The Things We Never Said (4 page)

CHAPTER SIX

It’s breakfast time. Hetty, who is Maggie’s favourite nurse because she smells of Helena Rubenstein’s Apple Blossom and reminds Maggie of her mother, is standing in the middle of the ward with a clipboard. She’s done this before, but Maggie can’t remember why.

‘Okay, ladies,’ Hetty says. ‘Listen for your name, and remember, no breakfast if you’re down for treatment.’

Thankfully, Maggie’s name is not on the list, although Pauline’s is. Pauline argued last time, said she didn’t need it, but they said she was ‘agitated’ and they called her again the next day, and the next, and the next. When she stopped arguing, it went down to once a week.

‘Treatment’s at nine,’ Hetty is saying, ‘so make sure you’ve all been to the lav. I’ll be back in two shakes and we can all go down together.’

She makes it sound as though it’s something nice they’ll all be doing, like an outing. Maggie stays curled up shrimp-like under the covers so that no one will see she’s been crying. Pauline warned her. According to Pauline, you definitely get put down for treatment if they catch you crying.

Maggie has good days and bad days. This is a bad day. Sometimes, she feels as if she’s full of poison, as if there’s a huge fat boil inside her, ready to burst. Today, it’s more of a hollow ache, a deep black sore yawning open somewhere between her heart and her stomach. She stays curled up with her hands around her knees until the feeling fades a little and she can bear to get up. She forces herself to eat her breakfast of watery porridge and a slice of cold toast and marge, and she tries as hard as she can to smile at Sister, and at Hetty and the other nurses.

After breakfast, she helps count the knives back into their box. If she’s volunteering for jobs, they’ll think she’s doing well. When the knives are all accounted for and safely locked away until lunch, she heads back to the ward, silently praying that the others will have already gone down to the treatment room. But as soon as she goes through the double doors, she sees that they’re still there, half a dozen women shuffling around, taking a long time to organise themselves. They’re holding back, Maggie realises, desperate to put off the moment of bone-shaking agony.

‘Come on, Dolly.’ Hetty goes over to one of the beds where the humped shape under the blanket is visibly trembling. ‘You’re for treatment today, sweetheart,’ she says gently. ‘Keep your nightgown and dressing gown on, and take your teeth out. We need to be going down now.’

‘Maggie,’ Hetty calls, spotting her as she herds her charges, pale with terror, towards electrocution. ‘Be a dear and pop along to the linen room for me, would you? I’m late getting these ladies downstairs.’

‘Okay,’ Maggie replies, trying to look keen and helpful.

‘It’s down the corridor, past the bathrooms, turn left and it’s just opposite the craft room. There’s a bundle of pillowslips I need bringing through. They’ll be labelled “C” ward so you can’t go wrong.’

Maggie walks back along the corridor, but the whole wing is so much bigger than she realised. She passes the long, narrow bathroom where there are five baths in a row and no screen or curtain in between, but the only other corridor goes to the right, so she turns into it and passes a row of locked doors that she thinks are to the single rooms, then there’s another small kitchen and dining room, and one more unlabelled door. She goes back the way she came and walks further along; more bathrooms. She turns off by the next one and she can see the day room, thank goodness. But when she looks in as she passes, it’s not the
right
day room. There’s a recreation room and another bare door, which is locked. She sees more unlabelled doors, so she tries to push them open but they’re all locked, and she just can’t find the linen room, or even the craft room, and she turns round to try and go back but everything suddenly looks too big and vivid and her breathing comes too fast; the black hole in her stomach is widening and aching and trying to fold her in two. She leans against the wall for support, but then sinks to the floor and curls up in a ball until one of the nurses comes along with the tea wagon, hauls her to her feet and leads her back to the ward, where she crawls back into bed and tries to keep the tears in.

*

Today, Maggie’s name is on the list. Hetty leads her and the other women along the corridor and down three flights of concrete stairs to the treatment room. ‘Don’t look so worried,’ Hetty says. ‘You’ll forget all about it afterwards. You don’t remember nothing about having it before, do you?’

