Under the Skin

by Nina Bawden

  She was bending over me with a puzzled look on her face. ‘Of course you don’t, darling. You never did.’ Her bedside manner was perfect, indulgent and consoling. Then her colour deepened. She said in a shocked voice, ‘Reggie didn’t, I mean he didn’t say anything?’

  ‘No. You can tell him so, if you like.’

  ‘Oh,’ Her cheeks looked like two polished Christmas apples. She said, ‘Tom, it wasn’t – I can explain.’

  ‘I’m sure you can. Don’t, though. It would take too long.’ I shut my eyes, thinking, how fortunate the sick are! They can always close their eyes and leave the healthy to feel guilty.

  ‘All right.’ I heard her voice, hesitant, slightly bewildered. ‘Tom, you can go to sleep in a minute. I just want to know one thing. Where did you leave the car?’

  ‘Jay took it,’ I said. ‘I told him to.’ I opened my eyes. ‘What’s happened to him?’

  Chapter Fifteen

  It was a long time before I knew the answer. At least, it seemed a long time, the eternity of an illness. In fact I was ill for ten days or so, ten days in which the world could have blown itself to smithereens for all I knew or cared. My consciousness was reduced to the limits of the private ward that Augustus, so I learned afterwards, had insisted on paying for, and for much of the time to the even narrower limits of my sweating, painful, itching body. The itching was the worst thing; it is always the humiliation, the small degradations of illness one remembers. Certainly there was no dignity, no heroic, sick-bed drama about what happened to me. I swelled up. I had reacted badly to some drug they gave me and swelled up in lumps like monstrously inflated flea bites. I lay there, suffering like Job, covered in drying calamine lotion and living for the times when the young nurse would come in with her clean, wholesome smile and her cool, unsexed hands and paint me with it again. For a few minutes after she had done that, I was comfortable, I felt as if I could lie, uncomplaining, until Doomsday, but then the itching would start again and the tossing and the hopeless attempt to find some clear corner of the sheets. Besides this, the pain in my chest seemed a minor affliction, though the drugs they gave me only removed the pain to the end of my bed where it sat for the duration, like some acquaintance you neither know nor care much about but for whom time and propinquity has produced a grudging respect.

  Louise was there much of the time. Julia came several times, whispering at me in low, hoarse, hospital tones and Augustus once: I remember him standing by the side of my bed, a dimly seen hulk, like a ship that looms up suddenly in a heavy fog before disappearing

  again. They were all, even Louise, intrusive shadows, without

  substance.

  One morning I went to sleep after my calamine bath and woke up without itching or pain. Sun lay across my feet the dust danced in the sun’s beam and I felt wonderful; limp, weak, but wonderful.

  Louise came. She was wearing a green tweed suit I hadn’t seen before. I smiled at her. She said, ‘You’re better,’ and came straight into my arms. With one hand I felt the delicate wing of her shoulder blade, with the other the warm curve where her waist flowed beautifully into her hip. Her cheek was cool against mine, she felt light and warm as down. I felt completely and contentedly happy, like an old owl in the sun. I could have stayed like that for ever.

  But she sighed, moved her head, lifted it a little and smiled at me. ‘I’m getting pins and needles,’ she said.

  She sat heavily on the side of the bed, pulling the blankets uncomfortably tight across me. She unbuttoned the jacket of her suit, wriggled, and tucked the blouse more neatly into the top of her skirt.

  ‘That’s new,’ I said.

  ‘Do you like it? Mother bought it. She met me outside the hospital and marched me into a shop. I think she was trying to cheer me up.’ Her eyes filled. ‘It seemed dreadful at the time, trying on clothes. I felt so heartless.’

  ‘It doesn’t seem to have spoiled your judgment. That’s a very nice suit.’

  She looked at me reproachfully. ‘Don’t be unkind. I thought you were going to die.’

  ‘Disappointed?’

  She caught her breath. Then she smiled. ‘Of course, you horrible old man. Why – I’d re-arranged my life. They said you’d be all right, but I didn’t dare believe it. It seemed safer to think the other thing. Like carrying an umbrella on a sunny day. You know.’

  ‘Yes.’ I laughed. I understood perfectly. ‘What had you decided to do with your freedom?’

