As the evening wore on Anne began to feel rather drunk. Her table companions appeared to be talking about physics and metaphysics, a subject beyond her even when sober. She might have felt inadequate — her bubble of happiness was never very thick — but the cider buoyed her up, so she smiled at the handsome Egyptian sitting on her right. “A cold world proved by logic,” she murmured.
The Egyptian released a flow of flattery in her direction, as though she had pressed a button.
Undaunted, she tried again. “While I fill my physical inside with foul smoke, my mental inside blossoms with the desire to seek truth.”
The Egyptian was a little startled, but John Drake answered, faithfully ensconced on Anne’s left side whether she paid any attention to him or not.
“I think the foul smoke facilitates the blossoming of the soul.”
“How?”
“It relaxes the body and therefore the mind. When the mind is relaxed it opens up like a flower, imbibing new ideas and perceptions in the process.”
“Even if cigarettes help my mind to open — yes I will have another one thank you John — wouldn’t draft cider cloud it?”
The Egyptian leaned forward and whispered in Anne’s ear, “Would you like to come back to my rooms in the university for a cup of tea?”
Anne thought it might be fun. She lurched to her feet and turned around to say goodbye to the table. John looked disgruntled, “Isn’t it rather late?”
“For a cup of tea? I’m dying for one.” Anne leaned down and whispered in his ear. “Don’t worry, Cambridge students are all well-bred men, indoctrinated with British public school values. No matter their colour.”
Anne didn’t notice when the Egyptian locked the door behind her. She kicked off her shoes, half-reclining on the couch and closed her eyes.
“I am so exhausted. Drank way too much. A cup of tea would be marvellous.”
She felt something wet on her cheek and sat bolt upright as though she had been scalded. He had licked her. Licked her! How disgusting and foreign.
“What on earth do you think you’re doing? Are you going to make me a cup of tea or not?”
His answer was to lunge at her, and she leapt to her feet with dexterity and skipped to the other side of the coffee table.
“For goodness sake! Control yourself.”
“You are the most beautiful thing I have ever seen. I want to make love to you.”
“Outrageous!”
He pushed the table to the side, and pursued her around the sofa till he managed to grab the back of her red jumper. Anne’s flight was hindered by a sudden onslaught of helpless laughter. The whole situation was absurd, with a dollop of fear to lend excitement. The student fell on her neck with passionate kisses. His hands were travelling in places she preferred to have control of, and her amusement fled with her dignity.
“Stop this at once! Let me out of this room.” An aggressive shove propelled him backwards and she dashed towards the door, shaking the handle.
“How dare you lock me in here! Let me out before I scream the place down!”
“Just one kiss …”
“I demand that you let me out of here now.”
“Sit here beside me and we’ll discuss it.”
“How dare you? How DARE you! Open this door before I scream for the porter.”
He approached her again, grasping her by the arms and bending his head towards her throat. She opened her mouth and shrieked.
“Shhh — it’s two o’ clock in the morning!”
“I’ll scream again. Let me out right now.”
“And what will the porter think of you? Will he think you’re a cheap little tease, like I do?”
Anne’s eyes filled with tears and she started to hammer on the door to hide her distress. He opened it without saying another word.
She rushed through the deserted streets, gulping back her sobs. Was she mad to go to his room? Or was he mad to behave the way he had done?
The next morning Louise shook her awake even before her internal alarm clock had a chance to terrorize her. She waved the red jumper in front of her face.
“How could you? How could you ruin my new jumper?”
For a second Anne didn’t know what she was talking about. Her head felt like a tender bruise, and Louise’s raised voice hurt everywhere, especially her eyes.
“A new jumper, which I’d never even worn. It’s so selfish. Everything’s about you and your pathetic little pleasures!”
“Benzedrine,” Anne murmured, feeling around the top of her side table in the semi-darkness. She found the bottle and popped one in her mouth.
“Are you listening to me?”
“I didn’t think you’d mind if I borrowed your jumper. I’m sorry I didn’t ask you.”
“It’s ruined!”
“I took very good care of it. I’m sure it’s not really ruined.”
“It is!” Louise screeched in her face, holding the jumper up to demonstrate how it had been stretched out of shape. “It doesn’t look new anymore.”
“I’ll clean it for you. It will look as good as new. I am sorry, but I can’t undo last night, can I? I feel wretched. Sick unto death.”
Louise walked out of the room.
Borrowed Louise’s jumper last night without asking. I didn’t ruin it on purpose. It was that bloody lecherous Egyptian. Maybe I didn’t apologize enough, but I’d just woken up and felt ghastly. I am finding excuses for my guilt. That’s what everybody does. In fact, I have a petty, selfish, jealous mind. I am not in full knowledge of myself, even though I have been given full control of myself. If I had enough truth and confidence I could perhaps keep to the path of righteousness I struggle to follow … but I am preoccupied with money worries and beauty preparations. ‘The Ideal is in thyself. The impediment too is in thyself. ’
Louise was sitting at the tea table when Anne went down, immersed in conversation with the nurse who had thrown Anne a malicious look the day before. It seemed to Anne that they both glanced up at her in a conspiratorial way, as though she was the subject of their conversation. She sat at the other end of the table in a daze of misery.
