A Time to Heal

by Claire Rayner

  “Oh, that’s all right. I’m very authorized. They’re my monkeys. I’m Dr. Berry.” And then, as he still looked suspiciously as though he were going to send her away, she fished in her pocket for something to identify herself. “Here—will this convince you? A letter addressed to me—see?”

  He looked at the crumpled envelope, and then more closely at her face, and suddenly smiled, which made him look even younger.

  “Sorry, madam. Of course. I recognize you now. Saw you on the J. J. Gerrard program, didn’t I? Go right ahead, madam.”

  “Thank you,” she said drily, and went into the main room, lined with its tall cages, and noisy with the activity of the monkeys who raised a great chatter as they saw her.

  “Smelly little beasts, aren’t they?” The policeman stood at the door, looking at the animals with an expression of distaste on his round polished pink face. “Can’t be doing with animals myself. Dirty objects!”

  “You probably smell unpleasant to them,” she said shortly. “They don’t smell as they do because they’re dirty. Only because that’s their natural scent. Could you close that door, please? Drafts are very bad for them; they’re delicate little creatures and need a controlled temperature.”

  Pinker than ever the policeman went away, closing the door sharply behind him, and she pushed one hand deep into her pocket and began the tour of the room. She always followed the same route, starting at the far end and zigzagging from one side to the other, missing no cage, and finishing at the door. She took a handful of nuts from the bowl on the feed table to reward them with, and they chattered and shrilled at her, their alarmingly intelligent little faces, as expressive as always, pushed against the cage bars to greet her.

  “There you are, funny face,” she murmured as the largest monkey in the far pen reached through the bars with tiny perfect fingers, so veined and delicate that they looked like models for a Capo di Monte figurine. “Some for you. Are you fit and well, you lovely thing? Are you—?”

  She always talked to them in this nursery fashion, and she was really rather ashamed of it; but it came to her so naturally and easily and it gave her some pleasure to do so, so she continued with the habit. Sometimes she had wondered whether she wasn’t being thoroughly absurd, anthropomorphizing like some writer of nursery storybooks. Or perhaps she liked treating these elegant intelligent creatures as though they were her babies in an effort to deny their intelligence, to make herself feel less guilt about using them as she did.

  For she did feel guilt, in a totally unscientific way, in a highly subjective emotional fashion. Whenever she saw them, with their beautiful liquid eyes, their shapely little heads, their arrogant curling tails, she wanted to look away, feeling herself to be a great ugly clodhopping soulless lump when compared to them. And when she had to make them diseased, in order to try her treatment, she suffered a good deal of distress; to deliberately damage such charming little humanoids demanded considerable efforts of will.

  She felt soothed and more comfortable when she reached the door, her largesse of nuts disposed, and sure in her own mind of the health and vigor of each one of them. They had all had cancers of one form or another, and had survived her treatment. She felt a great affection for them all as she looked back at them squatting in their cages and chewing delicately at the food she had given out.

  Theo was waiting in the unit when she got back, perched on the comer of Catherine’s desk and watching her capable hands moving over the graphs. He looked up eagerly as she came in.

  “Hattie, dear, how are you this morning? You look better than I’d hoped, I must say.”

  “Good morning, Theo. Please, don’t fuss about me. I’m perfectly fit, thank you. Look, there’s something I want to—can we go to the ward? I want to see George, and—”

  “George. Mmm. Look, Hattie, I Bed to you last night.”

  “What?” She had gone over to her own desk to make a note in the animal health book, and she looked up sharply at the heavy sound in Theo’s voice. “Lied? About George?”

  “Yes. You were in no condition to—”

  “Never mind that. What about him? How is he?”

  “Not too bad. But he had another small infarct yesterday—not too unexpected, after all! Sam did warn you. Fortunately Sam was in the ward when the monitor started bleeping, and got him out of fibrillation very quickly. He’s not bad at all this morning, considering.”

  She put the book down on the desk. “Catherine, I’ll be in the ward, Dr. Lemesurier’s, if anyone wants me. Will you tell John Caister that I’ve checked the big animal room this morning, as soon as he comes on? I didn’t check anything apart from temperature and humidity, though, so he’d better—or you could do it at the one o’clock round. All right? Theo, later, I want to talk to you.”

