Fruitful Bodies (4 page)

Skipping over the question of why she should have, Sara calculated that after selling the Kelvinside flat, Joyce must have bought a smaller but probably delightful place in London. Colebrooke Row, N1 seemed to prove her right, its mainly Georgian houses and long strip of communal garden down the centre looking even more prosperous in the generous glow of private outside lighting. They had just turned into it off the main road and Sara was noticing one of the nice things about London, the leaving of a busy road for a street filled with houses that is filled also with a beautiful hush. Little or no traffic disturbs the birds in the daytime
and at night, you suddenly hear the sound of your wheels on dry leaves. She slowed the car to a crawl and woke Joyce.

‘Joyce, we’re here. What number?’

‘Augh … gh,’ Joyce gurgled, her mouth slapping sleepily over her teeth. ‘Anywhere’s fine, just here. Here’ll do,’ she said, thickly. But it was late, the street was long, Joyce was tired and Sara was kind.

‘The number, what number?’ she insisted.

‘Eighty-one. Down the end.’

It was actually beyond the end. The road, lined with stuccoed, burglar-alarmed houses with original fanlights, grilles behind the barred windows and expensive plant tubs chained to their steps, came to an apparent end with St Peter’s Street cutting across it. But beyond it, Colebrooke Row continued with another short terrace of houses which had escaped the gentrification of the rest of the street. Most of them were of unadorned brick and dark with dirt. The plant tubs were plastic, the phoney Georgian doors were off-the-peg from Doors ‘R’ Us or some such place, and the metropolitan, crime-phobic manner of doing up houses to resemble extremely pretty prisons had not been necessary or possible here. As Sara pulled over to park, her dismay at realising that Joyce lived somewhere in this lot was interrupted by a wail of anguish.

‘Oh! Oh no! Pretzel! My wee Pretzel!’ Joyce was pointing with a shaky hand at a dark mound on the pavement near the railings. It looked like a heap of discarded boxes. She was out of the passenger door before the car had quite stopped. At the sound of her voice something moved from the heap, got up and started barking.

The dog was tied to the railings outside number 81 by a rope attached to its collar. What seemed to Sara odd, but
which Joyce appeared not to have noticed, was that surrounding the dog were two suitcases, several full bin liners tied with string, three boxes of books, a table lamp, a dozen or so Tesco bags, a box of crockery and, propped against the railings, an upright cello case with an envelope addressed to Joyce sellotaped to it. Sara ripped it off and pulled Joyce to her feet, pushing the excited dog away with her foot as forcefully as she could without quite kicking it. She regretted it at once, sensing saliva on her shoe.

‘Open it,’ she said, although what had happened did not really require explanation.

As she read, Joyce moaned. She handed the single sheet of paper to Sara with a guilty glance and crouched down once more to Pretzel.

Sara looked again at the jumble by the railings, then at her watch. Nearly one o’clock. She opened her mouth to speak and, looking down, took in Joyce’s thin back in the light of the yellow street lamp, the hair like a wispy old dishcloth dripping over her collar and the snuffling noise that might have been coming from her or the dog. She closed her mouth again. It was a stupid question. Of course Joyce didn’t have any friends she could go to.

‘Don’t worry,’ Sara said instead. ‘We’ll get most of it in, give or take a Tesco bag.’ Joyce straightened up and dared to look hopeful. ‘You can stay with me. For a few days, anyway, until you’re sorted out. You’ll have to come back to Bath with me.’

Joyce turned tremulous eyes to Sara. ‘Thank you,’ she said, her lips finding the words difficult to say, perhaps through unfamiliarity. She was shaking now. The chill of the street and the night were stealing into her body and even the bedsit’s electric fire that smelled of burning dust would have been welcome. She overlooked for the moment that she had no money for the meter in any case, but to break down now because she was out on her ear and debarred even from that much comfort would have been self-pitying, a characteristic that Joyce Cruikshank had never tolerated in others and was not now going to permit in herself.

