The Scattering (21 page)

Once installed in the tall stone house, yards from the shore, at the end of the sloping lane behind Mrs L'Estrange's white cottage, Rose would have her friends come to visit, and they would gasp at the view. They would wonder at the five ensuite bedrooms and the contemporary Italian kitchen; at her husband's building and architectural skills; at the smooth unpainted walls made from the stone he'd plundered from the beach. They would especially remark upon the stone, and how it still smelled of salt, and how standing in the house with its view of the curving shoreline one would think one was out at sea.

Thomas L'Estrange was a master craftsman. He had built their bedroom at the back of the house with a balcony so that at night they could watch the ships and trawlers pass slowly into the harbours of Greenore or Carlingford. He'd built a turreted roof for Gemma. Rose would beam with pride when her friends, home from London and Dublin and New York, would visit this ‘castle' her ‘prince' had built her. Most of them had left during the eighties, when recession had laid waste to the town, and, Rose believed, they had very much wanted to return, to have the life
she
now had. She would bring them on lengthy tours of the spacious sea-lit rooms, give detailed descriptions of her husband's meticulous building processes, list his ambitions for the property. It was, finally, as if it was
she
who had triumphed. And, if she were honest, this is what she had loved most about those five years in the house. She loved Thomas, she did. But she loved more the new and thrilling taste of triumph.

And it hardly lasted. For he had ruined it summarily, with something she could not in a million years have been prepared for. And whom could she tell? How could she turn to the once-pitying, now envious friends and tell them that after five years of marriage she had discovered Thomas L'Estrange was a – well, what was he? She hadn't the words for it. She was simply not ready for whatever vague and frightful thing her husband was. She knew only he was to have been her prince, not her princess.

Yet people did know. How, she had no idea; only he must have been in some kind of club or group. She had heard rumours; was told of a Gay and Lesbian Society in the basement of a building on Crowe Street in which there was a leopard-skin divan. Perhaps he had visited it. She wasn't sure and she hadn't asked. She saw what she saw and that evening left the house.

The image of him in the back room especially entered her mind during root canals. Again and again she would open the door, having come home early that day, and there he would be: walking towards the long mirror by the window, her tights stretched over his sinewy legs, ripped along his right calf, her Karen Millen dress a perfect fit over his slender back – while Supertramp's the
Logical Song
boomed from the stereo. She had wanted to laugh and thought he must have been joking until she saw his hands, those dry, stonecutter's hands, bejewelled and wafting through the air in an imaginary conversation with the mirror, his angular jaw jutting out from side to side. She stared in silence by the door for what seemed like an age, for she thought him beautiful: light and graceful, long and small-hipped. Surely this dazzling creature was not the man she'd married? It was as if he'd been set free from that person, like a butterfly let loose from a room. Then, as Thomas L'Estrange's beauty began to conflict with what he stood for in her mind and in her life, Rose checked herself. She was confused. That she had found him so alluring like this deeply surprised and disgusted her. Her hands shook as she closed the door. She referred to the incident only once packed.

Declan Whately must have noticed something was wrong. She was aware she seemed more aggressive in the surgery, more distracted in her breaks, though he said nothing about this. She often wondered if he knew about Thomas, or if, indeed, the whole town knew. And it was thinking about the town's old condescension towards her that brought Rose lowest. Five years earlier she had transformed the ‘tragedy' of giving birth at fourteen into a triumph. Now she was as before, her triumph reversed, like Cinderella's pumpkin, all due to Thomas L'Estrange's ‘inclination'.

Declan was shutting up the surgery when she fainted. When she came to, she was on the sofa in the waiting room. The window was open and the dentist was making her tea.

‘You fainted, Rose,' he said.

‘I'm so sorry, Declan.'

‘Oh no, you're grand. You've not been yourself at all lately, Rose.'

Then she told him. About the house, the stones from the beach, the discovery that day, about not telling a soul yet the peculiar sense she had that people knew. Though she neglected to tell him about the strange sensation that had passed through her as she stood watching her husband dressed as a woman. He would have asked her to describe it, and she did not want to explain how her eyes had softened and narrowed, how her legs had tingled.

