by Sally Bayley
A man dressed in a brown suit with black hair and a large forehead came out of a side door. I heard my name, ‘Sally Bayley?’ and I jumped. The name was a question. The man in brown was asking me a question. He was walking towards me and holding out his hand and the hand was a question too.
‘Sally Bayley?’ he said again.
I couldn’t speak, so I nodded, and I followed the man in brown through the white door, the door he was holding open for me. I went in.
The office was still and calm and square. It was so square that I started making outlines of the room in my head, square upon square upon square. I drew squares around everything to keep me calm. Inside one square, a plastic skeleton leaned against a wall. A window was open and a small breeze lifted him slightly; he tilted towards me. His eyes were dark and hollow and his jaw hung open. I looked away and stared at the desk. Here was another square. The doctor’s hands were folded slightly; they were folding and unfolding. They weren’t quite square, more like pyramids, moving pyramids. I didn’t want to look at his face because I knew it was beaming at me. I knew that his forehead was glistening and damp. He was hot; this room was too stuffy for him, for both of us. He should open another window and let in some air. The window: another square.
‘How can I help you?’
I didn’t know what to say. I had come all this way and I didn’t know what to say. I clutched at my knees. I couldn’t find the words. This wasn’t a room for telling stories in.
‘Are you feeling unwell?’ The man in brown touched his hair and wiped his brow. Perhaps he was feeling unwell.
‘I wanted to ask a few questions.’
‘What about?’
I hesitated. This was going to sound stupid. ‘About me, I suppose. I think there’s something wrong with me … At least, my aunt thinks there is. I’ve changed … She says I’ve changed … Or she means I’ve changed, even if she doesn’t say it. I’m not how I used to be. I’m pale all the time. My mum says so too. I’m too thin and pale, she says. I can’t tell, I don’t really notice … But they make it sound like it’s serious, so I thought I’d better ask a doctor. They don’t like doctors at home.’ I paused and looked at the man in the brown suit. ‘We’ve never been to a doctor in my house.’ I stopped.
The man in brown was frowning slightly. He looked confused. ‘Well, you do look a little pale. But that’s nothing to worry about. Are you eating? Do you have an appetite?’
‘I don’t know. I don’t think I eat as much as I used to. I had measles and then I stopped eating for a while.’
I stopped and looked down at the floor. The carpet was flat and green and made up of small squares. I started to count the squares. I didn’t know what else to say. Then I blurted out, ‘I think I’m just very different from the rest of my family. That’s the problem. We don’t get each other. Sometimes, it’s like living in a zoo. I’m the strange animal that doesn’t belong … the thing in the corner.’
The man in brown smiled and leaned forward. ‘Families are a lot of work, I know.’ Then he stopped and smiled again. He liked to smile. He liked smiling more than speaking. ‘Let me just have a quick check of your pulse and your heart rate. You do look pale, but plenty of people in England look pale. You wouldn’t be the only pale person walking around here, would you?’
I think he wanted me to smile, but I couldn’t. He opened a drawer and took out something with rubbery tubes – a stethoscope.
‘Let’s just see what your heart is like.’
He pressed something metal to my chest and leaned in and listened. ‘A strong beat. Nothing wrong there. Let’s just check your pulse.’
He lifted my wrist and pressed down two cold fingers. ‘Nice and strong there, too.’
The doctor smiled again and looked at me and said, ‘What I think you might need is a nice chat with our social worker, Audrey. We have a very good team here, and Audrey is marvellous. It might be a good idea for you to get some things off your chest. It sounds as if there’s quite a lot going on at home.’ He paused, and then rather than smiling looked quite serious. ‘I do know your mother … I knew your mother years ago. She was a very lovely woman.’ He paused again, but didn’t smile. ‘Things were quite different then … quite different. We all believed in something … the eternal mystery.’
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When Agatha Christie’s Lucy Eyelesbarrow enters the library to tell Emma Crackenthorpe that she has found a dead body in the Long Barn, Emma Crackenthorpe wrongly assumes that she has come to discuss a domestic matter. Lucy has had enough of Rutherford Hall and all its oddities; she will be leaving imminently. A shade of apprehension passes over Miss Crackenthorpe’s face. In such words do useful household staff announce their departure.