  She giggled; she looked suddenly beautiful with happiness. ‘I couldn’t make up my mind whether to sell the house and go to live with Mother, or whether to stay on and take lodgers.’

  ‘I don’t see you as a landlady. You’d have done better to go on a cruise with Julia. She’d be bound to suggest something like that. To help you forget. You’d almost certainly pick up some desirable widower. Someone rich this time.’

  ‘An oil magnate or a wool millionaire. Sable and emeralds or mink and diamonds,’ she said, and I felt a sudden stab of jealousy that bothered me. It was ridiculous that I could feel jealous of a hypothetical replacement when I had not felt jealous of Jay. But then I had no cause to feel jealous of Jay. Or had I?

  I said huffily, ‘I’m sorry to have deprived you of the opportunity,’ and she looked hurt for a moment before she smiled in plump, pleased, rather annoying fashion. ‘Idiot,’ she said. She opened her handbag, took out a thick, white envelope and laid it on my chest. There was a gleeful air of ceremony about the way she did this, like a little girl handing out the presents from the Christmas tree. ‘That’s for you, from Hilton. He said I was to give it to you as soon as you are well enough. He’s been awfully worried, he’s telephoned every day.’ She frowned and said in a stern, motherly voice. ‘Everyone’s been awfully worried about you, in fact. Even Veronica sent you a Get Well card. A rude, witty one with a plastic bed-pan attached. I don’t know what I did with it, though, it didn’t seem much of a joke at the time.’

  ‘And Jay? Did he get the car back safe and sound?’

  I spoke with a casualness that almost deceived myself. I was sure, now, that Reggie had been grotesquely misled; knowing that I wanted to believe this made me superstitiously nervous rather than suspicious. To say the least, this was a thorny area of misunderstanding I did not want to explore just yet.

  But I was unprepared, all the same, for her reaction. The colour rushed into her face and her eyes went dark. She glanced at me and then looked away. She looked thoroughly bewildered – no, guilty. There was no other word. But guilty, I thought, in the way a child caught out in some misdemeanour looks guilty. Then I thought: don’t comfort yourself.…

  I said cravenly, ‘Come on, love. Did he bash the car up? If he did, you can tell me. It’s my fault.’

  She shook her head. ‘The car’s all right.’ Then added, too quickly, too brightly, ‘Aren’t you going to open your letter?’

  ‘In a minute.’ Surely she wouldn’t act like this unless.… I felt my heart plummet down as if shot from a spring. I said feverishly, ‘There’s something wrong with Jay. He’s hurt – he’s had an accident.’

  ‘No. Jay’s not hurt.’ Recovering herself, she gave an impatient sigh. ‘Do stop worrying. Please, darling. You’re ill. Look – if you’re too lazy, I’ll open your letter and read it for you.’

  She put out her hand for the envelope and I caught her wrist.

  ‘It’ll keep. First, you tell me what’s wrong. There is something wrong, isn’t there?’

  ‘You’re hurting me,’ she complained. I knew that; I had meant to hurt her. I let her go and she rubbed her wrist. ‘All right,’ she said in a resigned voice. ‘I’ll tell you. There’s no dreadful secret. Only I wanted to wait till you were better.’

  ‘I am better.’

  Her eyes were anxious. ‘Sure? You won’t be silly and get upset – or angry? Promise?’

  ‘What’s happened? For God’s sake, you’re making me feel like someone in an ineffective Greek chorus. Get on with it.’

 
I felt tired, suddenly, sick and irritated, but in a distant, dream-like way. It seemed unlikely that I could rise to any more positive emotion than an invalid’s peevishness.

  ‘Jay’s gone home. To Kenya.’

  ‘I knew he was thinking of it. Agnes was ill.…’

  ‘Yes. But that’s not all. I’d better start at the beginning.’ She sat up very straight. ‘After he’d left you that evening, he did the oddest thing. He – he went to see your mother. He told Reggie afterwards that he’d met her before and she’d been charming to him. But I don’t know.…’

  ‘He had. She was. Mr Henderson,’ I said, and found myself smiling. ‘She thought he was Mr Henderson.’ I looked at her puzzled face. ‘It doesn’t matter. I’ll explain later. Go on.’

