Smut: Stories

by Alan Bennett

  ‘But they’re taught caring, aren’t they?’ said Partridge.

  ‘Oh yes. They’re taught it but it’s life that should have taught them it. Experience. And just as you are too young to be doctors they are too young to be nurses. The best nurses are middle-aged, except they won’t be nurses any more, they’ll be administrators. So stop asking for a nurse when all you want is someone to do the feeling for you. If there’s comforting to be done or consolation to be offered you’re the doctor; do it yourself.’

  ‘I work for an accountant,’ said Cora. ‘Am I right in thinking the basic problem is financial?’

  ‘Well,’ said Partridge, glad to have found someone sensible at last…

  ‘I warn you’, said Ballantyne ‘that if you say yes, Partridge, the other one is likely to put you on a life-support machine yourself.’

  ‘What has she got to live for?’ said Partridge plaintively.

  ‘Us,’ said Jackie. ‘Or me at any rate’.

  Partridge sighed. Who switched the machine off wasn’t his problem. He wanted to be a pathologist. The bodies he’d be dealing with would be dead already.

  ‘Let’s look on the bright side,’ said Cora. ‘If we switched her off it would reduce her carbon footprint.’

  Jackie began to wail.

  Partridge sighed.

  ‘Well,’ said Partridge ‘we’ll play it by ear.’ He shook hands with the sisters. ‘We’ll give her another week or two.’

  ‘No marks,’ said Ballantyne. ‘And nurses or no nurses you’ll have to brush up on the humanity, Partridge. Currently that box remains resolutely unticked. Whereas you, ladies, are wasted at St Mark’s. You should be on national television.’

  HAVING LOST HER LODGERS and even the sporadic rent they had provided, Mrs Donaldson found herself compelled to ask for extra sessions at the hospital. She tackled Ballantyne one lunchtime.

  ‘My charm?’ said Ballantyne. ‘Or a new fridge-freezer? There are some slots but nothing juicy at all. Still it will be nice to see more of you. What have we got tomorrow? You don’t want rectal bleeding do you, but that apart it’s just gallstones, which is no challenge to Bickerton Road’s answer to Meryl Streep.’

  He handed over a folder.

  ‘Unless of course you had a fit.’

  ‘I had a fit not long ago,’ said Mrs Donaldson.

  ‘So you did…and memorably too. You could bring up your lunch, of course, but I think not. Let’s keep it simple. Gallstones, it is.’

  ‘Perhaps she’s deaf,’ said Mrs Donaldson.

  ‘Or Latvian?’ said Ballantyne.

  ‘Diabetic,’ said Mrs Donaldson. ‘I know that inside out.’

  ‘Good girl.’

  Having thought it over Mrs Donaldson had decided, rent or no rent, against letting out the room. There would be no more nights with her ear pressed to the wall and none of the suffocating excitement that came every fourth Friday when the rent was due. It had been a holiday from respectability and not to be repeated, a one-off, the chance of her coming across any other lodgers as open-minded (and penurious) as Andy and Laura very slim. No. That chapter was closed. Regretful though she was, it had all been too much of a strain.

  Still it left her with a curiosity, a prurience even, that, associating it with freedom, release and a new life, she was not now anxious to suppress. She had heard that there were all sorts to be seen on the internet. She didn’t know about the internet but thought there must be courses one could go on: there were courses for everything these days though whether the instruction stretched to the kind of stuff she wanted to see she doubted. But, propriety preserved, that was what she thought she would do. Delia would know.

  HAVING HAD A DULLISH DAY (thyroid deficiency, hiatus hernia and (non-extruded) piles), she was sitting in the kitchen having a quiet drink when the doorbell went.

  Thinking it was probably Gwen, she whipped the glass into the cupboard before dutifully putting the chain on and opening the door.

  ‘Mrs Donaldson?’

  ‘Yes?’

  It was a boy and girl.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I thought you were my daughter.’

  ‘No. We’ve come about the room.’

  He was wearing a thin overcoat, jeans and shirt and, surprisingly, narrow though it was, a tie. It was a look she thought she might have seen on TV, where she had certainly seen the hat, a silly little black, narrow-brimmed affair that was a size too small. It was the hat of a pop singer who was frequently arrested for drug offences, and though he had a sweet face the hat did nothing for him, making him look younger rather than older, which she supposed was its purpose, and not worldly at all.

