by Marie Joseph
‘But you’re not dying.’ Clara heard the rattle of the food trolley at the other end of the ward. ‘What’s wrong with you, Joe?’
To her horror he began to laugh. A strange staccato jerking sound, and all the time he was laughing his bloodshot eyes mocked her. ‘Don’t you know? Oh, God, that’s funny.’ He put up an arm as if to shade his eyes from the too bright light. ‘No, I’m not dying, our kid. That would be too easy.’ He raised his head, and his fingers scrabbled at the turned-down sheet. ‘They’ll have me out of here as soon as I can stand on me own two feet. Beds are for sick folk, Clara, not for drunks.’
‘But you’re not drunk now.’ Clara reached for his hand, surprised to find it horny, hard and hot to her touch. ‘You’ve still got a fever, Joe.’ She started to get up from her chair. ‘I’m going to find the sister and have a word with her. She’ll tell me, if you won’t.’
The burning hand tightened on her wrist. He spoke very clearly. ‘I’m a drunk, our kid. An alcoholic, if you want the proper term. A sodden, pissed-out, no-good meths drinker, if you want the gospel truth.’ His swollen eyes were suddenly and disconcertingly merry. ‘An’ you always did want the gospel truth, didn’t you, little Clara?’ He ran his tongue over his dry lips. ‘Money, an’ I’ll drink whisky; no money, and I’ll sup owt. There’s no hope for me, Clara. I knew there wasn’t no hope when I came to find you, and I knew there was even less when I saw what had happened to you.’
‘Nothing’s happened to me!’ Forgetting where she was, Clara raised her voice. ‘I haven’t changed, Joe! I’m still the same person!’ Her face was as solemn as a child’s, as dedicated as the Sunday School teacher she had been not all that long ago. ‘I can help you, Joe. The Lord will help you, if you let Him.’
‘Him?’ Joe turned his face away. ‘You still beating the drum? Don’t you ever give up?’ He turned back again. ‘I went up home when I returned from South Africa. The bad penny turning up again, you know?’
The supper trolley clattered nearer, but Clara heard nothing. She was sitting quite still, steeling herself for what was coming, knowing it was bad.
‘Your father’s shop isn’t a shop any more, Clara. There’s a net curtain in the window and an aspidistra plant. There was a fat woman wearing a mob cap standing on the doorstep. Her arms folded over a cross-over pinny, an’ she had eyes like a pair of glass alleys missing nowt.’
‘And your house, Joe?’
The young nurse with the food trolley stopped at the foot of his bed.
‘Bugger off,’ Joe told her pleasantly. ‘Report me to sister, but for now do what I said.’
The ward orderly handing round the plates of mashed potato and pale steamed fish advanced on Joe with a ‘stop that nonsense’ look on her pointed face.
‘Want that muck slap in your kisser, luv?’ Joe’s voice was a whisper of silk.
‘You’re a naughty boy, Mr West.’ Backing away, the orderly moved on to the next bed.
‘An’ you’re a pissed-out old faggot,’ Joe said, smiling with his teeth.
Clara’s eyes never left Joe’s face. ‘And your house?’ she said again, rocking herself backwards and forwards on the edge of her chair. ‘Your mother, Joe?’
‘Dead.’ Lifting a hand, he studied it intently. ‘Alec went for our Fred’s wife with a knife. She’d been taunting him about his leg, telling him he could find some kind of a job if he tried hard enough.’
‘Yes?’ Clara was a child again, rocked against Lily West’s cushiony breasts, peering up through her hair at the beaky nose, the mouth that never quite closed over the decayed, protruding teeth.
‘Mam went to stop them and got the knife.’ Joe pointed to the black hairs on his chest. ‘Here. So Alec hanged himself in the backyard. The hook she used for her washing line wasn’t high enough, so he prised it out and drove it in higher up the coal-shed wall.’
Clara’s hand fluttered up to her mouth. The tea she had drunk and the buttered teacake were there, sour-tasting, making her retch. She rose from the hard chair. She didn’t know where the toilets were, they could be anywhere in those echoing corridors, but she knew she had to escape before she disgraced herself.
