I was lying on my bed drinking more tea about an hour later when George rang. ‘I’ve just heard you were took queer. I thought it was the light making you look green in the gallery. How’d you feel now?’
Iller and rather wonderful. Shirley had gone straight down to wait for Paul in the canteen. God bless Shirley.
‘Fine, thanks. Just went a bit off. Knowing Marlene ‒ you know?’
‘I thought it was that.’
‘She round?’
‘Talking.’ From his voice he was smiling. ‘Not that she’ll remember the next couple of days, but after that, she should do quite nicely.’
‘Yes,’ I said, ‘quite nicely. You’ve just made sure she’s got a future, can live a normal life, have a baby or two.’ He was silent. ‘How’s Trevor?’
‘Still a dirty grey up to a few minutes ago, which didn’t tone too well with the purple and yellow, but otherwise in top form.’
‘George, I’m so glad! It all went superbly. Don’t you feel absolutely wonderful?’
‘Well ‒ er ‒’
‘What did Roseburn say?’
‘You took the hell of a time over that second.’
I laughed. ‘What did he sing under the shower?’
“Praise My Soul, the King of Heaven”.’
‘How many verses?’
‘All four.’
‘George,’ I said, ‘George, you are in!’
‘Thanks, but I wouldn’t say that yet.’ He changed the subject abruptly. ‘Going away for what’s left of the week-end?’
‘No. You off?’
‘Till nine, now I’ve finished the notes. I’m on-call for the night and till one tomorrow.’
I looked at my watch, thought of last evening, his last visit here, that he had rung me now, and could always say no. ‘As you’ve got a couple of hours, if you feel up to coming round for a drink or a snack, I’ve got some food.’
He hesitated longer than I had. ‘Thanks, but would you mind if I don’t? I’m a bit bloody clapped out this evening, but if you’re free tomorrow afternoon, would you care to come down to Kent with me? The tenants haven’t shown up, there are a few things I want from the house and I was just thinking I’d like to get the hell out of it. We could have tea there, and eat somewhere on the way back. Or are you tied up?’
‘No,’ I said carefully. One needs to be careful when the one man one wants to say yes, says no. ‘Nice idea. Thanks for asking me. What time?’
‘About two all right?’
‘Fine.’
‘See you then. Oh ‒ sorry about this evening. You don’t mind?’
‘George, don’t be daft. After that op I’m only surprised you’d enough energy left to pick up a phone. Thanks for ringing me and I hope you don’t get too many calls tonight. Take it as easy as you can and forgive me if I now ring off but you’ve had quite a day,’ I added as if he were Joe, Andy, or another old friend and hung up. There didn’t seem much else I could do for him. Or, come to that, for myself.
He didn’t arrive till twenty-past two. ‘Sorry I’m late. Hold up in the Unit.’
‘Marlene?’
‘No, no. She’s pretty well but not too well. Just as I was leaving Roseburn came in with a chap I worked with in Benedict’s and I couldn’t get away.’
I looked at him quickly. He was wearing a darkish suit I hadn’t seen before and his most controlled expression. I liked the suit. ‘Benedict’s wanting you back?’
He shook his head and put on his driving glasses. ‘This chap doesn’t work there any more. Moved north. Hell of a lot of traffic around today.’
‘A fine spring Sunday.’
‘So it is. Thank God I no longer work in any Accident Unit. Sunday throughout the holiday season, synonymous with holocaust.’
‘With highlights at Christmas and New Year. Didn’t you tell me on New Year’s Eve you were hoping for a job up north later this year?’
‘Did I? Yes. With luck I might get on the short list. Heard from Alistair, recently?’
‘Not since a postcard from them both in Devon. Have you?’
‘Yes. He rang me when passing through London last week ‒ or was it week before? Forget. He asked me to give you their love. Sorry. Forgot that, too.’
‘You’ve had a bit of pressure. How are they?’
He smiled quietly. ‘They’ve fixed another date, but nothing else so I’m hanging on to the decanters. I will now only hand them over when Ruth has the ring on her finger.’
