by Jane Gardam
‘Where were you? Where am I?’ she cried. ‘Heneker—it’s midnight. Where’ve you been?’ It was ten years ago. But where was the glass roof, the smell of Earl’s Court? ‘Where’ve you been. I’ve been all alone.’ She looked around. It was now. Ireland. The expensive, rented house. Children. Charles somewhere in the world. Charles—
‘The children,’ she said, ‘I must see if the children are all right. The doors are all open. Anyone could have walked in.’
‘It was I walked in.’
‘But anyone could have. The I.R.A.—’
‘Don’t be silly, Het.’
‘You had no right to walk in.’
‘You said I was to come.’
‘But it’s the middle of the night.’
‘I was held up. It’s a long walk here.’
‘You’ve never been as late as this.’ She heard the voice, high, accusing. Oh God! Like a wife. Like then. It’s no different.
Wearily she got up. ‘I must go and look at the children, Heneker,’ and walked slowly away.
But on the stairs she stopped and after a while gave a sigh and turned and sat down, resting her head against the banisters. All the doors were open in the hall, and through the open front door on the right the moonlight flooded in, and the heavy, dementing scent of the night flowers in the garden. She shut her eyes.
‘Het,’ he was at the foot of the stairs beside the ancient telephone. ‘Het,’ he lifted his arm. ‘Oh, my dear Het.’
She pulled herself up and helplessly walked down back to him until she was two steps above him, level with his eyes.
‘Sleep with me, Hetty,’ he said and she said, ‘Of course.’
Between them on the banister the telephone began to ring.
‘It can’t! It doesn’t!’
‘Well, it is.’
‘It can’t. It never has. It’s terrible.’ She covered up her ears.
‘You’d better answer it.’
‘I can’t. I can’t,’ she cried.
‘Well I can’t, can I? For God’s sake, stop the bloody thing.’ He walked over to the open front door.
Looking at him all the time she picked up the heavy ear-piece and heard a tremendous crackling, then the voice of a sleepy post-mistress, more crackling and then from some ethereal wasteland, Charles.
‘Hester? Hester? Where on earth? God-forsaken—’
‘Here I am,’ she said, ‘Yes? Charles?’
‘ . . . coming at once.’
‘You’re coming when?’
‘I’ll be there . . . ’ more huge crackling, ‘ . . . over at last.’
‘I didn’t hear. When? Where are you? When are you coming?’ The crackling grew and became a pain in the ears, then stopped. There was silence.
‘He’s— He’s— Charles. He’s on his way.’
‘Where is he?’
‘I don’t know. Perhaps in Clifden.’
‘At twelve o’clock at night? Well, he’d not get here till tomorrow if he’s off a bus.’
‘Perhaps he’s even at Ballynish.’
‘Don’t be silly. Why bother to ring if he were already at Ballynish? He’s probably still in Dublin. Or more likely still in London. Ringing from the Hilton. Carousing with the clients.’
‘No. No. You don’t understand Charles. I’m sure he’s almost here.’
He grabbed the phone and threw it on the ground and took her wrists and said, ‘Look. Sleep with me.’
‘I can’t. I can’t.’
‘All right.’ He walked back to the door. She watched him turn back to her. Behind his head was the dazzle of the sea. ‘There never was anyone but you, Het,’ he said, and was gone.
‘HESTER!’ Charles’s pleasant voice in the hall. Sounds of dropped luggage, Irish voices from the taxi. Half the village in attendance, much information being simultaneously imparted. ‘What a journey! What a place to get to.’ Shrieks from Sophie and Andy. ‘Daddy! Oh—fishing rods! Did you remember to bring my orange bag? There are crabs, huge ones. Lobsters. We went to the fair.’
She watched them from the stairs, fickle, leaping like puppies, the taxi man, the taxi-man’s assistant, the taxi-man’s grandfather brooding by.
‘Hester. Thank God. Damn thing over. Come and give us a kiss.’ The attendants were paid off.
‘How are you, love? Can’t see you. Aren’t there any lights? What’s that thundering noise? Good heavens, what a telephone. Did I manage to get through on that?’