‘Well, no, but . . .’ Maggie doesn’t remember it specifically, but little snatches of memory keep flaring up, and they’re enough to make her legs tremble.

As she follows Hetty along the corridor, two nurses come out of what Maggie later learns is the recovery room, each holding the arm of what looks like a slow-moving old woman. As they pass, Maggie sees that the woman is young, with a lot of ragged, straw-coloured hair. Her pretty dressing gown, which is midnight blue with a scattering of pink rosebuds around the neck and hem, is undone and the belt is trailing on the floor behind. On each of her temples is a livid red mark the size of a half-crown and there are more marks at the corners of her mouth. A line of saliva trickles down her chin. She looks in Maggie’s direction, but her eyes are dead.

‘Here we are then, ladies,’ Hetty points to a long bench outside the closed doors of the treatment room. Just as Maggie sits, there is a loud shriek and a snort from behind the double doors, which then swing open as the previous patient is wheeled out, still convulsing, and taken into the recovery room. A minute or two later, the empty bed is wheeled back into the treatment room. Maggie sits rigid. There is a moment of stillness, a dense, frozen silence. Then the doors swing open again and a red-faced nurse with broad hips and a huge, shelf-like bust comes back out into the corridor. ‘Can we have Margaret next please?’ She looks along the row of women. ‘Margaret?’

For a moment, Maggie allows herself to not respond. Instead, she marvels at the nurse’s tiny shoes, and wonders how such dainty feet can possibly support that huge frame.

‘Margaret Harrison.’ The nurse is looking at her now. ‘Come
along
, dear.’

There is a high bed in the middle of the room, and a black box with dials and knobs; there are wires, and straps and buckles. The doctor, an Indian man whom she hasn’t seen before, smiles at her as she tries to get comfy, but he doesn’t speak. ‘Any false teeth or braces?’ the nurse says, putting her finger in Maggie’s mouth to look at her teeth as though she were a horse. ‘Any watches or hairpins?’ Maggie shakes her head. The big nurse leans over and rubs a greasy substance into her temples. The woman smells of chip fat and cigarettes. She pushes a black rubber gag into Maggie’s mouth and then stands behind her, holding her head with both hands.

Maggie wants to ask them to stop, to wait a second and let her prepare herself, but the rubber gag chokes her words. She tries to lift her hand to attract their attention, but someone is holding it down. The doctor puts two metal plates to her temples and she wills him to look at her, screams at him with her eyes so he can see that she needs to talk to him. Then her brain explodes. There’s a thunderbolt of pain; lightning strikes her eyes; her bones melt and are crushed in an instant; her legs jerk and fizz and her arms flail and she can hear a gurgling in the back of her throat. She tries to free herself but it’s as though she is in the grip of a giant vice. Then she feels herself falling, sinking fast until she is way down deep under the black water.

CHAPTER SEVEN

Frost sparkles on the steps of the crematorium. After the subdued lighting in the chapel, the brilliance of the sunlight glinting off the funeral cars is almost painful. Relatives and neighbours stand around in huddles, some stomping their feet and blowing into their hands, others smoking impatiently, keen to get back for the warming sherry they’ve been promised. Jonathan watches his mother stoop to read the cards on the floral tributes. She seems smaller than ever, her black dress and jacket accentuating her grass-like thinness and making her look so insubstantial he fears a sudden gust of wind might lift her over the rooftops like Dorothy in
The Wizard of Oz
. She’s more composed now, graciously accepting condolences as she moves among the mourners. This morning, as they waited for the cars, he’d tried to comfort her, and was surprised by how inept he felt. It had made him think; how long was it since they’d had any physical contact – other than the perfunctory kiss on the cheek? Fiona’s parents hugged him every time they met, and it always seemed so natural, but this morning when his own mother had leaned against him, it had felt strange and strained.

He looks at his watch. The funeral is making him twitchy now; he feels as though Gerald is watching him from beyond the grave, waiting for him to do something wrong or say something inappropriate.

