Women Are Bloody Marvellous! And Other Stories

by Betty Burton

  Coming from the brilliant morning sun, the tiny cell of a room appeared pitch-black.

  'Switch on the light, Emily.'

  There was the rattle and scrape of matches. I felt ridiculous, familiarly ridiculous, one of my 'why don't they eat cake?' kind of questions. There wouldn't be electricity up here, would there! Emily lit a candle then a kerosene lamp. The wick needed trimming, curly threads of lampblack rose from the glass chimney. Marie Antoinette went to open a window. Idiot! This was up here! No windows!

  Very quickly my eyes adjusted to the soft light. Emily was leaning over a bed.

  'Sara! My girl! The Medam has come.'

  There was no response. She prodded the mound of bedclothes.

  'Sara! You must unwind. The Medam will not like you to spoil the blankets.' Then, as though we were discussing the merits of brand-names, she said to me, 'She is lucky you have bought for her American blankets, they do not stretch with winding.'

  The mound on the bed was wound mummy-like in the pink blankets we had recently taken a morning to choose, and covered with a bright 'native' blanket; two hands clutching the hem of the top blanket was all of Sara that was visible.

  'Sara. It's me. Aren't you well?' Sara made a small sound.

  'Unwind yourself, my girl.' Emily's voice was deep and beautiful but her tone was unpersuasive.

  'Shh.'

  Emily took a step back, perhaps offended ... ah well, I would apologize later.

  'Sara. I'm going to get Dr Wunch to come. But I'll have to tell him what's wrong.'

  Her fingers moved, unlocking from the blanket.

  'Give me a hand.'

  Gradually, like unbandaging a tender injury, Emily and I freed Sara from her cocoon of pink blankets. I was shocked at the sight of her.

  No children were allowed to visit at the clinic, but every day during my stay there, Sara had wheeled the pushchair and brought my children to where they could wave to me. She had beamed and waved too, and had smoothed the boys' hair and straightened their collars, indicating to me that I needn't worry, they were being taken care of. She always washed her glasses and brushed her teeth several times a day and they glittered up at me — she had been her usual self.

  Sara was one of those people who when not wearing their glasses appear to be missing a feature. But it wasn't just the absence of glasses that made her appear strange. Her face had lost its brown shine and was a sickly yellow and appeared to have a dusting of dry grey.

  'I am sorry.' Her voice was thin, weak, like a very old person, she sounded exhausted.

  'It's all right, I'm going to call Dr Wunch.'

  Emily rustled her starched apron.

  'You see, my girl, how lucky you are.'

  I wished Emily wouldn't do it, it was always so embarrassing. It wasn't obsequiousness, but I think she felt she must take it upon herself to mention certain things, in case I should think Sara didn't appear grateful enough for such luck as pink blankets and Medams who asked doctors to call.

  'Emily, would you take a message down to the flat?'

  'I shall ask the Baas?'

  'Say that Sara needs a doctor. If he wants to know what's wrong, just say ... it's fatigue ... say she is overtired.' Obviously Emily preferred 'fatigue', I heard her telling David:

  'That girl has got fatigue. The Medam is sending for the doctor.'

  After Emily left there seemed to be a vacuum in the little room, a surprising chill, and I felt uneasy. I sat on the edge of the bed. Not only was it the first time I had been in Sara's room, it was the first time that I had ever seen her prone. In the kitchen she perched on a high stool, on the balcony no amount of persuasion would make her use a deck-chair, choosing to sit as she did on picnics, on the ground with her legs under her and her skirts tucked decorously round them. Seeing her in bed was like the unique occasion when my father took to his bed after an accident at work.The centre-pole from which hung the tent of my life was no longer upright. I hadn't realized how very much I depended upon her.

  'Sara?'

  She opened her eyes. She was crying. Not good, normal tears, but a constant heavy stream that ran from the outer corner of her eyes. I didn't know what to say. She was a stickler for protocol. It was she who had made the rules by which we lived. We had wanted her to live au pair, but she made few concessions. At the beginning I tried getting her to at least call us Mr and Mrs instead of the awful Medam and Masta. She called the children by their first names which at least was better than old Daniel, who cleaned the cooker, who used Master, Little Master and Very Little Master. She liked her uniform, and would eat only in the kitchen. I felt sure that she would disapprove of me sitting on her bed.

