Isobel on the Way to the Corner Shop (28 page)

‘Miss Landers asked me to buy it in town. I hope this is what you want. What’s it all about?’

‘We are trying to shift some of that khaki wool. I’m going to crochet motifs to sew on the shoulder of a sweater.’

‘Well, I wish you joy, dear. I don’t think that khaki will ever move. Even the moths won’t touch it.’

‘It’s not too bad.’ Isobel fetched the completed sections of the sweater from her cabinet. ‘We’re experimenting with contrasting colours. Then I crochet a motif and we put it all together as a kit. This one is going to be a sample.’

Mrs Kent picked up the khaki and white sweater front and studied it.

‘Well, perhaps you’re right. It doesn’t look too bad. Perhaps if one called the colour something else. Like desert gold, perhaps.’

‘Don’t put ideas into my head,’ said Isobel glumly. ‘I’m trying to make it respectable.’

‘Don’t be wicked, now. What a little treasure you are. I hope it doesn’t make Elsa cry. Remember poor Val bursting into tears when I said I loved the grey lace?’

‘She thought that knitting lacy patterns in 8-ply was positively illegal.’

Elsa whispered, ‘I think it’s charming.’

‘How is Val, by the way? Has anyone heard?’

‘Gladys had a letter. She’s very well. She has to go back for a check-up at the Clinic in six months. Have you had any news of Eily?’

‘You won’t hear any more from Eily, dear.’ Mrs Kent knew something she did not care to tell. ‘Out of sight out of mind with that one.’

‘That one’ pronounced in a tone which suggested the less heard about Eily and her doings the better.

This saddened Isobel, who would have liked very much to keep in touch with Eily.

Sim appeared when Elsa had been in residence for a fortnight. He came in bearing a hyacinth in a pot, advanced and kissed Elsa on both cheeks, saying, ‘Darling! I only just heard. I got back from Italy last week and rang Lee, who told me the news.’

‘Not very good news.’

‘No. Well, here I am.’

‘Sim, this is Isobel. Isobel, Sim Frobisher, a very old friend of mine.’

‘Sim short for Simon, a name I much dislike,’ he said. ‘My parents could never understand why I screamed so loudly at my christening. They thought it was an instinctive dislike of organised religion. There was that, too, of course. Happy to know you, Isobel.’

Isobel was now free to study Sim’s appearance. He was elderly. He could never be called old; age instead of withering him seemed to have peeled him, so that the skin of his sharp-boned face shone pink. He had sharp, bright blue eyes and sparse white hair, a figure of less than medium height but neat proportions. The words ‘spry’ and ‘dapper’ seemed to have been coined for him. His pale grey suit was of excellent cut, his shirt was snowy white, his tie was of rich silk in darker shades of grey. His shoes shone. One guessed that someone else had polished them.

‘My room mate. Though I am not very good company for a young woman.’

‘Ah,’ said Sim, observing the book Isobel had been reading. ‘But a young woman who reads Kafka. I should think she would find you very good company.’

‘Yes,’ said Isobel. ‘I’m the one who profits by the acquaintance.’

Such formal talk seemed in the circumstances to be acceptable.

Sim was pleased by it.

‘That was nicely said. I have profited very much from her acquaintance, too.’

‘You’re a flatterer.’

She smiled at him as if flatterers were her favourite people.

‘It is really good of you to come so far to see me. Did you drive up?’

‘Yesterday. I’ve booked into a marvellously decadent old pub, with stained-glass transoms over the door to the loos. I do not lie. Stained glass. I’m here to stay.’

‘Sim! How long?’

‘Why…’

They won’t mention death in front of me, thought Isobel. Like sex…not in front of the children.

‘You’ve given me so much joy with your music, my dear. It’s time for me to repay. I’ll give Europe a miss next winter. I’m staying for as long as you need me. If you get tired of me, you can say so and I’ll take myself off.’

‘It may be years.’

‘I very much hope so. We’ll make them good years.’

Elsa turned her head away. Sim took her hand.

Isobel bent her head to her book, wishing she could give them the privacy they deserved.

She considered getting up and going out on the pretext of a visit to the lavatory, the only excuse for leaving her bed, but the moment had passed.

