Paradise Lodge

by Nina Stibbe

  His hair was black and wavy and his brown eyes were so kind—he was half-puppy, half-boy. He looked like Mowgli and Aladdin and Richard Burton all rolled into one, only prettier, and he just got nicer by the day, and all the people who had pronounced another baby ill advised—my mother’s relatives—would see him in his pram or, later, in his stripy pushchair, holding a little ribbon in his fist and sucking his thumb, and they’d smile and feel happier than they had before. The only time I ever knew him disliked was by a springer spaniel called Turk and even he came to love him. Our mother had got away with it by having the nicest baby it was possible to have.

  There was no denying we were badly off, though, and having Danny had made things considerably harder, and Mr Holt—who was already very careful with money—tightened up further and put a lock on the garage where we kept the tinned foods and a lock on the phone that prevented us dialling.

  ‘Can we actually afford this baby?’ asked Jack, that first evening.

  ‘Good question,’ said Mr Holt. ‘No, we can’t, and we were stretched to the limit already.’

  ‘But he’s worth it, though,’ our mother said, worriedly, ‘isn’t he?’

  And Mr Holt lifted Danny into the air in front of him. ‘He’s all right,’ he said, but he was almost bursting with joy and had to get his hanky out.

  ‘What’s it like to have a baby?’ I asked my mother—I meant how did it feel, emotionally.

  ‘It’s like shitting a football,’ she said.

  ‘I meant, emotionally,’ I said.

  ‘Shitting a football,’ she repeated.

  4. Opportunity Knocks

  Early one morning, soon after my first day at Paradise Lodge, Nurse Hilary telephoned me at home to remind me I was down on the duty rota for Friday—a split shift starting at 8 a.m. It was news to me and I said I’d be at school on Friday and couldn’t work.

  ‘But you’re needed here,’ she said, ‘we’ve a bit of an emergency.’

  ‘But Friday’s a school day,’ I said.

  ‘I understand that,’ said Hilary, ‘but we’re short-staffed.’

  ‘OK, then—see you on Friday,’ I said and hung up.

  What could the emergency be? I imagined all the pretty hall tiles adrift and a spate of tripping accidents, but decided in the end it was more likely there’d been a sudden rush of new patients with special medical needs. It had been strange being phoned at home and it not being one of my friends saying they hated their dad’s guts or did I want to go into town for chips and beans in Woolworth’s café and have our photos taken in the booth? It was a coming-of-age call. I stood in the hall and pondered on that for a while and then had to run for the school bus.

  Miranda had been asked to do the Friday too. We walked up to Paradise Lodge together. She was dreading it. She was in school uniform and furious that I hadn’t phoned to tell her I’d be in my nurse’s uniform with a snake belt and white cap with bare, shaved legs. I was forced to tell her about our phone being ‘incoming calls only’ and she groaned and made remarks about my family being on the breadline. In self-defence I bragged about my rapport with the Owner’s Wife and Miranda said how repugnant she’d found the Matron in the Foster Grant’s. I felt I had the upper hand, but arriving at Paradise Lodge I could sense change.

  The little Matron was suddenly acting as though she was in charge and had put earrings in—hoops—not the sort of ear-wear you’d expect in a medical setting.

  She greeted us as we entered the kitchen and said that due to our superb performance on day one, she would like to interview us with a view to being promoted to the 38p per hour pay band.

  I asked what the promotion would entail. She explained it would be ‘a more responsible role on the teatime shift’ plus ad hoc hours to suit (them). We went, one at a time, to the owner’s office, me first. The owner’s office was a doorless nook with a pretty view over an old orchard. Though still small, Matron seemed slightly taller than I remembered and was rectangular-shaped—approx 20 inches wide. As we reached the office she invited me—with a hand gesture—to go ahead of her but then changed her mind and barged past me to beat me to the better chair. I wondered if the race for the better chair was all part of the assessment. I hoped not because I’d let her have it out of good manners and it occurred to me that it might be construed as unambitious. She was rock solid.