  It suddenly occurred to me that I had sent for our own doctor, and I had no idea how the system worked under apartheid. Did white doctors treat blacks? Surely they must, there were very few black or coloured doctors. And Dr Wunch practised in the salubrious suburbs, how would he react to being called out to a black girl in a servant's room? Emily hadn't seemed surprised. Perhaps it would be all right. I would have to just wait and see what happened.

  'Is there anything I can get you? Would you like some tea?'

  'Emily will make it.'

  Three times she had spoken, each time she had omitted the 'Medam' with which she usually prefaced everything she said to me. Maybe it took something like this to break down the barrier between us. God knows we needed each other. Each of us days of travelling from our homes. Each of us living by chance in an alien place, and longing to be in our own country. Living under the same roof, dusting the same furniture, sharing the same children. My roof, my furniture, my children ... perhaps her dignity was saved by the protocol.

  I heard Emily's voice and went to the door.

  'The Baas says OK, he has talk to the doctor. He will come. I tell the Baas it is all right for him to go to his office. I will see to every thing.'

  Sara would hate having Emily in her kitchen, but I said how nice it was of her and asked her to go down and make some tea for us. She went, telling everybody that she was going to make tea in the English Medam's flat.

  What would Emily have been under different circumstances? She needed to be expansive, organizing, involved with people, she should have been in charge of some large institution instead of serving a single woman who was away from home most of the day.

  Back in the little room I noticed a low stool which I placed beside Sara's bed and sat down.

  'Emily's gone to get some tea, and the doctor will come later.' She nodded acknowledgement.

  'Sara, have you been ill like this before?'

  'Yes, sometimes. Not since I have come to the flat.'

  'Have you had treatment before?'

  'Yes, they are doing research.'

  'Research?'

  She didn't say anything for a minute, then she filled her lungs and let out an enormous sigh. Her body seemed to relax and sink into the bed. A bit of her more normal colour appeared in her face.

  'At the hospital. On Thursdays.'

  Thursdays.

  Ever since she had lived with us she had gone to stay with her friends in Soweto at weekends, and Thursday afternoons she took the bus into the city. I had always assumed she went wandering round the stores.

  'Do you want to talk about it? Do you know what is wrong? Have you got anything to take?'

  Before she could answer, Emily rattled in with our best tray beautifully laid up. Fine china teapot, sugar-bowl, jug, basin, one cup and saucer and two thick kitchen mugs. The council-house child still feeling guilt.

  Damn you, Emily!

  No, no. Fool. It wasn't anything to do with Emily. She was behaving like the well-trained servant that she was. She didn't make the rules, they were made by people like me. Them and us, black and white rules. As usual I tried to apologize for my thoughts with an action. I handed her the cup and saucer and Sara and I had mugs. She didn't stop long, saying that she had better get back down as she had two flats to look after.

  I sweete
ned Sara's tea with three spoonfuls of sugar as she liked it, and she accepted a biscuit.

  'That's better,' I said.

  She pulled herself up in the bed and patted her hair. Slowly, the Sara I knew began to emerge. I gave her her glasses and before putting them on she polished them on the bedcover.

  'Medam, the hospital. Before I came with you I was ill a lot of times. It was the Worm. Has Emily told you?'

  'She called it that, but I don't know what it is.'

  She gave me her wise look.

  'You do know. You also have worm pills. The pills I get from the drug store for you? The yellow ones?'

  Of course!

  'In England, we say it is the black dog,' I said.

  'What does it do?'

  'It leaps on our back. You've seen me with the black dog on my back.'

  'In Swaziland, we say it is the Worm that comes in the night.'

  'How long...?'

  'First time when I was in Cape Town. It came from nowhere. I was frightened. Another girl gave me something to smoke, but it made me crazy. It came again some times, then I got used to Cape Town, I had a boyfriend.