  ‘Well – I don’t know what time he turned up but it must have been awfully late. Your mother was in bed. She’d been restless all day and the doctor had given her something to make her sleep. That was lucky in a way because she slept right through all the fuss and bother. Miss Foley had come in last thing, to see she was all right. She opened the door to Jay. I suppose it was a shock, seeing him. He looked so awful. Reggie said that even when he saw him the next morning and he’d cleaned up a bit, he looked terrible. There was blood and muck all over his clothes and he had this ghastly eye. Anyway, it was enough to frighten Miss Foley. She screamed and went on screaming apparently, and Jay got scared and started to run. A couple of neighbours caught him as he was running out of the gate. Of course they got the wrong idea, you couldn’t blame them, and fetched the police. The police were quite sensible about it – I mean, they might not have been, considering the way he looked. They took him down to the station and telephoned us. I was at the hospital – you won’t remember, but I was here till about four in the morning – so they spoke to Reggie.’ She cleared her throat nervously. ‘He said he didn’t know what had happened – he didn’t then – but he knew Mr Nbola was a friend of ours. Though he didn’t know what he was doing with our car.’ She looked at me. ‘That was quite reasonable, Tom.’

  ‘Oh, perfectly. One has a duty to protect other people’s property. I can imagine just how Reggie sounded.’

  ‘I daresay,’ she said, rather dryly. ‘But he’s not as bad as you think. I told him, when I came home, that it was all right about the car. He went down next morning and sorted things out. The trouble was, the police wanted to prosecute Jay.…’

  ‘For being forced to spend another night in a police station? For heaven’s sake!’

  ‘He hadn’t a driving licence,’ she said. ‘Though I suppose they were fed up, too. Anyway, Reggie talked to Jay. He was pretty miserable.…’

  ‘You surprise me.’

  ‘Oh, don’t be so stupid,’ she said with a flash of anger. ‘Don’t be so bloody clever. You’re not the only person who – of course he’s had a lousy time and of course it wasn’t his fault. Not all his fault, anyway. Though why on earth he went bursting down to your mother.…’

  ‘I told him to clear out,’ I said slowly. Then I thought of something. ‘Surely you must have spoken to him earlier? I mean, he must have telephoned you?’

  ‘Yes.’ She looked uncomfortable. ‘I’m afraid I wasn’t very – I mean I was upset about you. After all, he did say it was his fault you’d got in this fight. He said, should he come to see me and I said no, Reggie was there and anyway I wasn’t sure I particularly wanted to see him, just then. I wasn’t angry, Tom, honestly, just a bit chilly, I suppose.’ She put out a hand to me and I took it. She said, very low, ‘All the same, I can’t imagine why he should have gone to see your mother.’

  ‘I can,’ I said.

  I could imagine it only too well. I even felt a humiliated physical shrinking as if I had telephoned Louise and come up against that cold wall of indifference. It wasn’t Louise’s fault. In a moment of crisis no one cares about anyone except themselves and the people closest to them, their wives, their husbands, their children. Her concern was for me; she shut him out. Afterwards he had got back into the car and sat there, perhaps for five minutes, perhaps for half an hour, fighting with loneliness and exhaustion and fear that grew – because fear is the emotion that grows fastest when you are alone: fear of the police, fear of Edward Jones, fear of my house, fear of his friends and of the whole of this cold, alien world where there was no one close, no wife, no child, to comfort him. There was nowhere he could go, nowhere he could escape from the twin enemies of violence and indifference. Then he had remembered the only person who had said to him: come again, come any time. She might think he was someone else but it would be a relief to be someone else for a while; to be the friendly ghost of Mr Henderson, safe in a world of friendly ghosts. Perhaps when he had started he had not really meant to go there, perhaps it had just been a half-formed idea, an excuse to start driving, to travel somewhere, anywhere, to clear out, as I, his best friend, had told him to. But then, once he was out of London – past Lewisham, Black-heath, on the fast Maidstone road – he was afraid to stop because once he had stopped he would be alone again, in the dark, in the silence, with nowhere to go. So he had driven on accelerating faster and faster, up Death Hill, along the new motorway down to Charing in Kent, then on the winding road to the Medway Bridge and the Thanet Way. It was a miracle that he had escaped both death and the law, but he had; he had got where he wanted to go, found the house, and walked up the little front path to the only person whose welcome he thought he could be sure of.… And she didn’t open the door, she wasn’t there. Only poor old Miss Foley, who screamed.…

  ‘Damn, Miss Foley,’ I said. ‘Damn her for a silly bitch.’

