by Jill Dawson
And, yes, they had suggested she see a doctor, and that experience, too, she remembered with shame. The word ‘paranoia’ was at any rate used, at least once. She didn’t care to read her notes but felt sure – ha! Was this a further example of it? – that that was the diagnosis.
‘What can this letter-writer do to you? I wonder why you feel so convinced this person – this Stanley, or someone else out there – means you harm?’ the smooth young doctor had asked.
Birds twittered like maniacs in the window outside the consulting room as she had hunkered down in her chair and pondered that very question. You are half cracked, Patsy, that’s why I love you so much! She had an idea that someone ‘out there’ did indeed mean her harm. She couldn’t remember ever not feeling that way.
‘So did you manage to see Sam at the weekend?’ Ronnie asked, breaking into her thoughts. He placed his backpack in the trunk of the car and she sat in the front, turning the key in the ignition. They were going on a little trip to another church; evensong at Wormingford. Ronnie did not require her to express belief of any kind, but they both loved the singing.
There was a judder and a jolt as the engine cut. She had to pull out the choke to warm it up; she tried again. Eventually the engine was running smoothly.
‘Ah,’ Pat said. ‘Slight change of plan.’ She felt her voice sounded a little tight. Ronnie wisely said nothing, and the car bore them towards the cleansing dusk of Wormingford.
Once in the car, Sam bursts into tears.
She folds up, covers her face with her hands, and I’m shocked, as if it’s me who is crumbling. The way I’ve heard men say they feel, seeing their father cry for the first time: frightened. Appalled. And then, perhaps, a little humiliated.
It’s Gerald, it seems. The most ghastly, filthy fight. Minty didn’t witness it, thank God, poor little mite, but it was frightful, really terrifying, bloody. He shoved her, he kicked her, he screamed into her face. At one point he hauled her by her hair towards the stairs and she felt as if the top of her head might pull away, like a teapot lid. She straightens, passes her fingers under her glittering blue eyes, widening them as she tries to wipe away the mascara without stinging. Her scalp still hurts, she says. She feels sure her hair might start dropping out. She runs her hands along her hairline, catches a tear at her chin with her hand and wipes at it.
‘Oh, Pats . . .’ she says.
I’ve never seen Sam like this. I’ve never seen her anything less than immaculately composed. I have not uttered a word. I felt blow after blow, one after another, a kick beneath the ribs, my scalp burning, as she told it. I stare at my hands on the steering-wheel: five white knuckles spark up, ready, and I hate Gerald like death, like poison. Mother always said I had such big hands for a woman; I could be a man in drag, she used to say. Ronnie is kinder, but he, too, has remarked on them, the long fingers, the spades of the palms.
The things I would like to do to Gerald loom up, white-hot evil things to teach him a lesson, things to silence him and remove him from our lives, blot out those black-blue eyes, throttle him for ever . . . but Sam is talking now, in a calmer tone, sniffing and pressing one hand to her lips, fetching a handkerchief from her purse, trying to pull herself together.
‘Drive, would you, Patsy darling? I wanted to tell you, but now I want to talk of something else.’
‘Not Patsy. Not here. Pat. Or Patricia. Ronnie has no trouble with it. You’ll be able to manage it, won’t you?’
‘Oh, of course. Have you – you haven’t had any further – you know – bother? Or letters or suchlike from him, have you?’
A pause, then I turn the ignition key and the engine splutters into life.
‘Stanley? Nothing. No letters, no. No signs. No, no. I think I’ve shaken him off. There was a moment when I wondered – but it turns out a local girl is hipped on me. That’s all.’
Sam attempts a smile. ‘Should I be jealous?’
‘God, no. The girl’s . . . half cracked. The cute sort, you know? Nice figure, though, I’ll give her that much. A bit leggy . . . Christine Keeler type.’
