by Marie Joseph
‘Mrs Maynard?’ The same nurse was beckoning from the opening in the curtained screen. ‘Can you come now? Mr Reed is here.’
He spoke to her just outside the ward, a tall man with the stoop shoulders of his profession, wearing a plain dark suit that would have been just right for a clerking job in a city office. He told her that in view of his severe injuries her husband was lucky to be alive; that his broken ribs would heal; that there was some lung damage, but as far as they could be sure at that moment there was no internal bleeding. He said that her husband was a fit man, in good health, but when he came to the bad news he stared down at his shoes, speaking quickly as if what he had to say was better over and done with.
‘The spine,’ he muttered in a low controlled rush. ‘The spinal cord is damaged, and we won’t know for a little while just how much paralysis will result.’ He raised his head, and even in her own distress Clara winced at the naked exhaustion in his red-rimmed eyes. ‘The one thing I can tell you definitely is that he will never walk again.’ His hand, laid for a fleeting moment on Clara’s shoulder, was as weightless as a snowflake. ‘I am so sorry, my dear.’
He left her then, walking with quick neat steps along the corridor and down the stairs, out to his car in the concrete forecourt, to drive home to the wife and the bed he hadn’t seen for three days and two nights.
Leaving Clara to make her own way back to the bench outside casualty, to sit and wait for Bart.
Drawing a small grain of comfort from the knowing that he would come striding towards her with his long loping gait, and that when he came nothing would seem quite as terrible as it did at that moment.
Eighteen
‘I’D BE BETTER off dead! You know you’d be better off without me, so why don’t you agree with me? Go on. Say it! One of these days you will, so why not now?’
It was a year since John Maynard had been carried up the stairs to the flat, legs dangling floppily as though they’d been filleted.
‘Why me?’ His still active brain screamed aloud inside his head. ‘What’s left now for me?’
Day after long day he lay, staring up at the ceiling, allowing Clara or a nurse to shave and wash him. The fresh colour faded from his cheeks and his once smiling mouth set itself in a permanent downward curve beneath pinched nostrils. Robbed of his vitality, his energetic restlessness, he nurtured sarcasm like a growing thing, a spiky cactus plant. And vented his smouldering rage mainly on Clara.
She was tired almost to the point of collapse, driven to distraction by his continual carping, physically weakened by the poison of his overwhelming selfpity.
‘Do you ever wonder what happened to Joe West?’ he asked her one warm June night when, after a matinée and an evening performance of the successful new show, Clara dismissed the nurse to set about the thankless task of trying to make him comfortable for sleep.
‘Joe?’ Hearing his name for the first time in over a year, Clara looked up quickly from adjusting a bedside lamp, then turned her face away. She was silent for a long moment, knowing she was being got at, but much too tired to speak anything but the absolute truth. ‘I often wonder what happened to him.’ On her face was a look of utter weariness. ‘But Joe could always look after himself. “Like a bad penny,” he used to say. “Always turning up when least expected.”’
‘What would you do if he did turn up?’ John was out to needle her. Clara could tell that by the way he pushed himself up on his elbows unaided. ‘Tell me. What would you say to him?’
‘Has he been here?’ Clara was not prepared to show any emotion. If Joe had really been here John would tell her. In his own good time. But her tired mind was playing tricks on her. She could imagine Joe running up the stairs wearing the camelhair coat swathed round him like a dressing gown. Joe on top of the world again, smiling his curly smile. The bad penny turning up yet once again.
‘Did I say he’d been here?’ John’s eyes met hers, hard and unflinching. ‘Did I so much as hint he’d been here? Correct me if I’m mistaken.’
‘You said … you intimated you knew something.’ Clara moved quietly to sit down on the side of the bed. ‘Joe will call in one day. When he’s decided the time is right. When he’s made his own way again.’ She smiled. ‘Time means nothing to Joe. He disappears, sometimes for years. That’s always been his way. Then he’s back.’
‘Sober as a judge?’
‘Possibly.’ Clara nodded. ‘Oh, you remember Joe. He could take a thing or leave it.’
‘As he took and left you?’
Clara frowned and stared down at the carpet. ‘Yes. As he took me and left me. A long time ago.’
