The tight feeling came in Emily’s chest. Sister Lucy had told her she mustn’t dwell on the things that hurt, especially Linnie. So obediently she pushed away the image of Bonnie Bride beating towards the harbour on a dull afternoon with the gulls circling, and their warm breath fogging the window glass; she pushed away Linnie’s grey eyes with the little bruise-coloured shadows underneath, and the thing she’d said that time.
“You’ll dance at my wedding when I’m a bonnie bride.”
Emily thought instead of the framed scroll on the wall of Mother Stella Marie’s study – the Hippocratic Oath that had belonged to her doctor father. He had gone to the First World War and was killed in France after only a week. His death had seemed unbearably tragic at first, but in time Emily had reasoned that at least he hadn’t suffered in the trenches for years, only to be killed a week before the end of the war.
Emily had learned to read her first words from studying the scroll while she waited for Mother Stella Marie to finish her work. The nun might be going over the kitchen accounts, or writing to children who had left the Star of Bethlehem and were making their way in the world, as Arthur and Linnie had, as Emily was now.
How remote that prospect had seemed in the days when she lay on the rug sounding out the hand-inked words on the scroll. Since she’d been on the mainland she’d had two letters from Mother Stella Marie. Emily had torn them open in a flush of excitement, and while she was reading they had brought home close. But the feeling had faded, and afterwards home had felt even further away than before. It was not just distant in miles, but obscured somehow, concealed in a fold of time that would be difficult to reach, or even, perhaps, impossible ever to find again. It gave her a little bump of fear in her stomach. Perhaps that’s how it had been for Linnie.
In the days after the funeral, Doctor Cleary seemed to Emily to have a new spring in his step. His shoulders were no longer so hunched, and Emily didn’t actually hear him whistling, but she saw that his lips were pursed as if he had wanted to whistle but had stopped himself in time.
She remembered how he had sat with his wife in the intensive care ward. Emily had been summoned there to collect his dictation tapes for typing, though he had left them for her at the nurses’ station, so she hadn’t got even a glimpse of Mrs Cleary. Intensive Care was not as brightly lit as most other hospital wards; it was a tense, ominous place that Emily had been glad to hurry away from.
Eventually, Mrs Cleary had taken a turn for the worse.
“They switched off her life support this morning,” Sam said.
“How awful!” There were tears in Mel’s soft brown eyes.
Glenna sighed. “In some ways it’s a blessing.”
Emily had felt the bump in her stomach again. Would it have been Doctor Cleary’s decision to turn off the machines that had kept his wife alive? She had waited for Sam or Mel to say something about Glenna’s remark that it was a blessing, but neither one of them had spoken.
The latest batch of letters was ready for signature. The doctor surprised Emily by pulling up a chair and signing them on a corner of her desk instead of taking them into his office.
“I’m in a rush, and I have never yet found a mistake in anything you’ve typed.”
He scribbled his initials on the last letter and returned them to her with the flicker of a smile.
He must have been good looking once, Emily thought. What can his life have really been like with his wife – those howls, the accusing whispers?
Before he left he drew another tape from his pocket and handed it to Emily.
“There’s no end to sickness, or to letters, I’m afraid,” he said. “Luckily these aren’t urgent, because I must have forgotten to bring them in for typing, what with everything …”
When he had gone Emily pressed the tape into the machine and pulled on her headphones. She had been typing for perhaps a minute when the doctor’s voice was interrupted by the now familiar clicks, and the voice Emily dreaded.
Please, I beg you, if you hear this I need you to tell …
The letter went on again, and then thirty seconds later there was another break.
If you do nothing, and he kills me, it will be your fault!
The voice in Emily’s ear was speaking to her directly, its previously pleading tone now pointy with spite. Emily took off the headphones and ejected the tape from the machine. She had done nothing, and Mrs Cleary was dead. Was that her fault? And what action was she to take? If only she could ask Mother Stella Marie, or Sister Lucy, but they seemed so far away, unreachable. It would have been a comfort to have talked to Linnie.
