by Rose Tremain
“I’m sorry,” says Bernice, “I didn’t know you’d seen the film before.”
“On television,” he says and she nods.
He waits, afraid and sick, for Bernice to get out of the car. He’s no longer tormented by indecision but cruel in his determination to spend the night alone, dreaming of Miriam. Bernice never bullies him. She doesn’t need to. Both of them like to be alone from time to time. So, almost tragically unaware of the misfortune about to fall on her, Bernice places a chaste little kiss on Dr. O.’s cheek, gathers up her capacious handbag and leaves him. If she feels a moment’s sadness, it quickly leaves her, and when she hears the Morris start up again, she turns and waves.
And as Miriam rides to hospital with Leni, Dr. O. indulges his dreaming. Leni tells Miriam she’s in fairyland after that injection, “all lighty and flitty, darling,” and Dr. O. lies in the dark in the fairyland of his future. Throughout the night he hears bells chime the hours. Oxford. His city. Miriam is in Oxford. Safe in Leni’s house once more. Where she has always belonged in his mind. Today he held her. When her crying stopped, she said: “I remember now what a kind person you are. My father was so fond of you.” So the love affair to come will be homage to David Ackerman. David Ackerman, bone under the earth, worn thin in his lifetime with Leni’s soirées and parrot parties. Now, his daughter and his former pupil will plant their flowers of love in his departed soul. Leni will die and they will inhabit his very house. In the bed where love was made to the unsurpassably beautiful Leni, and the child, Miriam, began to grow, in this same bed will the wizard spend his magical seed. Not to make children. Not to alter the future, but to alter the past. The years of plain, cumbersome Bernice crumble to nothing. Separately, in separate lives, Dr. O. and Miriam have waited them out. Now Leni, the witch, near death, her body shedding flesh, paring itself to neat and tidy bone to be with David under a marble book – Jews turned gentiles as the Oxford cloisters cloak them in ancient pieties – Leni, the sorceress, summons them out of separateness and binds them in desire. Before yielding them her bed, she inhabits it, watching, knowing. Death keeps them waiting, wanting. Burning for this death, they wait, still not joined. Leni smiles. Her eyes are wells of soft darkness. “Wait,” she whispers. They reach out from either side of the deathbed, but their hands don’t touch. The bed is too wide. “Wait,” she instructs again. So they sit as silent as they can with this aching of desire in them, silent as they can, but dying of their longing to drink from mouths, to drown in their own touch. And at last she goes. The eyes stare up, blind. The hands freeze. And together, they lift her aside. Together, they lie down in the softly tumbled sheets her body has kept warm for them and peel away the clothes that still hold them separate from their final joining. Then at last he is in her. Her gold hair streams. History bursts open like a white, decaying peach.
Morning comes. Leni wakes in an iron bed with a drip in her arm. She feels heavy, like colossal stone. Prone, weighted down with oblivion, she can see now that she’s in a large ward. Other women, some young, some old, are eating cereal and wearing nighties. She vows she will say not a word to these women. She will say nothing, eat nothing, drink nothing, till she is moved to a private room. She will close like an oyster and they won’t dare to knife her open. So they will have to give her her privacy. She curses Miriam for abandoning her to strangers. Miriam, she decides, with that husband of hers who thinks all the wrong thoughts, dreams all the wrong dreams, has become tolerant of stupidity and mediocrity. She’s forgotten what life used to be. Even in her work, she’s become mediocre, ordinary, giving ordinary empty people the ordinary landscapes they want, the ones without meaning.
A nurse comes and inspects the colourless drip bottle. Leni asks, with a dry mouth, to be moved to a private room. The nurse picks up the arm without the drip and takes Leni’s pulse. Leni asks again, unaware that her words are heavy as stone, like the rest of her. The nurse smiles, says nothing and walks away.
Leni sleeps. When she wakes, it’s in the same bed in a ward that is now quite noisy with people. Someone is bending over her and shaking her. She doesn’t mind the feel of the soft arms of nurses. She doesn’t feel weighted down any more; she feels limp and light and yielding, like a baby.
“Mrs Ackerman. Mrs Ackerman . . .”
Leni stares up into a smiling Indian face: wide nostrils, heavy hair in a knot under the little starched hat.
“Mrs Ackerman, you have a visitor. Let’s sit you up, love.”
