by Patrick Gale
Edward was expecting a formidable, tall amazon in high-buttoned black, with an iron-grey coiffure and commanding manner. He was taken aback therefore when the door was opened by a tiny creature in a pale yellow twinset and pearls, with hair like spun sugar, delicate, fluttering hands and a powdery, fluting voice. Edward was no strong-man but he felt he could have lifted her up with one arm. If she commanded attention, he felt, it must be through subterfuge rather than head-on confrontation.
‘Come in, come in, Sally dear.’ She kissed Sally’s cheek. ‘And you must be Edward. How do you do.’ She gave Edward a rheumatoid hand which resembled a canary’s claw and, instead of shaking, let him hold her fingers while she led him into her chaotic bedsitting room. A kettle was boiling on a gas ring and the table had been laid for tea, with a large plate of crustless sandwiches. The books and papers, which must have previously occupied the table, had been slung on to a heap which already engulfed the desk and was spilling on to the floor. The bread crusts were scattered on the windowsill, where sparrows and a starling were laying them waste. The mantelshelf was fringed with bills and invitations, weighted with an assortment of glass candlesticks.
‘Sit,’ she pleaded. ‘Do sit, both of you. You’re both so huge there’s no room to move about!’
They sat at the table; the sofa was taken up by an open suitcase and an assortment of hats, the armchair by a typewriter, resting on a rough-hewn plank that bridged the arm-rests. Dr Pertwee snatched the kettle from the ring and filled a teapot, shielding her hand from a scalding in the steam by wearing what looked like an old rugger sock.
‘How are your parents?’ she asked, joining them at the table.
‘All right,’ Sally said. ‘Dad gets ever more immobile. He just sits listening to the radio all day, I think, unless we find him something to mend. His mates come in now and then and sit with him, filling the place up with smoke. I got him a wheelchair but he doesn’t like using it. Twenty years on and he still can’t admit he’s a cripple.’
‘What about her? Tea, Edward?’
‘Thank you.’ Edward took his tea, relieved that it was both weak and Chinese.
‘Mum ought to be stopping work by now,’ Sally continued. ‘I pay most of the housekeeping bills – but I think she’d miss seeing the “girls” every day, and she dreads the thought of being stuck at home with him.’
‘And what do they make of you, Edward?’ Dr Pertwee turned her cool gaze on him and he saw that she had extraordinary bottle-green eyes.
‘Oh. Well.’ He chuckled, still uncertain of how much leeway he was allowed in discussing Sally’s parents with other people, having barely discussed them with her. ‘They gave me lunch today. A proper Sunday lunch.’ He glanced respectfully at the sandwiches, which Dr Pertwee promptly passed him. He took two. ‘They didn’t talk much. I think they disapproved when I said I only work in the bookshop to make ends meet – not as a proper career. And they aren’t altogether happy with my being German, I suspect.’
‘But you don’t sound German,’ Dr Pertwee protested.
‘I think that makes it worse – as though I’m trying to deceive people. And then, of course, I’m Jewish.’
‘Really?’ The old woman was the soul of discretion. She reminded him of the headmaster’s wife at Barrowcester. ‘Do you know Simon Stern at Tompion?’
‘No.’
‘No reason why you should, of course. He’s a mathematician. Have another sandwich, do.’
‘Thank you.’
‘I think their real problem is with me being older, actually,’ Sally put in.
‘You’re not,’ Edward protested. ‘Not much.’
‘Three years,’ Sally said.
‘My dear,’ Dr Pertwee cut in, ‘Your age is immaterial. She’s probably jealous. After all, your poor father has been, shall we say, hors de combat for so long … In any case, the only reason for taking an older man as a partner is economic. With your earnings, pitiful though you might think them, and your qualifications, you have freedom of choice. I’ve always said that if I had ever married, I would have taken a man at least ten years younger than me.’
‘Why’s that?’ Edward asked her.
‘Biology, dear,’ she said and he saw Sally smile at his naïveté. ‘Men may keep their looks and fertility longer but their – how can I put it delicately? – their potential rarely outlasts a woman’s. Now tell me, Edward. Do you have your own lodgings?’
