by Barbara Vine
‘Not a faithless place, Genevieve?’
That reminded me of the ladybird poem and calling my true love. After she was gone, would anyone ever again call me Genevieve? I held her hand but she said no more. That was the last time Stella talked coherently to me, for the pain started to get bad and in the afternoon the doctor gave her morphine. Her voice altered, gravelly and thin, she said, relying on my understanding,
‘He left her and came to me. My children don't know that.’
‘I won't tell them,’ I said.
‘I wish I could have got over…’ She tried again. ‘I wish I could have – reconciled – yes, reconciled – myself…’ There were tears on her eyelids or perhaps it was just her eyes watering.
Next morning there was no question of breakfast. Sharon felt she'd been very successful in getting her to have a sip of tea.
‘She's starting to let go,’ she said to me. ‘It won't be long now.’
Richard was with the other doctor in the lounge. I felt what I'd never felt before, a kind of awe about Stella, that maybe I shouldn't just go in there the way I always had. Stupidly, I thought I ought to ask permission. The approach of death changes your attitude to all sorts of things. I listened outside the door, breathed in the silence, I knocked and getting no answer, not even a whisper, went in.
She was sitting up in bed, her eyes open, staring at the door. ‘Marianne,’ she said, ‘is your father coming?’
That gave me a shock though it shouldn't have. I should have been used to wandering minds and mistaken identities at Middleton Hall, not to say faulty memories. But Stella was different. Stella had been so clear-headed and so precise in her speech.
Her skull showed under the parchment-like skin. I went up to the bed and kissed her. She said, ‘Thank you, darling, that was nice,’ and then, ‘You're off tomorrow, aren't you? I hope you'll have a wonderful time.’
It's no use arguing with them when they're like that and it's no use being embarrassed. You have to play along. I said I was sure I'd have a wonderful time, and that at any rate was true. Every moment I've ever been with Ned has been bliss.
‘Your father and I went to Iona on our honeymoon.’
She'd never said that when she told me about marrying Rex and maybe it wasn't true. The morphine discovers all kinds of dreams and false memories buried in the mind. I wondered what she'd call the real Marianne, the actress, the woman with the long reddish hair. The door opened and Richard came in. As soon as I saw him I thought, she'll take him for Alan, she'll think it's Alan come back. But if she did she gave no sign. She gave him her glorious smile, she was still capable of that. I got up to go and she said,
‘You won't be able to move your car, Gilda. The garage will have to do that.’
Richard looked at me. ‘That's all right,’ I said. ‘I won't try.’
I met Marianne in the passage. She clutched my arm, said, ‘I'm not too late, am I?’
Mum has second sight, of course, she really can foretell the future, not to be wondered at when you remember she was my nan's seventh child and Nan was the seventh child too, or at least the seventh to grow up. People don't have seven children any more and maybe that's why Janis and I don't have Mum's gift, so it was strange how in that moment, when Marianne said that to me, I knew exactly when Stella would die.
‘Friday,’ I said. ‘It won't be till Friday.’
‘How do you know, Jenny?’
‘I just know,’ I said.
Marianne was wearing green, a dark green coat over her black pants and sweater. It made me shiver to see it. Of course I don't believe what they used to say, that it's because the fairies wear green that it's unlucky, that they don't like mere mortals to be seen in it. But I've known too many instances of ill-luck following the wearing of green to doubt. Whoever bought a green dress, my nan says, that didn't have to buy a black one afterwards? When Mum married Dennis she wouldn't even have green vegetables at the wedding reception, not a lettuce leaf on the table. If green is worn, love is down, they say.
Marianne made me go back with her. She put her arm in mine. We stood there and watched Stella's hands plucking at the bedclothes. That was something I'd seen often enough before but no one has ever given me an explanation. Why do the hands of the dying hop and creep like crabs going sideways along the edge of a blanket and the hem of a sheet? Her eyes were shut but her hands worked, a pianist playing on a cloth piano. Marianne asked me why but I had to whisper back that I didn't know, only the dead know. She and Richard stayed all day with Stella and they were still there when I left for home.