  The girl was more ordinary, big cardigan, long scarf, her only concession to fashion a shiny pink handbag.

  ‘The room?’ Mrs Donaldson said. ‘What room? There is no room.’

  Her decision to take no more lodgers had not been an easy one but confronted with this unbecoming pair she found herself relieved and even cheerful. No, no. They wouldn’t have done at all.

  ‘You are on the list,’ the boy said. ‘I’m Ollie, by the way. This is Geraldine. I’m at the College of Art and Geraldine works in a café.’

  ‘Organic,’ said the girl, handing the lodgings list to the boy.

  ‘Here you are,’ said Ollie pointing out her name (fingernails quite clean).

  ‘I told them to take me off,’ said Mrs Donaldson.

  ‘Well they haven’t,’ said Ollie. ‘It’s a shame since we’ve come all the way up from town. Did you have a bad experience?’

  ‘I’m sorry?’ said Mrs Donaldson.

  ‘That made you take yourself off the list?’

  ‘No, no. It’s just that I…I thought I’d have a break, you know.’

  ‘Couldn’t you just give us a trial?’ said the boy. The girl smiled wanly. ‘Then if you like us you might change your mind. We could give you a reference. We know Andy,’ said the boy, ‘don’t we?’

  The girl nodded and hid in her scarf.

  ‘Andy?’ said Mrs Donaldson.

  ‘Who was here before. We came round to see them once, only you were out.’

  All this had been round the door but reassured as to their credentials Mrs Donaldson took the chain off.

  ‘Do you see them?’ said Mrs Donaldson. ‘How are they?’

  ‘Andy’s in Edinburgh,’ the boy said. ‘Laura’s in Africa somewhere.’

  ‘Malawi,’ said Mrs Donaldson. ‘I had a postcard. Perhaps you’d better come in.’

  The three of them sat round the kitchen table, Ollie still in his hat.

  ‘We’d be very reliable with the rent,’ said Ollie. ‘Geraldine works in a café.’

  ‘It isn’t that,’ said Mrs Donaldson.

  ‘They weren’t, though, were they?’ said Ollie.

  ‘Weren’t what?’ said Mrs Donaldson oblivious of the chasm into which she was about to fall.

  ‘Reliable with the rent.’

  ‘They weren’t too bad,’ said Mrs Donaldson. ‘No. It’s not that.’

  ‘Is it us?’ The boy smiled at her. He could have been fourteen.

  ‘You?’ said Mrs Donaldson. ‘No. No. It’s not you.’

  ‘Anyway, they said you were very understanding.’ The boy smiled. ‘About the rent.’

  Geraldine wound her hands in her scarf.

  ‘We wouldn’t have a problem with that, would we, matey?’

  ‘No,’ said the girl, her scarf in her mouth. ‘No problem. No problem at all.’

  ‘Excuse me,’ said Mrs Donaldson. ‘I’ve just got to go upstairs.’

  She ran up to the bathroom, closed the door and was suddenly, surprisingly, sick.

  She sat on the bed, their bed, and hid her face in the pillow.

  It was something she had never imagined though now it had happened it seemed so obvious. If they knew, everybody knew, and she felt giddy with all the ramifications. The word would have gone round the medical school. And where better; she was a case herself. She felt be
yond compassion and respect. A joke. ‘Our landlady’.

  She wiped her face and went downstairs.

  They were sitting at the table, neither of them speaking.

  ‘I’ll think it over,’ Mrs Donaldson lied. ‘I can’t decide.’

  The boy put his hand on her arm as they stood up.

  ‘We’d be no trouble. Music and that.’ He gave her a piece of paper. ‘I’ve written down my mobile.’

  She smiled reassuringly as if there was hope.

  They stand on the doorstep and now for the first time the boy takes off his ridiculous hat and holds it against his chest in a gesture so old-fashioned she almost laughs, a pathetic waif whom the quest for accommodation has cast up on her doorstep.

  ‘I like your hat,’ she says.

  He puts it on and behind his head a plane crawls across the sky and somewhere a woman is singing.

