Through Streets Broad and Narrow (38 page)

All these things in his hands or stuck under his arms depressed him because they suggested that he was conforming. He thought he'd find himself taking flowers to a cemetery if anyone had died and was glad at least that he had resisted buying grapes for her. But what depressed him most was the knowledge that he had no heart in bringing them. If she were mine, how good it would be to be visiting her at the right time with the conventional sort of things. The roses would look different; we'd joke over
Woman
and laugh enviously at the photographs in the
Bystander
; we'd each take a bite out of the other's marshmallow. None of this would be original either, except for us.

The nursing home chilled him; the maid with a starched face and refined accent showing him through a hall that belonged to nobody into a waiting-room that belonged to everybody for
ten minutes to half an hour. The room was like an hotel room except that it was clean with anxiety; not a speck of dust anywhere, not a dent in a cushion. Whoever owned the place, a syndicate of doctors probably, had hired a Matron just as they had hired the house; between them they'd put up a few pictures they didn't want in their own homes: consulting-room furnishings. There was an ashtray with two long cigarette ends in it cherried with lipstick; more anxiety: they were only half smoked. There were so many mirrors: surplus to the requirements of the doctors and their wives, he supposed, or to those of the Matron who probably had a small personal room somewhere with a tray of drinks in it, and her S.R.N. Certificate, framed. Of course he paused in front of several of the mirrors. All the relatives would have done this too, the woman with the cherry lipstick, husbands, friends and heirs. He could not see his own face properly for these ghosts tweaking at their collars and ties, putting on more lipstick, primping before they went upstairs with their books and flowers, bunches of grapes.

Under a settee he saw a leg sticking out with a little brown shoe on it. So the Matron was married and had a little girl who had a large doll dressed in off-white organdie? The doll had golden curls and a hair slide, frilly knickers and no genitals. She had a silver bracelet and eyelashes like thin brown brushes. When she was laid down suddenly, something went thump under the organdie bodice but she didn't manage to say “Mama.” He took a great fancy to this doll, she was so substantial and peaceful. He sat her on his knee and fluffed out her frock.

When the maid came in suddenly and announced that Matron would see him a minute, he was not a bit embarrassed to have been caught playing with the doll. He let her sit there on his knee as though she were his first daughter, waiting too. He said thank you so coldly that the maid did not even dare to smile; she certainly did not care to ask him for the doll, though she must have recognized it.

The Matron, who looked as though she had doctors on the quiet, was as cool as a ward sister. She said, “I'm afraid I must ask you not to stay too long.”

“How is Mrs. Cloate?”

“She's quite comfortable; but apart from her relatives, you're her first visitor. Would you like the flowers put in water?”

“Oh, thank you.”

“I'll get Nurse to bring them up in a vase.” She was looking at the doll. “That's a strange present.”

He guessed she had said this more or less in spite of herself; since, though she was not in the least in awe of him or of any sort of man that he could think of, it was a little rude. She had a literally “tough” face, the features and the expression fibrous-looking under the careful makeup. In any case he was so dull-witted just looking at her that he didn't know what she meant. Her eyes lifted from the doll against his chest to his own face as she awaited his reply. He thought, We don't like one another, and, playing for time, asked, “Present?”

“The doll. Is it one of Mrs. Cloate's?”

He let the doll fall, hanging by a hand from his own, its brown shoes just touching the ground and the head remaining stiffly upright staring at the matron's legs.

“Oh
this
,” he said. “It's not a present; I found it in here, under the settee. I thought it was yours, or the home's.”

“It doesn't belong to us,” she said so shortly that he had to invent something else.

“I thought it might be one of the props, something for the children to play with.”

“Props?” With more brusqueness, she reached out for the doll. “I can't think how it got here. This room is done out every morning. One of the patients, I suppose. Now whose case was it, called with a child the other day? Mrs. Darling—” She cut herself short. He guessed then, he knew for certain, that Mrs. Darling, whoever she was, had been very ill and that the little girl who had brought the doll had sensed the anxiety and forgotten all about her doll when she came downstairs again with her father or someone. The Matron's eyes closed because she knew that he had taken all this out of the way she had said the last remark. Her expression closed up altogether as she asked him his name and dumped the doll on a chest in the hall. She led the way upstairs.

