Fifty-Minute Hour (28 page)

Ashamed, she dragged her eyes away. Neither man looked exactly wild with passion. Both were clearly irritable, fidgeting and muttering as the baby's screams crescendoed. She longed to hold the frantic child, soothe his desperate wailing. All he needed was a cuddle, not a slap – and an instant change of nappy, judging by the damp patch on his rompers. Where
was
his mother, she wondered almost angrily? Doctors like John-Paul were invariably so busy just because of mothers who gave up on their role, entrusted their own flesh and blood to callous substitutes.

And yet it worried her, the theory that all crime and mental illness was a result of faulty parenting. Did it mean you couldn't blame even hardened vicious criminals, but excused, say Adolf Hitler, because his mother fed him Cow and Gate instead of offering him the breast, or felt sorry for the Yorkshire Ripper because he'd been potty-trained too early? Or suppose a man like Bryan did something most unpleasant to her darling Jonathan, would it be wrong to want to murder him, instead of sympathising? She'd tried to bring the matter up with James, who sometimes helped unsnarl her muddled views, but when she'd mentioned Hitler, he'd gone off at a tangent and said that bloody Larry Crawshaw was a little Hitler in himself and if someone didn't take a stand, it would be gas chambers for his firm.

She unbuttoned her thick jacket and the top button of her blouse. It was stifling in the carriage, and probably full of germs. One of the
Daily Telegraphs
had a really nasty cold, kept trying to find a clean spot on his stained and soggy handkerchief, which she wished she could take home to wash and iron. If she'd been sitting by the window, she could have opened it a crack, let in some fresh air; watched the streets and houses flashing past the pane, glimpsed dreary Monday housewives hanging out their washing or making shepherd's pies. That had been her own life just a month or so. ago – a worthy round of cooking, ironing, church work, which ignored the wild exotic realms she'd discovered only recently: New Worlds between her open legs, undiscovered territories between her marvelling skull-bones.

She closed her eyes a moment, thought back to Friday's session with John-Paul. She'd been telling him quite shyly (though slowly gaining confidence as she sensed his quiet approval) about her so-called ‘Thrill-Kit' – her new vibrator-plus which came complete with a dozen separate snap-on heads described as ‘Happy Endings', and a clitoris-excitor with seven different speeds. She ran it in her mind again, revved the switch from purr to roar, added the rattling of the wheels, the juddering of the train, watched the signal rise, the lights change from red to green, as the 125 went racing up the incline and down the other side, finally thwacked against the buffers exhausted but triumphant.

‘Two hundred and five,' she whispered, as she dabbed her sweaty forehead with her glove, gave a secret gloating smile to the Minister of Health who was facing her on page three of the
Telegraph
. ‘Housewife Snatched From Death-Trap', she read, several columns down. So Bryan had thought she'd died. Well, she had died, in a sense – died of pleasure, anyway. A climax
was
a sort of death, or so the sex books said, and one tome had even mentioned that seventeenth-century poets used the word ‘die' or ‘death' as a sort of pun or
double entendre
meaning orgasm. They'd never taught her
that
at school, nor words like
soixante-neuf
or detumescence. She was learning such a lot these days – forget ‘Science and Society' – she only went to that to keep James happy, prove she wasn't quite the bird-brain he assumed, though, if she were truthful with herself, she could hardly grasp a word that Skerwin said; sometimes suspected he was teaching a quite different class from the one described in the prospectus, or was so involved in his own high-powered research, he'd totally forgotten that his students weren't all physics graduates with doctorates from Oxbridge. But once she moved from science to psychology, then she had surely earned her doctorate by now, if not a few gold stars.

She unfastened the next button of her blouse, imagined John-Paul leaning over to pin the gold star on her chest (breast); his strong male hand making contact with the nipple, lingering a moment before creeping down her cleavage …

‘
Stop
that!'

She jumped, removed the hand, swiftly did up both her buttons, looking round for angry Nanny who would slap her any moment, send her to her room. She heard the slap resound, but it was the baby who'd received it, right across his buttocks. ‘Shut up, you noisy bastard, or you'll get a harder one.' The girl shook the child quite callously, as if he were a kitchen mat or pillowcase and not a fragile psyche. She knew she shouldn't interfere, but if someone didn't take a stand, then in another twenty years or less he'd be lying on the couch.

