The Anderson Question

by Bel Mooney

  In half a day the information that the doctor had ‘done himself in’ had penetrated every household in Winterstoke, and each family made its judgement, and carried it to neighbours, who added it to their own. Young women clicked their tongues and felt sorry for his wife; old men shuddered deep inside, as though the doctor’s act of betrayal (‘How could he not want to live?’) mocked their own determined clinging-on to flesh and blood, however ungainly and painful. Parents whispered in front of children who had already heard the story from their friends, so that the questions babbled readily; ‘But Mum, why did he? Why did he do it?’ – eliciting weary responses from all those who had, at odd moments they could vividly remember, reflected how easy and healing it would be to stop.

  ‘Takes some guts, if you ask me,’ Alex Cater said to Ray Tilley, once their beers were standing before them, ‘I mean, all of us get bloody downhearted at times, but most of us haven’t got the courage to go through with it, have we?’

  ‘Easier for a doctor, though, isn’t it, Alex?’

  ‘Oh yes. Bag full of tricks, all the gen – no problem.’

  Ray shook his head. ‘But you’d think, wouldn’t you, that a doctor’ ud be the last person. Isn’t it going against some oath or other – to top yourself? Healing the sick, and all that carry-on?’

  ‘Don’t know about that, but I will say this,’ Alex Cater lowered his voice. ‘You can see why it used to be against the law at one time. They wouldn’t bury them properly, y’know. There’s something bloody unnatural about the whole idea of it. Like those kamikaze boys the Japs used. No wonder the yanks didn’t think they were human.’

  ‘Death with honour, wasn’t it?’ Ray Tilley’s knees and eyesight had dumped him in munitions during the war, and he still felt uncomfortably that he had missed out on the one real adventure in which he might have starred.

  Alex Cater sniffed. ‘The Japs were bonkers, and when you’re bonkers it hardly counts as being brave. Now our boys, when it came to the Battle of Britain …’

  Ray broke in hastily, ‘Do you think the doctor had gone bonkers?’

  There was a silence for a few seconds, a silence that seemed to spread across the bar, as the echoes of his too-loud question settled, awkwardly. Adrian Wright was upon them, polishing a glass with vicious energy. ‘No other explanation, is there?’ he said.

  ‘You don’t do that kind of thing unless you’re off your rocker,’ said Alex, gloomily.

  ‘Or pretty fed-up,’ Ray Tilley added.

  One or two voices broke in, asserting with a confidence akin to faith, that Dr Anderson was never, ever fed-up, and for a few moments the small chorus of familiar praise swelled once more … his goodness, his kindness, his energy, his little jokes, the time he took with everybody … before subsiding again under the flattening weight of fact. Adrian Wright summed it up for them all. ‘Still,’ he said, attacking another glass, ‘you got to face it: he doesn’t turn up at evening surgery, knowing full well all them people ‘ud be waiting, and he goes off calmly and sticks a needle in himself, leaving everybody else to pick up the pieces.’

  Ray Tilley looked dubious. ‘Yes, but it don’t work like that. By the time you’ve got to that point you don’t think about the consequences, do you?’

  ‘I wouldn’t know. Never been there,’ said Adrian Wright. Alex pointed at his empty glass, cleared his throat, and said, with the air of a man who has found the courage to speak an unpleasant truth, ‘Look, Ray, whatever you say, it’s selfish. Sheer selfishness. Wife, son, patients, friends … and not a thought for any of ’em.’ He whistled soundlessly, then clicked his tongue. There was a murmur of assent from all round.

  Ray Tilley drank in silence for a few minutes then looked up, brightening. He said, ‘No doubt about it, when he came in that morning, you could tell. I nearly asked if anything was wrong; he looked that strange. I could tell. I should’ve asked him. He might have wanted to talk.’

  His eyes moistened slightly; already he was comforted by the vision of himself as sage, counsellor, saviour; and the doctor receded from this more interesting role.

  Then someone remarked that Doctor Anderson had been rather brusque in surgery a fortnight earlier, and someone else thought that Mrs Anderson had looked strained; and there were nods and nudges. Over their beers the men in The King’s Head gradually came to an understanding, both of the event and the reason for it, so that by closing time they were ready to tell wives, neighbours and workmates that, yes, they knew exactly why Dr Anderson had chosen to die. The fault, they all agreed, could only be laid at one door. By the evening people who drove past the Andersons’ square, ivy-covered house, glanced with a curious mixture of hostility and embarrassment in its direction, before quickly averting their gaze.

