‘She makes me so sorry for her,’ said Pilar Bistouri, standing outside the kitchen cubicle that lunchtime. She was wearing the dress with narrow pink stripes which distinguishes auxiliaries from the nurses in their blue ones, a white folded-paper cap perched on the back of her tightly wound hair. Pilar was one of the many thousand migrant workers who help keep the National Health Service going. She’d no wish to return to the Philippines, because she was afraid of Marshal Lo. He was showering a confetti of torments on her homeland, she said, paraphrasing some of the dissident exiles’ protest literature.
‘Who is this Marshal Lo?’ I asked.
‘Who? Who is Marshal Lo? No, what?’
‘Oh, he’s so bad he’s a thing, is he?’
‘No, not he … it’s a thing. You mean you don’t know what martial law is?’ she asked, saying each word slowly and loudly, as if speaking to a tourist lost on the Underground.
‘Oh law, yes, right, sorry, sorry.’
Her English was practically flawless, except for the pronunciation, and we found ourselves standing there, blushing face to face, strangers to each other—neither anything like at home in that moment. It took me more than a few days to get over this foolishness, and the ignorance it revealed about what was going on out in the world. In fact, looking back, I don’t suppose we ever did get over it. Certainly Pilar soon stopped making any effort to confide in me.
‘You know I am really so sorry for Gran,’ she began again that day. ‘All the time she works and nobody will talk with her. Nobody can even make a joke to her. She thinks you are criticizing.’
The old girl we were talking about also wore the pink striped dress and white apron of an auxiliary. An epileptic with a limp, Gran, as all the regulars in Outpatients called her, though not exactly affectionately, must have been approaching sixty-five. She’d been employed by the hospital for the past seventeen years.
‘Hell of a long time,’ said Steve, towards the close of one more seemingly endless afternoon. Our ginger-haired Honda 250 biker was a temporary porter like me. He planned to go grape picking in France come September.
‘Someday you’ll have to settle down,’ said Jack, the senior man and our union rep, ‘spread sideways, take root, become part of the woodwork.’
Jack, a short man with a long grey beard like an Old Testament prophet, had been at the National man and boy. Nervously unsteady eyes and an indecisive syntax belied the daily efforts he made to assert his authority. Jack tended to do better at being fatherly with the likes of Steve and me—who presented rather different challenges to his precarious self-esteem.
Steve was in the habit of defending himself with an infectious, broad grin. Not long out of school, he must have been three or four years younger than me. London was his town, though, and he would offer me the benefit of his greater street wisdom. Steve treated Jack’s ingrained respect for the conventions and practices of the National with an undemonstrative bolshiness.
‘Stuff this for a game of soldiers,’ he would murmur, as we idled away the last few minutes before clocking-off time.
Gran had certainly taken root in the place. The colour of the hospital was in her hair: a whitish-grey. She always wore an elasticated bandage on her left leg. One day she fitted and fell so badly she suffered a fracture. The glistening look in her eyes wasn’t tears, but the medications she took for her epileptic condition. The pink glasses she wore had a tiny wing on either side.
The National was the only home Gran had left. She already looked like a subject for treatment all those years back, and the many quiet moments allowed me time to scribble down notes about her, and the complaints she attracted, on the backs of torn up heart-rate print-outs. Turning over my smudged and faded pencil scrawls these many years on, I can only think she must have died, and maybe Jack as well.
Steve, though, did cross our path again by chance one blustery afternoon. We happened to be walking in opposite directions half way between Queensway and Notting Hill Gate. You were with me, remember, and seemed to recall him too. But it was one of those tricky encounters when you know the moment recognition occurs there’s really not much you can say.
‘Have a nice rest of your life!’ Those were the words he as good as shouted over his shoulder after we parted on that late spring afternoon. It must have been ten years or more after that sweltering summer, and that September in the nineteen seventies.
There was no shortage of quiet moments through those months in Outpatients. I never like being caught at a loose end, and anyway needed to keep a nose in the Courtauld reading list. So I’d make sure to have something with me for the journey to and from work, for the lunch hour, or when our routine of jobs slackened off in the late afternoon. Most days there would be a thick paperback sticking out of the right pocket in my white porter’s jacket. The only thing bothering about this was that people could mistake it for a sign I didn’t actually think of myself as a porter, as part of the team. But then, let’s face it, I wasn’t.
‘Just warn me when you’re about to say something,’ said Steve, glancing at the Cubist cover, ‘and I’ll go and fetch a dictionary.’
Yet often the impulse to semi-licit study would evaporate in the limbo of Outpatients, with Jack unsmilingly tolerant of his porter being buried yet again in a book. That day, there were the latest newspaper reports about a playwright’s break-up with an actress, seemingly caused by his affair with some aristocratic writer. The usual photographs showed harassed figures emerging from swish residences and the insinuating speculative comments, the usual pocket biographies like interim obituaries.
While waiting for the next bit of work to arrive, Steve was interrupting those articles with some chat about this brilliant chick he had his eye on in Physio.