I returned from the doctor longing to announce my departure. I wanted something that could extract me from my house – a rare disease, imminent death, something more than an oddity. The doctor’s idea wasn’t going to make a blind bit of difference. What did a social worker do anyway? It sounded like something my aunt called a Left-Wing Thing, a half-baked idea, wishy-washy nonsense. But I worried that I might have started a Left-Wing Thing, and at any point the Left Wing might march through the door of my house and start sharing their ideas. Doctors must be full of Left-Wing ideas, ready to spill out of leather cases or from the inside of rubbery stethoscopes. Mr Crackenthorpe (who is called Josiah) thinks this; he doesn’t hold his doctor in high regard. A regular old woman inclined to wrap me up in cotton wool, says Josiah Crackenthorpe. He means Dr Quimper. Fuss, fuss, fuss, says Josiah. Got a bee in his bonnet about food.
But the doctor I saw didn’t have a big enough bee in his bonnet. I needed someone else to make the fuss. I should have taken someone with me, I thought. Betsey Trotwood, perhaps. She’d have pooh-poohed the idea of a social worker then bashed the man in brown firmly on the head and demanded a cottage by the sea in Kent.
Miss Marple manages this. When she goes to see Dr Haydock for a consultation, she suggests some nice bracing sea air and he agrees. London is too stimulating and St Mary Mead too damp. Dr Haydock suggests Eastbourne, but Miss Marple says it’s too cold; she suggests Dillmouth, a nice, quiet little town by the sea. Dr Haydock knows she’s up to something, but he goes along with it. He writes her the doctor’s note that will get her sent to Dillmouth. Dr Haydock folds the note nicely in two and passes it over to the old lady he has known for years.
Miss Marple tucks the note carefully inside her handbag. She looks up and gives one of her small, barely perceptible smiles.
27
Social Workers and Souls
Getting anything in the adult world is a matter of giving someone the right answer. Miss Marple knows this, and so does Betsey Trotwood. You present someone with a story as though it were a pressing fact, and more than likely they will swallow it.
The other way to go about it is to produce new elements, fresh opinions. This is bound to lead to conflict – people don’t like strangers barging in – but if you introduce someone new into the story, they might just back you up.
Audrey Taylor was a woman with long hair and flowing shirts and flares. When I first met Audrey I was sure that she was one of the coloured people. Once upon a time Audrey lived in Babylon and she hoped and prayed for Zion. Audrey Taylor knew her way up and down the stairs and through the white door. She didn’t carry castanets but I think she might have had them hidden in her handbag. Sometimes I thought I could hear them rattle.
Audrey Taylor was a medieval saint. She had a big wide forehead with a chequered handkerchief strapped across it. Sometimes she wore her hair up in a bun or in a ponytail, and then she looked like a Mother Superior. But she almost always wore trousers, wide flares that flowed from her bum like blue waterfalls. On top of her flares she wore a knitted Aran jumper that curled up around her wrists. I never understood why she liked wearing an Aran jumper but I thought perhaps she must like the irritable feeling close to her skin. Saints like to suffer.
Like most adults I knew, Audrey Taylor was religious. Audrey was religious and so was Dr Bollinger. I don’t think they were supposed to speak about God, but sometimes they couldn’t help themselves.
Audrey told me that she always prayed before she came to see me, which made me feel as though there must be something very wrong. People only say prayers when they are in trouble, or when other people are in trouble. Big trouble. Matters of Life and Death.
If you are religious you say prayers to save souls. It’s hard to explain exactly what a soul is, but I’d say it’s the biggest part of the human body. You just can’t see it, because it is made of air. A soul is the air you blow inside a balloon to give it shape, and only God can blow up the balloon.
But souls can burst. Audrey and Dr Bollinger believed my soul had burst and needed mending. Somebody had made a hole when I wasn’t looking. Out, out went all the air. Splat, bang, wallop. Thud. Only a lot of prayers could blow it back up again – the prayers they said behind the closed white door.