‘So you see,’ Joe was saying in that light, controlled voice, ‘that Jesus you used to say lived in the chapel at the top of the street must’ve gone on his ’olidays that day. Are you ready for the prayer now?’ Grief for the only woman who had never seen any wrong in him choked his voice. ‘Will a Catholic prayer do, Clara? Or don’t they count?’ Closing his eyes Joe chanted the words he’d heard his mother recite when things were going wrong, her own incantation to fend off the inevitable: ‘Holy Mary, Mother of God …’
Outside in the corridor Clara bumped into the ward sister coming back on duty, an expression of outrage on her face at the unbelievable spectacle of someone actually running from her ward.
‘She wouldn’t let me back in,’ Clara told Dora. ‘Joe’s bed was at the far end of the ward, and she practically held me back with her bare beefy arms. She kept on quoting the visiting times to me, reciting them in a singsong voice.’
Snatching off her hat, Clara shook her head to free the long fall of hair. ‘I told her I couldn’t come back at seven o’clock, that I worked every evening, and she looked me up and down as if she was thinking that there was only one job, apart from nursing of course, that a girl could do at night. And you know what that is!’ She pushed at her hair, lifting it away from her forehead. ‘I’m going back to the hospital in the morning, visiting time or no visiting time, and I’m going to give Joe some money.’ She tore at the buttons down the front of her green woollen dress. ‘A hundred pounds,’ she said wildly.
‘Then you’ll be pots for crackers.’ Using the curved handle of her walking stick, Dora scooped up the dress from the floor. ‘An’ if I’m not here to chip in with my bit of pension towards the rent of this place, and if you’re still set on refusing to go to America, then I reckon you might end up on the streets. Especially if Mr Boland refuses to renew your contract.’
‘He wouldn’t do that!’ Clara made for the bathroom, shedding bits of clothing as she went. ‘He’s not that sort of a man.’
‘You do like him, then?’ Dora’s voice was a shade too eager.
Clara turned round. ‘For someone of his age I suppose he’s all right. Why?’
Before Dora could think what to say, she disappeared into the bathroom. Over the sound of running water her voice came muffled. ‘Joe’s in a terrible state, Dora. He’s been drinking. Meths, he said, but you can’t tell when Joe’s making things up. If this water isn’t hot enough, I’ll die!’
Dora’s twisted fingers itched with the longing to help Clara out of the rest of her clothes and into the bath. But there was always that damned modesty to take into account, as well as the fact that Dora accepted she would be more of a hindrance than a help. So she sat still in her high-backed chair, her once busy hands idle in her lap.
‘Joe’s been sleeping on the Embankment. With cardboard to cover him.’
Dora closed her eyes, imagining Clara scattering bath salts lavishly into the warm water. ‘So you’ve persuaded yourself you still love him?’
‘No!’ Clara’s voice rose. ‘I needed him once, but I don’t think I ever loved him. But he’s a part of my life, and just to cross him off now wouldn’t be …’
‘Christian?’ With difficulty Dora prised herself up from the chair and limped across the room to lean against the half-open bathroom door. ‘And a hundred pounds would set him up for life?’ She gave an unladylike snort. ‘He’d sup every penny of it, you soft ’aporth, just as fast as he could pour it down his throat.’ Her harsh voice softened. ‘When I knew you wasn’t coming back for lunch today – and I’m not asking where you’ve been all day because I know you’re not in no mood to tell me – when I knew I had the day to myself, I went to see the place where I’m going to live.’
‘I’m not listening!’ There was the sound of water gushing from a tap, but the voice that
had once made itself heard right to the back seats in the stalls was more than a match for running water.
‘It’s out Twickenham way. A fine old mansion, with at least five acres of land to it. Every penny raised by our profession, and only forty residents living in.’
Dora shifted her weight from one swollen ankle to the other. It was no good. Standing was even worse than walking. Muttering to herself, she made her way slowly back to the haven of her high upholstered chair, her bosom beneath the scarlet silk organza of her teagown rising and falling with the effort. But she could still shout if she’d a need to. Arthritis hadn’t seized up her tonsils, thank the Lord.