The Indian nurse lifts Leni’s head. Pillows are stuffed behind it. Her head lolls. They’ve put me in a pram, she thinks. She’s hauled back onto the pillows. Her covers are straightened. She feels cold. All around the big ward, little clusters of people are talking. In the bed next to Leni’s a young woman with wild dirty hair is holding a man’s hand and weeping. The man looks embarrassed. He’s brought chocolates.
“Okay, Mrs Ackerman?”
“Cold,” says Leni.
“You’re cold, dear?”
“Yes.”
“Do you have a bedjacket, dear?”
Leni can’t remember what she has, what she doesn’t have. She remembers her warm, pretty room at home, the way Miriam sits on the bed holding her hand. Now Miriam has abandoned her.
“I’ll look in your locker, love.”
The nurse searches quickly through Leni’s belongings. She finds a blue crocheted shawl and she wraps Leni in this tightly.
“I’m sorry,” the woman next door is wailing, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry . . .”
Leni, bound in her shawl, looks away in horror from this spectacle and sees, at the corner of vision, an untidy familiar figure. He’s waiting by the door, quite alone, carrying a parcel. Leni stares. Thomas. It’s Thomas. Leni’s heart leaps. So she isn’t abandoned. Thomas has come. She lifts a hand and pats her hair. She feels hungry. They starve you in hospitals and your looks go.
“All right, Mrs Ackerman?”
“Could you comb my hair, nurse?”
“Yes. You have a comb, dear?”
“I think so. In my handbag.”
Thomas isn’t looking at her, he’s staring at the other patients and the groups of visitors. Leni asks for her lipstick. The crying woman is snivelling now. The man has sat down and taken the cellophane off the chocolates. Black Magic. One of David’s old nicknames for Leni in the days when she was beautiful and bad.
Her hair is combed and a bright lipstick put on her cracked lips. The Indian nurse stares at her bizarre handiwork with gigantic eyes.
“You look very nice, Mrs Ackerman. I’ll bring you some squash, love.”
Degrading, thinks Leni. No privacy, no dignity, no food.
But Thomas comes to her now, holding his parcel high and grinning. Leni fights her arms free of the shawl. He bends and kisses her forehead. He smells of pipe ash. Leni enfolds his bony back.
“Thank heavens you came, darling. I thought you’d all forgotten me.”
Thomas pulls back from this craggy embrace. Leni smells unwashed. Hospitals are the pits, he thinks. Symptoms are treated, not causes. People go home wounded, then sewn together. He wants to carry his grandmother away.
“Forgotten you? Leni Ackerman forgotten? Fat chance!”
“I refuse to die in here.”
“Die?”
“Yes.”
“You’re not dying, stupe.”
“Aren’t I?”
“No. You broke your foot, Mother said.”
Now she remembers it: Dr. Wordsworth, the ambulance, pain, Miriam and Gary at the bedside. She moves each leg experimentally. Thomas laughs at her perplexed face.
“Can’t you remember it? You were dancing on this table. Politicians in the audience, ambassadors . . . And you fell. Someone tripped you, goes the rumour.”
Leni smiles. Jokes. Irreverence. Thomas was always like this and she likes it. He’s not, she thinks, much like either of the parents. A changeling.
“Anyway,” he goes on, “the U.S. Ambassador sent
you this. Compensation.”
He sits down by her and hands her the big parcel. A few feet away, the man is popping a Hazel Cluster into the runny mouth of the weeping woman. Thomas starts ripping the parcel open. No solemnity with the present, here. He takes out a heavy, polished wood statue and puts it gently in Leni’s hands.
“Thomas!” she says, “What is it?”
“A man,” says Thomas.
“Get my glasses, darling. From the bag. Here.”
Thomas takes out Leni’s spectacles and sets them on her nose. Now, in unblurred vision, she sees the statue is of a kneeling figure, sitting back on his heels and hugging in his arms a wooden mast or pole, taller than his head and which rises upwards from his own groin. The top or head of the mast is cloudy crystal. Thomas reaches over Leni and presses a tiny plastic switch located between the man’s hands. The crystal lights, Leni stares, marvels, begins to rock with laughter in her dry throat. The chocolate woman stares at her with pink eyes.
“Bedside Man,” Thomas grins.
“Marvellous!” says Leni “Where’s the flex?”
“No flex,” says Thomas. “Batteries. He’s self-sufficient.”
Leni’s head rolls back with laughter. More visitors turn from their visitees and gawp at her. She holds the lamp aloft. “You’re a genius, Thomas.”
“Well I thought you’d like it better than sweets.”
“Here, put it on the locker, and switch it on. Let’s scandalise everyone.”
