Christmas Day was in a small hospital room, where she was recovering, sitting up in bed, a brace around her neck, so that she moved like a wooden puppet. Her stitches were coming out soon. Much to her surprise she loved her little room, loved the view of the back gardens, the nurses coming and going at all hours, nurses of all kinds, cheery, sullen, brusque, each with her little nylon cap pinned at a different angle, as if to convey her individuality.
“Merry Christmas … Merry Christmas.” She had heard it since dawn and snuggled under the covers, longing to return to sleep and the placenta of her dreams. She had been dreaming of a rose bed, a small rose bed crowded out with the bushes, one which Tristan had put in, and she had said sweetly to him that it was the wrong bed and they were too close together. In the dream he looked a little crushed.
“Merry Christmas,” she heard again and again. The fair-haired young nurse whom she liked was struggling with the cord that was supposed to lift the cloth blind but never did, so that either the left or the right side dipped down, carcass-like.
There was special breakfast. Besides the usual toast and honey, she had received a little chunk of Christmas cake in a wrapping of cellophane. On the icing was a silver ball, and this for some reason brought back another dream, one in which a baby had been born to her, slightly deformed, but alive, oh yes, alive and asking questions. The two features of its face she remembered most clearly were the eyes and a little tongue. Both were purple, the eyes small but liquid and the tongue like a violet nib off which the ink dropped, the ink which was speech. The baby said its first word. It was the word “echo.” It then asked what that word meant, and she tried wrongly to explain, said it meant a fox, or the lowing of a cow; it meant country things, but that was ridiculous.
“Your son phoned later on, last night … said he was sorry you got cut off, but to tell you that the pet they are thinking of acquiring is a pony and not to worry.” They were spending the holiday in the pony-trekking farm along with other children whose parents lived abroad. They had been told about her operation by the matron and it seemed had taken it well. The first time she phoned them, she felt frightened, as if they might say something cruel, but no, they had asked very solicitously about her health and if she was all right and if she was eating enough. They both used identical words, but neither said, “We came home and you were not there.” Still, they knew it, it hovered. Paddy had said he was earning extra money, “mucking out,” and Tristan told her his pony had run away with him but that he took it in his stride and fell quite merrily.
The second phone call was on Christmas Eve. It was arranged that she would phone them at a certain time. It was just before supper and she hobbled down to the office, hating when she caught sight of herself in a mirror: her whole body stiff, ungainly, her face marked. They were excited. Tristan had just won the jackpot from the fruit machine, won a great haul of money, and was worried that while he was talking on the phone, other boys, rogues, were picking up the coins and hiding them in their socks or under their beds.
“The money has rolled all over the place,” he said, his voice flushed with excitement and with nerves as he deferred to Paddy, who also said he had to dash so as to assist his brother and act as broker. Before ringing off they told her that they were thinking of getting a——, but she had not caught the word. A pony! Where would they graze a pony?
“Here goes,” the nurse said, holding up the red paper cracker, contorting her features in mock trepidation at the deed which she was about to do. Not long after, Nell was sporting a pink paper hat, looking at a picture of clover on her little pot of honey, and thinking, Will they forgive me … in their heart of hearts, will they forgive me? She had been foolish enough to ask several nurses, and opinions varied. Some said that quite honestly they could not say, others said that they themselves could not do it, and one very stern nurse who boasted about being up at six before she came on duty to mind her babies and leave feeds for the day said of course it was wrong. Nell believed that it was this young nurse who had set a madwoman on her, a dark-skinned woman from the kitchen who came into her room shrieking, telling her to repent, because Satan was in her, in her belly and in her eyes. It was one morning during that lull after breakfast, when the nurses were elsewhere, down in the operating theatres or having a tea break, and this eagle-faced creature burst in on her, hands like claws, voice high-pitched, calling, “Ora … oracle … oraculemus.”
“Who are you?” Nell said.
