‘Oh my! Oh my! Something must be done. I’d better phone Mr Leonard.’
‘No, no,’ I gasped at her; ‘it could be nothing.’
‘You’re not twisted up with pain like that for nothing. Look, who’s your doctor?’
‘I…I haven’t one yet.’
‘Well, who’s Mr Leonard’s?’
I lay back on the pillow now, gasping, ‘I don’t know. It’s silly, but I don’t know.’
‘I know what I’ll do. There’s a fellow round the corner in the terrace. He’s got a plate up. Doctor somebody. Oh, what’s his name? Double-barrelled I think. Morgan, Morgan, Morgan-Blythe. That’s it, Morgan-Blythe. I’ll get it out of the directory.’
I didn’t tell her not to bother, because by now I was more than a little perturbed. I could hear her voice from the hall, shrill as it always was when she was excited or upset. It had been like that the morning she came and told me that her May had brought home the fellow with the electric hair, with the intention of letting him sleep in her room, and Henry, Mr Flood, had thrown him out, literally by the neck. During all that morning her voice had been shrill.
She came back into the room, saying, ‘Who do these secretaries think they are anyway, God’s missises? Wanted to know what ailed me or what ailed who, or where did we live, and so on. I told her, half a dozen steps to the end of the terrace and up the street, and to get him here pronto…or else.’
‘You didn’t!’
‘I did. Who are they any road? Jumped up little nothin’s. They’re not even nurses and they play at bein’ doctors.’
I said, ‘I feel a fool, Janet; the pain’s gone now.’
‘You were no fool a minute ago. Shall I ring Mr Leonard?’
‘No, no, Janet. Please, please don’t. Anyway, wait until this man comes, the doctor, and see what he says.’
It was almost an hour later when the bell from the downstairs hall rang and I knew he’d now be in the lift. I waited nervously and then there he was.
He was a big man, florid, and he didn’t walk into the room, he bounced. I took a dislike to him immediately.
‘Well! What’s all this?’
‘I don’t know, that’s why I sent for you.’
He stared at me for a moment, before saying, ‘Is it? Is it then?’ Then not finding an available table near to hand on which to put his bag, he threw it on top of the bed. ‘What’s the trouble?’
‘I…I have a pain.’
‘What kind of a pain?’
‘It’s very sharp. It’s in my left side.’ I pointed.
‘How long has it been going on?’
‘I’ve felt twinges on and off for some time but, but it hasn’t had any great effect until just a while ago.’
‘Well, what happened then?’ He looked around for a chair, saw one at the far end of the room, brought it forward and sat down, crossed his legs, then stared at me as I said, ‘I was doubled up with pain.’
‘Well, we’d better have a look, hadn’t we?’
He bounced to his feet now, and I pressed back the bedclothes, then made to lie down again when he said, ‘Well, let’s have your nightie up.’
I paused a moment while I thought, Oh, for my own dear Mike.
His hands were dead cold and my body jerked and he said, ‘That hurt?’
‘No, it was your hand, it was like ice.’
He gave me a sharp glance, then pressed his fingers into my right side, and while he did so I put in, ‘The pain is mostly on the left.’
‘Sympathetic.’
‘What?’
‘The pain was sympathetic.’
Now I did start as he pressed his fingers hard into my right side. He straightened up, saying now, ‘Appendix.’
‘What?’ There I went again: it was just like the time when I first went to Doctor Kane.
‘You had better have it seen to.’
‘Immediately?’
‘Well, that’s up to you. If you’ve been feeling it, as you said, on and off for some time, it could go on grumbling for God knows how long. Then one day it might decide to burst. It’s up to you. Could you go into hospital?’
‘I could, but I don’t want to, not before the holidays.’
‘What’s your name again?’
‘Leviston, Mrs Leviston.’
He was sitting down now and, looking around him, he said, ‘Nice place you have here. What’s your husband?’
‘He’s a publisher.’
‘Oh.’ He turned, slanted his gaze now to the bedside table and books there, and putting his hand out, he picked up one, looked at the title and said, ‘Huh! Tagore. You go in for cults?’
