The Love Song of Miss Queenie Hennessy (11 page)

The next time you mentioned David, you told me he was hoping to go to Cambridge after the summer. ‘He wants to do the classics.’

‘Why didn’t you say that before?’

‘He doesn’t like me to talk about it.’

‘But I was at Oxford. St Hilda’s. I read classics too.’

‘Gosh,’ you said. ‘Golly.’

‘Is that all you can say?’ I smiled to show you there was no spike in the comment, I was only being friendly.

‘What do you want me to say?’

‘I don’t know. They’re such funny words. It’s like “Gor blimey”. Or “Blow me down”. I thought no one said things like that.’

‘Perhaps I say them when I am nervous.’

‘Do I make you nervous?’

‘A bit.’

You blushed, and I wished I could take your hand but of course I couldn’t. I could only sit there with my handbag. Instead I asked if David might like to borrow one of my university textbooks; I’d kept a few on my travels. Those books were incredibly precious to me, but I didn’t admit that. The truth is, I was trying to find ways of connecting with you, and offering my books to your son was all I could think of.

‘Do you think David would be interested?’ I asked.

Your reply, when it came, astonished me. ‘I think that dress looks nice on you.’ I assumed I had misheard. I glanced up and bumped straight into your eyes. I felt my body shower with pleasure.

‘It’s a brown suit,’ I said.

‘Well, it’s still nice.’

In my bedsit I had a midnight-blue ballroom dress sewn at the bodice with sequin clusters. I had a pair of black velvet dance shoes. But what did you admire? A plain wool suit the colour of a nut.

‘Gor blimey,’ I said.

By June, it was done. There was no going back for me. I watched you
carefully fixing the button on your driving gloves, or chatting with one of the landlords, gentle laugh lines at the corners of your eyes; and me, I wanted to halloo, I wanted to shout. I could barely contain myself. Sometimes I had to give a funny cough or worse – it came out as a snort. Anything rather than tell you my true feelings. It wasn’t even because what we said was funny. To an outsider, it might have seemed rather ordinary. But once in a while simply being with a person is enough and so anything he says or does can set you off. I loved your voice, your walk, your marriage, your hands, your zigzag socks, the sensible knot in your scarf, your white bread sandwiches, for God’s sake, everything about you. It was the giddying first stage when everything about the person is so new and full of wonder that you have to keep stopping, to watch, to listen, to take him in, and there is nothing else. The rest of the world turns to grey and is obliterated. On a brewery day, we sometimes shared a table in the canteen or you dropped by my office to discuss the next route, but there were always other people close by on those occasions. It was when we were alone in your car that you were mine.

After all I’d been through, I felt human again. I woke in the mornings and the day wasn’t something to hide from. I’d sit on the bus, getting nearer and nearer to the brewery, with my heart beating wild in my chest, and that is a gift: it is being alive. I knew you’d never leave Maureen. You were too decent for that. Another reason, of course, to love you.

I began to write poems. Love poems. How else could I express myself? I kept them in the zipped-up compartment of my handbag. I’d reach inside, touch the corners of the pages with my fingertips, and I’d wonder, Will I do it today? Will I tell Harold Fry how I feel? Instead,
I’d offer you a boiled sweet.

So when I turned my head away in the passenger seat and said nothing, it wasn’t because I was sleeping, Harold. I was picturing you and me. I imagined what it would be like to exist permanently at your side. Or I’d gaze out of the window and look places over, just for fun, to see if we might live in one of them. A nice pink detached house with a bit of lawn for you to mow, handy for shops and the laundrette. Or a cottage by the beach, more remote, but with sea views. Inside my head I put us on dining chairs at a small round table. I put us on an upholstered sofa. And yes, I even put us in a bed. I watched your hands on the steering wheel – and I am sorry to say this but I promised at the beginning you would get the truth – and I imagined those hands on my hands. On my breasts. Between my thighs.

When you are imagining a man naked beside you and actually he is wearing fawn casuals and driving gloves and is married to another woman, you have to do things to throw him off the scent. Once I said I could sing backwards and you looked astounded and said, Can you really? I couldn’t, of course I couldn’t, what did you take me for? I’d been a classics student. It was my father who could sing backwards. He did it as he planed a piece of wood or rubbed a plank with linseed oil. Nevertheless I went home after you asked that question and I taught myself ‘God Save the Queen’.