‘And now you’ve forgiven him?’ John’s voice was a sneer. ‘You believe in forgiveness, don’t you?’ The amber eyes were sick with contempt. ‘Just as you’ve forgiven me for killing that girl, and half killing myself. Just as you force yourself to look after me. You’re a bloody martyr, do you know that?’ His voice rose to a wail of despair. ‘Brenda was a good kid … and now she’s dead, and I’m finished!’ Tears of selfpity oozed from his eyes to run down his cheeks. ‘You always wanted a faithful husband, didn’t you? Well, now you’ve got one. You’ve got one so bloody faithful that if the Queen of Sheba walked in here stark naked and got into bed with me, I couldn’t oblige.’
As if at the flick of a switch, his mood changed. To Clara’s astonishment he reached out and gripped her wrist, pulling her down beside him. With his other hand he twined his fingers in her hair, jerking her face level with his own.
‘You’d be glad if Joe West came back, wouldn’t you? He’d be another shoulder to cry on, wouldn’t he? Well? Wouldn’t he?’
Her hair felt as if it was being torn out by the roots. The pain was sharp and stinging, but she didn’t cry out, although she had to close her eyes to shut out the sight of the once handsome face now twisted with spite. So she lay quite still, knowing that if she tried to get away he would only jerk her back again. She had suspected for a long time that, in spite of his obstinate refusal to submit to any form of massage or physiotherapy, the muscles in his arms were like bands of steel.
‘Yes, I’d be glad to see Joe again.’ The agonizing pain in her scalp was bringing tears to her eyes, but she blinked them away. ‘Because then I’d know that he’d survived once more. Joe is a survivor. Always has been and always will be.’
She sighed so deeply that he felt her breasts move against him. In her weariness she was so beautiful that just for a moment the sarcastic retort died on his lips. In another moment, but for the way he was, he would have taken her, releasing the pent-up frustration in his useless body. For a second he imagined … then groaned as his inadequacy stayed what would have been his instinctive reaction. From his waist down he was dead. He was a floppy flaccid nothing … No sensation, no feeling, no desire tightening his loins.
‘Kiss me!’ Grinding his mouth into hers, he forced her lips apart. Something … surely something of his manhood remained? Biting, panting, he fought to feel desire, then, with all the strength left in him, he pushed her violently away from him, covering his eyes with his arms as she rolled from the bed to sprawl face down on the carpet.
‘Get out!’ All the frustration festering inside him was in that tortured cry. ‘Get out of my sight! If I was a real man I wouldn’t want you in my bed. Leave me alone! Just bloody well leave me alone!’
Trembling and sick, Clara got to her feet. Pity and revulsion fighting for precedence in her expression as she looked down at him, lying still with his arms covering his face, a child hiding away from a situation he was too unhappy to face.
It was far too late now for her to try to adapt to him, always hoping that eventually he would turn to her. The John she had married, with his laughter and his overworked sense of fun, had died when his plane crashed. She had stopped loving him long before that terrible afternoon, but if she’d had any hope that his dependence on her would bring them closer, that hope had faded from the day she had him brought home.
T
here was nothing more she could say. All her attempts to help or to comfort had been viciously rejected. A half life was no good to John Maynard. If he couldn’t walk, or run, or swim, or drive his car, or fly, then he didn’t want to live. As he told her. Day after day after day …
In her own bedroom, which had once been Dora’s room, Clara went straight to the tiny mantelpiece and leaned her forehead against it. There was no hysteria, no drama in her thinking as she wondered how long they could go on like this? Feet on the ground, unflappable Clara, as Bart always called her, she tried hard to face up to a future totally without hope.
She moved her forehead against the back of her hands. It was all so impossible because John had turned his back on hope. He resented her stage work and yet, without the money for the rent of the flat and his medical attention, what would they do? Clara shivered, although the air was sticky with humidity. Where were the friends who had laughed at his antics, encouraging him to be more and more outrageous? Matty and Daisy, and Bart of course, were his only regular visitors, but John was so rude to them Clara wondered that they came at all.
