… a nose so prominent and genuinely beak-like the boys playing stick-ball in the gutter outside Olinskys on Pelham Parkway would stop and flap their arms at him. Herbie didn’t mind that so much; he wouldn’t have minded at all if his nose, with its huge oval tunnels designed to maximise breathing, actually worked. But every morning, he awoke with a palate so dry it felt like he’d been sleeping open-mouthed on the dead soil of the Great Plains at the height of the Dust Bowl.
Mommy stopped here and started to explain to me what the dust bowl was, but it was even harder to listen to her explaining it than it was listening to the story. As she was talking, the pages of the book flicked back to the start, and – I know I should’ve been listening but I just got bored – I had a look at the bit at the start again.
I was right. She had a missed a bit out, when she did the frowny forehead thing. She’d even underlined in pencil the bit she’d missed out, and put a little question mark by the side of the line. In the book, what it actually said was:
… but who would come to be know to all his friends as Herb, and to his parents – and wives – as Herbie.
I didn’t really understand why she’d missed that bit out. It just meant that all his wives had called him Herbie. What’s wrong with that?
So I said: ‘Mommy? Can you warm up Cuddles?’
She did that face where her eyes go all hard.
‘Darling. I’m trying to explain to you about the Dust Bowl. Have you been listening?’
‘Yes, but Cuddles is cold,’ I said.
‘Well, I’m warm him up in a minute, when we’ve finished reading.’
‘Her.’
‘Her.’
‘Please do it now, Mommy, please. I want Cuddles to hear the story, too, and she only comes alive when she’s warmed up …’ Mommy made a face at this, but it wasn’t a bad face: it had a bit of a smile in it.
‘Really. When she’s cold, she’s dead,’ I said.
‘Yes, all right,’ she said, and took him, and went out.
‘One and a half minutes …’ I said.
‘I know!’ she said from outside the door. That’s how long she has to put Cuddles into the microwave for. She’s got lavender pebbles in her tummy, and if you put her into the microwave for one and a half minutes they warm up, and it’s a lovely smell. While she was gone I grabbed the book and started flicking through the pages. There were loads of little marks she’d made in pencil. I didn’t get to see all of them. I saw this bit first:
… rather than cleaning them off, he would rub the sticky drops into his chest, convinced that the pleasure invoked by their release was contained somehow within them, and that such pleasure must promote good effects in the body. His sperm was medicinal, revitalizing and cheaper than Vicks VapoRub, which his mother bought in three packs from Bigelows and insisted on rubbing into his torso every night so vigorously he thought his ribs might break.
I tried to remember all the words: promote, sperm, invoked, medicinal, VapoRub, to ask Jada tomorrow. She always knows what grown-up words means. I got to see some more pencil-marked bits – just little bits of them, flicking through quickly, because I could hear Mommy coming back:
… the long dark progress towards marriage’s moribund centre …
… his ice skates, blades sharpened like bayonets …
… ‘They’ve raped that neighbourhood, the Italians …’
… the architecture of the dead …
… her ass raised, hovering, almost politely …
It was exciting, like watching grown-ups when they can’t see that you’re there and they start saying stuff you’re not meant to hear. I really wanted to read more but she was nearly in the room. I put it back down on the sheet where she left it just in time.
‘Here he – she – is!’ she said, holding out Cuddles. ‘She’s more than warm enough.’
I took Cuddles. ‘God,’ I said. ‘She is warm. It’s like she’s got a fever or something.’
Mommy laughed and shook her head. ‘A fever! I don’t know. You must have inherited your father’s black sense of humour.’
I smiled.
‘Are we going to read the rest of the chapter?’
She looked at her watch. ‘Well, what with warming up Cuddles and everything I’m not sure I’ve got time now. I said I’d be back in the hospital by nine.’
‘Oh, please, Mommy,’ I said.
She reached out and touched my hair, rubbing it. She looked really pleased.
‘Well, OK. I’ll get Elaine to read you the rest of it. Till the end of the chapter.’
I nodded. When I was younger, like five or whatever, I sometimes did this thing of nodding when I wanted something. Nodding a lot, over and over again. I guess I thought it was cute, like a puppy or something. I did it again now. It made Mommy smile even more.
