Devils, for a change

by Wendy Perriam

  She turned her back, checked her watch, still the Mickey Mouse one she had never yet replaced. Four a. m. The last hour had really dragged, despite her tot of whisky. She’d better watch her drinking. Joe kept bringing liquor, perhaps in lieu of decent furniture, or out of simple guilt. What furniture she had was an uneasy mix of Craddock, Liz and junk shop.

  She gazed around the room, half-shadowed now in the grudging light of the bedside lamp, itself a Craddock offering, and still lacking any shade. The Piccadilly Raindrops lamp took pride of place in the centre of the room, on a low and battered coffee table, which was all they had to eat off at the moment. The kitchen was too small for any table, Luke had bagged the only decent bedroom, so this one main room combined several different functions – dining room, sitting room, Luke’s playroom (toys still littered on the floor, rocking horse stabled in one corner), and was transformed into her sleeping quarters after ten o’ clock at night. The second tiny bedroom was crammed with rolls of lino, off cuts of old carpet, a huge dismembered wardrobe, and boxes full of cracked pink bathroom tiles. She hadn’t found the strength to clear it out yet, preferred sleeping on the sofa bed. That black and bulky monster was the best of Joe’s bequests, so far – not new, of course, but versatile, though she still found it rather tricky to set up and fold away, had to fight its heavy legs and faulty hinges; also fight her longing for a permanent bed, ready-made and waiting, which she could collapse exhausted into, after a long day like today.

  Except today was now tomorrow, first day of term for Luke, and one of the chief reasons why she was lying wide awake at four o’ clock. Pre-school nerves – hers, not Luke’s. Luke seemed merely numb, too miserable for nerves. He had also caught her cold. She had dosed him late last night with aspirin, malt, hot lemon, and a dash of Johnnie Walker, which at least had made him sleep. She’d crept into his bedroom every hour or so, to make sure he was all right. He’d seemed resdess, apprehensive, even in his sleep; muttering garbled words, hands twitching on the duvet. She had left him half her giant-sized box of Kleenex, the other half mere damp and crumpled balls now. She’d been using them all night, mopping, blowing, sneezing. Luke’s cold was far less heavy than her own, and though it was unsociable and selfish to take even a snuffly child to school, she knew it was imperative that he was there on the first day. Hard enough for him to start in January, rather than September, without turning up three or four days late.

  She’d been sly – or was it sensible? – bought him cold-suppressants from the chemists, to feed him with his breakfast. He must start school like the others, a normal law-abiding boy, neither late, nor ill, nor special; and he must also be in uniform – another source of worry. He had refused to wear his blazer, loathed it on first sight. She’d done everything she could to coax him round, put Mars bars in the pockets, bought him a school case with new and shiny pencils, even planned an offbeat breakfast of both his favourite foods: Heinz spaghetti hoops and pink ice cream.

  She trailed out to the kitchen to check everything again: bowls and saucepan ready, school case stuffed behind a cushion in the highest of the cupboards. She was keeping it well hidden, to produce as a surprise, hoped it would distract him while she somehow slipped his blazer on; told him only if he kept it on, could he keep or eat the Mars bars.

  She filled the kettle, lit the gas. She knew she’d never sleep now, so she’d treat herself to breakfast – a simple pre-dawn breakfast before her second one with Luke. She needed to keep busy, to calm the skein of worries in her mind, all tangled round that wretched stripy blazer. Would the convent do him any good, or had she only sent him there to suit herself, secure her precious freedom? Now she’d lost that freedom anyway, she kept questioning her motives, wondering whether uniform and chapels were really right for him; whether nuns with names like Sister Magdalena could gain his trust or only make him jeer. Would he even last there, or would Sister Anne decide he wasn’t suitable and must be moved to a remedial school, so they’d be back to where they’d started, after just one short trial term?

