‘I bet that’s the first time you’ve tried to smile.’
‘What?’
‘I said, miss, I bet that’s the first time you’ve tried to smile. What were you thinking about? Do you find my face funny?’
‘Yes, I do a little bit.’ The horse was galloping around him.
‘Well, we are getting somewhere but not along the road I expected. Young ladies should learn to be tactful. You should have said, No, I think you’re handsome.’
That would have been stretching it…Eeh! my goodness, I had nearly said that, and the horse was laughing.
Was I going a bit funny? When mother punched me like that, had it done something to me? No, no, I wasn’t going funny, because I’d always talked to myself, only I hadn’t seen a horse before, a dog when I was younger, and there had been a little girl whom I called Jennie. She had gone when my mother married George.
I blinked my eyes a number of times and the horse faded away.
‘Does your face still pain?’ His voice was quiet now, no humour in it, and I said, ‘No, it’s only a bit stiff.’
‘How did you manage to fall downstairs?’
I looked to the side before saying, ‘I tripped.’
‘Yes, you must have. Oh, yes you must have.’ He was nodding at me. ‘Do you get on with your mother? I mean do you argue and fight?’
I was staring unblinking at him and he at me and neither of my voices would give him an answer. Now he leant towards me and said, ‘If you should fall downstairs again with a kind of dizzy spell, which I suppose that’s what it was, wasn’t it? You must come straight to the surgery. Do you understand me?’
I understood him all right. His attitude was the same as George’s, only he was using different words to express it. ‘I must tell your mother to come to the surgery,’ he said, ‘and I’ll give her a prescription for a tonic. She’s not looking too well herself…You still haven’t told me which part of you feels the worst.’
‘I…I just feel low and tired.’
‘Do you have any trouble with your arm these days?’ He reached out and took my hand and waggled it up and down as if he were weighing it, and I said, ‘No, none at all.’
He now put his head on one side and surveyed me for some seconds. ‘You’ve grown a lot since I last saw you,’ he said. ‘But I think you could do with a little fat on your bones. Do you eat well?’
‘Sometimes.’
He now let go of my hand and stood up and, taking his case from a side table, he mumbled something before saying, ‘I’ll have that cup of tea downstairs with your mother and I’ll send you a bottle along that’ll make you jump about a bit. Goodbye.’
‘Goodbye, Doctor…’
I don’t know what passed between her and the doctor that day but almost until the day she died she visited him regularly every week. And from when I was fifteen I saw him regularly too.
Three
My mother had nerves, and I got them. They became evident when my left eyelid started to flutter and the corner of my mouth to twitch.
I had imagined the business of seeing the horse galloping across the doctor to have occurred because I was a little light-headed at the time, but I was to see him again on my first visit to the doctor and it was he who once more brought him into being.
I was to discover that Doctor Kane often used the term ‘horse sense’, and on this day that he saw me…and alone, for he told his nurse to tell my mother to stay in the waiting room, he said to me, ‘Now, miss, what’s all this about? You haven’t tripped and fallen downstairs this time. What’s troubling you? And don’t say you don’t know, use your horse sense and tell me.’ And there it was again, this beautiful horse, galloping right across him, its white tail flying, its two forelegs in the air, its head turned towards me, its upper lip back showing its big teeth in a grin; and it said, Tell him. Tell him that she doesn’t hit you any more, but she talks at you. Tell him you’ve heard her story from when she was a pampered little girl to what she is now, a nerve-ridden hag, a hundred times.
Eeh! don’t talk like that about her.
‘What’s that you say?’
‘I…I said, it’s my mother’s nerves. She keeps talking.’
‘Yes, she keeps talking. And yes, it’s her nerves.’ He nodded at me. ‘And her talking is getting on your nerves, isn’t it? In fact, it’s got. Well now…By the way, how old are you?’ He looked at the open folder on his desk.
‘Fifteen gone.’