‘Not that I know of.’
He picked up another book and made a huffing sound before he said, ‘John Donne. My, my!’ And as he dropped the book onto the table, he stretched his thick neck out and looked to where, on the far corner, Hamilton lay and, picking it up, he actually wagged it in his hand as he said, ‘Your choice of reading is catholic if nothing else. They’ll print anything when they print that. Barmy. Clean barmy, that woman.’
When, between tight lips, I said, ‘You think so?’ Hamilton sprang on to the foot of the bed. He was standing straight on his hind legs, and by the side of him stood Begonia. She too was rearing.
‘You ask me if I think so. Of course I think so. Did you read the court case at the beginning of the year? That judge was as barmy as she was, telling the jury that he too had imaginary friends.’ He rose to his feet now, snorting, ‘Lunatics! My sympathy was with her husband. No wonder he tried to get rid of her. But I can’t understand, if your taste runs to philosophers and poets, how you can stand that tripe…What’s the matter with you?’
He followed my gaze for I was looking at Hamilton who was now prancing round him. And I brought his head poking towards me when I answered, ‘I was looking at Hamilton. At this moment he’s prancing round you, and if it were possible he would take pleasure in kicking your tactless ignorant hide down the stairs.’ And I grabbed the book out of his hand, turned it over and presented him with a portrait of myself.
He stared at it, then turned his head slowly and stared at me. And now, without taking his eyes from me, his hand went out to the bag at the bottom of the bed, and slowly he lifted it up. Then, still staring at me, his teeth ground together and his knobbled chin came out and his mouth opened as if he were about to speak. But apparently thinking better of it, he turned, then bounced out of the room as he had bounced in. And I drooped my head forward and the hot tears ran through my fingers.
I heard the front door bang. The next moment Janet entered the room and, seeing how I was affected, she came hurriedly to me and put her arms around me, saying, ‘There now. There now. Don’t upset yourself about that one. And I had to go an’ pick him! He didn’t stop to put his hat and coat on. You were right about your horse. I wanted to kick him downstairs meself.’
I lifted my head from her shoulder and she nodded at me, saying, ‘Well, I was standin’ outside; I thought I might be wanted like. Who’s he to say that you’re daft, or anybody else who sees things. There’s my ’Arry. He saw some things I can tell you three years gone before he went for his cure, and they weren’t things like a nice horse that you can talk to and can make you laugh. No, he saw black beetles crawling over the ceiling and over the bed and over me, in their tens of thousands, he said. He tore me nightie off one night trying to get rid of them. Not satisfied with that, he banged me all over trying to kill the things. By, I’ll never forget that night. It took all the strength of our Greg and Rodney and Joe. Joe was at home that time. He had left his wife, or what was she, and there they were all struggling on me new carpet. It had been a toss-up atween that or a spin drier, and…’
‘Oh, Janet.’ I was wiping my face that had now spread into laughter, and I patted her cheek as I murmured, ‘You’re very good for me.’
She seemed slightly embarrassed now, for she pushed me back on the pillows, punched each side of them, pulled the coverlet up un
der my chin and said, ‘There now. Well, a good cup of coffee is what you want.’ Her face coming nearer to me now, she added, ‘Should I put a drop of brandy in it?’
‘No thanks, Janet, just the coffee, strong.’
‘Just the coffee, strong.’ She nodded, as if disappointed. Then straightening up, she said, ‘’Tis ’pendicitis then?’
‘Sort of, I suppose. What you call a grumbling one.’
‘Are you goin’ into hospital?’
‘No, I’m not. Not before the holidays anyway. And not afterwards if I can help it.’
‘But you couldn’t put up with a pain like that for any length of time, now could you? You mightn’t have any choice.’
She nodded at me before turning about and leaving the room. And I thought, Yes, she’s quite right. I mightn’t have any choice.
I didn’t get up, and so I was still in bed when Nardy rushed in at lunchtime, and my greeting to him was, ‘What do you want?’
