‘Did he say that?’
‘Something like that.’
‘Tell me exactly. I want to know every word he said about me - every single word -’
‘He said he didn’t think your face was as severely damaged as you believe it to be. That you ought to go home for a while to your family, and rest and use the time to think about -’
‘My family!’ he said in great disgust. ‘Ye gods, the man’s mad! Some bloody psychiatrist he is! He asked me about them and I told him what a shower they are. For God’s sake, does he really think I’m going to go and sit in Haworth with them?’
‘It might do you good to get the rest you need,’ she said, hating the idea of having him go away but feeling obscurely that it was her medical duty to urge him to do so. However much she might have hated Max Lackland and what he had said, all the same he was a consultant, and it was Brin’s right to be told what his advice was.
‘Some rest I’d get there, with my father sitting round looking as though he’s just waiting for the undertaker and my sister Sophie fussing around me like a hen with no chickens -’
‘But she would look after you?’ Charlie said.
‘Why not? She’s got nothing else to do. Ever since Ian was killed at Tobruk she’s lived with my father and fussed over him, so she’d just fuss over me too, and I -’
‘Has she no children?’
He shrugged that away. ‘They’d only been married a few weeks when Ian died, and she never got round to children. So she’d treat me like one. My blood runs cold at the very idea. No, I’m going to get this lousy scar cleaned up, if it’s the last thing I do - Charlie -’
He reached for her with both hands and seized her by the wrists, pulling her closer to him.
‘Please, Charlie, say you’ll help me? I can’t go on like this. I want to work, to get back to my career - I’ve got to - time’s running out for me. Please, Charlie, say you’ll help me -’
‘Brin, let go, for heaven’s sake. The whole ward’s staring!’
She felt her face redden as he pulled harder and she nearly lost her balance to fall over his bed, but she managed to stand her ground as he said even more urgently, ‘Charlie? You won’t pay any attention to that old fool of a nut doctor, will you? Promise me you’ll talk to McIndoe and make him take me? Please? You’ve only sent him photographs and talked to his secretary, for God’s sake - why can’t you go and see him, make him understand what it’s like to be me? You’ve got to help me, Charlie, no one else can. My life just isn’t worth living the way I am. I mean it, Charlie, I’m not just talking. I mean every word of it. If you don’t get McIndoe to fix my face then I just won’t - I’ll just give up. I swear it. Say you’ll go and see him for me -’
What else can I do? she asked herself as she looked down at that face raised to hers, at the scar snaking its way across that smooth brown cheek and the lift at the corner of the mouth; what the hell else can I do?
‘All right,’ she said at last, feeling as though the words were being pulled out of her with forceps. ‘All right. I’ll go and see him.’ And after a moment he grinned triumphantly and let go of her wrists and leaned back on his pillows, a smile lifting his uninjured cheek into contented lines, as the other one twisted into its usual sardonic shape. For the first time in weeks he looked pleased and happy. But Charlie felt deeply uneasy and far from contented. Max Lackland’s words had stung her and now she couldn’t forget them, as she looked down at Brin being pleased at last with the way things were going for him.
7
‘Oh, my dear, no! Absolutely out of the question. You don’t know what you’re asking. I couldn’t possibly.’ And Letty leaned back in her armchair and settled herself more deeply into its embrace as though she had no intention of ever leaving it again.
Lee looked at her and then around the room and sighed. This was one place that never seemed to change. In spite of bombs - of which Albany had had its share - and the long fatigue of war, and shortages and dreariness in general, here in Letty’s flat it was for ever 1935, when life was glittery fun and there was plenty to eat and drink and pretty clothes were everywhere and no one worried about anything more than the newest revue or the latest film and who was making the most delicious cocktails.
Except for me, she thought. I was worrying then about having babies and getting so anxious I was misery to live with, and now there they are, my Michael and Sally and Stella, and I ought to be so happy - but thinking about being happy meant thinking about Harry and she wasn’t here to think about Harry. She was here to talk to Letty and persuade her to work for Nellie’s.