  He went over the border and I did not see him again.'

  Why couldn't I simply hug her? It was what we both needed, but the barrier between us she had erected for her own protection. She had to live up here. She was an itinerant worker allowed to exist here only because she owned a Passbook. I should have taken a chance and put my arms round her, but we were too much alike. We were each encased in the shells we had made to protect ourselves from rejection.

  Emily would have done it.

  'Do they call it the Worm at the hospital?'

  'Yes.'

  'Why?'

  'It is a worm that eats at the heart.'

  I thought that she was going to cry again, but she stopped the tears by hard polishing of her glasses.

  'Do you think the pills are any good?' she asked.

  'No, do you?'

  'I think they feed the Worm.'

  'Was it too much for you looking after the children while I was at the clinic?'

  'No, no. I am better now I live with children again. We had plenty of fun.' She smiled. 'Can I ask you about it? Your black dog.'

  'What is there to ask? It is no different.'

  'That is what I wanted to know, if it was the same.'

  'Only that we call it depression.'

  'That is the proper name for the Worm. At the hospital the doctors are trying things on many girls who have this, they say it is maybe anxiety that is the cause. We must leave our children. We lose our sisters and brothers, our mothers are at home, we worry. They say it is more common than any other illness for girls.'

  'And are they all given the same pills?'

  'Some have two milligram, some have five milligram, They try us on different sorts, some only at night, some three times in a day. These are mine, Medam.'

  Her cardboard pill-box was under her pillow. Except for the name on the label it was identical to the one in my medicine chest. Same box. Same label. Same contents. Same instructions.

  'Valium. 5mg. One tablet to be taken three times a day.'

  Food for the Worm. Tit-bits for the Black Dog. Twilight for the sisterhood.

  WILLOW-HERB AND SPEEDWELL

  WILLOW-HERB AND SPEEDWELL

  Rick, swinging the picnic basket, was out of earshot. Ella, imagining herself in various situations, spoke aloud, trying it out.

  'Same age as Sophia Loren ... A bit younger than Jackie Onassis!'

  Smiling. 'Well, actually I'm fifty — it sounds a hundred doesn't it?'

  God! It did sound a hundred.

  She raised her voice.

  'Fifty, Rick. Sounds a lot older than forty-nine.'

  He wasn't listening but nodded all the same. It didn't matter much, they'd had plenty of not-listening conversations in thirty years of marriage. He would talk about hardware and software, bytes and megabytes and she would nod. She would tell him about Elisabeth Frink's sculpture or Sylvia Plath's poetry. Each knowing and giving the necessary response — they had lived together for thirty years.

  'There's a lot more old-man's-beard, Rick,' she called. 'The wayfarer trees have grown too. Can't see the valley any more.'

  Rick had stopped beside a five-bar gate.

  'It's ten years. Things grow in ten years,' he said.

  His arm spread wide, he indicated the gate, presenting it with a pleased smile.

  'Look, they put the gate back. That'll keep the bloody cars out!'

  It had been the bloody cars that had finally stopped them coming here.

  They had discovered the place over twenty years ago. The boys had been babies and the gate had still been in good repair. Coming from the city, it had seemed like going into the wilderness. So high up on the Hampshire downs that you could sometimes see all the adjoining counties; a place where Ella and Rick could stretch out under the porcelain bowl of sky and let the kids roll down slopes and make caves in long grass — away from it all for a few hours.

  It had been up here that she had first rebelled against domesticity — in thought only. Twenty years ago. Before the idea of the sixties got under way, before assertiveness, before feminism escaped from the intellectuals and women with money. 'Why should it bloody always be bloody me?' Simple thought, but take Marx for instance, he must have started with just a simple thought. Why?

  All that she had said that time was, 'I'm going for a walk Rick, I'll leave you to put out the food.'

  'It can wait. I shall only mess it up.'

  And as always she had ended up feeling guilty. Rick was in the rat-race, men had enough to do without being bothered with domesticity. Women with modern houses and only a couple of kids, and washing-machines and hoovers and all day to do it in. Up and coming Young Exec, needed the weekends to relax. The rebellion was quelled.