‘What’s all this is my answer to that question! Did that fellow upset you?’
‘He did somewhat. Anyway, Janet shouldn’t have told you. And well, yes he did. He was very rude, and the fact that I won my case seemed to infuriate him.’
‘Lie still,’ he said. ‘I’ll be back shortly.’
‘Where are you going?’
‘I’m just slipping out for a while.’
‘Nardy, please, don’t take it any further. There’s nothing you can do. He can simply say he wasn’t insulting me.’
‘Lie still, my dear.’
I lay still for a few moments, thinking that I hadn’t told him I had a grumbling appendix; the complaint seemed to have been thrust into the background.
He was gone more than half an hour and when he came back he walked slowly into the room and sat on the side of the bed. Taking my hand, he said, ‘I don’t think our friend will express his uninvited opinion in the future, or at least for a long time. It all depends on how long he can subdue that ego you so rightly detected.’
‘What did you do?’
‘Oh, I just let him have it.’
‘What!’
He laughed and said, ‘Oh, no, my dear, not physically, in height and breadth he doubled me all over. No, there’s a much better way to put a man like him in his place. The mention of the Medical Council, to which I told him I was writing, had a very subduing effect on his manner. I think he’s got a thing about women. Anyway, you’ve got a grumbling appendix and it’s making itself audible; you must see about it.’
‘Not until I must, and certainly not until after the holidays.’
‘Well, we’ll see. If that pain gets bad, Christmas and New Year will have to be postponed until such times as you can eat and be merry. Now, I’m going to knock us up some lunch.’
‘Aren’t you going back to the office?’
‘No; I’ve already phoned them and told them I won’t be in. Of course, the place will go to pot, me not being there during the next few hours, but that’s life.’
‘Big head.’
‘You said it, Mrs Leviston.’
Left alone again, I asked myself why I should have let that man upset me so much. For the first time in months I was now feeling tense, afraid, for he seemed to have dragged the past into this serene new life of mine. And now it was here, I felt I should never get rid of it, not really. And this was confirmed, because for the rest of the day I saw Hamilton, and once I spoke to him, saying, ‘Why can’t I throw this off?’ And his answer was, You should know enough by now to realise that you can never throw off the past. Everything that’s happened in your life is still in it, locked away in boxes and docketed. And a fellow like him is a kind of key, and the lid’s off and there you are, and the only way you can close it again is to ignore it.
‘Ignore it?’ I said. ‘How? How can you ignore things that man said to me, and what’s more, what he thinks quite a lot of other people might think?’
Oh, sure; yes, you’ve got a certainty there. Only fools expect everybody to love them. You should know that, an’ all, by now. And the same applies to tastes in reading. Don’t forget one or two reviewers were very much of the same opinion as that fellow, although not quite so strong. Nevertheless, as one pointed out, there were people who had been in asylums for years and who had never even thought of talking to a horse. This is life, Maisie. Your cocoon of love now seems the whole of life but the world is going on all round it, and you’ll be brought out into the cold reality of living sometime or other. Oh, I’m not suggesting that you’ll be disappointed in Nardy; no, I think you’re safe for life in that quarter, but he’s not the entire universe.
‘You’re not very comforting,’ I said. I saw him turn his head away while keeping his eyes fixed on me and now he said slowly, You never took me on to be a comfort, not really; your honest judge and jury, that was more like it, wasn’t it?
Yes, I suppose it was true. I watched him put out his front hoof and draw Begonia to him and turn her about, and together they walked out through the wall. And I repeated to myself: Your honest judge and jury.
Four
I had no sign of pain the following day, so we went to have tea with Tommy’s mother.
Tommy lived in a suburban terraced house. It was one of these tall four-storey houses, one which still retained some of last century’s elegance. And if the elegance hadn’t rubbed off on to his mother, who had lived in the house since she was a child, the flavour of the last century had, for she sat in her very Victorian drawing room, the very picture of a lady of that time. The only thing that was lacking in her attire was a lace cap. Her dress was long, almost to her ankles, and attached to it were white lace cuffs and a collar, and over all was a cashmere shawl. Her hair was grey and pulled tight back showing her ears, which were large and inclined to stick out. Her face was long, her eyes round and bright, and her mouth, when in repose, pouted slightly. Nardy said she had married late and Tommy was born when she was in her forties. Yet, even he did not know her exact age. But as Nardy pointed out, Tommy being thirty-eight, put her at one side or the other of eighty.