(The more traditional version.)

Backwards.

What else had I to do?

‘Good Lord,’ you laughed when I got to the end of it. It was the way my father used to laugh when I was a child, full of wonder that I knew
things and he didn’t.

Now, I could have said to you, Let me tell you about Socrates. Or I might have asked, What are your views on Bertrand Russell? But we had got ourselves to a place, you and I, that was both unreal and supremely ordinary. We were a tall, married man who was kind and a short, single woman who loved him. It was better to eat sweets and sing backwards than risk unbalancing the small thing that we had. And after a while it became our routine, it became our language, in the way that some people like talking about the weather or driving routes instead of saying the bigger things. There was a boundary.

‘I don’t have many,’ you said to me another time. It must have been early summer, because we were sharing lunch by the side of the road. I was in my suit. You were head to toe in fawn. We looked like two winter shrubs off for a picnic.

‘Many what?’ I smiled. ‘Whatever are you talking about, Harold?’

‘Friends,’ you said. ‘Friends.’ You picked the shell from a hard-boiled quail’s egg and dipped the egg in celery salt. I’d supplied both items, as well as the spread of carved ham, chutney, grapes, tomatoes, napkins and paper plates. ‘I have Maureen. And David. But no one else.’ You mentioned your mother. How she’d left just before your thirteenth birthday. You said something about your father too. Drink, it was. I assumed that was the reason you were now teetotal, and I felt a rush of tenderness. It was the most you’d ever confessed about yourself. Your eyes wore a pained expression, as if you’d made a mistake and had no idea what to do next.

It was like the day my father told me that things had not always been good with my mother. You’d let your guard slip, almost by
accident, just as my father had, and I wanted to put that right for you.

‘You have me,’ I said. ‘I’m your friend, Harold.’ It was important to say those words. I could hear the beat of my blood.

You went back to picking at another egg. You said to your fingers, ‘By the way, you know, that dress-thing looks nice on you.’

I realized then it was your way of saying thank you.

Everything had made a place for itself, Harold. You seemed happy. Your job was safe. And I was happy too. I’d got over the loss of my baby. I’d given up the room in the B&B and had rented a ground-floor flat on the edge of Kingsbridge with views towards the estuary. There was no garden, but I was not interested in those days. I found a place to go ballroom dancing on Thursday nights, and sometimes I danced with a stranger, sometimes I didn’t. I imagined lifting my hands to your shoulders and taking a waltz.

So long as I could see you every weekday, I was happy to love you from the sidelines.

We would grow old … we would grow old. You would wear the bottoms of your trousers rolled. I would keep the truth untold.

And then I met your son.

Yes, yes, yes

A
BAD NIGHT
. The wind charges at the streets and the sea. It rattles at the window and roars through the tree outside. I see David. All night he is shouting at me. He shakes the framed print, and as the blue birds fly out he snaps off their wings. He asks for all the items he ever stole from me, only he doesn’t ask, he screams. I open my mouth, but no sound comes. There is nothing. The words cannot rise beyond my throat.

A tenner! he shouts.

Yes, I grunt.

Another one!

Yes.

A bottle of gin!

Yes.

Another!

Yes, I honk.

Blanket! Beer! Biscuits!

Here. Here.

Your egg whisk!

My egg whisk? Why, David? Why do you need my egg whisk?

I want it! I want your egg whisk!

My throat feels carved with a knife. YES, DAVID. YES, DAVID. YES, YES, YES.

This morning I didn’t make it to the dayroom. During the morning
rituals, the nurse said she’d heard a volunteer was coming with musical instruments. ‘Sometimes people think they can’t play music but they can, you know. It’s always a good day when the music volunteer comes.’ I requested to stay in my room. Later I heard the other patients playing bells and drums, but it was like me being in one land and them being in another. After thirteen days of writing, my hand felt skewered. In the dining room I couldn’t pick up my fork to eat. My head throbbed. Twice I was sick. I could not eat. I could not even take my nutritional drink.

Dr Shah examined my neck, mouth and eye. ‘There is some swelling in the parotid gland.’