And his flying buddies? Where were they now? Was it that they could never forgive him for taking up a plane without authority that afternoon, narrowly missing the hangars as he showed off to his girlfriend by flying so low? Shuddering, Clara imagined the young girl screaming with excitement as the tiny plane skimmed over the treetops. And her frozen look of terror as the engine stalled and they nose-dived into the ploughed field not a mile from the airport. Was that the reason not one of them had climbed the stairs to the flat to visit the man who had once been the joker in their pack?
There was really only Bart. Her one true friend. At least twice a week he would come and sit in a chair by John’s bed, talking without getting any response, sometimes carrying on sitting there when John closed his eyes and turned his face to the window in insulting dismissal. At the very thought of Bart, Clara felt herself relax. Twice recently Bart had insisted on taking her out for an afternoon drive, a time of pale sunshine, white clouds drifting against a blue sky, carpets of blossom, and tea at Henley in an inn overlooking the river. A time of lavender-scented peace. Holding on to that peace now, she made ready for bed, so weary that her movements were slow and lethargic. She was drifting off to sleep when John called from his room, his voice loud and demanding.
‘Clara! Clara! Come here! I want you!’
He was lying exactly as she had left him, but with his arms lowered. So still that for a moment Clara imagined her tired mind had been playing tricks; the voice she had heard, a figment of her imagination.
Surely he was asleep? Tiptoeing to the bed, holding her breath … Oh, God, let him be asleep. Please let him be asleep. She put out her hand, only to draw it back quickly as he turned his head on the pillow to smile at her, a strangely triumphant smile, which left his light brown eyes narrowed and cruel.
‘Oh, by the way,’ he said. ‘I almost forgot to tell you. Your little playmate of yesteryear, your precious bad penny, won’t be turning up this time.’ He spoke with studied precision. ‘Because he’s dead. Has been dead for quite some time. Sozzled with the demon drink in a Sally Army dosshouse. That’s how your lover died.’ He closed his eyes, waving her away with a languid hand.
‘Crying for you, my informant told me. Wanting you to hold his hand as he breathed his last. Now, did you ever hear a more touching story than that?’
She was near to breaking point, but she didn’t break. She went to the theatre the next day and with practised skill concealed her pallor with a flush of rouge, crayoned out her pink swollen eyelids with green shadow and curved her bruised mouth with scarlet lipstick.
John was using her for his whipping boy, she whispered to her reflection. He was a prisoner in that upstairs room, day after day, night after long night. She could escape. Every day except Sunday she could walk out onto the stage and feel the warmth and the love – yes, the love – reaching out to her. She could stretch out her hands to gather it close, and it would sustain her if she just stayed quiet and allowed it to do so. She lowered her head so that the light above her dressing table made a halo of her hair.
‘There is no power but of God,’ she whispered. ‘He will not desert me now.’
Silently, from her own side of the cluttered dressing room, Daisy watched her. Prayers, she muttered underneath her breath. What good would prayers do Clara now? Daisy had dispensed with praying a long, long time ago, believing only in the here-and-now, and making the best of things if need be.
‘Five minutes, darling,’ she said aloud, trying not to let her sympathy show, for hadn’t Clara made it clear right from the beginning that sympathy in any form was unacceptable?
But for God’s sake, she wondered as they walked together down the narrow passageway and into the wings, why didn’t Clara stick that husband of hers in a home. Or smother him with a pillow. Him with his film-star looks and wandering hands. And him a vicar’s son too. A fat lot of good praying had done him, the rotten bastard.
‘Here we go, Daisy!’ Dancing out into the spotlight, she beamed at the audience, an ethereal creature in a froth of silver tulle, red hair like a nimbus round her face. ‘Packed in like ruddy sardines tonight,’ she told herself, swaying and twirling as the music soared.
‘Another packed house, Harry.’
Bart stood by the stage-door keeper’s little cubicle. ‘Would you have guessed we’d do so well?’
‘I never make guesses, Mr Boland, not in this game.’ Harry’s shrewd eyes twinkled behind the steel-rimmed spectacles. Who did Mr Boland think he was kidding? Making conversation and hanging about like some stage-door Johnnie? When all the time it was obvious what he was waiting for.