He could not observe anything any more and busted in behind her as she announced him to Dymphna.

“Mr. Blaydon to see you, Mrs. Cloate. I've told him he's not to stay too long.”

“But I'm so well now.”

“Orders are orders. Mr. Moffatt is very strict and this is only your fourth day.”

The matron left then, giving him an unpleasant look so that he said to the girl on the bed, “Did you tell her I was a medical student?”

“Goodness! You haven't changed a bit. Whatever does it matter?”

“She was terribly cool.” He was beginning to see things. Whoever had sent her all the flowers and all white? Carnations, forced narcissi and things that looked like Madonna lilies gone wrong.

“I don't tell
her
anything: but I have great crack with the nurse.”

“Then it comes to the same thing.” He paused, taking in the smell of the room: Dettol, face powder, flowers and blood.

“I bought you a few things.”

“Oh John, you shouldn't.”

“These are marshmallows, you used to love them.”

“I still do. I haven't changed either.”

“And the
Tatler
,” he said. “No, I mean the
Bystander
.”

“Oh good! You are sweet. Don't sit on that chair, sit on the bed so that I can look at you.”

The nurse tapped and came in with his roses in a cut-glass vase. The two women looked at each other and he knew that their eyes said, “Not now,” and that Dymphna's said, “Have a good look at him so that we can later.” And the nurse did take her time about pulling at the roses and mopping up a little water from the top of the dressing-table where she had placed the vase.

Dymphna only said to her, “Be a darling and switch on the stove.”

“You're all right, snug in bed, isn't she?” The nurse said to John.

“Yes.”

“Don't you let Matron catch you sitting on the bed. She'll have the hide off the pair of you.”

Dymphna said, “He loves tea. Any chance?”

“Not today. More than my job's worth since Mrs. Darling.”

Dymphna looked really pained, he knew her pain-face well. She laughed so merrily and said, “Well, anyway, give us our full half-hour, won't you?”

“Now you be good. Quiet as mice when the cat's
not
away.”

When she had gone they found themselves trying to pat things back into shape like disturbed earth.

Dymphna said, “And roses too, when I particularly said you weren't to.”

“How long have you been in here?”

“A week.”

He was trying to tick up the points but they kept drifting like reflections disturbed by falling stones; and the stones were the observations he was quite unwillingly making: that she looked pregnant and that this fitted in with her appearance the last time he had seen her sitting in Mitchell's, reading the letter from Cloate. The white turn-down of the sheet bowed round her stomach; she had a milky-white bed jacket very openly knitted and a low-topped nightdress. He could see the great milk veins of her breasts cold and soft and nearly as white as the lily flowers. He could even, after so long in the Rotunda, smell her pregnancy. A pregnant woman's breath smells of milk, not of cow's milk but of a milk sweeter and stranger. There was a lot of her breath in the room, it climbed over the smell of the fresh blood and the flowers.

“She said it was your fourth day?”

“My fourth day since my miscarriage, silly.”

“Oh,” he said, “I'm
sorry
. Honestly, it's the shock of seeing you again. I just couldn't focus. Your letter. You see I thought you'd been ill. I got the idea you were terribly ill.”

“No, it went quite smoothly really. They did get the wind up a bit, I suppose they always do over doctors' wives; but considering we'd left it so late it can't really have been too bad at all.”

“Oh good.” His mind had stuck at “Doctors' wives.”

“I hope to be going home next week,” she went on, “but I just had to see you before. I was a bit naughty in my letter, I admit. I did want you to think I was ill. I knew you'd come then.” She reached forward for the box of marshmallows. “Have one, and stop looking so worried.”

“What do you mean you'd left it so late?” he asked.

