by Carmel Bird
‘Oh, Sister,’ Dr Silver said to her, ‘I am sorry to disturb you, but we would like to have some hot chocolate, please.’ She smiled round at everyone. ‘And perhaps a florentine?’ She raised her eyebrows. ‘Yes, I think so. And would you be so good as to let Niall know I will be requiring the car in – let me see – twenty minutes?’
Pieta sat on the pink velvet couch in a stiff state of prolonged shock. Was Cora really okay? Pieta felt she had somehow entered an unknown realm without realising it, gone through a filmy curtain and ended up somewhere else, in a place resembling reality in many ways, but different, utterly different. She kept seeing Cora, in her mind, lying on the floor of the studio in a pool of blood. Now she, Pieta, was having hot chocolate and florentines. With the Principal? What on earth was happening?
‘You have done well, Miss Vienna, Pieta. It must have been a terrible shock for you. But Cora is going to be as right as rain. You need have no fear. I must telephone her parents immediately, before I go to the hospital. The poor child must have been in such terrible pain. Did she say nothing? Pieta?’ Dr Silver’s eyes looked straight into Pieta’s soul and dared her to withhold the relevant information. There are things Dr Silver needs to know.
‘Why, no, Dr Silver. No. Er, no. She was just – er – working on her – er – work, and suddenly she was on the – um – floor.’ Pieta whispered the words in a kind of breathless disbelief that she could even speak at all.
The jug of hot chocolate arrived on a silver tray with thin white cups and saucers fluted at the edges.
‘Nothing that she said earlier occurs to you? She had not been having – episodes of any sort? Pain, warning signs? Nothing?’
‘Oh no, Dr Silver, nothing. Nothing.’ The Principal smiled – she smiled too often – and commented that Pieta was beginning to sound like a moment in King Lear. Pieta looked blank, and the Principal handed her a cup of hot chocolate, and a small white linen napkin which was folded in the shape of a star. Pieta fumbled with it. ‘No, I see. Well, everything is being taken care of. I am sure Cora will be back at her easel in no time.’
Miss Vienna was still in a flurry and stupor of bewilderment and anxiety. Had she done the right thing in cleaning up? Of course she had. It wasn’t as if anything criminal or forensic had happened. Miss Vienna, or Rosita the Spinster, the Innocent, possibly watched too much television, ghastly images of blue and green people in laboratories slicing up the bodies of the dead by the eerie light of a mysterious bulb, to the sound of subterranean cellos and mysterious creaks and groans. She was simply doing her job, part of which was to see that the studio was kept as clean and functional as possible. She had paid particular attention to the grouting – that was always a giveaway, wasn’t it? She suddenly had a vivid thought of rats coming in the middle of the night to lick the blood from the tiles. Bouncing and teeming in rat hordes on whispery fast feet, with bright gleaming eyes and amazing teeth and whiskers. She shut her eyes and shuddered. The rats receded on rat feet.
‘Oh, Miss Vienna, are you unwell? You must go home as soon as possible. This has all been a great shock to you. Would you like somebody to come with you? And Pieta, I will see to it that you are released from duties for this evening. You will go take a shower and go straight to bed – that is,’ she smiled again, ‘as soon as you have finished your hot chocolate.’ The florentines, like the droppings of a large exotic marsupial, lay in uneven lumps on the plate. Nobody ate one. Untouched, they lay plopped on the gleaming snowy white plate beneath the twinkle and glitter of the Indian chandeliers.
Rosita’s highly coloured mind raced on to consider the blood on the hand of Lady Macbeth. She looked down at her own hands. Oh, all the perfumes of Arabia! She left Dr Silver’s powerful presence and returned to the studio where she washed down the floor again with disinfectant, smelling this time not of chlorine but of oranges. She began to feel better about everything.
