Mr Rawalpindi listened to me waffling on, and his bright, wrinkled face was so sad for me, so pained, that another bout of tears came out, snotty and gulping. He shuffled off inside and came back with a stained old monogrammed tablecloth for me to wipe my face on, and that made me laugh – wherever does he get such things? – and somehow made things better. It was getting cold by then so we went inside and got horribly drunk on his dusty old half-full bottles of whisky and other spirits that he’s somehow accumulated. I sat on a burst velvet armchair that puffed clouds of dust each time I shifted in it, slugged my smeared champagne flute of unidentifiable liqueur and told him everything about my parents and my childhood, the things I’d been attempting to write in my memoirs, the things I’d never confessed to anybody, not even Jeremy. In return, he told me all about his lover, a Waspish New York millionaire who was almost twice his age, who’d whisked him off to New York in the seventies. He’d been saving the story for his memoirs, he said, but was afraid he’d never get around to telling it: he’s been writing night and day since the course began and he’s still only partway through his childhood. He tried to laugh, make a joke of it, but I had seen the fear ripple through him, and the sadness come down like a shroud. He is an old, ill man, and however he rallies, his body is falling apart around him.
I suddenly sensed how exhausted he was. It was almost midnight by then, and the drink and the weed and the emotions had left me wobbly and drained, too. As I got up to go, he said, ‘I think she’s right, you know.’
My head was fuggy. ‘Sorry?’
‘The writing teacher,’ he said, impatient. ‘I think you should write your story as fiction. Your mother’s story. It seems to me that it’s her you’re trying to reach. Well, write her story.’
‘But how would I even start?’
‘First of all: by not getting hung up on hunting and pinning down exactly what happened. Like a butterfly collector, you know, those poor dead creatures stretched and skewered to a wooden board. Let yourself be free. Imagine yourself into your mother and write from her perspective, what it was like, being her. When you don’t know something’ – he tried to snap his fingers – ‘like that, just make a decision, use what comes most naturally to fill the gap, and if it doesn’t work, replace it with something, until the thing seems to hold together, to ring truest.’
I hesitated for a while, but he was so insistent, I ended up promising I’d give it a go. By the time, then, that I’d helped him empty and clean his colostomy bag – washing and drying around the stoma, reattaching the clamp – tidied up a little and made him a cup of herbal tea, he was drooping in the armchair, almost asleep. I got him into his pyjamas and helped lift him into bed, his body so light and shrunken it could have been made of canvas and balsa wood. I left a lamp on, in case he woke disoriented in the night – he suffers these days, he told me once, from strange, vivid dreams, where the people of his past come back to talk to him – and slipped outside onto the towpath, and home.
I’d expected to wake up able to argue against the promise I’d made. Somehow, though, in the night it had taken root, and the idea of writing as my mother, rather than seeming preposterous, felt suddenly almost intriguing. I phoned in sick to work – the first time I’ve ever done it, and it isn’t quite a lie – and arranged in front of me my mother’s things: the transcripts of our conversations, the contents of the shoeboxes. At least, Mr Rawalpindi had said, you don’t have to start completely from scratch: some people in the writing group were inventing whole dystopian worlds or alternative sci-fi realities, out of nothing. He’s right, I thought. These may be almost nothing, but they are something – the photo negatives, the ticket stubs, the Sylvia Plath with her writing in the margins – and I have my memories, and the little scraps of things she let slip, or very occasionally gave away. It’s worth a try, I decided, and as soon as I’d made the decision I was surprised by how excited I felt: daunted, yes, but undeniably excited, too. I have almost a year’s worth of holiday saved up, because who takes holiday when you’ve no one to take it with and nowhere to go? How ironic that suddenly it’s a blessing. I’m going to book it off as soon as I can, stock up on basics – coffee, biscuits, wine – and I’m going to start writing, and I’m going to do my damnedest to tell my mother’s story.