“Ora … oracle … oraculemus,” and she laughed as she sniffed out the environs of the bed, the foul bedcovers, and the sinning body beneath it. Like a little genie she had grabbed the emergency bell and pocketed it. Who was she? She was the one who routed Satan. She had been sent there. Her voices told her. In a strange guttural language and with a terrible anguished expression she searched the length of the body to find the seat of sin. Railed about his stench, then nabbed him, chased him, collared him, and squeezed him like a louse, this Satan, squashing him with her long nails, which were soft as a web. Then, peering under the bed, she shouted some more, stood up, took two little metal rods from her pocket, rods that jigged towards each other and made her mutter more. Before leaving she produced a book of hymns that was stained and tattered. Nell was to copy out each hymn and sing it, and in the singing she would find her way back to God.
“I’ll have you reported,” Nell said without blanching.
The woman looked at her with a strange, venomous glee and jumped as her metal rods had jumped, gaily and unconcerned.
“No one will believe you,” she said, and curtsied before going out.
So the day stretched before her, a long, quiet Christmas Day, misty weather and her brain misty, too, from the tablets they gave her to sleep. Her surroundings were by now as familiar as the lines on her hands or the pencil marks on the wall behind her bed, crazed squiggles by a previous occupant. Outside, a playground, the slide with the worn seat, school windows with frames painted a mustard yellow, tall trees, London plane trees which did not have the ramble or lassitude of country trees but were still trees, thrusting right down to the roots and clayey tentacles of themselves. She did many things to avoid thinking, stamped on each thought as if stamping flies. Anything not to break down. She would look at the trees, the slide, the rosebushes in the back gardens, bags of fertiliser, wheelbarrows, the humble impedimenta of suburbia, and think, I am on the mend … I am on the mend. The surgeon had been extra kind to her because of her dementia. After the operation she had screamed, could not be quieted as two nurses held her and one clamped a hand over her mouth, saying crisply that patients far worse than she, patients who were dying, would be unnerved by the hullabaloo. They sent for the surgeon, thinking perhaps that he would be more severe. At first she thought he was a chef because of his white coat and his white hat and told him to please go away. He sat with her, talked in a low voice, and asked her what was it, what was it. At first she could not tell him, because to say it was to relive it again, but gradually she described how in a waking vision she had just been home, yes home, up the avenue, over the high grass and the thistles, past young trees and old trees all lambent, and how at the doorway she was met by a man in livery, who admitted her. In the vestibule she saw the most beautiful collection of robes, laid out as if for a ceremony, scarlet, wine-coloured, with gold epaulettes, emblems of sovereignty; yet when she lifted one, she saw a severed head and next to it another, both freshly hacked, dripping, so that she dropped the garments and ran from the carnage, but running was no use, because she knew, yes she knew that these were her own people mauled and ritually sacrificed. Within the welter of it all, she had shouted out, “And still, the house gleamed as the world must gleam to those who are entering, before the vessels burst their ravenous bounds.” He said it was only a dream, the aftermath of anaesthetic, that many people saw and heard strange things. He envied her, wished he had such transports; his was just the same old exam dream, and even that was fading. She was to think of getting better, because he wished it, the nurses wished it, everyone did. Life was fun. Life was to be enjoyed. Her life was ahead of her, a bright tapestry.
“Thelma, peel me a grape,” he said then, for her amusement, impersonating Mae West: Mae in her high heels and her décolletage, treating people like scullions.
“Thelma, peel me a grape…” He said it two or three times, until she laughed.
The big strapping nurse who came to take off her bandages teased her about him, said that most likely he would steal away while the turkey was cooking and pay a surprise visit.
“He’ll be with his family,” she said, and for some reason she hoped he wouldn’t come; she wished him there with them, joking, presiding. Something so good and mild about his manner made her want him content. As the bandages came off the nurse hooted with delight, said how beautifully the wounds had healed and how soft the new skin was.
“Skin like a baby,” she said, then fetched a basin of water, and for the first time in weeks Nell washed her hands. She felt playful, a sensation from some far-off time, hands in a stream or in a rain barrel, clasping, letting go, hands swishing and paddling, alone, or with another. Which other?
“What’s the happiest moment you’ve ever lived?” she asked the nurse.
“Crikey…” the nurse said. What a question. She couldn’t say. They were all mostly happy, happy in different ways.
“But there must be one.”
“Yeah … when the parsley took.”
“Why the parsley?”
“It means you’ll hold on to your man,” she said, her laugh and accent deepening into the rich Northern burr of her childhood.
