The Fallen Curtain (21 page)

But she was driven to do so a week later. She could see something had happened to upset Mother the minute she walked into the room. Mother’s mouth was turned down and she kept looking at Pauline in a truculent, injured kind of way. And Pauline just sat there, determined not to leave Mother and Marjorie alone for a moment, although she must have been able to see Mother was dying to get Marjorie on her own. But at three the laundryman called, and luckily for Mother, there seemed to be some problem about a missing pillowcase which kept Pauline arguing on the step for nearly five minutes.

“That man was here again last night, Marjorie,” Mother said, “and he came into my room and spoke to me. He bullied me, Marjorie, he said awful things to me.”

“What on earth d’you mean, Mother?”

“Oh, dear, I hope she won’t come back for a minute. I heard him talking down here last night. About ten, it was. I’d drunk my water and Pauline had brought me another glass, but I couldn’t sleep, I was so hot. I rang the bell for Pauline to take the eiderdown off me. I had to ring and ring before she came and of course I couldn’t help—well, I was feeling a bit weepy
by then, Marjorie.” Mother sniffed and gave a sort of gulp. “The next thing I knew that man, that doctor, had marched right into my room and started bullying me.”

“But what did he say?”

“He was very rude. He was very impertinent, Marjorie. I wish you’d heard him, I wish you’d been there to stand up for me. Pauline wasn’t there, just him shouting at me.”

Marjorie was aghast. “What did he
say?”

“Just because he’s a doctor…. Doctors don’t have the right to say what they like if you’re not their patient, do they?”

“Mother, please tell me before Pauline gets back.”

“He said I was a very lucky woman and I ought to understand that, and I was selfish and demanding and I’d driven my daughter into a breakdown, and if I didn’t stop getting her up in the night she’d have another one and … Oh, Marjorie, it was awful. He went on and on in a very deep, bossy sort of voice. I started crying and then I thought he was going to get hold of me and shake me. He just stood there in the doorway against the light, shaking his finger at me and—and
booming
at me and …”

“Oh, dear God,” said Marjorie. Now she
would
have to speak to Pauline. She sighed wretchedly. Why did this have to happen? Not that she cared very much about what anyone said to Mother—do her good, it was all true anyway—but that someone should point out to Pauline facts which Pauline herself had possibly never realised! Much more of that and … She went out into the hall and intercepted Pauline parting from the laundryman.

“Mother’s been on about nothing else since first thing this morning,” said Pauline.

“Well, I don’t wonder. You know I don’t like to criticise you, but you really shouldn’t let people—I mean, strangers—upset Mother.”

Pauline dumped the heavy laundry box on the kitchen table. She looked even more tired than usual. Her skin had a battered appearance as if lack of sleep and peace and recreation had actually dented and bruised it. She shrugged.

“You believe her? You take all that rubbish for gospel?”

“You mean you don’t have a friend who’s a doctor? He didn’t go into Mother’s room and boss her about last night? It’s all her imagination?”

“That’s right,” said Pauline laconically, and she filled the kettle. “She imagined it, she’s getting senile.”

“But Mother never had any imagination. She heard him. She
saw
him.”

“She can’t see,” said Pauline. “Or not much. It was a dream.”

For a moment Marjorie was certain that she was lying. But you could never tell with Pauline. And what was more likely, after all? That Pauline, who had everything to gain in esteem and interest by having a man friend should deny his existence, or that Mother, who was eighty and half blind and maybe senile like Pauline said, should magnify a nightmare into reality? Could it be, Marjorie wondered, that it had been Mother’s conscience talking? That was very far-fetched, of course, what her son and daughter would call way-out—but if only it were true! The alternative was almost too unpleasant to face. It took George to put it into words.

“Old Pauline’s always been a dark horse. I can see what game she’s playing. She’s keeping him in the background till he’s popped the question.”

“Oh, George, no! But she did look very funny when I spoke about him. And, George, the awful thing is, if he does marry Pauline he’ll never have Mother to live with them when he feels like that about her, never.”

Worrying about it brought on such a headache that when the time came for her next duty visit, Marjorie had to phone Mother’s house and say she couldn’t come over. A man’s voice answered.

“Hallo?”

