A Rather English Marriage (35 page)

‘She rang a couple of times, shortly after he'd been admitted. Since she heard his prognosis – and I had to be honest with her and say that it will be some time before we know how much improvement to hope for – she hasn't rung again. Might
I
ask, who exactly are you?'

‘I moved in with the Squadron Leader – he does hate it, by the way, being called Mr Jervis. Just thought I'd mention it – about nine, ten months ago. But now I'm not with him no more.'

‘You looked after him?'

‘Yes, but he looked after me, too. We was both widowed together and ever so lonely, and the vicar suggested I might care to keep him company, get him sorted out, he not being the domestic type. It worked a treat until Alan, my son, died. After that his wife and my grandsons came to live with me, so I had to move back in to my own house.'

‘Well!' said Sister. She grinned at him. ‘You
have
been doing your stuff. But where does that leave him? Stroke victims need a lot of TLC – tender loving care – over the first few months if they're to walk and talk reasonably normally again. That's between ourselves, of course. Don't tell
him
that. Once he's discharged he'll need full-time nursing care for a bit, but even if he makes a good recovery he oughtn't to live on his own. He could have another CVA at any time. We shall try and persuade him to stop smoking and cut down on his alcohol consumption. That would help his chances a lot.'

‘What do you want me to do, Sister?' Roy asked.

‘There doesn't seem to be a lot you
can
do. I'll get in touch with his doctor, find out from him who the nearest relatives are, wait for Mrs Franks to pay him a visit.'

‘Is he going to be all right?' Roy asked.

‘A lot depends on how well he's looked after and how much he wants to get better,' she answered. ‘And now, Mr …?'

‘Southgate.'

‘I must be getting on. I'm most grateful for your help. Leave me your telephone number, in case of emergency.'

‘He's ever such a nice old bloke,' Roy confided suddenly. ‘His bark's much worse than his bite. It's a crying shame, him lying there all by himself. He doesn't deserve that. I'll try and look in again soon.'

‘You've got your hands full, by the sound of it,' she said. ‘Leave it to us. We'll sort something out. I'll let you know what happens if he's moved.'

Roy left, hurrying past the folding wheelchairs in the entrance with their corrugated black handgrips for frail fingers and oxygen cylinders for emergencies; past the handwritten notice saying bleakly, ‘Tea, Coffee, Biscuits'; past the clock which said four-twenty-seven. Below it was a small wooden box marked ‘The League of Friends. Please Help Us To Help You.' Who's going to help the Squadron Leader? he thought fiercely. He was a war hero, wasn't he? One of the Few. Fought for his country. He can't help it that he's got no children, only that posh Lord chappie and his stuck-up wife. They can blooming well get down here to see him. Blood's thicker than water. Poor old Squadron Leader: he doesn't deserve this!

Reginald lay in the narrow hospital bed, his mind like an overturned fishtank, his body suffering a dozen different kinds of discomfort. He could hear and understand everything around him but seemed unable to enunciate his words so that anyone could understand
him
. His first response to what had happened so savagely and unexpectedly had been throat-catching terror; but he had experienced terror many times before, and learned to use the adrenalin of rage to overcome it. Flat
out in his hospital bed, therefore, Reggie was in an extremely bad temper and frustrated by the fact that no one seemed to recognize this. He craved a cigarette, but there was precious little chance that anybody was going to provide one, let alone allow him to smoke. His second desire was to see Liz. She obviously had no idea where he was. He kept trying to tell the nurses her name and telephone number. He tried to write, but his hand was even more unreliable than his lips. Not to worry, they said, in another day or two you'll start working with the speech therapist. Their bland and kindly reassurance was maddening. He needed Liz
now
.

His buttocks were sore from lying on the rubber undersheet, which chafed and made him too hot. The food the nurses spooned into the side of his mouth was revolting, but all appetite was killed by the nausea that welled up in him. From time to time he vomited. Worst of all, he had difficulty controlling his bladder and bowels, and if they did not bring a bedpan the instant he rang, piss and worse would dribble out of him, filling him with shame. The nurses would roll him briskly this way and that as they made up the bed with clean sheets, and never reproached him.

