plausible she was, pretending her interest.

  ‘Tim died last month, he’s left me his books.’

  ‘Tim? Who the devil’s Tim?’ She knew perfectly well.

  ‘Reverend Bright, Timothy Bright.’

  ‘You mean he’s kicked the bucket at last? Thanks be to God.’

  Don’t answer.

  ‘I wish you’d told me, I’d have enjoyed his funeral.’

  Don’t say a word.

  ‘Don’t tell me you miss him? Sanctimonious old fool.’

  ‘Yes, I do.’

  ‘I thought you didn’t like him?’

  ‘No, I suppose I didn’t.’ Reverend Bright nursing the secret of happiness. ‘But I’ve known him all my life. And he married us, remember?’ Oh, stupidity, why did he remind her?