  ‘It’s the door, Daphne.’ Enid banged her stick against the armchair, so that her book slipped from her lap and landed with a thud on her toe. ‘Daphne! Door! Can’t you hear?’ she shouted, then added under her breath, ‘Oh, blast everything.’ Her sister kept bursting into tears, the breakfast plates remained on the table, dead tulips dropped their petals from the mantelpiece to the hearth, and now the library book was on the floor bent backwards on its spine. Daphne put her face around the door. It was shiny and damp, and she looked (Enid thought irritably) more and more like a plaintive furry animal in a children’s cartoon. ‘Just going,, just going. I wonder who it is, perhaps it’s Eleanor … Coming!’ Her voice rose, chiming like a door bell. Enid closed her eyes.

  Paul stood on the doorstep, framed by the fronds of wistaria. He nodded at Daphne without speaking; his face was pinched and his shoulders hunched. There was some thing about him which checked Daphne’s natural inclination to fuss and exclaim and smother. He made her feel ashamed, somehow, as if all her grief were vicarious, or her pity for herself.

  ‘How is your mother, Paul?’ asked Enid in her deep voice. He sat with his arms resting on his knees, letting his hands dangle in the space like a marionette at rest.

  ‘Terrible.’

  Enid made her voice gentle. ‘It’s not surprising, is it, Paul? Is there anything you think we might do?’ Daphne cut in with little cries of agreement, and looked at him eagerly, hoping that he might request a meal cooked, a cake baked.

  He looked up and both women were shocked by the look of pain in eyes which normally avoided their own. ‘She won’t …. She’s in her room all the time. She hasn’t got dressed or done her hair or anything. She won’t talk to me. She sent me away.’ Daphne murmured, ‘Poor Eleanor,’ but he did not hear. ‘When you rang up I went in again to tell her, and she snapped at me not to answer the phone or open the door till she told me to. Jack Ainslie came before you rang, but it was no good.’

  Daphne nodded. ‘Yes, I met him in the High Street. I guessed she wouldn’t have wanted to talk to Jack, but I’m her closest friend.’ She looked injured and stared at Paul as if expecting explanation.

  ‘Why doesn’t she get dressed?’ he said helplessly, ‘She looks so … it’s hard to say what.’

  ‘Ill?’

  ‘No. Sort of wild, somehow. She looks at me as if it’s all my fault. I don’t know what to say to her.’

  ‘She’s had a terrible shock, Paul,’ Enid said.

  ‘But that’s the point. I could understand it if she sat there howling. I feel like howling myself to think of Dad … But it’s not like that at all. She’s not acting upset in the way you’d expect. She seems … furious. Really angry. I feel as if she’s angry with me.’

  Confused, Daphne glanced at her sister, whose wisdom she respected as much as her temper. Enid folded her arms and looked at him gravely. ‘Not with you, Paul. You must get that idea out of your head, or you won’t be able to help her. She is furious, and she’s furious with your poor father. That’s all.’

  ‘Angry? With Dad?’ He looked miserable; ‘How could she be? I just feel terrible that none of us knew. Not angry at all. And I disappointed him, I know; I went away and did my stupid job, and never did what he wanted me t
o do. It must have depressed him. So I feel guilty about that. But not angry.’ He leaned forward and leaned his face on his hands.

  ‘Have you had breakfast, Paul?’ asked Daphne. He shook his head inside the hands. Enid nodded across the room at her sister. ‘Go back there with him, Daphne. Make him some scrambled eggs, and see if you can talk to Eleanor. But don’t force her.’

  When they had gone, Enid leaned back in her chair and closed her eyes for a few moments. Then she slowly pulled the rug from her knee, and reached for her sticks. It took seven minutes for her to cross the room to the piano, but once seated there on the wide velvet stool, Enid felt lighter and younger. She ran her fingertips over the keys, enjoying the ripple of their movement, before starting to play. The subtle repetitions of a Bach ‘Prelude’, the shifting intricacies of notes, acted immediately on her mind, banishing everything but concentration on the precise timing of the piece. Enid closed her eyes, and felt the music flow through her. Slowly the need to concentrate receded, and it was as if the music emerged from the piano of its own accord, magically, transporting her back to this very room, forty-five years ago. And she was in a pale blue crêpe de chine dress playing Chopin for young officers on leave, and blushing behind her ugly spectacles (never a beauty, no, but the music was beautiful) at her sudden power to banish all talk of tactics, tanks and death.

