Maddie had lifted her head more, Annie noticed now. Her eyes were still fixed on Annie’s own, but the lids were lower, which meant her chin had come up. She’s listening hard, Annie thought and her chest tightened with a sort of excitement.
‘So that was how it was, you see. Me going to that tatty private school – she did that for my sake, of course. She said his other kids, the ones we mustn’t ever talk about by name, they were at expensive public schools, so she said I ought to be at a school he had to pay for as well. So she chose this awful convent, where the nuns looked at your knickers to see if you had impure thoughts, and never thought of anything but sex themselves. Wicked old harridans – I hated them –’
She was silent then, not thinking about Maddie at all now. ‘That isn’t fair,’ she said after a moment. ‘There was only one like that, and she was a pathetic thing, really. The others were all right. Civilised really, in their own way, even though I didn’t like the religious stuff they shoved at me. It was the only way I could argue with Jen, you see. She went on and on about religion even though she never went to church. She thought she couldn’t, seeing she’d had me, and Colin wouldn’t marry her, but it didn’t stop her trying to make a Catholic of me. She didn’t, of course. You can’t be a Catholic if you don’t go to church and she couldn’t take me, so there was an end to it. But that didn’t stop her nagging. Until I lost my temper that day and – but we won’t talk about that. Will we?’
She turned her head to look at Maddie, waiting as if for an answer and then said roughly, ‘Oh, why the hell shouldn’t I tell you? I lost my temper and I hit her and she had a bruise. Is that so wicked, hmm? To hit your mother? She never hit me, mind you. Thought it was vulgar, you see. Told me that only the cheap ones hit their children.’ Again the imitation of the Irish accent appeared in Annie’s voice. ‘ “The bog Irish do that. I’m not bog Irish, you know. I’m middle class, always was,” she’d say. And then went and got involved with that man! How stupid can a woman be? Tell me that. How stupid can a woman be? All those years in that awful little house, collecting all her things because they were refined or pretty or whatever else it was she called ‘em, and they were all awful, believe me, they were awful, garish and ugly and awful, but she said they were nice and she collected them and dreamed of him and nagged me to be a lady and reared me a bastard –’
And then she was crying as she hadn’t cried for years. She hadn’t cried like that when Jen had died, hadn’t cried like that, it was certain, when she had heard Colin had died, long before, had never cried as she did now, thick tearing sobs pulling her ribs apart till they screamed their pain at her, and her eyes ached and her head thumped with it.
It stopped at length, of course, though she couldn’t be sure how long it had gone on. Only that she had been out of control of it, and that the weeping had been the real Annie, and her body just something that the weeping needed to use. She began to breathe more normally, not sobbing so much, though occasionally a single spasm lifted her diaphragm so that she hiccupped, and she blinked to see if she could open her swollen eyes. And then moved experimentally, to see if she could lift her head from her arms where she had rested it, and realised there was a weight on it.
And she put up one hand, trembling a little with the after effects of the storm of grief that had filled her and touched the weight and then managed to lift her chin stiffly and stare at Maddie. She still sat as she always did but she had one hand held out and awkwardly set on the top of Annie’s head.
8
January 1987
After that it was like a tide coming in, slow but powerful, sometimes eddying a little and sometimes seeming to retreat but always creeping further and further up the beach, leaving ever deepening water behind it as the shallows were filled in and new territory was swallowed up.
Because Maddie, once she started to talk, didn’t stop. At first her voice came haltingly, hoarse and low like a very rusty old engine creaking unwillingly into life, but as the days went on she became more and more fluent, and the words would come tumbling out in a steady stream. That was when it most seemed like a brisk sort of tide that would never turn, and there were moments when Annie almost panicked, fearing she would be engulfed by this woman and her history. But then she got used to it, and it became easier, because although to begin with Maddie talked what seemed to Annie to be gibberish, disconnected words and phrases interlarded with names that meant nothing to her and which Maddie never explained, gradually her account of herself became coherent and understandable.
It was a little bit, Annie would think, lying in her bed at the flat at night and remembering the day’s output of words, it was a little bit like doing a jigsaw puzzle but cutting out the pieces as you went along. Maddie would pour out a great gobbet of talk, and then, painstakingly picking her questions, to avoid startling her, going as delicately as Agag, Annie would chip away at the mass of words, persuading Maddie to explain, to discard, to shape what she was telling so that that piece of new information could be fitted in with the piece that had emerged the day before.
The comparative emptiness of the ward contributed greatly, Annie decided, to Maddie’s emergence from her years of silence. If it had been as it had been before the determined emptying of Greenhill by its busy efficient administrators, would she have spoken? Wouldn’t the constant chatter of the other patients, the noise of occasional arguments between them, the regular press of daily ward activities, have gagged her? Wasn’t Annie being presumptuous and excessively self-satisfied to think – as she sometimes did – that it was her doing that had unplugged that tide?
