‘Hell, what’s love? What do I know about love?’ He sounded uneasy. ‘A lot of silly girl talk, that’s all –’
‘Not so silly when it means getting married and having children and –’
‘You see what I mean? You’re a crazy kid, talking rubbish. I’m not marrying anyone. As for having kids – I’ve had enough of that, thank you very much –’
‘What?’
‘Never mind – look, I have to go and write letters, Maddie. Do me a favour and stop this nonsense. I can’t handle it – I mean, even if it was possible, can you imagine the family rows there’d be?’
‘I told you, Daddy’ll get used to the idea. He’d have to.’
‘I’m not so worried about him, believe me. He’s your problem, not mine. I have a family of my own, remember? My mother’d go crazy if I ever admitted I’d talked to a girl who wasn’t a Catholic. Dammit, Maddie, I never even met a Protestant till I was seventeen! Can you imagine if I went home and said, “Hi, Mom, hi Pa, meet Maddie Braham. Religion? Hell, she ain’t even a Christian far as I know” – can you imagine?’
‘They’d come round if they had to.’ A cold wriggle of anxiety was crawling in her now. This was something new, something her chocolate idea wouldn’t help at all. He’d said nothing before about religious differences. And she tried to think how her father would be if she told him Jay was a Catholic and she was going to marry him. Would he mind? Would it matter? He’d never said anything to her about religion; it was there hazily in the background as something that made the Brahams different, but not something that had ever been important and she took a sharp little breath in through her nose and said quickly, ‘Listen, Jay, that doesn’t matter right now. Right now what matters is money, hmm?’
‘You’re not bloody kidding,’ he said with more feeling than he’d shown yet. ‘I told you last night, money is –’ and she could almost see him shake his head as the soft whistle escaped from between his teeth and pursed lips.
‘Well, I have an idea about that. A very useful idea. What’d you say to making yourself about – oh, I’m not sure. At least a thousand pounds.’
‘How much? A thousand – that’s four thousand dollars – how?’
‘Come and have a cup of hot chocolate with me, Jay. And I’ll tell you all about it. Come right away, now. You can finish your letters later. And there’s no need to worry. Daddy’s out till past midnight. Plenty of time to explain it all. And for one or two other things too, maybe –’
And she laughed softly, throatily, again, and hung up the phone.
November 1986
Their feet crunched on the gravel of the path and she watched the small stones spit up under her shoes as they walked, keeping her head well down. Why didn’t I just sit there and refuse to get up when he came back to fetch me? Why didn’t I just say, ‘No, I’m going home’? I don’t have to do things just because he tells me to.
‘You know, there’s no compulsion here, Annie,’ Joe said as though she had spoken her thoughts aloud and she shifted her gaze from her own walking feet to his, alongside her. ‘I want you to be willing to take on this job.’
‘Really?’ she said harshly. ‘No compulsion? You surprise me. Listening to you in the boardroom I’d have said there was a lot of compulsion going on.’
‘Well, it’s not going on now. We can stop right here and you can go back to the car and drive back to the flat and just not bother with Maddie.’
‘Why the change of tack?’
‘No change.’ He stopped walking and perforce she had to stop too. ‘I said I thought you could help her. I still think so. I said it could be an interesting project for you. It could. But you have to want to.’
‘Why should I?’ She said it dully, still keeping her head down and staring at her feet. ‘Why should I want anything? Why should it matter what I do? Why are you bothering me like this?’
‘Because you can feel better than you do.’ He moved forwards and turned round to stand before her and now she could see his feet in front of her as well as her own. Her shoes looked scuffed and dirty compared to his which were old and creased but well polished, and she felt a moment of shame and lifted her hand to smooth into a semblance of neatness the hair that had escaped from her bun and which was blowing round her ears, while she shuffled her feet a little, not wanting to look at her shoes. ‘I feel fine,’ she said.