‘Very wise.’ I waited a few more miles. ‘This job up north. Edinburgh, I suppose?’
‘No. My God! Look at that moron in that estate job piled with kids cutting between that bus and lorry with mum holding the baby in her arms in the front seat. No belts on either and by that skid, bad brakes. Makes one’s blood run cold. Ever see a more obvious accident on its way to happening?’
‘No.’ Nor third warning-off sign. ‘I think there should be a law forbidding kids in front seats.’
‘Any government with the guts to bring that in would be slung out for depriving the citizens of their personal freedom. What if said freedom involves being mashed to a glass splintered pulp? This is why my tenants have had to back out. I didn’t tell you last evening as it didn’t seem the right time. They got into a pile up on the Ml. Not too bad as they were on the fringe, but bad enough to keep them in hospital for about six weeks and go home with some ugly scars. When the husband wrote he said they never used their belts as they felt constricted. Having seen his wife go face first through the windscreen, the poor guy’s changed his mind. Luckily, she had on one of those huge floppy rainhats and it stayed on. Saved her eyes and the top of her face but she’s got two jaw fractures. He did his ribs and right tib and fib. Typical de-celleration jobs.’
‘I’m very sorry! They’re doing all right?’
‘Now, yes.’
‘What about your house? Looking for new tenants?’
He said thoughtfully, ‘I haven’t done anything in that direction partly as I haven’t had time, partly as I’m now thinking of selling. No sense in hanging on indefinitely, if I’m not going to use it.’
‘Perhaps not, though it’s a nice house.’
‘Glad you thought so,’ he said casually as if he didn’t give a damn either way. There was no reason why he should. We had known each other for a long time, been involved in each other’s lives, but this was the first proper date he had ever bothered to make with me. That didn’t make me anything but a girl with whom he felt like spending a few hours today, probably as he had been too tired when he asked me to think of anyone he’d like better. I presumed that showed he must quite like me, rather as Alistair and even Tom Jones. Bully for quite likeable little old me, I thought, though the thought made me want to weep.
Yesterday had shaken me more than anything since Dave’s death. I hadn’t wanted this total involvement with George. I would still have much preferred to remain uninvolved, but if I had had any choice on that since the fire, I’d none now. I liked him as much as I loved him, which made it so much more difficult as I couldn’t try and kid myself this was just some terrific sexual attraction that would eventually burn itself out. It always took me a long time to like people, but once I did I was stuck with the liking for life. I thought of Dave. And loving. In retrospect I could see his faults and that our marriage might not have worked out, but that hadn’t stopped my remembering him with love, even if, sadly, I couldn’t now remember what he looked like. Just the kind of wild joy I felt in his presence.
I looked at George as he was concentrating on the road. Being with him evoked a different joy. The difference between a meteor and a log fire. Dave’s mercurial temperament had entranced me, but I was old enough to know I didn’t want and couldn’t spend my life in a trance. Life was bound to be hell at times and in hell one wanted love and kindness. I thought of the patients, any patients. I’d never nursed one who didn’t put kindness above skill, and all the other qualities they wanted from their doctors and nurses
. I had known that for years without stopping to consider why, or to realize that fundamentally it had been the one quality that made me remember George. It was extraordinary to think how hard I had tried to forget him and even more extraordinary that having managed to forget so much, I’d never succeeded there. When he sold the house and moved north, I’d have to work on it, wouldn’t I?
We were through the last village and running downhill to the marsh before he broke our silence since Maidstone.
‘I rang the Potters this morning to say we’d be down. Mrs Potter said she’d leave us some milk and a cake. She makes good cakes.’
‘How nice. How are they?’
‘She said the old man’s got a touch of the twinges in his back but as he won’t listen and will garden on a damp evening what can he expect and otherwise they’re fine.’ He drew up across the lane from the gate. ‘Everyone has the twinges on the marsh. Will you drive in if I hold the gates?’
‘If you wouldn’t rather I did the gates?’
‘As you wish.’