‘How are you doing at school?’
‘Not bad.’
‘What’s your best subject?’
‘English.’
‘What do you intend to do with yourself when you leave school? Going to try for university?’
‘Oh no.’ I shook my head. ‘I’m not clever like that.’
‘You should leave that to others to say. What makes you think you’re not clever like that?’
‘Well, I’m only good at English and drawing.’
‘Well, either of them should get you somewhere; and God knows, they want English, real English, because they’ve forgotten how to speak it in this country. If you want to hear English spoken correctly you’ve got to go abroad, because now and again out there you’ll hear words pronounced as they should be. The English spoken today is like most doctors’ writing, not understandable.’
The whiskers on his face parted and I was looking at his lips: they seemed to be the only evident flesh on his face and I was surprised to see how many teeth he had and all large and white. He had always seemed to me to be pretty old. He was forty, but that, to me then, was as old as the Ancient Mariner. ‘Now’—he was leaning across the desk and wagging his finger almost in my face—‘what you’ve got to do, miss, is to get out and about. Do you dance?’
‘No.’
‘Can you dance?’
‘No.’
‘Well then, you’ll have to learn. Take dancing lessons. Join a club.’
‘I…I couldn’t.’
‘Why not?’
‘I don’t make friends easily. It’s…it’s my arm.’
‘Nonsense.’ He pulled himself up straight and banged my case folder closed. ‘You’ve got two legs, haven’t you? People don’t dance with their arms. Come on, spit it out, get it off your chest. Tell me why you don’t make friends; why you don’t join clubs or go dancing.’
Go on, tell him. The great black horse had stopped galloping and was looking at me. Its mouth was closed now, but its eyes were speaking. Go on, it said, tell him the truth. He’s the only one you can talk to who will understand. You can’t tell George because he would just bang about and tell you lies, because he doesn’t want to hurt you. This man won’t do that. Go on, right now, tell him. And tell him Katie hasn’t spoken to you since the Sunday business because she blames you for splitting on her. And anyway, her mother has forbidden her to have anything more to do with you. Go on, tell him.
I didn’t tell him that, what I said was, ‘It’s my face.’
‘What!’
His eyebrows had moved upwards again; his eyes looked huge round brown balls.
‘I’m…I’m plain…very…not nice looking.’
He sat well back in his chair now and let out a long sigh, pulled his beard onto his chest and nodded at me as he said, ‘Yes, it’s true, you’re plain, but as regards not nice looking, there’s a difference. It’s no use telling you that the ugly ducklings turn into swans, because I’ve found out already that you’ve got quite an amount of horse sense in that head of yours.’
There! he had said it again, and the horse was at his antics once more and laughing now.
‘But the last term, not nice looking, that doesn’t apply,’ the doctor said. ‘Plain things can be nice. You will find that in life very few handsome men marry beautiful women. Some of the cleverest and most prominent women in the world are ugly. Do you know that?’
‘No.’
He paused and stared at me, and my lip began to twitch.
‘The big fellow
didn’t come back?’
‘No.’
‘Well, one can’t blame him. But your mother was a fool there, that’s the type she needed, not that she would admit it. Well now—’ he rose from the desk and came round towards me and, putting his hand on my shoulder, he said, ‘you come and see me next week. And I want to see you looking…nicely plain. Do you understand? Nicely plain.’ He sighed now as he added, ‘Send your mother in…’
He was to say those four words to me a number of times during the following year. There were times when I had no fluttering of the eyelid and no twitching of the lip, but there were other times, generally following her bad bouts, when it seemed that the corner of my mouth was trying to reach my eye. But during this time I had one consolation, I acquired a companion. My horse came to stay and I christened him. It was funny how the christening came about, because in a way it was connected with real horses. Up till that day he had just come and gone at odd times, mostly when I was talking to the doctor. But then he began to appear when my mother kept talking at me while we were sitting eating a meal, one each side of the table, in the kitchen; or when I was feeling very lonely. At these times he would always try to cheer me up. Then this day I was coming from school and while passing the Bentley Street traffic lights that had turned red, there stood a horse box and almost on eye level with me were the words in small print: B. Hamilton, and immediately I said to myself, Hamilton. That’s a nice name, Hamilton. Then there he was almost skipping over the crossing in front of me, as if he was pleased with the name. And so from then on he became Hamilton. It was as simple as that.
