Repeat It Today With Tears

by Anne Peile

  On another occasion I made a grave error of judgment; while the porter had sloped off for a smoke I went into the corridor to scan his abandoned post trolley but Herne the Hunter, unbeknown to me, was lurking in the ward office. ‘What do you need, Susanna?’ he asked me.

  ‘Nothing from you, at any rate,’ I said and returned to my room but my heart was beating fantastically fast in case he had guessed the object of my interest. I lay down and hid my face under the cover, fearing that he would follow me. I knew that he had seen me startled by his sudden appearance and he might think that thereby he had gained some advantage, some Achilles chink in my protective armour. I shut my eyes inside the dark warm tent of the blanket.

  ‘Look at the picture on the wall behind her,’ I sit at the painting desk and Jack leans over me, pointing at the Vermeer on the page. On his breath I can smell the Demerara sugar, two spoonsful, that I stirred into his coffee for him.

  ‘There are symbols in that picture; the sea is said to represent love and the ship is the lover, therefore we can suppose that the letter she is reading is from her sweetheart or husband who is a sailor away at sea.’

  That is almost the skipping rhyme and the singing game, blown on the breeze up and over the high wall of the infants’ playground between the Commons: A sailor went to sea sea sea to see what he could see see see but all that he could see see see was the bottom of the deep blue sea sea sea…

  You never wrote me a letter, Jack. You told it all into my ear instead. I wish you had written me something, even if you had just left me a note pinned to the door. Some scrap for me to hold on to. Gone to deliver drawings, back soon, please wait. Love Jack. Gone to fFitch’s for more inks. Love and kisses Jack. Susie, I love you so much that you cannot and will not live without me, signed Jack. Like some Renaissance polymath you have stripped my veins and turned them inside out but you never recorded it on paper. You did not even leave me so much as a scribble in a margin. Nothing.

  If I had left you for a while, if I had agreed to go to Oxford would you have written to me then, I wonder? And what would we have said to each other, in the mails? Would you have repeated on paper what you murmured to me in all the sweet long nights and vowed in the aching early mornings when sometimes, to draw out that exquisite anticipation, you stilled yourself in the action of entering me, like someone paused to listen. And how would I have replied to you? Cramming into a small blue envelope what huge words of love to be carried like an eggshell across Oxford’s hard cobbles to the pillar box.

  It is not fair that he left me no testament. He should have known to do so, he was older and he had seen far more than I have seen. If we had been allowed to go together it would not have mattered but the greatest unfairness is that I must stay such a long time in a waiting place, knowing that the evidence of he and I will be lost forever. With pity for myself and state a lump swells in my throat. Jack used to nearly choke me sometimes, when he came into my mouth. I never got to like that very much but to see my father in his ecstasies was thrill enough for me… And this now, this waiting place, it is my punishment of course. I knew, when I sealed this bargain, that I would have to make atonement. For now there is nothing to do; I must keep silent and suffer.

  Yesterday was very bad. No especial reason, just that some days the passing of time is more difficult for me than others. Bonnie Jean is very good, she senses when it is going to be worst. She settles herself on a chair beside my bed and she has the knack of looking else where while she sits and holds your hand; by pretending that she is not concerned, it makes the episode seem less serious.

  Before she went home she gave me a pink pill and made me take it with Bournvita. It was only four o’clock in the afternoon but she said that it would be better if I could settle myself down early. For a while I did but then I had dreams and the elderly man from the next wing was very disturbed. Before I saw him I always used to imagine that his appearance must be fantastical and melodramatic, as poor howling Mrs Rochester is envisaged; but then I did see him one day and he was just an ordinary old London man in a vest. He might once have been a boxer. In a second year English class we debated who was the most frightening, everyone else said the wife, that it was obvious, I was the only one who thought that pipe-smoking Grace Poole was worse.