‘I think I’ll just sit tight in here while you load up,’ she said. She toddled round to the passenger door and opened it. Before she got in she called across the roof of the car, ‘Oh, and you’d be wise to walk Pretzel up to the garden for a number two, dear. We don’t want him doing it in the car, do we?’

Indeed we don’t. But Sara still found it difficult to
explain to Andrew on her mobile exactly why, after finishing the performance of the Dvořák Concerto at a quarter to ten, she was still, at ten past one in the morning, three hours from home and in North London, waiting on the end of a rope for a dachshund to shit in the bushes.

H
ILARY
G
OLIGHTLY FELT
that she knew herself in mind, body and spirit, after more than a couple of decades thinking about it. She did things thoroughly on the whole, being a constructive sort of person, and her interest in what she called personal growth had moved on since she had begun to talk in such terms mainly to annoy her dad, who had been impatient with concepts such as karmic energy and psychic wellbeing after a lifetime in chiropody in the Harrogate area. Hilary was well up on her body rhythms, attuned both to her own and, after ten years of marriage, also to Ivan’s, but while he continued to sleep like a boy (a very indulged one) and wake up loose-limbed with a mind emptied, usually with pharmaceutical help, of ordinary care, she was waking earlier and earlier. She knew she had undergone some change. So of late she had taken to lying until morning came, listening to the incessant summer rain and praying, although she was too practical to address any particular deity, that the change she felt in herself was the one she craved and for which she had risked so much.

What had not changed, unless to increase, was her sense of being responsible for Ivan, of being the stronger
one, as well as older by eight years. She was still ever watchful for the signs that might warn of another of his episodes. She needed these hours spent beside him, but alone. Silently, in the dark before the day came, she was collecting her faculties in preparation for the next big thing, gathering enough strength for both of them. It was a habit formed early in their relationship, during his first episode, but there was something else now that was making her protective, cautious of mind and more careful in her movements.

The last Friday in July was wet and cold and Hilary rose silently, exchanged her nightie for an indigo sack dress and went downstairs, there being no reason now, except the fear that she might be mistaken, to delay. Gazing across the kitchen sink to the grass and the vibrant parsley patch, she pondered. She felt responsible in a way that was as yet untouched by anxiety, stronger in some way and paradoxically more vulnerable. Oh yes, and as sick as a dog. She turned on the cold tap and held her wrists under the water, a natural, healthful remedy for nausea she had read about and which today, as on the preceding six days, did not work. She turned from the sink and lit a cigarette, which did. As she stood puffing, letting blue threads of smoke weave into the dry clump of hair that fell over her face like a trailing plant with a bushy habit, she thought again about her parents.

The smoking, too, had started in defiance of Dad. Its unoriginality as a gesture now depressed her as much as it had enraged him. Hilary had been fifteen. Mum’s personality had long been submerged in deference to both of theirs; she had shrunk into the role of ineffectual referee, fretting between them and clucking that their problem
was that they were too alike. Hilary and Dad had been too busy hammering it out over boys, O levels and her hippy nonsense, refining their acknowledged, mutual stubbornness through several purifying stages of animosity, to notice Mum much at all. By the time Hilary lit up her first No. 6 in front of him they had achieved such a fragile, invisible perfection of hatred that they both took trouble to preserve it.

The fags had been stupid, Hilary saw that now. And Dad might even have been softened by grandchildren, but he was dead, and Hilary braced herself sensibly with the thought that it was impractical to mope over impossibilities. She thought of Stephen, Ivan’s father, so different in every way, and imagined his joy. She must choose just the right moment to tell him herself. If. She sank into a chair at the kitchen table, stubbed out her cigarette, opened the box and pulled out its contents and the instructions. There was a lot to read. Ivan would not stir for a while yet.