It was on my sixteenth birthday when I received the birthday card and a little parcel from George and Gran Carter that my mother had the first seizure.
I hadn’t seen much of George during the last year. He was working again on the long-distance lorries, and whenever I managed to visit Gran’s, he had just come or gone. Twice, when I saw him, he had the woman with him. She was the hairdresser that Gran had referred to that Sunday, that memorable Sunday, and from the beginning I didn’t like her. Not that I was jealous of her. Yet I suppose I was a bit. But at the same time I wanted George to be happy and I knew that he had to have a woman in order to be happy. Right from the start though I thought that George should have a better woman than Peggy Wicklow because she was common, really common.
It was on my first acquaintance with Peggy Wicklow that I realised all common things or all common people weren’t nice. She was a different common from George and Gran, she was loudmouthed. Of course, Gran shouted when she talked, and so did George, but not in the same way as Peggy Wicklow.
Just as I didn’t approve of her, so I knew she didn’t approve of me. And I knew it was a mystery to her what George saw in me to make a fuss about, because at our first meeting he led me to her and said, ‘This is Maisie, Peggy, and she’s my first girl.’ And at this Gran had cried, ‘There you are! After me bringin’ him up he pushes me aside. I’m nothin’ to him now.’
It was all in fun but I wished they wouldn’t do it because deep inside I knew they were putting a false value on me, a value that nobody else could see. I loved them for it, yet was sometimes irritated by it.
It was when I arrived home from school that I saw the parcel and the card. Neither had been opened, but she was there when I undid the sticky tape that was round the parcel. When I unwrapped the paper and revealed a little red box, I paused before lifting the lid and looked at her. She wasn’t looking at me but at the box. I told myself not to open it, but my fingers wouldn’t obey me and when I lifted the lid there was a gold watch lying on a bed of red satin. I lifted it out and held it between my finger and thumb. The wrist band was gold linked and when slowly I pulled it over my fingers I found that it stretched. It was an amazing feeling that these small solid links could stretch. It was as if I was witnessing magic.
‘Take it off!’
‘But…but…’
‘Take it off! Do as I say, take it off.’
It was while I hesitated that it happened. She opened her small mouth wide and gasped at the air as her hands clutched at her throat. When they moved down to her chest she toppled over and fell to the floor. I tore the watch from my wrist and flung it onto the hall table, and bending down to her, I cried, ‘What is it? What is it?’
She rolled onto her side now and began to groan. The colour had gone from her face, her eyes were tightly shut, her mouth was open and she was gasping at the air.
I must get the doctor. Mrs Atkins had a phone three doors down. I rushed to the front door and out on to the path, and there I saw Mr Stickle and I grabbed at him, ‘My…my mother’s taken ill. I…I’ve got to get the doctor. Mrs…Mrs Atkins has a phone.’
‘What is wrong with her?’ His voice was cool and polite.
‘I…I don’t know. She’s in a kind of seizure.’
‘Is she in bed?’
‘No, no, she’s in the hall.’ I jerked my head backwards.
‘Well’—his voice was still cool—‘you go and phone from Mrs Atkins’ and I’ll see what I can do.’ He passed me and went up the path, and I dashed down to Mrs Atkins’ and rang the bell three times. When she opened the door she looked surprised to see me. Again I was gabbling. She got the gist of what I was saying and said, ‘All right. All right. I’ll phone him for you. You get back.’