Reluctantly, Emily retrieved the tapes from the filing cabinet, and went next door to Glenna.
Glenna was tidying her desk. “I’m just getting ready for the onslaught after the next clinic,” she laughed.
Emily slid onto the visitor’s chair and cleared her throat. “Has Doctor Cleary had many secretaries?” she said.
Glenna hooked her long fine hair behind her ears, and her eyes dropped to the tapes in Emily’s hands.
“Well … yes,” she said. “None of them lasted too long. But sometimes girls don’t take to hospital work, or they don’t get past the transfer of symptoms stage, and so they look for something else.”
“You see …” Emily hardly knew how to go on, for what she was about to say sounded monstrous in this place where all of their lives were pitched towards helping people battle disease and injury. It will be your fault! She had to speak.
Glenna stood up and closed the door. “It’s about Mrs Cleary, isn’t it?” she said quietly.
Miserably, Emily nodded. “She must have taken his dictating machine out of his pocket.” She found it easier to put it this way than to jump right in with the woman’s allegations.
“Look, he’s a wonderful doctor,” Glenna said. “If I ever get cancer, God forbid, I will want to be treated by Doctor Cleary.”
“But his wife …”
“Emily, listen, I’m going to tell you something, but I don’t want you to spread it around.”
Emily shifted nervously on the chair. “All right,” she said.
“Mrs Cleary used to work here in the Blood Clinic. She was a vivacious woman, smart, and good at what she did. But she quit very suddenly, and stayed at home. People said she’d had some kind of breakdown.”
“I’d heard she was an alcoholic,” Emily said.
“I’m sure. There have been so many stories, some of them quite improbable.” Glenna sighed, and her freckled, good-humoured face looked sad. “Things went bad between them. If you ask me it was because they had no children, and it drove Mrs Cleary mad. Anyway, after a while she became involved in a scheme where babies waiting to be adopted were sent to her to be cared for, a sort of short-term fostering.”
Emily waited, since Glenna seemed reluctant to go on.
“Didn’t that help?” Emily said.
Glenna leaned closer, her face tense and pale. “There were two or three cot deaths,” she said.
“Two or three?”
“Three.”
The silence in the room rang in Emily’s ears. The buzz of panic began in her chest. That woman with the hoarse and frightening voice taking on the care of motherless babies.
“Why did they let her?” Emily whispered.
Glenna shrugged. “On paper she was capable, married to a doctor, the perfect candidate. There were inquests, but nothing could be proved.”
Emily thought of Mother Stella Marie’s exquisitely moulded eyelids, the kindness and calm that shone from her sea-coloured eyes. She thought of Sister Lucy’s cheerful bulk, her sturdy back bent over their rows of summer vegetables, the grace of her blunt grey head bowed in prayer. Over the years there had been one or two nuns she had learned to steer clear of, but those few aside, the sisters had received Emily with joy and had raised her with affection – how fortunate she had been to have fallen into their capable hands. Such a start wasn’t any guarantee, of course. Poor Linnie’d ha
d the same, and they had been told she had recited those lines of Saint Patrick’s prayer, the ones she would say at night to get herself off to sleep – Christ in every heart thinking of me, Christ on every tongue speaking to me, Christ in every eye that sees me – before stepping out of a fourth-floor window at Pullman’s shirt factory. She had worked there just over a week.
As the panic picked up its beat in her chest, Emily clung to the image of the scroll on Mother Stella Marie’s wall, its ancient oath, and the phrase that leapt out at her now was Primum non nocere – First, do no harm. Doctor Cleary would have sworn that oath when he graduated as a doctor. Mother Stella Marie often said it was a wonderful motto for anyone to live by, and for her sake Emily had resolved to honour it.
There was a knock at the door then, and Sam opened it and stuck her head in.
“I’m going to the shops at lunchtime. Can I bring you anything?”
Glenna smiled and shook her head. “Not unless it’s a winning lottery ticket.”