Sam bats me lightly with her blue scarf, the scent of her cologne whisking around my face. I pull away and, not knowing Ipswich, am soon lost in some back-streets by the docks. The rage of moments ago drained me: a feeling spreading through my veins as if I’d just been for a long run, a stitch under my ribs, breathless, and now I’m spent and hopelessly lost, and realise I have not been thinking of anything at all except Gerald and my loathing of him. I pull the map down from the nylon net above our heads and try to concentrate. We’re next to a bar called the Sea Horse. Sam suggests asking someone but I shake my head at that. I trace a finger along the names of roads: Grimwade Street. Well named, we think. I’ll get us home.
And at last we’re here at Bridge Cottage and, as predicted, she finds it ‘dinky’ (a sudden picture then of Sam’s elegant Highgate apartment, saturated with light, tall stems of orchids in a glass vase on a table in the hallway). There’s a fire in the grate and I’ve made her an Italian vermouth with soda and wrapped her in an extra blanket and she’s sitting on the sofa, trying to find something to watch on the television set. The image is fuzzy, like trying to see the picture through one of those snow-shaker globes, and it’s boring anyway, more electioneering and politics. We switch it off. She wants to show me pictures of Minty: here’s Minty in her school uniform, Minty with her blonde fringe, Minty watching Bleep and Booster in her nightgown, Minty holding a ladybird on her palm and grinning.
She’s relieved Minty is back at school; sobs afresh a little when she thinks of her, and Gerald, and how degrading it is for Minty to hear Gerald bellow at her in that way, call her those ghastly names, let alone witness Gerald actually strike her. Yes, I’m thinking. At last, an acknowledgement that a child might know a thing or two. That children are not idiotic creatures to be endlessly duped and lied to. A pain twists inside me.
‘Did Minty see?’ I ask. ‘You said she wasn’t there.’
‘Oh, not this time. But others, yes.’
And Minty. I look again at her. A blonde girl, sulky. A sudden flash of myself, dressed like a boy, in a cap and jodhpurs, six years old, just before we left Fort Worth. And Mother saying: ‘Do you know, Patsy, you’re a little bit cuckoo? Ready for the booby hatch, you know? Psychologically sick in your little boy’s clothes. Come here . . .’ and she would hold out her arms, sighing and scolding until I took a step towards her and she could snatch at me, hold me in an embrace so tight I could barely breathe.
‘You have to leave Gerald,’ I say. ‘You’ve told me you hate him, sometimes. Matter of fact, many times. It’s not good for a child to see – things like that. What’s keeping you there?’
Sam sighs then, pressing one hand to her hair, feeling for the silver pin that pierces a skein of it at the nape. She’s poised again. Whatever she let me see, moments ago, is smoothed over, like a magazine cover neatly closed.
‘As if it were easy! The person you’ve been with since you were seventeen, the only life you know, the daddy your daughter adores! Your life, your home, your future, give it all up, just like that?’
‘Cuckoo you are, my Patsy, in your boy’s hat and pants . . .’ Mother again and her cock-eyed pronouncements. At six years old I remember the taste of velvet in our Fort Worth boarding-house home: I’d developed a habit of putting my face into a cushion, opening my mouth and pretending to scream. Silent screaming: the stretch of your jaw, the velvet texture of the cushion in your mouth. I became an expert at it. I still do it sometimes. Perhaps Minty does it too. I take the last photograph of her and stare at it.
She’s younger than eight in this one, hair curlier and blonder, cuddly in a gingham school dress and genuinely tickled by the little creature she’s admiring on one outstretched hand. But in later photographs the wary look has descended and the smile is false.
The person you’ve been with since you were seventeen, the only life you know, the daddy your daughter adores . . .
/> ‘One day – one day he might, you know, really do something,’ I say.
‘Oh, darling, he’s such a silly man. He really won’t.’
She kisses me then. Her face is hot from the fire and the taste of vermouth burns in my mouth.