“Well from behind, he’s rather chaste. I’ll turn him outwards, shall I?”
“Yes. Let’s show all these dummies. My grandson’s a genius!” shouts Leni to the ward, “and a genius with a sense of humour, which is rare.”
People turn briefly, but chose to ignore her. “I’m ever so sorry, honestly,” the chocolate woman is saying again and again. On the opposite wall, a fat woman is being replenished with marzipan. We’re just substances, decides Leni suddenly, like nutpaste. My substance is diminished, though. The wind howls in my cuttlefish bones. She craves potato and milk and sweet cake. Thomas tugs out a packet of Gitanes and offers her one. A large sign above the swing doors says ABSOLUTELY NO SMOKING, but Leni takes a cigarette – her first in twenty years – and purses her lips while Thomas lights it for her. She feels hollow and wicked and weightless. She inhales and grins. Thomas pulls a plastic chair near to her and sits down.
“Conspirators,” she whispers down at him. “With you, I feel like a conspirator.”
“Well you are, Leni. I’m getting you out of here,”
Leni looks at Thomas sharply. “They’ve given me nothing to eat, darling.”
“No they don’t in these places. It’s part of their punishment. I’ll cook for you when we get home. What would you like?”
“Where’s Miriam?” Leni asks suddenly.
“Talking to a doctor about your fracture. I came on ahead.”
“I’m glad you came, Thomas. How are you going to get me out?”
“Carry you.”
“Now?”
“If you like.”
“You can’t carry me.”
“Why?”
“They’ve done something to me, strapped me down.”
“Rubbish.”
“It feels as if they have. My legs can’t hardly move.”
“That’s what they want you to think. Let’s see.”
The cigarette still in his mouth, Thomas stands up and pulls back Leni’s bedclothes. Below her gauzy creased nightdress, one leg is thin and white and still shapely, the other is plastered almost to the knee. Again, other people turn and stare. Thomas bends over the legs and gingerly raises each one in turn. Leni watches him, dazed and dizzy with smoke. There’s an ache in her. She feels grey and sick.
The Indian nurse, carrying a jug of squash, returns.
“You’re not bolted down,” says Thomas, “See?”
“My God, what is going on, Mrs Ackerman?” says the nurse.
Leni blows smoke and burps. The nurse snatches Leni’s fist, removes the cigarette and quickly returns the covers to the thin body. She glowers at Thomas. “Take your cigarette out, please,” she snaps. Thomas nods, drops the butt, stamps it out on the lino. The wide Indian nostrils flare with irritation. Visitors. They bring the wrong things. They cough and cry. They crease the counterpanes.
“You are very, very inconsiderate,” she hisses.
“Yes. I’m sorry. But we’re going now,” says Thomas. “We won’t bother you any more.”
“Yes,” says Leni feebly, “we’re going.”
“You’ve made this patient ill,” says the nurse. For Leni is retching into her hands. Smoke. Smoke billows and churns in her stomach. Smoke rides in her blood and gathers in her brain. A little puddle of grey spittle sits in her palm. This is all. There’s nothing in her but smoke.
“She needs food,” says Thomas.
“Thank you,” says the nurse, wiping Leni’s red mouth, “we shall decide what Mrs Ackerman needs. Now I think you’d better leave.”
The chocolate woman, dry-eyed now, is gaping at Leni. The marzipan woman and her visitors are gaping, gaping at Leni. On their faces is nothing but disgust. They stuff their sweets. Thomas feels like weeping.
Bernice Atwood has had her dream again. This time, the book laid on her breasts is slim: Boccaccio’s Il Filocolo. MS Canon. Ital. 85. The valuable old paper crumples when Dr. O. puts his hand on it and starts the familiar swearing of eternal love. She wants to tell him not to press so hard, to show more care. But he doesn’t hear what she’s saying and goes on. His delivery is liturgical and dull. To Bernice’s own amazement, she tells him it’s boring. So he stops and, when she reaches out to him, he isn’t there.
Gary Murphy has had a dream of darkness. He’s sunbathing on a hot Mediterranean beach. Round him, the Italian language bubbles and sings like a hot brew. Then he feels cold and opens his eyes. A front of pitch black cloud is slowly sliding across the sun, a cloud like a continent obliterating all the blue sky, its terrible reflection advancing towards him over the water.