‘You're a very
dirty
little boy, Master Reginald!' Nanny used to scold. Three years old (or was it five or seven or nine?) and still wetting the bed like a baby! ‘I can't
help
it, Nanny,' he would say, ‘it happens in my sleep.' Even when he had learned to control his sphincter and mistrust those insinuating dreams in which he spilled his bursting bladder with infinite relief into the lavatory bowl, only to be woken by a spreading wet warmth on the previously clean, dry sheet – even then, the prospect of going back to school could make him disgrace himself like a baby again.

Worst of all were the mornings in the dormitory. He would leap out of bed and pull up the bedclothes to conceal the evidence, but the older boys knew the signs and would rip back the sheets and mock him. ‘Conynghame-Jervis has done it again! Have you been pissing, C-J?' they would ask. Or shagging – long before he knew what that word meant. When
once, in an attempt to find out, he answered that he had shagged, they mocked him more than ever. ‘You're filthy!' they said. ‘You'll have hair growing on the palms of your hands! Show us … show us … Have you got hairy palms yet?' And they laughed at his horrified eleven-year-old face.

He had asked Nanny, when he got home, what the word meant but she had said, ‘Don't let me hear such language on your lips ever again, Master Reginald,' and made him wash his mouth out with sour carbolic soap. Afterwards she had comforted him: ‘Never mind. Plenty of time for that when you're grown up. You'll learn, and if you're a good boy you'll find there's more ways than one of stuffing a duck!' More mystified than ever, he had asked Gerald what it was all about, but even his brother had growled something incomprehensible and turned away. Not until he was a prefect of thirteen and about to leave prep school for Sedbergh had his house-master explained about wet dreams, and suddenly Reginald had understood what was meant by shagging. He blushed with retrospective shame.

Nobody talked about child abuse then, he thought, and none of the masters laid a finger on me; but we were abused all the same. Throughout my life I hadn't a hope of enjoying straightforward, happy sex because of those damned early accidents. Sex and peeing were one and the same thing, both equally dirty. By the time Mary and I tried to make our own fantasy world so that we could do it and not feel guilty, the confusion between sex and pissing had gone but the one between sex and death had taken over. Did everyone feel the same orgasmic excitement as they lined up the ME 109 in their sights, and let loose the tracer bullets, and watched the stream of flame issuing, spurting forth into the helpless target? Closer than brothers we were in the officers' mess, yet I could never have asked anyone that.

When the war ended we were supposed to forget about killing and being young heroes and turn into hard-working civilians in a peacetime world, settling down to desks and offices as though we had never plundered the sky. I did my
best. I fathered a child, a perfect child, happy, trusting, golden … The forty-year-old wound, freshly reopened, made him grimace and shut his eyes and roll his head to and fro. A nurse hurried over to his bed.

‘Are you all right, Mr Conynghame-Jervis? Do you need a bedpan?'

Reginald would turn into the pillow and doze during the day, exhausted by ten or fifteen minutes of strenuous physiotherapy. This meant he lay awake at night; he refused both sleeping pills and tranquillizers. He knew he had to keep what was left of his body alert and not let it slip further away from him, flabby, boneless, useless. During the long wakeful hours he listened to the other patients snoring and wheezing, groaning in pain, calling out feebly, ‘Nurse! Nurse!' His mind worked, planning the future.

If I get over this, he promised himself, I shall fuck Liz with a clear conscience. But as well as that I shall
notice
her, listen to her, ask her opinion; this time I will share my life with her, not just let her exist alongside me. That lesson I have learned. We will travel together when I get my strength back, we'll visit friends, go up to London, meet her children. I want to get to know her children. What did she say they were called? The boy was Hugo, but the girl? Cecily was all that came into his mind, Cecily, Cecily, Tush, my Tushy.

