Authors: Candia McWilliam
A week after the dinner party, Cora telephoned me at the hospital. At first, I was not pleased. I need to sequester the chambers of my existence. Then I recollected that she was to marry Hal, and I welcomed her call. Perhaps Hal would take to telephoning me at work.
‘Lucas, if I may call you that, Hal said I could call you there, I do hope it’s all right, it’s two things, really. Would you join me and Hal for supper tonight, I’ll cook, I’m sorry it’s such short notice, Hal said you wouldn’t mind, and could I perhaps ask you a favour?’
Anything, dear Miss Nothing, already using his name to touch like a girl with a tiny diamond, anything you wish, if you will remain so besotted.
‘Of course, Cora.’
‘If I came to see Dolores this evening, could you possibly give me a lift home? I’ll do all the cooking this afternoon.’
‘Dolores Steel? Do you know her?’
‘Pretty well over a time, and I’m sure she needs visitors. Her friends, well, the sort she has now, wouldn’t go into a hospital to save your life.’
Could Dolores Steel be a Christian Scientist? Surely it had said Church of England on her papers? I was not curious. She was a girl whose small features and long limbs were noticeable to the younger doctors. She sat up in bed, black hair over her breast. She did not read, she ate only fruit, and she wasted time. She asked questions all day, about the hospital, its history, its design. These poor men wanted to touch the one wound of her body which was not penetrated by a high-hung tube. I was not surprised she had no visitors. But I was pleased that Cora was showing herself a soft-hearted girl and a loyal friend. I thought of my old age; would she tuck me in a rug as my mother had my father?
‘Of course, I’d be delighted. Why don’t I help with your cooking a bit? I’ll bring some surprise from the market by the hospital if I can.’
This was unlike me, and I surprised myself. And Cora, who replied, ‘That is sweet. So shall I meet you by Dolores’s bed at half past seven?’
‘An assignation many would covet,’ I said, referring to Dolores, gallant, pompous and wrong, for do not all women hate to hear of another’s desirability?
‘Thank you,’ said Cora, and put down the telephone. She had taken the fool’s gold of flattery for herself, as they will.
I spent the morning going through the notes of my current patients. Many of the babies had never been well. Glancing at the notes of Dolores Steel, I saw that her heart specialist had been for two years someone called Hardiman. It was Douglas, I was almost sure. This surprised me; I knew he had wanted to be an osteopath. I looked again, as the notes were unclear at this point, and decided, prompted more by interest in my own life than in his, to ask a colleague about this. I asked my assistant, who wears a single pearl in each dark brown ear, her biro in her stiff black hair, and who has never once been late, to ask John Payne to call me. In spite of his alarming name, he is a gentle man. I think he is as good a surgeon as I am, but the newspapers have not found him photogenic. He is a married man, twice; the blond issue of each marriage plays in two separate frames on his desk. The two latest children play in a silver frame behind glass; the former babies, now with children of their own, sit like propped sandbags in a folder of red leatherette. That may be his worst secret; John Payne is a blameless man.
‘Lucas, what can I do you for?’ He makes these jokes. At weekends he shoots pheasants. I imagine him, more at ease with the farmers, joking, a bit too red in the face, and a bit too blue in the joke. His wife would look well with a dog, both trained to pick up what another’s skill has brought down.
I asked him about Douglas Hardiman.
‘Published a paper no one liked, ahead of its time but dotty in its way, or dotty-sounding. He contended that the spine was a sort of allegory for the rest of the body. It was called “The Myth of Atlas”, something like that. He was found a bit wanting by the big guns and he went into high dudgeon. Only to resurface in, ha ha, sort of low dungeon, you could say.’
‘John? Go on.’
‘He got a conshie fit if you can call it that and went off to work in the Queen’s Service, if you know what I mean.’
He was not asking me if I knew what he meant, but I relied upon my foreignness to pretend I thought he was. ‘What do you mean, John?’
‘He got himself seconded to H.M. Prisons, and treated them all for their knocks and blows, stitched up their mailbags, that sort of thing.’