  It was a long time before anyone came, I had the light on but it was very harsh each time when I opened my eyes between banging my head on the metal bed end. It was a man that came; more often it is men at night. They have a highly developed technique of making you swallow medication when they are in a hurry. Farm animals are handled like that. His colleague was shouting at him from beyond the swing doors at the end of the corridor. I lay down because I knew that he needed me to do so, as he backed hurriedly out of the room, he lifted his hand in a halting gesture, ‘Stay where you are,’ he said, ‘just stay where you are.’

  I tried but the howling of the Bertha Rochester man was like a wild animal and I could not block out the indignity of the situation that he – who had once been fearless and strong, a bragger and a brawler – must now be enduring.

  Perhaps there was a change of shifts because next time it seemed to be two different orderlies. One said, ‘Jesus Christ, she’s blacked her bloody eyes now.’

  They brought more medication, this time in a syringe. I knew that it would be responsible of me to explain that I had had something earlier but my tongue was woolly and my throat was sore from weeping or some such that I had done. Anyway, to me rehearsal for oblivion is always welcome.

  Knock-out one combined with knock-out two proved most efficacious. I was unconscious for I do not know how many hours or even days. Subsequently I was in a state where I could hear but not speak and feel. I could not move at all, I could not even lift my eyelids, though these may have been made the heavier by the bruising of them. At one point someone said, ‘Check her signs for me, will you? I’m not sure what I can find.’

  It felt as though I was bound to the bed and also weighted down so I knew that I was unable to respond. Once I wished that I could reassure Bonnie Jean for she sounded most anxious. The next time I was aware of voices it was her again but she was saying, ‘Our Susanna’s not with us today, I’m afraid, such a pity, when you’ve come all this way again.’

  ‘What has happened to her face?’ asks Olive.

  ‘She hurts herself, my dear, they do that, sometimes, bang their heads, cut themselves, you can’t always get to them in time.’

  Sounds went in and out like tuning the old wooden wireless we once had; I liked the names on the dial, Hilversum, Budapest, Eireann…

  ‘Will she get better?’

  … Munich, Moscow, Allouis, Luxembourg…

  ‘Who’s to say, my dear? Not you or I, anyway. Would you like to stay a while, sometimes it will bring them round, if they’re aware of someone in the room with them. Here, take this chair and I’ll fetch us some tea, I was going to sit with her anyway.’

  Olive must have been sitting watching me. Her same eyes would have watched Jack many times. In physics they explained about sight with pinhole cameras but I did not understand. She would have looked at him without even seeing him, because she expected him to be there. I always saw him. Ever faithful I watched and learned and I knew every nuance of his expression, not even the smallest muscle of his face would tic without me recognising immediately whether it was bliss or close to bliss, fatigue, concentration, anxiety or memory, or that transcendental, contemplative state of perfect love which I, blessed one, was able to induce.

  I heard the cups and saucers. ‘It’s a good thing, I think, that my husband never saw this,’ said Olive.

  ‘So you’re a widow then, is that right?’

  Bonnie Jean has been married for twenty-six years. Her husband’s name is Leo; they are very content. Sometimes when she is changing the dressing on my arm she talks of their home life and I glimpse it as though through the yellow lighted windows of houses seen from a train. The worst row they have ever had was over the subject of t
rade union membership. Their two children are grown up and making their own way. On Friday afternoons Leo comes to meet her after work to help with the heavy shopping.

  Now, the vicarious shiver indulged from the place of safety, Bonnie Jean wants to know how someone else’s husband was taken away. ‘What happened, had he been ill?’

  ‘No, not at all, it wasn’t that.’

  There is a tone in women’s voices, even solid women, which comes when they are talking about something which is difficult for them; it is querulous, almost, but paradoxically that querulousness is an indication that they are being brave, rather than timorous.