  ‘Don’t Tom.’ Louise looked at me. ‘She’s dead.’

  ‘Dead?’

  ‘She had a stroke. Not then, two days later. The doctor came to see your mother and Miss Foley wasn’t there, so he broke in and found her. She was dead in bed.’

  ‘Oh, my God,’ I said.

  She stroked the back of my hand. ‘It’s all right,’ she said. ‘Your mother’s all right. Though she was terribly upset Miss Foley didn’t come. She yelled at the doctor and threw—’

  ‘An inkstand?’

  She grimaced. ‘No. A kettle of boiling water. It didn’t hit him, fortunately. He got help and they took her to hospital.’ Her fingers went on stroking mine. ‘Darling, it was the only thing to do. And she’s all right. Mother went down to see – I asked her to because I knew you’d worry. But she seemed quite happy and the nurses are nice. There’s an Irish girl she’s taken a great fancy to, apparently. She calls her Harriet. And she’s on her own, in a nice room with a view of the sea. That was Reggie’s doing. He got on to someone, pulled a few strings – you know Reggie. He knew you wouldn’t want her in a general ward.’

  ‘No. I suppose it’s all for the best,’ I said. I felt nothing. I was floating in a warm sea of no-feeling. All for the best. A happy release. Did she feel that? How did she feel? I didn’t know. I could never know. There was no magic button, no way of knowing. No meeting, no sharing.

  Louise was looking relieved. ‘I’m glad you see that, darling. I was so afraid you’d be upset. Though there wasn’t anything else we could do, was there?’

  ‘I suppose not.’

  ‘Darling—’ she began, and stopped.

  I said, ‘And what happened about Jay’s driving licence? You may as well finish the serial. I suppose Reggie fixed that too. Reggie, the Fixer.’

  ‘He did, as a matter of fact. He persuaded them not to prosecute. As Jay was going back home.’

  ‘Did Reggie fix that too?’

  ‘Not exactly. I don’t really know, I mean I didn’t see Jay until it was all decided. I think he did want to go. It wasn’t just Agnes, though of course that was what he told the university. I think Reggie told him that if the police did prosecute, there might be trouble about his grant. I mean, the authorities wouldn’t be too pleased with him. So it seemed better, as Jay did want to be with Agnes, for him to go home straight away. It would keep his recor
d clean, so if he wanted, he’d be able to take his grant up again later or apply for another.…’ She hesitated. ‘Reggie paid his fare, actually. Though he thinks the Kenya Government will probably refund it. Do you know what Reggie said after he’d gone? He said, “You know, he was really quite a decent sort of chap”.’ She waited a moment, then said with disappointment, ‘I thought that would make you laugh.’

  ‘It does. I’m laughing inside like a drain. I think Reggie’s quite a decent chap, too. You can tell him so, if you like.’

  ‘Tom, don’t be horrid.’

  ‘I didn’t mean to be. What did he arrange about the boy? Or did he forget about Philip?’

  ‘No one’s arranged anything about Philip. Not yet. He’s to spend the holidays with Georgiana. Then it depends. I said, we’d talk to his headmaster. He can stay for the year, longer, if it seems a good idea. But if he wants’ – a small, mysterious smile hovered round her mouth – ‘he can fly back with us, in the summer.’

  ‘Oh.’ I felt about on my chest and picked up Hilton’s letter. I knew what was in it, I suppose I had known all the time. ‘I’ve got the job, haven’t I?’ I said. It didn’t seem to matter very much.

  She nodded. ‘You’ve got Hilton to thank. He telephoned Geneva and said you were ill and Kunz wrote back at once. When you’re better you’re to fly out and sit on an expert panel or appear before one, or something. You’ll be the Project Team Leader.’

  ‘I know the jargon,’ I said. ‘You are pleased, aren’t you?’

  ‘Of course.

  She kissed me, lightly. ‘I’m so glad, darling.’ Then she sat up and looked at me with a faint anxiety. ‘Really – it’s all worked out rather well, hasn’t it?’