Cora’s painting was still up on the easel, a lonely statement in the middle of the room. Rosita stood back and examined it in the night-time lights of the studio. The long jagged yellow smudge arced across the canvas from right to left, top to bottom. As Rosita looked she saw something quite distinctly materialise – the yellow paint was not really an accidental splatter, but had become an integral part of the design. It was the light of the sun, previously locked within the flowers and leaves of the painted garden, leaping forth in one great glowing golden thrust. And along the upper blade of the gold there was a fine green outline, pale as water, splashing in from the wet leaves, caught on the accidental edge of Cora’s flying paintbrush. As she turned away, Rosita’s eye was attracted by something among the leaves of the painted garden. She saw for the first time the darkly mysterious shadowy form of a woman, fuzzily defined by the edge of the outlines of two trees. It was as if in a silvery lichen mist the ghost of a woman was forming in the air, emanating from the centre of the earth. Rosita peered closely at the picture, and the closer she came the more difficult it was to see the figure. She moved slowly backwards, watching the image as it almost materialised, almost but not quite. There was a point at which it disappeared again, like the figure in a game of optical illusion, or like the strange business of hallucination. Had Cora painted the figure there? Rosita the Innocent was given to fantasy. Was this fantasy?
She took the painting from the easel and placed it in the storeroom where it could dry in private, waiting for Cora to come back and finish it. In the dim lights of the storeroom the dark figure faded away to nothing.
Rosita was developing a headache. She turned out the lights and left the studio, a highly imaginative woman who took with her in her mind the golden splash with its dreamy green edging, and the shifting woman in the shadows, and the memory, image and aroma, of a very clean studio. Spick and span. She bounced along on her sensible feet. It had been a long, strange and stressful evening and she hoped with all her heart that Cora was going to be as well as Dr Silver had said. There was something strange in Dr Silver’s manner. What was it? But then Dr Silver lived in a world high above Rosita’s world, and she often cast a shadow of doubt in Rosita’s innocent mind, a shadow that Rosita had no real hope of ever understanding or penetrating.
God’s in His heaven, thinks Rosita.
Well, possibly she is right.
Cora lay on the floor of the art studio in Rosita’s mind’s eye, distant now, like a little creature far far away. As the image appeared in Rosita’s memory, the dark-bright arrow of scarlet fear flew again through Rosita’s heart, her mind and, she would say, her soul. Again and again Rosita’s thoughts circled, cycled back to the sight of Cora on the floor, of the finger of blood slithering across the tiles until it burst and branched into its little fractal folly of webbed rivulets, and slid in gleaming patterns of trees and corals and underwater weeds. The image hung in her mind and began to haunt her.
At home after her dinner Rosita washed up her plates and left them neatly stacked to dry on the scrubbed pine draining board of the sink. She went into her studio at the back of the house, one window huge and filled in the daytime with the light from the south, the other almost overgrown with wild honeysuckle and the branches of a red red rose. Altissimo was its name.
She sat at a table on which there was an elevated and tilted drawing board. From memory she began to draw the shadow of the figure on the floor, concentrating for the time being on the detail of the finger of blood and its explosion of fine arteries and veins. The pencil whispered on the paper as the image came into view. Rosita took her pastels and selected all the shades of pink and red, constructing within the fan of the blood a bright skeleton leaf, or the vessels of life in the wing of a butterfly. The picture was small, only a handspan square. Rosita moved to gouache and a brush made from three fine squirrel hairs.
This was the first time in her life that Rosita had ever drawn a picture of blood. Well, most people don’t ever draw a picture of the structure of blood. She became absorbed and then obsessed, moving to larger images of smaller s
ections of her subject, all within identical little square frames, so that by midnight she had a series of seven views of the blood, each one a detailed enlargement of the last, the faint body of the girl left far behind in the first picture. She consulted her dead father’s library of old medical books, the spines cracking when she opened them, and there she found the sweet, glorious, faded pictures of blood that she had pored over as a child. The last image she made was of pale ghostly orange bubbles drifting through a cross-section of a watery pink tube. The series was unlike any work Rosita had ever done before. She stayed in the studio contemplating it, frame by frame, until light began to play in the morning sky. The shadow of the fallen figure on the art room floor had faded to almost nothing, and a strange fear gripped Rosita’s heart, a fear that Cora had died while Rosita was in the process of sketching her lifeblood. Cora has died – she heard the words in her own mind, loud and terrible words. Whose voice was she hearing? It was the voice, accusatory and unarguable, of Dr Silver. Rosita left the pictures displayed in the studio, had a deep warm bath, and went to bed.
