The following year, Mr. Oatley died and left me ten thousand in his will. I bought a house. I had nothing better to do with the money then. That same year, the rains fell around Manawaka in spring and early summer, enough to head out the wheat.
A few years later, the war came. The price of wheat went up, and farmers who hadn’t had a cent bought combines now, and new cars, and installed electricity. A lot of the Manawaka boys were killed. I read it in the newspapers. Most of them were in the same regiment, the Cameron Highlanders, and were at Dieppe, I think it was, some place where the casualties were heavy, as the newspapers put it, making them sound like leaden soldiers, no one’s sons. The ones who came back had enough cash, with their government grants, to go to college if they wanted, or set up in business for themselves.
He might have been killed or saved. Who’s to know? Or do such things depend on what goes on outside?
I’m crying now, I think. I put a hand to my face, and find the skin slippery with my tears. Then, startlingly, a voice speaks beside me.
“Gee, that’s too bad.”
I can’t think who it is, and then I recall—a man was here, and we talked, and I drank his wine. But I didn’t mean to tell him this.
“Have I been saying it all aloud?”
“It’s okay,” he says. “It’s quite okay. Do you good to tell it.”
As though it were worms, to be purged. But no matter. His voice is friendly. I’m glad he’s here. I’m not sorry I’ve talked to him, not sorry at all, and that’s remarkable.
“It was senseless,” I slowly say. “That was the thing. Pointless. Done for a bet.”
“These things happen,” the man says.
“I know it. I don’t need anyone to tell me that. But I don’t accept it.”
I can feel him shrugging, in the darkness. “What else can you do?”
I’m trembling now, and can scarcely speak for the choler that fills my throat. “It angers me, and will until I die. Not at anyone, just that it happened that way.”
“That doesn’t do you any good.”
“I know. I know that very well. But I can’t stop it.”
“I know what you mean.” He shakes the jug. “It’s empty.”
He sounds surprised, like a child. His voice is blurred, or else it’s my hearing. The words swim waveringly to me across the dark that separates us.
“Lou will be frantic. I oughta go. But I’ve got to sleep, just for a while.”
“Don’t go,” I plead. “You won’t tell Marvin I’m here will you? I’m all right. I’m quite comfortable here. You do see that?”
“Sure, sure. I see,”
“Promise you won’t tell, then.”
“I promise,” he says.
I believe him, and feel calmer.
“God, it’s getting chilly in here,” he says. “Don’t you think so?”
“Yes. It’s cold. It’s very cold. I never knew such cold.”
We sit close together for warmth, both of us, leaning against the boxes. And then we slip into sleep.
I waken. No trace of a moon tonight. The night is so dark, and the air is unseasonably cold for this time of year. The days have been scorching lately—you wouldn’t think the night could bring such a change. Perhaps it’ll rain—what a blessing that would be, after so long. This bed is uncomfortable. We should have bought a new one for this room—we never seemed to have the money to spare. Marvin didn’t complain when it was his room—I can’t think why not.
I’m feeling so ill all at once, my stomach sour and queasy, my throat muscles tightening in warning. What is it? What’s the matter with me? I’m all upset. Oh, I can’t stop it—everything, everything, all over the floor. So suddenly. I had no time to find a basin or go downstairs. Shameful.
My breathing is jerky and forced. I can feel my heart—it’s pounding like a trip-hammer. What’s the matter with me? I try to rise, but cannot.
“Oh—I’m so sick. I feel so awful.” My voice is husky and muffled, a retching of words.
Then another voice. “What’s the matter? You okay? What’s happened? Oh Lord—you’ve brought it all up. What a waste. I knew I shouldn’t have given it to you.”
A man’s voice. What’s he talking about? He strikes a match, and I see, bending over me, a familiar face.
“My God, you’re really sick—”
He sounds alarmed. I try to smile some sort of reassurance to him, but my face feels rigid—it must seem to him a parody of a smile, a serpent’s grin.
“It’s all right,” I say, “now that you’re here.”
“You’re sure? I don’t know. I don’t know what to do.”
The match goes out, but I can sense where he is. I reach out, almost amused at my timidity, and lightly place my fingers against his wrist.