The two of them laughed, and under cover of their merriment Emily slid the tapes out of sight into the yellow envelope. After work she would sit in the chapel; she would say a prayer for Linnie, who would never be a bonnie bride, and for Arthur, that he would let them know if he was still alive; she would pray for all the Star of Bethlehem children, past, present, and future, and for herself, too. Then she would take the bus to the automat, and eat there in the quiet.
Little Buddhas Everywhere
The hatpin is a pearl teardrop. Claire picked it up for next to nothing in a charity shop, but it may even be a genuine pearl. You never knew what children would dispose of when a parent died, and vice versa. The dress, too, would have come from some dead woman’s wardrobe. Claire presses dry lips together in irritation. Most of the time she manages to suppress such thoughts before they fully surface, because objects hold no memory of the lives they were once part of, and it does not do to dwell. It is too bad that she is forced to shop this way, but only by such economies is she able to keep up any kind of appearance, and keeping up is crucial; it is a full-time job.
Claire has seen what can happen to women who let themselves go, and the fall is so much further than she could ever have imagined when she was in her twenties, or even her thirties. A handful of women she knows have slipped over the edge into that dark abyss, first losing their figures to the empty calories of alcohol, and then losing their faces to the cigarette and suntan years, activities that at the time had seemed so harmless.
Ciggies had been glamorous props – Pall Mall, Dunhill, the rough, French, throat-tearing Gauloises, pastel Sobranis, the Black Russians, they had smoked them all. Snake-thin, their limbs had been, and golden, though a tendency to freckle had kept Claire out of the sun, and smoking had made her so sick that she had rarely inhaled. Because later, of course, they learned that tobacco and UV rays were wildly destructive. But by then she and a few of the other women in her circle had lost their husbands – usually to younger women. For some of them the plunge into hardship had been sudden and savage, with one of her old group, Jeanie Tarrant, actually rumoured to be homeless.
Claire turns her ruthless gaze towards the full-length mirror. Never has she allowed herself to avoid this weekly reckoning. For unless you meet age face-on, how can you manage it? Years ago she heard that Erris Cleary smashed up all the mirrors in her house in a drunken rage, including the gilt over-mantle that had been passed down through her husband’s family since eighteen-hundred and something. And poor Jeanie never got a full-length mirror in that house she and Rob had stretched themselves to afford in the new estate that had sprung up behind Claire and Tommy’s place.
Claire grimaces, remembering her old white-gabled house with its rambling garden. At Winterbourne she had entertained her women friends with their children during the day, and with their husbands at night, she had hosted dinner parties for the people from Tommy’s work; children’s parties, pot luck suppers with two or three other couples, summer barbeques, gatherings around a bonfire with mulled wine and fireworks on Guy Fawkes’ night, progressive dinners, curry nights, fondues and fire pots, charity fundraisers. There was that summer they threw the fancy dress party, when Erris turned up as Jay Gatsby in a man’s pinstripe suit, and danced all night with Delia Harper. Both their husbands had been furious, and later poor Delia was seen nursing a black eye.
If things went sour there, it was no fault of the house. It had brought her low to leave it, but at least her flat is all paid for, and not too hard to clean or too expensive to run. Poor Jeanie – how proud she had been of her dove-grey and white exterior colour scheme, and of the French windows that overlooked the garden she and Rob had planned but never quite got around to planting.
“I just love the light here!” she’d said when they first moved in, her waif-like figure habitually obliterated under a big shapeless sweater or t-shirt of Rob’s.
Jeanie’s delight in that gimcrack house had been touching. She used to paint with watercolours, which was maybe why she loved the light. Claire would see her in the mornings, riding past their house on her old black bicycle, slim brown calves pumping the pedals and a scruffy rucksack on her back in which she kept her paints and brushes, her sketchbooks, and sheets of watercolour paper. She would ride for miles to where the streets gradually gave way to farm land, and eventually to the wilderness of Bailey’s Wood, only returning to meet the kids from school. Jeanie’d had some of her paintings framed, and hung them on the walls of their house – landscapes, and nature studies, mainly. Claire had bought one from her, and it still hangs in the flat. But back in the day, at drinks parties at Jeanie’s and Rob’s, when Jeanie was in the kitchen, Claire had overheard people saying that the pictures weren’t much good.