  “Now, if you like.” He got to his feet. “I’m not operating this afternoon and I’ve done my morning rounds. So, at your service.”

  They went up in the lift to the ward in silence, however, for he looked at her face, closed and remote, and kept quiet. She was angry, obviously, but there was more than that in her preoccupation. She knew he was aware of her mood, and was catering to it, and that made her more tense; the sense of responsibility it forced on her was more than she wanted at this moment.

  George was lying propped against his pillows, sleeping, his face looking narrower and more fragile than it had been when she last saw him. There was a high round flush on each cheek that looked absurd, almost as though he were a wooden doll. His pajama jacket was open, and she could see the monitoring pads strapped over his ribs in the area of the heart’s apex, and the delicate licorice ribbons that were the leads coiling away among the sparse grayish hair toward the monitor screen. Automatically she raised her eyes to look at it, and for almost a full minute, she and Theo stood there watching the little yellow spark bouncing its cheerful way across the screen, leaving fine traces behind it that disappeared even as they were looked at.

  As though in the depths of his sleep he became aware of their presence, the old man moved his head, and grimaced so that his mouth opened to show the flecked yellow teeth, and then his eyes opened, and for a moment he looked blankly at them, uncomprehending and dull. Then recognition came, as obviously as if he had been a hawk with transparent eyelids to roll back.

  “Said you wanted—” he said hoarsely. “Got rid of me, didn’t you, got rid of me? Told ’em …” He closed his eyes again, and seemed to have gone back to sleep, but then he opened them again, and stared malevolently at Harriet, and she opened her mouth to speak to him, but Theo was before her.

  “You do talk a lot of old cobblers, George,” he said, and his voice carried a hearty friendliness. “Get rid of you, indeed! Believe me, you’re a lot more trouble here than you ever are at home. The sooner they can get you better and out of here, the better everyone’ll be pleased.”

  “Much you know,” the old man muttered. “You don’t know nothing about her and what she does. Boyfriend …” He closed his eyes again and then snapped them open, and said very loudly, “Great pansy! Filthy poof—”

  Harriet’s face filled with a scarlet flush but she couldn’t prevent herself from looking sideways at Theo. For a moment she could see humiliation in his expression but then he smiled, hugely, and turned and looked at her, and the smile was in his eyes as well, and didn’t seem to be covering any less pleasant emotion; only amusement was there.

  “Noticing old bastard!” he murmured. “Don’t look so stricken, dear heart! He’s not the first to taunt me, and surely won’t be the last. Usually, you know, remarks like that bespeak a certain—shall we say, AC/DC temperament? But perhaps we can acquit George. At his age and in his state of health, who could do otherwise?”

  He turned and looked at the old man again, once more sleeping with his mouth hanging lax and unattractive, and then took her arm and led her out of the ward toward the office-cum-kitchen.

  “You wanted to talk to me,” he said. “About George, I imagine? I’m sorry
about misleading you last night, but you really weren’t in any condition—”

  “I know,” she said abstractedly. “It doesn’t matter, not now. I’ve sorted out what to do anyway. Do you suppose Sam’d let him be moved, Theo? After this new attack?”

  “Ask him,” Theo said. “He’s in his office downstairs. You say you’ve definitely—what happened yesterday?”

  She had started down the stairs, moving purposefully, and he had to hurry to keep up with her.

  “Later—I’ll tell you later. But I need to talk to Sam first. Ah–there he is. Sam! Just a moment—”

  He looked back over his shoulder, and came back up the stairs, for he had been going on down to the next floor.

  “Might have known it,” he said equably. “Every time I go to get myself a bloody cup of coffee, someone comes between me and it. How’re you, Harriet? Proper Boadicea stunt you pulled last night, I hear! I thought you’d be very hors de combat this morning.”

  “A little bruised, that’s all. Sam, I want to talk to you about my father-in-law.”