‘The lights come and go,’ she said. ‘The thundering does too.’
‘I’ll fix it,’ he said. ‘The electrics will be the generator. I’ll get on with it in a minute. It’s very cold here.’
‘We can’t light the peat.’ said Andy.
‘But peat’s marvellous, you useless creatures. I’ll make a blaze. Where’s the sitting room? Better turn off the stopcock for the present. We’re going out to supper.’
‘We can’t, there’s only the pub. You have to book.’ (What’s the matter with my voice?)
‘I’ve booked.’
‘But the places round here don’t— Hardly ever,’ she said.
‘I stopped at the pub on the way. Went in and booked. Come on. Get the children out of their night shirts, we’re away to eat lobsters.’
‘Charles—I can’t go to the pub. I’m a mess. I’m tired. I waited all last night. We’ve waited around all today. It’s after eight o’clock.’
‘All last night? You didn’t expect me last night? I didn’t ring till midnight. I was still in London.’
‘And by the way, something else,’ he said as he drove them all fast down the hill. ‘The Bartletts are at the pub.’
‘The Bartletts? From home? From Denham Place? Oh no!’
‘Yes—Have you got a sore throat? Said they saw you yesterday. With some splendid man.’
‘I didn’t see them.’
‘I did,’ said Andy. ‘When we dropped Heneker at the pub.’
‘Children are so odd,’ she said to Cathie Bartlett in the pub. ‘Andy saw you yesterday but he never said.’
‘You seemed in a bit of a trance.’ Cathie Bartlett’s eyes were careful. Charles’s great laugh rang out at something Bartlett had said. They were alone in the pub dining room. A Bartlett child had come in from the television room and been gathered onto its mother’s knee. (But every knee is his knee. Every child is his child. Oh Heneker. Oh Heneker.)
‘Famous chap,’ said Bartlett. ‘The great artist. Caused a stir.’
‘Oh Heneker Mann,’ said Charles. ‘Oh, that’s it. Old flame of Hester’s, hey?’
‘Yes,’ said Hester. (I feel so far away.) ‘I was a student of his at the Slade. Oh, donkey’s years ago.’ (Oh what can I do?)
‘He’s gone?’ asked Charles.
‘Gone all right. Disappeared this morning. Barmaid’s gone too, I believe. There’s a great to-do. Well—he’d been with her every blessed night.’
‘Oh Noel!’ said Cathie.
‘Well he had. Be your age. These passages creak. We’ve not had a wink of sleep, Cathie and I, all week.’
‘Don’t blame her anyway,’ said Cathie. ‘Gorgeous. Don’t mind telling you, Hester’—she lit a cigarette expertly above her child’s head—‘I was green with envy when I saw you with him on the beach. You ought to watch out, Charles.’
‘Don’t you worry,’ said Charles.
They got up to go.
In Lord Thing’s sitting room the peat fire shone hot and bright. Charles brought in the tray and put it on the stool, then drew the curtains. He said, ‘I’ve settled the children. And I’ve had to make tea. I couldn’t find any brown sugar.’
‘I forgot it.’
‘Never mind. Tea won’t keep us awake. I say, what’s this? “Hetty Sleeping”.’
; ‘Give me that.’
‘No. Let me look. It’s lovely. Wonderful.’
‘It’s mine. Charles—give it me. Give it me. Give it me.’
‘No,’ he said. He held the drawing at a distance under the brilliant electric light. ‘“Hetty Sleeping”.’ He put on his glasses.
‘Give me that. Give me that. Give me that!’
‘“Hetty Sleeping”,’ he said. ‘Very sadly.’
He put the drawing delicately down on Lord Thing’s writing desk. Pouring tea for her he said, ‘Sweet Hetty, wake up soon.’
LUNCH WITH RUTH SYKES
She was crying again last night and that made it easier for me this morning.
I said, ‘I’m having lunch with Ruth Sykes today, dear.’
‘Mmmm,’ she said, black coffee one hand, toast the other, peering down at the morning paper laid all across the kitchen table—she never sits down at breakfast.
