5
Events and sensations swirled into a merry-go-round, strident with anxiety, since there was something which she must, at all costs, insist upon doing. Only in snatches could she remember what it was. When the whirligig stopped for a moment, with a jolting bump, she thought of Edith’s injection; she was off again before she could explain that to all the black men, rushing about in a snowstorm, and the policeman, and the men with a stretcher. They thought Edith was in a hospital. A kind black face came very close to hers, when she was on the stretcher, and said:
‘Mayam! You don’t have to worry. They’re taking you to the hospital.’
She could not explain that Edith was on Keritha because of the bells ringing – dinga-dinga-dinga-dinga – like a fire engine can’t you tell them to stop that noise she said to the policeman sitting beside her but he just wrote something down in a book – dinga-dinga-dinga-dinga fighting through the fiery snow sans gouvernail sans matelots Patti is in a museum – dinga-dinga-dinga-dinga – BUMP!
Edith’s injection! She had not got to Keritha. She was in bed and the fire engine had gone away. She said to the chubby young man in a white coat:
‘I don’t need an injection. It’s my friend, Miss Challoner …’
He took no notice and stuck the needle into her arm so that the whirligig began again. She spun through chaos and missed the boat.
There was dead silence in that no-light, as she stood on the bank and watched it slide away over the water.
‘Wait! Wait!’ she cried. ‘I’ve paid. They paid my fare in June.’
The shadowy people stood turned away, gazing at the darkling shore ahead. Yet one of them heard her. A young anguished face, spotlighted like a face on the stage, looked back and a desolate wail rang over the water:
‘The children … the children …’
‘Where?’ called Kate. ‘Where?’
‘The children …’
That cry continued long after the boat and the bank and the water had vanished. The children! The children! I must find the children. That’s why I missed the boat.
So she searched and searched amidst the stalactites and the stalagmites and the caves and the waves. She fought stubbornly for her life against phantom hordes, and against cobwebs hanging like veils from the dead trees, and the brassy clamour of cobnobs which choked her with a bursting pain.
‘How can I find any children with all these cobnobs about?’ she complained to the man with a long nose. ‘That Mrs McKintosh! A slut if ever I saw one.’
Chaos whirled her away again and brought her to a glowing emerald, hanging in mid air. Beneath it was an arrangement of white and blue and red. She thought it pretty. In a little while it came into focus. The emerald was a lampshade pulled low over a table where some girls sat. They had blue dresses, and little red cloaks, and white caps on their heads. Nurses. A hospital. She was ill. She shut her eyes to think about it and when she opened them next the emerald was gone. It was daylight. Bridie was there. Bridie was crying.
‘Don’t,’ she tried to say. ‘I’m all right.’
It was not Bridie after all, but Judith, and both were gone before she could explain that she was not going to die. She said so, however, to the long-nosed man when next he was there. He said:
‘Of course not. You’re doing splendidly. We’re very pleased with you.’
‘Tell them so. They think I’ve been dead a long time. Where are they?’
‘We’ve sent them home. But they’ll come soon and see you.’
‘Some children … their mother … I don’t know who they are … I missed the boat, you know, though they paid. They said all the things and did all the things, and answered all the letters. But I had to stay … for the children. It was the Visitors …’
‘You mustn’t talk so much if you want to get well.’
‘Oh, but I shall get well. I’ve got a lot to do only I can’t remember what it is.’
The emerald glowed again on an older woman who was writing in a book. She came over to ask how Kate felt.
‘I don’t know yet. I suppose I have pneumonia? Have I been in this bed all the time?’
‘No. You were brought up here when they got hold of your family. This is a paying ward.’
The whirligig had stopped but she still swam in and out of consciousness in a haphazard way. When next she came to the surface Douglas was assuring her that the children were quite all right. They had not caught her cold.
‘They say you’ve been asking about them all the time.’
‘Have I? I don’t remember.’
She could not recall any worry about Timmie and Caroline. Yet it seemed to her that some other children had haunted the nightmare from which she was emerging. As she reached after the memory it vanished for ever.
‘I shall never forgive myself,’ Douglas was saying in his dreariest voice. ‘If I’d realized you were so ill that day …’
She shut her eyes, thinking that she could not be bothered with him until she was better. This time she went to sleep and woke to a much clearer scene, comprising the whole ward and the patients in the other beds.
It was early morning. A coloured ward maid brought in a tea trolley. Some women in dressing gowns and hair curlers gathered round it, carrying cups to those who were still in bed. One of them came over to inspect Kate.
‘Feeling better, Mrs Benson?’
They knew her name here. To them she was already a person, involved in the present rather than the past; they had recognized that much about her before she herself knew where she was. Nor were they going to bewilder her by insisting that she ought to be somebody quite different.
‘You look ever so much better. Dr Ames is very clever, isn’t he?’
‘Is that the chubby one?’
‘Oh no. That’s only little Dr Cotteril, the House Physician. Though he’s quite clever too. A nice boy. Dr Ames is the Registrar.’