  “I didn’t think you wanted to proposition me. Come on—you too, Theo? Some Boadicea you’re turning out to be—nurse-maided all the time by this surgical oaf—”

  He chattered on, totally unoffending in spite of the things he was saying, as he led them into his untidy little office, heavy with the fustiness of stale cigarette smoke, and heaved a pile of books off the only armchair for Harriet.

  “Now, about the old boy’s heart,” he began. “You’ve seen him this morning?”

  “Yes. He looks—”

  “Ropy. I know. But it’s not as bad as he looks. It was a very small infarct, yesterday’s, and his prognosis is about the same in spite of it. He just needs extra care at the moment. So things aren’t all that different, really.”

  “There’s one thing that’s important to know, Sam,” she said, and smiled at him. “And in asking this, I want you to know how grateful I am to you for looking after him as you have.”

  “Oh, listen, it’s a pleasure, believe me,” Sam said awkwardly. “I must say, I’ve been feeling a bit of a sod about saying he had to go, the way I did last Sunday. But, Christ—you know how it is here, Harriet! Oscar on our tails like some bloody hound dog, always sniffing about costs. And there just aren’t the resources here for ordinary treatment! Just this handful of research beds, so—”

  “I know Sam. So, how soon can he be moved safely?”

  “How soon?” Sam turned the corners of his mouth downward as he thought about it. “Hard to say for sure—no less than a week, anyway, after yesterday’s go. Say a couple of weeks. We’ll keep him here that long, and sod Oscar if he starts his—”

  “I’ll deal with Oscar,” she said. “Don’t worry about that.”

  “Where have you arranged for him to go?” Sam asked, fishing in his pocket for a cigarette. “Got him into a home, have you?”

  “Whyborne,” she said after a moment, and Sam put down the cigarette unlit, and stared at her.

  “Whyborne? Jesus! That’ll cost you a fortune, won’t it?”

  “They treat staff and their families free of charge,” she said flatly, and didn’t look at either of them, keeping her eyes fixed on her hands crossed in her lap.

  There was a long silence, and then Theo said carefully, “I see. Have you told Oscar?”

  She looked at him then, “No. Not yet. I think—I’ll have to tell him tonight. Not now. Tonight.”

  She was bewildered, totally bewildered, and for a while let him go on, without either resisting or cooperating. He was kissing her with a controlled violence that was unusual in him, his hands moving against her body with an urgency that was beginning to excite her—more than just beginning, in fact—and now she pulled back, trying to hold his hands away from her and having to use a good deal of force.

  “Oscar? For God’s sake, Oscar, listen to me, will you? Did you hear what I said? I—”

  “I heard you.” He looked at her closely, his eyes a little narrowed. “I heard you.” He took his hands away from her hold, and reached for her again, and this time she let him pull her brassiere off altogether, just as he had already pulled off her blouse, cooperated as he fumbled with the fastenings of her skirt and then tugged impatiently at her girdle.

  It was all so ridiculous; she had started to tell him about her decision to go to Whyborne, and why, and he had listened, and then started making love to her, right there in the drawing room in front of the fire, pulling her down onto the heavy rug. She couldn’t remember him doing that ever before; Oscar was a man of elegance and order and had always made it clear that he loathed what he defined as messiness, preferring to invest everything he did, even and perhaps particularly sex, with style and a certain panache. Usually before he made love to her he bathed and shaved, came to her wrapped in a handsome dressing gown over gleaming skin just faintly scented with one of the subtle body oils he so favored. And certainly he liked her to be bathed and powdered and scented for him; had once objected because she had come to bed too soon after brushing her teeth, so that she smelled of spearmint. “Very unerotic, my dear,” he had murmured, and she had learned the lesson well.

  Yet now, they were rolling on the rug like a pair of urgent children who had just discovered sex and thought they had invented it; certainly he was. He was kissing her body now, his head moving against the bare skin of her belly, and then he moved more sharply, and with a shock of pleasure so intense that it made her almost cry aloud, she realized that he was intending to provide her with all the stimulus she most enjoyed and which made her most eagerly responsive.

