by Ajay Close
He was thirty-five and could have passed for twenty. She was, what – forty? Maybe not so old, but not so very different from those hags puffing on their pipes. That once-slender body shapeless as mashed tatties on a plate, her hair greying, both her top front teeth gone. His first thought was that he’d happened on her mother, the twice-yearly absence that had puzzled him throughout childhood. But there was something about the smiling way she held her head, as if she still remembered what it was to be beautiful.
When she stamped across the floor towards him, he knew what was wrong with her. It starts with the riot of the senses and ends with kinaesthesia. General paresis of the insane, the tertiary stage of syphilis.
‘Is it yourself, Shuggie?’
Her voice shook in the standard symptomatic way.
‘Kitty.’
‘Caitlin,’ she corrected him: she was married to Finn MacCoul. Grandiose delusions are a feature of the tertiary stage. She drew his hand towards her, forcing it inside her dress against the flaccid breasts. He tried to pull away, but her grip was like a vice. She lifted her gaze to his, and they were the same laughing eyes, under those drooping lids. He must not worry: her husband understood that her passions were more urgent than one man, even a giant, could satisfy. She moved closer, trapping his arm between their two bodies, her breath in his face, the salt smell he suddenly, mortifyingly remembered now identified as unwashed genitalia. ‘I’ve missed my Shuggie and his brave soldier, so quick to stand to attention.’
By now he was almost desperate enough to strike her. The other patients were nudging each other and grinning. One of the female attendants had to come to his rescue.
‘Ho! Kitty! Put the doctor down.’
She was dead within six months.
He has timed it well. We are entering the farm gate as he finishes this account. So many questions in my head. Did he pity her? Did he pity that lost boy, the twelve-year-old Hugh who had loved her? Was Glasgow Fair the only time? Was this poor wretch the only one, or were there others after her, other black-eyed lassies with easy country morals? Did he take the test himself? But of course he did. And so, after thinking it over, I ask him nothing.
HILDA
London in wartime is not the city Hilda loves. The Empress Hall is a balloon store now. You can’t get Cavo’s ice cream sundaes, or beef Wellington at the Trocadero, or take an arc-lit evening stroll beside the Thames. There are Belgian refugees everywhere you look, and Zeppelin raids, and too many nights hugger-mugger with the servants in the basement of Earls Court Square. Thank God for handsome strangers in the blackout. Handsome voices, anyway. For a few months, Fritz stops paying his calls. The skies are clear. But in June, just when a girl is feeling safe again: an air raid in broad daylight. Planes, not Zeppelins. Such a novelty that people pour out of the buildings and stand in the street, gawping, as the bombs rain down on them. In July it happens again. Hilda is walking up High Holborn and a hundred-pounder drops right in front of her. The pavement judders under her feet. She’s sure she’s bought it, she can feel the pressure squeezing her skull, but it’s a dud. What a fluke! Mama just about hugs the life out of her when she gets home, then packs her case, dashes off a note to the Doc, and puts her on the chuffer to bomb-free Perth.
Where all is peaceful. Or at least, there’s no threat from the Hun. But something’s up in Prison Cottage. Dodo looks five years older, her eyes ringed with violet. She has acquired a new habit, a darting glance to check the Doc’s reaction. Oh-ho, Hilda thinks, but she bides her time until next morning, when he has left for the clink. Dodo suggests a walk along the river but Hilda would rather stay indoors and have a good old confab.
She lifts Dodo’s hand and inspects her fingernails. Chewed, as she thought. ‘Marriage doesn’t suit you—’
Dodo glances towards the door.
‘—He’s gone.’
She whispers, ‘Mrs Hendry.’
‘Is she his spy?’
But this is too much. Dodo gets that hoity-toity look Hilda knows of old, ‘Of course not.’
‘It’s too late to start faking now, Dodie—’
Dodo crosses to the sideboard and rearranges a perfectly serviceable vase of fresias.
‘—I’m worried about you.’
‘Needlessly.’
‘All right then: say it. Say, the Doc and I are blissfully happy.’
Dodo gives her another fish-eyed look.
Hilda tries a new tack, ‘Do you want to know what happened last night, when he gave me the once-over for shell shock?’