The story of Jane Moorhouse
Harley Street, September 1971
Her friend Lydia got them the interviews. Lydia’s cousin’s friend was a receptionist there; that’s how word reached them. The salary, Lydia said, was almost twice what they were earning at St Bart’s, and the hours were half. It was a no-brainer. They could afford to move out of their digs and get a nicer flat, in a nicer part of town. Clothes and shoes and make-up, the lifestyle, all of it. Snag classier guys, instead of the supercilious junior doctors who thought you should drop your knickers out of gratitude that they’d deigned to pay you the time of day, and made lewd comments about you afterwards on the ward rounds. Jane was less sure. She was happy enough at St Bart’s: but it was hard to argue with Lydia’s logic, and so she typed up a letter, too, and sent it along with Lydia’s. When she saw the place, she knew she had no chance. It was right in the middle of Harley Street, steps and columns and gilt-plaque entry-bell, and inside were thick muffling carpets and art and lilies in tall vases. The receptionists were like fashion models; tall, thin, hairdos, faces full of make-up. Lydia had done her hair in a chignon, and her nails; lots of lipstick, eyeshadow to match the powder-blue skirt-suit she’d borrowed for the occasion. She’d overdone the make-up, Jane thought, and the skirt was a teeny bit too small for her, but she looked far more the part than Jane, plain Jane, with her fawn outfit and forgettable face.
It was a shock to both of them when Jane got offered the job. When you thought about it, though, a nurse had no need for hairdos or mascara. As Lydia said, with the receptionists it was a different matter: they were an advertisement, the first thing you saw. A nurse, on the other hand: well, you wanted your nurse to be neat and clean, didn’t you, and that was about the extent of it. Just like Jane: small, neat, anonymous, nondescript. The sort of person that would melt into the background, that wouldn’t distract you in the operating theatre. No offence, Lydia said, and Jane said there was none taken. There wasn’t, she told herself: she and Lydia were friends, indeed, Lydia was the closest to a best friend she’d ever had. They’d roomed together at nursing college, had come to London together, shared digs together, done most things together for the past three years. It was because of Lydia that Jane had applied for the job, and it was because of Lydia that she took it. Not out of spite: it was more she sensed it would anger Lydia if she didn’t.
The clinic had been set up just four years earlier, offering minor facial surgeries. Removal of non-malignant moles, scars or birthmarks; brow-lift, chin-tuck, simple facelift. There were plans to expand – to offer breast reduction and augmentation – but for the moment the surgeries were minor outpatient procedures. The three men who’d established it – an American, an Irishman and an Israeli-born surgeon – had a business model whereby consultants could work private-practice hours at their own discretion, relatively easy and well-remunerated work, whilst retaining their more challenging day jobs. They took out discreet black and white advertisements showing before-and-after pictures in upmarket magazines and the Times. Their start-up costs were high, but so were their prices: high enough to reassure. Clients came slowly, at first, but word of mouth spread. Two years after they had opened, they fitted out and equipped a second operating theatre in order to double their capacity. They recruited two more surgeons, of whom Patrick Connolly was one. They advertised for more surgical assistants, the job for which Jane applied. Their permanent employees at the time Jane joined them were two certified registered nurse-anaesthetists, or CRNAs, a receptionist, and four registered nurses and surgical assistants.
She is standing in theatre, holding the tongs that lift the skin of the patient’s forehead, while the surgeon snips and extracts strips of subcutaneo
us tissue and ligates the facial nerves and repositions a slither of muscle fibre. She has been standing for hours – days. She is swaying on her feet, and trying not to sway, and reciting – fiercely, desperately – her times tables. Her surgical mask sucks into her mouth with every shallow breath and she wants to pluck it free, tear it away, but both of her hands are holding the tongs. If she doesn’t stop shaking, she might rip the skin of the patient’s forehead. Concentrate. Seven sevens are forty-nine, eight sevens are fifty-six. Her own forehead is cold with sweat, and she can feel her gown clinging where her back has sweated. Nine sevens are sixty-three, ten sevens are sev-en-ty. Ridiculous that it should be the times tables. Some nurses recite psalms, or the words of popular songs. It’s the times tables that have lodged in her mind but she daren’t try to find anything else: and so she clings to them, each conjugation, like rungs on a ladder, like inching up a rope in the school gymnasium, feet clenched, hands burning. It’s a mistake, being here. She should have stayed at St Bart’s. She hasn’t even been here a week, she can’t leave. She can leave precisely because she’s only been here a week. Oh God, why did she do it in the first place? Don’t think now. Eight times one, eight times two, three eights are – Her stomach lurches, but then she has it, twenty-four, and four eights are thirty-two, and five eights are forty and six eights forty-eight. It’s working. She’s settling back into herself. Her hands are shaking. They are: it’s not just her imagination. The surgeon glances at her, his eyes narrowing in the space above his mask. His mask is flecked with blood. Bodily fluids have never made her squeamish before. Seven eights are fifty-six, eight eights are sixty-four.
