‘There is no need for that,’ she said. ‘I’m there.’
‘But Miriam, you will be ill yourself! Why this sacrifice?’
‘Beatrice is all I have in the way of family,’ she said helplessly. She did not try to explain their wary complicity, each protecting the other. She was not sure that she could explain it, could dissipate the puzzled frown on his healthy face, assure him of her own equilibrium. Nevertheless she turned down his further invitations, insisting that she had to be home by two, when Mrs Kinsella left. That was why she went to the London Library in the morning these days. She felt ashamed. How could she entertain him with reports from Wilbraham Place, where she discovered, on her return to the flat, the main topic of conversation had been Anne Marie Kinsella’s change of job, from the record shop to the supermarket? How could she tell him about the odd communion of their Sunday walks, of their prehistory? What could he know of women like herself, even if he were anxious to find out? He devised meetings for them, coffee, lunch, but these delayed her too much. Work, and the money thus earned, were too important to be relegated to second place. She tried, once again, to explain all this, heard her voice growing shrill, and stopped, abashed. He too had heard the rising note of exasperation, was reminded of her behaviour when they had last had dinner together, and had concluded that she was moody, moody being his euphemism for difficult.
‘You mean you think I’m being hysterical?’
‘I think you’re over-reacting, certainly.’
‘Oh, Tom, Beatrice has no one.’
‘That’s very sad, of course. But must she have you?’
‘Yes. I think she must.’
‘I see,’ he said stiffly.
She remembered that tone of voice – formal rather than hurt – from previous attempts she had made at self-justification. He was not a man to indulge irrational feelings, hers or his own. If he were disappointed it would be because he was a little tired of her increasingly fraught expression, and, more than that, of the lost look in her eyes, which were surely larger, as if her face had grown thin. He would have liked to see her more often, fully intended to do so, but was not quite so keen on having the same conversation all the time. He could see that she was frightened, but failed to understand that her wordless confession of fear was her only relief from the stoical common sense that served her so well at home. He could not give full weight to her kind of suffering, having seen the real thing at too close quarters, in Malaysia, in Indonesia, where he conducted his own investigations into abuses by the state. His own work seemed to him more interesting than Miriam’s problems of domestic organization. She could see this, knew that he wanted to trust her, but did not want to shoulder these particular burdens. More important: he did not appreciate being held at arms’ length. He could make the appropriate noises of sympathy, could feel for her quite genuinely, but would have liked to see her attention directed towards himself rather than unhappily wandering.
‘I’m sure your sister urges you to go out,’ he said.
‘Oh, yes. Yes, she does.’
‘Then what about coming out with me next Sunday? You said you liked to walk …’
‘But you see I usually take Beatrice for a walk on Sunday. It’s become a routine. It’s really the only time she has a change of scene.’
‘I see,’ he said again, and summoned their waiter for the bill.
She saw with despair that she had nearly ruined something of value, even in that moment admired him for not flinging down his napkin, admired the courtesy he still showed her, and recognized her own inability to convey to this attractive and normally constituted man, to whom fortune had probably been kind, her own particular brand of sadness. This defeat had been preceded by the one she could not talk about, least of all to Tom Rivers, and if she saw him clearly, saw the set of his shoulders and the firmness of his jaw, she could still see clearly, too clearly, the graceful figure of the one who had proved even stronger than she had thought herself to be, and whom she now saw in her mind’s eye as poised for escape. Recognition of her signal failure added to her shame: she too retreated into courtesy. He kissed her cheek as usual, but it was now she who wanted more. Sadly she turned away, knowing that this was an impossibility. He watched her bent head, was sure that he had lost her.