Torn between the longing for Liz and distaste at the thought of her seeing him in his present state of physical incompetence, Reggie waited for her visit but stopped trying to bring it about. Meanwhile he co-operated urgently, angrily, with the physio and speech therapist, forcing his body to relearn the infantile skills of walking and talking. I
will not
be old! he thought, brimming with the uprush of deep internal furies. I have the chance to get it right this time; I refuse to be old, to disintegrate, to be tidied away and consigned to a home and collapse and mumble and fumble and stumble and smell and leak. I am going to make a complete recovery and begin life again with a wonderful young wife and
astonish them all
.
Reginald lay in bed one lunchtime, two weeks after he had first arrived, smelling the greasy, tepid smell of reheated beef, damp carrots, cabbage and burnt roast potatoes – the hospital's standard Sunday treat. Turning his head at the sound of stolid footsteps approaching, he suddenly beamed, with a beam that matched her own.

*

Speaking in vowels, as he had to nowadays, Reggie said, ‘I-i Ow-er-ah-er!'

‘How many times do I have to tell you? You can call me Mrs Odejayi or you can call me Aggie, but you will
not
call me Mrs Owsyerfather!'

‘I e-y ad oo ee ou!' said Reginald.

‘And I'm glad to see you, though it's more than you deserve! But the good Lord has punished you enough for the wicked words you spoke to me, so I'll forgive you. Never mind that – I'd have come to visit you long ago, if anyone had thought to tell me you was here!'

Still beaming down upon him, she leaned over to give him a kiss. The smell of bleach and carbolic and womanly sweat filled his nostrils, seeming to Reggie the sweetest, cleanest smell he had ever known.

A month ago he would have regarded her as beneath him for half a dozen reasons – black, a woman, working class, fat, middle-aged – but today he was overcome with affection towards her.

‘Aggie!' he said, enunciating clearly for the first time.

She called out to all and sundry, ‘There now! Did you hear that? And if that ain't this Sunday's miracle, I don't know what is. Can you do it again, Squadron Leader?'

‘Aggie!' he cried joyously, ‘Aggie, Aggie, Aggie!'

While her own future collapsed around her and even Russia seemed about to retreat from glad morning back into darkest Communism, Liz sat out the warm, wet August days in the shop. She was poised between two courses of action so finely balanced that she could not move a step towards either. Today, with not a single paying customer all morning, she had plenty of time to consider the alternatives.

One possibility was to go ahead with this suddenly preposterous marriage and become – for the foreseeable future – Reginald's wife and unpaid nurse. It seemed clear that he would be an invalid for several months to come and was heading for a doddery old age. Liz had not been able to bring herself to visit him in hospital. She hardly knew how to confront him, after their previous encounter, and was in no hurry to see for herself whether Roy's graphic description of his shambling movements, his slobbering and gibbering, was accurate.

Roy had rung her again a week after Reggie had been admitted, sounding thoroughly lugubrious. ‘He can't get his words out very clear just at the minute, but they've started him on speech therapy and they say it does wonders. He's ever so determined to get better: already out of bed and practising his walking. It all depends, Sister says, on how much encouragement he gets …' Roy added meaningfully.

‘It's awfully kind of you to have visited him, Southgate,' Liz had offered.

‘
Mr
Southgate to you,' Roy muttered under his breath. Then he said, ‘He's been asking for you, the nurses think, though sometimes it's a bit hard to make out what he means. They said there was a lady that rang to inquire after him and said she was his fiancée. I didn't know you was engaged.'

‘Yes,' said Liz. ‘Well, this is a very busy time of year for me.'

‘It's up to you, Madam, of course. He's going to be there for another two weeks at least, and after that –'

‘Very good of you to ring and let me know,
Mr
Southgate,' Liz concluded firmly, making no promises.

It would be different, she thought, if we were already married. I wouldn't have much choice then. I don't love him, and I don't suppose he actually loved me. We seemed, very briefly, to be in a convenient state of mutual need. But now all that's changed I am
not
going to put my head into the noose. I don't pretend to be a particularly nice person. I don't think I've been nice or good since David left – my erring, irresponsible, irresistible young husband,
still
, damn him, the only man I have ever really loved. After he went, I stuck it out with the kids, twelve years' hard labour on my own, but that's my lot as far as service and self-sacrifice goes.