When I Was Otherwise (35 page)

Marsha's face looked old and very drawn in a way that it hadn't looked earlier, when she had been filled with fiery anger. One of her legs had started trembling spasmodically; her shoe beat an involuntary tattoo against the polished tiles. Yet her voice remained steady, even if it sounded odd. Not merely toneless. In some way odd.

“But you don't know what you're saying, Daisy. You only met him once. Or maybe twice. You scarcely knew him.”

“No, dear. Correction. You were the one who scarcely knew him. He and I had quite a little love affair. He said I was the most exciting woman he had ever met. He said that he'd do
anything
for me. Anything! I told him in that case just to take his punishment like a man—and run off home to you!”

Outside, in the crescent, a horn hooted—there was a tremendous squealing of brakes—a dog barked; none of them was aware of it; not even Dan, who simply stood there motionless, gazing at the floor.

“He was a nice lad,” said Daisy; “he had depths—which you, I'm sure, had never seen! But just the same what use would he have been to me? No,
I
didn't want him. Not in the least. Yet it was good to know I could have had him. That all I had to do was raise my little finger!”

She chuckled.

“Oh, I wasn't quite as beautiful as you; I admit that. But there was something else I wasn't, either—and that was a poor fish, a poor sad little fish swimming all unloved around her poor sad little bowl. You'd only been married such a short time too; yet you obviously couldn't hold him—not for all your vaunted loveliness! Me, I just had a funny little mug.” She pulled a face at them, to illustrate. “And that's why, now, you want to take your revenge. Turn me out. Lock me away. Bedlam.”

Her tone had turned to bitterness again. Memory of the present had come back to strike out triumphs of the past.

“And do you know what William Congreve said?”

They either already knew what William Congreve said, or else at that moment were in no tearing hurry to find out. But Daisy enlightened them anyway.

“He was another man who knew what he was on about. Plainly. You naturally won't have heard of him! What William Congreve said was…”

She paused. They respected her pause. But it lasted so long that Dan had even raised his eyes to look at her in the second or so before it ended.

“
Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned
!”

She delivered this truth, which had gradually shaped itself out of her anguish, delivered it like the message of inspiration it undoubtedly was. And then she turned—always knowing the best line on which to make her exit—she turned, swiftly and magnificently, to sweep back up the stairs. Yet even as she did so the magnificence acquired a quality of dizziness. She meant to thrust out her hands to slow down her accelerating world; her newly accelerating world. But where
were
her hands? Her legs buckled under her and she became entangled with her walking stick and she lost consciousness; and she fell.

Part Six

47

“I don't want to die,” he'd said.

“I know, dear. I know.”

She took his hand and held it tightly and for sometime they just sat in silence.

“Your work!” she told him. “You've got to lose yourself in your work. It's the only thing that matters. It's what you'll leave behind you, to say that you were here.”

“My work,” he repeated, bitterly.

“Yes!”

“No good. The poetry's all dried up.”

“What poppycock! From now on it'll be better than ever.”

“There's not a single thing I want to write about.”

“Write about Lourdes, of course.”

They'd only just come back.

“Oh, what's the use?” He pulled his hand away in despair and clenched his fists wildly, struggling to express himself. “Nobody cares,” he cried. “We're always so alone.”

He looked—really he did look for just a minute—as though the devil might have entered into him.

Yet then the feverish quality departed; the desperation and the drama; mere despondency remained.

“So alone,” he repeated.

Well, that was probably quite true. But it wasn't apropos, she thought, and it was better not to speak of it. Things somehow grew more real as soon as you put them into words.

Or some things. Her belief in miracles—her belief in the possibility of delayed reaction, in the possibility that just because
so far
the symptoms hadn't magically cleared up—all this had paradoxically grown less real when she had attempted to express it. Paradoxically, since here she had been dealing, obviously, with articles of faith.

She concentrated on the poetry. “It's the first line that's always the difficulty, isn't it?”