  Summers came and went. The babies became the kids, then the kids became the boys, and stopped making grass caves. They grew their way through kites and balsa-wood airplanes, flint arrow-heads and boredom. Ella and Rick had been drawn into the Young-Exec.-Estate-House-PTA circle and the picnics had become jolly expeditions. Other muesli-eating, squash-playing, state-educating parents who were up in things like the effect of lead and religion on children, came in company hatch-backs, picnicking from wicker baskets and wine-coolers. They had all laughed a lot about their ragged-ass beginnings and their present upward mobility, talked socialism and put up as Labour in council elections. Stripped-pine Marxists.

  One day the gate-latch disappeared, next the spring-hinge was ripped off so that the gate could be propped open, and so the bloody cars had started to come. At first just one or two families bumped up the flinty path, and parked under the beeches so that they hadn't got to walk at all. Then, one summer the whole gate had been thrown in the hedge, and it seemed as though half Hampshire discovered Beacon Hill. Cars parked all round the summit as close as in a city carpark. People unloaded their belongings beside their bumpers and sat close to their cars. Transistor radios squeaked cricket commentary and quacked music.

  'Why can't they just enjoy it?' Ella said, waving her arm at the field-patterns, the beeches and encircling horizons.

  'They do!' Tom, eleven, had a knack of drawing Ella back from the brink of talking like a company wife.

  Fifty!

  Reached your half-century, Ella's mother would have said. Now you're in double figures; when Ella was ten. Into your teens. Out of your teens. Best years of your life. Fair, fat and forty! Menopausal years. Over the hill. Mother had euphemisms for age, birth, cancer, death. Now Mother was dead — passed over. Nobody now to tell Ella to buckle down to it in a marriage.

  Ella had buckled down all right. Worked in a typing pool to save for the first house deposit, then seven shirts a week for the Young Exec., hundreds of four-hourly feeds, a million dirty nappies. Taught socially acceptable table-manners, eased frightened or stubborn children into the school system. Dutifully buckling down. Dr
ifting. Waiting for Rick to get to the top. Waiting for the boys to go to school, waiting for them to finish their 'O'-levels, 'A'-levels, university, apprenticeships. Waiting uselessly for her mother's speech to return after the stroke.

  And now — fifty!

  'Come on.'

  Rick held open the small side-gate. It was one of the things she liked about him, a down-to-earth kind of courtesy that stemmed from his working-class origins, quite unlike the correct mannerliness of some of his present colleagues who bobbed up and down when their wives came into a room but left them to lug the shopping home.

  Through the gate the path widened and soon they were on the crest. They exchanged pleased looks. The white obelisk was as it had been twenty years before, barely visible amid long, seeding grasses. Far below in the growing heat-haze barns glinted, grazing land looked like bowling-greens and cattle seemed not to be moving. No matter where they let their gaze fall, they could see no other human being. The simple act of replacing the old gate with a substantial one with a padlock and a small separate access, had defeated the bloody cars. Beacon Hill had been returned to the few people who were prepared to walk the mile or so of track.

  'Shall I put the food out?' Rick asked.

  'If you like. I don't want anything yet.'

  Rick put the basket in the shade. It contained hardly anything compared with those she used to pack when the boys were growing up — just a couple of peaches, grainy bread, some cheese and a bottle of wine. The stuff they used to hump up here! Rick had once bought an expensive basket from Harrods, all fitted out with cups and saucers, knives and forks, boxes and flasks. Posh, and it weighed a ton. Today, everything they needed was contained in a small shopping basket.

  Rick spread the blanket and stretched out on his back; after a look at the Sport and Business sections of the Observer, he would doze. Ella wandered off down the slope. This was the moment. Anticipation. Elation. Even when they had come with the crowd, she had nearly always managed to go off on her own. There had once been a clever discussion between two of the crowd who were English teachers, as to whether Ella was Eustacia Vye or Tess Durbeyfield and she had wished that Rick had understood what they meant.