The phone was ringing as I let myself into the house. I wonder if the time will ever come when the sound of Ned's voice doesn't send a thrill through me and raise the hairs on the back of my neck. I want that time to come, I want that to happen, an ordinariness, an acceptance, I want to take him for granted, because that will mean I've had a lifetime of getting used to him.
He said, ‘Tomorrow evening, Jenny?’
‘I've got something to tell you,’ I said. ‘We can talk about it tomorrow.’
‘You've found somewhere warmer for us.’
‘You could put it that way,’ I said. ‘We won't be going to Stella's after Thursday, that's for sure.’
‘You're very mysterious.’
‘No,’ I said. ‘No, I'm not. There's no mystery. It can all come out in the open now. Listen, Ned, I'm going to do what you asked me, I'm going to leave Mike and come to you and we can be together. I'm sorry I wouldn't do it before, it was stupid of me, I shouldn't have kept you waiting like that, you asked me so often. I've been such a fool.’
It was a lovely sound, his sigh of relief. ‘Have you told him?’
‘Not yet. I want to be with you first.’
He began saying something, his voice very tender and sweet, but the doorbell was ringing. I could see the shape of Janis through the frosted glass, her piled-up hair-do and her huge earrings.
‘I love you,’ I said, ‘I have to go now. I'll see you tomorrow.’
Janis had run out of teabags, she was down to her last one, and the shop shuts at four-thirty. I gave her twenty out of my packet of PG Tips and she started telling me a long tale about how her friend Verna had been combing her hair by the open window, had twisted the combings round her finger and put them outside and a magpie had flown off with them in its beak.
‘What, in December?’ I said.
‘That makes it worse,’ she said. ‘It's been so mild. I mean, you don't expect it. Not for them to be making nests. She got this really bad headache straightaway. What d'you reckon? Mum says she'll die within the year, but not to tell her, there's nothing she can do.’
She wanted to see the conservatory, so I took her into the dining room and showed her Mike's work.
‘You are lucky,’ she said. ‘Steve can't open a tin without getting tetanus.’
I wandered round the house while I was waiting for the tile man, wondering what to take with me and what to leave behind. None of our wedding presents, I didn't want any of them, Mike could keep the lot. I'd take my books and my Chambers Dictionary but not the music centre or the CD player and the telly was too big to carry. Thirteen years. Mum would say it's because it's thirteen years, because we've just passed the unluckiest anniversary, the one she has a special name for. The first is your Cotton Wedding, the second your Paper Wedding, five years is a Wooden Wedding, twelve years Silk and Fine Linen, everyone knows twenty-five is a Silver and fifty a Gold – well, thirteen years is a Brimstone Wedding.
Maybe because it's explosive or because it's hard and dark like a burning stone, which is what brimstone means. I'd never asked Mum and I was thinking of ringing her up to find out when the man came with the tiles. And when he'd gone, though I'd only left there a bit more than an hour before, instead of ringing Mum it was Middleton Hall I phoned. Pauline answered. No, Stella was just the same, very feeble, weak as water, sleeping a good deal of the time, but that was from the doctor's morphine. Marianne had gone
but Richard was still there. They were both staying at the hotel in Thelmarsh.
Mike phoned just as I'd put the receiver down. He wanted to know if the tiles had come. I was glad he didn't say what he would have done once, that he missed me and he'd be glad to be home again, because if he had I'd have felt guilty. I just thought of telling him on Friday evening and I did wonder a bit how he'd react. By asking me if that was the gratitude he got for building ‘my' conservatory, I suppose. When he'd said goodbye and not even that he'd see me on Friday, I started speculating about various women in the village who'd be after him once I'd gone and wondering which one he'd take up with. It wouldn't be long, I was sure of that.
