Repeat It Today With Tears (17 page)

The next time she was brought in to a meeting some weeks had elapsed. I must have done something so that they sedated me again. She sat on the edge of a hard chair and when her skirt rode up her crossed legs in their tea coloured tights she hitched the hem down again on those thighs that she did not shave. They should ask her about that, I thought.

Derrick Hearn’s assistant in her crimplene pinafore dress questioned whether I had had any male teachers at school. I remembered Mr Cork for music; a girl with a double-barrelled surname had found a Durex wrapper in the street and placed it in his pigeonhole outside the staff room. I said nothing.

‘What about film stars, pop singers, who do you like?’

Who was the man in the film called
Morgan A Suitable Case for Treatment
I wondered. David Warner, that was right. I had liked David Warner and Terence Stamp. When I was twelve and plump I had sent anonymously a badge saying ‘I Love You’ in an envelope addressed to Terence Stamp, The Albany, London. When I was sixteen I met a young man in the Chelsea Potter with hair like a yellow lamb; he told me that he was a singer in the chorus of a musical and that he had had his heart broken by Terence Stamp.

‘
Noggin the Nog
was good,’ I said ‘… and the
Pinky and Perky Show
, when the puppets used to jig about to records, that was ever so clever.’

‘How many times did you have full intercourse with your father?’

How many indeed, I wondered. A hundred times, a hundred times a hundred times. On more than one of those uncounted, sweet and blissful times, Jack wept. Once it was when he was as high inside me as he could go and yet even so he despaired of his labours. Still he pushed harder and he said that he wished that he could reach my heart that way. Then I felt that there were tears on his face and I sipped them up as though they were spoonfuls and he, excusing or confessing his repeated efforts, said, ‘I don’t want to let there be any part of you that I have not touched.’

The woman in the sludge coloured pinafore dress said, ‘Well, I can see that you’re determined not to be helpful today,’ and she and my mother exchanged glances as though they were in the head-scarved huddle at the school gates, sharing anecdotes of maternal and spousal hardship.

Again they expected my mother to return to my room and sit with me a while. I could tell that she would rather not. My head ached from her resenting presence.

‘You needn’t stay,’ I said.

‘I’ll leave you to them then,’ she said, bridling a little. ‘There’s nothing I can do, obviously.’

After that she left it to two or three times in a year.

Because nobody ever comes to visit me it was unexpected, that windy autumn afternoon when Bonnie Jean, walking slowly because her new shoes pinched, came to tell me that I had a visitor, if I wanted one.

Some half an hour beforehand I had been looking down onto the visitors’ car park from my window. I liked watching the brown leaves of London plane and sycamore skittering and chasing after each other across the asphalt. I had noted a
woman whose blonde and white hair was lifted at the back with a bar and pin slide. Although this person was unknown to me some quality about her made me feel that I ought to recognise her. Then she was lost to sight within the building and soon afterwards snatches of rain began, hitting the window panes as if thrown in handfuls and making patent shiny the blown and antic leaves.

My premonition about the woman persisted. I wondered if she were some agent of pipe man, another in his chess set of psychologists and analysts and social workers ranked to trick me into talking and to confessing what a deviant I was. I opened my door fractionally and heard the visitor talking in the corridor to Bonnie Jean, who should at that hour be taking her break in the small square airless staff room. ‘I’m not a relation as such, just a distant family connection, by marriage.’ There was a trace of the north in her voice and a matter-of-fact element; also, she seemed quickly out of breath.

‘Well, I’m sure that will be fine and I must say I’m glad to see you, she never has any visitors, this one.’

I heard them coming towards my room and I wanted to escape. I wished that the windows were not locked shut; I would have gone that way if needs be. ‘Well, here we are, here’s our Susanna,’ said Bonnie Jean brightly but looking as though she wished she had made me wash my face and comb my hair.

My visitor was the solid woman with hair of now whitening blonde. It was caught up in a bundle at the back and the pin slide was made of tooled leather. She wore a black coat and glasses with gold wire frames. ‘I hope you don’t mind if I first sit down,’ she said. She seemed noticeably breathless. She took the visitor’s chair; I sat on my bed and hugged my knees which were my paling fence.