  She watched the slow and lazy gas flicker in a draught. There was no permanence in anything, at present. When she folded down her sofa bed each morning, she was surprised the house itself still stood, hadn’t collapsed exhausted in the night. This row of shops was structurally unsound and officially condemned, several of them vandalised, only Charlie’s functioning, and even that to close by next October. Rita’s health was similarly precarious. She was still in hospital, and no one knew how long she might be there. Although weak, depressed and listless, she might suddenly make progress, or be sent home anyway because they were desperate for her bed – go home not to Maureen, but to Wandsworth; resume her former role as wife and mother. Which meant she’d lose her own role, as she’d already lost her job at Claremont College. Andy had been fiercely coldly angry. She had hardly recognised the urbane and friendly fellow who had shown her around two months ago, as he lashed her with his tongue, called her selfish, irresponsible and totally ungrateful. Liz had called her wonderful – and crazy.

  She made the tea, poured herself a bowl of Luke’s Oat Krunchies, removed the plastic Rambo from her bowl. There was also a coupon on the packet for a free real linen tea towel. Two pre-birthday gifts. It was her fortieth birthday in just four days’ time – that at least was certain – the official start of official middle age. In the convent, age had been irrelevant, except that the older you grew, the closer you approached to the afterlife – and God. Old nuns were respected, often held high office. If she’d stayed herself, kept her faith and fortitude, she might well have become assistant to the Abbess. She was nothing in the world – a spinster, out of work – and with each successive birthday, she’d lose a little more, grow plainer, tireder, creakier; depreciate in value like a car. Perhaps better not to recognise her birthday, just totally ignore it, tell nobody at all.

  She carried bowl and cup into the sitting room, switched on the television, the most luxurious object in the flat. Joe had somehow found her a twenty-six-inch colour set, with remote control and a video recorder. The videos themselves he’d bought cheap as a job lot, an extraordinary assortment of sex and violence, blood and thunder, and a few old classic movies of the sentimental kind. Luke had refused to watch Lassie, preferring Son of Werewolf, so she put it on herself now, lolled back on the sofa. What luxury! Breakfast in bed, in-room movies, bathroom en suite (well, a shower which leaked and a toilet minus seat), and full bar service day and night.

  She removed her whisky from the bedside table (an upturned wooden crate), to make room for the tea, drained the last half-inch of liquor in the glass. It was an expensive malt, which had aged so long, Joe claimed it was getting on for near as old as he was and had cost an arm and a leg. Poor Joe. He was trying quite pathetically hard to keep her happy, keep her there, control at least one section of his life. He seemed stunned by Rita’s second operation, totally confused at living in his house alone, with no noise but the passing trains, after more than thirty years of wife and kids, racket and commotion. He kept dropping in to bring her things, or was it more for company, or even reassurance? Her former anger with him had totally subsided. In some strange way, he had become her own father – complaining, grumbling, never really happy, uneasy in a world he no longer seemed to fit. She had longed to have her father back, so she could say those things she’d never dared express, explain her guilt and sorrow at being absent from his funeral, somehow forge a bond with him. Her shy and stilted relationship with Joe could hardly compensate, yet, nonetheless, even in these few short days, it had helped her come to terms with her own parents; their inadequacies, their failure, the fact they, too, had been fashioned by bad parents in their turn, which somehow lessened her resentment, made it easier not to blame.

  She spooned in Krunchies, washed them down with tea, lined up her Kleenex to cope with the next sneeze, or perhaps a tragic end to Lassie. She hoped it was a long film, to fill the gap till Breakfast Two, distract her from her worries. She drained her cup, settl
ed back, kept her mind firmly on MGM’s Welsh collie, to prevent it darting up to Claremont, or, worse still, running through her pieces for Grade 8.

  Three hours later, she was woken by the postman, groped up in confusion, still half-drugged with sleep. A pool of sodden Krunchies was congealing on the carpet, and the television talking to itself – no longer Lassie, but a hearty-sounding weatherman precacting gale-force winds, persistent rain. She took the narrow stairs as quickly as she could, throwing on a coat above the nightie and the sweaters.

  ‘Mornin’!’

  ‘Good morning.’

  ‘Rain again.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Well, I suppose we’re lucky it ain’t snow.’

  ‘Mm.’