The first thing I heard when I got in on Thursday morning was that Lena had caught Stanley's flu bug. She'd had the sense to go to bed and not spread her germs about. Stella was alone. As I kissed her I felt her cheek turn to me, but that was the only sign of consciousness she gave for a long while. For the first time of being with her in that room, perhaps because it was also the first time of silence and rest, I thought of the secrets locked up inside her head, moving in there, whispering unheard.
I'd been there half an hour and was thinking I couldn't stay much longer, I had Gracie and Arthur to see to, when she opened her eyes and said, ‘Darling?’
‘Yes, Stella?’
‘What did you do to her?’
She said it, not strongly, not loudly, but so clearly it surprised me. Was it Alan Tyzark that she thought she was talking to? And did she need some sort of denial from him in order to rest?
‘Nothing,’ I said. ‘I didn't do anything.’
She turned her face away. It wasn't exactly a snoring that she made, more a heavy strangled breathing. She had passed into a deep sleep. But there was a chance she would wake just as quickly. I sat there watching her, hoping she would wake but not daring to be cruel enough to will it, glad in a way I hadn't inherited Mum's powers to fetch the words out of her.
Richard arrived in the late morning, then, after about an hour, Marianne came with her children. The older one must be seventeen because when they'd been five minutes with their grandmother he drove the pair of them off in the Volvo. I went in once. Stella was conscious. At any rate, her tired eyes were open and there were traces of tears on her cheeks. Marianne wiped her face very gently with a tissue. I thought I'd never see Stella again, though I was wrong there, and in saying goodbye to her, just the usual words I always spoke when I was leaving for home, I tried to speak in a more solemn and final tone.
‘Goodbye, Stella.’
I kissed her and her cheek quivered. Marianne laid her hand briefly on my arm, the green sleeve on my blue. The room was darkening by then and before Richard got up to switch on the bedlamp I fancied I saw the figure of a woman standing silent and waiting between the window and the wall. My nan would have named her as Death, come to keep her appointment with Stella, but when the light came on I saw it was only the way the curtain had been carelessly pulled, catching at the corner of a picture frame.
Perhaps I shouldn't have gone. Someone I loved and had grown close to was about to leave this life, she was on her deathbed, and I was off to enjoy myself. Is that a strange way of putting it? Not really, not when you understand being with Ned was the greatest true enjoyment I've ever known.
I could say that Stella had her son and daughter with her, that she was slipping out of consciousness, anyway. Her room was no place for me while they were there. Yet I could have stayed in the building, sat in the lounge, waited in case I was needed. Come to that, I could have swapped with someone on the night shift. Once I would have, if it had all happened a year ago, before I met Ned, before I loved him.
For it's love that was responsible, love that overcomes your better nature and casts all those fine feelings of friendship and duty and the other kind of love, loving-kindness, to the winds. It's so urgent, it's so demanding, a force like a gale that blows you over or a wave of the sea that throws you on to the shingle, you can't resist and you don't want to. I wouldn't have resisted the pull of love for Stella's sake and I wondered if I would have for my own nan or even for my mother, or, if I'd had one, for my child.
That's not to say I wasn't guilty about leaving. I was ashamed of going and I fancied Lena looked at me strangely and Carolyn gave me a sidelong glance. But I left and closed the front door and went down the steps where the cold of night was closing in. Abandoning Stella bothered my conscience but to give up seeing Ned, that was unthinkable, there was no future on the other side of it.
Frost turned my windscreen into a bathroom window patterned all over with fern leaves. They made me think of the ferns in Ned's shoe that would draw him quickly to me. Our meeting would be another last time, the last time we would meet in a cold borrowed house and make love in someone else's bed.
Ned was due at seven. By that time I'd lit twenty candles and the two oil stoves and the house was full of that familiar but never exactly acceptable smell of wax and paraffin. Some people associate certain perfumes with their love affairs, or the scent of wood smoke or the bouquet of a wine. Perhaps it's because I'm not one of their sort, because I'm ordinary and working class, that my love will always be remembered when I smell burning oil, the poorest, cheapest fuel of all.