‘Hanging in, there?’ he says, his words muffled by his mask, and she nods, not trusting herself to speak, not trusting that words will come out instead of the rush of sour vomit she feels rising in her throat.
Nine eights, nine eights, nine eights. Her mind is losing its grip on the rope. She inches along: sixty-five, sixty-six, sixty-seven, six to seventy and that leaves two, seventy-two. Nine eights are seventy-two. Of course, or eight from eighty.
He swabs and dabs and takes the tongs from her, and her hands fall to her sides, like lumps. When he asks her to hand him the suture kit – proud of his own handiwork, he does his own suturing, where most others leave it to the nurse – her hands are like paws, huge clumsy animal paws that can’t pick up or hold or grasp. The other nurse passes the tray with the threaded needle and strips and gauze and iodine swabs. She stands, rushed with heat where a minute ago she was cold. She shouldn’t have left St Bart’s. She’s never felt like this before. She’s never been squeamish. At nursing college people fainted every week, for the first few months. For some it was blood, for others slopping out bedpans, or tweezering the packing from a gangrenous sore or infected ulcer. But you got used to it: you got on with it, precisely because there was something to do; you kept yourself in motion. Unlike here, where you just have to stand.
The surgeon is finishing up, the CRNA is checking the oxygen mask and the vital signs, the other nurse is replacing the used instruments. Someone has made a joke; they are laughing; she can’t keep hold of what has just been said. Ten, twenty, thirty, forty. Tens are too easy. Eleven, twenty-two, thirty-three: elevens, too. It doesn’t matter now. It’s over. In just a few minutes she’s going to leave, and she’s never going to come back. She’s had it with here, with this place. This isn’t even her first procedure, it’s her third, and it’s got no better. She has to leave. She’ll write the letter tonight, give it to them first thing tomorrow morning. Perhaps she won’t even have to do that, because this is still her trial period. Perhaps all she’ll have to do is tell them – she’s not cut out for this – and she can go back to the bustling wards of Bart’s and the patients and the cleaning and chatting and soothing and caring. That’s what she wants to do: that’s what nursing is about, not this. Rich, vain women getting their beauty spots snipped off or their jowls pinned up, this isn’t the world in which she wants to spend her life. Much as she and Lydia and the others complained about the junior doctors, at least they were meeting people. Here, it’s all women, apart from the fly-by-night surgeons. Fly-by-night: that’s like something her mother would say. It’s true: they come in, consult, do a procedure, go off to their real lives. None of them stays around any longer than they have to. There’s no social life. There’s no drinks after work, or cinema parties on the days off, or any of the rest of it. She’s never going to meet anyone here.
All of these thoughts are swirling around her head and she starts when the surgeon pulls down his mask and speaks to her.
‘You’re all right, there?’ he says. She realises that it’s over: the patient is being wheeled away, the CRNA and the other nurse leaving. It’s her job now to clear away the detritus, sterilise the instruments, get the room ready for the cleaners.
‘Yes, thank you,’ she says, automatically.
‘Thought you were going to faint on us there.’
She’s flustered by that.
‘Ah, I’m only coddin’ ya.’ He peels off his latex gloves and his hairnet and drops them to the floor. ‘You’re new here?’ he says.
‘I started on Monday.’
‘How’re you finding it?’
‘To be honest,’ she says, before she has a chance to think, ‘I’m not cut out for this.’
His laugh is surprisingly loud. ‘Not cut out for it. That’s a good one.’
She hadn’t intended to make a joke. She’s not even sure it was that funny.
‘Ah,’ he says again, ‘that’s a good one, I must remember that one. Not cut out for it.’
She’s not used to doctors – to consultants – talking to mere nurses. Is he flirting, is he just being friendly?