‘Well,’ she said, ‘well, it’s led me a merry dance, finding you.’
She unwound from her neck a long hand-blocked silk scarf in green and purple which may have been the souvenir of somebody’s far eastern travels. On the collar of her blouse I saw that she wore a modern oval brooch in silver and coloured enamel-work but I already knew that she was Olive.

‘My name is Olive,’ she began, ‘Olive Owen.’

I knew that there was nothing I could do but sit and wait. Her eyes were pale blue grey and her nose tilted up a little, a feature which can be charming in youth and can even make an older woman’s face look younger, if she’s lucky. If she knows, I thought, if she knows at least I will be able to ask her why she has dropped the first part of his name. I would never do that. ‘If one of you had been a boy… ’ said my mother in her grievances. If I had been Jack’s son I could have used the ‘ap’ as well. I wondered if this visitor woman was going to shout at me. Breathing seemed to be intermittently difficult for her, her doll mouth went into a small straight line and she was silent, looking downwards. I thought she might be noticing the whorls of white fluff that rolled playfully in little billows under my high bed like cartoon mice. Some days I watched them for hours at a time.

‘Sorry about that,’ she said, after a while, ‘I’ve got this stupid heart thing and it can mean that I get a little out of breath. Do you like art?’

Instead of under the bed she had been regarding the pile of books on my locker shelf.

‘Sometimes, it depends.’

‘Well, that’s good, and perhaps it will make my task easier, in some ways. Do you mind if I call you Susanna?’

Own up now, you might as well, I said to myself. So many secrets and some of them so very beautiful. Jack’s hands.

‘I am Susie. My name is Susanna but people call me Susie.’

‘Well, Susie, there’s things I need to talk to you about, if that’s
all right. I feel that it is important to me, I want to try and get to know you, if I may. I am Jack’s wife.’

‘Who is Jack?’

‘Your father, Susie.’

‘I haven’t got a father.’

‘Yes, Susie.’

‘No Susie, no know Susie, know nothing Susie, no things at all.’

I wanted something I could button across my chest. Bonnie Jean came in with cups of tea on a tray. ‘Please help me find my cardigan,’ I said.

‘I thought this might be welcome,’ she said to Olive as she set down her cup. I thought that she could not hear me.

‘Please help me,’ I said.

‘It’s here, darling, here it is,’ she brought it to me on the bed, ‘Remember, you can only wear one sleeve. Don’t try to put your bad arm in, honey, you know you’re not to have anything touching on that now.’

Olive picked up her teacup but her eyes were on the unclothed limb and its bandaging and splint. Bonnie Jean, to emphasise her point about the sleeve, had lifted my left arm gently and laid it down again on the cellular blanket cover. One humid summer night I had played a juvenile, foolery game with the husband of the woman who sat beside me. Unable to sleep due to the heat and to the insatiate lust which even to our own selves was a wonder and a delight, we had done that thing that children do, piling hand over hand, describing an ascending tower in the air. I recall that one of the sheets had been wrinkled and rumpled into a roll, as though someone in a laundry had been wringing it out. ‘You win,’ said Jack and collapsed himself on top of me.

‘Why don’t you try your tea, it’s very good,’ said my father’s wife and Bonnie Jean, at the edge of the room, nodded her approval.

‘I can’t,’ I said, ‘I can’t do it.’

Simultaneously both women must have decided to interpret this as drinking my tea.

Olive said, ‘Shall I… ’ and Bonnie Jean said no, that she had better; to me she said, ‘Would you like a pink pill with it, Susie, would that be a good idea now?’

I nodded and some minutes were used up by her administering the tea and the pill during which Olive could not speak to me.

‘She’s not used to seeing people from outside. Have you come far?’ Bonnie Jean, smoothing my head, enquired of my father’s wife.

‘Quite far, Suffolk, actually, but I am used to the drive, at one time I did it two or three days a week, for work.’

When you were teaching, I thought, at Kingston School of Art.

‘Where were you working, then?’ Bonnie Jean makes conversation as she chafes my wrist and tells me there, there, now.

‘At an art school.’

‘Well, there’s a nice coincidence, isn’t it now, Susanna? This girl is so keen on art, you would not believe, isn’t that right, Susanna?’