‘A little,’ said Sister Philomena.

‘And what’s happened to her hand?’

I tried to pull it away, but I wasn’t fast enough. Dr Shah caught my right hand and turned it for a better look. He saw the blister between my thumb and forefinger where I’ve been holding the pencil. My thumb was hot and inflamed. The palm was pulsing. ‘That looks infected. What’s she been doing?’

Dr Shah is a good man, but I wish he would talk as if I can hear.

Sister Philomena folded her arms. She smiled at the pages scattered all over the floor. ‘Queenie has been keeping busy. Haven’t you, Queenie?’

‘You need to take better care of yourself,’ said Dr Shah. And he placed my hand very carefully on my lap, as if it were something precious to him, so that I felt wrong for criticizing him in my mind only moments before.

Later the duty nurse came to dress the wound. She punctured the
blister and drained it of pus. She dabbed on antibiotic gel and wrapped my hand with a gauze dressing. When she was gone, Sister Lucy sat beside me.

‘Why don’t I paint your nails?’ she said. She concentrated so hard, she breathed through her nose. The room seemed to lift and fall as she sat working.

My nails are now the colour of the dawn sky over the sea at Embleton Bay, when the day is so new it is almost white.

The nun and the peach

‘Y
OU HAVE
been overdoing it, dear heart.’

When Sister Mary Inconnue entered my room this morning, she was bearing her typewriter in its leather bag high above her cornette, like a tray. ‘Look,’ she said. ‘Look what I have for you on this fine Tuesday.’ (It was raining.) She lowered the bag. She showed me a plate with one soft, amber peach.

I shook my head to remind her I can’t eat. If I am honest, I felt angry. As if she and the letter had become one and the same thing. I showed her my bandaged right hand.

She said, ‘Well, what do you expect? You push yourself too hard. You are always writing. On Sunday you hardly stopped. You wrote about Harold and the drives all day.’

But this letter was YOUR IDEA
. My pencil stabbed the page.

‘I didn’t tell you to do it the whole time. Waiting is about being still. You can’t keep busy every minute, otherwise you’re not waiting. You’re just throwing things around to distract yourself.’

Sister Mary Inconnue set her typewriter bag on the foot of my bed and drew up the chair. ‘It’s time to concentrate your energy on other things. Like this lovely peach.’

And how exactly was a peach going to help me or Harold Fry? I didn’t write that for her. I just thumped the bed.

I shouldn’t even think these things, because Sister Mary Inconnue swoops in with an answer as if she’s just stepped inside my head and heard me. ‘It won’t make any difference whatsoever,’ she said. ‘But it
will make you less anxious. The peach is here. It’s in the present. Whether you can wait for Harold Fry is not something you will influence by working hard or getting upset. We behave these days as if we can have everything the moment we think of it. But we can’t. Sometimes we just have to sit and wait. So take the peach. Don’t be so cross. Go on.’

She put it in my hands. Look at the skin, she told me. Look at the colour. The shape. What a beauty. Touch it. The room was very still. Just a peach.

I stroked the velvety red blush of its skin. I felt the give of its flesh as I pressed it with my fingertips. I traced the well-defined crease. The dimple at its centre where once the fruit was attached to a stem, a tree, and grew there. This may sound strange, but I forgot briefly that you could eat a peach as well as touch it. Sister Mary Inconnue lifted the fruit to my nose, and the smell was so honey-sweet my nostrils began to zing.

‘Let’s cut it open now,’ she said. She took up her knife.

I watched everything. The glint of light on the blade, the nick in the flesh as the knife pierced it, the sudden overspill of sticky amber juice down her fingers and then on to the plate. After she had eased the knife once round, she put it down and held the peach between her two hands in order to prise it open. She twisted the top half away from the lower and pulled her hands apart so that the peach emerged in two glistening halves, one bearing the stone like a wet nut, the other showing a soft naked bed with pulpy ruby strings. My mouth began to flood.

Sister Mary Inconnue cut the flesh into quarters, then into smaller pieces. She mopped her fingers before offering me the plate.

‘Have a try,’ she said.

I shook my head. I pointed to my throat.
I’ll choke
.

‘You can spit it out if it’s too much.’