  ‘So, Lizzie, what can you tell me about the elderly?’ she asked. ‘And don’t just trot out the Owner’s Wife’s golden rules.’ She sounded sarcastic.

  I paused for a while because I was a bit confused and because I had heard something recently that was highly relevant to this question. Matron drummed her fingers on the desk while I searched my mind for the thing. It seemed to go on for a long time—her finger-drumming and my mindsearch.

  Then it came to me. ‘Old people are not suited to granary bread,’ I said, triumphantly, ‘they dislike it.’

  It was worth the wait, she looked at me wide-eyed, as though I’d surprised and impressed her.

  ‘Yes, and they’re right to dislike it—it’s evil,’ she said emphatically. And we went off briefly at a tangent and seemed to bond over our mutual hatred of the stuff. Matron said she didn’t know a single person who liked it. Then she remembered someone who did but said that person was nothing but a fool and not to be trusted. Getting back to the point, the elderly were particularly at risk from it, she said, and the bakeries were all jumping on the granary bandwagon, and the dentists and doctors were all in cahoots.

  ‘Folk are putting their stoppings out on bits of grain like gravel and blocking their internal tubes with the seeds and what have you,’ said Matron. ‘And who gains from that?’ she asked.

  It was rhetorical so I just nodded and said, ‘True.’

  ‘OK,’ said Matron, moving on, ‘what experience have you for this role?’

  ‘I’m an expert beverage maker. I know the imperativeness of pouring freshly boiled water on to the bags and that only constant agitation prevents the forming of tannin and the telltale metallic skin and bitter taste.’

  We’d just done this in chemistry, but I wasn’t entirely faking. I did love tea.

  Matron was clearly pleased to hear this and said she’d be in touch forthwith. She followed me out of the owner’s office nook and, to my annoyance, Miranda sat there—applying roll-on lipgloss using a hand-held ladybird mirror—listening.

  ‘See you anon,’ Matron said and ushered Miranda into the owner’s nook. I watched as Matron barged her into the archway, exactly as she had done with me. Miranda barged her back, though, and flopped into the better chair.

  I walked away.

  I doubted even Miranda would have the nerve to bring up granary bread, as if she’d thought it up herself, or that she’d get through the interview without unwittingly revealing her hatred of old people.

  I stood around the corner and listened. Matron asked Miranda what she knew about the elderly and Miranda came straight out and said she found them difficult to comprehend and a bit depressing but would do her absolute best to help them not wee everywhere or drop their food. Far from being cross with Miranda for this negative attitude, Matron agreed and said in her opinion the patients were a bunch of spoilt old bastards and not one of the ladies had done an honest day’s work in their life—apart from Miss Tyler, and even she’d had the life of Riley since retiring and having bread and marmalade brought to her every morning on a tray.

  Later on, Matron called Miranda and me into the office nook. First she told us we’d both been successful in our application for promotion. And then she told us she had news.

  ‘I have good news and sad news,’ said Matron. ‘Which would you like first?’ she asked.

  ‘The sad,’ I said.

  ‘It’s the Owner’s Wife,’ said Matron, ‘I’m afraid she’s gone.’

  ‘What, dead?’ asked Miranda.

  ‘No, she’s left Paradise Lodge and gone to start up an art school, if you please,’ sneered Matron.

  ‘Oh,
no!’ I said.

  ‘Ah, but the good news is, I’ve been promoted,’ she said. ‘I have taken her place as General Manager—as of yesterday I’m Queen Bee.’

  ‘Congratulations,’ said Miranda, ‘that’s great news.’

  I was speechless but managed a smile.

  I could hardly believe it. The Owner’s Wife—the linchpin, my mentor—gone. Ridiculously, I wondered if I was partly to blame for it, the way my sister had felt when my father left (blaming herself, not me). Matron was now Queen Bee. It didn’t make sense.

  In the kitchen at coffee break we discovered not only had the Owner’s Wife gone but she’d also taken Dee-Anna, the very normal nurse who I’d suspected of having something to hide on day one (and now I knew what it was). Also gone was Lazarus, the golden retriever—but not the owner’s Rembrandt self-portrait. The owner wished it had been the other way around, for Lazarus meant more to him than Rembrandt and had been by his side for the previous five years. He’d telephoned his solicitor to see if he could arrange a swap but the answer had been no.