  ‘There was some sort of accident; at the inquest the possibility that he… that he had killed himself arose… Suicide, you know, suicide is the ultimate form of violence. I hadn’t realised that before, it was just a word, albeit with dreadful connotations for those concerned. But when it was being said, about my own husband, I could see then that it is the most extreme form of violence…’

  I still cannot speak or move but going through the motions of attempting either action is so effortful that it renders me unable to hear. It acts upon my ears like being underwater. When I next can listen I know that they are looking at me, with my funny bits of doll hair and my damaged eyes. I had a doll once, bought for me unexpectedly by that Clapham landlord. I called her Marigold and to my great regret I cut off her lovely yellow nylon hair during a dressing game; I tried to fix it back again by plaiting it in but it was not a success.

  ‘I must say I’ve wondered if there was always some flaw, something wrong, and if so, whether it could have been passed on to Susie.’

  ‘Did he show any signs before, of being disturbed?’

  ‘None. He was in a bad way when we first met, but that was alcohol, mainly. Once we got through that, no, not at all. Not the easiest of men, he had his dark side, but nothing untoward.’

  ‘And were you happy?’

  ‘Yes, well I thought so, most of the time. He liked to be alone a lot; I stayed in our house in Suffolk…’

  I expect that one of the first things that the father of the new family will do is fix up a swing, on one of the apple trees.

  ‘He used to live and work in London, during the week. In that last year of his life, that’s when things changed.’

  ‘Why so?’

  ‘Another woman, inevitably; entirely unoriginal, I know, but my goodness, he had it bad. I used to watch him when he came home at weekends, when he didn’t know I was looking, and I used to think my God, Jack, one of us is headed for a fall. I tried warning him, gently, but it didn’t make any difference.’

  ‘Did you ever ask him outright?’

  ‘No, I never did. I thought about it sometimes, especially when he behaved very badly and let people down because he was so obsessed. Do you know, one Sunday we had gone out to a special lunch with some very dear old friends, it was their twenty-fifth wedding anniversary. We’d only just started and suddenly he jumped up, like a man possessed, and said he had to go; no apology, no explanation, he jolly nearly ran out of the restaurant…’

  So, my father’s wife describes events earlier in that day; the other occasion on which I saw him weep. This was by far the worse; you may know that sobs issuing forth from a grown man sound quite dreadful. I, all unaware and humming a song from Ali’s radio, had climbed the stairs at Oakley Street in a haze of Diorrissimo and anticipation, the tips coins weighing down my pockets. Jack had given me a key and I did not expect him to be back but he was waiting in the doorway of the room and he snatched me as if from danger at a cliff or platform edge. Then I realised that he was sobbing and he told me that he had thought that I was never coming; he said, ‘Oh, Susie, thank God,’ and he tilted my face as though he expected to see some sign or device of bad tidings inscribed there in magic writing and then again he hugged me to his chest and was sobbing the more so. I felt that I was ill equipped to deal with this adult grief. Lacking any appropriate stock of conversational phrases I did the only thing I could think of which might give him comfort, I began to undress. Expiating his sobbing and his sorrow he pushed me very hard that afternoon, bruising me quite markedly, there on the teatime bed. I accommodated and indeed encouraged his brutishness because I felt that it must be reassuring for him to do it that way. As he finished he might have been turning himself inside out. Afterwards he apologised; not for his ferocity, but for his earlier comportment, so really he was saying sorry not to me, but to Olive and to the old and dear anniversary couple friends.

  ‘God, what a stupid cuss I am. There I was with half a bloody avocado in front of me like a bar of soap and this blind panic seized me… I had this awful presentiment, I just had to get back to London to see… ’

  ‘What did you think had happened?’

  ‘I thought… er… I thought… I got this idea into my head that you had decided to call it a day… that you wouldn’t be here anymore… ’

  ‘But I promised you.’

  ‘People break promises, Susie. Christ, I should know that better than anyone… ’

  ‘I don’t,’ I said and then the kiss that I gave him was almost vicious.

  ‘I don’t.’

  ‘It’s all right,’ says Bonnie Jean, ‘she’s dreaming, that’s all.’

  ‘The funny thing was, apart from the times when he let people down because of it, I wasn’t angry at all. Well, I was a bit, with myself, for not knowing sooner, but I wasn’t angry with him, I couldn’t be, you see, because he was so absurdly, ridiculously happy. I couldn’t find it in me to begrudge him, I did care for him, after all and he was, I don’t know… transformed by this affair.’