‘A terrible load of weighty stuff to keep to yourself, Rose. A person could explode with all that inside them. Or implode maybe, like you've been doing.'

She was glad of the dentist's fuss, and appreciated his kind and thoughtful words. Especially when he told her she was a treasure to the surgery, that her warmth was a natural gift, that her holding the patients' hands in their half-hour of need was proof of a large and indomitable heart, that any man would be mad to let her escape his life. He said that most people had secrets, and asked her to think again about the meaning of what she had seen her husband do.

‘Is it really so bad now, Rose, to do a bit of dressing up?'

Rose noticed that in Declan Whately's eyes Thomas L'Estrange was not the monster she had made him out to be. He was much worse: a thing of pity. Rose did not notice, however, that the dentist listened intently, not only to all she told him about Thomas but to the musical tone in her voice, as if he himself would faint with pleasure; to her breathy pauses, her nervy intake of new breath. And she certainly did not see there was no triumph to be had in a time when no one was looking anyway, when no one cared, when pity might be the very most someone might offer another, when everyone in the town these days was busy not noticing anyone else. Rose, who noticed none of these things, walked into the dark and empty street wondering what the dentist meant by ‘a natural gift'.

Stitch-up

At least I'm still breathing. If I make small heaves with my ribs, I can just about get enough air: piney, laced with some kind of oil, perhaps Eucalyptus. Little to do except cast my eyes around the room's brushed chrome and steel; at the immaculate white and jade-green tiles and, poker-stiff, ponder my incredibly good fortune.

The room looks different. I know that, before, I was oblivious to its beauty. Before, I would never have marked, for instance, the sensitive design of that kidney bowl. How beautifully it curves and relaxes to one side. How it glistens in a file of pale, dustless light. And my drip: a clever, labyrinthine construction. If I had the wherewithal right now, I think I would kiss my drip.

There is no fruit in the room. No flowers, no fruit, no soft drinks. It is essential that I be sealed off from every kind of germ.

Caulked with sleep, I seem to have kept company with the figures of dreams for an aeon. Last night, for instance, I met a woman clad in thinly woven gloves – a sort of greeny Prussian blue. They hugged her fingers like net. She sat in profile, dark-haired, spindly. She tried to tell me something but I cannot remember what. This morning, I think I dreamt I was driving. Sometimes in my dreams, I drive a white car and sometimes an orange car. Anything orange usually indicates some kind of revelation. I love when I get orange. I love when I get the orange car. But usually I get the white car. The white car brings me through a lived experience, possibly so that I will examine it in some detail. I cannot remember if I drove the white or orange car this morning.

They will come in, I hope. When they realise the operation was a success they will enter. Perhaps I have woken up ahead of schedule. I like to be ahead of schedule. I am punctual to a fault. Hopefully, one of them will write a little something about me for the
Herald
: I am a miracle after all.

Plaistow described the procedure in detail. As a noted scientist myself I needed to understand what he would do. Let me explain: I was born with an exceptionally weak heart. I had open-heart surgery at two weeks old in Great Ormond Street Hospital in London where I was born. I was hailed the miracle boy: Anthony Blythe, saved by a radical new procedure. (It was the sixties.) I was expected to die at five, then perhaps fifteen; certainly, I was not expected to live past thirty. I am now thirty-four years old. Plaistow explained that after incision, my heart would be removed and packed in ice whilst a pacemaker was fitted, and a small, flexible metal gauze placed over the hole. The heart would then be replaced and reattached to the veins. It was to be, as has been my good fortune, yet another ‘radical new procedure'.

Boston General is to all intents and purposes, a Victorian building. The cardiac annex however, is a state of the art addition – all gentle sheen, brushed chrome, glass bricks and steel. An architectural triumph, it was designed by Roya Foster, Norman's protégé and niece. It is a comfort now to guide my thoughts through the serpentine splendour of the place. Corridor floors consist of squares of sturdy, multi-layered, tempered glass with steel rivets; the wall-to-wall white tiles are sheets of small mosaic squares. All non-tessellated surfaces are wipe-able; there are no soft furnishings, no chintz. Standards of hygiene are second to none. The sense of clean, reductive distillation in this ward is tense, almost sexual. A sterile but nonetheless stirring place.

