Faith Fox

by Jane Gardam

  ‘Was that the surgeon,’ she asked much later, ‘that doctor?’

  ‘It wouldn’t be the surgeon. You’ll not be seeing him, dear.’

  ‘But it was somebody. Somebody who looked important.’

  ‘Oh, that’d be Andrew. He’s hardly qualified. He looks the part, dear, and he does very well.’

  Jocasta floated away, returning later to Andrew’s face. She noticed his clean nails. He was still gripping a clipboard and she saw that he was younger than she was.

  When he saw her eyes open he said, ‘Hello there, Jocasta. What a nice name. How are you now?’

  ‘Did you take the lot?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘What have you left me?’

  ‘An ovary.’

  ‘No womb? Was it cancer?’

  ‘No. We did take the womb but you have had a child, so that’s not so bad, is it?’

  ‘I’ve had one child!’

  ‘But there are plenty of women with none. Perhaps I might have a word with your husband.’

  ‘I have no husband.’

  Late that night they came to rearrange the catheter and set it up again. Dr. Braithwaite had telephoned to say to keep it going.

  ‘Is he worried?’

  ‘Dr. Braithwaite is always worried, dear. We’re not worried.’

  ‘Where is he?’

  ‘At his home for once. He’s usually here night and day.’

  ‘Night and day,’ she said.

  ‘Shall I tell you something? Last night while you were asleep he came in and drew the screens round and stood looking at you. He does this sometimes. He stands thinking. But this time it was for half an hour. Don’t say I said so. Dr. Braithwaite is our favourite. We don’t want to embarrass him.’

  ‘What sort of a doctor is he?’ she said. ‘I don’t care about your favourites.’

  ‘He’s very caring, dear.’

  The next time he came to see her they drew the screens round and he sat beside the bed. He said, ‘I see you’re thirty. It’s early for a hysterectomy. I’m so sorry.’

  ‘I buggered myself up,’ she said. ‘Oh, don’t look like that. I say these things to most people. I forget. What I mean is I’ve been living a messy sort of life.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘Don’t look so stunned. Haven’t you met anyone? Just bodies, I suppose.’

  ‘I meet people every day who say they have buggered themselves up but they don’t look or seem like you.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘Will you tell me what happened?’

  ‘Nothing happened. I grew up and had a child. Then the framework packed in.’

  ‘It doesn’t happen like that. Were you promiscuous? On drugs? Undernourished? You look so very small. You look a good woman.’

  ‘I buggered out off to India and played music. Beads and sandals and smoke. Had the child there. It was after RADA. I failed RADA.’

  ‘A hippie?’

  ‘A bit old for that. I’d got in a mess here. I couldn’t get a job. I was trying to find myself.’

  ‘You sound like a schoolgirl.’

  ‘What was I like inside? Have I a disease?’

  ‘You have some dis-ease,’ he said. ‘Physically you will be all right now, but watch out for depression. It hits people a week or so after this business.’

  ‘I shall watch. And what shall I do when I see this depression coming into sight? Have you any medicine against the dark?’

  He got off the bed and patted her hand. ‘I’ll look in tomorrow.’

  Soon he knew that Jocasta had nowhere to go, that her child was being cared for by a friend in a bedsit, that she had long since broken all her ties with England and that she was still searching for the meaning of life. She told him all this in a restaurant a month later after he had taken her to a fleapit cinema to see La Strada: the mute waif and the tramp on the eternal road to nowhere, sleeping on heaped rags, the retarded girl shining with love and joy.

  ‘I want to be her,’ Jocasta said. ‘No luggage.’

  ‘No purpose,’ he said. ‘Where do you come from, so dead against purpose?’

  ‘Child of the time,’ she said.

  ‘Don’t be arrogant. You were born twenty years too late. The times now are full of purpose. Money and graft. What’s your politics? What’s your religion? You’re not of the time, you’re antique.’

  ‘I’m an animist. I put bunches of flowers round the boles of trees and say prayers to Creation.’