The last time Claire had visited Jeanie her walls had been bare, what you could see of them. For after Rob moved out Jeanie had kept the place closely shuttered, as if the light she’d once loved so much now hurt her eyes. The soft furnishings, Claire recalled, had smelled of dust, of smoke, and fried chicken. Their kids, a boy and a girl, had left home young. Once the support from Rob had petered out Jeanie could no longer afford her cartons of Marlborough Reds. In time she had not been able to cover her utility bills. It was terrifying to think that a woman like that was so reduced, dependant on the dwindling goodwill of her few remaining family and friends. It could happen to any of them.
Erris Cleary, though, is dead, and Claire would say, if anyone asked her, that she is not surprised. It was no surprise, either, when Delia and Roger Harper split. With her hennaed hair and fine white skin, Delia was a flame, and Roger a wet blanket. When they separated, Roger took their boy, and Delia the little girl. She has heard that Roger still lives in the old neighbourhood with a new wife, but no one seems to know what happened to Delia.
Claire turns to the wardrobe, where her dress dangles from the top of the door. Second-hand clothes feel almost new once on a wire hanger under clear plastic, and side-stepping a fate like Jeanie’s is worth any amount of distaste for the dress’s provenance. It is only women of a certain age who are squeamish about pre-used clothing, she’s noticed; young people seem not to care if they walk around in the outfits of the dead. Just last week, Claire overheard one of the granddaughters boasting of a designer dress she’d got at a knockdown price in an Oxfam shop. Juliet, it had been, not her favourite – well, not strictly her granddaughter either, but the eldest of Tommy’s children with Rosanna.
That her ex-husband has been married to someone else for so long that one of their offspring shops by herself still amazes Claire. Eighteen years it has been for Tommy and Rosanna, but thirty-two for Tommy and Claire, so she is still on the winning side. And now it is their golden wedding, or would have been if Tommy had stuck it out with her.
Rosanna doesn’t drink or smoke, though privately Claire thinks the UV rays might claim her in the end. Rosanna the runner; Rosanna with the permanently caramel-coloured skin; Rosanna with her spaghetti strap tops beneath which her breasts ne
stle so casually that they make Claire feel old, and tired, and frumpy, make her feel the full weight of their twenty-one-year age difference. Rosanna works with computers. She understands their complex systems as easily as Claire understands the proportion of sugar, butter, flour, and eggs in a batch of cupcakes or a Victoria sponge. Rosanna uses a sun bed, apparently.
Claire and Tommy are to meet at the Hotel Windsor, where they will sit in their usual spot overlooking the park. The hotel is a little shabby these days, though still respectable, and Claire loves the view from the first floor lounge. She has used the excuse of sorting out the insurance on her flat, for Tommy has always handled their business affairs and he continues to manage things for Claire, even after marrying Rosanna. Claire puts this down to having remained calm and reasonable throughout their split. Knowing Tommy, he would simply have faded from her life if she had kicked up a fuss. As it was, he had negotiated the sale of Winterbourne and the purchase of her flat, which she insisted be put into both their names, as the old house had been. It gave her a sense of security, she said, when Tommy had raised his eyebrows. Having his name on the deed to her flat hadn’t gone down well with Rosanna, but to Claire it felt as if her ex-husband was still there to look after her if anything went wrong; she felt bolstered by this knowledge, as she had throughout the years of their marriage. Except, of course, when what went wrong was Rosanna.
Though cramped, Claire’s flat is in an elegant block in a good suburb, and her ex-husband takes an interest in the ongoing communal matters that arise among the flat owners. Claire could easily manage this herself, but she wants Tommy involved. For when she rings him to discuss this or that small problem, it feels as if they are still together, still a team, despite the fact that he has another wife: Rosanna the feminist, Rosanna the Buddhist, whose politics and religion had not conflicted with stealing another woman’s husband.
Murmurations Page 2