A great spate of activity set in as the night nurses put the ward to rights before going off duty. Beds were made for patients well enough to sit up. Advanced convalescents set off with sponge bags to the bathroom. There was much coming and going with bedpans. A distracted old man rushed in and made for a curtained cubicle but was driven off by a nurse.
‘His wife’s in there,’ commented Kate’s companion. ‘She’s going up to the theatre today. Of course she’s under already. Had a shot before the tea came in. He shouldn’t come rushing in here just when everybody is perched on the bedpans.’
‘He doesn’t know what he’s doing, poor man,’ said Kate.
The unhappy creature had drifted to the tea trolley and was absently finishing up the cold dregs in the cups until Sister came and led him out of the ward.
The tea trolley was wheeled away. A newspaper trolley arrived. The night nurses trooped off duty, smiling good-bye as they went. The day nurses trooped in, smiling good morning as they came. The women in dressing gowns got into bed again and took the curlers out of their hair. Vase after vase of flowers was brought in. Breakfast arrived. A procession with a wheeled stretcher came to remove the operation patient.
Kate knew that she had come back to the world again – a world full of people living their private lives and enduring the common lot.
6
It was a strange world and she liked it better than she would have expected. Hitherto she had always supposed that a ward full of other patients must be an irritating nuisance to an invalid. Yet, when a private room fell vacant, she refused to move into it, preferring to remain where she was.
She and these other women, shut up together like passengers on a ship, knew more about one another than is usual with shipboard acquaintances. Most of them were sustaining, or had recently sustained, some ordeal by pain, terror, or shock. Each had her own way of going about it. Beneath a surface of commonplace chatter, mutual sympathy, high spirits, and valour were plainly discernible. They were a corporate body, on pleasant terms with the nurses but by no means subdued by them nor was there any superst
itious respect for the doctors.
‘I can’t help laughing,’ said a massive matron to Kate, ‘when little Cotteril tells me things I knew before he was born or thought of.’
From six in the morning, when the first tea trolley came in, till nine-thirty at night, when all lights were extinguished save the emerald over the nurses’ table, a slow, quiet, efficient bustle of activity went on. Somebody was always doing something. Something was always being done to somebody. Patients were washed, given injections, given enemas, given blood transfusions, and trundled off to the theatre. Fresh flowers arrived. Faded flowers were thrown out. Twice a day the newspaper trolley came. Twice a week the library trolley came, also a trolley with writing paper, soap and bath powder. Meals came. Visitors came. Curtains were pulled round beds and pulled back again. Important doctors, with their retinues, trod the ward and stood murmuring round X-ray photographs. New arrivals, flung into a waiting bed, lay for a while in mysterious isolation. They were soon absorbed into the community; their names and case histories were common property before nightfall. Mobile patients wandered from bed to bed, exchanging magazines, knitting patterns, and cooking recipes. Pastors of various denominations flitted tactfully about in search of their sheep. Little bells were rung and Mass was whispered in some curtained corner. Death, pain, and panic were held at bay, not only by doctors and nurses but by humanity, solidly arrayed to defy the foe.
In this sane and tranquil sisterhood lay Kate, so weak that she could scarcely lift her hand, a little stronger every day and every day more aware of the impasse before her. What should she do, where should she go, when she could no longer lie here?
She could not live with Douglas again. He had no genuine wish to live with her. The flat, Ronnie, and Mrs McKintosh suited him perfectly. To leave them would be a sacrifice imposed by convention since any revival of Edwardes Square was now impossible. She could not very clearly remember all that he had said on that dreadful afternoon, but enough survived to settle the matter. Had this break not occurred in their lives they might have continued very well in the path that they had always trodden. He could have escaped from bitterness and self pity by spells of fantasy with some Pamela or other. She could have borne with him by reflecting that she, probably, got more out of their marriage than he did. Although she had, long ago, rejected the Mortimer maxim that all men are silly, she had come to believe that Mortimer women inevitably married silly men, were mysteriously attracted by them, attractive to them. Men of sense, hovering for a while round the bevy of red-haired beauties in the Addison Road, were apt, after closer inspection, to bow themselves out. Douglas had cut a more impressive figure in the world, was far less meek and browbeaten than the average Mortimer husband.
This workable compromise was now at an end. She could not stomach his determination to sentimentalize his own remorse when he supposed her dead. That remorse was very natural; she had felt it herself, often enough, when aware of the astonished compassion with which the living think of the newly dead; she had then perceived the mystery, the pathos, the unfinished pattern of any human life. It was typical of Douglas to falsify this compassion by dismissing, for his own peace of mind, all that she had been and done. It suited him better to substitute an artificial creature, an elfin, poetic girl quenched by poor Michael’s death.