‘Not really,’ Dodo says to the fresias.
‘Weren’t you jealous, all on your ownsome, your pretty sister and your handsome husband out of sight upstairs—?’
Frowning, Dodo extracts a wilting stem.
‘—You weren’t, were you? Are you sure you don’t want to know what he said?’
‘Quite sure.’
‘Any sign of a sprog yet?’
‘We’ve only been married seven months.’
‘Thought not. So what’s it like, sporting in the marital bed?’ Hilda flexes her eyebrows, ‘You could be at it every night. Twice on Saturdays and Sundays.’
That does it. Dodo doesn’t buckle, not yet, but her face loses its snooty cast. ‘All right, what did he say?’
‘He told me not to breed.’
‘Oh.’
She starts to blub, and it all comes out. Grandaddy Richmond being a depraved lunatic. The possibility that Hilda and Dodo and Gordon have inherited Cupid’s itch. The way Doctor and Mrs Ferguson Watson live. Eating together, sleeping apart. They have never seen each other naked.
‘Then you’re not really married. You can get out of it.’
‘He would never agree.’
‘He doesn’t have to agree: he’s welshed on the deal.’
‘He would die of shame.’
Hilda would quite like to slap some sense into her elder sister. Instead she says, ‘So you’re still gone on him.’
Had Mama sent a missive before despatching her north, Hilda is quite sure the Doc would have said no. But here she is, claiming sanctuary, only to find herself in the middle of a war. No prizes for guessing whose side Mrs Hendry is on. Interesting, that ‘Mrs’: since when did Scottish housemaids get so ritzy? The Doc behaves as if Hilda herself were an unexploded bomb. No sudden moves or loud noises around her. Smiling at her. A constipated sort of smile, but more than he gives his wife. She hardly knows what to think: her superior elder sister in such a fix. Everyone should know what a catastrophic blunder Mrs Atkins’ favourite daughter has made. But then she’d be poor Donella again. Better to leave her to her fate. Once a year, someone will say d’you ever hear from Dodo? And Mama will sigh she lives so far away now. And it will serve her jolly well right. But here’s the shocker: it breaks Hilda’s heart to see Dodo so cowed by that red-faced prig, and still putting some lemon into her retorts, telling herself she’s holding her ground, when anyone can see she’s dying of loneliness. Crikey, she’s only twenty-seven. What is life, if not verve and laughter: a rag to be danced at double-quick time? You can’t say Dodo is living. She might as well be locked in one of the cells.
The house is every bit as hellish as it was last year. The camel-back sofa, all that pompous mahogany. She has changed nothing, which tells Hilda she has been hopeless from the start. What do people think when she entertains? Dodo looks shamefaced. ‘What, never?’ She gives a defeated shrug: whom would she invite? Hugh has no friends. Apart from Aunt Nellie, and if she ever crossed the threshold, she would surely smell a rat. This is when Hilda hatches her plot. A dinner. Uncle and Aunt and three more guests, to make the numbers even. Dodo shakes her head, so Hilda scales it down: surely she can find one person in the whole of Perth? What about the Doc’s former assistant, didn’t she hear his nibs say he’s home on leave? If he’s medically qualified, he must be half-way civilised. Never having met him, Dodo can’t say. That settles it: Doctor Lindsay is coming to dinner. Hilda is determined to let some fre
sh air into her sister’s marriage. And if that air happens to include a good-looking sawbones, so much the better.
The Doc says no, as Hilda knew he would, so she traps him in the drawing room, while Dodo is having a gingerly reproving word with Mrs Hendry. The Ancestors are agog for news of their eldest daughter: how is she settling in to married life, has she found a place in Perth society? She has always been so gregarious. They will be coming north in three weeks for their summer spree with Nellie and George. It would put their minds at ease if Dodo could tell them of a dinner she gave ‘just the other day’. He says he will speak to Lindsay, but Hilda’s not such a chump as to leave it at that. She posts the invitation, and Doctor Lindsay accepts in writing. Dodo is transformed, prone to sudden gusts of laughter, spending hour after enraptured hour poring over her recipe books. They visit every baker and dairy in the town, every grocer, greengrocer, fishmonger and flesher. Hilda is appalled by the empty shelves, the smelly cheese and stringy pigeons Dodo pounces on so gleefully. Could the shopping not be done by Mrs Hendry? Dodo looks quite crestfallen. This is the most fun she has had since she was wed. Passing the licensed victuallers, Hilda remarks that a gin fizz before dinner would help things along no end, but Dodo says the Doc would never permit it.