‘Did he work on hearts after his break with bones?’ John’s puns were affecting me. No word in English is free of the body, often impolitic.
‘Good one, Lucas. I think, d’you know, he did. Not like us, but I think he has made a study of congenital irregularities. A bit of a weirdo, though, very anti the knife and for the exercise of the heart.’
‘That sounds like Douglas. I wonder, does falling in love exercise the heart?’
‘Lucas, that isn’t you trying to tell me something I ought to know, is it?’
‘Thank you, John, I hope I didn’t disturb you.’
‘Pleasure all mine.’
Had Dolores spent two years in prison? It must be coincidence. After all, I take my car to be serviced in Wormwood Scrubs, but that does not mean the mechanics are taking metal files in to the inmates daily. That spoilt girl with her chocolate eyes could not have survived prison.
At a quarter past seven, I left my room and collected the small package of shopping and a bunch of flowers I had bought in the market. I had a gauzy swarm of painter’s sorrow and a long spill containing five white anemones, wall-eyed, without the black centre of coloured anemones. The white flowers, like white oxen and white horses, looked like emblems of unfallen times. I took the lift down to the adult ward. As I passed the children’s ward, I saw the family of the brown boy. I saw the crossed legs of the daughters. A nurse was giving the boy a drink. His parents observed him as though he might break, as though they saw the drink trace through him. An enormous bear in jogging clothes crowded his cot.
When I arrived at the bedside of Dolores Steel, Cora was already there. She was seated and her hair was full of rain. So, she had only just arrived. She cannot have been very enthusiastic about seeing her old friend.
‘Good evening, Dolores, how are you feeling?’
She must have been feeling very much better because she turned to me with an expression, more a grimace, of what looked like strong antipathy. On her dainty features, which had the enamelled prettiness of a ballerina’s, this looked like a rictus of photogenic, intense, forced pleasure, what a rapist may imagine he sees in the victim’s eyes. She reached to her bedside table and took her spectacles, which she put on carefully, lifting the black tines of hair away from her ears. She continued to look at me; I felt grateful for her spectacles, as though they were eliminating the worst of her gaze. She said nothing at all, but picked up a brown ball from the counterpane and nipped it with her teeth. Then, with the concentration of one peeling layers from their fingernail, she removed the skin, with its silver pink lining, of what must be a lychee. She put the jellied fruit into her mouth.
‘Hello, Lucas, I’ve brought Dolores some fruit as she doesn’t eat much else. How are you? Have you had a busy day?’ said Cora.
I liked her for her dull little question, and her wide open face. Dolores was cracking and sucking at the fruit with her fine fingers and huge eyes like a lemur. On a green hospital plate on the pale green bedcover a pile of shiny stones and spirals of husk was growing. Poor girl, her body was so slight, it hardly lifted the bedclothes.
‘Aren’t you the lucky one tonight, though?’ came the voice of John Payne. He stood and rocked at the foot of Dolores’s bed. ‘Two gorgeous ladies,’ he said. Had they been nurses, he might have said, ‘What a lovely pair.’ But he knew his game, and these girls would never be in his season. I introduced Cora to him. ‘Who are the flowers for, Lucas?’ he asked. To ask that was to know they must be for the invalid, and I handed the blank-faced windflowers to Dolores with as little grace as possible. It is not professional to give flowers to one’s patients. A Sinhalese doctor had once given a bag of sweets to one of ‘his’ mothers and the nurses expected the baby to be striped, Tooting and Kandy. But John had made it impossible not to bunch the wraith in the bed. He was looking at her like a dog. There is an acrid type of woman, invariably thin, who whips men in. The men read in the malice and sourness of these narrow bitches some delectable painfulness, biting or scratching, I do not know. Dolores was looking at John with the same pointed antagonism she had directed at me. It was as though she disliked us on principle.
‘They won’t live,’ she said to me of the flowers. They would not, now she had cursed them.
‘I remember you love flowers, Dolores,’ said Cora.
John took his eyes from black-haired Dolores and turned to Cora. This evening she was hiding inside a tent of loden cloth. Her very white neck and glowing face made the china witch in the bed look more deadly. Her eyes were patched about with colour and she wore boots which curled like mangoes at the toe. These were pink and red and silver, and at the front of each, as though they were small Greek boats, were eyes.