She had not been born ‘a different person’. She had never betrayed her own nature, the strongest impulse in which was to love and care for children. She would have been the same Kate, no matter whom she had married, more of a mother than a wife, perhaps, but a good wife for a certain type of man. It seemed to her that she would have done very well for some old-fashioned, heroic explorer who, having discovered the North Pole, would come home and beget another child before going off to discover the South Pole, confident that his wise Penelope would guard his house for him in his absence and would always welcome him back with open arms. Many a man has rejoiced in such a wife, many a woman in such a husband. Sooner than marry Douglas she might have done better to become a Nanny, giving her life to a succession of children and turning to new ones when time stole away the old.
Some way of living apart must be devised which should not shock or distress her family. She had done so already, in a most careless and culpable way, and they were letting her know it.
‘You look tired,’ she said, when Judith came one day to see her.
‘Well, you know, we’ve all had rather a fright. It’s taken a lot out of us. We can’t think how you got to the Addison Road.’
‘I was delirious. I thought the Challoners’ garden was full of black men.’
‘It probably was. That house is now a club for coloured students. Thank heaven one of them looked out of the window and saw you! Otherwise …’
Otherwise … she might have died all over again. They would have been obliged to go through it all twice … a funeral … feeling sad … impossible! One obol is the fare for Charon. Nobody gets two.
‘Hazel and Andrew got worried when you didn’t come home. At last they rang father up and they all hovered around for ages before doing the sensible thing and going to the police. They upset each other so much that Hazel threatened a miscarriage and her Mummie came flapping up from Leamington Spa and scalded herself with a hot-water bottle.’
‘Oh dear.’
‘You’d have been traced quicker if you’d had your address in your handbag.’
‘I haven’t got an address,’ muttered Kate. ‘What?’
‘Hazel is all right, isn’t she? There’s no danger …’
‘Oh no. That was just something they dreamed up to make things worse. Then at 3 a.m. they proceeded to ring us up.’
‘Oh dear, oh dear,’ sighed guilty Kate.
The period of canonization was clearly over. She was a real person again and a very tiresome one into the bargain.
‘I suppose you thought you still lived in the old house?’
‘No. I think I wanted to get to Keritha. I was worrying about Edith and how she’s managing without me.’
‘Keritha?’
Judith looked thoughtful. Presently she said:
‘It must be nice and warm there. Very different from this horrible climate.’
‘You get cold north winds in the winter.’
‘But the Challoners’ house is lovely and warm?’
‘Oh yes. Quite.’
‘And soon it will be spring. It comes so much earlier there. It must be heavenly. And all those servants!’
‘Yes. It’s wonderful not having to lift a finger.’
‘I don’t wonder you were so happy there.’
Kate had not been happy there. She had been desolate and miserable, most of the time, wondering why they did not write. She would have said so if her tea had not arrived just then. Judith poured it out for her, saying:
‘Quite nice! And it ought to be, considering what they charge.’
‘Oh dear!’
They talked about the children for a little, but Judith looked pensive and presently asked what Kate thought of Mrs McKintosh.
‘I think she’s awful. So do you, don’t you?’
‘I don’t think she’s so bad,’ said Judith, blushing slightly. ‘And she can do no wrong in Father’s eyes.’
‘Men!’ said Kate. ‘It’s that Scotch accent. I must admit I’ve been misled by it myself. We Englishry always associate a Scotch accent with honesty, and efficiency and common sense.’
‘Well …’ Judith laughed a little, ‘it often is. If that’s all you have against her …’
‘I agree it often is. They’re a wonderful nation. But they do have a small percentage of throw-outs and she’s one. And I have plenty against her. She’s a very indifferent cook. There were cobwebs on the ceiling. And they went to get a whisky bottle from the sideboard which they thought was full. It was half empty. They were quite astonished. Mrs Mac, who was bringing in some underdone chops, gave me a squinneying sort of look. She could trust them not to put two and two together, but she obviously wishe
d me farther.’
‘Was this all on the day you were delirious?’ asked Judith derisively.
‘I wasn’t delirious then. And when first I got back you all … since when have you decided she’s not so bad?’
‘All I mean is that Father is provided for. You needn’t be in a hurry to find a house or a flat till you’re quite strong.’
Judith departed soon afterwards, leaving Kate to be torn between relief and remorse. The demand for a new Edwardes Square had apparently been suspended. Douglas might remain indefinitely in his widower’s burrow. The whole family had lived through a night of terror for which her own delirium was not a complete excuse. It seemed to her that some warning had flashed through her mind, when she was sitting in that garden, and that it had been ignored. She had known herself to be ill, and had behaved as though she wished to die. Yet later she had fought her way back to life for some purpose which now eluded her.
Douglas came to see her no more. He was reported to have contracted a chill in which she did not wholly believe. A chill had always been his resource in any difficult situation. He lay apologetically in bed, declaring it all to be too maddening, until the situation cleared up. This chill, said Andrew, who brought her the news of it, was nothing serious. Mrs McKintosh was coping with it. She was giving him friar’s balsam.
‘How perfectly wonderful of her!’ snapped Kate.
‘Isn’t it?’ he said innocently. ‘She’s really, in her own way, a very capable person. Mother … we ought to think a bit where you go, when you leave here. Of course Hazel and I would love to …’
The Forgotten Smile Page 19