Then she laughs and glances at the window in the front room to make sure the curtain is closed (it is). She gets up to try the television once more. We watch for five minutes, some teenagers with hair cut like black pudding basins, then switch it off again. She wanders around the house, roams upstairs, announces herself thrilled with my art room, managing to step in some blue paint in her bare feet – she’s taken off her stockings, leaving them folded neatly on the sofa downstairs – treading it into the hall carpet so that I know I will never be able to see the nubs of cobalt there on the beige wool without thinking of her. The barely begun portrait she only smiles at – lifts once, puts it back – unaware that it’s going to be of her.
She picks up a photo album of mine, flicks through it gleefully. Is that Stanley? I show her the photograph of my mother and stepfather on their honeymoon; him dazzling and proper in a blazing white suit and boater, she his perfect shadow – I always thought they planned the photograph that way – entirely in black, with a brim so wide it obscures her face.
‘What did you say your mother did?’ Sam asks, and I tell her about the illustration board that dominated any house we ever lived in, the portfolio Mother dragged from publisher to publisher, and the times she would say to visitors, ‘Patsy is my best judge. Patsy is a little artist herself and she loves my work,’ and the way the visitors would look at her and I would read their minds: Huh! You think so?
‘Ha! That’s just you. I’m sure everyone thought you were a charming little girl’, Sam says.
There’s only the one of me and Mother, from that time, me with my big bonnet mostly hiding my face, eyes downcast, wearing a dress for once, and long socks, legs outstretched on the grass. I guess I was four or five – I don’t really remember it: it’s just something I’ve looked at, as if it was another little girl, someone else’s family. Mother has the haircut of the era – a modish bob, pressed to a perfect flick at her cheek – a dress of showy stylishness, her gaze, as ever, fixed firmly over my head.
Sam puts the album back on the art-room windowsill and follows me downstairs, where I need to add another log to the fire and check on the steaks under the grill. I remember my little pang of hurt when Sam mentioned how often a simple supper of steak and salad featured in my books. Of course, steaks back home, the fatter and juicier ones, were the height of luxury. I struggled not to feel wounded. Sam was surprised, too, that I looked hurt when she said we both knew that cooking was not my forte. I didn’t know that, I’d said. And that day when Sam brought snails from Fortnum & Mason and I refused to eat them. I wondered if she would know what creamed chipped beef on toast was. Our first days in New York, alone in the apartment, that’s what I’d fixed myself. A lifetime away from Fortnum & Mason snails.
The vermouth is finished but whisky spins in two tumblers and I hand one to Sam. I guess she would love to know more about my family and I feel like a heel for not wanting to tell her.
‘You know I hate that Freudian voodoo,’ I say.
‘Your friend Betty said she’d heard from her. Your mother. And that she’ll probably come and visit you in Suffolk while you’re here. I’d love to meet her.’
‘Betty said that? First I’ve heard. And, trust me, you wouldn’t want to meet Mother!’
‘She looks young – what is she now? Sixty? More like a sister in that photograph, than a mother. She’s awfully glamorous . . .’
I remember something then. The grey blob, and the mouse.
‘I had a . . . I don’t know what it was. A sort of . . . well, I guess some kind of child’s make-believe or, I don’t know, a hallucination . . .’
‘An imaginary friend! Delightful!’
‘It wasn’t. It was . . . a grey spot. Just at the outskirts of my sight, like a mouse skittering across the floorboards out of the corner of your eye – and I’d go look and it was never there.’
I can’t bring myself to say more. Not the mouse but the other creature is what comes into my mind then, but I shoo it away. As I’m speaking I’m searching for the oven-gloves to lift the grill pan. I’m distracted and not really listening to myself, but Sam is listening hard. She’s leaning against the kitchen wall and watching me intently.
‘What did people make of it? The – grey spot?’
‘I was ashamed to tell other people – I soon figured they didn’t see it. But they all looked so shocked. At me jumping. I mean, whenever I saw it, or shrieking. It used to happen a lot when I was reading. Lost in thought. I saw it all the time.’
‘Did it stop? How strange.’
‘Ha. Granny gave me a cat for my birthday. It quit then. Let me fix you a refresher for that drink.’
