The Best of Fiona Kidman's Short Stories

by Fiona Kidman

  In the meantime there is work to be done. I fill the sink with hot soapy water and get out the scrubbing brush. In a few moments the sick has gone. I have a soggy felt hat dripping in my hands, but at least it is clean.

  The husband and wife team, ‘available for cocktail, waitressing and barman duties in the privacy of your own home’, has arrived. ‘Don’t worry about a thing,’ they say. ‘You just enjoy yourselves and we’ll take care of everything from now on.’

  In the clothes drier, the hat whirls around.

  Our son has left for the church. Soon we’ll have to go too. My husband is resplendent. He wears his father’s watch chain across his waistcoat. His father was a guard on the railways, back in the old days. That watch has started a thousand trains on country railway stations. Sometimes I remonstrate with my husband for wearing it; it doesn’t always seem appropriate. Today it is exactly right. The spring in the watch has given up long ago, but the watch will start the wedding on time. Sooner or later.

  My hands shake so much he has to do up the pearl buttons on my Georgia Brown silk. ‘It’s time we were going,’ he says tentatively. I know he’s thinking about the hat, and wondering if he can get me away without it.

  But it’s dry. Dry, and softly drooping around the brim, so that it swoops low over my right eye when I put it on. I stare at myself in the mirror, entranced. I feel beautiful. I glow. I love hats. This hat is perfect.

  Our son’s wife-to-be is late, but then she usually is. Anyone is allowed one failing. I don’t mind. It gives me time to relax, breathe deeply, smile and wave around the church. Across the aisle I see her, the mother of the bride. She is not wearing a hat.

  Instinctively, I touch the brim of mine. I have shamed her into coming without her hat. I should feel jubilant but I don’t. I feel bad, wonder how to take mine off without drawing attention to myself. But it’s impossible. At the door to the church the priest has said, first thing when he sees me, ‘Oh what a beautiful hat.’

  I look away, embarrassed. I tell myself I must not think about it. The wedding is about to happen, and we can’t repeat it when I’m feeling better, so I’ve just got to stop thinking about it, the hat on my head.

  And then they’re there, coming into the church together, which is what’s been arranged, and it’s not quite the same old responses, because some of that wouldn’t be suitable, but they say some nice things to each other, making promises to do things as well as they can, and they’re so young, so very young, and that’s all you can expect from anybody, to do their best, isn’t it?

  The couple are facing the congregation now. This really is very modern. Our daughter stands up at the lectern and reads from the Book of Ecclesiastes, and then some Keats, O brightest! though too late for antique vows, and she’s pale and self-contained and not showing signs of things turning over inside of her, and so lovely; she and the boy, her brother, look at each other, and it’s as if they’re the only ones in the church for a moment, Holy the air, the water, and the fire, like a conversation just for the two of them, putting aside all their childish grievances, though a few people in the church who haven’t done English Lit. look a trifle confused but it doesn’t matter, these two know … so let me be thy choir … thy voice, thy lute … and then our son and his new wife’s baby cries at the back of the church where he’s being held by the auntie, and the spell’s broken, as the two parents look anxiously after their child. The wind rises in the funnel where the church stands, and a plane roars overhead, and the light shines through the stained-glass window on to the same spot where my father’s coffin stood last year, and with all the light and the sound I don’t hear any more of the service, I just smile and smile.

  It’s over. We’re forming up to leave. She and I look at each other across the church again. Suddenly it’s all bustle and go, and what none of us have thought about is the way we get out of the church, but there it is, as old as the service itself, or so it seems, the rituals of teaming up, like finding your partner for a gavotte, step step step an arm offered and accepted she goes with my husband and I go with hers, that’s the way it’s done. Delicate, light as air, we prepare our entrance to the dance, to the music, but before we do, she and I afford each other one more look, one intimate glance. Hatted and hatless, that’s us, blessed are the meek, it’s all the same now. We’re one, her and me. We’re family.