  In the Chelsea Potter, when Barry French was describing some supreme moment of pleasure, he talked of being translated. Bonnie Jean must have brought them biscuits to share from the big red Family Assortment tin; for a while I listened to crunching.

  ‘And did you know her, this woman?’ Some determination transmitted itself from my brain through my central nervous system and my hand twitched. Bonnie Jean leant across and patted it.

  ‘No, I’m still not sure, who she was… ’ Her voice trailed into a dreaminess, ‘But, my God, he must have loved her… ’

  For a few seconds I sensed Olive regarding my marked face and my bits of ruined hair and her gaze was making them precious again. Fleetingly, during those few seconds, I believed that she knew and was recognising me for what I was to my father and as she held out her arms to me I gave myself up and both of us were glad for knowing.

  ‘And do you think that there was some connection here?’

  ‘How do you mean?’ Olive’s tone snaps back sharply from its dreamy state.

  ‘I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to pry.’ Bonnie Jean begins to stack up their cups and saucers.

  ‘No, no, I know that you didn’t, and it is a question I have asked myself, that and other things, I just don’t know. I did try to find answers. As soon as I felt able to face it I went to the house where he lived during the week, I thought that the people that knew him there might be able to cast some light… ’

  As surely as if I were able to open my eyes and look I know that outside the window the sky and the line of treetops have lurched sickeningly and wildly as when the liquid in a snow storm globe is tipped. It is vital that I muffle what she is saying. I do it with the song, which somewhere Jack is singing; he is humming, not in tune, over some task. Shoes. He is polishing the old brown shoes with the brush and the Cherry Blossom Shoe-shine from under the sink, kept beside the medicinal Spanish brandy… ‘They can’t take that away from me… oh no they can’t take that away from me…’ He sings louder over the rhythm of the vigorous brushing but I can hear chair legs scrape upon the linoleum as Bonnie Jean pushes it back against the wall. I want him to sing louder still so as to block out the light that Olive has seen cast. But I am safe after all.

  ‘But there was no one… there had only been two of them left in the house, old time tenants with controlled rents, once Jack was
gone, the landlord was quick to persuade the last one out and sell, it was such a valuable property, you see… so there was no one I could ask, no one who would have remembered him. He lived a very solitary life in London.’

  ‘A bit like a monk’s cell,’ says Jack as he opens the door that first night before he falls headlong into my eyes.

  ‘Maybe it is just as well not to know,’ says Bonnie Jean and Olive says that maybe it is and as she departs she pauses to pat the cover of my bed with its smooth white icing sheet.

  Periodically Trevor tries a new tack, especially when I have had darker days. Herne never does, he just worries at old ground mercilessly; probably he even bores himself. But Trevor, dedicated and optimistic, feels it incumbent upon himself to ponder new strategies and potential for us inmates. He might have been a curate in a deprived parish, wearing a chunky wooden cross and running a youth club.

  ‘How do you envisage your life after you leave here, Susie? What would you like the future to be?’

  ‘Don’t know.’

  ‘Come on, Susie, what do you want?’

  What I want, Trevor, is to let my head sink, with a sigh, upon my father’s chest so that at last I can safely go to sleep again.

  When I lay me down to sleep

  Fourteen angels watch to keep…

  I can listen for the rise and fall of his breathing and be lulled and comforted by the little bits of sweetheart words he murmurs to me, scraps of coloured ribbons, as we drift towards our rest.

  Someone to watch over me…

  ‘Will you have ambitions for yourself, do you think? Are there things you hope to do? You could have gone far at school, we know that.’

  ‘What do you most want in all the world, Susie?’ Side by side in the bed in the room in Oakley Street we lay, Jack and I.

  ‘You,’ I said.

  ‘You’re very sweet.’

  His arms and my arms were straight down at our sides. I was holding his long hand and I closed on it very tightly, pressing hard on the bones.