  ‘And skulk round Richmond Park looking for magic mushrooms and eat nothing but brown rice and wear trailing skirts and don’t wash. Stop lying.’

  ‘I did all that. I wash now.’

  He thought she looked neat and composed. She moved her fingers about fastidiously on the tablecloth. She wore one blue ring. Before she left to go back to her little boy he said, ‘You ought to be seeing my brother not me. He’s the unworldly one in the family. You’re his sort.’

  ‘What sort are your sort?’

  ‘Women? I’ve never had time for them.’

  ‘You must have had women,’ she said. She had a cool clear voice that carried across the restaurant and he looked about him. The restaurant was round the corner from the hospital. Other men’s girls said this sort of thing but Andrew was considered senatorial. He gave off an air that great standards were expected of him. Many of his colleagues found him a drag.

  ‘I think,’ she said leaning forward and taking both his white hands, I think you’re really a bit of a joke, you know. You’re pompous.’

  He read the bill carefully and counted out the money to the nearest penny on the inside lid of an auntie purse. He wore a grey cardigan and collar and tie.

  ‘But,’ she said, getting hold of his wrists and sliding her hands up inside the cardigan sleeves, ‘I could teach you so much. I adore you.’

  A week later he took her to Ellerby, stopping off at Stamford for the night on the way. He had bought her some clothes and signed in for both of them as a married couple. He lay watching her unpack, run herself a bath, wrap herself in the big white towelling robe from the back of the bathroom door. She ordered drinks in the room and sat looking at hers in the window seat far away.

  ‘Come back to bed.’

  ‘Not yet. I’m thinking.’

  ‘You seem very much at home, thinking in a luxury hotel.’

  ‘I am. I’m thinking of Philip. I’ll have to do something fast for Philip. Annabel’s patience is on the wane.’

  ‘He’ll be fine at Ellerby. I promise. You can begin a life there.’

  ‘Will I be fine?’

  He nearly said, ‘Have you any choice?’ and thought, I’m a shit. ‘We can but see,’ he said.

  She unravelled herself and curled beside him on the bed. ‘Oh Andrew, Andrew, you are so good. How can I live so far away from you?’

  ‘I can’t marry you. No question of that at all. You know that. I earn twelve thousand a year and I’ll be living in the hospital for a year and a half more at least. It’s no life for a wife. We’d last six weeks.’

  ‘But afterwards. There would be a life to follow.’

  ‘It would be a long wait.’

  ‘I’ve learned to wait.’

  At breakfast next morning at one of the small tables in the hall she ate two croissants. She looked well. She said, ‘And where is this depression that was going to strike?’ He said, ‘I love you,’ and she said, ‘I would wait, you know.’

  A week later he saw her off with Philip for Ellerby Priors, this time on the train, and was struck again by her composure, her knack of fitting her surroundings. In the hotel she had been the experienced guest; at Ellerby, the Art and Drama teacher designate, born for the job; here on the train she was the woman always on a train, waving as it drew away, expert at saying goodbye, never losi
ng tickets, money, baggage, the professional departer, causing no trouble. Philip, five, glared and pulled maniacal faces from his window as she waved a cool hand and turned to find her seat.

  Andrew ached when the train was gone. That evening, when he managed to phone Jack and heard that Jocasta was safe there and already sorting dormitory linen and tomorrow was going for art supplies and to see to Philip’s new school, he felt worse. ‘Get her away from work tonight, you bloody man,’ he shouted. ‘She’ll be exhausted. Tell her I want to talk to her. She’s still not strong.’

  ‘She won’t come to the phone, Andrew.’

  ‘I don’t believe you. Where’s the boy?’

  ‘Off somewhere. They both seem perfectly happy.’