‘Could I hold him for a moment? I've got three boys myself, so …'

‘By my guest,' the girl said, as she dumped the howling infant on Mary's ample lap, retuned her Walkman, lit a cigarette, ignoring the ‘No Smoking' signs.

‘Hush now, precious. What's the trouble? Teething, are we? Let me look. Oh, dear, it
is
sore, isn't it? Poor pet, poor wee mite.' Mary rocked the red-faced infant to and fro, let him bite her finger, stroked his fuzz of hair. The wild yells slowly quietened, changed to shuddering gasps, one final choking hiccup, then silence, blessed silence. Mary could feel the tension dropping in the carriage. The two men settled back, both turning over pages of their newspapers, as if to prove they could concentrate once more on the rise in the inflation rate or the car bomb in Beirut. The girl blew lazy smoke rings, one foot gently tapping to the private rhythm of her Walkman. Even the train itself seemed to decrease its feckless speed, stopped lurching quite so violently, as it rattled over points. Mary longed to rock and soothe them all: blow that poor man's nose for him, rub some Vaseline on his swollen reddened nostrils; remove the young girl's cigarette and replace it with a dummy; gently chide the train for making too much noise, distract it with a picture-book or jigsaw.

‘Shall we kiss it better, then? There, that's it – all gone now.' The baby closed his eyes, at last, pressed his tear-wet face against her bosom. ‘Good boy, good little sausage. You sleep now, Brian, all better.' She settled back herself, smiling round the carriage. That's all the other poor Bryan needed – a little basic comfort, a little understanding. If it was his birthday this next Friday, then why didn't she invite him for a birthday tea on Saturday? James would be away the whole weekend at a conference in Scarborough, and all she'd planned to fill the gap was some help with teas (and washing-up) at the Union of Catholic Mothers' jumble sale. Tea for an AIDS victim was surely more important. Catholic mothers had quite enough already – families, security, free coffee mornings every week, Father Fox on call – whereas infected homosexuals had nothing in their lives save the prospect of the grave.

If Bryan's poor mother had never found the time to arrange a children's party, then she must lay one on herself– a little late in life, perhaps, but some therapies she'd read about did actually encourage a return to early childhood as part of growth and healing. She'd even discovered one amazing case of a sixty-year-old male patient who'd gone back into nappies and been fed three-hourly from a bottle, snuggled on his (female) doctor's lap. She wouldn't go that far with Bryan, but was there any reason why he shouldn't have a birthday cake, and even a few games and things to help pass the afternoon? Of course she couldn't ask the boys he craved – it just wouldn't be responsible – but the two of them together could have quite a jolly time, and it would provide a chance for him to talk to her, open up, confide. She had so much help herself these days – John-Paul twice a week must be the equivalent of a whole
life
of children's parties, with cakes from Harrods' bakery and the best conjurors in London – the least she could do was help others in her turn.

She glanced up at the window as they jolted past Vauxhall. Only two more minutes and they'd be into Waterloo. Had James found a seat, she wondered, when he'd tackled the same journey a whole three hours ago, or been forced to stand on a jam-packed rush-hour train? Poor James. She ought to help him, too, if he were kind enough to keep paying John-Paul's fees, which would be going up from January, and were pretty high already – that she did admit. But if only he could understand how exceptional the doctor was; how not just wise, distinguished, but sensitive, artistic, and with that really rather thrilling voice, which appeared to issue from somewhere deep inside him, to bypass throat and larynx and well up from his groin.

She held the baby closer, ran a gentle finger around his open mouth, heard him mew with pleasure. Babies were much easier than husbands. How could she soothe James, make him mew with equal satisfaction, kick his feet ecstatically? Invite Pam and Larry Crawshaw for a really special dinner, which might defuse the tension; or buy him a new putter (except the only money she could use was what he gave her anyway, so it would hardly be a present)? Or how about
The Joy of Sex
, Volumes One and Two, compressed into a single night, to stagger and astound him, prove the sessions with John-Paul were triumphantly successful; worth double what he charged?

