The Facts of Life (16 page)

‘For once one can honestly say she died in her sleep, Monsieur.’

‘How?’

Edward found himself nonsensically suspicious, as though she had been killed twice over. The doctor sighed.

‘Heart attack, we assume.’

‘Did she have a weak heart? You said she was in perfect health.’

‘Not to our knowledge but – after what she must have been through … Of course, if Monsieur wanted an autopsy …’ He caught Edward’s eye and raised an eyebrow.

‘No. No. Of course not.’

Edward deflected the look with a careworn gesture, running a hand through his hair. There was a disturbing air of complicity in the doctor’s expression. For a few mad moments, Edward entertained the fantasy that the staff were well aware that he had – how did one best put it? – helped his sister on her way, but that this was a common occurrence in the establishment, scarcely noteworthy. Then he looked up at the doctor again and saw that, no, of course, his face, his sighs, even his manner of offering Edward the tenuous companionship of a cigarette, were merely the furthest he dared go to suggesting that they both knew she could only be happier in her decease.

Edward signed forms. Of course, he had to deal with her body now – it had not occurred to him before. He bought a bouquet of white lilies for the nursing staff on Miriam’s ward and a crazily expensive bottle of whisky for the doctor. He arranged for his sister to be cremated as swiftly as possible. He would take her ashes home with him, completing her life’s restless trajectory by making her last resting place a country she had never known, whose language she had never mastered. He sent a telegram to Sally, saying why he would be delayed, trying to convey, as best he could in terse telegrammese, that this did not constitute a crisis.

He used the hotel room for another night after all. He took to his bed with a bottle of cheap wine and lay for hours in the darkness, waiting for the storm to break over his head and coming to understand, with the ponderous clarity of the wilfully drunk, that it had passed him by.

When he was a small boy, Miriam had tried to help him overcome his horror of storms by counting the seconds that elapsed between lightning flash and thunderclap.

‘Every second is a kilometre,’ she explained, crouching on his bed. ‘Three. Four. Five. Six. You see? It’s already further away. We’re quite safe.’

But usually it seemed to Edward that the longer wait only made the ensuing blast sound louder. And he could never quite believe that the last was indeed the last. During the war, hiding in air raid shelters from his countrymen’s bombs, he had sometimes longed for the spectacular, swift death of a direct hit. Anything to free him from the horrific game of trying to guess whether the hellish onslaught were moving slowly away or bearing inexorably closer.

Sally had always thought that writers exaggerated but while Edward was away, she truly did ache for him. No other verb would do. Waking in the night to an empty bed or seeing his piano with the lid down and the keyboard hidden, she felt his absence as a sporadic dull pain in her groin and her lower back that only his touch would cure. Without him The Roundel seemed too large and empty.

Twelfth Night had arrived, so she dragged the Christmas tree out into the garden wearing her oven gloves, heaped it with the strands of holly from around the house and set fire to the brittle leaves. As the swift flames roared and died, leaving her cheeks hot, the evening shadows seemed thicker, threatening winter more than ever about her. The ritual had failed, leaving her comfortless.

She hurried back into the house and busied herself sweeping up pine needles. She wrote a letter to Dr Pertwee. She washed her hair and made an omelette. She heard inexplicable noises, left lights and radio on for comfort and had trouble sleeping. Had she still been working at a hospital, she would have volunteered for night shifts to fill the void with work but Richards, the doctor she now worked for, still retained the principal loyalty of his country patients and if they had emergencies in the night they sent for him.

Her mother’s tests had proved positive and she was being kept in hospital for a hysterectomy. Sally rode the motorbike over to Rexbridge every day to visit her, once taking her father in the sidecar. Her mother took badly to illness and surgery horrified her, but she masked her fear with social brio, sporting a succession of bed-jackets and scarves and repairing her make-up at frequent intervals. From among the other patients, she had gathered slavish admirers around her bed. These were mainly sad, impressionable women but a few men pulled on their dressing gowns and found their way to her from other wards, following some sexual magnetic north to bask in her harsh treatment of them. Her admirers left her tributes – fruit, chocolates, magazines – much of which she used as barter to win over newcomers. She pointedly sent Sally away with a pile of
Good Housekeeping
.