  Needles and Glass

  AGAIN SHE WATCHED THE WOMEN WALK across the grass towards the man. They smiled and some of them laughed aloud. There were so many of them. The man’s eyes were dark and watchful, his cheekbones jutted above his beard. Then Helena’s father hurried her away so that she could not watch them any more. Only, that night, the wind carried the voices of the women to her. They spoke a language she did not understand.

  Around her now was the night, and in the bed before her was the dying woman. Helena felt the dark around them and the wind pressed against the window pane. There were pockets of silence in the hospital and yet they were not silences if you listened with all your senses. Sounds leaned in. The sluicing room where the bedpans were cleaned was down the corridor. Spasmodic jets of water hissed on the enamel. Pans clattered together as they were picked up. Helena got up from the bedside and walked down the corridor, her feet gliding on the brown linoleum.

  ‘Nurse Moore.’

  The young woman carrying the pans stopped and did not turn.

  ‘Yes, Sister?’

  ‘Look at me when I speak to you.’

  The young woman turned to face her. ‘I’m sorry, Sister,’ she said, before Helena had spoken again. ‘Mrs Carrington’s flooding.’

  Her hands shook slightly as she clasped the pans. A wedding ring glinted on the left hand. Her face was fair and pretty, but tired, her hair greasier than it should have been and straggling from under her cap.

  ‘Move quietly, how many times must I tell you … Well go then, if you’re needed.’

  Nurse Moore began her journey down the corridor again. ‘And see me in the morning before you go off duty,’ said Helena.

  The nurse cast a quick agonised glance over her shoulder, her eyes beseeching, and walked on.

  And why did I do that, Helena wondered. Who’s to gain, when an exhausted woman waits back for a reprimand which I have not even composed, while her children wait for their breakfast and their father is about to leave in search of work again?

  Ah, the unemployed. Like beggars at the door. They had fed ten of them that night and God knows where they were sleeping now. At least Moore and his wife had a roof over their heads, and some thanks to her for that too, keeping Moore on, for she was a nurse of only average capability. No, standards must not slip, she had no reason to reproach herself.

  Back at her vigil, she thought to lean her face against the window, but stopped herself. She expected better discipline than that from her staff. Was she not Helena McDonald McGlone, with a standard to set? We are the best, her father had told her, we are from a proud line, we own castles, we are lairds among our own, we must not forget it here.

  The hospital was on a high hill and the sea was below. There were no stars and she thought she heard a storm rising out beyond the harbour reef. A light jerked far below her and it seemed to be on the water. The ships, like the poor, were restless. How the hungry wandered, not just now, but always. They would stop at the farmhouse door, and the servants would give pitchers of water to the swaggers, and sometimes her mother would come out to buy soap, or pins, or some herbal remedy from the passers-by. Why did she buy things she would never use, Helena would ask her, and her mother, delicate as the silk roses she sewed on her cushions, would sigh and say that they must help the poor. Won’t we be poor too, if we help too many of them, Helena had asked then, but her mother had shaken her head at such cosmic incomprehensibility, and told her that they must do what they could to relieve the sufferings of others.

  Which was more or less why she was here, Helena supposed. Only lately the poor seemed to have increased. It occurred to her th
at Nurse Moore was pregnant. She couldn’t understand how she had failed to notice this before, or why she had happened to notice on this particular evening, for that matter.

  Something to do with the way she had straightened her back and turned carefully when Helena had spoken, perhaps. Helena sighed, thinking about it. There would be nothing else for it. It was so difficult, the way things were going, and the riots and the looting in the towns. She hoped Moore’s husband would keep his head. Oh but if the fool had kept other things under control.

  She wrapped her arms around her. It had become colder in the room.

  And the dark women moved over the grass again and the land was covered with light. The sun beat fiercely and the beads they wore twinkled and shone. The man was impassive as they came to him, but his eyes seemed to single out one of them.

  Which one had it been, which one?

  Some of them sang that night in the woolshed where her father let them stay, before their journey north began again next day. The man helped her father to dig a ditch in return for their food and shelter. It was hard work in heavy clay and it had tired her father a great deal. Was the man tired too, and did he, that night, lie down to rest as her father had done, quietly, and in a separate room from her mother, who lay in the double bed with her fine hair spread upon the lace-edged pillowslip? She knew that he did not. There were no separate rooms in the woolshed, only bare boards and the deep and greasy smell of sheep fleece.