  London was a desert. The few hours’ sleep he had in the hospital were troubled by dreams of her. Her face kept appearing to him during the day. Not a patient with a scar across her body failed to raise the image of Jocasta’s lithe slight frame, her brown-silk skin. He had grown to love the scar, caress it, kiss it, apologise to her for it as she lay looking at the ceiling. Her lovemaking shattered him. Her past she never mentioned. The father of her son seemed not to have existed. Once he asked her and she said, ‘He was nothing. I can’t remember.’

  ‘Where was Philip born?’

  ‘I can’t remember.’

  ‘You forget everything.’

  ‘I don’t forget you,’ she said. ‘Not for a single minute of the day or of the night. Not for a moment do I forget you.’

  In the face of fury from the powers above he got leave to go to Ellerby less than a fortnight later, reaching it at night with snow blowing against the windscreen and heaping up against the snow posts along the ridge road. Near the Saxon Cross the car began to slide and he gave up, wrapped himself round with everything he possessed, staggered down to The Priors, once falling up to his shoulders in snow. He banged on the door. It was at last opened by Jack, who thought he beheld a vision.

  Jocasta had been sitting in the solar beside an old oil-stove cutting out coloured paper-chains for Christmas. Her hair was done up in a braid and she wore a long brown dress and the expression of acceptance of a dreary Gwen John. She had achieved the poverty-stricken aspect of the surroundings and scarcely looked at him. He went off alone to find a drying room for his clothes and it was Jack who brought him soap and towels and sweaters and trousers.

  When finally they were alone, he said, ‘You know I love you,’ and she replied with the maddening slowness he had once so adored, ‘I love you, Andrew, you know,’ but she continued to cut out the paper. When he came near to touch her she said, ‘I must keep to my own bed here, Andrew. Unless you will marry me.’

  It was not the ultimatum that had shocked him, not the bargaining; it was the way she had continued carefully cutting out the paper.

  ‘I am cold,’ she said and wrapped a bald coat of Jack’s around her. It made her look ugly and old.

  He thought of the nights they had had and couldn’t believe in them. They seemed months ago, not days. He thought of a party he’d had to go to the week before, all pub glitter and dirty rugger songs and falling beer glasses and young girls with bright lipstick, nurses worn to shreds with work and still managing to dance. Holly Fox had been there. He’d heard of Holly Fox. She had been wearing prickly bunches of holly over each ear and expensive high heels and a silk shirt and she came over to him, laughing, to introduce herself. They had made jokes about medical horrors. She had poured out self-confidence and hope. ‘She’s after you,’ someone said, ‘and she gets what she wants, Holly Fox.’

  In the wild snowy night at Ellerby Andrew found Jocasta’s room and she was crying in her iron bed. She was cold, she was lonely. Philip was being troublesome and she couldn’t take all the religion. She wanted to come home.

  Making love to her, she came alive again and he knew there was none other.

  But in the morning she had disappeared and he found her, wrapped up in old jerseys of Jack’s, writing intensely in a notebook by an icy window niche. She covered the writing with her hand.

  He found he could not ask her anything, could not tell her anything. He knew that her love for him would drown him, that he could not live with such a passion, with the sense of being always emotionally outclassed. ‘I would destroy you, I suppose,’ she said. He said, ‘Don’t worry, I’m leaving. I’m going back right away. I see it’s over,’ and knew that she knew he was pretending she had been the one to tire.

  Jack and some of the others—little Philip was there—walked up the track with him and pushed and shoved to get the car started, towed it along behind a tractor, gave him a shovel to put in the back in case he got stuck further on. He was back on the motorway in an hour, in London as night fell.

  An hour later he was on duty. Happy Holly Fox came clattering down the ward on chic black legs. Her unassailable assumption of conquest. He smiled at her.

  13

  In the car now, going to fetch her son Philip from school, Jocasta sat silent beside Andrew with her eyes closed. He drove very fast along the moor roads until she said, ‘We’re not late, you know. Can’t you slow down?’

  ‘I’ll stop if you like,’ he said.

  ‘No, just slow down.’

  ‘I’d forgotten. You’re afraid of driving. Even now?’