She also knew that Beatrice was aware of her fear, yet was still strong enough not to share it. Miriam found it difficult these days to know what Beatrice was thinking or feeling. What was never referred to was the fact that their mother, and indeed their father, had both suffered strokes, from which they had subsequently died. But Beatrice appeared to have retreated into a form of serenity into which it would have been unkind to intrude. Of the two of them, Miriam thought, Beatrice was decidedly the more composed, which did nothing to lessen her own sense of failure, failure of heart, of nerve, even of intelligence, for she did not see the way ahead, or rather saw it only fitfully. Her duty, she knew, was to continue, but she sometimes doubted whether she could continue for very long. She put her condition down to justifiable fatigue, promised herself a break from her present habit of working late, placed her hopes in momentary recovery, and grew wistful, as sleep continued to elude her. In her mind much information had become elusive, obscure. For this reason, perhaps, she became wordless. In any event, she had never been any good at unburdening herself. She had only to look back on her recent conversation with Tom Rivers to realize how she misunderstood the whole process.
Beatrice was more aware of Miriam’s disarray than of her own. She knew that for all Miriam’s studied impassivity and frequent disapproval her sister was tender-hearted, knew without asking or being told that something irreversible had taken place, that last hopes had been relinquished, that disappointment had set in. She did not entirely blame herself for this; in fact her own state of mind was curious, almost resigned. But she also knew that without her Miriam would have a better chance. This thought glanced across her mind from time to time, without dismay, as if she had read it in a book. But she did not read much these days, preferring to go through the biscuit tin of old photographs, which she examined attentively, as if looking for clues to her own history. Here were her mother and father on their wedding day, her father smugly smiling, her mother with a faint crease of doubt on her still pretty face. That doubt had become endemic, as though her husband, who continued to smile, but whose smile increasingly embodied exasperation and possibly genuine unhappiness, even before the birth of the children, somehow declared that he was let down, misunderstood. He had thought, no doubt, that his own faults should have been dealt with sympathetically, rather than angrily repudiated. There were no more photographs of their parents together, only one of their mother, anxiously smiling, one hand on the railing of the steps leading down into the garden. A widow then, she had accepted widowhood gratefully, but still that smile was anxious, as if there were no one there any longer to tell her what to do. Anxiety was the key to the whole family, that and the knowledge that there were no guides, no one to advise them how to achieve a better life, better than the one that had so badly let them down.
Here was Miriam, aged three or four, her eyes already dark with apprehension, seated on the obligatory cushion, her hand on a large ball. She was wearing an uncomfortable-looking pleated silk dress, and her hair was long and brushed fiercely back. Another one of Miriam, the most disturbing, showed her clasping a doll, and not doing so naturally, as if the doll had only been lent to her and could be reclaimed at any minute by its rightful owner. She had cut off her hair as an act of defiance when she was fourteen. Beatrice remembered how their mother had shrieked and wept, pressed her hand to her heart and threatened to faint, while their father had trembled with rage. It was Beatrice who had taken her to the hairdresser and had watched while he tidied it up, until a small pretty head had emerged, and her face had taken on a tentative smile. But when they returned home their parents had pretended not to notice, and the matter was never referred to. Miriam had worn it short ever since: sometimes Beatric
e could trace the abstracted expression of the child on the plain clever face. No one had said, ‘Well done.’
Here was Beatrice at her piano, smiling that discreet smile that accompanied all her performances. She had long ago discarded the childish photographs, as if all she cared about, and cared to have recorded, was the finished person, the musician, seated at the piano, directing that winning smile at some unknown listener, who would ideally be more watcher than listener, keen to study the graceful figure, keen to believe that she was playing for him, or so she hoped. He had never revealed himself, however. There were studio portraits of her which interested her far less. These had in common the strenuous upward glance, the strained throat and parted lips that had been de rigueur for this kind of display. One or two of them had even appeared in the newspapers, on her retirement, which she had announced bravely. ‘I’m going before they tell me to go,’ she had told an interviewer. No one knew the story behind that retirement, or rather that dismissal. No one had said, ‘Well done,’ that time either.
Faced with the glossy almost continental smiles of those latter-day portraits (someone had remarked at the time that she resembled Elisabeth Schwarzkopf) she could hardly believe that she had endured her career for so long. It had in many ways been a mistake, a misadventure, although at the time it had seemed like the card of identity that would permit her to enter the adult world. She had never felt at home. Her rising tide of panic at being so exposed she had fought down successfully, but sometimes, on her way to the concert hall, she had had to stop and force herself to breathe slowly. That was what she now remembered: the fear. So that for all her brave words, and her burning feeling of shame at being so disposed of, she was not really sorry when her career had been taken away from her, had come to terms with her invisibility which had been experienced as a relief, had almost enjoyed playing at being the kind of woman she envied, idle, home-loving, self-indulgent, no further efforts required.