Elsa said, ‘Now tell me about Italy. Talk about the landscape.’

This was subject matter to which one could listen without offence. Sim talked, and talked well, conjured up cypress trees, olive groves, hills crowned with ruined temples, until Elsa closed her eyes.

He got up to go.

‘I’ll be back tomorrow morning. Is there anything I can bring you?’

Elsa opened her eyes and said with astonishing energy, ‘Tomatoes!’

This amused them all, Elsa included.

‘Tomatoes it shall be. I suppose the food is rather dreary.’

‘It’s not so bad if you season it properly. Freshly ground salt and pepper make a difference.’ She gestured towards the grinders and summoned a smile. ‘Isobel calls them the aspersions. Casting aspersions on the food. But I’m persuading her.’

Sim looked with interest at Isobel.

‘She’s lucky in your company. She loves a joker. Even gives marks for trying.’

‘I’ll admit it wasn’t much of a joke,’ Isobel agreed amiably.

She was not sensitive on this subject, being aware that her own wit often outstripped her wellbeing. She was pleased to see that she had startled him.

He recovered quickly.

Indeed, one did give Sim marks for trying. His eagerness to please was reassuring.

Isobel looked back always to the first weeks of Sim’s visit as a happy time. In the company of grieving Sim and dying Elsa she was happier than she had ever been. There was the physical pleasure of health returning: she knew that the illness was over and the languor which kept her quiescent was the beginning of convalescence. There was the animal satisfaction she got out of enjoying food again, eating from hunger rather than forcing food down with determination and often with fortitude.

Elsa too was growing stronger. She was conscientious in attempting the food Sim brought and sometimes managed half a portion. Doctor Stannard smiled and declared her condition stable, if not a little improved.

Isobel was living on the shore of a great, shining lake of devotion which sometimes overflowed to touch her. It made no demands of her, except the respect she gave unasked; it did not exclude her. It existed, simply, and changed the climate round her.

Sim observed the routine of the hospital. He arrived every morning during the free hour, which gave him some private time with Elsa, while Isobel joined the group on the verandah. He brought gifts of food, which Isobel shared, stayed to prepare the lunch and then drove to the restaurant on the highway for his own meal. He came back for a visit at some time in the afternoon, observing the rest period with care. He was tolerated by the staff, his devotion to Elsa being much admired.

On Friday afternoons he drove to the city for the weekend.

‘I have to collect some scandal to amuse you, darling,’ he said to Elsa.

He talked at her request, or they were silent in a shared peace which made Isobel feel that she was in church—not the Catholic church of her childhood but some empty church in a foreign place, a space which imposed respect though it asked no obeisance.

At these moments she wished she could offer them privacy, but they were unselfconscious, untroubled by her presence, so that she began to share their serenity.

Sim brought salads and fruit and delicacies from David Jones’ food basement: anchovies, caviar, foie gras, which Isobel did not like at all but was glad to have tasted. It would be useful for future fiction to know what the rich ate.

His main mission was to persuade Elsa to eat. He searched the town for supplies of appetising food, arriving one morning in triumph, carrying two screw-top jars which he set down one on each cabinet.

‘Potato salad with sour cream dressing,’ he said modestly. ‘I have found the most divine little delicatessen. Run by migrants, a married couple, Czech, and such charmers. And they take food seriously. We talked for half an hour about recipes. They grow their own herbs. Basil on the tomatoes. I couldn’t believe it.’

Isobel, who could hardly believe that cream which had been acknowledged to be sour was considered fit for human consumption, eyed her portion with apprehension. She was determined not to betray her inexperience to these sophisticates: she attempted the first mouthful with apprehension, the second with relief, and the third with appetite.

There was food for the mind, too. Sim talked about the theatre, reporting on the plays he had seen in London, and Isobel made no pretence of absenting herself from the conversation. She had too many questions to ask, and his answers were enlightening. Indeed, she was useful, since Elsa confined herself to listening and smiling.

He did bring back scandal from the city: political scandal, literary scandal, stories of betrayal, divorce, slanderous anecdotes about the lives of people whose names were known to those who did not know them. She should not have listened to that, of course, and did pretend to be reading, but it was too entertaining to be ignored.