“Don’t worry, my dear. It’s nothing. I’m quite all right. It’s thoughtful of you to be so concerned, but you’ve no call to be. You go back to bed.”
“Your voice sounds kind of—I think you need a doctor.”
“No, that’s nonsense. I need no one but you. I’m glad you weren’t quite so late tonight. You needn’t have come back on my account. But I’m glad you did.”
“Heavenly days,” he says. “Who do you think—?”
I’m feeling better now. I’m resting easy. My hand remains on his wrist. So thin it is that I can feel the fine bones through the skin and the quick beating of his pulse. If there’s a time to speak, it’s surely now.
“I didn’t really mean it, about not bringing her here. A person speaks in haste. I’ve always had a temper. I wouldn’t want you to feel you always had to be going out somewhere. You could come here in the evenings. I wouldn’t say a word. I could go into the front room, or upstairs, if you liked. I’d not get in your way. Wouldn’t that be a good idea?”
I’ve spoken so calmly, so reasonably. He can’t in all conscience refuse what I’ve said. I wait. At last I hear his voice. An inexplicable sound, a grating, like a groan or a sob. I grow anxious, and think he may still be angry. But when he speaks, his voice is not angry at all.
“It’s okay,” he says. “I knew all the time you never meant it. Everything is all right. You try to sleep. Everything’s quite okay.”
I sigh, content. He pulls the blanket up around me. I could even beg God’s pardon this moment, for thinking ill of Him some time or other.
“I’ll sleep now,” I say.
“That’s right,” he says. “You do that.”
Nine
THE MORNING LIGHT stings my eyes like frost. I’ve slept all night stretched out on this board floor, my head against a box, and now my muscles and joints are so wooden that I can barely move them at all. My stomach convulses, and thirst scorches my mouth.
I’m covered, I perceive, with a tweed coat, and not a very handsome one at that, a shoddy coat, made of thin stuff, short-term economy. Whose coat?
Sickeningly, I recall, and look around me. He’s gone. My memory, unhappily clear as spring water now, bubbles up coldly. It could not have been I, Hagar Shipley, always fastidious if nothing else, who drank with a perfect stranger and sank into sleep huddled beside him. I won’t believe it. But it was so. And to be frank, now that I give it a second thought, it doesn’t seem so dreadful. Things never look the same from the outside as they do from the inside.
Something else occurred last night. Some other words were spoken, words which I’ve forgotten and cannot for the life of me recall. But why do I feel bereaved, as though I’d lost someone only recently? It weighs so heavily upon me, this unknown loss. The dead’s flame is blown out and evermore shall be so. No mercy in heaven.
I’m confused. It was nice of him, that man, to leave his coat. Not one in a hundred would have done that. If only I had a drink of water. I think he’ll come back.
They can dump me in a ten-acre field, for all I care, and not waste a single cent on a box of flowers, nor a single breath on prayers to ferry my soul, for I’ll be dead as mackerel. Hard to imagine a
world and I not in it. Will everything stop when I do? Stupid old baggage, who do you think you are? Hagar. There’s no one like me in this world.
I ramble from this to that. My mind’s so loose and ambling this morning. Why doesn’t he come? He’s bound to come—of that I feel certain. It had better be soon. I’m thirsty. I’m feeling faint. If I ate something, I might be all right. Perhaps he’ll bring oranges. An orange would go down well right now. Or—no. I don’t believe I could eat, after all. A glass of water is really all I want.
Then I hear the footsteps, not of one but of several people approaching. I must tidy myself immediately. But I don’t. I lie here passively, hating my passivity. It can’t be him. He’d be alone. He promised.
“Right here. There’s the door.”
His voice? He’d not betray me. He did promise, after all, and I believed him. The door opens, and I hesitate to look. Then I turn my head slightly. Marvin is standing there, in his good dark-gray suit, his wide face frowning. Beside him, Doris grasps his arm and gasps. There’s a stranger beside them, an emaciated creature with nervous rabbit eyes pouched with shadows, and a reddish mustache.
“Well, thank God,” Marvin says in a steady even voice, devoid of expression. “It’s about time. We’ve looked everywhere.”
Doris in gloomy rayon—she’s wearing that hideous brown dress of hers again—flies across the room, bends, touches me here and there, pokes at me as though I were a side of beef and she a purchaser.