‘There’s a long waiting list,’ she bellowed. ‘I’ve been lucky. Lucky! D’you hear me?’ She closed her eyes.
‘I hear you, Dora.’ All at once Clara was there before her, a large white bath towel hiding her nakedness, her hair skewered on top of her head. ‘Lucky? Is that the right word?’
The question was asked so harshly, Dora flinched. Painted blue eyelids lowered themselves over the suddenly unguarded expression in her eyes.
‘Mr Boland was here, wasn’t he?’ There was a sad note of resignation in Clara’s voice. She sat down on the chair Bart had occupied the night before, tucking the towel carefully round her bare legs. ‘I smelled his cigar smoke when I came in.’
‘Mr Boland?’ Dora heard herself trail off miserably.
‘He wangled you a place in the home so I’d go with him to America, didn’t he? Gave them a huge donation to ensure just that. Didn’t he?’
There was a moment’s silence before Dora began to bluster. ‘You think I’m such a bleedin’ martyr I’d have myself put away just so you could go to America with a clear conscience? Without the millstone of an old ailing woman round your neck?’ The helpless hands on Dora’s lap lifted to rest on the padded arms of her chair. ‘I’ve told you. I want to go into the home. It was all right when I could be with all the gang at the theatre every night. I’d got company then. Harry at the stage door, Matty, and the girls.’ She sniffed. ‘What company have I had from you today, come to that?’
Immediately the telltale blush rose to stain Clara’s cheeks with bright colour. ‘I’ve been wanting to tell you,’ she said quickly. ‘An old friend came backstage to see me. I’ve been seeing him today.’ She put a hand to her throat. ‘His name is John. John Maynard. His father was the minister of the church belonging to my school.’
‘So that makes him all right?’ Dora was being peevish and didn’t care. ‘I’ll be able to have a bit of a singsong when I move,’ she said, as if Clara hadn’t spoken. ‘Some of the girls are old friends. Arda Arlene, Phyllis Nelson.’ Her eyes were all at once sharp with spite. ‘Neither of them have worn as well as me.’ Complacently she patted her jacked-up bosoms. ‘Dropped. Right down to her kneecaps in poor Phyllis’s case.’
Getting up from her chair, Clara walked towards the bedroom, trailing the white towel behind her.
‘So you don’t want to meet my friend John?’
Dora closed her eyes against a recollection of young Bart Boland sitting in the chair Clara had just left. She remembered the way his eyes had softened when he’d admitted his love for Clara, and the way Dora had known at that very moment in her heart how right they were for each other.
‘Friend John?’ she asked in a voice choked with disappointment. ‘Then he must be a pansy. There’s only two sorts where women are concerned. Pansies or lovers. One or the other. Friends, never!’ Stiffly Dora twisted round in her chair, her powdered face creased into lines of vindictiveness. ‘Mr Boland went with me this afternoon to look over where I’m going. He cares about people, Mr Boland does.’ She was very tired and more than muddled in her thinking. She had thought it was all going to work out right. The home for her, and Bart Boland marrying Clara. The two of them walking off into the sunset together. She could have died easy then, the two people she loved most in the world married to each other. ‘More than your friend John does …’
Dora’s eyes were suddenly quite blank. Confused with the effort of thinking, remembering her life in detail from years back, and yet nothing of what happened the day before, the anxiety in her was almost too terrible to bear. Who was this John? And if she knew him, why couldn’t she remember a single thing about him?
‘I’m living too long,’ she barked in the voice that seemed to have grown more rough-edged in the last few minutes. ‘It was Mr Boland who took me to see over the home,’ she said again, wanting for some inexplicable reason to be nasty. Stiffly she twisted round in her chair. ‘I can see your bare bum!’ she shouted. Getting her own back. For what, she wasn’t quite sure.
That night, bathed in the shimmering spotlight, Clara sang a song from an old Broadway musical. It was Jerome Kern at his best, and as she sang the man in the front row of the stalls lifted his fair head, his expression one of total pride and possessiveness.
