“I wasn’t expecting you.”
“Embarkation leave.”
“No.”
“Yes.”
“Liz. I love you.”
“I love you.” I was bursting with love, the rain and my wetness completely forgotten. I could just make out his face in the darkness.
“We’ll get married won’t we, Liz?”
“Of course.”
“As soon as it’s all over.”
We kissed.
“Joey bought it yesterday. Over Cologne.”
“Joey Dench?” Baby-face Joey.
“Yes. It helps to have you.”
“Are you afraid?”
“Petrified. Every time I go up. We all hate it.”
“It will soon be over.”
“Not soon enough.”
He picked up my satchel and put his arm round me and we walked slowly, happily through the puddles, not minding the rain. I was seventeen.
Two
The rain fell on to the pavements of Wigmore Street and bounced off them again. I stood under the lee of the shops and made advances to every taxi I saw. Every single one had somebody in as always seemed to be the case when it was raining. I could feel my hairdo, which had looked so nice, disintegrating in the damp and decided that even though it was ten to two I had better go into Debenham’s and buy an umbrella. Had I not been going to meet Dobbie I would have gone to the haberdashery for one of those plastic rain-hats but I couldn’t turn up looking like a boiled sweet for our assignation. I had come a long way since the night I became engaged to Tim. I hadn’t thought twice then about the fact that my hair was plastered to my face like a wet spaniel’s, my nose rinsed clean as a beacon. This was Wigmore Street, not a country lane, and I belonged to the affluent society. I had two perfectly good umbrellas at home and didn’t want anything too expensive. The assistant tried to sell me a very elegant one with a tortoiseshell handle that went with Madam’s coat and cost seven guineas; failing that one of the telescopic variety which I never seemed to be able to untelescope at the crucial moment. She seemed quite upset when I decided on a plain red. It wasn’t really the colour I wanted but was the cheapest they had and would probably end up going to school with Diana. It was five to and I hadn’t the correct money. She seemed to write the bill out deliberately slowly then disappeared on varicose-veined legs through handkerchiefs and stockings in search of change. It seemed she had gone for lunch while she was at it but she did eventually return. We thanked each other profusely, smiled, hoped it would stop raining soon, and agreed that it was better than the fog, anything was better than the fog. It was a minute to two. Outside it was really overcast now, the rain looking as if it was in for the afternoon. A taxi pulled up outside John Bell & Croyden letting someone out. I raised the red umbrella and shouted and attempted to cross but the lights were against me. I thought the driver had seen me and was waiting and was relieved I wasn’t going to be very late for Dobbie. When I reached the other side of the road I was in time to see a man dash from the shelter of the shops and into the taxi. My shoes, which were black snake-skin, were soaked. I knew there must be mud splashed up the backs of my legs. I felt thoroughly cold and damp and just a little hysterical and imagined Dobbie drawing up at the car park, it was just on two, and looking at his watch. There seemed nothing for it but to walk as quickly as I could. It would take a good ten minutes, I could have done it in less in flat shoes. Perhaps I would be able to pick up a taxi on the way.