‘Don’t be silly, for heaven’s sake.’ He sounded irritable suddenly. ‘We all know that when people are depressed they try to hide the fact, but for Christ’s sake, Annie, this is me, remember? I’ve known you long enough now, surely, to be regarded as a friend? Can’t you trust me yet? Tell me the truth?’
Now she did look up, and stared at the way the wind moved his curly hair lightly and how his face was a little creased as he looked back. Creased but friendly. ‘Hmm?’ he said and smiled.
‘Friend?’ she said and put all the venom she could into the word. ‘Is that what you’re supposed to be?’
The corner of his mouth tightened slightly, but that was all, and after a moment he said, ‘I hope so.’
‘Oh,’ and that was all she would say. No matter how he pushes, no matter what he does, she thought with sudden passion, I won’t let him have the pleasure of hearing it. I won’t. Why the hell should he feel good?
‘Well, whether you know it or not, I am,’ he said lightly. ‘And what’s more I’m a useful friend. Depressed people need friends who are psychiatrists.’
‘Mad people need psychiatrists,’ she said.
‘Yes, so they do. But so do a lot of other people. You among ‘em. So even if you can’t accept my friendship, the fortunate thing is it’s still there. Now, shall we go on to see Maddie? Will you help us with her? Now’s the time to say one way or the other.’
Across the wide grassy slopes that led to the gates and the remains of the East Pavilion the sounds of the bulldozers came clanking at her together with the steady thwack of the iron ball being hurled at the walls, and she lifted her head and looked back. There were no watching patients now; just the workmen and their great ugly machines and beyond that the gates and the road and the tumble of suburban roofs falling down the hill towards the motorway, snaking along in the valley beneath. Somewhere down there on the far side of that ribbon of road crawling with traffic was her flat, and she suddenly saw it in all its dreariness. The newly painted walls in their buttercup yellow and the clutter of packing cases everywhere and her bed tumbled with its duvet, unmade, unwelcoming, and the kitchen with its empty refrigerator and just a packet of tea and a bottle of milk on the table, and tried to find pleasure in the thought of leaving him standing here and going back there. And because there was none to be found, deliberately called up the pain of remembering the old house, with Jennifer sitting slumped in her armchair amid all her treasures and her ornaments and her overstuffed furniture and gilded peach mirrors. But all that happened was that her eyes filled with tears of rage and pain and misery.
He paid no attention to that; he just moved back to be by her side and took her elbow and began walking again and she made no demur and went with him. Whatever they were to find in the West Pavilion, it couldn’t be as bad as what she’d find if she went back to the flat. There there would be only herself with all her memories and thoughts waiting for her on the doorstep. In the West Pavilion there would be someone worse off than she was. And ugly though it was to find comfort in that, it was better than going on as she was. Somewhere deep inside her there was still a fragment of common sense, a shred of desire to feel better, and it was, she told herself drearily as they reached the paved path that ran round to the front door of the building, worth nurturing that. So she allowed him to lead her into the building, letting them in with his own key.
It smelled. That was the first thing of which she was aware, the layers of odours that assaulted her. Above all, disinfectant, raw and rough and powerful, rising from the ferociously clean tiles of the floor and from the glossy yellow paintwork of the high wal
ls. Then there was floor polish, thick and heavy in her nostrils, and after that cooked food – glutinous greyish sort of food – and old plimsolls and sweating human bodies and, faintly, flowers, and the shock of it was so powerful that the tears came to her eyes again, actually stinging her lids.
It was as though the past six months hadn’t happened, as though she had just brought Jen to the East Pavilion to spend the long weekend so that she, Annie, could go to Paris for Easter. It had taken her weeks of planning, weeks of anxiety and guilt, but Joe had said it would be all right, that the hospital would take care of Jen, there’d be no need for her to worry; and what had happened?