I pour more whisky into our glasses and hand one back to Sam. She moves forward, goes to scoop my hair away from my neck to kiss it. I tremble and disintegrate: I’ve turned into sherbet. ‘Don’t feel sorry for me. I hate that,’ I say, and it’s true. I’ve noticed Sam always responds this way when I talk about Stanley and Mother.
Mrs Ingham’s light is not on over at Bridge House. The curtains are closed, but who knows?
‘So sad, darling,’ Sam says, ‘thinking of you as a little girl. Only Granny to ever care about you . . .’
‘And Dan. My cousin. He was older – twenty, when I came along. He was an orphan like me.’
‘You weren’t an orphan.’ She laughs, but we both know what I mean.
‘We were like brothers more than cousins.’
‘Brother and sister, you mean.’ Again, she’s teasing me.
Another memory, this time of trying to fall asleep at night and every time wondering: Am I going to die? Is this what death feels like? How will I know? It was because they always told me dead things were ‘sleeping’: my little cat; people in the graveyards at Fort Worth . . . No wonder sleeping filled me with horror. I used to sip water – keep a glass by the bed and try to sniff it up my nose; I thought that would keep me awake. It was painful: my nose burned and my eyes smarted. I’d read comics, Ranch Romances, the Girl of the Golden West, the Girl of No Man’s Land and think about them trick roping, to keep my eyes from closing. I don’t tell Sam this but she suddenly says: ‘Did you ever think why not just give up, give it all up, it’s too painful?’
‘Please don’t say that,’ I murmur quickly. A feeling like a scalpel turning in my heart.
I am afraid to discover what she means. Is she talking about death, about suicide, or giving this up, giving us up? She has talked about suicide before – it was when I told her about my old girlfriend Allela killing herself in ’46 and how guilty I felt then, even though we weren’t any longer together, and Sam’s response: ‘I can imagine killing myself, though. Can’t you, sometimes?’ I immediately felt my ears ring and the room spiral into a tunnel; I had to put my head between my knees to keep from keeling over. Now I let her rest her cheek against mine for the barest second. I pull away, a little stiffly, and begin laying forks and knives and folded red-checked napkins and the little jug of salad dressing on the table, next to the posy of flowers I’d put there earlier.
‘What did you and Gerald fight about?’ I ask her, pretending to be casual, spooning dressing onto curls of lettuce, after rescuing a leaf first and putting it aside for the snails upstairs. I pour us a glass of water each. I’ve been thinking of Gerald since she told me. Under everything else simmers Gerald. How soft and low his voice is. Everything about him is soft: disgustingly, toxically so. His belly, his smile, his handshake. It’s as if he’s purring or vibrating with the effort to contain his own hateful feelings, his loathing.
Sam doesn’t answer. She is sitting at the table now, forks a piece of cucumber into her mouth.
‘Was it us? Did you tell him about us?’ I persist.
‘No. But he said
he knew there was someone. He assumed a man. He said: Off to see your little friend to tell her all about it. He was – you can imagine.’
Another occasion comes to me then. A publishing party. This time in a bookstore in London – Hatchard’s, was it? – after we had begun to see one another. Gerald’s brother was a writer and he liked to mix with authors. Little knots of people standing around and I, feeling awkward, was on my own, pretending to read the back of a book I’d pulled from a shelf. I glanced up when I heard raised voices. I was close to Gerald and a couple of other men. Somehow I gathered that someone had snubbed him, something trivial; someone at the party was talking about shares at the bank Gerald worked at, something dodgy, and Gerald took offence. Gerald: such a small man, slim except for that belly, like a snake that has swallowed an egg. Nothing altered in Gerald’s demeanour as he stood there, grey shirt neatly tucked in over the paunch, holding a glass of wine, that sinister softness still hovering around him. But I knew. His smoothness had a silky, poisonous quality, like something foul and gaseous. A poison. Some have it in them, some don’t, and that’s all there is to it, and I saw at once that Gerald was like me. One of those who did.