Unable to sleep, Sally sat up in bed with the magazines, driving away night thoughts with brightly coloured blasts of housewifery and sentiment. The stories – of naughty boys, errant husbands, untrustworthy ex-schoolfriends and culinary disasters made good – were mawkish and unconvincing. The large-print caption beside each introductory picture often made it needless to read on.

‘
She asked him to marry her
,’ she read. ‘
The man who had loved her forever. He asked no questions. Not then. Not later…
’

After glancing longingly through the fashion pages and demoralising herself with cookery articles, Sally concentrated on the advertisements. These provided an editorial of their own, at once chastening, flattering and envy-fostering. Faces beamed out at her, eyes twinkled knowingly, rhymes jingled their carefully plotted way into her memory –
Fortune Chocolates make the heart grow fonder. Sentinel Hygienic Towels. So soft, so safe, so secure. The cup that satisfies. Medilax laxative pellets encourage smiling cheerfulness by keeping the person free from the depressing poisons of constipation. It’s a dream! It’s a Harella! Faces turned towards her with wonder and admiration and the faintest hint of envy as she sailed in dazzling them all with the pride and confidence of her beauty. Protect your child from Deadly Diphtheria
.

When she finally slept, her head swam with a fever of brand names. Slimma Slacks. Stillmore Suet Pudding. Lux. Plasticene. Rinso. Lavvo. Propax. Carlox Tooth Powder. Vinola Baby Soap and Nell Gwynne Marmalade. She had terrible, insecure dreams in which women in indiscreet furs showed her
How to Distemper a Small Room
and an insufferably perky couple called the Young-Marrieds urged her to give her husband plenty of Vitamins A and D. The next morning she threw the magazines in the dustbin as if they were a source of virulent infection.

She realised she was pregnant on the same day Edward’s telegram arrived from Paris. Knowing nothing of her sister-in-law, she could scarcely be expected to grieve for her, but her emotions see-sawed as her delight at what was happening inside her weighed against her compassion for Edward.

She had half-decided not to tell him, until she was doubly certain, not to excite him needlessly in what she assumed to be his present state. But as she rode her bike about the area, receiving the occasional wave from a patient, as she shopped in the market, meeting the flirtatious banter of stallholders with a deflecting smile, her happiness worked up to a pitch where she felt people could tell its source just by looking. Her first bout of morning sickness dampened her ardour somewhat, as did the cold realisation that when she was forced to give up work they would have financial worries, unless Edward managed to sell something or drum up a commission. At their wedding reception, Thomas’s ‘sympathetic’ chaplain had murmured something about commissioning an anthem or some canticles. She resolved to be more of a Lady Macbeth, and lean on her diffident husband to follow through on opportunities.

Edward came home two nights later. A battering wind had blown up during the afternoon. It rattled window panes and filled The Roundel with thin, whispering sighs. He had rung from Dover, so she was ready for him. Towelling herself after a bath, she could hear the car’s engine a mile away, even through the noise of the wind. From an upstairs window she saw the small cones of light from the headlamps swing this way and that as he crossed the bridge over the dyke and turned on to the perfectly straight road that stretched along a precipitous poplar-fringed bank next to the water.

He slammed the door against the wind, dropped his suitcase and turned to her. His cheeks were cold to her kiss. He half pushed, half carried her to the hall sofa where she tumbled, pulling him with her. Under his questing hands, her dressing gown soon fell open so that her naked flesh, still warm and slightly damp from the hot water, was chafed by the thick, hard textures of male clothes – tweed, drill, the buckle of his belt, the bruising toecaps of his shoes – all still chilly from the night air.

‘I’m sorry, darling,’ she tried to say. ‘Poor Miriam. I’m so very sorry.’