And she took a sheet of paper from a pile she'd set beside his bed and sucked with much determination on her pencil.

Later she went out and along with the groceries bought him more books, trying to encourage him to read and hoping that stimulation might arrive through entertainment. (Or at least—one was a dictionary of quotations; did that quite qualify as entertainment?) She also bought him more gramophone records. He liked Carroll Gibbons and Jack Payne. She would have preferred something classical—an oratorio perhaps—but she sat near him and kept rewinding the machine as zealously as if it had been Handel or Purcell or Gluck to whom they listened.

These things could be expensive. She was broke; she never quite knew where she was going to find the money. Somehow she always did. (But she categorically refused to go to his mother to ask for help.) For the time being she had given up her physiotherapy, both in Thayer Street and in the Harrow Road.

The following day she said to him: “You were wrong, dear. You aren't alone.
I
shall be here. Always. Every moment. I do care. We all care. We none of us want you to die. And the miracle could still happen.”

Well, that was true enough too, all of it, so far as it went. The world was founded on half-truths; though it frequently ran terrified from whole ones.

But of course he did die. And she didn't know if he had ever quite believed in her attestations of concern—even while delivered to the beat of Jack Payne. (During the final half hour, however, it had been entirely true: empathetically, she had fought for every last gasp almost as strenuously as he had; her own heartbeat had felt wholly attuned to his—their futures had been one.) Later on, though, she'd remembered only her impatience; and she'd felt sad and worthless and ashamed.

“What will you do after I'm dead?” he had once asked.

“Carry on as I did before,” she'd almost answered. But, thank goodness, her usual innate tact had stopped her. “Oh, I don't know. Somehow I suppose I'll manage.”

“I only wish I had been able to provide for you.”

She merely smiled; then pursed her lips and shook her head.

“You've been a good wife, Daisy. You've been the best thing that ever happened to me. If anyone could have made anything out of me,” he said, “that person would surely have been you.”

“You silly ass.” She busied herself, rather unnecessarily, with tucking in his blanket again—the blanket which Dan and Erica had given them.

“I hope that things go well for you.”

“Oh, perhaps I'll achieve something,” said Daisy. “Of some sort. Despite myself!” She chuckled. “And if you can achieve something
despite
yourself that's quite a feather in your cap Lord dild you!”

“Yes. It is. I really hope you will,” he repeated. “
Dild
?”

“Shame upon you! Don't you know your
Hamlet
? ‘Well, God dild you! They say the owl was a baker's daughter. Lord, we know what we are but know not what we may be. God be at your table!'”

“Yes, and at yours, Daisy. May he be forever at your table! Even when you're dying.”

“Thank you, dear. I trust he will. I certainly sent out an invitation! But I forgot to put RSVP, so you can never be quite sure.”

“Oh, yes,” he said, “I think you can.”

That was the Saturday before he died. He seemed to have discovered a certain strength during those latter days.

48

About one hour later Dr Ballad was at the door. By then Dan and Marsha had got Daisy into bed—she was only a small thing and even as a dead weight she was finally manageable for the two of them, although Dan was breathing very heavily, more so than Marsha, and seemed to be looking to her for guidance as to every move. She didn't mind that. When Daisy was arranged neatly on her bed—and the counterpane too pulled neatly across, right beneath her chin (“Tomorrow, Dan, I'll put her in pyjamas and tuck her cosily between the sheets!”)—Marsha led her brother down to the dining room and sliced off the tops of his eggs for him, which mercifully hadn't grown hard (she noted, with much gratitude, that had they eaten them as soon as she had set them on the table the whites would surely have been watery; none of them enjoyed a watery egg). She cut his bread and butter into strips so that he could dip them in the yolk. “Soldiers,” she said, and smiled at him. “I'll go and warm some milk and put a lot of sugar in it. I think you've had a shock.”

And, of course, they'd both had a shock, a dreadful shock. But she was stronger; she was younger; she could handle it. (All right, she
had
misjudged the timing of the eggs. Yet even that had turned out for the best.)