‘I didn’t mean to ruin her bloody jumper,’ she thought to herself. ‘I had a horrible experience with that nasty man. What petty revenge is this? What nasty, spiteful, womanly revenge? A man would just punch you, and then it would be over.’
If Louise knew how she had barely escaped violation….
“How’s my little girl?” croaked Anne’s favourite Irish tramp. She sat by his bed and took his hand, ready to regale him with her adventure. But he couldn’t listen. His haggard eyes shifted in their sockets as his breath struggled within the cancerous throat.
“The social worker is coming around, dear. Can I ask her to get anything for you?”
“Cigarettes,” he said, “I’d love a cigarette.”
When she brought him the cigarette he leaned to one side of his bed, smoking with pleasure. Anne squeezed his hand and left to attend to her duties, popping in and out of his room all morning.
When he died, she held his hand for a time. She was determined to lay him out even though she was supposed to be in the operating theatre during the afternoon. She was his special girl, and she didn’t want anyone else to do it. The ward sister gave her permission, as she was so fond of him, and she spent the last afternoon with her Irish tramp, washing him, tying his jaw closed, covering his emaciated body with a white shift. She took her time, resting her eyes on his face often, cheered by the difference between his time of suffering and his peaceful expression at death.
That evening, the student with the big, shaggy head was at Dorothy’s. Anne danced wildly, feeling the music course through her veins and override dark thoughts. Flitting from partner to partner, she was amused to glimpse the shaggy student progress awkwardly across the floor
in her direction, a shambling bear amongst a whirl of dervishes. She twirled around to face him, and he began to shuffle from foot to foot, treading on her toes several times in an effort to follow her flying feet.
She stopped. “Perhaps it would be better if we sat down for a bit.”
“Yes, absolutely! Can I get you a drink?”
Anne thought he’d better get her a stiff one, to make up for his dancing.
He lumbered in the direction of the bar, happy to be released from the torture of his inadequacy on the dance floor.
Anne was planning to knock back the drink and find a more suitable dancing partner, but the shaggy student sat down opposite her.
“It has been precisely three weeks since I first saw you. You were looking in a shop window, and your profile riveted me — your round forehead and strong Greek nose, straight as though God had used a ruler to create it.
Hear my soul speak:
The very instant that I saw you, did
My heart fly to your service.
“I let you pass on, and rushed to occupy the spot where your feet had been. I looked in the same shop window, trying to guess what had caught your attention. Was it this?”
He fished a box out of his breast pocket and placed it open on the table. It contained a pair of silver earrings.
“They are beautiful,” Anne said, smiling at the intensity of this strange young man.
“Are they? Are they?” he asked, leaning forward as though he would knock his forehead against hers.
“They are,” she answered, thinking he could not have afforded the earrings she had really been looking at through the shop window.
He was satisfied and retreated a little. “Then I saw you here and realized the whole world was in love with you. This should have been obvious, but I was stupid, stupid!” And he delivered such a blow to his forehead that Anne grabbed his hand. He kissed her knuckle.
“That night, I beseeched God to make you ugly so that I alone would love you!”
“God forbid,” Anne murmured.
“Other men might find you beautiful, but I am not like other men! I sense a beautiful soul behind your transient beauty. I, also, possess a beautiful soul underneath my wretched ugliness. In the final reckoning surely it is our souls that matter.”
Anne watched his full lips, mesmerized. Surely the strange way he talked was affectation, but he was so very earnest.
“Would you accept an invitation for tea in my rooms?”
“I don’t even know your name.”
“Samuel. Samuel Golden.”
He offered his arm as they walked along the street. “The joy that you have given me by agreeing to come! Yet I was sure it would happen like this.”
“You had no reason to be sure. Something nasty happened to me last night and I might easily have refused to come.”
“What happened?”
“Oh, nothing. A man tried to take liberties.”
“Who was it? I’ll make him yearn for liberty.”
“It doesn’t matter who it was.”
A little winding staircase led to his rooms in the university, which were filled with the usual heavy leather furniture. Samuel raced about in excitement, cooking some steaks that had apparently been sitting in readiness on a hot plate plugged into an electrical outlet in the bathroom.
“Did you know you were going to invite me back here, or did you just happen to have steak in your rooms?”
“I always eat in my rooms. I did sample the wares at the Hall when I first arrived but found there was too much meat around me and not enough on my plate.”
Anne smiled. “Aren’t you rationed?”
“You can have all my rations.”
Anne stared curiously around the room, noting the messy piles of books strewn across the heavy desk, paper and pens in disarray. There was a little black skullcap perched like a hat on the lamp.