‘I’m being serious,’ she says.
‘You’re a funny wee thing, aren’t you?’ he says. ‘Here, take your mask off, till I get a look at you.’
Flushed, fumbling, she does what he says. She should turn and walk from the room, she thinks. The tone of the way he’s speaking to her. Lydia once slapped a lad, or said she did, for giving her lip.
He studies her face. She is nothing much to look at, she thinks. Her face is small, peaky, pale. Neat, anonymous, symmetrical features; thin lips, light eyes. Hair in damp wisps where it’s come loose from its bobby grips. A blue vein threaded across her forehead; too prominent; almost ugly. The only feature of distinction in her face.
‘What’s your name again?’ he says.
‘Jane.’
‘Je-an.’ The way he says her name, he splits it in two. ‘Je-an what?’
‘M-moorhouse. Jane Moorhouse.’
‘Well, Je-an Moorhouse’ – the house like hice, like rice, like a sneer – ‘don’t take this the wrong way, but you’re going to have to pull up your socks in here, so to speak. If you decide to stay, that is. I understand you’re relatively new to this, so I can make allowances. But in the future: there’s no room for heads in the clouds. Do I make myself clear?’
It’s like being slapped in the face. She doesn’t know what to say, or where to look. He claps her on the arm. ‘No offence, OK?’ he says. ‘Just a friendly wee bit of advice.’ He turns and leaves, whistling, bundling his gown off and letting it fall behind him, on the dirty spattered floor for her to pick up.
She has never been so humiliated in her entire life.
And this, somehow – perversely, inexplicably – changes everything, turns it all on its head. She won’t leave now, she decides that night. She can’t. She’ll stay, and prove herself. That a man like that can treat her like that: she’ll damn well stay, and prove herself. She’s stubborn, Jane Moorhouse. Beneath the nondescript exterior, there’s steel; there’s something stronger than self-pity, something even she doesn’t fully grasp or understand, because so far in her unremarkable life she’s had no need to. It flexes in her, that night.
The Langham Hotel, 1972
She’s been like a virus: crumbs under his skin. He’s not used to people being immu
ne to his charm, his banter, his easy good looks. But she is, and it discomfits him. It’s nothing he can put his finger on, exactly – she’s always perfectly polite; neat and precise and alert. Yet he can’t shake the feeling that she’s scorning him, or laughing at him, secretly, the whole time. There’s some wall he’s never encountered before, and when she looks at him it makes him feel watery inside, uneasy, as if she’s seeing through to something deeper within. Ridiculous, he knows, to put it in such terms. But that’s how it makes him feel. He dreads her being on his rota, and yet he somehow longs for it, too, and one Thursday when it turns out she’s back home in Yorkshire it plunges him into a bad mood that pollutes the whole day and evening. She’s never the first one – perhaps that’s it – to look away. It’s always him, glancing sideways or making some excuse to turn away, like a silly, smitten girl. He is at least ten years older than her, and considerably more senior, but none of that gives him the authority with her that it should. He cannot understand it, and it gnaws at him. He thinks about her far more than he should.
His wife is finally pregnant; has a baby, their first. When he’s next over in Harley Street he insists on taking everyone out for a drink. The air-headed receptionist, the CRNAs, the surgical assistant, even the cleaner. Champagne at the Langham Hotel. It’s over the top, he knows, but he wants to – what does he want? To provoke her? To impress her? To show his largesse? The others get tipsy and giggly and compete with their cooing over pictures of the baby. She doesn’t. He’s had fantasies – for weeks, now, he’s had fantasies – that when everyone leaves, she can be persuaded to stay, and then— It’s awful, he knows, with his wife and four-week wain at home. He knows that. He just can’t get her out of his thoughts. She’s not – he tells himself – even that pretty. You wouldn’t look twice – you wouldn’t look once – if she passed you in the street. But there’s something about her, there’s something between them, and he’s damned if he’s the only one who feels it. Sometimes he thinks she’s playing him. Then he thinks: don’t be ridiculous. In the gaps between his visits to London, as he plays things over in his head, her power grows over him, swells and distorts. He has to remind himself she’s just a girl. But the thing is: she’s not, and he can’t explain it.
All the Beggars Riding Page 11