It might have been worth breastfeeding after all, she thought, as the nurse came and took the now furious baby and started to feed him, if it was going to upset Blossom so much. It would be nice to sit and do it in her very own sitting room during the regular Sunday visits to Commonwealth Avenue on which Jay insisted. But oh, it would be nicer still to have someone here as well as Jay who loved her and would take care of her and wouldn’t be so hateful and suspicious of her. And now the tears did come as she lay on her pillow and thought about her father.
22
June 1987
‘The trouble is, we’re running out of time.’ Gresham’s tone was one of sweet reason, all regretful common sense. ‘That ward has only seven people left in it, Miss Matthews! How can we go on like that with costs being what they are? It isn’t reasonable. The contractors need to get down to it, and if we don’t put a move on we’ll be in breach of contract and that could lose the whole sale. I’m afraid I really can’t do much about it. She’ll just have to be sent somewhere – anywhere I can get her in –’
‘She’s not fit to be sent away!’ Annie said. ‘Not yet. Give me a little more time and maybe she will. Joe, can’t you get across to him that this is ridiculous?’
Joe came over to Gresham’s desk from the window out of which he had been staring. Below him the grass was being cut and the smell of it, rich and fresh and soothing, came drifting into the room on the warm June breeze.
‘It’s not his fault, Annie. It’s the system – he’s no happier about it than you are. Right, Gresham?’
‘Hardly,’ Gresham said feelingly. ‘Once we’re finished here I have to up my stakes and go half across the country to start again. There won’t be any job here for me, so I have to go where the work is and drag my family with me. Wolverhampton, would you believe …? No, Miss Matthews, it is not my fault. In fact I’ve used your Maddie as an excuse to delay things much more than they should have been. But they’re running out of patience. So we’ll just have to put a move on.’
‘Joe, what can we do?’ she appealed to him with all the passion she had. ‘You can’t let her be sent away now. I’m just beginning to get somewhere at last. She’s really unbuttoning. She’s been pouring it out – about how it was when she lived in Boston, all sorts of stuff. I’ve started writing it all down, so that I don’t forget – I’ll let you see it as soon as I’ve knocked it into some sort of shape. But stop her now and I hate to think how she’ll be. She’ll go back to being as she was. Worse, maybe –’
‘I wondered about the hostel on the Larcombe Estate,’ Gresham said. ‘But Sister B raised hell at that. Says even though she’s so improved she couldn’t take the responsibility, not till the nurses’ locker arguments are sorted out anyway. Would you believe it?’
‘I’ll believe anything about Sister B,’ Joe said. ‘But actually she’s right. Maddie wouldn’t be happy there. Look, Gresham, I have a couple of beds to play with in the acute ward. I’ll put her there and see if I can get in a couple of sick people from the other major units on the patch to back it up. If I have long-term heart or kidney problems to look after there, they won’t be able to rush us out, right? And it’s well away from the main blocks so the contractors will be able to get on. It could give us another few weeks.’
‘Well, some, I suppose,’ Gresham said dubiously. ‘They’re behind on the work they’re doing on the East Pavilion, so perhaps – will you be able to get away with that? Keeping her in an acute medical bed for any length of time won’t be easy.’
‘Watch me,’ Joe said. ‘But God help you, Gresham, if you tell anyone what I’m up to. I could be in real soup with the Medical Committee if they think I’m playing ducks and drakes with their precious beds.’
‘Not a word,’ said Gresham fervently. ‘Just get Maddie out of the West Pavilion and let me put the contractors in. I’ll have the other six patients disposed of by the end of the week, and the men can start on Monday. Thank you very much, Dr Labosky, and you too, Miss Matthews. I knew we’d find an answer that’d please everyone if we tried.’
‘I doubt it’ll please Maddie too well,’ Annie said as Gresham got up to go. ‘She mightn’t find the change all that much to her liking. She’s not used to changes, after all. She’s lived in that ward for almost forty years now. It’ll be a hell of an uprooting for her.’