  ‘The parcel’s for old Charlie, but I thought I ought to ring. Anything you leave outside gets nicked.’

  ‘Yes, thank you. That was kind.’

  ‘And a letter for you. Postmark says Madras.’

  ‘Madras?’ She took it from him, tried to close the door. The rain was blowing in.

  ‘Yeah. Been in those parts, have you?’

  ‘No, I …’ Her voice trailed off as she suddenly saw the writing on the envelope – three sets of writing, actually, and two of them she knew. She dashed upstairs, dread and wonder clashing in her mind. The first writing was Aunt Eva’s, dead and lost Aunt Eva, whom she’d hunted down for months – chased, pursued, and chivvied – then finally abandoned, deliberately uprooted from her mind, so she wouldn’t waste more time on fruitless visits, unanswered futile letters; wouldn’t have to mourn. Yet here was Eva addressing her from India, and addressing her as Sister Mary Hilary at the Convent of Notre Dame de Bourges, as she had done every Christmas since 1966 – every year except the last. She’d know that writing anywhere: a large lopsided scrawl with generous leaping upstrokes, i’s dotted only randomly, j’s with fancy loops. Reverend Mother’s writing was far more neat and cramped, still produced a ripple of unease. The Abbess had forwarded the letter to Cranleigh Gardens, where it had been sent on in its turn by Mrs Philpot; caught up with her, at last, at her new Tooting Bec address. It now looked tired and tattered, despite its bulky size scarred with postmarks, smudged with rain, even a grubby thumbprint on the back.

  She ripped it open, a hundred questions racing through her mind. Had Eva emigrated, or was she just on holiday? And why India, for heaven’s sake, when she’d always been on walking tours to quiet and temperate places like the Dales? How could she afford long-distance air fares on her meagre nurse’s pension? Why had she not written a whole year ago? Had she been in Madras all that time, or fallen ill, or …?

  She sank down on a chair as she tried to take the letter in, still hardly daring to believe that it was, in fact, from Eva; that her Aunt was still alive, not coffined or cremated.

  ‘Yes, shoot me, darling! I deserve it. I’ve always been a lousy correspondent – well, you know that, don’t you, pet – just my one scrawled letter every Christmas, and even that went by the board last year. I know I promised you I’d write, on that tiny mingy card I sent, and you must have been wondering all this time how my round-the-world cruise went off, or where the heck I’d landed up, or even imagined I had drowned or something, or run off with the Captain. No such luck!’

  Hilary laughed aloud, not so much at the thought of spinster Eva eloping with a Captain, but in sheer stupefied relief that her Aunt had turned up from the dead, was writing in her usual lively style. Drowning hadn’t crossed her mind, but several other forms of death had seemed all too sadly likely – cancer, or a stroke, a smash-up in a car, even a fatal mugging in the dark streets of North London. Yet she was still completely mystified. How could modest Eva afford round-the-world cruises when she’d never saved enough to fly to Benidorm? And what ‘tiny mingy card’ was she referring to? She’d received no card at all, no single word from Eva since Christmas two whole years ago.

  ‘I don’t think I even told you how Edward and myself happened to be cruising the high seas at all …’

  Edward? Had her Aunt got married, or, even more unlikely, found a sugar daddy? She fought an irrational surge of jealousy, raced on through the letter, discovered Mr Edward Unsworth Taylor was a man of nearly eighty, who already had a heart condition, but was determined to see the world before he met its Maker, as Eva quaintly put it. He had advertised in London for a private nurse who would also act as chaperone, companion, on a ninety-day world cruise. Eva, hating both retirement and her move from friendly Gloucestershire to a vast impersonal city, had answered the advertisement, been finally selected in preference to a host of younger girls. They had set off on the P&O, called at Gibraltar, Malta, Port Said and Suez; then on to Madras, via Mahé and Colombo, with at least one day ashore at every port and still twenty-odd more ports to go.

  ‘Alas, my love, we never got to see them, never made it past Madras. Edward collapsed right in the middle of a bustling Madrasi market, which sold everything from curry to dead bats – collapsed not just with heatstroke, but with a full-blown heart attack. Our three-month cruise was cut to just three weeks.’