I have always been rather amused by the fact that the place where surgery takes place is referred to as ‘the theatre'. It is as if the surgeons are the actors performing a rehearsed, intricate task; the nurses standing conscientiously in the wings the Greek chorus, and the patient the willing, trusting audience. Except that one can't get up and walk away from a bad operation as one can from a play. One has no choice but to endure. One wakes or one doesn't. Destiny plays the pivotal role. This is difficult: control of self given over entirely to someone else. Absolutely difficult.

Before they cut into my baby stitches, I asked Plaistow if I could inspect the wards. A colleague of my wife, he came with impressive credentials. Of course I take nothing for granted. One shouldn't. I wanted to ensure I was in the best possible hands and, in all honesty, wanted to allay my nerves by contriving to gain, via some modicum of understanding of his process, an element of control over my impending surgery.

We talked. I then went alone to Plaistow's Heart Theatre. Walked through, in the obligatory white coat with a hard, starched-linen mask secured tightly over my mouth. The instruments had been sterilised and placed elegantly in their white and dark-blue plastic pouches. They lay flush under sparkling glass. Containers of acetone lined a long white marble table. Sink areas were spotless; soaps made from bleached tallow were grooved neatly with a PLEASE DISPOSE OF AFTER USE emblem. I felt entirely at ease. Though I did happen upon one very annoying thing on my way out of the theatre. It had certainly not been there on my way in: on the long glass floor of the landing, where the tempered glass met the vinyl tiles of the Victorian block, lay a row of eighteen dead flies. They had half-mounted the verge of the glass partition as if they had attempted to crawl under, perhaps through.

In a shaft of the blue-white Massachusetts morning pearling along the floor's rim, the flies both compelled and disturbed me. It has always been my particular idiosyncrasy to become rather electrically stirred by anything grouped: maggots, bees, rats, ants, sometimes even people. A strangely pleasurable repulsion that has been known to extend to inanimate objects. Once, I observed an April blossom in Krakow draped in a corolla of Christmas bulbs. The unlit bulbs appeared to me then as tumors devouring the tree, and it at once repelled and held me. Faced daily with sprawling, often mutated cellular formations under the microscope, my eye is drawn naturally to groups of anything; there is a certain magnetism for me, therefore, in swarms.

The flies had not been there before, I was certain. My sense of confidence in both Plaistow and Boston General, despite my peculiar fascination, had been undermined. How did they get there? Each miniature metallic body upturned, with black legs hooked, lying on the creamy floor. I put it down to a hatching from an imprisoned female that had probably made her way down the vents. There are no conventional windows in this block. The air is entirely controlled. Out of sheer courtesy, I felt compelled to mention the sighting. Plaistow confirmed the females came in search of heat and sustenance and, as there was neither sustenance nor means of escape once inside, the offspring would die. Boston had had snow for four long months; the warm mouths of the vents, he said, had clearly offered sanctuary.

I am looking forward to seeing them – my children, family and sisters. Even Mel. Such robust, vibrant people. I am lucky to have spent my days with them. I, a cobweb in this demandingly physical world, the runt of the litter, am miraculously still living. I have treasured my days more than I have expressed. It has been difficult to articulate one's love. People would have inevitably considered one's declarations determined by one's daily possibility of dying. But I rarely dwell on such things. I drink, I have smoked, I've played cricket and football. I've also suffered a collapsed marriage, yet I believe I would do it all over again. Melanie loved the Boston Science world; the Harvard cocktail parties; the Cambridge soirees and charity evenings at American Rep'. She loved to spend her Saturday mornings on Newbury Street, then dropping by the Diabetes Clinic at the Evelyn Centre, where I still work, usually to dangle elaborate credit card bills in my face. There were scenes. To put an end to her vituperation I would usually capitulate. I think there were times she had hoped I'd turn blue and die. Perhaps she will be disappointed I have survived. Because of my condition, my insurance is enormous; cashed in, my premium could have made her a tidy sum.