‘Jonathan.’ His mother is coming towards him. ‘Darling, would you and Fiona mind going back to the house to get the place warmed up a bit? And perhaps get the kettles filled and make sure everything’s ready?’ She looks flustered as she hands him her keys. ‘Thank you, dear. You don’t mind, do you?’

‘Of course not,’ he says, trying not to look too relieved at the excuse to get away.

*

As they walk up the drive to his parents’ house, he starts to feel an unfamiliar lightness. For the first time, he can walk through that door without bracing himself against the weight of his father’s disapproval.

Fiona hangs up her coat. ‘How are you feeling?’

He considers this. His father is dead; that’s it. Too late now to make amends; too late for everything. ‘It’s bizarre,’ he says, ‘but I can’t say I feel anything really, except a mild sense of relief that I don’t have to try and impress him any more.’

‘That’s hardly surprising, is it? After the way things have been?’

‘But he was my own flesh and blood. I wish . . .’ He sighs. ‘Oh, I don’t know. Even if I can’t experience grief, I should at least feel some sense of loss, shouldn’t I?’

‘Don’t be so hard on yourself. Lots of people don’t get on with their parents; it’s nothing to be ashamed of.’

‘I suppose so,’ he feels a momentary chill, and quite suddenly, he has an overwhelming need to be held. He pulls Fiona towards him; her hair smells of winter and yet her body is so warm against his. He’s about to kiss her but she moves away.

‘Let’s get that fire on,’ she says. ‘It’s bloody freezing in here.’

She looks great, he thinks, as she bends over the temperamental gas fire. Her skin is glowing, and there’s a definite swell to her belly, even though no one else would probably notice. She looks ripe; bursting with life.

‘Come on fire, light!’ she says. ‘Good fire!’

‘You’re mad.’ He slides his hand across her buttocks. ‘But you’ve got a gorgeous bum.’

‘Jonathan!’ she laughs and smacks his hand away.

He lifts her hair and kisses the soft white skin at the back of her neck.

‘We shouldn’t be snogging at a funeral,’ she murmurs, kissing him anyway.

‘I know.’ He runs his hand up the back of her thigh, the smooth nylon hot against his cold skin. ‘How long do you think they’ll be?’ He whispers against her ear.

‘Oh, I don’t know. Fifteen, twenty minutes?’

‘Do you think we’ve got time?’

She pulls away and looks at him. ‘You’re not serious? Jonno, this is your dad’s funeral! We’re in his house.’

‘I know, but I really, really want you.’

She makes a low noise. ‘We can’t,’ she whispers, but her eyes are glittering.

‘Let’s go outside, then we won’t be in “his house”.’

‘Outside? But it’s freezing,’ she laughs. ‘Are you insane?’

He takes her hand and leads her to the back door. It does seem insane, but he can’t fight it. It’s not just desire, or even lust; it’s an intense need to be close to her, to be as one, feeling the skin and the warmth and the wet and the beating of their two hearts close, close, together.

‘Jonno, you really have lost it.’ But she follows him, grabbing their coats on the way.

Ten minutes later, faces flushed, they hang up their damp coats and stumble into the living room just as the first car pulls up outside. The chemical-smelling gas fire is glowing like orange honeycomb and they warm themselves briefly in front of it before leaping into action. By the time the guests spill into the room, chatting now and clearly relieved to be over the more sombre parts of the proceedings, Jonathan has filled the sherry glasses and Fiona is pouring tea into china cups. The odd bubble of laughter rises up from the clusters of guests as they relax into the civilised pleasures of the funeral tea.

As he hands round the sandwiches, the combined smells of egg mayonnaise, sherry, strong tea and spicy aftershave begin to make him feel queasy, so he goes into the kitchen for some water. He stands at the sink looking out onto the well-tended garden, the only thing his father had really cared about. They’ll never know now whether the baby would have made any difference; this is how it is. A picture flashes up in his mind: a late summer evening; he is very small, perhaps three or four; his father, in casual trousers, short-sleeved shirt and the ever-present tie, is bending over the rose bush, cutting a bloom almost tenderly. ‘Careful.’ He puts it into Jonathan’s outstretched hand. ‘Don’t crush it.’