  Nurse Eileen, Nurse Gwen and Nurse Hilary were still there, though, and you could feel something, maybe resentment, betrayal, abandonment. But mostly, the staff were furious with the owner (apart from Matron, who he’d put in charge). Nurse Gwen told us that the Owner’s Wife had been trying to modernize the place for years—she’d had plans drawn up for new wards, hospital bathroom facilities and everything—but the owner had forbidden it, due to not being able to cope with change or dust or builders, and he’d threatened to leave or slit his wrists or go and live in the Volvo if she covered over any more tiles with lino.

  It was difficult to get on with the daily routine with this cloud hanging over us, and because I’d not actually been fully trained except vis-à-vis the comfort round. We all sat at the table smoking and saying how awful the owner was, driving his wife, the linchpin, away.

  Even the cook, who was a known friend of the owner, called the Owner’s Wife ‘the beating heart of the place’.

  ‘She ran this place like clockwork,’ said Nurse Eileen.

  ‘The owner has let us all down by driving her away with his drunken cuntishness,’ said Nurse Gwen.

  ‘She must have been at the end of her tether,’ said Miranda.

  I couldn’t add anything so I just said, ‘True.’

  Everyone agreed it was a disaster, the home wouldn’t survive without her and Dee-Anna, and the owner himself wouldn’t survive and would probably take the coward’s way out. It seemed they’d said all these things before and were just reiterating them now for my and Miranda’s benefit.

  By lunchtime they’d become more philosophical, partly because the owner himself was sitting at the table sharing his thoughts about what had happened. His wife hadn’t been happy since she was thwarted in her ambition to desecrate the house with linoleum. She’d succeeded in laying vinyl flooring in the ladies’ ward while he’d been in hospital having a simple male procedure and she had been about to have the hall done too but he’d arrived home and put a stop to it.

  And Nurse Hilary, who’d called him all the names under the sun earlier, poured him a glass of Tio Pepe and massaged his slumped shoulders and eventually he shuffled off and we could talk more freely about the doomed marriage and the bleakness of the future.

  The Owner’s Wife leaving Paradise Lodge wasn’t the only thing that hadn’t turned out as I expected.

  When I first joined the staff, for instance, I imagined that I’d be the cheeky-but-wise one. The one who said clever, witty things that made the others gasp-but-chuckle. But somehow Miranda took that role and she wasn’t quite as good at it as I’d have been—her cheekiness being a bit on the mean side. To be fair, she didn’t mind being slightly disliked—which I would have. An example of this was that Miranda kept lording over us that she was a non-smoker and loved saying negative, disparaging things about smoking—which was an odd thing to do when all the rest of us delighted in it and did it as much as humanly possible, me included. She’d say things like, ‘Hey, you lot, I’ve made a bonfire outside with a load of swept-up leaves, why don’t you all go out there and stand around it and inhale for free?’ in a sarcastic way. And everyone would laugh at the wise-but-cheeky thing she’d thought up.

  It was particularly annoying for me since smoke rings were my non-verbal catchphrase—either a stream of tiny ones or a large, thick quivering one that hung in the air. I’d practised in the mirror in my bedroom since I was eleven and could even do rectangular ones and ones which shot out and then stopped. And I’d received many compliments. Nurse Gwen, who was usually unsupportive, said my smoke rings were like a modern art phenomenon and I should go on Opportunity Knocks with them.

  One day, when Miranda complained that the air in the kitchen was like a London fog and dramatically opened a window, Matron commented that it was odd and unnatural for a nurse not to smoke. ‘All nurses smoke, it’s their prerogative,’ she said, and she repeated it because it was the run-up for one of her jokes. And then she said a nurse not smoking was as odd as a Chinaman who didn’t like tea or a nun who didn’t like sex. No one really noticed the joke but I’d started to notice how many times people said ‘Chinaman’ in jokes. I felt offended on Mike Yu’s behalf and looked at Miranda to see if she was. She wasn’t.

