Perfect Happiness (22 page)

‘Yes.’

‘You should have come before.’

How they do like to rap you over the knuckles, these people, Zoe thought. ‘If you turn a blind eye to a problem there's always a good chance it'll lose its nerve,’ she said cheerfully. And I never could be bothered fussing over the blights of femininity. Certainly I'm not going to waste time over some damn menopausal ailment. She glanced at her watch. You kept me waiting fifty minutes, chum, my time costs money too. ‘O.K.’ – placatingly – ‘I should have come. Sorry.’

The doctor, now, was consulting a list. He looked at her. He began to talk. And Zoe, listening, registering with shock and amazement what he was saying, found herself studying his face, an unfamiliar face, a somewhat unappealing face. How perverse, she thought, that some of the more intense moments of one's life should take place in intimacy with people one does not know. She saw, quite clearly, the long-since face of a French nun leaning over her, holding a mewing baby. The doctor finished what he had to say and waited for her to speak; she could think only that his face, too, would loiter in the head.

*

She said to Frances, ‘Oh, by the way – I'll be away for a few days from the end of next week. A job in Rome. So don't bother to ring.’

Through the ensuing days she smiled. She smiled at people and talked of other things and within she felt the queasy hollowness of fear. And a great solitude. She lay awake at night, reading to pass the hours. But her eyes travelled over the print and she talked to herself. She said: It is not necessarily cancer. From what he said I would make an informed guess that there is about a fifty per cent chance that it is not. Which means that there is a fifty per cent chance that it is. And if it is, as he so delicately explained, there is a good deal that can be done. ‘One of the more treatable ones.’ Well, this time next week I shall know. I shall come out of the anaesthetic and someone in a white gown will sit by the bed and tell me, in good B movie style.

She was suffused with rage. The rage, at times, drove out the fear and she hurried about what she had to do in a storm of indignation. I haven't time to be ill, she fumed, I have too darn much to do, above all I haven't time to die.

The world had never shone so brightly. Wherever she went in the city she was transfixed, as though she saw for the first time the crisp frontages of the Nash terraces, the symmetries of the darkly stooping trees in the parks, the opalescence of clouds above the river. She watched from her window, from buses and taxis, and recorded its indifference. She could not decide if the inhumanity of what she saw outweighed its pleasure; she worried at this as though there might be a correct answer. Is the physical world a comfort or not?

When Tabitha telephoned Zoe was brisk and gay. Tabitha would be going back to Cambridge next week. ‘I have to go away for a few days,’ said Zoe. ‘See you thereafter…’

She could not endure sympathy. The rest she could stand, would get through with. Alone. If I have to come to it, she thought, the visits and the forced optimism and the bloody flowers and the damn grapes, then I have to come to it. But for the time being I'll do it on my own.

There is time, which is supposed to be linear, and there are seconds and minutes and hours which are supposed to be of a particular duration. And there are also days, in which we live. The day on which Zoe went into hospital was not linear, neither was it composed of minutes or hours that bore any resemblance to one another. They raced, or they crept. Occasionally the day stopped altogether and hung suspended in the greenish light of the ward, quite self-contained, like the sterile world of a space capsule.

Once, obediently, Zoe padded down corridors in her dressing-gown and slippers to be wired up to a machine that whirred and clicked and showered figures and numbers across a television screen. ‘Your heart,’ said a woman in white, ‘is quite normal.’ ‘I'm glad to hear it,’ replied Zoe. ‘I've sometimes wondered.’ The woman smiled. ‘Back to the ward now. Can you find your way?’ Zoe padded off, past ordinary people in their suits and dresses and jackets, a creature apart. Now I know, she thought, why the first thing they do with prisoners is remove their clothes.

In the ward, she sat on a chair reading. Nurses, from time to time, tried to tidy her away into the bed. ‘No thanks,’ said Zoe. ‘If you don't mind. I'm not ill till tomorrow.’