Daisy, too, must have received a shock. Poor thing. Even though she'd brought it on herself! Obviously. One only hoped that it would prove a valuable lesson to her. Both valuable and lasting.

When she returned with the milk Dan hadn't started on his meal; he was just sitting at the table staring across at the wallpaper. She didn't scold him. She dipped in the first of his bread-and-butter fingers and held it out to him and he obediently opened his mouth like a young bird.

“I wonder who first thought of calling them soldiers,” she said as she watched him chew and swallow. “And why.” She pursed her lips a second. “I know that Daisy regards me as unintelligent, yet I'm not so sure she's right. I do wonder about things—I always have: things, maybe, which she just takes for granted but doesn't really know the answer to.”

“Is the doctor coming?” asked Dan. He had asked her several times already.

“Now don't you worry your head about the doctor, darling. You just drink your hot milk and eat up those nice eggs. There's a jam Swiss roll for afters. You know I phoned the doctor as soon as it happened, don't you?—although I'm not really sure I need have done so, now.”

“Why, is she dead?” He stopped his chewing and looked at her in trepidation.

“Good heavens, no, darling, she's not dead.” She handed him another strip of bread and he accepted it mechanically; she saw it now not as a finger or a soldier but as a fat white juicy worm dripping with yellow goodness.

“Because I know I saw her breathing,” he said.

“Of course you saw her breathing. Of course you did. I only meant—one does so hate to trouble people without proper cause. Doctors are such busy folk as well. It would be selfish if one brought them out for nothing.”

“I think I heard her moan a bit, too. I'm fairly sure I heard her moan.”

Marsha continued feeding him. “Well, yes, I'm sure you did. That would only be natural.”

“She may have broken bones,” he persisted. “In fact, she probably has. She looked quite
funny
, didn't she? All sort of twisted up—before you straightened her and pushed her into place?”

“Dan, dear, I can see the food in your mouth! It isn't very nice. You must remember that broken bones do knit. Everything heals with time. Well…nearly everything.”

Marsha scraped around the bottom of his first egg; got out every scrap of white and then with satisfaction popped the spoon into his mouth. She hated wastefulness. Even the skin which had formed on the top of his milk she drew off with the same spoon and slipped carefully on to the congealing yolk of his second egg. The two other eggs, her own and Daisy's, she would boil up again tomorrow; she would use them either in sandwiches or in a curry or a salad.

“Besides, Dan. What makes you speak of broken bones?” She shook her head at him with unchallengeable authority and gave him a broad and reassuring smile. “Haven't you heard Daisy tell us—time and again—that people only need to know the proper way to fall? If there's one thing you can safely leave to Daisy it's any problem concerning the correct way of relaxing while you're having an accident. Or is it the correct way of arranging your limbs? I seem to have forgotten but anyhow the point is…” She hardly needed to say what the point was. “Isn't that so, my precious?”

He nodded then, his own thoughtful nods staying in harmony with hers. He seemed much comforted but also just a little uncertain. And despite the care she'd taken when she put the cup to his lips and brought it down each time, a particle of creamy skin dangled from one corner of his mouth. She ministered first to his physical requirements and then to his mental.

“You see, Dan, all you need from now on is complete trust in my judgment. Marsha knows best. Marsha knows what's best for all three of us. She'll look after you; she'll take care of things. Because you haven't forgotten, have you, what happened here that morning you were out and there was a spider in the bath and
she
, silly thing”—Marsha jerked her head towards the ceiling—“was absolutely terrified? Well, who was the one who coped? Who was the one who brought tranquillity back into this house? And do you know how I did it? I put myself into that poor little spider's head. I said to myself: now what is the best way to set about this, not only from Daisy's point of view and from Marsha's point of view, but from my own point of view as well (said the spider!—oh, what a clever old spider I am, I am! What a clever old spider I am).”