Rosita the Innocent prayed aloud: ‘Holy Mary, Mother of God,’ she said softly, ‘by your grace may Corazón live. Please. If it pleases you.’
And Corazón did.
Rosita’s bedroom was not the room she had slept in as a child, but had been her parents’ room. You could say that Rosita had moved from childhood into a sort of orphan-widowhood just by walking down the hallway, taking her intimate possessions with her. It was a large room with a high ceiling and deeply recessed windows set with small square leadlight panes, a certain air of the fairytale in its design. The curtains were heavy moss-green velvet running on smooth pale wooden rings. The double bed dated from the nineteen thirties, so its dimensions were of the time – fifty-four inches wide and fifty-one inches high. The head and foot were tall and solid, glowing walnut, the headboard decorated with the inlaid pattern of a single large star. Rosita had always loved and feared the bed, and now that she slept in it she had the feeling that she had conquered something, some old spirit of the bed. In deeply secret moments she thought about the fact that she had probably been conceived in this bed. This was still a disturbing thought to her, so darkly physical and intimate and animal. The dreams she had there were the largest dreams she had ever known, and she had a sense that one day she was going to translate these dreams into paintings. There seemed to be no real link in her dreams to her daily existence of walking to school, working with the girls in the art room, then walking home to her solitary dinner table with her glass of red wine.
The night after Cora fell from the stool Rosita half imagined, half dreamt of a burning ochre desert where she had been summoned to supervise a firing squad to come and shoot the people beside the wall. Rosita did her duty, and the people lay dead on the sand. Then ritually she poured water from a pitcher onto the bodies of her victims, and the people dissolved slowly, leaving a broad and shapeless damp patch of dark gold in the general shape, perhaps, of Cora Mean as she lay on the art room floor. When she woke up Rosita knew that one of her victims was certainly Catherine Silver.
It was one of her typical dreams. In its way it was a kind of routine comfort, but it was the comfort of horror. You possibly wouldn’t imagine, to look at Rosita the Spinster, that she would be capable of all this violent thinking, dreaming, but there is no getting past the fact. (I think it was Nabokov who said: ‘Tell a dream and lose a reader.’ Much of what he said was wise, so I just hope I haven’t ‘lost’ you.) Rosita’s dream is a little insight into her psyche, a part of her that Nabokov would doubtless deny. But there it is – Rosita the Spinster had the dream, and also had a psyche which made itself evident in her artworks as well as in her darkest dreams. I feel it is important to know at least some of what goes on in Rosita’s mind. Maybe everybody wears a mask, but some masks are more misleading than others. Rosita herself more or less believed her own mask of peaceful innocence to the extent that she was usually able to project innocence.
At Lisieux, Niall the Driver came round with the car, and Dr Silver briefly called Cora’s parents in Woodpecker Point, startling them out of their dreamy existence on their flower farm with her news of blood and mystery, and then she was off to the clinic to check on matters medical.
‘I will ask you to collect Mrs Mean from the airport early tomorrow morning, Niall. I will let you know the time,’ she said, and settled back in silence, listening to a CD of a guitar trio playing her favourite Falla, and staring somewhat blankly into the gathering darkness. It was well after twilight.
In chapel the next morning Father Bruccoli, also known in the school as Broccoli or Zucchini or Brussel Sprout, led the prayer for Corazón who was, he said, recovering from an emergency procedure to remove her appendix. The surgeon had indeed removed Cora’s appendix, which was in fact not quite healthy, after a brief discussion with Dr Silver. This surgical procedure lent a nice veracity to Roland’s story in the school chapel, but it was not the whole story.