  Eva’s writing, always hard to read, had now become illegible, as if it were suffering from the shock of Edward’s coronary. Hilary jumped two crippled lines, picked the story up again, with Edward in St Thomas’s, an expensive private nursing home, where he survived nearly a whole month, Eva at his side. When he finally expired, she was genuinely upset, had come to like the spirited old gentleman, with his eccentric ways, his little fads and fancies. She was equally sad at the thought of leaving India, which she had also grown to love; the nurses at the hospital who had accepted her as one of them, permitted her to nurse her charge, administer his drugs.

  ‘Why not stay on here and get a job?’ one of them had asked her, almost casually.

  ‘Why not indeed!’ Eva wrote, the ink smudging on the letter here, as if her hand were sweating in the heat. At least half a dozen reasons why she couldn’t think of staying. She was past retirement age, had never lived abroad in all her life, and had a house in London which was standing empty, only checked on once a week by a rather vague acquaintance who lived in the next street. There were also endless rules and regulations about getting jobs in India, problems over visas, red tape by the mile. Yet the wild idea was somehow most appealing, and once it had rooted in her mind, she couldn’t seem to dig it out again.

  ‘It’s not actually impossible, I allowed myself to think.’ (More smudges and the writing getting wilder.) ‘I’d nothing to return for, after all – no single living relative save you, my darling girl, and you were cut off anyway by those high walls and your vows. I’d no job and no real home, except a tiny terraced house in the most unfriendly street in London. I don’t like London, Gloria, and I’d never found my feet there. India’s a crazy place – chaotic, over-crowded and too damned hot for a paleface like Yours Truly, but the Indians are darlings (most of them!) and so wonderfully attentive. I mean, I find I’m now respected – revered out here as old and wise, rather than slung out on the rubbish heap, as I would be back in England. And anyway, I rather liked the feeling of landing up five thousand miles from home, with a circle of real friends already, and not actually starving, because my dear old generous Edward left me a few bob and …’

  Hilary paused a moment, felt out of breath from the tidal wave of Eva’s words. Eleven sides she’d read so far, with at least another dozen still to go. She dithered, checked her watch. The postman had come, early, but even so, she was pressed for time, had a child to get to school, maybe a battle to be fought over a blue and gold striped blazer. She ought to wake Luke up, give him time to eat his breakfast with no sense of rush or hassle, take things really calmly. Yet she burned to know what happened next in Eva’s Indian saga, and once he was awake she’d have no chance of finding out. He’d probably be rebellious; would need her full attention, all her ‘mother’s’ skills. She stuffed the pages back into their envelope. Best continue with it later, once she’d delivered him to school. Easier
then to concentrate. She could spin the letter out, relish every word, free from all distractions.

  She moved into the kitchen, lit the rusty oil stove, switched the kettle on, so she could wake Luke with a cup of tea; picked him out the Batman mug, the last two custard creams. She started pouring juice into the milk jug, cursed, and tipped it back. Her mind was miles away – cruising from Gibraltar to Madras. Would Luke really need so long to eat his breakfast? Too much time to hang around could be just as bad as rushing him; might only build his nerves. She was wasting time right now. No point watching kettles, especially sluggish ones.

  She dived back to the sitting room, snatched the letter up again, skipped the next few pages – endless snags and setbacks in Eva’s bid to get a visa, land herself a job. By page fifteen, she’d wangled both – a visa for a year, and a nursing job not at chic St Thomas’s, but at a smaller shabby mission hospital run by nuns. Nuns! She gasped, couldn’t quite imagine Eva’s strident tones and scarlet-painted fingernails ringing out against the soft-voiced pallor of the Mission Sisters. Yet she appeared to have enjoyed her work enormously; admired the nuns: their gentleness and patience; the endless hours they toiled – she, too! – with no real rest or recreation. She’d been meaning to write for months, she said, kept starting letters, but never finishing them, on account of the pressure of the job, the constant stream of patients, the fact that overtime was just a normal unpaid part of every day.