  ‘Shall we drive?’

  ‘No, let’s walk,’ he said, ‘I want some air. And even though I hate walking through Winterstoke, it makes me think things.’

  ‘What sort of things, Paul?’

  ‘Oh, I dunno. But passing the school on the way to your house I thought of Dad coming there, to parents’ evenings and stuff like that. I remember the day I left to go to Newtonstowe Boys’, and how old I felt then, at eleven; glad to leave and go on the bus. All those little things were exciting then. Funny, isn’t it?’ He was talking very quickly. They strode side by side, past The King’s Head. ‘Where did you go to school?’ he asked abruptly.

  ‘Me? … Oh, Cheltenham Ladies’ College, I’m afraid. For a while anyway. There were other schools too, because we moved around. It was the army, you see.’

  He scowled. ‘I hate all that.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘The army; the glorification of war, all that. Your father – I bet if he’d had a son he’d have expected him to follow in his footsteps. Go to Sandhurst and all that rubbish.’

  Daphne winced, but her voice was mild. ‘Who knows? You can’t say that really; you never know how people might have behaved. But I must say, my father didn’t glorify war; it was just his job. Though when men like him were fighting the Second World War, they believed in what they were doing. It seemed worth it – to defeat Hitler.’

  ‘But all those people dead!’

  ‘Well, I suppose my father would have said that it’s the sort of sacrifice that has to be made, if something seems important enough.’

  ‘No way,’ he said, thrusting his hands deep into his pockets, his long legs making it difficult for Daphne to keep pace. ‘What about Hiroshima? What about all those people? They’re still making their sacrifice. That’s war, for you.’

  ‘Are you involved in, what do they call it, the nuclear peace campaign?’

  ‘I’ve joined CND, if that’s what you mean,’ he replied, dryly. ‘A guy in work took me to a meeting, and I felt like I was with people like me, for the first time. Not like round here.’ He glanced with hostility at the shops and the street, and Daphne sighed.

  ‘Oh Paul, it’s not as bad as all that. People in Winterstoke, they just jog along, but they aren’t any worse than people anywhere. Perhaps, because not much happens, they gossip a bit more when something actually does. But it doesn’t do any harm; they don’t mean it. I don’t think you should assume that because people live in cottages and see each other most days their lives are so alien to yours. Oh, I know what it can be like. I know that people smile about me behind my back.’

  ‘You?’ He did his best to inject disbelief into the syllable.

  ‘Of course, Paul! You have to expect it and in the end you don’t care a jot. I’m like your mother in that; we both feel that we have a duty to make ourselves useful, because you have to use your life as best you can, and if some people resent you … well, it’s the price you pay.’

  He looked sideways at her, feeling destructive. ‘Well, do you know, for instance, what the village kids call you?’

  She smiled wryly. ‘Oh yes, Daft-knees, isn’t it? I heard that years ago. I suppose my knees are rather large, if one cared to examine them closely. But I don’t recommend it!’

  They walked on in silence. Paul glanced surreptitiously at the woman beside him, whose walk was as rolling and large as her figure, and he compared that rounded, comfortable profile with his mother’s. Yet the old image of Eleanor was already hard to fix in his mind; that gentle and dignified face blurred into something harder, more ragged. Go away, Paul, she had said, looking at him as if he were someone else, and he flinched from the memory of the sudden isolation he had felt, reducing all his late adolescent angst to a charade, the light before the real darkness. He looked at the High Street again; neat cottages, and small shops which did not ruin the façades: a pretty place, littered with cars on weekend afternoons in summer, when strangers in stout shoes would stop, Ordnance Survey maps in their pockets, and buy ice cream and chocolate at Ray Tilley’s shop. ‘Dolls’ houses, and toy shops, and stupid, mindless, mean people,’ Paul thought. ‘No wonder Dad couldn’t stand it. No wonder he didn’t want to go on living – not here. Fancy seeing your life drag on and on, in this place, seeing these people day after day, and looking up their noses and their arses and down their throats. Jesus! What sort of life was it for him. None, none, none at bloody-all.’