‘So you’ll be all right, dear?’
‘Mmmm.’
‘For lunch I mean—after surgery. I’ll leave it ready in the oven. Just to take out.’
‘What?’
‘Your lunch, dear. After surgery. And your visits. It’ll be in the oven.’
She looked at me through her big glasses—such a big, handsome daughter. How could such a great big woman have come out of me? I’m so small. Jack was small, too. And neither of us was anything much. Certainly nothing so clever as a doctor in either of the families, anywhere. It’s funny—I look at her, my daughter, my Rosalind and I can’t believe she’s the same as the baby I had: the fat little round warm bright-eyed thing holding its wrists up in the pram against the light, carefully watching the leaves moving in the birch tree like a peaceful little fat cat. She’s so bold and brave and strong now—fast car, doctor’s bag slung in the back, stethoscope, white coat. So quick on the telephone. Oh it’s wonderful to hear her on the telephone!—‘Yes? When was this? All right—do nothing until I’m there. I’ll be with you in ten minutes.’ Oh the lives she must save! She’s a wonderful doctor.
But the crying is awful. It was really awful last night.
‘Why can’t you be here, mother?’ (Flicks over page of The Telegraph. Peers closer.)
She never lets herself go even when she’s happy. I think the last time I remember her being overwhelmed in any way by feeling happy was when she got into Oxford. And then she just opened the telegram and said, ‘Oh my goodness!’ and spilled a whole cup of coffee all down her school uniform—all over the clean floor.
‘I’m having lunch with Ruth Sykes.’
She finished her coffee. ‘’Bye,’ she says. ‘Have a nice time. See you for supper—oh, no I won’t. Forgot. I’ll be at the hospital.’
‘Till when, dear?’
‘God—I don’t know. Ten? Eleven?’
‘All right, dear.’
The road outside as well as the front garden and the house is diminished without her. Energy has gone out of the morning.
I go back in the kitchen and start clearing up the breakfast.
Am I really going? Dare I?
I wash things up and stand for a time looking at the china cupboard door before putting them away. I go upstairs and change into my dark blue wool suit and good shoes and stockings and look at my face in the glass.
It is a very silly face. Like an unintelligent bird. Birds are supposed to have intelligent faces, but I don’t know. Mine is like a bird’s but not a very bright bird. A C-stream bird. It’s a timid self-conscious face. Ready to be made an ass of. An ass to be made of a bird. Rosalind does make me feel such an ass. She didn’t as a baby—she used to get hold of bits of me then—my ear or my chin—and hang on tight, and laugh and laugh. It does seem a pity—
Anyway I’m better looking than Ruth Sykes. I’m not an ass when I’m with Ruth Sykes either. I’m perfectly easy. We were at school together and she was nothing like so clever as I was though I was nothing special at all. I wish I were having lunch with Ruth Sykes.
I’m not though. I decided a fortnight ago and I’m not losing my nerve now. No I’m not.
Not with all the crying.
I’m going to London to see Michael.
The crying didn’t start as soon as Michael stopped coming here. She was quite sane and calm and quiet at first, even rather nice to me. I remember she said would I like to go to the theatre with her once, and I got tickets for the two of us for Rosenkavalier—just locally. It’s not my favourite at all and I expect she loathed it but we sat there together very friendly, side by side.
‘Is Michael busy tonight?’—I hadn’t realised then.
‘’Spect so,’ she said.
She didn’t stay in at home though, not at all. And she never mentioned him. She kept on being very nice to me for several weeks—sometimes she’d come and sit by me and watch the telly for a bit, and once I remember she said she liked my dress. Once she seemed to be looking at me as if she was going to say something and I just waited, I was so afraid of doing the wrong thing. I talk far too much you see. I’m a bit of a joke the way I talk once I get started.
She didn’t say anything though and all I said after a day or two more was that Michael hadn’t telephoned lately and were they going on holiday together again this summer. And she just got up and slammed out.
Then that night I heard her crying—awful, awful long sobs. They woke me up and I couldn’t think whatever they were—like terrible sawing noises, seconds apart. I went out on the landing and they seemed to be coming from the top floor where she sleeps, and I went running up and stood outside her door.