The image pops like a bubble and disappears.

After a few minutes, he goes back into the sitting room. Fiona nudges past him with a knowing smile; shame pokes him in the stomach, then begins to bed in more deeply, causing a surge of self-disgust.

‘Fi, I’m sorry,’ he says. ‘I don’t know what came over me.’ This is true; even though he regrets what he’s just done, he’s still slightly stunned by the intensity of what he’d felt.

‘Jonno, we haven’t done anything terrible.’ She puts her arms around him. ‘I read somewhere that wanting to have sex is a common reaction to someone dying. It’s a normal response to grief, to death. Something about needing to feel more alive when we’re faced with the ultimate evidence of our mortality.’

That makes a certain sense, but it doesn’t really help, because deep down, he wonders if it was more some sort of twisted two-fingered salute to Gerald.

‘Look, it’s your mum that matters now,’ Fiona says. ‘And she’s coping; she has us both at her side and she’s grateful. You’re being a good son, so stop beating yourself up.’

A good son. As a child, he’d tried to be a good son, he really had. But that was before it dawned on him that his dad didn’t actually like him. ‘Do you realise,’ he says, ‘I’m now exactly the same age my father was when I was born?’

‘And?’

‘Doesn’t it bother you? The idea that I might be totally out of touch?’

‘Out of touch? In what way?’

‘Like my dad was; you know, making me wear ankles-wingers; getting my mum to cut my hair because he wouldn’t pay for a barber – I’ve told you this – then when I got beaten up for looking like something out of the fifties he told me not to be a crybaby.’

‘That’s nothing to do with age; it’s just insensitive parenting. And I still think your mum should have stuck up for you.’

He mimics his mother:
‘If they pick on you because your trousers are shorter than theirs, they’re not the sort of boys you want to be friends with.’
They both smile, glancing along the hall to make sure she’s not within earshot. ‘The point is, if I don’t get it right, if I misjudge it when the poor little sod wants to wear fluorescent purple pantaloons or whatever they’ll be wearing by that time . . . well, I just don’t want our child to go through that.’

‘Right, listen. For one thing, you may be older than me but we agreed it’s not too old, and for another, being older doesn’t automatically make it impossible to relate to your kids.’ She drops her voice again. ‘There’s no one in my antenatal group under thirty-five, and at least three of them are over forty. And most of the dads are older than the mums. You can’t keep comparing yourself to your father. He’s always been old, you said so yourself.’

He sighs, pulls her towards him and kisses the top of her head. ‘All I’m saying is, don’t let me become like him, will you?’

She tightens her arms around him. ‘Jonno, you’re not like him; you’re about as different as it’s possible for a father and son to be.’

*

After everyone’s gone, they clear away and wash the tea things. The day has taken it out of Fiona and she’s looking tired again, so Jonathan drives her home and then goes back to check on his mother. By the time he arrives, she’s changed into her nightclothes; the long pink nightie and dressing gown make her seem vulnerable somehow.

‘I think it all went off rather well, don’t you?’ She sits down surprisingly heavily for such a small woman. He notices the raised blue veins snaking over her feet. She nods towards the whisky bottle on the table by her chair and raises her own glass. ‘I thought it would be acceptable, under the circumstances. Pour yourself one and sit down, dear. It’s been a long day for all of us.’

He’s driving, so he piles ice into his glass and pours in a tiny amount of the peaty-smelling scotch. Gerald’s Old Holborn tobacco tin and silver lighter still lie on the bookshelf; his pipe, the mouthpiece dented with teeth marks, rests alongside. There’s something both poignant and innocent about these things, placed there by his father yet never to be touched by him again. He looks back at his mother.