“Well, how could we at this stage? And I was too frightened to tell Fergus. I knew it would worry him dreadfully when he can't even get compassionate leave. I kept putting it off so that when I finally did write I was well past the third month.”

He took a marshmallow for something to do; it was squishy and tasteless, he couldn't even taste the icing sugar.

“You've got it all over your mouth,” she said.

“Go on with what you were saying.”

“No, I don't want to. It's all over now. I didn't ask you here to talk about that. I wanted to see if we couldn't be friends again. I seem to have lost all my friends by marrying Fergus and it's quite unfair. I'd made all sorts of plans—”

“You were saying about the third month.”

“Oh, well, I suppose you're nearly a doctor, so it won't seem so sordid to you. But promise me you won't ever refer to it again after this, if I tell you?”

“I promise.”

“Well, I hadn't quickened or anything, I didn't feel any movements; they don't start until the something or other week—”

“The eighteenth,” he said and she hurried on, “But we had to move very fast. I didn't know what to do, I never expected to be so fertile, it must practically have been a honeymoon baby; I mean conception. Anyway, Fergus managed to get a wire through telling me to see Douglas Moffatt at once, and then a few days later he wrote to us both and Douglas got me in here straightaway and took it away.”

“Did your parents know?”

“Good Heavens, yes. We just told them that I was bleeding, that it was practically inevitable, you know? And really after that they were quite relieved, obviously.”

“I suppose you haven't much room at home,” he said. “You still have paying guests for the shooting and fishing?”

“More than ever. Officers on leave, an absolute shuttle-service. Isn't the war a curse? It's ruined everything. But for that we would have had our own house, somewhere to put it, even though it was so much sooner than we'd planned.”

“What would it have been?” he asked.

“What? Oh, you mean the baby?”

“A boy or a girl?” he repeated stupidly.

“How do I know? I never thought about it in that way. It was just a nuisance and, anyway, how could it possibly have been either at that stage? It was just a lump in my tummy, I never allowed myself to think of it except as an operation. I don't think really that I can be the motherly type, or perhaps no one is until they have had one. Mummy says she had no affection at all for either of us until we were about six months old.” She took another marshmallow. “But that's enough about that. We've only got ten minutes left and I want to hear about you, everything. Who are you in love with now?”

“No one.” He noticed that she was taking very small bites out of the marshmallow, complacently.

“What happened to Mrs. Darling?” he said and saw her forget to eat the rest of it.

“Oh, it was terrible,” she began to weep. “You shouldn't have asked me, you really shouldn't have come here just to fire questions off at me as though I were a criminal.”

“Did she die?” he asked.

But she couldn't answer, she had the sheet up to her face, holding it against her eyes with both her hands so that he could only see her dark hair and a ribbon she was wearing in it and which until now he hadn't noticed at all.

“Did she have a daughter,” he asked, “with a doll? Because if she did, it's in the hall.”

“Please!” she said from behind the sheet.

He was standing up, looking round the colourless room. When he saw her again she had brought the sheet down; her eyes were red-lidded and, though she was quite incapable of anger and so long as he had known her, always had been, he saw that she was going to comfort herself and was glad.

“But it's important,” he insisted, “not the doll but the child.
They don't leave them behind in places like women leaving umbrellas. Small girls love their dolls, and when I saw that one downstairs I knew that it was a pain, a fearful one. It seemed like death—”

She lowered the sheet. “What are you saying?”

But he went on trying to express it all to himself. Something to do with Victoria and her own death.

“How can you know anything about Mrs. Darling, from a doll?” she tried.

“Or murder,” he went on; then stopped short for a moment to reply to her question. “The Matron mentioned her, but that's not how I knew. I knew from the doll; I was certain of it. What I didn't know until now was that the woman must have died from an abortion, instead of the baby she would have had. I don't know why but it has made me angry. I hate it, the daughter loses her mother, the mother loses her child, all the daughter can lose is her doll. It's a ring of nothingness. It's as much of a destruction as the war, as the gas chambers of the Nazis.”