  She comes back inside and sees on the table the slip of paper with his mobile number and next to it he has drawn a silly smiley face with a hat on it. Upstairs she lies on what had once been her bed, lies on it on the left which had always been her side.

  AND THERE AT SEEMINGLY THE END of what has turned out a cautionary tale, Mrs Donaldson could be left and readers wanting a moral ending should probably stop here and focus, as they say, on that suburban bed where the lady grieves for the sound and sensible woman she had once been and been thought to be, whereas the word that keeps coming into her head is bawd…a leering loose-breasted attendant on the pleasures of others.

  She sees herself fallen into laughter and contempt and absented from all pardon and understanding, her ordinary suburban home if not quite a brothel certainly a place of erotic trade, barter and exchange.

  No, she should be left mourning everything she has so thoughtlessly thrown away.

  Which would be all very well did she not still run and rerun her calloused recollections constantly in her head so that the (only two) scenes in which she had figured lose all colour, flavour and feeling; and then she runs them again. She knows the moments when had she not been so timid she could have intruded on the action herself even though this, for her momentous, intervention would have amounted to no more than laying her hand on the boy’s lunging rump.

  ‘He wouldn’t have minded,’ she tells herself, ‘and probably wouldn’t even have noticed…Still, one thing might have led to another.’ And Laura similarly whose hand she might have taken and let it lead her into the action.

  The preliminaries, too, she rehearses – the preamble in the kitchen, the preparations upstairs, the candles, the casual undressing: the whole sequence so familiar that in memory it becomes almost a ceremony. Her lodgers gone, it is what puts her to sleep every night and even on this fateful day, dismayed though she is and raw at the prospect of exposure, it’s not a ceremony she omits.

  But she thinks, too, of work, that old analgesic though one in this case that is no painkiller at all. She remembers incidents she had been puzzled by at the time – the unexplained laughter in class, the guffaws when Prentice had had to take her hand, the students smirking without apparent cause. Had she heard Maloney say ‘I thought she was the one who was supposed to be cool’ she would have known. Now she did.

  The next day she felt less chastened, mildly excited even, the actress in her quite relishing the bold face she was going to have to put on. Yesterday she had felt robbed of her necessary armour but this morning as she hung her coat in the locker she remembered one of her presentations on stigma and a woman whose face had been disfigured in an accident. ‘I look at people’, she had had to say ‘as if they were the injured ones.’ So she put on a bold face.

  Except that it hardly seemed to be necessary. Nothing appeared to have altered. If she was a laughing stock no one was letting on. Perhaps Andy and Laura had been more discreet than she was giving them credit for: they had told the boy in the hat and his glum girlfriend, it’s true, but they were not part of the class or medical students even. Her disgrace might all have been her imagination.

  Looking at the schedule Mrs Donaldson remembered that it was today she was to be working with Miss Beckinsale, whose undisputed province old age and its infirmities had always been. This dated from an early presentation of dementia that had so impressed Dr Ballantyne, it had seemed as rambling and diffuse as the real thing. Over the years Miss Beckinsale had contrived to annex contingent territories like aphasia and amnesia, strokes and other cerebral malfunctions. ‘The mind’, as she was fond of saying, ‘and its encumbrances’.

  Miss Beckinsale, though, was no longer young and some of her performances had got so wayward and self-indulgent as to be clinically unhelpful, so that occasion ally Ballantyne would steer some cerebral problem Mrs Donaldson’s way: Alzheimer’s of early onset, a couple of aneurysms and (very satisfyingly and a treat to perform) Tourette’s. This last had been offered to Miss Beckinsale but she turned it down as it required her to blurt out obscenities she claimed never even to have come across. She hadn’t heard of the disease either and when it was explained to her still wasn’t convinced, putting it down to a lack of self-control.

  The crumbling of her empire was not lost on Miss Beckinsale.

  ‘Expect ructions,’ said Delia. ‘No trespassing.’ Though to begin with at any rate the troupe’s senior member seemed quite relaxed, even linking arms with Mrs Donaldson and whispering, ‘Welcome to the mind.’

  Ballantyne, too, had foreseen some genteel chuntering but when none was forthcoming, on this particular day he had ventured to team the two ladies in a scenario involving a daughter wanting to get her mildly demented mother into a home.