Most of the women were old. Their grey or white hair was a curious affront to their pastel nightclothes, to the lemon nylon and pale pink candlewick and the frills and arch transparencies, as though they were macabre dolls. Some sat propped against pillows, others shuffled past, peeping at Zoe with curious eyes. She was offered sweets and newspapers; hospitals are kindly places; people are nice to one another. Sometimes it was still morning, the morning on which she had been told to present herself, and at other times a gilded evening light flooded down through the high windows, striping the shiny linoleum floor. The day folded back and forth; she was no longer in real time, just as she was no longer in the real world.

She tried to penetrate the customs of the place, as though it were an alien society; nurses, she noted, are labelled by name and their rank denoted by subtleties of dress. She observed caps and the colours of sleeves. She talked to a young woman hooked up to a Christmas tree of chrome and tubes and bright pouches of blood and serum. ‘What are you in for?’ asked the girl. ‘Armed robbery,’ said Zoe. The girl, clutching her side, laughed, and the Christmas tree danced and glinted. An old woman shuffled by on her way to the lavatory, steered from behind by a nurse with both hands on her hips; the light shone through the old woman's nightdress so that the body beneath was like a statue, heavy thighs and sagging breasts, a dark clump of pubic hair.

A young woman doctor came and talked to Zoe. ‘Don't worry,’ she kept saying. ‘I'm not,’ said Zoe with honesty. What she felt was not worry but a curious deadening, akin to hopelessness; she had stepped aside from life, and did not expect to step back.

In the evening, she got into the bed. The ward doors were opened and visitors arrived, homing upon the bedsides to sit awkwardly there like gaolers or ministering priests. When the bell rang and they left the ward seemed to heave a little with relief. Nurses came round with trolleys, dishing out pills and drug cocktails in tiny plastic cups. Zoe was given a mug of Ovaltine and a sleeping pill. ‘Nothing more for you till after the op,’ said the nurse. ‘They'll be taking you down to the theatre at ten.’ Zoe declined the pill. ‘Sure?’ said the nurse doubtfully. ‘Some people feel a bit wakeful, the night before.’ ‘No thanks,’ said Zoe. ‘I've never touched the things.’

She did not sleep at all. Time had failed altogether. Now and for always she lay in the twilight of the ward, listening sometimes to the noises – the squeak of the nurses' shoes, the sighs and moans of patients – and drifting at other times into a kind of privacy in which she summoned up ghosts. She talked to Steven and to Frances. She shuffled the pack of days and selected one here and one there; she lay with Eric in a bed in Prague, when first she knew him; she watched an infant Tabitha take her first wobbling steps across a sun-blotched lawn; she had a row with a one-time boss, a glorious liberating eruptive moment of verbal violence, as cleansing to the spirit as absolution. But for the most part she simply lay there, passive, alone and yet surrounded by people whose breathings and sighings gave the ward a corporate life as though it were some great somnolent creature. From time to time there were crises: someone would call out, nurses pattered to and fro. Screens were put round a bed; a doctor came. Beyond the screens voices muttered. A nurse kept saying, ‘It's all right, dear.’ Someone groaned and groaned. Zoe turned on to her side. When it was daylight the screens were gone and the bed was empty, clean sheets strapped tightly to the mattress. She thought, I have been present at the death of a person I never knew.

It was another day. Early morning of another day. The end of which was invisible in a particular sense. All days are open-ended, she thought, this one is more open than others. And with the thought came an odd tranquillity. The dull queasiness that had gnawed at her for a week now ebbed away and in its place there came a determination. She knew that whichever way it turned out, she had gained something in these last surreal hours. She remembered what she herself had said to Tabitha: Nothing is wasted.

The woman doctor returned. She said, ‘All right?’ She sat for a moment on Zoe's bed; her young face was strained with fatigue. Zoe said, ‘I'm fine, love.’ She added, ‘You've been up half the night, haven't you?’ The girl nodded. This place is driving me sentimental, Zoe thought, something is happening to my natural distrust of humanity. I keep seeing goodness.

She was given an injection, and floated into a careless drunken world in which nothing really mattered. An elderly Pakistani toured the ward with an immense floor-polisher, importantly poking it beneath the beds. He said to Zoe, ‘Machine is coming.’ ‘So I see,’ said Zoe. ‘Is very good machine, is doing very good cleaning’; the hospital and its mysterious workings were relegated, he ran his hand down the metal stem of the polisher with respectful familiarity, like a groom handling a thoroughbred. ‘It's a beautiful machine,’ said Zoe.

