The Lives of Women (3 page)

She would remember, too, Doctor Townsend coming from across the road and climbing into the ambulance ahead of her, a hem of pyjama leg showing under the end of his trousers along with a hard knob of ankle. After that she had gone down a hole and disappeared into a delirium.

She was gone for a long time. She crossed a desert and was almost drowned in a crimson sandstorm. It filled her eyes, nose and throat.

A man pulled her out of the storm. He wore a large scarlet turban and had a big silver moustache. When he spoke, it was through a hole in his neck. When he smiled, there was an arc of gold-speckled teeth instead of an Adam's apple.

There were goats on the journey. Sometimes in a herd, but mostly alone. She hated the goats. The way they shot out of nowhere, nudged her nightdress back with a cold, damp snout, gave a few bleats, before biting down on her buttock and disappearing again. She liked the man, though, and his safe brown arms with their mane of fine silver hair.

The man whispered words into her ear – right down into it. The words were small, warm shapes made of air. She could feel them entering her head, winding their way around and nesting in her
brain. She knew they would always live there, that they would grow strong and never leave. They would become part of her. She also knew she would never quite hear them, never mind understand their meaning.

 

When she came through to the other side, there wasn't much flesh left under her skin, her hands were crippled and her legs were two hockey sticks that showed no interest in walking. She was in quarantine, in a small square room with a glass wall on either side. There had been a baby in the room to her right. Beyond it, similar rooms that seemed to go on forever: layers of glass and the movement of nurses. Hers was the second-last room on the row. On her left, in the last room, was a man in paisley-print pyjamas.

 

Three months later the doctor said she was in recovery.

She had wanted to ask what that meant exactly, but the doctor's back was turned to her, and he hadn't been speaking to her anyway, he'd been speaking to her mother. Over his shoulder she could see her mother nodding away, touching her hair and looking up at him sideways as if she'd been expecting him to ask her to dance.

In his opinion the girl was greatly improved but by no means completely recovered. Nonetheless he would consider discharging her, depending on the results of a few last minute tests.

‘Well, of course, Doctor,' her mother was saying. ‘If you think that best, of
course
…'

For a young girl to be stuck so long on her own… The loneliness
– you see? It gets to them. ‘She is what now?' he asked then, reaching for the chart at the end of the bed.

‘Seventeen in December,' her mother said.

He lifted the chart and squinted into it. ‘Sixteen,' he corrected, ‘and a young sixteen at that – would I be right?'

‘Well, yes, Doctor, indeed. Like myself, she's an only child and, well, we are inclined to be a bit reserved.'

 

The previous few months had been the loneliest of her life. Days had gone by without a single visitor and only the baby seemed to make sense to her – the two of them lying on their sides and gazing at each other through the glass wall. Different sized nurses had passed through her illness, night into day and back again, but there'd been no conversation beyond a few generalities that only seemed to concern the weather or her bowels. There had been little or no interest shown in her at all, except by the man in the paisley pyjamas who had made her skin crawl, the way he sometimes stared in at her.

For all that she had grown used to the hospital. She liked being on her own. She liked, too, not having to put up with her mother's habit of asking endless questions about everything and anything that happened to wander into her head. Or being nagged into constantly eating just to keep her company. She liked the small portions they served here. The little silver bowl of jelly and ice-cream for dessert every day, and the way she was given her own little pot of tea. She liked that she didn't have to share. She had her radio and her two pillars of books – one short, the other tall
– and knew she could rely on Mrs Hanley to keep them coming.

Her mother, for all her suffocating ways, had only come to see her twice a week: once when her father drove her after church on Sunday, and for an hour or so every Wednesday afternoon when she came by herself. For the week-day visit she took a taxi and it had been clear from her jigging about that she couldn't wait to get back to her housework. On Sundays, she put in more of an effort, bringing a bag of homemade buns along with a compendium of games. Elaine always looked forward to these visits, but no sooner had they started when she wished they were over. Her father in the corner of the little room, plucking cake flesh out of the buns and reading the Sunday newspapers. Elaine and her mother by the bed, half-heartedly rattling dice in a plastic cup and pushing coloured buttons up ladders and down snakes.

 

The doctor brought the good news in person. Her tests had come back. She was to be discharged this very afternoon.

She'd been reading one of Mrs Hanley's novels at the time and her heart had been thumping on some faraway beach in the South of France.

His sudden appearance gave her a fright. For some reason, she felt ashamed of the book, turning it over and covering it with her hand. She'd had trouble understanding him or even why he should be addressing her in the first place. She kept looking around, expecting her mother to be standing there behind her in the doorway.

The doctor sat side-saddle on the end of the bed and called her ‘young lady'. He tapped his thigh as he spoke. There would be
certain conditions, of course: a weekly check-up in the outpatient department. Bed rest and quarantine for a further two weeks. After that, afternoon naps and early to bed to allow her immune system to build itself up. ‘In short, young lady, you will be a hot-house plant, but at least you'll be a hot-house plant in the loving comfort of your own home where your own people can take good care of you.'

Then he wished her good luck and sauntered off down the corridor, leaving her bereft.

She had thought about getting up and shouting down the corridor after him. She thought of all the things she might say: ‘But I don't feel better, Doctor. I don't feel ready.'

Or, ‘Please, can't I just stay for another week, a few days even? Oh,
please
?'

Or, ‘I'm not going! Do you hear me? I'm just NOT!'

