You must have changed, just as I have changed. Where my skin once showed the faintest of lines, there are now ridges and indentations. Where my hair was thick and brown and shoulder-length, it is soft and white as the tufts of old man’s beard that fleck my sea garden in winter. My waist that was once plump and beskirted is a hollowing curve between the knobs of my hipbones. Maybe you don’t even wear fawn any more. Maybe you have moved on to blue.
I laid aside my notebook and tried to picture you in blue. You looked made of water. I had to dress you quickly back in fawn again. And then I remembered there was no postcard and I felt stupid for thinking all this.
Sister Lucy asked if I’d like to help with her British Isles jigsaw, but I only shrugged. Sister Catherine suggested a visit to the Well-being Garden. ‘It’s a nice day. A spell outside might do you good. You like plants and things, don’t you, Queenie?’ I shook my head.
When Sister Philomena came in with the trolley of nutritional milkshakes, I said no to those as well.
‘Listen here,’ said Finty. ‘I’ve been watching you, missy. You sit in that chair over there and you write away in your notebook. Then it comes to mealtimes and you hardly eat. Sometimes you don’t even show your face in the dining room. If you’re going to keep living, you have to come here and take the nutritional milkshakes with the rest of us.’
‘No,’ I groaned. ‘Please.’ I had them in hospital. They made me sick.
‘It seems like you’ve got a man walking the length of England. There are some of us here that haven’t even had a visitor. So the least you can do is not kick the bucket. Now, I know you think you look like a monster, but this is hardly a beauty pageant. Look at Barbara here. The Pearly King has a plastic arm, and I’m carrying the contents of my bowel in my handbag. Either you take the drinks like we do or you’ll end up on a drip feed. Which is it going be?’
‘Don’t push her,’ said Sister Catherine. ‘It’s different for everyone.’
‘Excuse me, sister, but I’m talking to Queenie Hennessy.’ Finty fixed me with a look that was like being pinned to the wall by two orange eyebrows.
I opened my mouth. I could sense them all watching, the patients, the nuns. I didn’t think for a moment they’d understand. ‘The drinks,’ I grunted.
‘Excellent,’ said Finty. ‘Come on, everyone. Gather up. We’ll get in a round.’
Sister Catherine helped me out of my chair by the window. It was only a small distance to the other patients, but I was so slow, it was like climbing a hill. She settled me in a reclining chair by the coffee table. I couldn’t lift my head. I couldn’t look at anyone. I just had to pretend I was very preoccupied by the swirly pattern of the dayroom carpet.
Sister Lucy offered a choice of flavours. Barbara and Finty chose strawberry. Mr Henderson asked for vanilla. The patient with the monster slippers pointed at butterscotch. The Pearly King went for chocolate. I put my hand up for vanilla.
‘It makes no difference anyway,’ said Finty. ‘They all taste like wet cardboard.’
Sister Lucy unscrewed the lids from the bottles and served the shakes in glasses with straws. They were all a colour halfway between beige and pink that has no name except possibly ‘blush taupe’.
We drank slowly. Half mine spilled out the side of my mouth. Nobody spoke or moved until the glasses were empty. I was the last to finish. Mr Henderson got up to hand out tissues.
‘Thank fuck that’s over,’ said Finty, rubbing at her mouth and her sweatshirt. ‘Let’s have a game of Scrabble.’
‘Are you laughing?’ asks Sister Mary Inconnue.
I am happy. I had a nice time in the dayroom. And also at tea.
She laughs. Her sandals swing, she is laughing so much. ‘Good,’ she says. ‘That’s good.’
She murmurs something and it sounds like a blessing until I hear the words ‘tuna fish’ and wonder whether she’s recounting her shopping list.
I will not give up hope.
I will wait for you, Harold Fry.
A different perspective
THIS MORNING I asked Sister Lucy if I could borrow a dictionary and a thesaurus. She fetched Pictionary and a throat lozenge.
‘Also a glass of water,’ she said helpfully.
There is a postcard from you with a picture of the Bluebell steam train. No message. You seem to have forgotten that bit.