Audrey prayed with Dr Bollinger behind the surgery door, and I wasn’t allowed to go in; but I don’t think they were saying prayers exactly, I think they were wailing them. Perhaps when things get really bad with souls you have to wail your prayers, otherwise God just won’t hear.
I’d arrive at the surgery and the lady with red teeth would tell me to go and wait in the Consulting Room.
‘Now don’t mess around. Sit nicely on the chair. They’re in a meeting. They’ll be out soon.’ Glasses moved up her face and she opened her mouth and pecked her teeth. Birds. Ladies always look like birds. Birds with their mouths about to open for worms or berries, red berries, chocolate and lipstick.
In the next room Audrey and Dr Bollinger were praying and wailing. I sat next door in the perfectly still room, until they came out with those smiles on, those big, broad, wide-as-the-sky smiles, as though they’d been up to Heaven and back again and God had whispered in their ears and told them where to find my soul, among the stormy Hebrides.
My soul was lost, and the only way to get it back was to work on my feelings. Audrey and Dr Bollinger worked on feeling, and feeling is a lot of work. This is what they told me, anyway: that feeling was the thing. I had to feel my way back to my soul; and feeling was religious.
Dr Bollinger only once listened to my chest with his stethoscope, only once took my pulse. The rest of the time it was all feelings. What they wanted most was for me to talk about feelings in front of my mum and aunt. If I could do that then my soul might be found. Audrey and Dr Bollinger believed that they could help me open some doors and windows and let in some air. What they meant was that I could let in the feel of the Holy Spirit. But the Holy Spirit takes a lot of feeling to arrive, even more than Betsey Trotwood has over her special patch of grass and the terrible donkeys; or Mum for her roses; more even than Jane Eyre in the Red Room, who’s furious enough to smash a mirror.
But before the Holy Spirit could arrive the fateful letter had to be sent.
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It was a dark day in November when the letter arrived. It was a perfectly ordinary letter, in a perfectly ordinary envelope, but at the top of the envelope was stamped, in pink letters, ‘Westcourt Medical Surgery, Child Support Services’.
Whisssh! And the small white envelope floated down through the letterbox on the breeze and lay just there, on the mat.
It lay there until my grandmother picked it up as she came in with her early-morning shopping. Without her glasses, my grandmother couldn’t see the red circle with the address at the top, so she didn’t know what she was pushing under my mother’s door.
Letters can cause a great disturbance. Letters are hidden hurricanes sealed away in small white parcels. Once opened, they can wipe out everything around them, everything you once knew, everything that had been there right from the start.
Think of David Copperfield. He suffers from the terrible disturbance of a letter arriving one morning at the house of his aunt, Betsey Trotwood. By now, David is living with his aunt in Kent, near the white cliffs of Dover. A lot of things have happened in between, far too many things to tell. All you need to know for now is this: after David’s mother dies (she’s called Clara, but you won’t remember that), his cruel stepfather, Mr Murdstone, moves in. Not long after Betsey Trotwood flounces out, Mr Murdstone barges in with his spiteful sister, Miss Murdstone. Soon there are plans to send David away to school, but David hates school, so before that happens he runs away, and the place he runs to is his aunt’s house in Kent. David runs away towards the cliffs of Dover where Betsey Trotwood lives.
At the present time, Betsey Trotwood lives downstairs from a man called Mr Dick. Mr Dick is obsessed with writing a history of Charles I (that’s the king who had his head chopped off). Anyway, Mr Dick calls this his Memorial, which is the bee in his bonnet. Betsey Trotwood and Mr Dick are not married and nor is Mr Dick her boyfriend. They have a distant connection, says Betsey Trotwood, who is very clear about this.
Mr Dick has a backstory. His family thought him mad. According to his family, Mr Dick went that way. But the real trouble starts when his favourite sister takes a husband. This is just too much for Mr Dick, and he begins to crumble. His sister was his whole world.