Awful sobs.
Well, I daren’t of course go in.
I went down again to my floor and back to bed with the door open and listened—just shaking, my eyes wide open, trying to imagine her face, all so smooth and assured, twisted up in the dark with the mouth crooked and those awful noises coming out of it.
Yet at breakfast she was just the same—coffee cup one hand, toast the other, peering down at the newspaper. Perhaps two lines had appeared above the nose, creased together, that was all.
‘Sit down, dear. You’ll strain your eyes.’
She didn’t answer. I got up in a sudden rush and went all round the table and I put my arm round her waist—she’s so much taller than me—and I said, ‘Darling, can’t you sit down a minute?’
She said, ‘Oh for Godssake, Mother,’ and pulled away.
I said, ‘You’ll hurt your eyes.’
‘Is there any moment of the year,’ she said, ‘when you don’t say that?’
‘Do you think,’ she said, ‘that just once you could express a single original thought?’
I didn’t hear her crying for a while and then three weeks ago it began again. For a week she was crying every single night. I got up each time. At first I walked round my room bumping things about. Then I took to going out on the landing and clicking on and off the light. Once I pulled the lavatory chain. The crying just went on. In the end—like last night—I took to going and sitting on the stairs outside her bedroom. It did no good of course, but it was all I could do and so I did it. I took the eiderdown and put it round me and I just sat there praying she would stop. Sometimes I told myself stories that she would come out and trip over me and say, ‘Oh Mother!’ and then I would hug her and hug her and say, ‘Oh Rosalind, what happened? Tell me what happened. What happened to him?’
She never did.
The crying always stopped in the end—longer pauses between the sobs and then when the idiot birds began to wake up she’d be quiet at last. So funny. When she was a baby that was the time she would always wake up. She got a real nuisance about one and a half and I had to be quite firm. I used to go in and she’d be standing in her cot with her nappies round her ankles and her nightie all frills and her face like a rose.
‘Now, Rosalind. Back to sleep.
Too soon, baby. It’s only five o’clock. The day hasn’t started yet.’ ‘But the birds has begun to tweet,’ she said. Oh she was lovely! ‘The birds has begun to tweet.’ And she wasn’t two—still in nappies! I still tell that story, I’m ashamed to say. I oughtn’t to because I know she hates it. She glares and stamps out or, even worse, she withers me with an icy stare. ‘I wonder how many times Ruth Sykes has heard that story,’ she says.
Well, I know I’m a fool.
Our doctor thought I was a fool all right a couple of weeks ago when I went to see him and said I had a bad heart and wanted to see a heart specialist. ‘Well, well, Mrs. Thessally,’ he said. ‘Shall I be the judge of that? What does your daughter say?’
‘I haven’t told her,’ I said. ‘I don’t want her to know. But I am sure myself and I want to see a specialist. I want to see Dr Michael Kerr.’
‘He’s not the man I usually use. And anyway, let’s have a look at you and see if we need to use anyone.’
He examined me and said he was glad to say that we need not use anyone. ‘Perfectly normal heart it seems to me. Very good for your age. What are you—fifty? Fifty-two? No signs of trouble at all.’
But I went on and on at him. I do rather go on and on when I am not with Rosalind and then I hardly speak.
‘Look, my dear—I can’t send you up to Harley Street with absolutely nothing wrong with you,’ he said.
‘My daughter says that three-quarters of the people she sees have absolutely nothing wrong with them. It’s all in their minds. This is my mind,’ I said. ‘I can’t get it out of my mind.’
‘Not sleeping?’ he said.
‘No.’ (That was true anyway.)
‘Eating?’
‘Not much.’
‘Something worrying you?’ he said, putting his fingertips together and looking over them like an advertisement for medical insurance. Whatever use in the world would it be to tell him.
‘My heart,’ I said at last. ‘I know I’m being a fool.’ I have big blue eyes. As a matter of fact I notice that if I look at people steadily with my eyes open wide and think very honestly of what I have just said they often smile at me as if I had given pleasure. The doctor did now.