‘Why doesn’t Harold Fry take a hint and spare us the agony?’ said Mr Henderson from his chair. He stared at his playing cards as if he suspected them of cheating.
‘Is your friend a keen walker?’ said Sister Catherine.
I doubt it, I thought. You and I walked only once. I tried to draw a picture in my notebook of you driving your Morris 1100. I don’t know if you remember, but art was never my strong point. When I hung out in the late seventies with the female artists in Soho, I used to do their shopping and compose their letters, but I could never draw. I’d sit for them while I read, and they’d paint me naked with my book. They were a delicious bunch but always forgetting the sensible things like food and daylight and only remembering the more intoxicating ones like love and gin. So when Sister Catherine laughed at my picture, it’s possible she mistook my drawing of you in a car for one of a man inside a giant rabbit. I didn’t mind her laughing, though. She was right. You looked funny.
But Mr Henderson hadn’t finished with the postcard. ‘If Harold Fry got on a train he could be here tonight. We could have this whole stupid business over and done with.’
‘That is not the point, you old bat,’ said Finty. ‘Any fool can sit on a train.’
‘Fool?’ he repeated. ‘You know who’s the fool here?’ Mr Henderson’s hands began to shake. They look stripped to the bone. The knuckles poked out and his sleeves hung loose as if Mr Henderson had no more substance than a coat hanger inside a dogtooth jacket. His mouth was so blue, the lips looked bruised. ‘Have you any idea how far it is from Kingsbridge to Berwick?’ Mr Henderson tried to get up, but the effort was too much. His knees buckled and he slumped to his seat again. ‘Have you any idea how many miles?’
‘Of course I do,’ said Finty. ‘I’m not stupid. It’s a fuck of a lot.’
‘There are over six hundred of them!’
I know, of course. I’ve travelled the distance by bus and train and bus again. Every new mile that passed between us was like shearing off another piece of me. Sister Lucy reddened. ‘Is it really that far?’ She removed several pieces from her jigsaw.
‘Six hundred miles, and the man isn’t even a walker!’
‘I couldn’t do it,’ said Sister Catherine, and another volunteer agreed that he couldn’t do it either.
‘I suppose it’s a question of faith,’ piped up Sister Lucy, only I knew she wasn’t sure. She barely gave voice to that last word. It came out with no middle, sounding more like fth.
Mr Henderson slammed his hands down on his playing cards. The cards sprang up in the air and scattered to the carpet. ‘It’s ridiculous! It’s not fair! It’s an insult! Has the man no idea what this place is? He’s making fools of us all!’ He shook so hard he began to cough.
‘Need a hand, old man?’ growled the Pearly King.
‘Ha ha!’ roared Finty.
‘You make me sick, the lot of you,’ shouted Mr Henderson, trying to stand and still not managing.
Sister Catherine rushed to help, but he kept pushing her away and hanging on to his walker and asking did she think he was a cripple, as she tried to clear him a safe path out of the dayroom. We could hear him all the way down the corridor, shouting, ‘Fool! Fool! Fool!’ and coughing and banging into the walls. Nothing the sisters said made any difference.
I looked at Finty and tried to smile. Her red lipstick bled from her puckered mouth. I thought of the wild poppies in my sea garden that seeded themselves between the stones. ‘I guess it is a long way,’ she murmured.
Nobody contradicted her. Nobody said anything. In the end Barbara asked if anyone would read Watership Down to her. She told us
her neighbour had started the book before Barbara came to the hospice, and she was keen to know what happened next. Sister Lucy said in a rush that of course she would; it didn’t matter if they skipped the beginning. Everyone seemed impatient to be busy.
Mr H is right, I wrote in my notebook later. It’s too far to walk. It’s too late.
Sister Mary Inconnue was experiencing a minor difficulty with her typewriter keys. ‘You listen too much to other people,’ she said.
I don’t, I told her. I was listening mainly to myself.