The problem was would James respond? He'd been so strange these last few weeks, wary and defensive, as if the more she lost her hang-ups, the more his own increased. She couldn't understand men, especially not the real ones, as compared with those in sex-books. The husband-kind seemed only to desire you when you put up some resistance, offered them a challenge, or a fortress to be scaled. She'd dismantled her defences after a dozen years of barricades and ramparts, and what had happened? James had stopped besieging her, curtailed his nightly forays, appeared even to have lost his own libido (to use John-Paul's second favourite word). She'd tried at first to blame it on his work, the constant mounting pressure at Holdsworth, Pierce and Hampton – but it could well be her own fault. No good her making overtures unless she got them right. According to the experts, sexual skills took practice, were a bit like GCEs, demanded study and commitment, total concentration. And you had to go all out – yes, even with a husband – woo him like a lover, use every ruse and wile. She could pick one night next week, make it really special, discard the role of boring wife and play geisha girl or vamp, do everything those sex-books recommended: douse herself with perfume, buy a skimpy nightie and a black suspender belt, dim the lights, feed her man oysters and champagne, ignore the bed and spread-eagle on the hearth-rug, or even the kitchen table, as one enthusiastic book advised.

She checked the baby – sleeping now – then gently closed her own eyes so she could see the kitchen table in her mind. It was a little cluttered for a night of throbbing passion, but if she cleared the toaster off, removed the bread-bin and the ironing, swept up all the toast crumbs so they wouldn't tickle her bare skin, then it would probably serve the purpose. She leant back against the grainy wood, trying to smell
L'Aimant
, and not Clean-O-Pine and onions; reached out a sultry hand to James, coaxed him down towards her. ‘I love you, darling,' he whispered in his vintage-brandy voice, already mollified and melting as his open mouth met and startled hers.

‘I love you, too, John-Paul.'

SHOPPING LIST

champagne oysters
L'Aimant
(scent and bath oil)
suspender belt (black lace?)
negligée or nightie (Check Ann Summers catalogue)
KY Jelly
Vaseline
shirts for J. (Still slim-fit? Check his waist.)
flour/eggs/ butter/sugar/icing sugar
jellies (lime and raspberry)
birthday candles (blue)
sandwich loaf (check fillings)
batteries (high-power)

It's freezing on the step, the wind cutting round the corner and slashing my bare face before it hurtles on across the road and up north to the Arctic. The step is stone and damp. I'll move off in a moment, once I've found the strength to face a bus or tube train. I've no more cash for taxis, used every cent I had, first to check out Seton's boat, then to drag up here to Kilburn. I hoped someone at the gallery might know where Seton was – he seemed so much at home there, knew so many people – but the door is locked and bolted. I arrived here just too late, at five-thirteen, when the damn place shuts at five. Actually, somebody's inside still, but they wouldn't let me in, ignored the bell completely.

It's cold without my hair. I never realised all these years how I've used it as a sort of extra muffler. The wind sneaks into places now it never did before, and I'm more conscious of my ears. They're too big, of course, and ugly, but no one ever saw them through my mane. I don't think my hair will grow again. I'm too old for any blossoming, regrowth. I try to work out days and times, conclude it must be Thursday, which means it's four days since I scalped myself. It feels more like four years, and, anyway, Thursdays seem quite different without John-Paul embedded in them. All my days are empty now, or crippled – frames without their pictures, boats without their engine-rooms.

It was awful at the boat. The taxi driver got more and more sarcastic about the stony unmade track, and in the end I walked the last half-mile, listening to the silence, the heavy winter pall of dusk and damp and loneliness which had been laid across the marshes. I could smell not just swamp, but sickness – the sickness of the Isolation Hospital, which Seton said was founded there a hundred years ago, its bleak windows looking out at the ancient smallpox cemetery, stiff with pock-marked corpses. The boat was dead itself – no lights, no fire, no movement, just a hulk adrift in mud. I kept shouting Seton's name, in case he might be fishing further down the creek, or out collecting driftwood. No one answered, save a few screeching gulls echoing my voice. An old salt told me years ago that seagulls are the restless souls of sailors wrecked and drowned at sea, still searching for their bodies and their ships. Perhaps Seton's died at sea and is circling far away now, soaring past the lonely Arctic Circle.