Hilda wears her scarlet Fortuny, a head-turner even in London. She’s not going to get herself up like a frump just because the porridge-eaters are barely out of crinolines. Dodo takes one look at her and goes back up to change into her pleated silk, so it’s almost like old times: the Atkins girls cutting a dash in their snazzy plumage. The Doc’s face is an ominous shade of puce, but Nellie and George are delighted to see their nieces brightening up this dreary war, so he has to agree that they look ‘very nice’. The crying shame is that the other guest should be so unworthy of their fine feathers. Doctor Lindsay turns out to be baby-faced and prematurely balding, with an off-putting whiff of unwashed trouser. Completely smitten by Hilda, of course. He seems to think he has been invited to flirt with her, to hold her gaze with his pink-rimmed eyes. She finds his presumption rather killing. Along with her brother-in-law’s obvious disapproval. And there’s another amusing detail. Although the Doc calls himself Ferguson Watson, and Dodo has taken both barrels as her married name, Doctor Lindsay addresses him as plain old common-or-garden ‘Watson’.
They talk about how expensive everything is, especially bacon. When you can find it, that is. Hilda wonders if this is coded absolution for the revolting scoff on the table, but the topic seems endlessly interesting to everyone but herself. What they could buy for ten shillings before the war, now costs them a pound! At long last, Uncle George spots her less than riveted expression and changes the subject, asking Doctor Lindsay where he’s stationed. (Nowhere near Billy Bellairs, alas.) Their guest bangs on about the Front for a while, then tells a repulsive tale about field amputations which turns poor old Uncle G quite green. Dodo brings up Hilda’s miraculous escape, and she gets to tell her bomb story, playing up the peril to make Aunt Nellie shudder, but it’s rather tame after Doctor Lindsay’s lip-smacking reminiscence, so she has a bit of fun: ‘Hugh says I’ve suffered no ill effects.’ She smiles naughtily, her glance circling the table, ‘I felt heaps better once you’d examined me. You really have the healing touch.’ Doctor Lindsay’s tongue makes a brief appearance on his lower lip. After a moment’s silence Uncle George observes what a boon it is having a doctor in the family. Dodo puts her knife and fork together and informs the table that her husband had a very interesting case this year, a Glaswegian revolutionary who wouldn’t eat.
Doctor Lindsay chuckles at this news. ‘You soon settled his nonsense, I’ll be bound. Like old times, eh? I wish I’d been here to lend a hand.’
Doing what, exactly, Hilda wonders.
Her brother-in-law leans forward, making it plain to the rest of the table that he has merely tolerated the conversation thus far. Now, at last, they have a subject worth discussing. ‘Political self-starvers are generally intelligent, but neurotic. My method is to treat the neurosis by talking to the prisoner, gaining his confidence . . .’
‘Or hers,’ Lindsay interjects.
‘. . . persuading him to accept the only logical conclusion.’
‘Which is?’ enquires Hilda, who is on hunger strike herself. At least, until the pudding.
‘That he’ll be more comfortable eating his supper than taking it by stomach tube.’
Uncle George asks, ‘Were you here when those suffragettes were making such a bally nuisance of themselves?’
Hugh is about to reply, but Lindsay beats him to it. ‘Indeed we were, sir. It was a regular siege. Thousands of them shrieking outside the gate. I went to Glasgow to collect a woman who’d tried to blow up Rabbie Burns’ cottage. There was a handover at the railway station. The hoydens got word and followed me. With all due respect to your sex, Miss Atkins, I’ve never been so windy in my life. Turned out the prisoner was Lord Kitchener’s niece. We were feeding her by tube, and worse. Of course, we’d no idea. They all used false names. There was the devil to pay when the Commission found out. That’s why we had to let the other one go. She was a handful. Pretty girl . . .’