‘I know,’ she says. ‘I’ve sent most of his clothes to the charity shop but I couldn’t quite bring myself to . . . well, not yet. I’ll get around to it, I expect.’

Jonathan is about to speak when she astonishes him by taking a packet of cigarettes and a lighter from her handbag. ‘Bad habit, I know,’ she mutters. ‘But there’s not much point in giving up now.’

‘Giving up? But you haven’t smoked for years!’

‘I have, actually. But I told your father I’d stopped. Once he took up a pipe, he didn’t like me smoking cigarettes, so I pretended I’d given up. Better to keep the peace.’

Jonathan sighs. ‘But why did you always have to keep the peace, Mum? I don’t just mean about the smoking. Why were you always so afraid of upsetting him?’

‘Don’t be tiresome, Jonathan,’ she snaps. But then she sighs, and when she speaks again her voice is softer. ‘I know your father could be rather ill-tempered sometimes but—’

‘Rather ill-tempered? He threw his dinner at you because you’d overcooked the cabbage, for Christ’s sake.’

‘Don’t blaspheme Jonathan, please.’

‘He put my new train set in the dustbin because I’d left it on the floor—’

‘That was to teach you to put your toys away.’

‘Mum, he
knew
the dustmen were coming that morning.’ There’s a pause, then he sees the memory adjust itself. What he doesn’t add is,
and so did you
.

She’s always defended Gerald. He remembers coming home from school one day, aged eight or maybe nine, to find his guinea pigs gone. He’d gone straight through into the garden only to find an empty space where the hutch should have been. Bewildered, Jonathan had run into the kitchen where his mother was cutting up kidneys on a wooden board. He’d stopped, eyes level with the blood-smeared knife in her hands. ‘Well?’ she’d said. ‘What do you want?’ He tried to speak but he couldn’t tear his eyes away from the kidneys, which bled in an almost human way, like a cut finger.

‘Jonathan, I’ve a pie to make; I can’t stand here all day waiting for you to—’

‘Salt and Pepper,’ he said. ‘Where are they?’

‘Ah.’ She put the knife down, then picked up a cloth and wiped the worktop before turning back to him. ‘Your father took them to the RSPCA this morning.’

‘But . . . why?’ Jonathan thought he could feel his heart beating in his ears.

‘Because you haven’t looked after them, have you?’ Her voice was sharp. ‘You promised to clean them out every Saturday, and when your father went out there this morning, well, he said it was disgusting, frankly. I’m sorry, Jonathan, but your father’s right. If you can’t be trusted to look after them, they should go and live with someone who can.’

He’d fought the tears for long enough to argue that he’d been going to clean them out today, and it was only two days late, but she told him not to answer back.

The room is quiet apart from the hissing of the gas fire and the clink of ice cubes. His mother stubs out her cigarette and tops up her drink. ‘We did a lot of things badly, Jonathan. We should have . . .’ She falters and a tear runs down her papery cheek.

‘Mum, I didn’t mean to upset you.’ He leans forward to put a hand on her arm. ‘I don’t blame you for the things he did, but I wish . . .’ He stops; he shouldn’t be getting into this, not now, but it’s the first time she’s even hinted at regret. Something a colleague said recently pops into his mind. They’d been talking about good and bad parenting, and the older man had said:
That’s what’s great about grandchildren – they’re your chance to put right the balls-ups you made with your own kids.
Maybe that was true. He watches his mum dabbing her eyes with an embroidered handkerchief; perhaps the baby will change everything.

‘I loved Gerald very much at first, you know,’ she says. ‘He was the most charming man I’d ever met, so gallant – a real gentleman.’ She reaches for another cigarette. ‘He treated me like a princess when we were courting. He had such presence.’ He knows what’ll come next – he could say it along with her. She needs something else to think about, something to take her mind off the past.

‘My parents thought the world of him. Mother said his voice was so commanding he could have ordered the sun to come out and it would have.’ She half-chuckles. ‘Mind you, even after we married, I often felt like I should still call him Mr Robson.’