I set off quickly, the rain dripping off the red umbrella, thinking of Dobbie waiting and if he would think I wasn’t going to turn up, had cold feet or something. That was funny, cold feet, he would soon find out. It would have been better if it hadn’t been cold. In summer it would probably have seemed less calculated, the sun hot, warming everything, less clothes, the exhilarated feeling that the crisp air gave you instead of this chilling drip drip. I tried to protect my handbag beneath the umbrella, progressing as fast as possible. The rain was driving directly towards me so that if I held the umbrella to protect my face I couldn’t see where I was going. The taxis were passing at speed all of them occupied. Normally I would have stopped to look at the shops. I hardly saw them trying to keep the rain off and not to collide with anyone. The post office clock said three minutes past two. I wasn’t doing at all badly, must have been walking faster than I thought. I eased up a bit. I wasn’t going to be more than ten minutes late and didn’t want to arrive in too much of a state. Picturing Dobbie sitting in the car, smoking probably, perhaps listening to the radio while he waited. I had a sudden urge to run to him, to be there, right away, in his arms, secure, removed from Mrs Mac and Robin and Diana and Martha and even Tim; somewhere where no-one could find me until I chose to emerge. Dobbie, I said aloud. No-one could see beneath the umbrella. If they did they would just think me a little mad. People often walked along talking to themselves, you just smiled. Dobbie! I won’t be long. I speeded up again and was about to cross Orchard Street when the lights changed to red. I stood impatiently on the edge of the kerb with the dripping crowd while the rain swilled down the gutter and the cars and taxis, indicator lights flashing redly right and left, passed wetly by. People behind waiting to cross pushed up almost into the flooded gutter. No-one wanted to stand around in the downpour. An old lady next to me in a navy gaberdine mac with a plastic rain-hood decorated with daisies over her grey hair teetered on the edge of the kerb. The rain streamed from the edge of her hood, down her glasses and on to her nose. She was peering up at the lights and I suppose she thought they had changed to green because before I realised she was stepping into the road, head down. All at once, instead of just the steady hiss of the traffic and the people waiting to cross Portman Square, everything was in a turmoil. What happened first I’m not sure. There was a red Jaguar approaching fast from Baker Street to get across before the lights changed and this old lady stepping in its path and suddenly a tremendous screech of brakes and crumpling metal and screams and soaking water splayed to the knees. Then the old lady was lying quietly in her gaberdine in the middle of the road. The red Jaguar was sideways on. The people from the kerb were horror-struck momentarily then were rushing past me. The old lady’s handbag, brown plastic, lay in the rain-filled gutter at my feet.
I often dreamed about or imagined accidents particularly when we were going on holiday by air. For days before I had misgivings. The plane would crash and we would all end up scattered in little pieces against a mountainside or in the sea. I’d wonder how Tim and I could be so criminally negligent as to involve Robin and Diana, who had no choice, in the risk. There was more chance, Tim said, of having an accident in the car. Even crossing the road the risk was greater than going round the world I don’t know how many times by air. I was unimpressed by the statistics which I knew to be impeccable. All I was aware of was that the week we planned to go away there always seemed to be some ghastly plane crash in the Persian Gulf or Arizona, usually in an identical plane to that we were to travel in. Tim said better still; it lowered the chances of our plane coming down. This particular piece of logic I never understood at all. Tim said I should have been flying during the war when things were coming at you from all sides and that going to Italy in a Comet or a Boeing was an absolute piece of cake. In the car crashes I dreamed of, going of course at speed, I was usually the victim. I could bear the image of myself lying spread-eagled in the road looking with serenity at the clouds with faceless people tutting softly, sympathetically above; or pinned beneath the steering wheel in my own car, wondering painlessly if I should ever walk again. Other people’s accidents I walked quickly by. Years ago there had been a child under a bus. I remember the driver’s face as he stood in the roadway, completely grey, and had gone home to be sick. I always prayed there would be others at hand to help. I had learned First Aid at Guides where we’d had great fun bandaging each other’s healthy limbs. They hadn’t taught us what to do with a smashed skull gushing blood or a grotesquely twisted limb.
From
nowhere the ambulance had come and policemen. I was alone on the kerb. The rest of the crowd was in the middle of the road jostling for position in the rain.
The handbag was still in the gutter. I picked it up. There was no weight to it. It was probably precious to the old lady, might help to identify her if necessary. I pushed my way through the crowd holding the red umbrella aloft and trying not to tangle with the others of various colours which protected some of the onlookers from the rain. It was coming down harder than ever on to upturned collars and dripping trilbies. A stretcher on which lay the old lady, covered with a horrible red blanket dark with rain spots, was disappearing into the back of the ambulance. Three police officers took down a statement from a woman in a beaver coat who kept saying “she just stepped into the road, my God she must be crazy”, and was on the verge of hysteria. I presumed she had been driving the Jag.