She went out and called Elaine. I could hear her slow steps on the floor outside. She always sounds like she’s got a limp when you hear her, but when you see her, she hasn’t. I hoped that Mommy would leave the book on the bed again, but she hadn’t, she’d gone outside with it. I could hear Mommy whispering stuff to her. She was telling her about the pencil marks, about not reading me those bits. I guess she was showing Elaine them, too.
But Mommy didn’t tell her about Cuddles. I touched her. She was already going cold.
* * *
The news that Meg Antopolski has had a fall goes round Redcliffe House like – not exactly wildfire, given that the actual information had to be conveyed from geriatric mouth to geriatric ear, with a fair amount of mishearing and drifting off halfway through sentences – but certainly very quickly. Because the nature of the days is so static, any news is exciting, even bad news. And, in fact, bad news happening to someone else is, as it is in any other human environment, particularly choice: one shouldn’t imagine that the inhabitants of an old-age home are any less prone to schadenfreude than anywhere else. One perhaps thinks they should be, because of the supposition of wisdom, which is, in the conventional imagination, harnessed to selflessness, but also because it’s all going to happen to them very soon: there’s no point in luxuriating in a peer’s downfall if you’re quite so imminently in line for the very same downfall – that very same fall down, in fact, to the same bone-shattering parquet.
But then again, the bad things befalling the inmates of Redcliffe House are the bad things that will befall us all, eventually, so certain residents are entirely happy to indulge in the delicious frisson afforded to them by the realization that their hip bones, however arthritic, are not at present fractured, unlike both of Meg Antopolski’s. Pat Cadogan in particular luxuriates in the telling; or so it seems to Violet, as she listens to her in full flow at teatime.
‘Both gone; smashed to smithereens. She’ll not walk again,’ she says, her thick Yorkshire accent painting her prurience over with a patina of common sense. It must be nice, thinks Violet, to possess vowels which make everything you say sound like it must simply be the most natural response.
Mandy puts their plates brusquely down in front of them. Violet has ordered the soup, tomato and basil; Pat a cream cheese and cucumber sandwich, sliced neatly into triangles, with a small handful of crisps on the side. Teatime at Redcliffe House is at five thirty, and the last meal of the day. Like lunch, residents can make their own in their rooms, but Violet, like most, is always too tired this late in the day to cook.
Violet remembers when she first arrived, realizing that teatime did not mean actual tea, with perhaps some cake or scones, at three, but rather a kind of early supper (but never with very much food, designed to facilitate an expected bedtime of nine, and minimize digestive issues); it made her feel like repacking her bags and going back to her flat in Cricklewood, re-rented though it was. So many things go with age, but it was the ones that slipped through the net without notice – or, rather, that were slipped through the net by others who, in their idea of your best interests, tried to make it seem as if nothing had been lost – that induced not just sad
ness, but rage.
‘I mean, to be honest, she never looked where she was going, did she? Meg.’ Pat was continuing. ‘Always barging about. No one could ever tell that woman anything, let alone to look out. You know what she was like, always thinking she knew best.’
‘Did she trip?’ Violet knows that Pat will have the details. She chooses to ignore her use of the past tense.
‘Slipped getting out of the shower. She had one of those rooms with the sit-down showers. She reached up to hold onto the rod and it was all soapy, wasn’t it – her hand slips off, and then …’ Pat makes a small exploding noise, inducing her lips, with their thin coating of cream cheese, to tremble.
‘So she was found …’
‘Completely starkers. Yes. Got to the panic button but couldn’t get to the towel rail.’
‘Poor love,’ says Violet. Pat raises an eyebrow, as if to say, that’s what happens if you go barging about without looking where you’re going your whole life.
Norma Miller comes into the dining room, unseen by Pat. She makes a face to Violet, indicative of the awfulness of having to eat with Pat. Violet suppresses a smile, which becomes harder when Norma approaches Pat’s chair from behind with an invisible dagger, bringing it down on her back over and over again.
‘What?’ says Pat and turns round.