John looked at this Tyrolean scarecrow with boats for feet with pleasure, and I felt the air lose some of its charge. He introduced himself, and Cora herself, and then she said, to him and to Dolores, who had been rattling in her hand a handful of pits like a maraca, ‘I must go now, do get well soon, Dolores, I’ll come and see you again soon, goodbye Mr Payne.’
‘I’ll come down with you,’ I said. I did not want to, on account of John Payne and what he would now think of my exercised heart, but I was tired of the black spell of Dolores’s bed, and how otherwise would Cora find the car?
‘Goodnight,’ said John Payne, reassured to see the animals leaving, as God intended, two by two.
Cora had no parcels. It was a blue night without stars, cold. I opened the door on the passenger side to let her in and put my things at her feet. She fidgeted a little.
Only when we were moving along did she say, ‘Your shopping leaked, I think.’
‘What?’ I was not concentrating, though I had been pleased to notice she did not hum or talk during the music from the car tape-machine.
‘There is something on my seat, I think it is meat.’ I had bought that morning three bulbs of fennel, some smoked eel and a horseradish root.
‘What do you mean, Cora? Here, let’s stop, it’s a red light.’ I see viscera very frequently, but in the place where they belong, inside the body. In the light Cora’s coat was brown, but her hands were a light red, marked with darker brown. Matted and textured like the coat of a drowned dog, and big and lolling, in her long fingers, was the long tongue of an animal.
She did not scream, but she took my evening paper from beside her feet and began to wrap up the tongue. The paper said, ‘
little Ahmed struggles for life
’. There was a photograph of ‘my’ family, in their cardigans.
‘Are you all right?’ I asked. ‘Would you like to get out? Do you feel sick?’
She made no reply. I feared an ululating female scene.
‘What shall we do with the tongue?’ I asked.
‘Press it,’ replied Cora, and I saw it in my mind like a juicy flower between the pages of a book. ‘Shall we go? The light has changed.’
‘Please don’t tell Hal,’ I said, ‘he hates mess.’
‘Hal hates mess, does he?’ said Cora, collecting even now information about her loved one.
‘I am sorry,’ I said, after some time. We were approaching her house. ‘I can’t think what it is about.’ I did not seem to be able to think at all.
On the doorstep of Cora’s house, I waited for her to open the door. She was taking a long time. The basement light was on and the room appeared as usual to be awaiting at least Prospero. A thin animal, with white elbows, eight of them, was on the floor. It had two white eyes at its centre. They were moving up and down. I felt cold as though my blood had stopped reaching the edges of my body.
‘Do you feel better?’ asked a tall girl with pale blue velvet breasts and a long butcher’s apron.
‘Than what?’ I felt well but very empty.
‘You were sick,’ said Cora, ‘and you fainted. I’m lucky to be so big. I put you here.’ We were in a white and blue room.
‘
I’m
lucky,’ I said. She gave me some tea. It was dark and sweet and reeked of rum. The room smelt of mast.
‘If you feel better, would you like to start cooking? Hal’s coming at half-past eight but he is always late.’
I replaced the visor of chilliness I keep about my face. I did not want to be told about my love by this fat girl.
When I had drunk the tea, I felt better and followed a noise of singing to where Cora was cooking. In a very big saucepan was boiling water. It was scummy, but smelt faintly of sausage-making day in my parents’ shop. The tongue, I guessed.
‘There was a note,’ she said. ‘It says “
they can’t talk
”. She looked interrogatively at me. I had no reply, and felt ashamed.
‘What had you been going to make?’ she asked brightly. She seemed to have taken my jacket off so all I needed to do before cooking was roll up my sleeves.
‘Fennel fritters and eel with horseradish.’
‘On you go, I shan’t interfere,’ said Cora. The kitchen was wallpapered with the jocular paper which was popular before everyone knew about ratatouille and holidays, when shops like my parents’ proliferated. It repeated a design of flasks and wine bottles and yellow onions.