Not two hours after she had arrived in Paris, when she had just taken her clothes out of her weekend bag and arranged them in the neat and pretty room on the third floor of the Hotel de Pavilion in the Rue St Dominique, and was eagerly about to take the five-minute walk to the Esplanade des Invalides to start her much-longed-for holiday weekend at last, the telephone call had come, and she had stood there in the little reception area with the concierge of the hotel watching her with avid curiosity and been told that Jen had collapsed and died.
A stroke, they had said. A blessed release, they had said. Nobody’s fault, they had said. An act of God. But for Annie it hadn’t been an act of God. It had been an act of Annie’s and now she stood in the clean cold lobby of the West Pavilion and smelled the Greenhill smell and felt the cold hand that had held on to her ever since Paris tighten its hold, and it was all as though it had happened yesterday.
Whether he knew how she felt, she didn’t know. It didn’t really matter, after all. But he did the right thing, setting an arm across her shoulders so that she had to walk forwards, and so led her, without any effort, to the big double doors that led to the ground floor ward.
‘No matter what we do to make these places better, they always strike horror into me,’ he said, as their footsteps echoed across the tiles. ‘They’re hellish to come into, and they make everyone feel lousy when they come through the door. But it’s never so bad in the wards themselves, is it? And they are at least all different.’ And he pushed open the doors so that she could see into the ward beyond.
Quite different, of course. The ward where Jen had been and where she had died had been a long medical one, with rows of beds and lockers neat and organised like teeth in a widely open mouth. That ward had cried out its closeness to pain and death. But this one was not like that. This was a big open room with chairs set in clusters round tables with jigsaw puzzles and magazines on them. There were curtained windows and screened sections behind which red counterpaned beds, arranged in fours, could just be seen. There was a television set with a big screen flickering and muttering to itself in a far corner, and in another three men argued shrilly over a small billiard table. Old women watched the television set in one group, while another sat beside the jigsaw puzzles, staring at them but making no attempt to do anything with them. At first glance it looked ordinary enough, cheerful even, until the eye wandered and saw other details; a man standing by a window and gesticulating furiously and obscenely out of it at the trees; a woman with long grey hair straggling over her shoulders marching up and down purposefully, over and over again using the same carefully circumscribed dozen feet of floor; a girl in a corner, weeping. It was like looking at a Richard Dadd painting she thought, then; at first you think it’s just prettiness and charm in fairyland and then you look closer and the faces are distorted and malevolent, and the soft colours threatening and sickly.
She turned, wanting to go now because it hadn’t been like this in the ward where Jen had come to spend her last hours, so that her selfish daughter could go and enjoy herself in Paris. That ward had been what a ward should be, antiseptic and redolent of disease. This was a different sort of horror, where nothing was quite as it seemed and where decent reticence and good behaviour and politeness were peeling off like paint from a sunburned door.
But he seemed unaware of her attempt to turn away and walked on, very directly and quickly, leading her across the polished floor, past the marching old woman and the weeping girl to a chair which stood with its back to them, facing out of the window.
‘Here she is, Annie,’ he said cheerfully. ‘Your new project. Meet Maddie.’ And he took his hand from her shoulders and reached for the chair and pulled it round so that she could see the occupant.
4
August 1949
Maddie, confused. Maddie not sure that she was saying the right things, frightened she would scare him off, yet driven to say them all the same, because they were so exciting, because just using the words made the skin over her belly crawl as though he were actually touching her, even though he was in fact sitting a little remote and chill in the armchair facing her.
‘Why not? This is 1949, for heaven’s sake! You’re sounding like – like a Victorian frump! I told you I love you! I want to give you all of myself, now and for ever –’
‘If you’re going to talk like that, I’m going right now,’ he said, though he didn’t move. ‘It’s all such guff – real romantic guff. Real people don’t carry on that way, Maddie! You’ve been reading too many romantic magazines.’