“I’m sorry, I think I’ve got a wrong number. I wanted to speak to Miss Needham.”

“Miss Needham is lying down, having a well-earned rest.” The voice was deep, cultured, authoritative. “Is that by any chance Mrs Crossley?”

Marjorie said breathlessly that it was. But she was too taken aback to ask if her mother was all right, and who was he, anyway? She cared very little about the answer to the first question and she knew the answer to the second. Besides, he had interrupted her reply by launching into a flood of hectoring.

“Mrs Crossley, as a doctor I don’t think I’m overstepping the bounds of decorum by telling you that I think you personally take a very irresponsible attitude to the situation here. I’ve hoped for an opportunity to tell you so. There seems to me, from what your sister tells me, no reason at all why you shouldn’t share some of the burden of caring for Mrs Needham.”

“I don’t, I…” Marjorie stammered, thunderstruck.

“No, you don’t realise, do you? Perhaps you haven’t cared to think about it too deeply. Your mother is a very demanding woman, a very selfish woman. I have spoken to her myself, though I know from experience that it is almost useless telling home truths to someone of her age and in her condition.”

So it was true, after all. Marjorie felt a spurt of real rage against Pauline. “I should have thought it was for my mother’s own doctor,” she blustered. “I don’t know what an outsider …”

“An
outsider?”
She might have levelled at him some outrageous insult. “I am a close friend of your sister, Mrs Crossley, perhaps the only true friend she has. Please don’t speak of
outsiders.
Now if you have any feeling for your sister, I’m sure you’ll appreciate …”

“I don’t want to talk about it,” Marjorie almost shouted. Her head was splitting now. “It’s no business of yours and I don’t want to discuss it.”

She told George.

“He said he was a close friend, her only true friend. They’re cooking this up together, George. He means to marry her, but he’ll get Mother out of the way first. He’ll foist Mother on to me and then they’ll get married and…. Oh, George, what am I going to do?”

Not see Mother or Pauline, at any rate. Marjorie extended
her headache over the next two visiting times, and after that she half-invented, half-suffered, a virus infection. Of course, she had to phone and explain, and it was with a trembling hand that she dialled the number in case that awful man should answer. He didn’t. Pauline was more abrupt than ever. Marjorie didn’t mention her doctor friend, though she fancied, just as she was replacing the receiver, that she heard the murmur of his voice in the background talking to Mother.

It was George and Brian together who at last paid a visit to Mother’s house. Marjorie was in bed when they came back, cowering under the sheets and trying to make the mercury in her thermometer go above ninety-eight by burying it in her electric blanket.

They hadn’t, they said, seen Pauline’s friend, but Nanna had been full of him, now entirely won over to him as a charming man, while Pauline, as she talked, had sat looking very close with an occasional flash of impatience in her eyes.

“He’s got some Russian name,” said George, though he couldn’t remember what it was, and Brian kept talking nonsense about dogs and reactions and other things Marjorie couldn’t follow. “He lives in Kensington, got a big practice. One of those big houses on Campden Hill. You know where I mean. Pauline did a private nursing job in one of them years ago. Quite a coincidence.”

Marjorie didn’t want to hear about coincidences.

“Is he going to marry her?”

“I reckon,” said Brian, “going from the way Nanna talks about what he says.”

“What
do
you mean?”

“Well, Auntie Pauline went off to get us coffee and while she was outside Nanna said he’s always telling her how lovely her daughter is and what a fine mind and how she’s wasted and all that.”

“Nanna must have changed. She’s never had a good word to say for your auntie.”

“She
is
changed,” said George. “She’s all for Pauline going off and leading her own life and her coming here to live with
us. Dr Whatsit’s told her it would be a good idea, you see. And I must say, Marge, it might be the best thing in the long run. If Nanna sold her house and let us have some of the money and we had an extension built on …”

“And I’ll be off to university in the autumn,” put in Brian.

“I never did think it quite fair,” said George, “poor old Pauline having to bear the whole burden of Nanna on her own. It’s not as if they ever really got on and …”

“Nanna’s an old love with people she gets on with,” said Brian.

“I won’t do it, I won’t!” Marjorie screamed. “And no one’s going to make me!”