The fire muttered in the grate, and a few embers fell in with a little hiss and rattle and Letty leaned forwards to look consideringly at her small stock of coal in the scuttle.
‘Now, shall I or shan’t I?’ she said musingly, as though there was nothing more important to think about in all the world than the state of her coal supplies. ‘If I put more on now, will I be able to light a fire tomorrow? Mrs Alf told me this very morning that for all her nagging the coalman says he can’t come again for a fortnight, and it could get even colder and nastier yet, couldn’t it? And it’s still only October - What shall I do, Lee? To warm or not to warm? That is the question.’
‘Put some on. I’ve got a few logs I’ve managed to get from Johanna. They’ve been cutting timber at Collingbourne, she said, and she’s sending me some next week. I can let you have a few as soon as they arrive.’
‘Oh, the joy of having relatives among the landed gentry!’ Letty said sardonically and at once piled more coal onto the grate. It cowered there for a moment and then the flames leapt up from the embers and lit the room into a new cosiness. The light flickered on the old wood of the furniture, burnishing it to a richer sheen than even Mrs Alf, Letty’s indefatigable housekeeper, could manage, and lifting the warm reds out of the old Turkey carpet on the floor.
‘It’s lovely to be here with you, Letty,’ Lee said impulsively. ‘It’s like the War never happened, being here. It’s all so warm and cosy - and you’ve hardly changed at all.’
And she smiled at the older woman, trying to convince herself she was telling the truth and knowing she wasn’t, really.
Letty was looking older and much more tired than she had used to look. Once sturdy and solid, her familiar head with its square-cut grey hair held high, now she looked rather as though some part of her had fallen in on itself, leaving her a little shrunken and somehow hollow. She seemed to need fuel to fill out those narrowed cheeks with the fine lines which softened the skin to a papery delicacy, seemed to want warmth to lift her once vigorous body back into its old strength. She sat there and looked at Lee, her eyes, the only part of her that really seemed unchanged, glittering wickedly, and she laughed and shook her head.
‘Stuff and nonsense. The flat may look the same, but I’m damned sure I don’t. I’m old and I’m tired and it’s time I turned up my toes.’
‘Rubbish,’ Lee said strongly. ‘You’re not that old. You can’t be -’
‘Sixty-five,’ Letty said and made a face.
‘Then you ought to be ashamed of yourself, talking about being old enough to turn up your toes and so forth. At sixty-five? Bless you, my father’s five years older than you and he’d be ashamed to be heard talking so!’
‘Ah, your father - he’s a man of God, though, isn’t he? They always stay young longer -’
‘Pooh!’ Lee said. ‘He seems religious, I grant you - spends more time at the synagogue than he does at home, but I dare say that’s as much because Mamma chatters at him so much as because of any deep piety. But seriously, Letty, you really shouldn’t be talking so - so pessimistically. It’s not healthy. Whatever’s the matter to make you so low?’
Letty made a face again. ‘I’m tired, I suppose. That Benefit I did for the war orphans - it half killed me. It’s hell to get hold of so much as a length of flex to mend a set of lights and as for costumes - ye gods, it was like pulling teeth.’
�
��It was a marvellous show, though, for all that!’ Lee said. ‘I enjoyed it hugely. It looked lavish and glittery and - really, it was just like one of those marvellous pre-war things we all used to take so much for granted.’
‘Well, most of the stuff we used I dug out from the various warehouses where I stored it, but it was on its last legs. Some of those costumes were in tatters, and they certainly can’t be used again. So, if you’re working your way round to trying to persuade me, dear Lee, to go through all that again, the answer is still no.’
‘Oh, Letty, you really don’t change a bit!’ Lee said and laughed. ‘All right, I am going to try to persuade you. I don’t care how much you fuss and try to get out of it, I’m going to find some way to make you see how much we need you.’ And she launched herself into an account of Nellie’s pressing financial problems, painting a graphic picture of ailing patients waiting for admission, of gallant nurses and doctors struggling to cope with inadequate supplies of everything from syringe needles to actual beds; but all through it Letty sat unmoved, watching her with those glittering dark eyes, and smiling faintly so that her lined cheeks creased agreeably.