‘Not exactly, Doctor. I rent a bedroom from my old tutor. Professor Hickey. I think you know him.’
‘But of course. We are old sparring partners.’ She mutely offered the sandwiches to Sally, who declined with a smile and a headshake. ‘So you have little – how shall I put it? – independence to offer one another. I thought that might be the case.’
The doorbell interrupted Dr Pertwee’s train of thought. She glanced at her watch.
‘Oh blast. That’ll be my taxi to the station. I’m off up to London for the night – another ghastly committee. I really don’t know why I can’t say no. My mother was so very good at it. Even in retirement one isn’t safe. I shall have to cultivate a deceptive veneer of senility. Odd shoes, perhaps, or a tendency to drool.’ She hurried over to the sofa, threw a book on top of the clothes in her suitcase and slammed the lid shut with surprising vigour. Edward stood, followed by Sally.
‘We mustn’t keep you, Doctor,’ he said.
‘Nonsense, dear. Nonsense.’ She fussed, pulling on a lightweight cream coat and tying a silk scarf loosely about her neck. At the gesture he could suddenly see that in her day she had been extremely attractive. Even in age, some of her movements had an actress’s poise – she was used to being watched. ‘I’m so sorry to be rushing off like this,’ she added. ‘But I insist you stay quietly and enjoy yourselves. Eat and drink anything you can find and light the gas stove if it gets cold.’ The doorbell rang again. ‘Yes. Coming!’ she fluted.
‘But –’ Sally began.
‘There are towels in the bathroom and clean sheets on the bed. I’ve got the key so just pull the door shut when you leave. Now. I must fly. Bye-bye, dear.’ She presented her cheek for Sally’s bemused kiss then held out her hand again for Edward to clasp. ‘Such a pleasure meeting you,’ she said, and left, closing the door firmly behind her.
They stood, waiting and amazed, until they heard her taxi shudder away down the street, then they tumbled, laughing, on to the mattress.
‘A bed!’ Sally gasped. ‘A bed! She’s given us a bed!’
She kissed him greedily then he rolled them over and kissed her back, small nuzzling kisses around the mouth, down on to her long neck and up behind an ear. She was wearing vanilla essence again.
‘Do you think we can?’ he asked, his face in her hair, unable to meet her eyes in case she was outraged.
‘There’d be hell to pay if we didn’t,’ she chuckled. ‘I think she’d have doubts about your – how can I put it delicately? – your potential!’
They laughed and writhed, kissed, rolled apart a little to stare, thought of something else funny, then kissed again, snorting with amusement. Slowly, with the unbuttoning of shirts, slipping off of belts and shoes and tense, gasping release of bra clasp and suspender fastenings, the prolonged frustration of the previous weeks came to possess them. Smiles fell away into bitten lips, laughter into a kind of astonishment. Slowly, intently, and with the occasional hoarse mutter and misplaced elbow, they made love. On one of his recent fortnightly visits to the barber, Edward had shyly accepted, with fresh understanding, the enigmatic offer of ‘something for Sir’s weekend?’ He had been fearful since, lest this prove presumptuous on his part, but no less afraid of being without them should such a heaven-sent opportunity arise. Sally cried out when he thrust into her, prompting the first of several apologies, and he kissed away a tear forced out across her cheek.
Compared with Sally, he was a sexual neophyte, if not quite a virgin. There had been girls while he was a student – sheltered daughters of academics or bol
der, but heavily chaperoned students at the few women’s colleges. None of them, however, had gone further than teasing and flirting, stirring him to such fever pitches of frustration that he was often tempted to seek relief elsewhere. At the end of a drunken celebration following the completion of first year exams, he had ended up in a brothel on the edge of town. It was not the red plush sin palace of his teenage imaginings but a drably respectable private house, where gentlemen were expected to await the next available lady’s pleasure in a far from cosy parlour full of crude knick-knacks and seaside souvenirs. After a numbing wait, a tired older woman led him to a back bedroom where he was shut in with a girl so young and evidently frightened that what little ardour was left him drained away and he fled in disgusted confusion. In his second year, when word from even friends of his family dried up altogether and Europe began her slow, reluctant manoeuvring into war, he found himself increasingly ostracized. Awkwardness was caused first by his Jewishness, and then his nationality. Even invitations to tea dried up and he spent hours of refuge from this tacit rejection alone in the college library or labouring compulsively at the piano. The internment camp, where he had to sleep in a crowded impromptu barracks, rank with the smells of underwashed clothes and frustrated male, crowded his libido into silence much as boarding-school had. There were women there who doled out the sloppy overcooked food, some of them quite young and friendly, but he regarded them as coldly as if they had been so many automata. It was only later, when he fell ill, that his sex drive came surging back – almost as a symptom, it seemed, of the disease. The mere memory of a nurse’s black stockinged leg or downy neck as she rearranged his bedclothes or took his temperature could work him into hot spontaneous spasms of desire. Sally’s unexpected arrival at his work table on the hospital promenade and her direct, encouraging smile, had been as warm bread to the starved.