Ideally she would have chosen an alternative career, as a kept woman, perhaps, like those women in Colette’s stories, which Miriam had once urged on her. They had been so close then. Now they no longer confided in each other, as if unwilling to confess to the burden of failure that they both carried. Beatrice even found it restful not to speak, conscious as she was of her faintly lopsided mouth. She preferred to dwell on the remote past, that time before the bright hopes faded. She dated their emergence into adulthood from the day that Miriam had cut her hair. How well she had dealt with that incident, had commanded the hairdresser to delay another appointment, had supervised carefully as the scissors crept round Miriam’s newly naked ears! Her triumph on that occasion was the only undilutedly happy memory she could dredge out of a past marked mainly by half measures. But Miriam had known; Miriam had always known. It was another matter of which they never spoke.
The immediate past did not detain her, although there was a photograph of Max among the others. She had asked him for one, like a neophyte at the stage door, when he had got her her first engagement. He had appreciated the request in a way he never entirely forgot, much as she remembered Miriam’s haircut. Was it true that she had intended to go away with him, to live some entirely fictitious life in the south of France? She could no longer believe in her own folly, which had been prompted by desperation. She had always had a tendency to invent alternative lives for herself, lives which had come to nothing. And word had reached her that Max too was unwell, had developed a tremor that convulsed his face from time to time. So that the retirement in the sun that she had planned for both of them would have been a geriatric affair. She was glad that it had come to nothing.
Her own life, she knew, was finished. At some point she would be removed to a hospital or a nursing-home, as Miriam had once removed their mother. She would prefer to die at home, or even to linger on indefinitely, but she knew that this would be too hard on Miriam. Neither of them, she thought, had deserved their premature reclusion. She sometimes dreaded Miriam’s return to the flat, when both would have to pretend that they were more cheerful than was the case. This almost evangelical cheerfulness grated on them both. It must, she thought, be even worse for Miriam, whose cynical nature had hardened somewhat over the years. In a sense both were brokenhearted, but for different reasons. Of the two of them only Miriam could be saved.
‘Do you want your coffee?’ asked Mrs Kinsella above the noise of the kitchen radio. ‘Only we’re out of milk. Shall I pop out and get some?’
For she hated being alone with Beatrice, only felt comfortable when she could complain to Miriam. Yet she had behaved well, Beatrice reflected, had remained loyal, even when she could have found a more agreeable job, one where she could vent her own grievances and worries – Anne Marie going out on Saturday nights with her new mates from the supermarket and coming back the worse for wear – without having to hover anxiously over another. It was Mrs Kinsella who wanted coffee, not Beatrice, who, conscious of her unsteady mouth, pretended that she was never thirsty.
‘No,’ she said. ‘I’ll go.’
‘Are you sure? You’re not supposed to go out when Miriam’s not here.’
‘It’s only over the road. And I haven’t been out since Sunday.’
‘Come straight back, then. And cross by the lights.’
‘I will, I will.’
Out in the air she felt better, although the noise of the street confused her. She grasped her stick, measured the distance to the other side of the road, waited for the lights to change, and to change again. Marooned on the pavement, her courage left her. When the young man from the hairdresser’s darted across the road with his plastic cup of coffee from the delicatessen she followed in his wake. Miriam, she thought, her last cogent thought. She heard the car approaching, felt her stick slip away from her, fell, and allowed herself to fall. Across her mind flashed the message, I have been killed. She sensed rather than heard the voices. ‘Don’t move her,’ said one. ‘Leave her down until the ambulance comes.’ And a more familiar intonation: ‘That’s Miss Sharpe. I do her hair.’ The crowd that had gathered relinquished her gratefully to the ambulance men, and she had a vague notion of being hoisted aloft, as if on the swing that had been in the garden when they were children. Then she knew nothing.