If you google ‘broccoli’ you will find how recent research has suggested that men who eat plenty of broccoli might not develop testicular cancer. Might not. I am not suggesting that Roland actually eats broccoli, I just thought the news was interesting, and decided to pass it on.
The detail which Roland the Good did not give, did not know, when he spoke in the chapel was that the surgeon who had performed the appendectomy had also performed a salpingectomy, removing one fallopian tube which had been very damaged by the growth of a foetus. The hopeless foetus was dead. The laparoscopic procedure was minimally invasive, and the surgeon had moved on to do a laparoscopic appendectomy. The question of what was removed and why was now only a matter of record, the small scars fading over time. The surgeon, Mr Benedetto, a fashionable Catholic who ministered to the rich and chosen, possibly thanked God in heaven for the swift and concealing recovery of his patient with her healthy young tissue and excellent diet. He discussed with Dr Silver the wisdom of prescribing, in due course, the contraceptive pill in order to regularise Cora’s cycles. Nothing more, you understand, nothing more. Dr Silver would later pass this wisdom on to Cora’s mother, a wise and simple woman who kept it in her heart, making but a brief note of some details in her diary. This is the twenty-first century, where Catholic doctors and school heads can be, perhaps need to be, thoroughly modern and expedient.
Pieta Berri positioned herself in the chapel – it took some doing to achieve this – directly underneath the angel with the mirror. This was a favoured, desired and contested spot beneath a low section of the ceiling where a large painted angel with rainbow wings, billowing ivory robes and flowing russet tresses held a giant looking glass, the centre of which really was a looking glass. You could gaze upward and see, or imagine you could see, your own reflection, up there, in heaven, with the angels. A small silver plaque beneath the angel’s foot explained that the whole device had been donated in memory of a mother, a former student at Lisieux, who had died in childbirth. The baby had also died.
In her office Dr Silver explained the details of the events to Cora’s mother who had taken the first available flight from Tasmania. She explained it in a plain, unemotional, warm tone, asking Edith Mean what she considered was the best approach to take. She had no real intention of following Edith’s ideas if they clashed with her own. Would they pass on all the information to Cora, inviting the inevitable discussion of the details of the pregnancy, surely compromising Cora’s final year results (which promised to be excellent)? Or would it be wiser to allow Cora to believe that her appendix was all that had been removed? The shocking and dramatic matter of the ruptured tissue and the loss of the foetus, and the implications of all that, was receding, drifting back, back along a winding track of Dr Silver’s expert making. Soon all that would cease to exist, and the narrative of the appendix would remain alone and uncontested. Perhaps in due course Cora’s family could choose to reveal the other matters to her, since her future fertility had been to a certain extent compr
omised.
One unspoken question that hung in the air was: ‘Did Cora realise she had been pregnant?’
Another was: ‘Who was the father of the lost child?’
Those questions hung there, and began to recede behind the picture Dr Silver was constructing.
Dr Silver did not say so, but she was prepared to wager that Cora did not truly know the facts of her condition. Appendicitis should in this case cover all contingencies. The child was sixteen. Supposing she had in a panic obtained a kit for detecting pregnancy, she would surely experience only relief when she learned that this was flawed, that she had not been pregnant after all. And yes, the doctor had prescribed the pill purely in the interests of regulating Cora’s cycle. Appendicitis and a very heavy period, an almost life-threatening period – poor dear Cora – she needed to be helped, medicated, regulated, soothed. And so the story wove itself, wound itself silkily like the pale pink cocoon of a worm fed on juicy mulberry leaves.
Quiet and reflective, Edith Mean was a woman of considerable wisdom and faith in a prevailing goodness. An old-fashioned kind of woman. She had visited Cora in the hospital, and had offered only her love and comfort and concern. No questions were asked, no story offered. Now she listened in silence to Dr Silver’s speech. It seemed to her that there was a certain value in the fabrication of the deceit. What they don’t know won’t hurt them? Least said, soonest mended? What the eye does not see the heart will not grieve? The damage – such damage – had been done, and what was to be gained at this stage by disturbing Cora further?