‘No, I have not,’ she cried passionately. ‘Don’t make such a fool of me! I love you, for God’s sake! Ever since that very first time I set eyes on you and we danced I’ve been crazy about you! I tried not to tell you, but it was like – it was like I was in a river and the water just went too fast for me. You’re stuck with me, Jay Kincaid, whether you like it or not. And I so much want you to like it, my darling – I so much do! And you could, believe me. I can see we can’t be married yet, but I have plans to make it easier for us, to get you the money you need, but until then we can be lovers the way we were surely meant to be –’
She knew, of course, that he was right. She was spouting a lot of romantic gush, letting the words tumble out of her, but it was true even if it was gush. She ached with excitement whenever he was near her, and ached even more with emptiness whenever he wasn’t. Until she could make him understand how much a part of her life he was now, and always would be, there was no other comfort for her, no other way to express her feelings except in showers of flowery words.
He laughed, staring at her and she stared back, trying to see behind his eyes to what he was thinking. But all she saw was the beautiful face and the thick dark gold hair, smooth as honeyed toast.
‘I’ve come across some girls in my time, Maddie, but none like you. D’you really believe all the things you’re saying? I’ll just bet that if I took you at your word and came on strong and tried to get you into bed, you’d scream blue bloody murder.’
‘Try me!’ she said and leapt to her feet and with shaking fingers pulled at the tie on her frilly dressing gown to take it off. To display herself in all her lovely nakedness in front of him – oh, that would be the pinnacle, the very tiptop magical pinnacle of –
‘Hey, hey!’ he said hastily, sitting up straight. ‘None of that! Okay, okay, I’ll believe you. But Jesus, girl, I’m going to have to look after you. You’re not safe out –’
‘I love you,’ she said simply and let her fingers fall. She wanted to show herself to him, wanted him to make love to her, all the way love, too, not the silly petting they’d been doing, but that couldn’t be hurried. He had to be as sure as she was, and as eager. It wouldn’t be any pleasure otherwise. She didn’t know how she knew that, but she was certain she was right. ‘I’m safe as long as I’m with you. So please, Jay, will you agree? That one day we’ll be married?’
He was still leaning forwards and staring at her. ‘You’re quite a girl, aren’t you? If you were plain it’d be different. I’d just put it down to being over-anxious and hearing wedding bells in your sleep. God knows Boston’s full of that sort and they’ve been after me for years. But you don’t have to do that, do you? You’re pretty –’
‘Pretty enough for you?’ she said swiftly. ‘Really pretty, the sort that you’d be happy to h
ave around you after a long time? Ten years, twenty years pretty?’
‘Pretty,’ he said. ‘And no fool. And your Pa’s got plenty of the necessary too. You don’t have to come on strong like this just to get a living, do you? So it must be true, I guess. All that stuff about love –’
‘It’s true,’ she said. ‘I keep telling you, I love you –’
‘What was this plan you had? The one I came here to talk about?’ He leaned back abruptly and folded his arms across his chest and stared at her.
She blinked. ‘You agree then? We’ll be married as soon as it’s practical? And until then we –’
‘I agree nothing,’ he said firmly.
‘– and until then we are lovers,’ she went on, her eyes very bright and fixed on his, and after a moment his gaze wavered and slid away.
‘You’re being ridiculous,’ he muttered. ‘I came here to talk about some moneymaking notion you had and –’
‘And about the reason for making the money. So that you and I can be free of my father and of your family and do what we want to do. If it’s money that you need to make you feel safe with me, all right, I’ll help you make it. That’s easy –’ She looked scornful for a moment. ‘I don’t know why you make such a fuss about it. I’ve listened to my father long enough and often enough. Anyway, I only had to ask. He’s never kept me short. And with the best part of thirty thousand due to me when I’m twenty-one –’
‘Thirty thousand – around a hundred thousand dollars,’ Jay said and lifted his brows. ‘And your own. It’s easy for you to be offhand about money. We’re not all so fortunate.’
‘Your father’s rich, isn’t he? My father said they’ve been making money together for years.’
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