When Miriam returned from the London Library, her briefcase in one hand and the day’s shopping in the other, she was met by a tearful Mrs Kinsella, who told her that Beatrice had been taken to hospital.
‘They found her details in her bag,’ she told Miriam. ‘They rang up. I said I’d wait until you came home. I’m afraid it’s bad news.’ Her eyes darted away from Miriam’s face; she was overwhelmingly anxious to leave.
‘You go,’ said Miriam. ‘I’ll see you tomorrow. I expect I’ll be here.’ She had known what to expect, had known it ever since the slow year had turned its face towards the spring.
‘Philip Treadgold,’ said the man in the white coat. ‘I was here when your sister was brought in. I’m afraid there was nothing we could do. I expect you’d like to see her.’
He led her to a small side ward. Then she sat staring at the bed, wondering how to continue now that the worst had happened. When, after fifteen minutes, a nurse came in, Miriam was conscious only of the newly admitted noise of the ward. Of that, and of Beatrice’s once beautiful hair clinging to her own wet cheek.
15
On the morning of the funeral Miriam was touched to see Anne Marie Kinsella accompanying her mother. Both were carrying bulging shopping bags.
‘Why, Anne Marie,’ she said. ‘How nice of you to come.’
‘That’s okay. We get a day off for a funeral. And we’ve brought some stuff from the shop.’
‘You can pay me later,’ said Mrs Kinsella, tying an apron over her black dress, and looking askance at Miriam’s grey suit. ‘They’ll be coming back here, won’t they? I don’t suppose you thought of that. You’ve got sherry, haven’t you? And whisky for the men.’
‘Oh, I don’t suppose there’ll be any men. Only us, I s
hould think.’
She had put a notice in The Times, but had not expected it to be singled out from more important, more lavish deaths. She no longer scanned these every morning, fearful of seeing her own name. And it had only taken a couple of lines. ‘Beatrice Sharpe, musician,’ it had said, with the dates of birth and death and details of the funeral, at Golders Green, which she did not suppose anyone would attend. But in fact she was astonished to see a sizeable group of people, all chatting amiably, outside the small chapel. She was greeted by men and women she had never met, who assured her of their sadness over the death of ‘a dear friend’, ‘such a lovely artist’, ‘so sad when she retired so early’.
These were figures from Beatrice’s past, glad of a chance to meet up again, to exchange professional gossip. And the occasion was guaranteed not to be too melancholy: few of them had seen Beatrice recently, none, despite their protestations, had known her too intimately. The exception was Max, who was, she could see, badly shaken, holding a handkerchief in readiness with a hand that seemed palsied. And on the edge of the crowd was Tom Rivers, who stayed discreetly where he was, finding the enthusiastic gathering not to his taste. As they filed in he grasped her hand.
‘I read it in The Times,’ he murmured. ‘I came to offer my support. If you need it, that is.’
‘I shall do. You’ll come back to the flat afterwards, won’t you? Forgive me if I concentrate on getting through this.’
The music she had chosen came crackling through the loudspeaker, but nothing could destroy the haunting Romanian pan pipes which Beatrice had loved – although Beatrice was strangely absent from this event, which seemed given over to her erstwhile colleagues. Only Max dabbed his eyes, moved no doubt as much by the European character of the melody as by memories of Beatrice, who, perhaps fortunately in everyone’s opinion, had not died at home, but decently, in a hospital. Cheerful as they seemed to be, they were glad that they would not have to celebrate Beatrice’s passing on the actual premises of her demise. Death was sad enough, seemed to be the consensus, without having it brought physically to one’s notice. Miriam, rigidly at attention, longed only for it to end, deplored this crowd of strangers. When the time came for her to touch the coffin she found that she could not reconcile Beatrice dead with Beatrice living. The latter stayed most forcibly in her mind, but it was the Beatrice of long ago, still ardent, still expectant, before the advent of harsh truths. Everyone dies badly, she reflected, as she led the way out into the garden. She was grateful for the warmth of the spring sun on her thin shoulders.
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