  As if she could read his mind, Daphne said quietly, ‘I think we should try to talk about your father to Eleanor, if we possibly can. It’s much better if you can.’

  They crossed the road. ‘Better than what?’

  ‘Better than bottling it up,’ she replied, ignoring his flat tone.

  ‘I can’t talk to her about him.’

  ‘You must, Paul, for her sake.’

  He threw back his head and laughed, sadness attempting sarcasm. ‘Oh yes, let’s all worry about her. But what about me? She sent me away, don’t forget. She’s not worried about me; and he was my father, don’t forget.’ Daphne hesitated; then she did what she had wanted to do since they left her house; she reached out and took Paul’s arm. Rigid, it resisted at first, then relaxed, so that they walked through the Andersons’ gate arm in arm, like an old married couple, the heavy woman even more ungainly in her efforts to match the young man’s stride.

  Eleanor was dressed, and peeling potatoes at the kitchen sink. She glanced up as they came in, then down again at her task. It was the hair that shocked Daphne more than the lack of greeting; hanging about her face in long strands, it made her features look long and predatory. Before she could stop herself she called out in a breezy, false tone, ‘Eleanor, you haven’t done your hair yet? I’ve never seen you with it down. It looks quite glamorous!’

  ‘Don’t be so absurd, Daphne. It looks terrible and I really don’t care.’ Eleanor’s voice was cold: ‘And I really would prefer it if you didn’t address me in the voice you use on your visits to the Oakwood Old People’s Home.’

  Paul looked at his mother, then across to Daphne, suddenly terrified that the woman to whom he had been rude, the woman who had still taken his arm, would leave, offended. He needed her there, as a buffer, or a guardian against … what? The realisation of how much he dreaded being alone with his own mother shocked Paul; it was as if this were a further betrayal of his father, who would surely have hoped? … Who would have hoped.

  ‘I’ll make some coffee, Mum.’

  ‘If you like.’

  ‘Sit down at the table, Daphne, we’ll have it in here.’

  ‘No Margaret this morning?’ asked Daphne, noticing the unwashed pl
ates.

  ‘She didn’t arrive,’ replied Eleanor, shortly, still avoiding Daphne’s eyes.

  ‘Oh? Well, I suppose that’s not surprising; she must have heard.’

  ‘I shouldn’t think there is anybody in this village who hasn’t by now, would you?’ Eleanor’s voice rasped uncomfortably, but she showed no sign of agitation, and Daphne began to suspect that Paul had exaggerated her state of mind. She murmured, ‘It must have been such a shock for Jack and Margaret; they were so fond of David.’

  Paul turned round and leaned against the sink. ‘I don’t get it,’ he said. ‘All this stuff about blows and shocks and how terrible – it all sounds as if everybody thought it was perfectly OK for Dad to be dead. Nice, normal heart attack – no problem. But now, when we all know it wasn’t normal, that he decided to die, we all avoid each other’s eyes as if something rude has been said. It doesn’t make sense. Dad’s dead, and that’s the only fact I’m interested in!’ His voice rose, almost to a shout.

  ‘Of course, Paul dear, of course,’ Daphne said soothingly, when Eleanor said nothing. ‘That’s how all of us feel. It doesn’t alter our grief now that we know the truth. It’s additionally sad because none of us knew how depressed he was. We might have helped, mightn’t we, Eleanor?’

  ‘Might we?’

  Daphne rattled on, ‘But you see, Paul, none of this alters our feelings about your father any more than it does yours. It doesn’t alter the facts of David’s life – I mean, the way he died doesn’t. That’s why I feel very strongly that we should have that memorial service, as you were planning, Eleanor, and still show how grateful we are for all he did for us.’

  ‘Should we?’ Eleanor gazed straight ahead, her face set into new lines that were a parody of her old committee look.

  ‘But of course, Eleanor dear.’

  ‘Why?’

  Nonplussed, Daphne looked at Paul, but he stared at his mother with an expression that matched her own. ‘Why not?’ he asked.

  Eleanor cupped both hands around her mug of coffee, and stared into it as the silence lengthened. At last Daphne could bear it no longer and started to say, ‘Perhaps we should leave …’ when Eleanor jerked her head up sharply, and folded her arms tightly across her chest. ‘I’ll tell you why not. I’ll tell you what I mean. I mean that I’m ashamed, and I can never, ever, forgive David for what he’s done.’