May read, as usual, before she went out.
First she got herself completely ready. Alfred’s pyjamas, freshly laundered, neatly folded in a plastic bag inside another, larger plastic bag that held today’s Daily Mirror and a quarter of extra strong mints, just in case he should be feeling a bit better, just in case he should fancy something. It was comforting, getting the bag together. It meant she could still look after Alfred, though she also experienced the usual sense of boredom; women spent their lives looking after men. And even that tiny skin-tag of irritation was comforting, because entirely familiar. The house was so much colder since he had gone.
She was completely ready, hat on, coat fastened, twenty minutes too early to leave for the hospital, even if she walked slowly, even if she dawdled, not that she would dawdle on a day like this, even if she stepped into the Park to have a quick look at the café and the flower-beds so she could report to Alfred later. Each day she had half-meant to do it; each day she had found herself unable to, because she couldn’t bear to see the Park without Alfred. Without the hope of seeing Alfred …
Without the hope of seeing Alfred come hurrying down one of the distant paths, trim, narrow-shouldered in his old army greatcoat and the new check cap she had bought him for Christmas, eyes turned away from where he was going to follow the deeds of some child or dog. Then she might hear him shout or whistle to recall the wrong-doer to order. Not today. That piercing whistle. The Park Keeper’s whistle which had sometimes pained her like the sound of chalk pulled the wrong way across a blackboard now seemed in its absence an arrow of light, a clear white line shooting out across the darkness.
Twenty minutes early. So she sat in her chair as she had done every day this week and began to read, clumsy in her coat, catching its heavy woollen sleeves on the pages.
And again she noticed a difference. It was normally evening time when she read and Alfred would be there, rustling his newspaper or clicking the cards as he laid out a game of patience, and he always said ‘What are you reading?’ in a grumpy, almost affronted way, as if he had failed to entertain her, as if she was rejecting him, and she always made herself answer cheerfully, she always ignored his tone of voice and said ‘Auden, dear,’ or ‘Catherine Cookson, dear,’ though he had been doing it for nearly half a century. But now he had stopped, May found she missed it.
‘Tennyson, dear,’ she whispered in the silence, slipping inside the entirely familiar Victorian patterns in their long cool scrolls, the beloved rhythms of her other Alfred:
He watches from his mountain walls,
And like a thunderbolt he falls.
But she couldn’t concentrate; Alfred, Alfred.
It was still too early, but she picked up her bag, checked its contents and the angle of her hat (for she wanted him to be proud of her; appearances mattered a lot to Alfred), slipped in her book as an afterthought although she knew she’d have no chance to read it, and let herself out into the chill March wind.
She always liked to have a book in her bag. In case she got stuck. In case she got lost. Or did she feel lost without her books? There wasn’t any point, but she liked to have one with her, a gentle weight nudging her shoulder, keeping her company through the wind, making her more solid, more substantial, less likely to be blown away, less alone. More – a person.
Perhaps it was a little piece of the past, since her books all seemed to belong to the past, a far distant past when she was thin and romantic and in love with – what had she been in love with? Life, which seemed to mean happiness then, a word for the future, not the past. Not ‘Life gets you down,’ or ‘That’s life, I’m afraid,’ but life, hope, poetry …
The harsh wind battered her hands and face, pummelling her ears with great noisy blows, and she felt she would never get in through the high red gate-posts of the hospital with their ugly array of cardboard notices, temporary things with clumsy writing … What was she but another piece of scrap, blown willy-nilly across the forecourt? Would the main entrance be closed again because of the endless building works? (They were building new bits all the time, but it never got finished, and the rest was falling down.) She tried to ask a nurse on her way home but the light was already beginning to fade and the wind blew hard between her teeth and turned her voice to a soundless whisper, so the woman passed by oblivious.
I don’t exist. I no longer exist. When Alfred dies, I’ll be nothing, nothing … I couldn’t even read, today. The words were there, but they didn’t help.
I love them still … idyll, ambergris … but maybe they’re no more solid than us. Dirk only reads his computer magazines, Darren never liked poetry, Shirley reads mostly catalogues, so who’ll have my books, after I’m gone?
Twilight and evening bell,
And after that the dark!
And may there be no sadness of farewell,
When I embark …
Onward, onward. Over the threshold. Into the frightening new place which was suddenly part of their life together …
Part of their new life apart. A place where he must go alone, a place where she could only visit.
But she shouldn’t be frightened of this place. It must be one of the last good places. May told herself, this is here for us. We fought the last war for places like this. Hospitals and parks and schools. Not concentration camps, like the other lot had.
A hospital was a place to share. Where all could come in their hour of trouble. The light was harsh, but it shone for all. (Some of the bulbs were dead, she had noticed. Broken glass was replaced with hardboard.)
She stood for a moment, blinking, breathing.
She would get there first, because she loved him. Proud always to be the first. She stood by herself in the fluorescent sweep of the hospital foyer, taking off her hat, patting her hair, slipping off her old coat to show the blue dress, for blue was always his favourite colour … She saw herself reflected in the glass of the doors, astonishingly tiny, a little old lady, but I’m not old, nor particularly small.
Soon other figures would come out of the shadows, out of the dark with their bags and bundles, their flowers and sighs and shruggings-off of coats and scarves and hats and gloves. Nervous smiles, frowns, whispers, biting their lips, blind in the light. Newcomers. Latecomers.