I mustn’t get too pleased with myself, she would think, as she left Maddie safely put to bed at the end of each day, and made her way back to her car and the journey back to her bleak flat. I mustn’t take credit for something that’s nothing to do with me –
But Joe Labosky wouldn’t have that. He had made one of his usual visits on a Tuesday morning, ostensibly to check on Maddie’s progress, but in fact to see how Annie was – not that he would have let her know that for the world – and had found the two women sitting with their heads together and so wrapped up in each other that they did not notice his arrival. Usually Annie was very aware of the presence of others, and if one of the nurses appeared anywhere near their section of the ward would lean back slightly in her chair, so that Maddie, seeming to communicate instinctively, would immediately stop talking, only to start again when Annie leaned forwards in that confidential way that showed that it was safe to do so. But on this morning Maddie had been particularly verbose and picking anything useful out of what she was saying so much more difficult that all Annie’s concentration was fixed on her; and when she felt Joe’s hand on her shoulder and looked up to see him standing beside her she felt a lurch in her chest and belly that made her feel sick, she was so startled. At once she leaned back and equally quickly Maddie slid into her customary silence, but they were both too late. Joe had seen and, more importantly, heard.
Maddie of course would not talk while he was there. She sat as she had for as long as he had known her, erect, blank of expression, rocking silently and with unfocused gaze, and although Joe tried to persuade Annie to try to get her talking again so that he could observe what happened, she refused.
‘I can’t,’ she said mulishly, after he had insisted she come to the ward office to discuss it. ‘It’s nothing to do with you. It’s between Maddie and me. She doesn’t like to talk when anyone is there but me. So I shan’t make her.’
He grinned at her. ‘Really? Are you sure it isn’t that you don’t want her to talk to anyone but you? Have you developed a proprietary interest, Annie?’
‘Like hell I have,’. Annie flashed. ‘If you think that, you can go to blazes. I’ll stop coming here and I’ll stop talking to her and –’
He lifted his hands in a posture of mock self-defence. ‘Sorry, sorry! It’s a bad habit of mine you’ll have to forgive. Always trying to see all the possible motives behind a course of acti
on. All right – how do you know Maddie doesn’t like to talk when other people are around?’
‘Because she stops doing it,’ Annie said witheringly. ‘It’s the most obvious evidence you can have, I imagine.’
‘But do you signal her when other people are around and warn her to be silent again? She can’t see the bulk of the ward – it’s behind her. All she can see is the window in front of her. You’re the one who can see the ward, because you sit in front of her. So isn’t it possible that somehow you send a warning to her, and that makes her stop?’
‘I didn’t see you coming today,’ Annie said. ‘And she stopped as soon as you arrived. So what more do you want?’
‘Nothing,’ he’d said. ‘Nothing at all. So it’s got to be you and your company that’s worked this particular bit of magic. I do congratulate you, Annie. You’re a remarkably successful psychiatric nurse, clearly. We should have brought you in sooner.’
‘Rubbish,’ Annie said sharply. ‘It’s nothing of the sort. Nothing to do with me, at all. It’s Maddie herself. She decided the time had come to talk so she’s talking –’
‘But she won’t when you’re not there. If she won’t talk to anyone but you –’
‘I don’t want to discuss it,’ she said and got to her feet. ‘She ought to hear what we talk about, when we talk about her. It’s not right to go on like this behind her back.’
He looked up at her and smiled. ‘Good for you, Annie.’
‘Good for what?’
‘For this. For Maddie. For you. That’s what being a friend is about. It’s nothing to do with listening or talking or anything of that sort, is it? It’s to do with protecting the interests of a person you care about.’
‘ “But it was the very best butter,” said the Mad Hatter,’ Annie said making her voice sound as contemptuous as she could and turning for the door. ‘Do you have to lay it on quite so thick? It doesn’t impress me.’
He shook his head with an obviously exaggerated patience. ‘Dear me, but you make it hard for a person to be friendly to you! Oh, well, if that’s the way you want it, what can I do? Maybe abrasive will stop being your buzzword in a month or two. It’s getting a bit boring though, I must say.’
She had reached the door and was almost out of it but she stopped and not turning round stood still for a moment. And then turned deliberately and said carefully, ‘I’m sorry. You’re quite right. I’ve been unnecessarily rude. I’m sorry.’
He actually looked taken aback and she could have laughed aloud at that. She had been very rude to him, but she had enjoyed it. It was like punching a cushion to speak so to him because he absorbed all her anger or her hate and whatever it was she was feeling and gave nothing disagreeable back. But it was something that had to be dealt with, she had decided, this tendency to take pleasure in being nasty. I don’t have to come on like Pollyanna, all sweetness and light, she thought now, but it won’t hurt me to mind my tongue. Being hateful and bitchy can be a bad habit, and no more than that. It can be just as easy to develop the habit of being polite if still remote. They’ll still leave you alone if you do that. It’s not that I give a damn about what he thinks. It’s just that I have to start somewhere and it might as well be with him. So she repeated it. ‘I’m sorry.’