He wakes, glad of morning in his lilac room, glad of normality and Marmite and frost on the oak leaves outside his window. Two days now till Wednesday. Already, he knows he’s going to write a love poem to Gabriel, or at least about Gabriel. You don’t let the poetry show too much this early in a relationship. It makes you seem squashy. So they keep prodding you to see if you really are. Better to get a few laughs going first, then some trust. Then you can offer the poetry. They know you’re quite tough by then. They know you cope with loutish kids all day. Gabriel said, with his impeccable vowels: “I simply could not do what you do. I don’t know how anyone can bear to do that when children are so beastly.”
Gary has a title for his poem: it’s called Walk.
Bernice has thought of children – unborn, unwanted – and examined her body for signs of swelling. She thinks there’s a tight feel to her breasts that isn’t normal. As she brushes her hair, they hurt slightly. Bernice knows she would like those secret first months of pregnancy, holding the blind, growing newt in her protecting blood. If she could only have a secret child. Wrap it and put it in the dark like her pots of bulbs. Go and peep at the white limbs, touch them even, like she touches the hyacinth tips and knows her care has made them grow. But it’s the infant she doesn’t want, the separate squalling person with furious eyes and hungry mouth. Babies depress her. The lolling limbs. The silly pushchairs. The plastic paraphernalia. She couldn’t bear this. Her love is too grave, too deep and scarlet and pious to need this lucky, mucky blessing of a child.
She feels strange this morning, overlarge in her small rooms. She makes weak tea, but then doesn’t drink it. Instead of going straight to work, she walks to Magdalen Bridge and spends some time staring down into the water. Her own reflection, on this bright autumn day is clear and still. She wishes, as she stares at herself, that for this part of her life she was a beautiful woman.
Thomas leaves the hospital with Miri
am, but without Leni carried aloft in his arms, without the prize he wanted.
Thomas is, to Miriam, like one of his fabrications: odd, sometimes beautiful, surprising, vexing and crude. She doesn’t know how such a son was fashioned. The grey hair. The sprawling, bony legs, the bright, mad eyes. He was silly at school till he began to understand history. Then he started to read. What he read, he tried to express in drawings and paintings and then in objects and sculptures. He drew Napoleon eating Europe and shitting soiled uniforms: he made a Queen Victoria musical box which played Night and Day; he stuffed and stitched a set of Fat King beanbags – Henry VIII, “Prinny”, Edward VII. You sat on them anywhere, on their stomachs, on their heads, on their bums, on their feet. David Ackerman was amused by these and nodded his approval. “Your lad,” he said to Miriam, “could do worse than come to Oxford and read History.” Thomas did worse – or better as he saw it. He joined the Communist Party. He founded a squatters organisation in Battersea called S.H.I.T. – Squatters Homes in Town. He lived with, loved and left a seventeen-year-old Polish girl called Mima, a sixteen-year-old Battersea girl called Rosalyn and a nineteen-year-old American girl called Philomena. During all this time, he stayed away from Larry and Miriam and Oxfordshire. Only Leni he wrote to. Erotic letters about his love affairs which he thought she’d like. She kept them hidden from the rest of the family and read them on days when she felt old. Larry started Aquazure and re-plumbed his heart to bypass his son. Miriam quietly mourned him. David Ackerman died, never knowing about Leni’s letters. Thomas came, for Leni’s sake, to the funeral. He wore a black shirt and braces with glitter dust. His wreath was paper daisies, oddly pleasing. When it was over, he told Leni he no longer carried the Party card; the Communists were too cruel on the individual. What now inspired him was the creation of what he called Message Objects or Marxist Thought Things, and thus his business began. He never expected to make money out of it, but he quickly did. This making of money seemed to cure his hatred – which began in the early juvenile days of the Monarch bean bags – for Larry and Larry’s commercially-turned mind. The years of father-and-son, son-and-father unwound uneasily on. Aquazure crashed. Thomas offered to lend Larry money and was refused. Perdita, the blond and shiny Australian girl, moved into Thomas’s business and eventually to his bed. Perdita broke the last links with SHIT and set them up in a Fulham warehouse – workroom and flat. Now they have a shop in the Wandsworth Bridge Road. They wholesale to Harrods and Heal’s. Certain Thomas Kendal one-offs are collectors’ items. The shop is called PEE COCKS. Perdita supports her gran in Melbourne with monthly cheques. There is talk of a retail outlet in Brussels. Thomas buys Perdita a Mercedes. With this car to love, she decides to terminate a pregnancy. Then Leni gets ill and Thomas is sent for by Miriam. But he knows Leni will fight a good fight with death and he doesn’t hurry. He sands and polishes the Bedside Man. Now, today, he is here.