I got out. Suddenly, it would have taken more than Chopin’s Funeral March to give me a good laugh. I had irrationally been looking forward to this moment ever since he rang yesterday. Now it had come, it wasn’t the disappointment of vague, unreasoned, childish hope that flattened me. It was the oppressive conviction that this time really was the last time. No Peking, no Samarkand, no golden journey anywhere, ahead. Just a nice quiet tea, a nice quiet chat, a nice quiet dinner, a nice quiet, ‘Thanks for coming, Anne. See you around.’
‘Sure. Thanks for asking me, George.’ Coronary Care tomorrow. Sister Cardiac Unit by the end of the year. Good job, good flat, good friends. The nice quiet life I had spent years telling everyone, including myself, that was what I wanted.
I fixed one gate with a stone, held back the other and waved him in. If I could forget Dave, one day I would forget George. One day, probably, I’d be old, retire. Jilly by then was bound to be running the General Nursing Council and a Dame. We’d have tea and cucumber sandwiches together and say student nurses were not what they were when we were gels.
The small front garden was transformed. The lawn had been rolled and mown, the roses pruned, the old lavender bushes on either side of the front door cut back, the straggling forsythia against the house trimmed and re-tied.
It was covered with yellow flowers. ‘Mr Potter found you a gardener, George?’
He shook his head and looked over to the marsh. ‘The local men are all too busy on the land now the weather’s better. I’ve had a couple of half-days down here. I like gardening. Helps me to think.’
‘Doesn’t painting?’
‘The reverse.’ He unlocked the front door. ‘Come in this way.’
It could have been imagination, but I had the impression he was as flattened as myself. I guessed it was a combination of the reaction from yesterday’s strain and prospect of selling the house plus the obvious future job problem he didn’t want to discuss, that was upsetting him. He certainly looked very tired.
‘Sit down, Anne.’ He switched on the sitting-room fire as before. The room was very much cleaner. ‘I’ll get the kettle on and whilst it’s boiling get some things I want from upstairs and keep forgetting. Be all right in here?’
We had been through this one before, but as this time he’d apparently asked me for myself, I asked if I couldn’t help.
‘Not for the moment, thanks, though ‒ er ‒ later I’ve a bit of a problem bugging me I’d rather like to have your views on. To be honest, that’s why I asked you here. I wanted a quiet talk with ‒ er ‒ well, someone who knows the whole scene. Impossible anywhere near the hospital. Either a phone or a walkie-talkie or something blasts off in mid-sentence.’ He smiled with his lips. ‘Let’s have tea, first.’
‘Good idea.’
‘Back in a minute.’ He closed the door. I heard him put on the kettle then go upstairs. I closed my eyes as I liked that room too much and did not want to do any thinking. Not that I had time, as Mrs Potter was knocking on the window.
‘Don’t bother to come out, dear,’ she said when I opened the window. ‘I just want the Doctor ‒ there he is!’ She backed to look up at the window above. ‘Ever so sorry to trouble you, dear, but hubby’s stuck in his chair. Could you give me a hand getting him up to his bed? Just the Doctor, dear,’ she added to me, ‘or he’ll be that put out if he thinks I’m fussing. Can’t abide a fuss, he can’t, but he’ll not mind the Doctor seeing as we’ve known him since he was the Professor’s little lad across the lane. I’ll not keep him long ‒ find the milk all right?’
George had come in. ‘And the cake, thanks. Looks magnificent.’
‘Mind you take it back with you! You know what they say about hospital food! Wouldn’t feed it to his pigs, hubby says. Best get back to him ‒ he’ll be right as rain after a day in bed and I told him this morning ‒ you stay there! Would he listen? Stubborn, that’s what he is! Mind, like he says, his back, isn’t it? Thanks, dear.’
George closed the window for me. ‘Sorry about this ‒ God, the kettle!’
‘I’ll deal with it.’
‘Thanks. Shouldn’t be more than ten minutes. Take a look round if you’re bored.’