  There had been times during the past eighteen years when he had apparently gently but with unmistakable intent teased her about her “peasant earthiness—such very carnal tastes, yours, my dear. But there, women—so sensual—” Yet now he was being quite as sensual as she could ever wish him to be and she was lost, quite lost in the sea of sensation into which he had plunged her with such skill and dispatch. She no longer cared why he was behaving so, only how, and with the urgency rising in her reached for him, to try to pull him closer to her to make him move more quickly and directly, but he laughed softly and said, “Not yet–wait a little—not yet—” and again dipped his head toward her body so that this time she did cry out with her need and urgency.

  And eventually, just when she thought she could bear it no longer, but would reach orgasm too soon so that it was a merely surface experience instead of the deep reality which she most urgently wanted it to be, he moved and plunged at her, hurting her marvelously over and over again.

  And then they were lying still, damp and breathless, and he moved away from her slightly and whispered, “Good? Was it good?”

  She laughed softly, deep in her throat. “Bloody marvelous. Bloody marvelous. As if you didn’t know …”

  “Twice?”

  She yawned hugely, and then laughed her growling laugh again, and said, “Yes. Twice. Like the Queen of Aragon—”

  He laughed too, but more loudly, and his lips were so close to her ear that she winced at the sound, and he rolled away from her, to lie on his back beside her, staring upward, and she lay there too in a haze of pleasure, watching the flames of the fire making patterns on the plastered cornice of the ceiling.

  She dozed for a while, and woke sharply as the light struck her lids. He came from the lightswitch to sit down on the sofa, fully dressed and sleek, staring down at her, and she lay there looking up at him, blinking a little, and said uncertainly, “Oscar? I fell asleep—”

  “Indeed you did,” he said, and continued to look at her, quite unsmiling, and she became aware of the way she looked, of her tights still dangling from one leg, of the rest of her clothes Uttered about, and she sat up, stiff and awkward, suddenly very aware of her own body.

  She could see all too clearly how it must look to him; quite apart from the ugly blue and purple bruises of yesterday’s incident, there were the somewhat heavy sagging breasts, the crêpy pleated s
kin across her belly, legacy of two pregnancies, the gleaming white stretch marks across her hips. To be looked at by a fully dressed man, in very bright light and under such conditions was suddenly the most deeply embarrassing thing that had ever happened to her. She collected her clothes awkwardly, and with all the dignity she could muster, knowing it to be pitifully little, went to the bathroom to wash and dress and repair her self-esteem.

  He was sitting beside the newly made-up fire, a pot of coffee and two cups ready on the small table, when she came back, and he looked at her and nodded toward the other armchair, and she went there, feeling almost like a gawky teen-ager again.

  He gave her a cup of coffee, and she sipped it, and then put it down beside her. It was too hot, and somehow even that made her feel at a disadvantage.

  “What happened to you, Oscar?” she said lightly, and smiled at him. “Such urgency! Really, if I’d been Mata Hari, you couldn’t have been more …” she shrugged.

  “But you aren’t Mata Hari, are you, my dear?” He smiled at her for the first time, she realized with a faint surprise, since she had woken.

  “No, I suppose not. But I’ve never pretended to be! I’m just Harriet, that’s all.”

  He laughed a little. “And I know Harriet very well, don’t I? Hmm? Do I know how to make you happy, my dear? Do I please you?”

  “You know bloody well you do! You’re as talented a lover as–oh, I don’t know. I’ve never precisely set out to make a comparative study! Apart from you and David, I’ve no criteria. I just know that you … make me feel happy, yes. You please me, yes. Is that why you were so urgent, Oscar, because you were suddenly filled with the need to prove yourself a great lover?”

  “Not to me, my dear. Not to me. But I was attempting to prove something. I suspect I’ve succeeded.” He drank some coffee, and then refilled his cup. “The question now is, have I proved it to you? Because that was the object of the exercise.”

  “I’m not sure I understand what it is you’re getting at, Oscar.” She sat back in her chair, watching him closely, her arms resting heavily on the brocade covering, feeling in herself a weariness that contained as much of the memory of yesterday’s aches as of this evening’s sex.