“Step back if you please, madam,” a constable with a dripping cape said, coming at me with arms wide. “On the pavement if you please.”
“Her handbag.” I held it aloft and pointed towards the ambulance with my umbrella. “This is her handbag. She dropped it when she was knocked down.”
He nodded briefly allowing me under his arm and turned his attention to the rest of the gawpers.
I peered into the ambulance, everyone taking no notice of the constable except to shuffle back a few steps, and looking to see what I was up to. All the way up Baker Street traffic was hooting and everything seemed to be in a considerable state of confusion.
In the ambulance a man and a woman in navy blue uniforms were bending over the old lady.
“Excuse me!” I waved the handbag. “This belongs to her.”
“Oh yes,” the female attendant stretched out her hand. I went up the steps into the ambulance to give it to her.
In spite of myself I looked on to the stretcher, thinking to see blood everywhere, a smashed head. The old lady had her eyes closed, the daisy-spattered rainhood still incongruously on her head. She seemed to be sleeping peacefully.
“Is she…?” I said.
“Just a little concussion,” the woman said, “these wet roads. Is she a relative?”
“A relative?”
They were pulling up the steps at the back of the ambulance.
“Oh no. She dropped her handbag. I was standing next to her. We were waiting to cross the road.”
“Nice of you to come, anyway. She’ll be pleased to have someone by her when she comes round.”
It was too fantastic. They were closing the doors, I moved towards them. The old lady groaned, opened her eyes for a moment and looked at me.
“Lucky the car didn’t actually hit her,” the attendant said.
“Didn’t it?”
“She just collapsed from fright, thinking it was going to. She hit her head.”
I still had the handbag and turned to lay it on the stretcher.
“Old people all alone,” the woman said, feeling for her pulse, “they get bewildered in today’s traffic. It’s hardly surprising.”
“I have to go.”
“We’re only taking her to St Patrick’s.”
They were bolting the doors.
“I just picked up her handbag.”
“She’ll be pleased you did. Probably contains some treasures. We shall be able to find out who she is.”
The ambulance was moving and I sat down with a bump on the stretcher opposite the old lady. The bell began to ring with urgency and I looked out of the blue-smoked windows and wondered what on earth I was doing.
We seemed to be going terribly fast, not stopping for anything. The attendant was a woman in her forties with bell-bottom trousers and old-fashioned, square-shouldered, uniform jacket. From beneath her cap coiled a few grey-blonde curls. She was busy folding blankets and making everything ship-shape. She felt the old lady’s pulse very matter-of-factly as if the thin wrist coming out of the raincoat was some inanimate object, a stick or something, which it looked like. I wondered if they ever washed the red blankets and how many babies had been delivered in that confined space and how messy it must get after the really nasty accidents and if that woman, who looked more like a kindly assistant in a grocer’s, could really cope. She was talking all the time as she moved; about the fog and the number of accidents it caused and illness among old people. The hospitals were bursting at the seams, she said, with chronic bronchitis. She should really be off duty, was just going off in fact when the call came but her relief hadn’t arrived and it was going to make her late but it was just one of those things.
Late! It was ten past two, gone, and Dobbie would be on his second cigarette sure now I wasn’t coming. My car was there in the car park, he’d see my car. That was a stroke of luck, putting it there so he must know I intended to be there, would probably wait. I could certainly get a taxi from St Patrick’s. People were always coming up to hospitals in taxis, so if I just waited. I looked at the old lady, her wrinkled face serene, her jaw dropped slightly. She didn’t have her glasses, perhaps they’d been dropped when she fell, smashed. I wondered whether she could see.
“She was wearing glasses.”
“I have them here. Someone picked them up. Lucky they weren’t broken.”
She looked very pale.
“Is she all right?”
“Her pulse is good. They’ll X-ray her skull. See if there’s any damage. Their bones are brittle. Old people. Here we are.”
She bent her knees to look out of the window. The ambulance made a wide turn and slowed down.