I wasn’t sure he really meant that, or if it was a good idea, but having turned off the kettle it seemed preferable to sitting trying to avoid thought. ‘How do you think Roseburn’ll take it if I accept this job in John O’Groats, Anne?’ Or was someone starting up a Heart-Lung Unit in the Outer Hebrides? Or Arctic Circle? He hadn’t specified the U.K. This Benedict’s man worked in the north. ‘North’ covered a lot of territory and it was all very, very, cold.
A door at the far end of the kitchen opened into a small hall with a blue carpet, enclosed stove, another door to the study, and a huge grandfather clock that wasn’t working. From the hall a short, black oak staircase ran up to what looked to be the only upper floor. All the rooms there opened off one side of a longish, narrow corridor with an uneven floor beneath the same blue carpet as the hall and stairs. The doors of the three bedrooms and bathroom were open; the bathroom was modern, included a shower and had some rather attractive red and white tiles. The first two bedrooms were much larger than I expected, neat and impersonal as empty hotel rooms. The last was smaller, and had a vast, unframed oil canvas nailed with over-efficiency to the black wall beams, which explained why it was still there. It was a painting of a frail, grounded aircraft I didn’t recognize. I went closer to read the small typed label fixed to the bottom, left-hand corner. Dad’s Supermarine Spitfire, copied from a snap taken Biggin Hill, 1940. G.M.F. August, 1956.
I looked at that for quite a time, then backed out very quietly though I had the house to myself.
There was a narrower, and from the layout I guessed a cupboard, door just beyond that room, but as the key was in the lock I opened it. It wasn’t a cupboard. It was the entrance to the attic stairs. There were about ten, steep, wooden and uncarpeted, running up to a dusty sliver of a landing with doors at either end. I went up feeling like Alice in reverse and opened the door on the right first.
It was an attic with a sloping roof, dark and musty as it had no window, and crammed with old tin and cabin trunks, tuck-boxes, golf clubs, tennis rackets, football boots and a couple of rugger balls. There was a roughwood door, so low that I would have had to go through it double, in the inside wall; obviously it led into the loft with the water tanks. I didn’t bother to investigate. I closed the landing door and moved on to the other.
For a moment or two I stayed in the doorway fighting it out and throwing in with my better nature my horror of spiders. Then I went in to George’s old studio.
There was plenty of light despite the cobwebs on the fanlight cut in the roof too high to be visible from the ground. From the look, no-one had been up there for years. The bare floor, large easel, aged red leather armchair with broken springs, stack of cubes and cones, and zinc-topped table had a grey film. The old sheets protecting the stacks of block
ed canvases against the walls were thick with more dust and cobwebs.
Directly I saw those sheets I knew exactly why I was there and the certainty that I was now intruding where George had never intended wasn’t stopping me. I wanted to see what she had looked like, if her portraits were still there.
I didn’t expect the discovery would make anything easier, and there wasn’t time to reason out my sudden, compulsive curiosity.
Gingerly, I flicked the sheet from one stack and smiled involuntarily. The boy in a dirty shirt and hideous Bermudas was Alistair at about fourteen. It wasn’t a work of art, but the likeness was good. I took out another and again didn’t have to read the label. Mrs Potter asleep in a deck-chair, knitting on her lap. Several of the house from all sides; the oasts; the marsh in various seasons, and the technique improving with each one. One very good one, Dad, gardening. July ’66.
I forgot the spiders, sat on my heels for a better look. The scene was the back garden. The thin man smoking a cigarette on an upturned wheelbarrow had greying fair hair, a long, amused face and the jaw he had handed on to his son. I wished I had known him.
It was like a family album. Mrs Mackenzie, hurtling a tartan scarf over one shoulder. Edinburgh, grey, austere. Ben Nevis, half-hidden in cloud. Rows of Fort William from different angles. Rows of the Scottish highlands, splashed with purple, tan and gold, each carefully placed and dated. Then a totally different highland scene.
The mountains were higher, bleaker, the technique was now professional and produced an instant impression of icy loneliness. There was no name or date on the front. In ink on the back of the frame, Greece. May ’67. G.M.F.
Suddenly I was too sickened with myself to go on.
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