  She was busy telling the saga of her Great-Granddad Norman who’d had a lung pack up on him due to tobacco smoking. He’d had it removed in touch-and-go surgery, and was now living his last days on the dodgy remaining lung.

  ‘It doesn’t even look like a lung any more,’ said Miranda, ‘more like a dog’s ear in a pound of tar.’

  ‘How do you know?’ Eileen asked.

  ‘He keeps it in a piccalilli jar on the sideboard as a deterrent.’

  If we’d been at school, everyone would have been snorting with laughter by now, but this was the adult world and you had to sit through all sorts of manipulative rubbish and pretend to be interested. We all fell silent and none of us took a puff until the story was finally over, and wasted at least half a cigarette each that break time.

  It was exactly the kind of psychopathic effect Miranda was after.

  5. Certificate of Secondary Education

  The previous year at school, work had suddenly got harder. We were expected to listen, take notes, study at home and demonstrate our understanding of subjects with endless little tests. This new climate coincided with the arrival of baby Danny and my having the odd day off and, for the first time in my school life, I found myself struggling to keep up—as previously mentioned.

  My chemistry teacher, Mr Mackenzie, spoke to me one day after I’d scored 8 out of 50 in a test.

  ‘It’s all the lessons you’ve been missing—you’ve fallen behind,’ he said, ‘way behind.’

  ‘I know, I’m sorry,’ I said.

  ‘I had you down as a scientist, Lizzie,’ he said.

  It sounded like he’d given up on me. I was heartbroken. I quickly, slightly tearfully, reminded him of my idea to invent a strongly scented talcum powder, which would mask odours but be completely see-through and invisible, not white. And therefore could be used liberally all over—on the occasions when bathing isn’t an option—and no one would be the wiser.

  ‘You need to get your skates on and catch up,’ said Mr Mackenzie, ‘otherwise you’ll fail the end of term exam.’

  I confided in him about the birth of Danny and my mother’s despondency since a friend, who lived opposite, had seen her weeing in the kitchen sink and suggested a net curtain if she was going to make a habit of it and how this had caused the friendship to end and thus my mother had been friendless at the most vulnerable point in her life.

  Mr Mackenzie had seemed sympathetic and showed me—in my textbook—the sections I particularly needed to work on at home. And I really meant it when I said I would.

  It was the same in French. In the third year I could name every building and business in the city, I could get you to the park and the cinema and buy a t
hree-course meal in informal and formal French. I had invented an alternative French family whose complications and quirks demonstrated my verbal and written linguistic skills and delighted Madame Perry. I had twin brothers who played the accordion and rode a tandem, and triplet sisters who loved roller-skating. Our granny, an ex-trapeze artist, lived with us and our five English sheepdogs, a donkey called Raisin and a cow called Noisette. By halfway through the fourth, I couldn’t follow even the slowest conversation in class and kept asking ‘Voudriez-vous ouvrir le fenêtre?’ (masculine) instead of ‘la fenêtre’ (feminine).

  Working at home wasn’t easy—which was why Mr Holt used to stop on the way home and do his paperwork parked in a field gate. I tried to work, but honestly the stuff on the pages looked like Egyptian when I opened the book at home.

  One day, after chemistry, Mr Mackenzie spoke to me again; he seemed less sympathetic this time. ‘You’re disrupting the class with your questions and chatting,’ he said. ‘I have reported it to Miss Pitt.’

  ‘Oh, no,’ I groaned and tried to explain my predicament, using the kind of scientific language he’d understand.

  I was like a sandstone rock with a tiny crack in it, I told him. And water had got in and when the sun went down and the night froze, so the water had frozen and expanded and pushed the crack further apart and then, when the sun had come back, the melted ice had crept further into the crack. And so it had gone on and on, making the crack bigger and bigger, until a whole piece of me had fallen off into a fast-flowing river which had transported and deposited that piece of me into a lake where I languished under layers of sediment. My analogy began to break down and Mr Mackenzie interrupted.

  ‘You’d better tell all that to Miss Pitt, she’s a geography specialist.’