I dashed back and into the hall to see Mr Stickle putting a cushion under my mother’s head. She was still on the floor, and he glanced at me and said, ‘It looks like she’s had a heart attack. She’d better not be moved.’ Then straightening himself, he stood looking around the hall, his eyes lingering longest on the open door that led into the sitting room. After a while he spoke to me again, saying. ‘Has she had bad news…a shock?’
I didn’t answer. But yes, she’d had bad news, a shock. Nine days ago she’d had her thirty-seventh birthday and the only thing she had received was a card from me. I’d written formally on the bottom of it: Happy Birthday, from Maisie. I couldn’t say anything else. She hadn’t received a present of any kind. I never had any money now to buy anything. Since George left the only money I handled was my bus fares, and at times the precise amount if I was going to the pictures. The exception was when I went to see Gran Carter. She often gave me a shilling, and George always put a half-crown in my pocket when we met, and I bought chocolates on the side with the money.
My mother, I knew, was quite well off; her parents, although not wealthy, had been saving people. How much my mother had been left I didn’t know, only that she drew just so much out of the bank every week for the housekeeping. But on her birthday she hadn’t received a present from anyone, and yet here was I, her nondescript daughter, her thorn in the flesh, as she called me, the recipient of a beautiful gold wrist watch. It must have been too much for her.
When I didn’t answer Mr Stickle he moved towards the front door, saying, ‘Well, I must get back to business,’ and he pulled the lapels of his coat together as he spoke, then adjusted his neat tie. I stared at him, wanting to say, Don’t leave me. Before this I’d only glimpsed him, but now I was looking him full in the face. Without his trilby hat he didn’t look so old as I imagined. He was tall and his face was round. The shape didn’t suit his length. His skin was pale as if it had never seen the sun; his eyes I noticed were blue and his lashes quite long for a man; his nose was thin towards the tip, and his mouth small, like my mother’s I thought; he spoke precisely, his words clipped. He paused on the doorstep and stood as if thinking for a moment; then turning to me, he said, ‘I’ll go and tell my sister. She’ll stay with you until the doctor comes.’
‘Thank you.’ I felt deeply grateful to him for his kind thought. I went back to my mother and knelt down by her side. She was moaning gently as if in pain and I asked her if she was: ‘Are you in pain, Mother?’ I said, but she didn’t answer.
Some minutes later when I heard the footsteps on the pathway I rose and went to meet Miss Stickle. I had never looked at her fully before either: s
he was as tall as her brother but twice as thick; she looked hefty, strong and much older than him. She seemed to bounce into the room. Her voice was loud: ‘Well, well,’ she said; ‘she’s collapsed, has she? Dear, dear.’ And she bent over my mother and asked her, ‘Are you in pain?’
When she got no reply she straightened up and, looking at me, she said, ‘Looks like a heart attack. One thing sure, she won’t be able to get upstairs for a while. Have you got a couch, I mean in your sitting room?’
‘Yes.’ I pointed, and she marched forward, right to the middle of the room, and there she stopped and stood looking about her, her eyes seeming to rest on one piece of furniture after another. I stood in the doorway watching her. Presently, she patted the chesterfield couch, saying, ‘This should do in the meantime. When the doctor comes we’ll get her in here.’ And she again looked round the room before turning to me and saying, ‘Nice, nice. It’s bigger than most rooms in the terrace. How’s that?’
‘I…I think it was two rooms at one time.’
‘Oh, yes, yes’—she nodded—‘I can see now.’ Then she pointed to the windows. ‘Good idea, plenty of light.’ She came back into the hall now and, looking down at my mother and her voice low, she muttered, ‘Hasn’t been well for some time, has she? Nerves, suffers from nerves?’ She glanced towards me, and I said, ‘Yes.’
‘All nonsense really; lack of willpower.’
I was amazed at her talking like this and felt upset when I thought that the whole neighbourhood must know my mother had nerves. I wished the doctor would come …
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