  Which one? Why did the others sing?

  The crumpled body in the bed before her now was stirring. Helena reached to pull up the covers, thinking that the cold must have woken her patient. But by the light from the corridor, Helena could see that the eyes were wide and unnaturally bright. She switched on a night-light. There was a syringe of morphine on the table beside the bed. The table was lustrous and bare except for the small tray holding the syringe. Helena expected she would have to use it before the dawn. It was only two o’clock now, and it was too soon.

  But when the pain came, it bit hard and with only the briefest warning, and though the woman would fight against it, once it began she would scream, and the hospital ring with the sound of agony.

  ‘Is the pain coming, Mrs Hardcastle?’

  ‘I’m not sure.’

  ‘Tell me if you need an injection.’

  ‘You’d let me have it?’

  ‘If you need it.’

  ‘If I need it?’ For a moment the voice was waspish. ‘Since when did I decide when I needed it?’

  When Helena didn’t answer, she said, ‘Then it’s as I thought.’

  ‘What did you think?’ said Helena.

  ‘Oh, you know, that it’ll happen soon.’ Her fingers plucked the sheet. ‘I’ll be glad, you know.’

  ‘I expect so.’

  ‘You expect so, eh? That’s a strange thing to say. As if you’d like me to. Well, why not, I can’t say I blame you, you’ve put up with me long enough.’

  ‘No, it’s not that. I expect you’re tired of this, that’s all.’

  ‘Yes, that’s true, I’m tired all right.’

  Mrs Hardcastle was silent awhile, frowning to herself. Far away, in another part of the hospital someone began to shriek. Both women cocked their heads.

  ‘Shouldn’t you be there?’ the patient asked.

  ‘The doctor’s with her.’

  ‘Such a fuss some of them make. Oh I’m not one to talk, I suppose you’d say, look at all the noise I’ve made. But babies, that’s a different matter … no dignity some of them.’

  ‘No two are the same.’

  ‘You’d know I suppose.’

  Helena caught sight of her reflection in the glass, illuminated by the night-light, and it occurred to her that she knew nothing at all. Her face was pale but then that was always so, her eyes nearly as black as her hair: a McGlone, her father had said, with approval. Yet in this strange night her image on the glass might have belonged to anyone, even one of the women who walked across the grass.

  Outside the wind was dropping and a prickle of stars emerged from behind the clouds. If the night could have penetrated the room it would be full of frost now, and not a storm at all. By this new light a shadow moved. It would be the beggars, searching for food. Helena remembered then her mother’s dying and the moustache which grew on her finely moulded upper lip before the end, where food and saliva would gather, and it had become so hard to kiss her once-beautiful face.

  ‘Will I get someone for you?’ Helena asked.

  ‘Is it as close as that, d’you think?’

  Helena took the woman’s pulse, so that it was some time before she answered. ‘It’s difficult to tell,’ she said at last. ‘Have you still no pain?’

  ‘No,’ said her patient. ‘It seems to be taking a rest.’ She touched the spread covering her distended stomach, speaking of the tumour as if it were a live creature, apart from her.

  ‘You can have the morphine if you want.’

  ‘Thank you. But let’s wait and see what it thinks.’ She touched the coverlet again.

  ‘And you don’t want anyone?’

  Mrs Hardcastle was not very old, or certainly not old enough for it to be said that her time had come. Helena had forgotten exactly how old, although she had seen it on the records, but she knew she was closer to sixty than seventy. Her hands were thick and even after months in hospital there was still a roughness about them from scrubbing with cold water, and helping out on the farm when her son’s wife was in having babies. She and the man she called Dad, or Jack, depending on how she was feeling about him after a visit, still took their turn on the farm. Helena supposed that in a sense she must still have a role to play there, to help out like that while the next generation were being born and raised. There was a useful place in the world that she would leave empty with her death. Helena wondered if that could be possible in her own life. It seemed unlikely. There would be other nursing sisters to run small country hospitals, the world was full of unmarried women who did their work well.