She took out a bottle of white spirit and cotton wool buds and began to clean her keys. The sharp smell took me straight back to the hospital. I could see the hard floors. The strip lighting. The crêpe-soled shoes, the masks, the hairnets, the green gowns. There were days when I longed to see a muddy boot. Over the last few years I’ve had four operations. Cut away any more of my throat and neck, and my head will fall off. And that is all I am going to say on the subject.
Sister Mary Inconnue sighed. ‘You could try to look at things from a different perspective.’
What perspective? I can’t wait for Harold. I am here to die.
Sister Mary Inconnue was still bent over her typewriter. I could see only the starched points of her headdress. It was like talking to a serviette.
She said, ‘Pardon me, but you are here to live until you die. There is a significant difference.’
I could have cried. Instead I wrote, I don’t know if you have noticed but Harold Fry still seems to be down in the southwest.
Sister Mary Inconnue went quiet a moment. ‘I do admit that’s a problem. But you love Harold Fry, and you believe you let him down. You must do this one last thing. You must confess the truth.’ She fed a fresh page through the paper guide and adjusted the platen knob to fix it in place. ‘There. All sorted. Now let’s get back to your letter.’
Making a friend of bindweed
WHEN I WAS fifteen my mother said to me, ‘There is no such thing as love at first sight. People get together because the time is right.’
My parents had met at a dance just before the outbreak of the war and were married within three weeks. I suspect the wedding was an act of kindness on my father’s part to save my mother from deportation, though he never said that to me. The only thing he let slip once was that life had been difficult for them at the beginning and so had other things. By ‘other things’ he meant sex. It was after the war, when he found work as a carpenter, that happiness came. ‘And you, Queenie.’ He had cried when he said that, and so I made them both a cup of tea.
It was hard to imagine my mother happy. She rarely laughed. English never came easily, perhaps because people were not kind to her during the war. She avoided friendships. Sometimes my father fetched the dictionary, but she said a housewife had no time for books and so I read the dictionary instead.
My mother’s view on love appalled me. It suggested love had more in common with the boiling of an egg than the discovery of another person from whom one couldn’t bear to live apart. I had started to explore Baudelaire by then as well as the Romantic poets and the Brontës and I liked to think that when I fell in love I would do it with style.
I liked to think I would do most things with more style than my mother. She cooked with offal. I became a vegetarian. Make-up? My mother had no idea about that. I bought liquid eyeliner, mascara and blusher. (‘Do I look nice?’ I asked my father once. ‘You look very purple,’ said my father. I took this as a compliment.) Since she was tall like my father, my mother had given up trying to find dresses and shoes to fit; instead she marched around in his trousers and boots. Appalled by that too, I hunted for fitted dresses at jumble sales – I loved a belt tight around my slight waist – and coloured dance shoes with button straps. It mortified me to be seen with my huge parents. I took to losing letters from the school about concerts or prizegivings. If my father ever tried to hold my hand on the road – he did frequently; my smallness made him anxious – I did everything I could to swing him off.
So when my mother told me that love was only about timing, I shrugged. I didn’t ask why she’d said it, because I was young then; I thought the world centred on me. But now I look back to that day and I see my mother sitting on the back step, with her chin in her hands, and her elbows on the canvas knees of the blue trousers that were not her own. At the end of our small overgrown garden I see my father’s profile at the dusty window of his workshop. I see the weeds that grow between my father and my mother, the grass that is the height of wheat, the nettles, the wild buddleia. I see the pain in her eyes, the solitude. And it occurs to me she was saying the words not for my benefit but because she couldn’t bear to keep silent. Now I understand what it was like for her, to be a stranger in a foreign country. I know how it is to live in exile from your past.
I wish I had not been so hard on my mother. I wish I had given her my time.
It is many years since she died, but I have come to understand her point about love too. When I first met you, I was ready. I had a space for you. It was because of my baby, you see, or rather the loss of it. The baby opened my heart to you.
The world is full of women who have children, and women who don’t, but there is also a silent band of women who almost had them. I am one of those. I was a mother. And then I wasn’t.