When the girls began to troop out from their dressing rooms, he moved back into his cubby hole, to perch on his stool and call goodnight to each girl as she passed by. High heels tapping, chattering and laughing like magpies, they came, hurrying by in a cloud of scent, short skirts swinging round silk-clad legs.
She was always the last, the little one with the voice of an angel, and she never failed to say goodnight to Harry. Even knew the name of each of his grandchildren and that his wife suffered badly from chronic bronchitis.
But tonight Harry was being tactful. One look at Mr Boland’s face had told him the man was near to cracking. Turning away to peer at his ledger, Harry tried to make himself invisible.
Bart had seen her coming towards him, as light of step as all the other girls, but to him it was a jauntiness that spoke to him of her weariness, a shouting to the world that she could manage very well, thank you very much. That somehow she would always manage. Hadn’t she said so, many times before?
‘I’m going to take you home.’ Bart stood directly in her way. ‘Yes, I know it’s a fine night and that you like to walk.’ He winced as he saw the bruised look round her eyes, and his eyes turned away from the tiny blood blisters on her bottom lip, even as his mind screamed aloud at their implication.
Suddenly he could take no more. The long year of biding his time, of seeing her grow thinner and paler, culminated in a moment of decision. Taking her arm, he walked her outside, up the short slope to the busy road where the late-night traffic wended its way out to the suburbs. Hailing a taxi, he got in beside her, giving the driver his own address.
‘Bart,’ she said, smiling at him and shaking her head. ‘What is this? Do you realize what you just said?’
He nodded, his expression serious and intent. ‘I said I was taking you home, but what I meant was to my home. It’s time we talked.’ His voice was a little husky. ‘It’s time we had a long, long talk.’
Clara twisted round on the black leather seat to look directly at him. ‘But I can’t go to your place, Bart. I can’t go to any place. They’ll be waiting for me. The nurse and … and John. They’ll be worried if I don’t turn up.’ She laid a hand on his arm. ‘Tell the driver you’ve made a mistake, Bart. Please.’ She looked out of the window and smothered a little
exclamation of dismay. ‘Bart! We’re going in completely the wrong direction. Tell him now!’
Bart folded his arms, keeping his face averted. ‘Tonight is Friday, when the nurse stays all night. You told me so. Tuesdays and Thursdays she goes home, but Friday she stays. That’s the drill, isn’t it?’
She started to speak, but he held up a hand. ‘In my flat is a telephone. When we get there you can use that telephone and tell the nurse that you will be late home. That she is not to expect you for at least another two hours; that she can convey that message to John if he is still awake, and that when you do get back you will try not to disturb her. All right?’
‘No, it is not all right!’ Leaning forward, Clara stretched out a hand to tap on the glass dividing them from the driver, only to have it caught in a relentless grip.
‘We’re almost there,’ Bart told her firmly. ‘And you’re going to do as I say. Otherwise I won’t be responsible.’
His face was very close to hers, so close she could see deep clefts running down his cheeks. His eyes burned into hers and she found she couldn’t look away. Found she didn’t want to look away.
‘I’ve never heard of anything …’ she whispered, and moved away from him to fiddle with the collar of her evening coat.
It was as though he had suddenly changed into a man she didn’t know. This grim-faced stranger sitting beside her wasn’t the Bart she had known for so long. The friend always there by her side when she needed him, the quiet-spoken elegant man ready to listen, to advise and to comfort, when she allowed herself to be comforted.
‘Here we are,’ he said. When they got out of the taxi he pushed a note at the driver, waving away the change. ‘Just one flight,’ he said as they walked into the large foyer of a newly built block of flats. ‘The lift hasn’t been working too well lately, so we won’t take a chance.’
Afterwards, Clara was to ask herself why she had gone with him so quietly. It was very late, she was very tired and somehow the fight had gone out of her. The horror of the night before was still with her, and Bart spelled peace. Even in his present mood of domination she sensed he only wanted to help her. And oh, dear, dear God, she needed help from somewhere. Hatred was a terrifying thing, and when John had called her from sleep and told her about Joe, she had seen the hatred in his eyes. He hated her because she could still walk, because she came in from the world outside, and he hated her because she had brought him home from the hospital when she could see that left there he would have turned his face to the wall and died.