“Oh dear, you threw an awful scare into us. Why should you go and do such a thing, anyway, Mother? When I came back from the store, and found you weren’t there, I nearly went out of my mind. It’s been so worrying for us, and we felt so awful, having to go to the police. They looked at me in such a funny way, as though I should have taken better care, but how on earth was I to know you’d do a thing like that?”
“Dry up, honey, eh?” Marvin says. “She’s suffering from exposure, that’s obvious.”
“Oh my heavens, what a mess,” Doris intones, looking at me, at the room, the soiled floor, not missing a thing.
I lie here huge and immovable, like an old hawk caught, eyes wide open, unblinking. I won’t speak. Let them gabble. Marvin kneels.
“Mother—can you understand me? Do you hear what I’m saying?”
The stranger sucks his mustache as though it contained some secret and delicious flavor. He doesn’t look at me.
“She’s confused,” he says. “She was sure confused before. Like I told you, Mr. Shipley, I was just walking back from a neighbor’s when I heard this kind of groaning sound. I went to look, and there she was.”
“We’re ever so grateful to you, Mr. Lees,” Doris chirps. “Aren’t we, Marv?”
Marvin gives the man a long and skeptical look. “Yeh, we are. It would have been better, though, if you’d gone sooner to the police.”
The man flaps his hands. “Well, like I told you, I had to go back home first—”
“Yeh. So you said.”
I feel a mute gratitude toward Marvin. He’s not easily taken in. In my heart I have to admit I’m relieved to see him. Yet I despise my gladness. Have I grown so weak I must rejoice at being captured, taken alive?
I catch the stranger’s eye and regard him with as much haughtiness as I can muster. He knows I’m clear-witted now. His eyes show it. They’re unhappy and fearful. He holds out both his hands toward me.
“I couldn’t help it, see?” he mumbles. “It was for your own good.”
He holds my eyes. He won’t let them go. Then I see, to my surprise, that he is waiting for me to pardon him. I’m about to say the words—I know, I know, you really couldn’t help it—it wasn’t your fault. But these are not the words that come.
“Can’t stop—” The first I’ve spoken today, and my voice croaks. “Born in us—meddle, meddle—couldn’t stop to save our souls.”
He looks at Marvin and shrugs.
“She’s confused,” he says. “I told you.”
Marvin begins to lift me. “Try to walk, Mother. Can you try? Here, I’ll hold you.”
The stranger tries to take my other arm, but I strike his hand down.
“Don’t touch me! Get away from me, you.”
“Okay, okay,” he says helplessly, stepping back. “I only wanted to help, that’s all—”
“How can you be so snippy, Mother?” Doris protests. “After all, Mr. Lees saved your life.”
This ridiculous statement almost makes me laugh, but then, looking into this strange man’s eyes, an additional memory returns, something more of what he spoke to me last evening, and I to him, and the statement no longer seems so ridiculous. Impulsively, hardly knowing what I’m doing, I reach out and touch his wrist.
“I didn’t mean to speak crossly. I—I’m sorry about your boy.”
Having spoken so, I feel lightened and eased. He looks surprised and shaken, yet somehow restored.
“It’s all right—I knew you never meant it,” he says. “And—thanks, about the other. That goes for me, too.”
I can only nod silently, moved by his tact in front of Marvin and Doris.
“Well, I guess I’ll be going,” he says awkwardly. “Unless you’d like me to give you a hand after all.”
“I can manage,” Marvin says brusquely. “You needn’t bother.”
And so the man goes away, back to his own house and life. I am not sorry to see him go, for I couldn’t have borne to speak another word to him, and yet I am left with the feeling that it was a kind of mercy I encountered him, even though this gain is mingled mysteriously with the sense of loss which I felt earlier this morning.
“What did you mean?” Marvin said. “What boy?”
“Oh—it was nothing. Something he said. I’ve forgotten. How can I get up those steps, Marvin?”
“Hang on,” he says. “We’ll manage.”
He tugs and pulls, sweats and strains, teeters me aloft. I’m dizzy, only half aware as we mount the steps, one and one and one, interminably. Marvin’s arms are like a steel brace around me. He’s very strong. But we’ll never make the top. That I do know.