But his lips chewed away her words. The hot insistence of his tongue overturned her train of thought. His unshaven jawline felt like sandpaper and as he rubbed it with heedless cruelty against her, an image from one of her mother’s magazines popped up unbidden in her mind of a tearful girl with vividly scarlet cheeks, clutching a bar of Knight’s Castille and sobbing, ‘Now I can kiss goodbye to Stubble Trouble!’

Sally flinched, relaxed then stiffened again as, silencing her with a deeply penetrating kiss, he thrust enquiring fingers between her unprotected thighs. She had expected tears not passion and her head swarmed with words she wanted to voice, thoughts that impeded pleasure. For the first time, she found their desire out of joint. For the first time she found his need far fiercer than hers. For the first time she submitted her body rather than giving it. As he hammered painfully into her, his eyes were closed, viewing some dark, interior world, and when he came, it was not with his usual surprised shout of triumph. His entire body jerking spasmodically, he bit his lip then gave a series of rasping gasps as though the release were no delirious outburst, but something torn painfully from his guts.

Pressed between his clothes and the thick, discarded mat of the dressing gown, her limbs shone with sweat. As he rolled to lie beside her, to relieve her of his weight, she shivered at the chill of sudden exposure and picked at the towelling to pull the gown around her again. He spoke at last. His first words since his return.

‘I could hardly tell it was her. Just her eyes, maybe, or the bushiness of her hair. We always had the same thick hair –’ He broke off. Bit his lip again. He was staring up at the dome.

‘What?’ she prompted. ‘Tell me.’

He turned to look at her.

‘Do you mind if I don’t? Not yet, at least?’

She smiled weakly.

‘Don’t be daft. Of course I don’t.’

And he never did tell her.

Unwrapping the exquisite but slightly tight underwear he had brought her, Sally noticed another, smaller parcel in his suitcase. It was carefully done up, like a selection of pastries, and her heart jumped for a moment in infantile anticipation of a further treat. Then she realised from the startled way he pulled a shirt out to hide it, that the folded paper contained her sister-in-law’s incinerated remains.

In the weeks, then months that followed, the subject of Miriam slipped back into the mire of his secrecy as completely as if she had never been mentioned. He had no photographs, no mementoes. All that Sally knew was her name and the colour of her hair and eyes. Trying to imagine the woman, she could only picture a feminised Edward in a quiet, floral frock; a disquieting image she hastily dropped.

From the night of his return, Edward felt sickeningly disoriented. It seemed impossible that so little had changed in his brief absence. He was now irrevocably different from the young man who had nervously taken Ivan’s telephone call. His unavowable secret had changed the expression on the face that met his gaze in the looking-glass as profoundly as any livid scar.

Acts of violence produced a reaction – a gun’s report, the smack of colliding skin and bone, blood, bruises, cries of pain or horrified gasps – but his, seemingly, had produced nothing. The body – he could not think of it as his sister – had been destroyed; no questions asked, no accusations levelled. A tasteful helping of its cinders had accompanied him, passportless, home.

Had he found The Roundel now as weirdly warped as the sets from
The Cabinet of Dr Caligari
it would have been more comforting than the sweet normality which greeted him. Only the harsh onset of January and the charred remains of the Christmas decorations accorded with his mood. The house was as still, the landscape as desolate, his wife as lovely as when he had left them.

His work-in-progress lay untouched on the piano top, challenging him to continue it seamlessly. But he felt compelled to break away from the passage he had been writing, developing instead the theme for Lucifer. Aged years in a matter of days, he reapproached the work with a new professional realism, promptly reducing its status in his mind from grand opera to staged church cantata.

Even the arrival of snow, coating the mutilated rose-bushes, piling thick against the door, blocking out the light from the dome, was not alteration enough.

He found himself seeking to effect a more dramatic change by making greater demands on Sally. He would take her often now, abruptly, in the kitchen, the bathroom, the larder – anywhere but in the smothering confines of their bed. He was wilfully inconsiderate in the hope, perhaps, of producing an indignant reaction, but he provoked nothing in her beyond mute acquiescence, tempered occasionally with a wry, wincing smile.