  It was the afternoon.

  ‘Are you the carer?’ said Miss Beckinsale.

  Mrs Donaldson sighed. ‘No. Violet. It’s Jane.’ The students not having come in from their lunch hour, Mrs Donaldson wasn’t having any of Miss Beckinsale’s usual antics.

  ‘We’ve not started yet, Violet.’

  Miss Beckinsale shut her eyes tight.

  ‘I don’t start. I am! You’re the carer.’

  ‘I am not the carer,’ said Mrs Donaldson. ‘I am your daughter, Lois.’

  ‘You? You’re never my daughter. You’re far too old for a start. And you wouldn’t catch a daughter of mine in a cardigan that colour.’

  This was a typical Beckinsale tactic. Knowing no blame could attach, out of the thickets of her supposed dementia she fired spiteful little darts at her colleagues, one symptom of supposedly losing her mind her readiness to speak it.

  Now the students were filtering in and Miss Beckinsale closed her eyes and let her mind drift at its moorings.

  The student this afternoon was Metcalf, a stolid young man who thought geriatrics was a good area to get into, and now he joins the two women on the podium, shaking hands with the supposed daughter and ready to do the same with her pretend mother except that Miss Beckinsale, who was still getting into character, appeared not to see either Metcalf or his extended hand.

  So he sits down at the table and makes a note.

  ‘Now Miss Murgatroyd…’

  ‘Mrs,’ said Mrs Donaldson.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ said Metcalf. ‘So there’s a Mr Murgatroyd?’

  ‘There was. He’s dead.’

  ‘She murdered him,’ said her mother. ‘Pushed him out of the window.’

  ‘Prostate,’ said the daughter.

  ‘I don’t even know her name,’ said the old lady.

  ‘What is your name incidentally?’ said Metcalf.

  ‘Lois.’

  ‘It never is,’ said her mother, ‘her name is…’ and Miss Beckinsale cast about for a name that would cause the maximum offence.

  ‘…My daughter’s name is Tracy.’

  ‘Lois,’ said Mrs Donaldson again.

  Metcalf made another note.

  ‘I’m going to ask you one or two questions to determine the degree of care Mother requires. Is Mother incontinent?’

  ‘Only when she wants to be.’

  ‘
Does she soil herself?’

  ‘When it suits her.’

  ‘What is she saying?’ the old lady said. ‘Ask me not her.’

  ‘I have to do everything for her,’ said Lois.

  ‘Interesting point,’ Ballantyne’s voice comes from the back of the class.

  ‘When anyone says “I have to do everything for her” what they generally mean is that they have to do one thing for her.’

  ‘She has men,’ the old lady said, ‘in droves.’

  Ballantyne ignores this.

  ‘It’s also interesting,’ he continues, ‘that though a daughter can say “I have to do everything for her” about her aged mother, at the other end of life a mother would never say of her infant child “I have to do everything for her”. Why do we take the helpless condition of infancy without complaint but not that of senility? Culley, any thoughts?’

  Culley considered.

  ‘The shit smells worse for a start.’

  There was a shout of laughter in which Ballantyne does not join.

  ‘It’s a serious point. So it does. On you go.’

  Metcalf persevered asking his textbook questions to do with memory, mobility and waking in the night but getting nowhere. It’s plain that, mother and daughter, these are two awkward women. The mother wants to stay in her home; the daughter can’t cope and wants her in a different sort of home. If they were in the least bit fond of one an other it could be heart-rending but they’re not.

  ‘Have you and Mother ever got on?’ he asks.

  ‘We get on,’ says the mother. ‘What makes you think we don’t get on?’

  ‘You’ve just called her a cow.’

  ‘She’s my daughter. I can call her what I like.’

  Out of the blue Metcalf said, ‘Who is the prime minister?’

  ‘That feller,’ she says. ‘I know but I’m not telling you.’

  ‘Can you take five from seven?’

  ‘Why should I want to do that?’

  Metcalf turns back to the daughter. ‘You see Mrs Murgatroyd, it’s pretty well accepted that elderly patients do better in familiar surroundings and this after all is Mother’s home.’