“Oh, I can’t—”
“Only a little way more. Try.”
At last I open my eyes. We’re in the car, and I’m swaddled with blankets and pillows.
“Now—I suppose it’ll be straight to that place—”
“No,” Marvin says slowly, his eyes on the road. “Too late for that now. It’ll be a miracle if you don’t get pneumonia. You’ll have to go into the hospital. The doctor said there’d be no question of anything else now.”
“I’m quite all right,” I cry. “I’m just a little tired, that’s all. There’s nothing wrong with me. I’m not going into any hospital.”
“We didn’t want to say,” he says apologetically, “but if you’re going to kick up such a fuss about the hospital, I guess you’ll have to know.”
And then he tells me what was on the X-ray plates. It’s unimportant, really, only a name. It could be anything. If it hadn’t been that, it would have been something else. Yet, hearing it, I’m repelled and stunned.
Odd. Only now do I see that what’s going to happen can’t be delayed indefinitely.
Lord, how the world has shrunk. Now it’s only one enormous room, full of high white iron cots, each narrow, and in each one a female body of some sort. I didn’t want a public ward, but Marvin said the doctor told him there was no room anywhere else. I wonder. I just wonder. If I’d been someone with position, one of those silken dowagers with primped-up hair like you see on the society page, then they’d have found room quickly enough, I’d stake my life on that. This ward must have thirty beds or more. It’s bedlam. I lie here on my slab of a bed, the sheet drawn up to my chin, my belly like a hill of gelatine under the covers, quivering a little with each breath. My feet are stuck straight up to ward off cramps. I’m like an exhibition in a museum. Any may saunter past and pause to peer at me. Admission free.
I close my eyes and gain
for a moment the illusion of privacy. But the noise is fierce. A constant jingle and ring of curtains being pulled open or closed along the overhead rods. Each bed can be shut off, given its own small cubicle, but they won’t allow you the privilege at night. I asked the nurse to curtain off my bed, and she refused, saying I needed the fresh air, and, besides, the night nurse liked to be able to see everyone. So you sleep here as you would in a barracks or a potter’s field, cheek-by-jowl with heaven knows who all.
Nurses in white and aides in blue patter to and fro, always with trolleys, little clanking trains freighted with bedpans or pitchers of apple juice or trays of food or paper cups of pills which they hand to you as though you were a child at a birthday party, receiving your ration of candies. The pill nurse has a jolly booming voice that rubs me the wrong way.
“Mrs.—Mrs. Shipley, is it? Now let’s see what we have for you tonight. A big pink one and a teeny yellow. Here you are.”
“I don’t want them. I’ve no need. I can’t abide pills. They stick in my throat.”
“Ho-ho,” she laughs, like Santa Claus. “Well, you can get these down, I’m sure, with a good big swallow of water. Doctor said you were to have them, so we can’t do anything about it, can we? Come on, there’s a good girl—”
I’d stab her to the very heart, if I had a weapon and the strength to do it. I’d good-girl her, the impudent creature.
“I don’t want them.” My eyes are burning and heavy, the tears being close to the surface, but I won’t let her see. “I don’t even know what they are. You needn’t shove them at me like that. I’ll spit them out.”
“I can’t spend all night here,” she says. “I’ve got forty patients to do. Come on, now. Just take them. One’s a two-ninety-two, and the other’s a sleeping pill, that’s all.”
I open my mouth to speak and she flips the pills in, like a boy shooting marbles. Perforce, I swallow. They do stick in my throat. I knew they would. I gag.
“Here—have some water.” She shoves the glass at me. Then, treacle-voiced once more, “That wasn’t so bad, after all, was it?”
I he here and feel the pain beating its wings against my rib cage. Gradually, the assault grows feebler, and I relax. At last the lights go off, but all around me in the not-quite-dark I can hear the noise of women breathing. Some snore raspingly. Some whimper in their sleep. Some neigh a little, with whatever pain or discomfort is their particular portion. A wisp of a voice sings in German, off-key. Near me, someone prays aloud. The nurse’s heels tap softly, like a knocking at a door. And endlessly, the breathing and the voices flutter like birds caught inside a building.
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