I wasn't thinking like that while I waited for Ned to come. I wasn't afraid of anything. They call it a low self-image, what I used to have and what in her different way Stella had, but in my case he had done wonders for that. By loving me he had made me love myself. He had made me think something of myself, know that I look good and I have more brains than people give me credit for, that I'm as worthwhile a person as anyone else.
I waited for him, sitting close to one of the oil stoves, holding my hands spread over the grid on the top of it, only my hands and face warm, a chill seeping through the rest of me. But even that didn't matter much because it was the last time, because the coldness of this house and my struggles to warm it would soon be things for us to look back on and laugh about.
The curtains are never drawn till he gets there. When he comes I draw them to enclose us from the outside world. I'd wrapped myself up, blue jeans, thick blue sweater, blue shawl round me, all blue to counteract Marianne's green, I suppose, though what I was saving from harm I don't know. It was too late to save Stella. Protecting him, I reckon, from the hazards of the road, the ice and the freezing fog, twenty-ton trucks coming in the other direction. From his own mistakes, like whistling in the dark. As for me, for once I thought I needed no protection, I was safe, home at last.
I got up once or twice to look for him from the window. It was dark out there but the darkness was clear and glittering and when a car passed its lights showed the frost on the hedge and a line of it like white paint on tree branches. I suppose I watched ten cars pass. I know I did, for I counted. I watched for headlights to flare and swing blindingly towards me as he turned his car off the road and up the path to the house.
*
It didn't happen. He didn't come. He'd been late before, he had much farther to come than I did, and it wasn't always easy for him to get away on time. I think the latest he'd ever been was twenty-five minutes. No, am I still deceiving myself that I didn't count? Twenty-seven minutes it was, not twenty-five. After twenty-eight minutes I started getting frightened.
Time passes so slowly when you're waiting. It goes so fast when you're with the man you love that it seems as if you're not talking about the same thing, as if there are two kinds of time, one for happiness and one for fear. The time passed more slowly than I'd ever known it while I waited at that window. Each second was like a single drop of water that you watch fall from a tap.
And outside there was nothing. There was no movement of any kind, only the empty road and the wide fields running away into darkness. In the stillness I seemed to see the frost itself descend on to the grass and the hedge, first a wetness, then a glitter. An owl called into the silence and at the sound shivers ran down my body, for its cry is an omen of the
approach of some dire calamity. I could hear my nan saying those words as I waited there, just as she had spoken them to Janis and me as children when we heard the owl's shriek at night.
There were so many things that could have happened to him, there are so many, for I still don't know. A car crash, some accident at work, some action on Jane's part, something that she had done or said or he had that I don't know, that no one has told me. But my worst fear was for his safety, his life. You see, nothing would have stopped him coming to me, nothing ever did, and what but some terrible thing could have stopped him coming to me on this special evening when we had our future to talk about?
When you're in a situation like that you think of the awful things that have happened to other people you know or you've heard of. I thought of Charmian Fry saying goodbye to Rex Newland, then waiting and waiting for him to phone her. He never phoned and he never came to her again because he'd died in the train. Suppose Ned had died at the wheel of his car? I looked back over the day that was past and tried to think what I'd done that was changing fate. Gracie had spilt salt and I hadn't taken a pinch and thrown it over my left shoulder. I'd dropped a glove and picked it up myself.
I stayed there at Molucca till nine. It was ridiculous staying so long, for they were long those hours, they were the longest two hours of my life. I paced the house, I walked up and down the stairs more times than I know, I went out into the cold and walked to the road, looking this way and that in the blackness, as if I could bring him by my will and my peering into the dark. I wrung my hands, I'd never done that before or seen it done, but it's what you do when you're worried out of your mind, it's what you do in despair when you say, God, God, God help me!