‘Hello, Pat …’ says Norma, having recomposed her features. Her hand, however, is still raised above her head in a fist.
‘What on earth are you doing?’
Norma looks up at her hand. ‘Well. The nurses made an announcement: apparently a sexy young man is coming into the house and is looking for a dinner date for tonight. So I said …’ she gestures to her raised hand, ‘Me! Me! Me!’ She shakes her head. ‘And then I just couldn’t get it down. Arthritis, you know.’
Violet laughs, engendering a sour glance from Pat. She has seen Norma do this before: she is one of those old ladies who likes to draw attention to the absurdity of their sexlessness. Pat is not. With a wink to Violet, Norma moves off towards another table. Violet wishes she could go and eat with her and listen to more of her incongruous raunchiness, even to the point where it might become too much, as she knows it would.
‘Where is Meg?’ says Violet. ‘At the Royal?’
‘Yes.’ Pat sniffs, and pats her mouth with a napkin. She looks Violet square in the face. ‘She won’t be coming back.’
Violet blinks, knowing that the way Pat has presented this information is intended to be demonstrative of her straightforwardness, and, in particular, her straightforwardness in the face of death. It says something about herself, more than about poor Meg: it says, and of course, when my time comes, I shall be ready for it. I shall not lark about. Violet’s hand hesitates, holding her spoon, and Pat glances towards the small red puddle within, daring her to prove her own no-nonsense acceptance of death by carrying on the journey of spoon to mouth.
But Violet does put her soup spoon down and smoothes her hands over her lap, the rucked-up flowers on her dress regaining their equidistance from each other. She wonders about hips: about why so many people of her age break them, and why this so often represents the opening of the morbid door, the first step down to the darkness. Her bones are good, she thinks, a consequence of her mother always insisting that she begin the day with a glass of milk, even when it was difficult to get hold of. But feeling the tips of her hip bones now, tiny, jagged mounds grazing across her palms, it is hard not to gauge their fragility.
She has only ever broken two bones in her life. When she was nine or ten she had a skipping accident and broke her wrist. Like many of her distant recollections, the tones and colours of this memory seem clearer and more real now than events and conversations that happened yesterday: sometimes even than the meandering, shiftless present itself. She remembers the rope tied to a fence post, her sister twirling it faster and faster at the other end, telling her she could skip as fast as her if she tried, and then the touch of the rope, hairy, spidery, tangling on her naked ankle. She remembers the fall, crashing to the cobbles. She remembers the particular cobble, the small brown dome rising up out of the road to meet her right wrist smack in the centre of the bone. She remembers screaming, remembers her father charging out from their backyard, remonstrating with her sister, and the rush of air as he picked her whole body up in one clean movement. His chest was heaving with the effort of running so quickly out of the house, and each expansion of it squeezed her more tightly, but the pain seemed to counteract the pain in her wrist, the good fire chasing out the bad, and she wanted to be squeezed harder. She remembers him saying, Vi, Vi, where does it hurt, his normally raucous Cockney voice whispering, full of the knowledge that even though the accident was not his doing it had happened on his watch.
The other time was when she was with Eli, when they were living together in one room above a bakery in Walthamstow just after the war. She broke her nose. It was soon after the war – eighteen months into their marriage – and at first there was no convincing Gwendoline that Eli had not punched her. Gwendoline was by this time living apart from Henry, and had herself sustained a number of black eyes and bloody noses on her way out of the door: thus she had already, in her mid-twenties, become the sort of woman whose most unshakeable convictions are built upon an assumption of the evil of men.
‘You may as well tell me,’ she said, as they walked through Walthamstow’s post-war streets, searching for somewhere that would sell them sugar. Gwendoline wanted to bake a cake, but she had baked two this week already – she had filled out a lot, Violet had noticed, since leaving Henry – and her ration limit was up. ‘I know when you’re lying.’
‘I’m not lying,’ said Violet. ‘I fell out of bed and hit my face on the chest of drawers. It’s Eli’s fault, in a way, because our room’s so small and I’ve told him to shut that drawer before, but he stuffs it with his clothes, and it sticks a bit …’
‘And he’s lazy.’