‘And when I told them how wonderful you are,
They didn’t believe me,
They didn’t believe me …’
Her voice was as smooth as slipper satin. She sang the beautiful song straight, as a ballad, the way Kern had written it, and before she reached her final chorus the audience was singing along with her. When it was over John absorbed the applause as if it had been meant for him. In that telling moment he made up his mind that before he left for Amsterdam the following morning he would have made Clara promise to marry him.
He took her to dine at Gennaro’s in Soho where, true to the current fashion, at least half the women were wearing fringed shawls draped decoratively over their long evening dresses. He saw the way they glanced quickly at Clara, then away; but not before he had seen the naked envy in their eyes. In her simple dress of pale green georgette, with its high round neck and long tight sleeves, and her hair caught back from her forehead with a twist of the same material, she was as beautiful as a dream. John raised his glass to her.
‘I’m sorry about this afternoon.’ His smile was rueful. ‘I didn’t know I had it in me to be so jealous.’
‘Of Joe?’ Clara’s glance was direct. ‘Of weasel-faced Joe West, with his dirty nose?’
‘Steady on, love. I said I was sorry.’ Leaning forward and patting her hand, John’s smile broadened. ‘Men can be bitches as well as women, you know.’
Clara looked around her. The restaurant was crowded, and she guessed it would be quite a while before the waiter reappeared with their order. All of London seemed to be dining late that evening. Some of the men in white tie and tails, and the women with cropped shining hair, smoking between courses, with cigarettes in long holders held in slim white hands.
‘They don’t grow women like these where we come from,’ she said. ‘It’s a different world.’ The wide set green eyes were suddenly bleak. ‘I wonder what Lily West would have made of all this?’
Her head was still aching from the aftermath of her visit to the hospital, and from Dora’s petulance and childish behaviour before she’d left for the theatre. It had been a long day, and she still hadn’t been honest with John. He was going away in the morning and it had to be said.
‘I loved Joe once,’ she whispered in her husky voice. ‘I’d loved him when I was a child and that same loving spilled over, so that when he came home three years ago I slept with him, and I got pregnant.’
She saw John take a deep breath as he struggled to achieve some sort of expression, but before he could speak Clara held up a hand.
‘No, don’t say anything, not yet.’ She pressed her lips together and gazed up at the ornate ceiling. ‘I lost the baby. They took me to hospital, and the doctors scraped what was left of it away. There were other complications, so I may never be able to have children …’ She finished on a sigh, staring at him mutely, the blood drained from her cheeks.
‘Oh, my God!’ John had found his voice at last. ‘But he stood by you? He offered to marry you when you found you were …? Oh, my God!’
‘He never knew.’ Clara wante
d to weep, but this was not the place for such self-indulgence. ‘He went away even before I knew.’ Her eyes pleaded for understanding. ‘He was like that … is like that. No one can keep Joe tied down.’
‘But he knows now?’
‘He knows now.’
John stared down at a plate of thinly sliced smoked salmon being placed before him by a waiter who had been told so often he looked like Rudolph Valentino he felt he must act the part.
‘You can see the bloody pattern on the plate through this,’ John grumbled as the waiter minced away. Picking up his wedge of lemon he squeezed it fiercely between thumb and forefinger. As he wiped his fingers on the starched damask napkin, anger flashed like a swift moving shadow across his face.
‘Why did you have to tell me? To ease that damned puritanical conscience of yours?’
In the semi-darkness of the restaurant the faces at the tables had taken on a kind of luminosity. John’s anger was that of a child deprived of its favourite toy. Never a deep-thinking man, his emotions, his actions were all superficial, and he was struggling now to understand. He was a man of the world, wasn’t he? And he hadn’t exactly been celibate over the years. Forking up a piece of smoked salmon, he stared at it morosely. In his job only a monk could have turned his back on temptation. Girls threw themselves at men who flew planes. Especially the years he’d spent with the circus. And there was that time on the Paris run when, due to an engine problem, he’d been grounded for almost a week. The long-lashed amber eyes narrowed. But for God’s sake, he was a man! And that was different!