May set off briskly, ahead of them.
She walked down the ward. It was becoming familiar. She no longer always took the wrong turning after passing the Hospital Volunteers’ Shop. She no longer peered anxiously across into the nurses’ room which guarded the ward, asking for permission and reassurance. The black sister gave her a smile (were there two of them? Did she muddle them up?) They saw she was not a time-waster; they had helped with the problem of Alfred’s boots. They knew her now. She was almost a regular. Before she drew level with their open door she had already located the precise spot far down the long bright fallen ladder of the ward where Alfred would be, if he hadn’t died. And there he was: he had not died. A stern face propped on an enormous pillow, staring straight ahead of him, a king on a coin.
A rush of relief; he would always be there. Like the head on a sixpence, never wearing out … but growing smaller, somehow, as the world grew larger. A few more steps, and she saw he was asleep, upright as ever in his good blue pyjamas but his eyes closed, his mouth slightly open. She hoped he hadn’t snored; Alfred was too proud to snore in front of other people. She would never let him, if she were with him. But they had been parted, after a lifetime.
I suppose that pride won’t help us, now.
How did my Alfred come to be here? Alfred of all people, who never was in hospital, Alfred who never took a day off work, Alfred White who was never ill.
But we all come here. I shall come here.
She shrugged the voice away, impatient.
The ward was getting ready for visiting time, combings of hair, straightenings of dressing-gowns, eyes turned longingly towards the entrance where faces from the other world might appear, younger, healthier, bearing gifts. Faces that once seemed ordinary, now brightly coloured, glowing, miraculous.
Why was he still sleeping? There was so much to do. In her bag there were documents for him to sign. Only now did she realiz–e how foolish she had been, letting everything be in Alfred’s name, the house, the pension book, the bank account.
Darren had got angry, on the phone. He rang so rarely, and it was gone eleven, the middle of the night, it seemed to May, and she was so drowsy and confused that she’d spilled out all her worries, and cried. And he’d made her feel a fool. ‘What do you mean, you can’t draw any money? You mean Dad always got the money? How could you be so bloody daft …?’
But then, she had never really pleased her sons. Even the names she chose annoyed them. Darren and Dirk … They were film star names that Alfred was unsure about, but he said ‘That’s your department, May. Women know better than men about names.’ Their daughter was Shirley, after Shirley Temple. Then Dirk and Darren. She had done her best, though Dirk, the youngest, always complained. May had loved Dirk Bogarde with swooning intensity; his sideways smile, his dark deer’s eyes, the narrow elegance of his body, and though he had mysteriously changed, become old and angry and homosexual, she still felt she had let him down, giving his name to someone who despised it.
Dirk was sulky, but Darren was rude. ‘…You’ve never even had a banker’s card? I can’t believe it, it’s unbelievable …’ He shouldn’t have talked to her like that. She had heard him be sharp with his wives and children – worse than sharp, worse than his father – but he had no right to be sharp with his mother. Why couldn’t he be nice, like Thomas? Thomas was Darren’s oldest friend, and he had always been kind to her. Thomas didn’t make her feel old and stupid. (Yet he was quite successful too. As she’d once told her son, when he was rude about Thomas, Thomas was a real writer. And Darren had gone silent. She knew it hurt him.)
Of course Darren lived in a different world, where women had armfuls of credit cards, and wrote all the rules to suit themselves …. Whereas with Alfred, everything had been laid down. Rules that were lost in the mists of time, walls he built and cemented in till that red-brick labyrinth became her life.
Only now nothing seemed quite safe any more. The walls were shifting. The sea was rising.
May stared at the chart at the foot of his bed. The marks were mean and small, as usual, and she squinted at them, but they told her nothing.
There were languages you weren’t meant to read. Medical people had their secret language. May’s mother had felt that about all books, that they were meant for other people, better people, richer people with drawling voices, the ladies who sometimes peered in through the window of her father’s workshop where he sat mending shoes, only coming in doubtfully, little mouths pursed, holding their skirts as if they might get dirty. Her father read books, history, politics, not books for women, he told her impatiently, books for men, serious books. But May knew different; both parents were wrong.
Because books were meant for everyone.
Of course there were writers she couldn’t understand. Some she could like without understanding, but some she was affronted by because she felt they didn’t want her to understand. If so, she could do without them. There were plenty of writers who spoke her thoughts.
Did doctors want people to understand? Probably not. It was probably less trouble. That way, they didn’t have to get into arguments. But it didn’t matter, she told herself. They were professionals. She trusted them. They were a bit like priests, in their clean white coats, and the nurses were like women tending a temple … She wished she could pray. She wasn’t really religious, but Alfred looked so little, so lonely.
There must be a prayer. Shirley would know it. May found herself praying, in a kind of dream, praying to the past, or the future, or the doctors, and the words came slowly, refused to come …
Do what You like to him, but get him out … Send him back to me. He wants to be out … he needs to be outside, in the light. Please, if there’s Anyone … or Anything …. we’ve done our best … You know we tried … family was everything to us … There’s the kids to think about … especially Dirk … he’s no more than a baby … he needs his dad … Do what You like to him, but send him home.