‘You should see her do the massages,’ he was saying, with a parody of a leer.
‘But I thought she worked in the Dispensary.’
Steve was also killing time in a protractedly hopeless flirtation with the blonde chemist there.
‘No, not her; that’s my other one.’
‘Oh, your other one?’ I said. ‘But she’s got to be at least five years older than you. Haven’t you noticed her chatting up the junior doctors?’
‘So?’ said Steve.
‘She’s a chemist. You’re a porter.’
‘And so?’
This time the question seemed to be asking why anyone should care a damn what he did to get through the summer’s duller moments. What did it matter if he was wasting his time? Steve enjoyed being flirtatious; they, at least up to a point, enjoyed finding new ways of sending him packing. Which still, despite the convenient assumption that ‘No! No! No!’ means precisely its opposite, made it baffling how Steve could convince himself or pretend to think that ‘Get away with you’ might be taken as a come-on.
Now we’d been joined in the empty patients’ armchairs by some of the staff nurses drinking cups of tea, and our talk drifted back onto Outpatients’ perennial complaints about Gran.
‘You know she hasn’t had much of a life,’ said Martha.
But Pilar, still at a loss, was taking a different line.
‘I know we must pity her for the life she lives,’ said the auxiliary, ‘but sometimes I want to cry at the anti-social things she will say.’
The kitchen cubicle where Gran worked was not quite a room, more a space partitioned off near the rear entrance. Its walls were painted white and it offered, at times, the only respite from all those quiet, or occasionally not quite so quiet, private tragedies crowding Outpatients during treatment hours.
While washing up some pots, Gran asked if I would go and buy her the Evening Standard. It was her little conspiracy: the conspiracy of being liked by someone. That had a history too. Everyone had a history, like everyone had a mother, difficult though that might be to imagine with some people who give the impression that they were born old. Gran’s name
was Enid Warburton. She was from Kings Lynn, and her mother was still alive somewhere out in Essex.
‘The old girl’s ninety-four, and gets upset by the sight of Gran,’ said Martha, ‘and her elder brother tries to keep her from seeing the dear. She’s terribly isolated.’
‘Oh thank you,’ said Enid as she tucked the newspaper inside her shopping bag. ‘I’ve got no one but you to do anything for me here. You’re my only friend. I haven’t had a word from my brother since my birthday in June. And you see I get so tired. The drugs I’m on do tire me, and it’s worse if I’ve had no breakfast.’
Matron in the National Hospital for Nervous Diseases was a distinguished-looking lady of about sixty, dressed in black, who walked with the aid of a telescopically adjustable aluminium stick.
It was her policy to employ epileptics as auxiliaries. The staff nurses and SRNs in Outpatients knew that when Gran had a hair-do, she might well fit the next day. She was going for a holiday to Margate on Wednesday next. She had arranged with Matron to have her hair waved on the Tuesday morning.
‘It’ll be all right here in Outpatients, won’t it?’
Jack said that. He’s been here even longer than Enid. He’s worked here for twenty-two years.
‘The way you porters stand outside our windows and stare up at us girls, it’s disgusting!’ Gran said a few days later from beyond the kitchen cubicle door. ‘No, it’s not so bad just now, in the summertime, with the leaves on the trees. But every winter you can see right in. And a body needs her privacy. I hardly dare undress and the room gets so hot, what with the central heating pipes and all. I just want to open the window, but, I ask you, how can I? You never know who might be standing outside!’
‘Do you mean in the freezing cold, on a winter night, outside your window?’ asked Steve, with genuine-sounding curiosity.
Gran had lured him into her kitchen cubicle on the pretext of asking if he would run an errand for her. Now she’d cornered him there and he was allowing the endless stream of her complaining to be vented in his ears. But soon Steve too would start to look round for some work to do, or Jack would rescue him with a task he could go off and pretend to fulfill.
There he goes, sidling furtively away, just glancing in my direction with one more of his conspiratorial smiles.
‘And just who were you staying with last night?’ you asked me, stumbling about amongst a crowd of withered pot plants on a back garden terrace. We were alone under the stars, with a half moon casting down its borrowed light; there were three hollyhocks pitching slightly in the breeze that flurried your white party dress, made faintly luminous by that moon. At last you sat down on a wooden bench by the French windows. ‘Oh it might as well rain until September’—the record’s sweet refrain came drifting out into the thick rhododendron bushes whose leaves reflected more splashes of moonlight at the borders of an un-mown lawn. Beyond those borders, some hardy perennials survived the student neglect.
‘Go on. Tell me. Who were you staying with last night?’ you repeated, staring out into that wilderness.
‘What do you mean?’
‘The toothbrush,’ you were sighing, ‘the toothbrush!’
Your voice, saddened as if by expectations finally confirmed, echoed across the forsaken garden.
‘Oh come on now, you know you’re a hopeless liar.’
So there went my plans to keep that summer fling a secret: jacket hanging open, the brush protruding from my inside pocket, its worn bristles first.
‘Why don’t you come in and join the dancing?’
It was Emily, our hostess, appearing through the metal-framed French windows to interrupt the silence.