Soon after the taking-of-the-husband business, Mr Dick’s brother places Mr Dick in a mental asylum. His family says this is necessary because of his madness. What they really mean is that Mr Dick is a peculiar sort of chap. Maze says that when you go all peculiar you are more than likely to find yourself flat out on the hallway floor without knowing how you got there. I think Mr Dick was just too full of funny turns for his family to manage. After all, the hallway floor is a long way down.
Fortunately, Betsey Trotwood knows this and she steps in and takes Mr Dick off to live with her. As a matter of fact, Betsey Trotwood has a soft spot for Mr Dick. Why else would she scrape him up from the floor? In any case, this is how Mr Dick comes to live upstairs in the house, around and about the cliffs of Dover.
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But to return to the letter.
‘I have written to him,’ Betsey Trotwood announces one morning at breakfast. David looks blank, then anxious, so Betsey Trotwood continues. ‘To your father-in-law,’ she says. ‘I have sent him a letter that I’ll trouble him to attend to, or he and I will fall out, I can tell him!’
David is petrified. He can’t finish his breakfast. He can’t drink his tea. He can’t sit still. ‘Stop squirming,’ Mum says. ‘For goodness’ sake, sit still. What is it? Have you got ants in your pants?’
But David knows letters can cause disturbance. Letters carry threats and warnings. Letters bring people to you, but they also take them away. Some people believe they are messages from God. For David Copperfield, the letter that came back from Mr Murdstone was a message from the Devil, and the Devil was throwing black rocks.
‘I have sent him a letter that I’ll trouble him to attend to, or he and I will fall out, I can tell him!’
‘Does he know where I am, aunt?’ I inquired, alarmed.
‘I have told him,’ said my aunt, with a nod.
‘Shall I – be – given up to him?’
‘I don’t know,’ said my aunt. ‘We shall see.’
28
A Momentous Interview
The anxiety I underwent, in the interval which elapsed before a reply could be received to her letter to Mr. Murdstone, was extreme; but I made an endeavour to suppress it.
(David Copperfield)
The first time she came to the house Audrey Taylor was dressed like Paddington Bear. She was wearing a duffle coat, and I thought that that might be something at least, because Mum liked duffle coats. She thought they were practical and smart.
But then, when I looked at Audrey again, I saw that she looked wrong. Audrey was wearing a duffle coat which looked too long; she looked like a piece of stretched toffee that someone had chewed on for a while, but it was too late to do anything now, because A
udrey was knocking on our front door.
When Audrey knocked the house shook. She knocked on the door and I shook, from head to toe. Audrey knocked on the door and every bone in me quaked. She knocked on the door and the curtains and window frames jumped. Audrey knocked on the door and my mother and aunt’s faces – the faces sat in front of me on the pink chaise-longue – turned to thunder.
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Thunderclouds are looming the day the Murdstones arrive. David Copperfield sits in the front parlour opposite his aunt and watches her face; her face will say everything. He only has to watch his aunt and he can tell what sort of storm might be coming. Betsey Trotwood’s face is ‘a little more imperious and stern than usual’, but she isn’t flummoxed. To be flummoxed is to wear a face that says everything. Betsey Trotwood would never look flummoxed; her mind is always on the job, and the first job in hand, when she looks out of the window that morning, is to deal with that nuisance woman riding roughshod all over her special green patch. How dare she? The cheek!
No, that morning Betsey Trotwood is the opposite of flummoxed; she is outraged, her face is full of fell wrath. Her sacred space, the space she jealously guards from the straying donkeys, the space where her housemaid, Janet, is sent several times a day to shoo them away – ‘Janet! Donkeys!’ – that space is now being trampled over by a lady with a sharp face riding sidesaddle on a donkey.
‘Janet! Donkeys! Janet! Donkeys!’ And Betsey Trotwood sounds the alarm.
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Thus I began a new life, in a new name, and with everything new about me. Now that the state of doubt was over, I felt like one in a dream. A curtain had forever fallen on my former life. No one has ever raised that curtain since.
(David Copperfield)