Presently, hands lifted her on to a trolley. She slid down corridors, gazing at the shiny ceilings. Time ceased altogether.

Morris and Frances sat in deck chairs in Green Park. At a short distance the band played, bestowing an atmosphere of decorous carnival. Dogs scampered; a child turned somersaults; Frances said, ‘What a good idea this was.’ Morris glowed.

It was their second outing. She had come with him to a South Bank concert and now, a week later, he had felt able to telephone at short notice and wonder if she would care for an afternoon at Burlington House, followed by tea in the park. And here they were. From time to time Morris gazed, furtively, at Frances. She wore a sea-green dress and high-heeled sandals. He liked the way she wore very little make-up and the streak of grey across the front of her fair hair was undisguised; deceptions, of any kind, had always irritated him. A tribulation of his professional life was the interviewing of opera divas that he from time to time had to do. One glossy lady had lied so prodigiously about her age that he had listened to her with distaste ever since. Which was irrational: her voice remained the same. Preoccupied, momentarily, with this theme of honesty, it occurred to him that there was one thing he ought to make clear before this friendship, if friendship it were to be, got any further. He said ‘My wife left me.’

‘Yes,’ said Frances. ‘You said so. When we met in Venice.’

Morris, doggedly, added, ‘I mean she simply got tired of me. It wasn't that there was anyone else.’ It occurred to him, now, that he might be inflicting confidences where they were not welcome. In confusion, he added, ‘Not that it matters.’

‘Of course it matters,’ said Frances. ‘It must have been awful. But it's all over now, I imagine.’

‘In so far as things are ever over.’

‘That's a gloomy line to take. And quite the wrong one for me just now.’

‘I'm sorry,’ said Morris, in anguish. ‘That was thoughtless.’ After a moment he went on tentatively, ‘Are things… any better?’

‘Sometimes they're better and sometimes they're not. But probably more better than worse.’ Frances paused; the band finished a selection from
The Mikado
and there was a flutter of applause. ‘I got absurdly distressed a couple of weeks ago because I found that Steven had been briefly engaged to someone before I met him. It unnerved me, in some way, that that should always have existed and I never knew. But I think I've digested it now. It doesn't seem so important.’

Morris nodded. He wished that he had not asked that. Now the husband hung there again, an inhibiting presence. I must not get into the position of some kind of therapist, he thought, that would be to start off on the wrong foot. He pushed Steven aside, with a twinge of guilt. ‘I've been putting into practice your advice about indexing. The thing begins to look more shapely.’

‘Good,’ said Frances. And beamed. ‘It's nice to be useful.’

At which point Morris became, it later seemed to him, slightly unhinged. He reached out across the gap between their two chairs and took her hand. They sat there, thus, looking at one another. Frances wore an expression of mild panic which Morris misinterpreted as distaste; he continued to hold her hand but his stomach lurched and he could find nothing to say. Frances, in anxiety, could only think: But you are not Steven; I don't know if I can go on with this; you are not Steven.

Tabitha, on the train to Cambridge, watched the landscape flow past; the same landscape that had flown the other way three months before. Opposite, a young man she slightly knew, a medical student, was going on about dissection. ‘Yuck,’ said Tabitha, ‘I don't know how you can.’ A small town streamed by: church tower, wet slate roofs, red brick cartwheels of a housing estate; I've seen that before, she thought, I remember the church. ‘Is it right,’ she said, ‘that your blood cells are changing all the time?’

‘They renew themselves,’ said the medical student, ‘every few weeks.’

‘And skin?’

‘That's growing and flaking all the time.’

‘I am not physically the same person that I was three months ago,’ said Tabitha. ‘Not even that.’

‘Oh well, come on,’ said the boy. ‘Bones… Muscles… Do you want a cup of coffee?’

‘Thanks,’ said Tabitha. The boy went off to the buffet car and she continued to watch the landscape. It is much more than three months, she thought, since I came past here; time is not only to do with months or weeks, it is to do with feelings and what you know and who you are. Time eats you up; there is practically nothing of me that is the same as when I last saw that church, those trees.