‘She’ll manage,’ Joe said, and put his hands in his pockets to stop himself from touching her. She looks marvellous today, he thought, alive and alert and almost pretty, with that hint of make-up on her face, and her hair a little longer than it had been used to be but still short, curling over her ears. ‘She’ll manage because the most important factor in her life won’t change. You. As long as you’re around, she’ll cope very well indeed.’
‘I wish I could be so sure,’ Annie said. ‘I know how moving from a place you’re used to turns you upside down. Looking back on it now, I think a lot of the bad way I felt last winter was because of moving to the flat as much as anything else. I did hate it so –’ She stopped then and looked sideways at him. ‘I suspect I was hateful to be with around that time.’
‘Oh, you were,’ he said cheerfully. ‘Ghastly.’
‘Oh!’ She was nonplussed by his bluntness. ‘Well, I’m sorry.’
‘No need to apologise,’ he said, still cheerful. ‘Just be glad you’re through that stage and out the other side. But you could be right up to a point about Maddie being a little more difficult for a while after we move her. But you can handle that, can’t you? I’m beginning to think you and Maddie together can handle anything.’
July—October 1951
She would not have thought it possible that she could feel quite so dreadful. She had always been full of energy and eagerness; when her girlfriends had wilted and cried off from parties, it had been she who had chivvied them and teased them until they had made the effort, she who had been able to keep going night after night and party after party on the minimum of sleep and the maximum of excitement.
But now it was all different. She came out of the hospital with Buster, who was proving to be a difficult baby, according to the nurses, much given to waking in the middle of the night and demanding large feeds only to throw them up again as soon as he was put down to sleep, to return to the new house on Beacon Street. Jay had not been able to take her home; he had to go down to Quincy, he said, to meet with Cray Costello, who was financing the whole project.
‘It’s really exciting, Maddie!’ he had told her the night before she was to leave the hospital. ‘He’s putting up two million – not all his own of course, nothing like it, but he has access to a lot of good money – and getting him to work with us has to be good news. He makes a bad rival, know what I mean? Pa and him, they’ve been after the same business for years, and sometimes Pa got it, sometimes Cray did – but this time, it’s between us. Him with the loans, us with the goods. Very pretty. We can make a nice deal. So I’ve got to go tomorrow to meet with him. He wants to walk the site, look at the survey and the quantities we’ve assessed –’
‘Did you explain it was the day I was to come home?’ she said, suddenly not caring about business. She had imagined it night after night since Buster’s birth; riding back with him, walking up the front path of their own house, Jay settling her comfortably in her sitting room, seeing to it the girl they had hired to help with the baby was ready to take him and look after him, and then to go to bed again together – for sleeping alone this past ten days had been misery; she needed his closeness more than she needed food and drink – it had all been very important to her. And now he was telling her he wouldn’t be there.
‘That’s the way of it, Maddie!’ he’d said cheerfully as he kissed her goodnight. ‘Come on, honey, you understand the business as well as I do! If I want to make anything useful out of this deal I’ve got to be there. D’you want I should send Declan instead? Exactly! Listen, I’ll be home about eight, nine maybe. No need to make anything fancy for dinner. Tell the girl she can broil a
steak when I get in. Take care of Buster, now!’
So she had gone home alone in the taxi he had sent for her (‘Can’t send Liam,’ he’d told her on the telephone. ‘Declan and Pa have taken him over to Walpole to check out the Friary Fruit markets. Pa reckons they’ve been slicing the top off the profits – the taxi’ll see you’re okay.’) and it had been a shabby taxi, and a smelly one, because the driver smoked heavy old shag in a filthy pipe and by the time she got to the house, she felt queasy and shaky. And then when she had let herself in the shock of what she saw made her knees buckle.
The builders had been supposed to fix the kitchen while she had been in hospital. Some faulty work in the first place had resulted in water seeping through one wall, but ten days, Jay had said, would be plenty of time to get the job done, and it’d all be as good as new when she got home. He’d stay with his folks on Commonwealth, he’d told her, while it was going on, so there’d be no one in the workmen’s way.