‘Oh,’ was all he said, and suddenly she smiled and then turned and went, leaving him sitting half perched on the edge of the table in Sister’s office, staring after her. Knowing she had surprised him was really very pleasant, she thought as she went back to Maddie. I really enjoyed that. I must tell Maddie all about it.
And she did.
April 1950
The important thing, Maddie told Jay, was to make yourself pleasant to people. ‘It’s what they remember most,’ she said. ‘Not what you did, but how you did it. Believe me, there’ll be no problems over this deal. No one’ll think you had anything to do with it. If they remember you at all it’ll be just as someone pleasant. You see if I’m not right.’
She was, of course. He handled the chocolate affair, collected his thousand pounds and it all went as smoothly as the chocolate itself; smoother in fact, because as Maddie said, it was pretty lousy chocolate. It was weeks before Ambrose stirred himself to do anything about his other instructions and he made such a racket when he found it had all been dealt with already, that all anyone remembered was that Ambrose Braham was a bastard, a typical rich man’s kid who threw his weight about and made a pest of himself. And they stored it up as a score to discharge some time in the future, and no one paid any attention at all to Jay. Least of all Alfred, who was too busy with other matters to be interested in Ambrose’s complaints. He just found him another deal to handle and sent him off grumbling to do it.
But that was the start of it all, as Maddie would remind Jay sometimes. It had all gone so very well and he was so very excited about his new-found solvency that he took her out a good deal that spring. They went to the races, and they went to dinner dances at the Savoy Hotel and the Caprice and to parties in houses by the river, and Maddie began to glow inside, knowing it was just a matter of time now. He’d soon see it her way, and they’d be married and it would all be just as it was meant to be.
But then he began to change. Not a great deal but enough to make her start to plan again. Odd dates missed and invitations to parties set aside because he was ‘too busy’ and she felt him sliding away from her, and had to make a new plan that didn’t involve chocolate. There wasn’t any chocolate to work with anyway; Alfred had had some sort of disagreement with the American end, she found, listening to one of his conversations on the phone at the Regent’s Park flat, so that avenue was closed.
But there were others, and she needed them. And when Alfred sacked yet another secretary (he was famous for that, Maddie told Jay afterwards; the girl wasn’t born who could be what he wanted, which was an efficient shorthand typist, a filing clerk, and willing to go to bed with him without expecting any special treatment in the office next day) she moved in.
‘I’m bored, Daddy,’ she told him. ‘So bloody bored –’
‘Don’t say a word like that. It ain’t stylish for a decent girl.’ He said it abstractedly, not really listening, trying to pick his way through a confidential letter that listed actual sums of money and therefore couldn’t be entrusted to any newcomer he might find to fill the departed Polly’s chair.
‘Well, I am. Nothing to do all day –’ She came and leaned over the back of his chair as he went on picking away at the keys, swearing when he made a mistake and savagely pulling the paper out to start again.
‘Get something to do then,’ he grunted. ‘And get out of my way, for Christ’s sake. Bad enough trying to get this out tonight without you driving me crazy –’
‘Oh, here,’ she said, all disingenuousness. ‘For God’s sake, let me do it. You’re all thumbs –’ And she pushed him out of the chair and sat herself down and with an expert twist of her wrist put the paper in the platen. ‘Is this what you want copied? Right, let’s see now –’
And she rattled through the letter with only two or three mistakes which she was able to rub out neatly enough, and he looked it over, his cigar jutting up between his teeth in what he fondly regarded as his Churchill manner, and looked at her with a great grin.
‘Hey, where’d you learn to do this?’
‘Honestly, Daddy, you really are the dregs sometimes. At school of course! You sent me to that bloody – sorry! – that boring finishing school and they taught us this as well as flowers and walking with a book on your head and all the rest of it. Said it was a useful thing for a naice gel to be able to do –’ And she laughed. ‘Though why, they never said.’
‘It’s bloody useful,’ Alfred said and signed the letter with his sprawling carefully practised signature and then watched her as she typed the envelope and folded the letter and put it in. ‘Here, come to my office and help out till I can get a girl who’s got a bit more in her mind than what’s between her legs. I got more stuff to sort out this w
eek than you can shake a bloody stick at, and girls are playing up about jobs, you never saw anything like it. They want their four pound ten and a five-day week and an hour for lunch and no bloody work, that’s what they want.’
She set her head to one side and grinned at him. ‘Me, I’d want the hour for lunch and the five-day week and at least six pounds ten. But you’d get plenty of work for it. And keep it in the family,’ she said and laughed when he chewed his cigar at her. ‘Oh, come on, Daddy. You need some help and I’m bored. I might as well earn the money you give me as not, so why shouldn’t I? If it doesn’t work out, you can get someone else and no harm done. Make up your mind. I might change mine any minute. It might be as boring in your dreary old office as sitting around here all day.’
Maddie Page 10