We waited while the driver got out and opened the doors and let down the steps. It was good to breathe the fresh air after the confined space. It hadn’t stopped raining but we were under an awning. White paint on the ashphalt where I stepped said ‘only’. I presumed we were parked on the bit that said ‘ambulances’.
Together the two of them took the stretcher out. They seemed not to have to use a great deal of strength. I was still holding the handbag.
“Can you take this? I have to be off.”
The woman looked round from the hospital entrance which they were half way through with the stretcher.
“Just bring it in will you, dear? We’re taking her through to Casualty.”
This was getting ridiculous. I stepped forward to put the handbag on the stretcher so that I could run when a porter said just a moment if you don’t mind. I had to stand aside while two stretchers were carried out by white-clad porters. By the time I got inside the doors they were nowhere to be seen with the old lady.
I enquired the way to Casualty and was directed along a tiled corridor like a public lavatory and thought my God English hospitals were the absolute end. We seemed to think of nothing but football pools and cricket and should be filled with shame.
I pushed open the swing doors where it said Casualty and there was a room which seemed to be full of people waiting, a few of them bandaged, a nurse, and some cubicles with green curtains. There was no sign of my two ambulance attendants.
The nurse looked harassed and was leaning over a desk writing.
“Can you tell me…?”
“Sit down a moment somewhere will you?” She didn’t look up.
“I’m not a patient. They just brought an old lady in, I think it must have been in here. I have her handbag.” I held it up.
She stopped writing. “Oh yes. Doctor Macintosh is with her now.” She nodded towards one of the cubicles.
“If you could just take this.” I held out the handbag.
With a widening of her eyes she indicated the crowded room, people coming and going, a child crying, the desk on which there wasn’t an inch of space, and her own hands which were occupied.
“I have an appointment,” I said weakly.
She looked at my coat with the mink tie and my snake-skin shoes and handbag and stockings Christian Dior, splashed now with mud, and was aware, I knew, of the Memoire Chérie I had dabbed behind my ears and on my brow and dropped in my bra on a piece of cotton
wool. There is a life outside I wanted to tell her, but could forgive her, in this atmosphere, for being unaware.
I gave in gracefully. There was no alternative except to hurl the handbag at her and stalk out churlishly. I sat down next to a man holding a filthy handkerchief to his eye. Five minutes would not now make a great deal of difference. As soon as I got rid of the handbag I would phone Dobbie at the flat where he’d most likely go as soon as he got fed up with waiting, to see if I was there.
“The leddy with concussion?” a voice said.
A young man in a white coat with bright red hair sticking up on end stood before me. He looked about nineteen and I presumed it was Doctor Macintosh, doctor, I must be getting old, and he must be more than that.
“Is she all right?”
“No so bad. Sister will take her particulars and then would you sit beside her and let us know if she comes round? We’re short of nurses and the wards are full, no more extra beds after the fog. We’ll X-ray for fractures and maybe ye can tek her home.”
“But I’m…” I held up the handbag but he was gone with a swirl of coat behind the curtains of a cubicle.
A Sister with a frilled cap and a nice face had pencil poised.
“You’re the lady with the accident? Relative is it?”
“I brought her handbag.”
“May we have her name?”
I explained, slowly, what had happened.
“How kind of you to come. So often these old people have no-one to go home to. Perhaps we shall find some means of identifying her in her handbag.”
I opened it, a reluctant conspirator. The Sister waited, answering countless questions from people who approached her with infinite patience. There was a coloured Woolworth’s handkerchief, a pocket comb with two teeth missing, a key, a worn purse which felt as if it had a single coin in it, a pension book.
“Ah!” the Sister said. “That should tell us.”
I was conscious of my own handbag heavy with the gold compact Tim had bought me, keys and cheque book, in its leather case, wallet with my initials holding driving licence and account cards from Selfridge’s and Harrod’s, as well as money, and two lipsticks, a Parker Fifty-one with pencil to match and two hankies from the Irish Linen Company.
The Commonplace Day Page 14