But clearly his plans had gone hopelessly wrong. The hallway and the way that led through to the kitchen were bare, with the carpet rolled back against the walls. The floor was sodden and she picked her way gingerly over the mess, leaving Buster bawling in his Moses basket by the front door, to see what had happened. Clearly there had been some disaster in the work, and water had flooded in, for the whole kitchen was a mess of floating debris and dripping walls, and the living room and dining room which ran off each other out of the other side of the hallway were piled high with furniture from the hall. The whole place looked dreadful and anything but welcoming, and she sat in the middle of it and wept as she remembered how pretty it had been when she had finished the decorating, and thought about how long it would take to get it clean again.
It was at that point that she realised that there was no one else in the house but herself. The girl Jay had told her he’d hired to help her with Buster and to look after her: where was she? There was no sign of her and, wearily, Maddie dragged herself to her bedroom, which was at least as she had left it, if somewhat dusty, and gave the baby the bottle the nurses at the hospital had prepared for him, before curling up miserably on the bed to sleep.
Jay came home not at eight or nine but at ten, rosy with the convivial dinner he had shared with Cray Costello, and found her there. Far from being abject at the sort of homecoming she had had – and she would have been comforted, she told herself later, if he’d shown he was at all sorry about it – he had lost his temper spectacularly, cursing the stupid builders he had hired who had obviously made the mess-up, and then run away for fear of reprisal, and the hired girl who hadn’t showed up. But most of all he was angry with Maddie.
‘Why in hell did you just sit here feeling sorry for yourself?’ he roared. ‘Why didn’t you call my mother? You should have gone over there in a taxi; she’d have looked after you –’
After that she could do nothing but weep. She couldn’t explain to him, couldn’t tell him how impossible Blossom was, could do nothing but cry and though at first he had shown some compunction and tried to comfort her, she knew that he became irritable after a time and wanted only to go to bed and sleep.
And when they did, Buster woke and screamed and neither of them had much rest. They started the next day with Jay in as filthy a temper as she had ever seen him and she herself feeling worse than she ever had.
It got no better. Within two weeks Jay had found new builders and had the kitchen put to rights, and Rosalie, who had come to visit and stayed to hover over her and murmur over and over again, ‘Oh, you poor dear, you poor dear,’ until Maddie thought she would scream, had found her a new hired girl. But somehow Maddie never was able to pick up her energy again. Each day she woke as soon as the sun rose, and sometimes even while the sky was still pearly grey at dawn. Each afternoon she found herself dragging her weary bones around the house and night after night found herself weeping helplessly into her pillow, trying to disguise the sound for fear that Jay would hear. Because there was one thing about which Maddie was quite certain: Jay must not know how miserable she was. If he did he would leave her.
She had no obvious reason to think so, no sign from Jay that he was thinking of any such thing; indeed, he was so totally absorbed in the business, so eager to get to the office each morning and so late coming home that he had no time or energy for anything else. But she remained certain. Her need for him, her longing for him, had now grown to such proportions that she felt desperately unsafe. The more her passion for him consumed her, the more she doubted her ability to hold him. And the more she doubted, the more desperate her love became, and the more fearful she was of letting him know how she felt.
Yet she managed to keep her misery out of sight. The hired girl turned out to be reasonably sensible, and was at least willing to stay in at nights and look after the baby once Jay did get home. They could be together then without worrying about Buster or his needs and that helped a little. The evenings Jay was home were the best times in the bad times, Maddie thought. By nine o’clock the worst of her lassitude seemed to have worn off, and she could push away the bad thoughts that came to her, the hatred she sometimes felt for Buster for coming to spoil everything the way he had, and the even greater hatred she had for Blossom who had made her so angry and so fearful.