  ‘I do plenty of it now. I get Philip back and forth every day. But I still hate going fast.’

  ‘I’m sorry. I should have given you this car to go for him by yourself but it’s only insured for me. Or I could have come by myself and saved you the journey altogether.’

  ‘It wouldn’t have done. I don’t let him get into cars with strange men, or men he hasn’t seen for six years—which amounts to the same thing if you’re eleven.’

  ‘I should have been the one to take Pammie to her train,’ he said. ‘I hadn’t reckoned on Jack wanting to take her. I’m sorry. I’ve muddled it.’

  ‘Jack seems smitten,’ she said. ‘Surprise, surprise. He puts us all on pedestals. He loves women.’

  They drove along the ridge, where steep clefts either side ran down from the rim of heather to brilliant steep green fields. On the horizon stood the three huge golf balls of the early warning system.

  ‘They still frighten me,’ he said, ‘even though they’re obsolete now, aren’t they? Do people still do sit-ins around them? When I was at school there were “observers” coming from all over the place. Americans. Russians. Now they sit there like kids’ balloons.’

  She had shrunk down in her seat in the Toyota, her ankles demurely crossed like an old woman’s. Dressed in black pants and a sweater and her hair pulled back in a knob, she looked like a resting ballet dancer. Her hands were clasped so tight there were white marks on the knuckles. Staring at the three domes, her black eyes welled up with tears. She said, ‘Oh how could you? How could you have married?’

  He gave the cough he reserved for bedsides before imparting bad news. ‘It—well, it was taken out of my hands, Jocasta, that’s all I can say. She was—very forceful. You met her.’

  ‘I met a hockey-playing extrovert who never stopped laughing. A gymnastic outdoor Betjeman girl. A woman of no subtlety, a bossy, tiny-minded bourgeois. I’m sorry. I know she’s dead. I shouldn’t say it. You must be suffering, I suppose. In your way. But I can’t help being honest.’

  ‘Nor could Holly. She was as honest as you. I think that’s why—’

  ‘Oh, don’t give me that crap.’

  ‘No, I mean I think that’s why I thought I’d be able to manage.’

  ‘Manage!’

  ‘Without you.’

  ‘But why manage without me? I was there. I was yours. Why?’

  ‘You soon found Jack. Every woman wants Jack and you’re the only one—’

  ‘Yes,’ she said, looking for a handkerchief, ‘I soon found Jack.’

  ‘It looked like pure ma
lice. The timing of it.’

  ‘No,’ she said, ‘not malice. It was a way of still being near you.’

  ‘And now look what’s happened. If you were free now . . . Jocasta, I’m trying to tell you that I’m a man who’s made very few mistakes in his life but not marrying you was one of them.’

  ‘And do you honestly believe,’ she said, ‘truly in your heart, that I would ever consider marrying you now even if I were free as the wind? Do you have any idea how much you’ve hurt me? And how much better the man I’ve married? And how much happier I am than I could ever have been with you? And how much loved I am now?’

  They sat and the wind blew all around the car as if it might knock it over and roll it away. Long minutes passed. One car went by and dwindled away down the ridge and over the moor until it was a speck, and then was gone.

  ‘You kept your secrets,’ he said. ‘What about Philip? You turned up in London with a five-year-old son and never a word about him.’

  ‘Why ever should I?’

  ‘You know everything about me. I told you everything. I told you long before we were lovers.’

  ‘You never asked.’

  ‘You were so beautiful, Jocasta. Like nobody else. You were like a brown nut. You were skintight like a Red Indian. You were still as a stone. You look no older now. You look untouched by Jack, or anyone.’

  ‘Yes, I’m untouched by everyone. You look older. That great bald head. And your mouth is smaller. And mingier. And it sneers.’

  She looked at him to see if she had gone in deep. She had. Bloody good. His transparent London pallor was flushed and his head tilted back in apparent disdain. He turned on the engine and said, ‘We’d better get on.’