I never saw the baby. I was only sixteen weeks pregnant when I lost it, and I was discouraged from giving it a name. My loss was nothing compared to the one you and Maureen would later suffer. I tell you only because in my pregnancy I had discovered a new way to love, freely and joyfully and without expectation. Until that point my love was mainly for people who let me down. Now I was part of a club I hadn’t even known existed, a club of women whose lives had fresh purpose, whose bellies were home for a life that was not their own. Who’d have thought my little body could become so important? I’d sit daydreaming of the things we would do together, my child and I. I had my new love all set up, you might say, all on tap, ready to go, generous and beautiful, and then in the tick of a moment its heartbeat was gone. Everywhere I looked I saw mothers and babies. I could have hated them, but I had hated life when I left Corby and I didn’t want that any more.
I never lost the thick ring of flesh I gained at my waist when I was pregnant. It’s because I’m small. As an adult, it’s never been easy for me to appear slim. Or perhaps I kept the extra weight because it was all I had left to remind me of my baby. I don’t know. I could tell that the reps at the brewery made jokes with Napier about me. But I was recovering from a miscarriage. I heard them call me names and imitate my walk, and I put up my chin and I waddled more. If they were going to laugh, they might as well do it properly.
I had no child and so I gave my love to you. After all, I observed you most days, depositing your beer cans in the bin below my office window. Giving my love to you was like finding a convenient vessel into which to pour the thing I had no use for, just as you had found a bin in the yard for your unwanted empties. Since the stationery cupboard we hadn’t spoken, you and I, although I was aware of you, sometimes glancing in at my door to check that I was still working at the brewery, maybe even looking for me in the canteen. I found myself listening for your voice, and if someone mentioned you by name the heat came to my face and my pulse quickened. I still had your handkerchief. But I took care to avoid you, and so giving you my love felt a safe option. It kept me warm, it gave me pleasure, but I expected nothing more.
It was time to pack my suitcase and move on. ‘You never rest,’ my father said one of the last times I saw him. ‘You never stay long enough for a cup of tea.’ There was no anger in his voice. Only the habitual moist-eyed wonder.
I hope you are hearing this, Harold. I hope you are taking it in. I confess my part in your tragedy, but you must understand that I tried to remove myself from Kingsbridge, even at the beginning. And this was before I’d got in your car and come to know you. This was way before I’d met David.
At the beginning of March, I went to N
apier. I’d finished working through the boxes of loose accounts. I’d put them in order, and in only two months I’d found a way to save him six hundred pounds. I’d achieved more than I promised. It seemed fair to hand in my notice.
Some things in life are a law unto themselves. Napier was one. Bindweed is another. One summer it grew all over my sea garden. It coiled itself round the tender stems of my Mrs Sinkins pinks and strangled the living sap out of them. I tugged it up by the armful, but a few days later it was back. You have to leave only a small piece of bindweed in the ground and it will regrow itself, leaves and roots and everything.
So I said to the bindweed, You want to be in my garden and I don’t want you. I can’t dig you out. If I poison you, I run the risk of poisoning the plants I want to keep. We have a problem that will not go away. Something needs to change.
Beside every bindweed stem, I pushed in a hazel pea stick. About twenty in all. The bindweed shot up these supports and rewarded me with lilac trumpets of flowers striped with white. I wouldn’t say I loved the bindweed. I certainly didn’t trust it. It would have scrambled all over my pinks the moment I stopped offering new sticks. But sometimes you have to respect the fact that even though you don’t want bindweed you have it, and you’d better get along side by side. It was the same with Napier.
When I told him I was leaving the brewery, he went very quiet. Then he screamed. I’ve never seen a man fly so quickly from composed to hysterical, missing out the progressive stages in between.
‘What do you mean, you want to go?’ He slammed his fist down on the desk, and his Murano glass clowns trembled like frightened girls.
‘I need to travel,’ I said.
‘You’re not a student,’ he said.
I said I was thirty-nine, but I could still purchase a bus ticket.
Napier lifted his fingers to his teeth and ripped the ends off three poor nails. ‘You have a good job. Good pay. What exactly is your problem here?’ His voice was getting higher and higher. ‘Just because you went to Oxford, you think we aren’t good enough?’