‘I am very cold.’

‘All right, feet under the covers then, come on,’ Bonnie Jean is immensely patient; whenever she waits for me to complete tasks she stands impassive, with one hand on her chest and the other on her hip until I have done, as though she has all the time in the world.

‘Yes, I noticed the books; who have you got there?’ Olive leans forward so that she can read the titles on the spine.

‘There is nobody else here. I live here on my own.’

‘You do seem to like a wide range of work, Susie. It must
be something you’ve inherited; I suppose you can inherit such things.’

I suspect that she will confront me as soon as Bonnie Jean leaves us alone together. I wonder if she carries a picture of Jack in her head; righteously, holding it up for me to see, like the banner of a protest demonstrator or a statue on a Holy Day. I hope not. Strictly speaking he belongs only to me, she should be told that. I am his one and only, now and ever shall be. But inside I was becoming less pugnacious and more panicky. Silently I began to abjure her, whimpering please do not have a picture of my father inside your head, make it anyone else, a random stranger, the better man you could have married. Please, not him.

Olive, with or without her mental placard of righteous indignation, had got up and was walking around my room. She paused by the window, I might have supposed that she was being considerate and discreet in looking away, in case Bonnie Jean had to perform some personal or undignified task upon me, but she wasn’t.

She turned and made her move, ‘There’s an awful lot I’d like to say to you, Susie, if I may.’

Seeing that I could not get up and run away and save myself from Olive and her head pictures and the awful awe full words she had stored up to say to me I did the ostrich thing instead. If you cover your eyes and face with your raised arms it keeps people out quite effectively. If your left arm is incapacitated by bandaging and splint you can still manage somehow with one; it is, after all, a desperate measure.

‘Come on, ostrich’ Trevor always says, ‘I know you’re in there somewhere.’

‘I don’t think she’ll be up to much more today,’ said Bonnie Jean.

‘I understand. I’ll come another day, Susie, if that’s all right.’

Sister Anna Maria, the library trolley nun whose eyelids flutter like trapped moths, says that only God can sort things out. So far I do not pray because I could only form the plea to have Jack back and if God cannot do that then what chance is there that I will ever be able to believe.

That teacher, Mrs Bartlett, who taught the foundation of languages in the first year at Clapham County, devoted one lesson to the role of myths and legends. A mere thirty-five minutes from drilling bell to drilling bell, but I recall much of the content, particularly Herne the Hunter. A being who can turn cows’ milk to blood is not likely to be forgotten. ‘Some of you might have visited Windsor Great Park with your parents,’ she said, ‘Herne the Hunter was believed to stalk the Forest of Windsor.’

‘You may think you can carry on indefinitely like this, Susanna, but I can assure you that you cannot, we are arranging for you to see a neurologist about your arm, you’ve caused a great deal of damage to yourself,’ says Derrick Hearn.

When I am able to answer him back I can feel again, just for a moment, the Kings Road pavements beneath my feet; and, tasting the sweet angelica trace of Pimms No 1, I can flick my long hair and curl my glossy lips and remember that I was once a victor.

‘Where do you live, Windsor?’ I asked him.

‘No, but staff do not disclose their home addresses.’

I nearly said, ‘Why, are you afraid us loonies will give you a heavy breather?’ but it was only ever personalities like Alison who could carry off such cocky ripostes and anyway I must try never to let him hear me utter any sexual reference.

When I was taken back to my room there was an envelope lying on the bed cover.

‘What’s this?’ I asked the auxiliary who worked with Bonnie Jean. She said that she was sure she did not know and taking up the linen she had changed she left me on my own.

Postmarked Suffolk, it was a large envelope, very like the one that Jack, guilty and elated in unequal measure – probably the ratio being 1:3 – had once despatched from a Sloane Square dawn to his wife in that county. Now that she had tracked me down at last, I saw that Olive, in an elegant symmetry of recriminative impersonation, was having her revenge. Perhaps the content was exactly the same; no accompanying letter; though the guilty lecture notes and carefully annotated slides being message enough for me to understand her meaning, shuttled back across the postal service. I know who you are, I know what you did, shouts the coded message from within his careful script, pause for slide, Jan Steen.