‘I’m sure Miss Atkins doesn’t want to hear our old stories,’ the Doc says, abruptly.
‘Oh but I do,’ Hilda purrs, ‘it sounds fascinating.’
Which is all the encouragement Lindsay needs. ‘She was tall for a lassie. Hair your sort of colour, Miss Atkins. And yours, Mrs Watson. In fact, it gave me quite a turn when I walked in here tonight—’
For the first time Dodo gives him her full attention.
‘—what was the girl’s name? Fought like a tiger at the start, but the doctor tamed her.’ He taps the tablecloth. ‘Isabel? Annabel . . .?’
‘Arabella?’ Dodo suggests.
Hilda’s brother-in-law turns white as a ghost. Perhaps he has bitten a piece of lead shot.
‘That’s it,’ Lindsay says, ‘Arabella. I wonder what became of her.’
The Doc tells Dodo her uncle would like some more pigeon pie, a suggestion George is quick to refute. ‘Though it was delicious, Donella.’
Midway through the evening, Dodo leaves the chit-chat to fend for itself, and turns her attention to her better half, but not with the sort of moithered glance that so disheartened Hilda on her arrival. This is more of a long, cool, interested stare, which somehow her spouse manages not to acknowledge. Hilda knows this has something to do with Doctor Lindsay’s suffragette, and does all she can to revive the subject, but Lindsay has finally noticed his old boss looking daggers at him and won’t be drawn. Instead, the conversation turns to their hostess. Aunt Nellie wants her to put her brains to use on a charitable committee. Dodo says she has approached the Society for Combating Venereal Disease. Doctor Lindsay snorts into his napkin. Uncle G just about chokes on his gooseberry crumble.
The Doc gives her a look that would turn milk, ‘And when was I to hear about this?’
Hilda leans back in her chair to enjoy the show.
‘I’m telling you now,’ Dodo says. She smiles at the rest of the table, ‘My husband is an expert in the field. I don’t have his extensive knowledge, but I fancy I have something to contribute.’
‘We’ll speak of this later,’ he says in exactly the tone he would use to dismiss a servant.
Dodo flushes, ‘We can speak of it, but my mind is made up.’
‘You are my wife and will do nothing to disgrace me.’
An electric thrill of embarrassment visits the table.
‘Of course,’ Dodo says in an impressively offhand voice, ‘but ours is a modern marriage, is it not? We each have our private domain. My committee, your . . .’ She shrugs, as if plucking the words out of the air at random, ‘your Arabella.’
‘A patient I’ve not seen for three years.’
‘But you’ve thought of her.’
Over the past week Hilda has witnessed the arid talk in Prison Cottage and drawn the obvious conclusion: her sister’s marriage is a de
sert. But now she understands that every stunted exchange is lush with implication, with unspoken responses and ramifying consequences. Their life together is a silent conversation so choked with allusion that everyone else is shut out.
The Doc’s knife and fork clatter onto his plate. He throws down his napkin, pushes his chair back from the table. ‘I’ll walk you to your lodgings, Lindsay.’
The evening seems to be over.
TWENTY-ONE
It is very late when he comes in. He was hoping I’d be in bed, but finds me sitting in the drawing room. Without my sister, he notes thankfully, albeit with the dusty bottle of brandy he keeps for medicinal purposes. He understands that my desire for alcohol is secondary to the need to defy his wishes.
‘I was beginning to think you might not come back,’ I say.
‘Where else would I go?’
‘To Arabella’s perhaps.’
He cannot prevent that flash of blood in his cheeks, but he keeps his voice neutral. If I am determined to quarrel, he is no less determined to deny me. ‘You are labouring under a misapprehension.’
‘Am I? What misapprehension is that?’
‘That I am guilty of infidelity.’
I give a laugh that makes his teeth grind, though he will not show it. ‘Actually I think you’re extremely faithful. But not to me.’
‘And that is a misapprehension.’
‘It’s just an accident that you call me by her name?’
Alarm flares in his gaze. ‘When?’
He thinks I’m going to tell him he has been talking in his sleep.
‘The day we met, and the day you asked me to marry you.’