Violet looked down at her feet, moving over the dust-filled pavement cracks. This was true, as regards shutting drawers, or, indeed, any domestic duty; it was not true in other respects, but it was too difficult – and not worth it on this point – to challenge Gwendoline.
‘But why did you fall out of bed? What on earth was he making you do?’
Violet looked up. Gwendoline’s mouth had curved along a line poised halfway between prurience and disgust.
Violet wondered what to say. The truth, on this occasion, was nothing. But there had been many times when the violence and strangeness of Eli’s desires had made her think she was not just going to fall out of bed, but out of herself. Violet had been a virgin on their wedding night, and nothing Eli had told her about himself had led her to believe otherwise about him, but there was a purpose and resolve to the way he moved sexually which disorientated and at times frightened her. Any sense she may have had of sexual understanding being a joint process – each overcoming the other’s nervousness, holding hands as they took their first paddling steps into the sea of love – vanished. Instead, she often felt, in bed, like a spectator, even as she herself was made into spectacle. For example: she had expected that this aspect of their marriage would be conducted in the dark, but Eli insisted on the light always being on. And then he would look at her: but really look, peering, studying, all the time frowning and rapt as if the answer to whatever question burnt away at the centre of his soul lay somewhere in her secreted self.
On one level, Violet relished this – sex allowed her to feel that here at last she was Eli’s focus, that she held his gaze at night in a way she could never do during the day. It allowed her to imagine herself as the rarest of diamonds, examined through an eyeglass by this most studious of jewellers. At other times, it simply emphasized the stern, unyielding fact of their separateness. Eli’s lovemaking, then, she knew, was not a dialogue; it was entirely rhetorical.
‘Well?’ said Gwendoline. She had stopped, ostensibly to look inside the window of Percival’s Toy Shop, but mainly to emp
hasize her need to know.
The truth was that Violet had been pregnant for two and a half months, unbeknownst to anyone. She had no one to confide in – her mother by this time was insensible with alcoholism, and Gwendoline herself, with her entrenched hatred of men and deep cynicism about Eli in particular, would only have been negative about the prospect. And not Eli: she had no idea what Eli would think about having a child. It was a period of time when he was squeezing every second between the end of work and bedtime – he had got a job in the sorting office for the local branch of the Royal Mail – to write. He had written a set of short stories, and was two-thirds of the way towards the completion of Solomon’s Testament, the manuscript of which lay on the floor at the end of the bed, there not being enough room on Eli’s tiny desk to accommodate both its towering pages and the fat black wedge of his Remington typewriter. It sat there, day and night, growing as he wrote, a totem pole of paper, around which they tiptoed in silent reverence.
Would a child disturb him too much? Or would he be pleased? Would it help him in some way? She had been convinced, always, that she would have children, and never would have imagined that the announcement of the imminent arrival of one could have elicited an ambiguous response from her husband, but there it was: she had not been sure how he would take it.
Then a week ago she had woken up in the middle of the night with a piercing pain in her stomach. One of her many uncertainties about her condition was whether or not it was all right for them to continue to make love while she was pregnant, but since she was not the kind of woman who could withhold her body against her husband’s demands for enigmatic, undisclosed reasons, they had carried on as normal. And she did not think, on waking and feeling this pain, that it was her husband’s fault. She blamed herself, in fact, for not saying anything; for having wriggled underneath him during sex in a vain attempt to move the clutching life out from under his weight; for not knowing – for never knowing – what the best thing was to do. Her hand went between her legs and she could feel a mix of liquids. She lifted her hand to her face, but was too frightened to switch on the light – the same light that had been left so resolutely on a few hours before. Quickly and quietly, not wanting to wake her husband, she scrambled out of bed, trying to get towards the tiny bathroom – shared, on the landing, with the flat next door: it crossed her fevered mind that she might be found on the floor by the neighbours – but in her haste, and in the dark, she fell, her face coming directly into contact with the edge of a drawer left open by Eli. It was, as she had said to Gwendoline, always too close, that chest of drawers – dark and huge, it loomed over their single bed in a way that would have convinced a child that it was a monster – but there was nowhere else in the room it could go.
The Death of Eli Gold Page 15