Checking that the sleeping silence she had left behind in their bedroom was still undisturbed and that the dining room was empty, Hilary quietly closed both doors to the kitchen, lifted her dress, squatted on the floor and squirted the ‘few drops of early morning urine’ demanded by the leaflet into the tiny plastic container, designed by a man. She accomplished it with more ease than she expected and was silently congratulating herself when, rather too late, she realised that the leaflet had said nothing about where she was supposed to put the rest of it. The leaflet designer obviously assumed (naively, Hilary thought, for how often is a pregnancy test uncomplicated by who is or is not meant to know, and so
not
done on the quiet) that a person would be in the loo. But she hadn’t
been able to use their bathroom because Ivan might have staggered in for his early morning pee, and if she had preempted that by locking the door she would have made him suspicious. Cursing quietly, still doubled over and with her pelvic floor held as tight as a fist, Hilary gathered her dress up in a wad in front of her, waddled on splayed feet to the back door, stretched up and unlocked it (a feat in itself), made it outside and finished her pee in the herb garden, sprinkling the chives. She stretched up to her full height with a sigh of relief and surveyed the morning with defiant dignity. Although she had no belief in an afterlife beyond a faintly Buddhist question mark in her mind about continuity, she looked up at the sky and hoped that her father had not been watching. Now that he was dead she had, in an effort to think kindly of him, grown fond of picturing him looking down on her from a peculiarly Yorkshire Heaven, a sunny place a bit like Castle Howard on a nice afternoon with fresh tea and proper cakes and spotless toilets.

Hilary returned to the kitchen in time to hear the sound of the door into the dining room being opened and closed. So she’d got the main part of the business done just in time, although Mrs Takahashi would hardly be likely to wander into the kitchen. She would be tidying her boring little tourist’s uniform of polo shirt and little denim skirt. Next she would be taking up her position at the small table overlooking the bird bath where no birds ever came, staring at the stainless steel cruet and the artificial primulas in the cut-glass vase, waiting for the breakfast that she would not eat. The woman was getting on Hilary’s nerves. Hastily, she carried out the rest of the instructions involving the dropper and the test tube, and placed the test tube in its little stand on the high shelf with the jamjars and
Tupperware. Then she wiped her hands, filled and switched on the kettle, lit the gas and reached for the frying pan.

A quarter of an hour later she sank back into her chair at the kitchen table, grateful that she’d made it to the dining room and back without throwing up, and irritated beyond endurance at having to make the effort again. For the fifth morning in a row she had swallowed hard before cooking and serving Mrs Takahashi her bacon, sausage, tomato and egg, and unless today was going to be different most of it would come back on the plate, just pushed around a bit. Hilary had wondered momentarily whether to ask, on the second day, if there were some other thing that Mrs Takahashi would prefer for breakfast, but she had managed to stop herself. It was not, as she justified first to herself and later to Ivan, as if she was running the Ritz. Besides, the B&B was only a sideline. She and Ivan had their own proper jobs at Ivan’s father’s clinic, the Sulis, and it was only right that they put that first. They owed it to Stephen and he relied on them.

But the justification for Hilary’s breakfasts, once rehearsed and ready, had not been called for. Mrs Takahashi had not complained and it was not because she could not speak English. She could when she wanted to. It was rather that she seemed, most of the time, not to want to. Where breakfast was concerned she certainly was not, scrawny little thing, driven by anything so basic as appetite. With mounting annoyance Hilary had continued to dish up the breakfast that she might have saved herself the cost of buying and continued to do without the lie-in she also could have done with. It had not occurred to her to ask Ivan for help with either.

On Tuesday, when the Traditional Bath Breakfast Platter had again come back rearranged but uneaten, Hilary had washed the egg yolk off the sausage and saved it, warming it up on the Wednesday, when it had come back still un-tasted but cut in two. The tomato was on its third day now. Hilary lit another cigarette with the satisfied thought that what Mrs Takahashi didn’t know was that the parsley sprig on her plate this morning had also garnished Tuesday’s, Wednesday’s and Thursday’s. It was a nice touch, parsley on a breakfast plate, and it never lasted less than a week if it was rinsed off after each trip to the dining room and kept in the fridge. She swallowed, flicked her ash into the puddle of lard in the still-warm frying pan on the table and looked at her watch.