He brought progress reports on the foundering marriage of a pair named Paul and Marianne.

‘Looked at one way, Marianne’s a saint; looked at another way, she’s a kind of greenhouse where the vices of others come into full and glorious bloom. As for Rachel’ (who must be the villain of the piece) ‘she’s so suspicious of men that she has to get some other woman to try them first.’

Elsa had smiled and nodded, whispering, ‘Like an emperor with his taster.’

‘Precisely.’

Elsa listened to Sim’s gossip with the quiet relish of one sucking on an acid drop. This was at first disconcerting to Isobel, who had expected a nobler stance. But there it came again—the illusion that suffering ennobled.

Herself, knowing one system of ethics only, she put these remarks and many others away for future use.

Sim was looking for a house in the town.

‘I talked to that remarkably pretty doctor of yours. He says there’d be no objection to my taking you out for the day, so long as you feel up to it and there’s not too much walking.’

‘The hearty breakfast,’ said Elsa.

‘Now, don’t let’s have any naughty talk. I can move in the record collection and get a decent player so that we can have music.’

‘Oh!’

Elsa closed her eyes, this time not in fatigue but in joy.

‘As for the furniture, we’ll simply have to avert our eyes. Such horrors as I have seen, my dear!’

He went into the matter of wicker whatnots, photo frames encrusted with shells (‘like some disgusting skin disease, my dear’), flights of plaster ducks, an occasional table with sinister legs (‘Darling, I thought the object was
about to walk
’).

‘I shall simply have to dismiss aesthetics, that’s all. What do you think, darling? Could you make the effort?’

‘To hear music again, yes.’

‘Then I’ll settle for this last place, I think. And I’ll bring up the records next weekend.’

Elsa’s day out was planned, as Elsa whispered with amusement, like a safari, every detail a triumph or a concession in the long struggle between Sim and Sister Connor, who made every possible objection to the scheme. Sim asked for a wheelchair to take Elsa to the main door, he would bring the car to the door, there was no need for Elsa to dress, since he would take the car to the door of the rented house, she would lie down all day, yes, on a suitable bed—would Sister Connor care to come and inspect his arrangements? There would certainly be no visitors. He would observe every rule.

To Sister Connor’s objections he opposed Doctor Stannard’s permission, in the light of which he had taken a lease on a house. If he had known of all these restrictions he doubted that he would have taken such a step. He did not mention money, but its presence was understood.

Isobel noticed that, for all Sim’s eagerness to please an audience, he could be sharp; he believed that the spending of money brought privilege and he did not care to have that belief undermined.

He had expected to take Elsa to the house whenever she felt strong enough for the excursion. That was not to be allowed.

Allowed?

Sim’s astonishment amused them all.

The excursions were limited to one a week, on Thursday after rounds, with the doctor’s approval.

Sister Connor did not hold that all animals were equal but some were more equal than others.

It was on the night after the second excursion that Isobel was awakened by the noise of water running full and hard in the basin.

She could not turn on a light. The lights went out at the main switch at nine o’clock. After that there was only the glare from the great torches the nurses carried on their rounds and the moonlight and starlight which prevented C Ward from ever being completely dark.

Elsa was standing at the basin.

‘Elsa. Are you all right?’

‘Did I wake you? It’s nothing, dear. Just a bit pazzy. Those wretched tablets. I’m just getting back to bed. Go to sleep.’

*

Isobel however lay awake wondering at Elsa’s use of the word ‘pazzy’, which was certainly not part of her vocabulary. She might have said ‘bilious’ if it had been relevant. Isobel did not think it was relevant. If the PAS tablets brought on a bilious attack, that happened infallibly before lunch.

She had come back to the hospital, withdrawn in a quiet happiness which she did not seem to wish to interrupt by eating dinner.

Sister Knox’s affectionate protest, ‘Darling, if you’re naughty you won’t be allowed out again,’ had roused her only to a look of polite interest which quelled Sister Knox and made Doctor Wang particularly inscrutable.

Isobel, sure that Elsa was living in the memory of the day’s music, had not wished to disturb her.

She had got up to go to the lavatory, had cleaned her teeth and washed at the basin without any sign of bodily weakness. They had retired with minimal communication for the night.