But she stayed as she was, clutching her book in her old lady's hands and staring down at a photo of F. Scott Fitzgerald, who stared blandly back with his girlish eyes and thin sardonic smile.

 

It had been strange to find herself standing in clothes again. It had been strange to be standing at all. Her yellow jumper poured off her like thick custard, her jeans barely stayed up on her hips. Even her shoes seemed too big. Next door, a nurse had lifted the baby, making his little hand wave at her through the glass. And she felt this warm, sharp gush come into her chest as if she might be going to cry, although she couldn't see why – because how could she love him when she'd never even touched him and probably
wouldn't recognise him again, should their paths ever cross in the outside world?

Her mother piled books into a cardboard box and praised Mrs Hanley's good taste. She said she hoped there'd been no spillages – jam or tea stains or such like – because the books, of course, would have to be returned.

‘But Mrs Hanley said…'

‘Oh now, I'm sure she didn't mean—'

‘No, no, she said, she said…'

‘Now really, we can't expect. At least not forever.'

‘They're mine! I'm telling you, she said they were mine.'

‘All right, all right. Calm down. Surely you're not going to start crying over a few old books! Tell you what, I'll pop over, offer them back and see what she says.'

As her mother began rolling clothes into the hold-all, Elaine felt a chill in her stomach. She remembered, then, the way her mother would sometimes come back from the shops pinkened by the news of some medical woe: this man's cancer, that woman's pleurisy, the butcher who had a daughter who had a friend who had a neighbour who had a baby who'd just died.

Now, bustling around the hospital bed, the little grin on her face said it all – there would be weeks of playing nursies ahead. Her daughter would become her project. Her something to talk about. Her something to
do
.

She'd felt so old then; old and cornered, the way she imagined old people must feel when they find themselves trapped by the mercy of others. A few months ago she'd been a chubby adolescent, and now here she was, a skin-and-bone adult, watching her mother
stuff toiletries into a washbag, squeezing and plumping the sides with the palms of her hands, drawing the edges of the zip together: tug, tug, tugging until it finally closed over and everything had been forced to stay jammed inside.

There would be changes. New chair in her bedroom; new set of towels waiting on the bedside table; new rug on the floor. The garden puffed up with early summer. The shed painted a thin shade of green. In the garage, a chest freezer that growled like a peevish beast.

The two biggest changes concerned her mother.

For one she'd started to smoke again. In her youth she'd been an occasional smoker but had always assured Elaine this had only been to give herself something to do while waiting by the wall -flower wall at tennis club dances. And it helped show off her hands, which she considered to be her best feature. It had been an excellent means, too, of striking up a conversation – a man might offer a cigarette, one would accept and then naturally a conversation would follow. Elaine had always imagined these conversations taking place against black-and-white settings and conducted in fruity uppercrust accents – ‘Care for a cigarette?' ‘How kind, don't mind if I do.' ‘I say, what perfectly lovely hands you have!'

Now it seems her mother was back on the cigarettes, only this time she meant it.

*

While they were waiting for the nurse to complete the paperwork, her mother broke the news about her new smoking life. It had started as a way to calm her nerves while Elaine had been at the height of her illness. When she was taken off the critical list and declared out of danger, she had decided to stick with it because Martha Shillman told her it was a great way of keeping the weight down. Instead of the afternoon bun, she'd been reaching for the packet of fags. Two cigarettes in and all thought of the bun would go flying out the window. Already she could feel her skirts beginning to loosen their grip. Martha Shillman had been right all along. Martha Shillman was no fool in such matters.

Martha Shillman's name, Elaine had already begun to notice, was cropping up quite a bit in recent conversations.

 

She'd been expecting to see her father's car on the hospital fore-court. At the same time, she hadn't been all that surprised to find, instead, Martha Shillman in her husband's car, grinning out over the steering wheel. Even so, Elaine had decided she should probably ask.

‘Your father? Oh – who knows? Too busy, I suppose. Off racing, no doubt. Anyway, thank goodness for Martha Shillman, says you.'

 

On the way home they went in for a drink. Really it was just to have a fag in comfort, Martha explained. ‘Shillman goes mad if you smoke in the car. I wouldn't mind, but he thinks nothing of stinking us out of house and home with those bloody awful cigars of his.'

She had forgotten that Mrs Shillman called her husband by his surname. She had forgotten too about the amount of make-up she wore and the fug of her perfume. Her mother, she noticed, was wearing more make-up than usual and had also doused herself in perfume, and it not even Sunday.

Elaine opened the back window of the car and half-listened to the conversation up front. Mrs Shillman was explaining something to her mother about China, using a story heard in diplomatic circles to illustrate the point. Mrs Shillman, Elaine knew, was an intelligent woman. She spoke fluent French. She knew about politics. She had once taken a correspondence course in psychology and often wrote letters to the letter page in newspapers; some of them had even been published. Even the men listened to her in mixed conversation. While she spoke about China, her mother made muttery, agreeable sounds. Elaine felt a pang under her ribs. Her mother wasn't an intelligent woman – in fact she could be quite stupid. That was something else she had almost forgotten.

 

The pub – a dirty dive: damp, clumpy sawdust over a black-speckled floor. An ungentlemanly stink from the gentlemen's toilets. A man on his own, throwing rings at a board. Further away, another lone man, using both hands to forklift his glass from the table to his face.

The barman told them it was too early to open the lounge: if they wanted a drink, they'd just have to put up with it – counter service only. Oh, but Mrs Shillman
much
preferred these old fashioned bars, so full of charm and character – wouldn't he agree?