Because that had become an obsession with her. Blossom would find a way to persuade Jay to leave her. She would sit and watch him eat his dinner and listen to him compare the food the hired girl had provided with the sort of fare he had from Mary Margaret, and feel sick with terror that somehow Blossom’s baleful influence would come snaking towards them from Commonwealth Avenue to suck him away and swallow him up. It was as though Blossom wanted to take her son back into her own body again, and hideous images would rise before Maddie’s mind’s eye as the thought came to her.
And then there were the thoughts about her father. She would lie on her bed each afternoon, ostensibly taking a rest while the hired girl took Buster out for a walk in his buggy, and toss and turn as she thought about him. She would see the flat in Regent’s Park, see the rooms empty and dusty and then see her father slumped dead in a chair, with no one to know because she wasn’t there to look after him. Or she would see the office in Great Portland Street and watch helplessly as he came out of the door and went to the head of the stairs and tripped and tumbled down them to lie dead and broken at the bottom, until she was weeping great desperate sobs and was almost out of her mind with fear. It was the way that her thoughts ran away with her, and ugly images came and went of their own volition, that terrified her most. She was out of control of her life and she didn’t know how to get it back into her own hands again.
And no one knew what was happening. She went through the times when other people were around her with a fixed smile on her face and an air of calm insouciance and showed no sign of her hidden misery and turmoil. Rosalie admired her new slimness – which was entirely due to the fact that Maddie had no appetite at all – and said she hoped she’d be able to get her figure back as fast as darling Maddie had, but then she didn’t have Maddie’s great willpower! and she would droop heavily in her chair with her hands looped across her vast belly and stare at Maddie with her great adoring eyes and beg for reassurance that it wouldn’t hurt too much having her baby, and then cry, ‘Please, please Maddie, be with me. I need you so much, what with Timmy being in Washington –’ And Maddie would smile brightly and assure her she’d be fine and remind her she had her mother to rely on, and after all wasn’t that why she was in Boston and not in Washington to have her baby? So that she could be near her mother? And Rosalie would subside with a few tears and say, ‘Well, yes – I suppose so,’ and say no more. Until the next time when she would trail out the same old plea.
Maddie even managed to hide what had happened to her feelings for Jay. She still adored him, with a fierceness that never wavered, still wanted to be with him and only him, still felt renewed when he came home and abandoned when he left to go to the office, but she no longer wanted his
lovemaking. That deep aching for sex that had been so intrinsic a part of her feeling for him had gone as though it had been a candleflame someone had blown out. When he touched her she felt at first nothing and then a crawling distaste that made her grit her teeth and breathe deeply to control the nausea that rose in her. She wanted his love and his support more than she had ever wanted anything, but she did not want his body. He, on the other hand, seemed as eager as ever; it was a rare night when he didn’t grope for her almost as soon as they got into bed, and sometimes he started the day in the same way, waking with an urgent need that allowed him no time for any finesse or even an invitation. She would find he had reached for her shoulder and flipped her over on to her back and was thrusting himself into her almost between one breath and the next; but curiously she didn’t mind that as much as the night-time lovemaking he wanted. She was at her lowest ebb in the morning, but at least it was quick and easy then. He demanded no more cooperation from her than her body’s presence. At night he demanded cooperation and what was more, enthusiasm, which she did her best to simulate.
But he didn’t know. He would talk to her of the baby, of work, of the house, and show no awareness of any of her feelings and for that she was grateful. It made her feel safe and that was what she needed most of all.
Summer limped, sweaty and heat-shimmering, into a rich golden autumn and still she felt no better. She was almost gaunt now and Jay had begun to comment on it, complaining in a heavily jocular fashion about the way her breasts had diminished in size, and she made an effort, forcing herself to drink milk and to take extra vitamins and minerals from the drug store and that helped a little. The baby on the other hand was growing at a great rate, as the hired girl became more and more attached to him and showed her affection by filling him with quantities of extra sugar in his bottle feeds. Maddie watched him grow bracelets of fat and thought, at least he’s all right, though somewhere at a deep level she suspected he needed better care than he was getting. But she was too weary and too miserable to care.
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