And when Lee at last ran out of breath and stopped talking she smiled even more widely and said sweetly but with definite finality, ‘No, Lee, my darling. You’re a dear girl, and your determination does you infinite credit, but no, no, no.’
Lee sat silently and looked at her, and Letty smiled amiably back and then leaned forwards to pour more tea for them both from the tray Mrs Alf had left there waiting on the low mahogany table where a blue faience bowl of bronze chrysanthemums glowed in the firelight. And then Lee sighed and said abruptly, ‘Well, all right, if I can’t persuade you to do it for the good of Nellie’s, maybe you’ll do it for Peter.’
Letty’s hands stopped moving among the cups and saucers and the milk jug but she did not lift her eyes, and then she went on calmly pouring milk into tea and said easily, ‘Peter?’
‘You haven’t forgotten Peter,’ Lee said. ‘And you can’t pretend you have, so don’t try to fool me, Letty.’
‘Of course I haven’t forgotten Peter. No one could. How is he?’
‘Have you seen him lately?’
‘If I had I wouldn’t need to ask.’
‘Nor have I. No one has.’
‘What’s the news of him then? You’ve seen Max and the Old Man?’
‘We were all at the Governors’ meeting, when we talked about this Benefit idea,’ Lee said, and then lifted her hand as Letty opened her mouth to protest. ‘No, hear me out. That’s the point, you see. We talked about Peter as well as the idea of the Benefit.’
‘Well?’
‘The Old Man is dreadfully unhappy about him.’
‘Aren’t we all,’ Letty said and leaned back in her chair again, turning her face away from Lee to look into the now steadily glowing fire. ‘Dear Peter. It’s a dreadful thing to know he’s still so unhappy -’
‘Max and his father - we all agree that he needs something to do. Something that would make him think about other things. Not just - whatever it is he sits and thinks about there at home on his own.’
Letty took a long slow breath and nodded, ‘I see. I see it all. You think that if I do another Benefit I can persuade Peter to help me with it? That it would be some sort of therapy for him?’
‘Why not? It might work.’
‘Yes. It might.’
It might, it might. It had worked for Theo, after all, Letty thought. And suddenly it was as though almost thirty years had rolled away from her and she was a girl again making her first important film in the streets of London on Armistice Night. She could smell the acrid shreds of fog that had filled the air that night and the reek of heavy beer and gin in which the revellers had seemed to be wrapped, and could see Theo’s face gleaming at her out of the darkness. Dear Theo who had been, and was still, so beautiful a man. That face that she had been the first to recognize as being so rich in potential was imprinted on the romantic imaginations of three-quarters of the women in the world, but he had been hers first. He had been a shell-shocked, deeply disturbed man and she had pulled him out of the morass into which the War had flung him and given him back to himself. And to other people, God damn it, and to other people. And now, here was Lee asking her to do it again for someone else. For Peter, who had worked with her and for her so steadily and devotedly for so many years before the War - and she was so tired, so deeply bone tired and those fleeting pains she had been trying to ignore in her belly for so long weren’t as fleeting as they had been, and she was tired, tired, tired -
In the facing armchair Lee too was staring at the glow of the fire, also immersed in her own thoughts. Peter, she was thinking. Peter who had been so kind to her, who had helped her so much on that long frightening journey they had shared through Europe as the threat of war had grown darker and heavier. Peter who had taught her to find her peace of mind, who had found her beloved Michael for her, had helped her to bring him home. Peter who had loved her so much. More than Harry does, she thought then, more than Harry does. Maybe Peter still does want me, or maybe he could again? And then there would be someone to care for me, to hold me as though I mattered to him and not just because he wanted to please himself, who would look at me as though he saw me and not just a dull wife, who -
‘Please, Letty,’ she said then, not appealingly, not coaxingly, but very directly. ‘Please, will you do it for Peter? He needs help so much. Whatever else comes of it, do it for Peter.’