Spent, he held her, panting, in his arms. Then he tiptoed across to draw the curtains, turn on a light and bring back a glass of water and the rest of the sandwiches. Seeing her curled there, soft, dark hair wonderfully awry, cheeks flushed, lips swollen as if with crying, he found himself unable to stop talking.
‘It was strange having Sunday lunch with your parents today,’ he began.
‘How so?’
‘It made me think. It was ten years ago when I last ate with mine. They’re dead, of course. In the war. I’m sorry I’ve taken so long to tell you much of this. I just didn’t feel ready and then, well … We weren’t orthodox Jews or anything. At least, my grandparents were, on my father’s side. We had to go to them for Seder and so on, and there were some fights because they wanted me to go to a different school with other Jews, not the Gymnasium with the sons of my parents’ friends. But my parents were totally irreligious. They were intellectuals and socialists, which was probably worse for them; getting them onto two black-lists instead of just the one. They knew what was coming. They couldn’t not, with so many of their colleagues losing their jobs and homes. Actually, I think most people knew; it’s just that they couldn’t bear to admit it. It’s all very easy to say we should pack up and move in such circumstances, quite another thing to do it. Doing it is an admission of fear. They were passionate anglophiles. They had always planned to send me to school in England anyway, or so they said. It simply became an imperative instead of a choice for them, I suppose.’
‘Where did they send you?’
‘Tathams at Barrowcester. Do you know the school?’
‘Do I look as if I would?’
‘It was torture there. Unrelenting torture. I had no idea that small boys could be so cruel. Well, I did, but I had always been immune to it. In the Gymnasium in Tübingen, I was one of the strong ones. In Barrowcester, I was suddenly the outsider, the German, the Jew with the comical accent. My name was changed in a hopeless effort to disguise my otherness.’
‘Really?’
‘Eli Pfefferberg to Edward Pepper. But no-one was fooled, of course, from the moment I opened my little mouth, and I kept making matters worse by forgetting to answer when my new name was called.’
‘How old were you?’
‘Too young. Even eighteen would have been too young for such treatment.’
‘Couldn’t you leave?’ She brushed his cheek with the back of her hand, frowning, concerned. Edward shook his head.
‘There was nowhere I could go. I knew enough to know that I couldn’t go home to Germany. There were only distant contacts of my parents in Manchester – which wasn’t too far from Barrowcester – and a second cousin in London, Isaac. He was a lawyer. Unmarried. No sense of humour and an unmarried sister who had even less. Rosa. She could curdle milk with a smile. It was bad enough having to stay with them in the holidays without turning up unannounced mid-term. I learned to become invisible. I copied the others’ accents, picked up their slang and their little aggressions. I learned to bully. And I spent hours hiding away in the music rooms. There was a Jewish music teacher. A Mancunian. We were allies. He saved my life by insisting I took extra lessons and be given time off the rugger. When I got a scholarship to Tompion I could hardly believe it. It was so civilised there, so understanding, so liberal. At least on the surface. Maybe they’re all Jew-haters underneath, but they don’t throw your books in the urinals or beat you up on the playing field. But then the war started and I was interned. Isaac visited me occasionally, and did his best to get me let out, and dear Thomas managed it, of course …’ He broke off, staring across the rumpled bedding to their tangle of discarded clothes.
‘What is it?’ she asked. ‘What’s wrong?’