“So who’s the man?” Nell asked, and in reply was told a riddle, that to ask was like “gathering grapes from thistles.”
Boris and Olga came after lunch, glided into the room, looking radiant. They had been running and moreover had decided to leave London. Boris walked across to look through the window while Olga stood close to the bed and handed Nell a gift in crinkled tissue paper. It was a brooch, a leaf of marcasite in which there was an inset of ivory, which had darkened over the years. It was her grandmother’s, on her mother’s side, who had vanished in Prague, had been rounded up along with a sister and two brothers.
“You shouldn’t,” Nell said, overwhelmed.
“She should … stupid cow,” Boris said, and laughed, because stupid cow was rich, since many women needed massage around Christmas, women in Belgravia and St. John’s Wood and as far up as Highgate, women with husbands, women without husbands, randy women all alone in rooms, needed their tummies flattened. Then, to prove their affluence, Boris took Olga’s leather drawstring bag and held it upside down, so that the coins rolled along the floor, and then he made Olga get down and pick them up while he kicked her amiably and she whimpered, “It hurts, Kermit … it hurts, Kermit,” as she did the circuit of the room. Soon, they were going abroad, first to Bali and Indonesia, then on from there to Australia, where they would become beachcombers.
“London is ugly … ugly,” he said, and made a face to emphasise his distaste, adding that the places where they had been squatting were not fit for animals. Strange that there was no rancour, none at all, but they were not quite real to her, though she could see their blushed faces and even smell the cachou smell of Olga’s breath as she pinned the brooch to the collar of her nightgown. In a way she wished that they would go. Her mind was too frazzled, and when she thought of her brain, the image that cropped up was of telephone wires under the pavement, tangled, weevilling into one another, so that men had to come along with pincers to straighten them and snip them apart.
“Snip … snip,” she said as she saw Boris look at her and think how barmy she was, barmy and old, with old, unshining, sapless eyes.
It may have been the light, yes she believed it was, the soft melancholy light of a winter’s evening touching her to an extremity of feeling.
“Dear Mother,” she began again. “There are moments in which you appear tender, like a snapshot melting, tinged with beauty and grace, imparting the same vague sorrow as when one sees an old man or a young child at a farmhouse, staring, the child waving but not sure if the wave is seen and losing heart in the middle of it. You would come down from the yard, your hands smeared with meal, a few eggs in a can, but never enough; they would be dunged and covered in meal and the one above all others that I remember is the shell-less egg, soft as any placenta, its bruisedness a resemblance of us. If only we could have imagined ourselves into each other’s depths. If only!”
She folded it again and again, thinking she would go back one time covertly and leave it on the grave, a shredded flower.
It was dark when she saw the figure in the doorway and for a flash believed it to be Duncan, her wandering bard. Only when he spoke did she realise that it was the porter, and then she turned the light on, to find him in his suit, ready to go home, but bearing a gift, a bowl of fruit—grapes, strawberries, and kiwis. He had put a paper napkin under them so that they sagged, and like a courtier he proudly placed it before her, muttering, “Do you good … do you good.” He had seen her earlier, had caught her crying when he came to ask her preference, brown meat or white meat of the roast turkey, found her in her nightgown rooting in the wardrobe, looking at her clothes and her money to make sure they were still there, holding up a plastic vase in case she got flowers.
“Do you good,” the porter kept saying, not knowing where best to place his offering. A letter he brought had been in the wrong pigeonhole downstairs. This indeed was Duncan’s handwriting —at once childish and assertive. Inside, a picture for her. It was as if he had taken a bottle of red ink, poured it over the flimsy paper, allowing it to make its own sweet, zany, barbaric course. Underneath he had written—“For you, tonight, the blood on my sleeve and the love that I’ve left.” The postmark was from Arizona. So he had gone to his desert, gone without her.
“Strange,” the porter said as she held it up. Most likely he had been hoping to see robins or a jingling sleigh.
“From Arizona…”
“Arizona … that’s a long way,” he said. Yes, she could picture him, his eyes sand-mad, sunsets like footballs of fire, but no matter how hard she tried, she could not picture herself there in the emptiness alongside him.