For a little while no one attempted to. Marjorie prolonged her illness, augmenting it with back pains and vague menopausal symptoms, for as long as she could. Mother never used the telephone, and Marjorie could have counted on the fingers of one hand the number of times Pauline had phoned her in the past two years. Now there was no communication between the two houses. Marjorie began to go out again but she avoided going near Mother’s, and her own family, George and Brian and Susan, wishing perhaps to prevent a further outburst of hysterics, kept off the subject of her mother. Until one day George said, “I had a call at work from that doctor friend of Pauline’s.”

“I don’t want to know, George,” said Marjorie. “It’s no business of his. I’ve told you I won’t have Mother here and I won’t.”

“As a matter of fact,” her husband admitted, “he’s phoned me a couple of times before, only I didn’t tell you, seeing how upset it makes you.”

“Of course it upsets me. I’m ill.”

“No, you’re not,” said George with unexpected firmness. “You’re as right as rain. A sick woman couldn’t eat a meal like the one you’ve just eaten. It’s Pauline who’s ill, Marge. She’s cracking up. He told me in the nicest possible way; he’s a very decent chap. But we have to do something about it.”

“Any other man,” said Marjorie tearfully, “would be thankful
to have a wife who stopped her mother coming to live with them.”

“Well, I’m not any other man. I don’t mind the upheaval and the extra expense. We’ll all do our bit, Brian and Sue too. Don’t you see, it’s our
turn.
Pauline’s had two years of it. The doctor says she’ll have another breakdown if we don’t, and God knows what might be the outcome.”

“You’re all against me,” Marjorie sobbed, and because he was her husband and she didn’t much care what she said in front of him, “Pauline’s got pills from her nursing days, morphine and I don’t know what. There ought to be—what’s it called?—euthanasia. There ought to be a way of putting people like Mother out of their misery.”

He looked at her, his eyes narrowing. “There isn’t. Maybe dogs are luckier than people. There isn’t a geriatric hospital that’ll take her either. There’s no one but us, Marge, so you’d better turn off the waterworks and make up your mind to it.”

She saw how it would be. It would take months for Mother to sell her house and get the money for an extension to theirs, a year perhaps before that extension was built. Even when it was built and Mother was installed, things would be bad enough. But before that … ! Her dining room turned into a bedroom, every evening spoiled by the business of getting Mother to bed, nights that would be even worse than when Brian and Susan were babies. And she wasn’t thirty any more. The television turned down to a murmur once Mother was in bed, her shopping times curtailed, her little afternoon visits to the cinema over for good. Marjorie wondered if she would have the courage to throw herself downstairs, break a leg, so that they would understand having Mother was out of the question. But she might break her neck….

And all the while this was going on, Pauline would be living in the splendour of Campden Hill, Mrs Something Russian, with a new husband, an educated, important, rich man. Giving parties. Entertaining eminent surgeons and professors and what not. Going abroad. It was unbearable. She might lack the courage to throw herself downstairs, but she thought she could
be brave enough to confront Pauline here and now and tell her No. No, I won’t. You took it on, you must go through with it. Crack up, break down, go crazy, die. Yes, die before I’ll ruin my life for you.

Of course, she wouldn’t put it like that. She would be firm and kind. She would even offer to sit with Mother sometimes so that Pauline could go out. Anything, anything, except that permanency which would trap her as Pauline had been trapped.

Things are never as we imagine they will be. No situation ever parallels our prevision of it. Marjorie, when she at last called, expected an irate, resentful Pauline, perhaps even a Pauline harassed by wedding plans. She expected Mother to be bewildered by the proposed changes in her life. And both, she thought, would be bitter against her for her long absence. But Mother was just the same, pleased to see her, anxious to get her alone for those little whispered confidences, even more anxious to know if she was better. Her purblind eyes searched Marjorie’s face for signs of debility, held her hand, pressed her to wrap up warm.

Anyone less like a potential bride than Pauline Marjorie couldn’t have imagined. She seemed thinner than ever, and her face, bruise-dark, patchily shadowed, lined like raisin skin, reminded her of pictures she had seen of Indian beggars. Marjorie followed her into the kitchen when she went to make tea and gathered up her courage.