  ‘He’s got to do the milking this morning, it wouldn’t be fair,’ said the patient, coming to a decision.

  ‘But …’ Helena checked herself, it felt like giving special leave to one of the staff to attend a wedding or a ball.

  Mrs Hardcastle was almost apologetic. ‘Young Rob had to go to town overnight, see. The separator broke down. You can’t be without the separator.’

  ‘No, of course not.’

  ‘It’ll be all right. You’ll stay, won’t you?’

  ‘Oh yes.’

  ‘Besides, it mightn’t be till after the milking.’

  ‘Shall I put the light off?’

  ‘It doesn’t make much difference. No, leave it on.’

  For a long time then, they sat in silence. Mrs Hardcastle appeared to doze and didn’t move when Nurse Moore came to tell Helena that Mrs Carrington had given birth to a daughter and was safe. The doctor put his head in the door a little later, and took Mrs Hardcastle’s pulse and temperature, and still she drowsed on without seeming to notice. Out in the corridor Helena told him what had taken place, and he said the patient might last until the morning or longer, who knew, she was closer to death than either of them and might know more about it. He said he would sleep at the hospital if Helena wished, but he was white with exhaustion, and besides she had the needle on the shining table, and she sent him away. Somewhere out on the rim of the world the light would be weaving its way towards them, but still it was not dawn. Now Helena knew that there was indeed a frost outside, and she thought how hard it would be for Jack Hardcastle as he faced the milking alone in another hour or so. Now that the wind had dropped she knew it could not be the trees that moved outside but surely there were not so many of the poor out there roaming the night either. There were too many shapes. She rubbed her eyes. The women were moving again, only this time they were moving towards her. Their hands were empty but there seemed to be something bounteous about them, as if they carried fruit and flowering branches. One o
f them held her hands in front of her as if she was holding melons but then Helena saw that it was her breasts she was holding high.

  ‘What time is it?’ asked Mrs Hardcastle.

  Helena jumped, trembled. ‘Nearly five o’clock,’ she said.

  The palest sliver of light was slitting the sky.

  ‘Could I have half the needle now?’ said Mrs Hardcastle. Her breath was panting quietly.

  ‘You can have it all.’

  ‘No … I want to be awake when it comes … aah, yes, yes. Thank you, Sister, you’re a good girl, yes.’

  ‘Lie back now; it’s all right, I’m here with you.’

  But Mrs Hardcastle’s hand had floundered towards the table where Helena had replaced the now half-empty syringe.

  ‘What is it?’ Helena asked.

  ‘My spectacles. Will you put them on me, please?’

  ‘Why yes, if you want.’

  She hooked the steel frames around Mrs Hardcastle’s ears and propped the bridge as comfortably as she could on her thin nose.

  ‘What do you see?’ she asked, for Mrs Hardcastle was peering around her in a distracted way.

  ‘I don’t know. Everything and nothing. You can see so much and still do nothing about it, can’t you?’

  ‘I suppose so. Yes, I’m sure you’re right.’

  ‘I’ve seen a lot of things in my time. Too late to tell you now. Should have. Would you have been interested? Would you have listened?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Ah, would you though? Tell me, Sister, what have you seen?’

  ‘Oh … I don’t know. Not much. The things that have happened in hospitals, sick people, things like that you know.’

  ‘Oh that, yes I can see that. But I mean, what have you seen? Really seen?’

  Helena walked to the window again and thought, I should not be having this conversation, I am a nurse, it is not for me to tell people about myself, my private self. And yet, what did it matter, in a few hours this would all be over, there was nothing to lose. Her face closer to the glass, the reflection full of fine lines. No girl this, a woman growing older; soon she would be middle-aged, and then before you could turn around, an old woman like the one in the bed beside her, if she made it that far. She reached back into her memory for something she might have seen that this woman had not. The McGlones and the McDonalds, perhaps, but they were only her parents and, if it came to that, maybe not quite so different as they would have had her believe.