“Are you Jewish?”
Samuel shot her an indecipherable look through the bathroom door. “Yes.”
He re-entered the room with two plates and two glasses — a large gin and steak for him, a small gin and steak for Anne.
He stared at her for a moment before giving her the plate.
Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?
Thou art more lovely, and more temperate.
He talked while they ate, propounding the differences between the Augustinian view of mankind and the Rousseauist.
“Augustinians believe that mankind is essentially weak and draw the reader’s attention to the evils of the material world. The Rousseauist, on the other hand, believes that man is fundamentally good, and brings home to us the health and wholeness of the real being.”
Anne listened. She had never met anybody who spoke with such passion and energy, and wondered whether it was a Jewish characteristic, differentiating them from their undemonstrative English counterparts. As he relaxed into his second gin and tonic, his stilted speech normalized and he spoke with fiery inhibition. Could this man guide her own poor fumblings towards a deeper understanding of life?
Suddenly, Samuel ceased his intellectual musings and got up, coming close to Anne and putting his arm around her. She moved to the other side of the table, but he lumbered after her. It was a hysterical repetition of yesterday’s farce, except that there had been no lead-up to this onslaught at all. From Augustus to sex.
“What on earth do you think you are doing?”
“I am pursuing you around the coffee table and the remains of our steak dinner.”
“I understood that bit. Why?”
“To kiss you.”
“That’s not going to happen,” she said, smiling at the ludicrousness of the situation.
“Eventually it will, according to my experienced friend.”
The simplicity of this remark disarmed Anne. “Someone advised you to behave like this?” she laughed.
Samuel looked perplexed, and a little pleased at the same time. “According to my trusted friend Philip, the physical relations between man and woman resemble a primal hunt. I am prepared to go round and round the coffee table ad infinitum, but I’d be grateful if we could pretend I’ve caught you, because there’s a severe stitch in my side.”
“Let’s pretend you have, and forget the whole thing. Who is this Philip, filling you with such rubbish?”
Samuel looked sheepish. “Perhaps it works better for him, because he’s more athletic.”
“Chasing women around the coffee table isn’t good advice. I have to go now.”
He gave her a stricken look.
“Don’t worry, I’m not angry. We’ll see each other again, won’t we?”
He grasped the hand she held out to him, then brought it gently to his lips.
An important figure has entered my life, she wrote in her diary. Am I not a desert waiting for the rain? Have I perhaps found it? I have been warm all night because I spent the evening with him. It was so glorious, how I revelled in it! I know that we will again be together. We will laugh and his brow will be furrowed and he will gesticulate and I will listen and smoke and smile. Then he will tell me how beautiful I am and try to make love to me — this I know.
THREE
I lay the manuscript on the bedcovers and look at the ceiling. My shoulders and neck ache, and I realize that I’ve been tense the whole time, attacked by a gamut of feelings: terror the manuscript was going to be awful, relief that it wasn’t too bad, wincing at the weaker lines — how pompous and stilted my father sounds!
More than anything, amazement that my mother wrote this. My mother!
Obviously, this is a story about my mother’s life. I had heard all about the formidable grandmothers in their starched gowns and their attitudes about sex, and I knew she’d been a nurse at Cambridge, though the flirting and pill-popping were a shock. I realize I am jud
ging anxiously all the time I am reading. Her self-knowledge surprises me, her diary embarrasses me, especially lines like, “Am I not a desert waiting for the rain?” Like for fuck’s sake, who are you trying to impress? I imagine my mother imagining others reading this, wanting them to see her in a certain way. I just hate shit like that. I feel like I’m standing at the check-out of a grocery store, and she’s spouting this rubbish to the stunned girl behind the counter. Then the pomposity of my father’s voice — he does have a stilted way of speaking, but the effort to capture this on paper irritates me.
Still. The main feeling is one of incredulity. I am reading a manuscript about my mother’s life. And my father’s. Just a little more, even if I regret it tomorrow.
Matron cornered Anne just as she was emerging from the tearoom.
“Nurse Anne! I’d like a word with you! Please come to my office.”
Anne sat in the hard upright chair, feeling annoyed. The caustic Matron had interrupted a daydream about the shaggy student.
“You have been in the operating theatre most afternoons for the past few weeks.”
“Yes Matron.”
“Under the operating table, to be precise, gathering and counting the swabs.”
“A very necessary part of the process.”
“Yes. And the most boring part as well. I asked the ward sister why she gave a bright nurse like you such a menial job all the time, and she said you had asked to do it. Why?”
Compliments weren’t usually forthcoming from Matron, so it was pleasant to hear that she thought her bright. Anne’s natural warmth overcame her irritation, and she leaned forward in her chair.
“I know I have to do a bit of everything while I’m in training, but I don’t like the atmosphere in the operating room. It’s so stressful, and I can’t get used to watching the doctor cutting people open.”
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