He breathed quickly, shallowly. For a moment a thick fist of grief threatened to break through his accustomed control.
If I cry now, he thought, if I let it all out now, I’ll terrify her.
She reached out to touch his neck and pull him down beside her again, but he held back. He sensed she was on the verge of offering him pity, treating him as a patient just when she had honoured him as a man. He fought back the urge to weep, forcing his mind to focus instead on the extraordinary fact of their new, naked closeness.
‘Nothing,’ he told her. ‘It’s nothing. I’m sorry.’ He gently cupped her breasts in his hands, amazed at the rapidity with which he was permitted a gesture so intimate. ‘I shouldn’t have started talking about it. This should have been special for you, for both of us.’
‘Don’t be daft. It was special.’
She laid her hands on his, encouraging him.
‘But I’ve spoilt it all.’
‘No you haven’t. Anyway.’ She slid a hand between his legs and he felt himself stir at her touch. ‘We can do it again.’ She smiled up at him at the sweet simplicity of this truth, her pale face warm in the lamplight across the sheets. Edward lay back on the bank of crushed pillows, and caressed the skin over her ribs with the back of his hand.
‘I know,’ he sighed, astounded, his mouth curling up into a private smile. ‘I know.’
5
Sally rode her motorbike home through the network of dykes and waterways in a fury. The sun was dazzling but there was a water-cooled wind which stung her face into a grimace. In her anger she had left without her helmet and didn’t care. Occasionally her hair blew across her face and she smacked it savagely out of the way. Gordon Graeme had called her up to his office after her rounds and placidly informed her that the doctor she had replaced had at last returned from serving his country and wanted his old job back.
‘But I thought you said he’d resigned.’
‘Well so I did. But it seems he only felt it was his duty to sign up, as he was still of an age to serve. Now that he wants to return, I can’t very well refuse him.’
‘I hate to sound selfish, but what about me?’
‘My dear Miss Banks.’ Like the nurses, he always called her Miss, never Doctor. ‘You are young and relatively inexperienced. I’m sure you’ll agree that your time here has been valuable. Now you can find something else.’
‘Just like that, I s
uppose.’
‘I can give you references.’
‘This place is understaffed, though. Surely I could stay on to relieve the burden?’
‘This place, as you so quaintly put it, is also underfunded. We could only afford to keep you on a junior nurse’s salary – which I’m sure you’d be loath to accept.’
‘Of course.’
‘Even setting aside the future of the hospital, which you know is by no means certain now, you must see that we have to give Dr Grismby priority. Quite apart from it having been his job in the first place, quite apart from the debt of patriotism we owe him –’
‘Debt of …?’
Graeme held up a liver-spotted hand.
‘If you would just let me finish?’
‘Of course, Sir. I’m sorry.’
‘Quite apart, as I say, from these considerations, it would be something of a risk to invest too much of the hospital’s funds in training you further. You are not yet thirty, after all. For all we know, you may still want to get married, have children and so on …’
Sally ran his words through her mind again and grunted with irritation as she dismounted. She unlocked the door into the narrow passage at the side of her parents’ house and rammed the bike against the dustbins. A dustbin lid fell off with a clatter. She stooped to replace it, wrinkling her nose at the smell of rotting fish coming from a bloodied newspaper bundle inside. She heard her mother’s low voice from the kitchen window. Clutching her white coat bundled to her chest, Sally leaned against the cold brick wall behind her and waited to calm down. She absorbed the familiar scene about her. The yard, weeds springing up bright between paving stones. The washing line which she and a neighbouring girl used to unhook to skip on, on the rare mornings when it was empty. Her mother’s bicycle, set against the concrete coal bunker, an old black Raleigh, with a thin, red, trim, elegant, curving centre bar and a bell that rang out one clear ‘ping’ instead of the more common, spring-powered jangle. Beyond lay a mean patch of garden, where a gardenless family friend, Ida Totteridge, was allowed to grow vegetables in return for a half-share of the produce. The runner beans were in flower already; the one vegetable which Ida always planted in excess. The far end of the plot was still disfigured by the mud-covered Anderson shelter, which no-one had the strength to dismantle. Ida grew marrows and sweet peas, trailing off its sides and top in gaudy confusion.