‘Why so long-faced? Come on. Enjoy yourselves! Have another drink!’ exclaimed inebriated Emily with yet another laugh.
‘We’ll be there in a second.’ You had managed a smile. ‘It was too hot inside. We thought we’d try your garden for a moment, didn’t we. It’s nice and peaceful out here.’
‘Not much to look at, I’m afraid!’ said Emily, skipping back into the flat.
One of the rooms was crowded to the door with dancers, its stereo turned up to full volume, and, as you implied, we were both such choosy beggars when it came to dance music. Another room was pitch dark, filled with intertwined couples. Which left the kitchen. It too was crammed with the partygoers, but here they were rifling through a sink filled with empties searching for one last drink. There, and in the crammed passageways, you couldn’t hear yourself think above the wild exchanges between drunken friends, acquaintances, and strangers who sounded on the point of picking a fight.
‘Why don’t we go for a walk round the block?’ I shouted it into your ear.
Cooler than Emily’s party, the empty streets nearby were still warm from the day, the heat slowly fading out of them, dying away in the darkness. We walked past bleak three-storey Victorian houses with small front gardens behind low brick walls—their shiny privets glinted in the moonlight.
‘I was just staying overnight with Alice.’
‘You know, I thought it was something like that.’
‘Like what?’
‘You tell me.’ You had stopped beside one of the low stone-capped walls that separated the front gardens from the street.
We were already half way round the block and in danger of arriving back at the party too soon. You took out a handkerchief, dusted the grimy stone and, catching the skirts of your white dress up under you, sat down on the wall.
‘How long has this been going on?’ you mumbled, as if echoing the distant stereo system; sun-parched leaves crackled faintly in the breeze.
‘It just sort of happened that weekend when we went up North.’
‘Oh really, that weekend … and were you going to get round to telling me?’
But then you couldn’t stop yourself from moistening at the eyes, still staring straight ahead across the deserted suburban street, into the shifting branches opposite. ‘And don’t you dare think I’m clinging,’ you added. ‘That’s the last thing I want!’
There was another nasty silence in the deserted street, a sharp sense of unforeseen loss and disorientation figuring itself in the contrasts of leafage and brickwork.
‘All right then: why don’t we just stop seeing each other?’
Nothing came to mind, and so I said nothing. You had turned to look at me, with eyelids glistening—your lips slightly parted, and quivering from the disappointment, the rage.
‘Honestly, I wouldn’t have minded so much if it had been with someone I’d never met,’ you said. ‘But you must have been talking about me behind my back, making assignations even when I was buying a drink for you both, like the other day at the Lamb, or when I went to the toilet. And I thought we had no secrets from each other. I thought we could talk about everything.’
‘Really, well, anyway, every one has secrets.’
‘They do? All right, why don’t we just stop seeing each other then?’
‘But why should we?’
‘Because I don’t want to be compared all the time: it makes everything impossible. Don’t you see?’
‘That must mean you expect to come out worse from the comparison.’
Your reply to that was a look of cold contempt.
‘Didn’t I let you get on with it last year when there was somebody else? You know, what’s his name? I went away for the weekend so you could be with him, didn’t I?’
‘Except that he didn’t turn up!’
‘But that’s not the point, is it? Did they ever make any difference to us?’
‘No, because you never met any of them.’
‘So what?’
‘So I thought her and me were friends.’
‘Better be getting back to the party,’ I said. ‘Emily will be wondering.’
‘You’ve got to be joking—I’m leaving—I’m going home�
��I’m going home right now.’
You got up off the wall, dusted down your party dress, remembered to pocket your handkerchief, and began walking slowly away. Then you stopped and glanced around, as if trying to remind yourself who this person was—the one who had met you after your shift, travelled down to Denmark Hill, talked on the Tube about our holiday planned for September, the one you had lived with for two whole years in St Luke’s Square. Me, the one still standing in the silence of that street, he was evidently not. On your face was an expression of what looked like contempt and sorrow commingled. As if that person had gone forever.
‘Look,’ I said, ‘why don’t we meet up … meet up and talk about things quietly, over a meal or something?’
The following Monday in Outpatients I was sitting amongst the crowd of visitors attending for their treatments, flicking over pages of The Illustrated London News and waiting to be commandeered for my next job. That day it was Parkinson’s disease. Most of the staff didn’t pay any attention to the roomful of shaking people. Then a pungent old woman wearing a faded moss-green headscarf occupied the armchair next to mine. A glance confirmed that she must have been one of those people who regularly sleep rough in places like the Gardens of the Savoy. There was a layer of dried grey mud on her sloping-heeled shoes, her face and hands engrained in dirt. She had two plastic bags of possessions, one from Sainsbury’s and the other from Top Shop.
‘Who do you bloody well think you’re looking at, you great fat loon?’
‘Pardon me.’
‘Pardon me! Pardon me!’ she jeered. ‘I bet you think you’re a right fool clever dick, reading that pornography there. You ought to be ashamed of yourself!’
September in the Rain Page 7