And if the whatever else that comes of it is some sort of happiness for me then I’ll take it, I won’t turn my back on it. I’ll learn to be reckless and live for me and think of what I want, just for once.
‘If he says he wants to, then I’ll have to,’ Letty said after a long moment. ‘But it will be for him and not for the hospital. Understand that. If he refuses then so do I.’
And if working with Peter again makes me feel better, less hollow, makes the pains go away for a while, then I suppose it’s worth it. Even though I know I ought to tell someone at Nellie’s about how I hurt and get something done about it, I won’t, because I know damned well what it is and I don’t want to be meddled with. But working again with Peter will make me well again. And absurd though she knew the notion was, she felt better, suddenly, as a little surge of unfamiliar energy rose in her.
‘Come on then,’ she said, and got to her feet. ‘The sooner we ask him the better.’
Lee stared. ‘You mean - go and see him now? But why not phone? Or even write to him?’ She was frightened, suddenly, of the thought of actually seeing him, frightened and excited too.
‘That would be stupid,’ Letty said brusquely but not unkindly. ‘He’d not talk, or he’d tear the letter up, the way he is. The way I’ve been told he is, that is. If we’re there, sitting there in front of him, he won’t be able to say no, will he?’ She laughed then. ‘Any more than I managed to say no to you, sitting there, you wretch. Come on. Let’s see if we can find a cab. It might be our lucky day. You never know.’
The last three games of Patience had come out as easily as melted butter oozing through hot toast, and he stared down at the piles of playing-cards on the table in front of him and thought - maybe if the next one does it as well it will be all right? Maybe then I’ll find the courage to get up, go to the door, take my hat and call out to old Jenny in the kitchen that I’m just going for a stroll, to have dinner at a restaurant, go to a play, tell my father I’ll see him at breakfast? And he reached for the cards to pile them together again, to shuffle them and relay them for a new game. And then pulled back.
And suppose it doesn’t come out? Will I see that as yet another reminder that I have no right to be here, that I ought to be dead like all of them? I can’t go on setting myself these stupid targets, I can’t - it makes it worse, not better; and he got to his feet sharply, moving so quickly that he sent the table tipping and the cards spilling all over the carpet, but he made no attempt to pick them up. There wou
ld have been a time, long ago, when such untidiness would have offended his fastidious eye, when he would have had, willy-nilly, to get to his knees to collect them all together again. But now he paid no attention to such trifles. Now he didn’t care what his surroundings were like. They could be as ill kept as he was himself, with his unshaven hollow face and his staring eyes and his hair ill-cut and straggling over his collar. His trousers, old flannels which had been worn out even before the War and which were now sagging and threadbare, hung on his thin shanks like rags and the old cardigan he wore had torn elbows, and he didn’t give a damn. He almost seemed to revel in his own squalor, resisting fiercely any attempt by old Jenny to take his clothes to mend and press them and glaring at his father with those hot deep-set eyes when he said anything about getting him something better to wear.
He went to stand at the window as he so often did, staring out onto the street below, looking slightly to his left so that he could see the traffic of the Bayswater Road. Below him the stucco of the house front was peeling a little in the driving rain and he thought for a moment - Mamma. She would have been mortified to see her house in such a sad state, Mamma who had been so particular about details, who had been so warm and so dimpled and so altogether Mamma-ish, and he tried to conjure up a picture of her in his mind’s eye, tried to see the round face and even rounder body that had been Miriam, the softness of her and the sweetness of her - but it failed of course, as did every attempt to think of anything other than that which he had to think of.
And now there they were again, marching past against the background of the Bayswater Road and its splashing pedestrians hunched against the driving rain and its swishing vans and lumbering red buses; the endless parade of figures that never left him. Skeletal, with dead eyes and shaven heads, shuffling along on their almost thread-like limbs, fragile inside the black and grey stripes of their cotton uniforms, looking at him as they went past him, their mouths open in silent shrieks, telling him, begging him, demanding that he do something, get them out, take them home again to real life where people ate food and lay in real beds and could sleep in the sure knowledge that they would wake next morning to live another day, instead of being dragged to a gas chamber to -
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