Well, she might have been eighty in looks and a hundred and eighty in her dress and manner, but her voice and eyes denied all this, for her voice was crisp and her eyes bright and piercing.
Tommy had greeted us at the front door after it had been opened by a woman in her sixties, whom Tommy then introduced as Bella, his mother’s companion. I later learned that the companion was merely a complimentary title for poor Bella who had begun her life in an orphanage and who had for almost forty years now cooked, cleaned, and maided the mistress of the house. Bella had a round kindly face and her body was as thin as mine, for likely all the fat had been run off it early on. I’d heard about Bella and I shook her hand, saying how pleased I was to meet her, at which her face had brightened, only for it to redden as Tommy put his hand on her shoulder and said simply, ‘My saviour.’ I guessed now that Tommy was the reason why poor Bella had stuck to his mother all these years. To her, he was likely the son she had been deprived of.
Anyway, here I was, standing in front of the regal lady and saying politely, ‘How do you do, Mrs Balfour. I’m so pleased to meet you. But I think we’ve brushed shoulders before, at Andrew’s and…’
My voice was cut short by the voice now saying to me, ‘Rubbed shoulders, did you say? You’d have to grow a bit, young woman.’
‘Mother.’
‘What?’ The steely eyes were turned on Tommy.
Tommy made no answer. Then the voice said to me, ‘Well, sit down and let me hear your version of it.’
She was pointing to the sofa opposite her chair and I sat down and found myself much nearer the floor. I’d heard of businessmen who viewed applicants placed strategically in a lower seat on the opposite side of the desk, and I felt very much in the same position at this moment as the bird-like eyes riveted on me and the voice now said, ‘An imaginary horse, I can’t believe it.’
‘Mother, you haven’t said hello to Nardy.’
/> ‘Don’t be silly.’ She cast her glance towards her son. ‘Do I say hello to you every time you enter the room? And Nardy has surely been here often enough not to expect a hello as if he were a stranger.’ On the last words she looked at me again and now said, ‘Well, about this horse.’
I stared back at her. There was something already rearing in me against this woman’s manner, and it took shape, for there he was standing to the side of her chair on his two back legs with his head thrust forward.
‘Have you always seen things?’
‘I don’t quite follow you, Mrs Balfour. What do you mean by seeing things?’ My cool tone seemed to take her aback for a moment and her chin, on which were showing long prominent hairs, jerked upwards. ‘Well, by what you said in that book you’d imagined weird things from a child, imaginary children and dogs.’
‘I didn’t consider them weird; most children don’t.’
‘Huh! Well, I never imagined such things. Did you, Nardy?’
‘No, Mrs Balfour, no, not children or dogs; but I once imagined I had a crocodile.’
I turned my gaze on my husband. That was the first I’d heard about the crocodile. And when he now turned his head slightly towards me and smiled as if apologetically, I wanted to laugh. He had never imagined seeing a crocodile. And Hamilton confirmed this by tossing his head to the side and kicking his left front leg out as if dismissing the whole idea. It was then an imp got into me and I looked at Tommy and said, ‘Did you ever have an imaginary playmate, Tommy? A horse or a crocodile or a dog?’
Tommy looked at me for an embarrassingly long time, it seemed. Then he looked at Nardy, and then at Bella; he didn’t look at his mother as he said, ‘No, I never imagined an animal, but I did imagine I had a companion. It was a little girl, and she stayed with me for a long time.’ He smiled now a wry smile as he ended, ‘But I could never get her to grow up.’
‘Don’t talk such rot.’ Mrs Balfour’s head was moving from side to side, and she added now, ‘Bring in the tea, Bella.’
Goodbye Hamilton Page 4