Smut: Stories (2 page)

Still, conscientious though she was, she felt badly that she had been unable to tip Laura the wink about her upcoming falling down but Ballantyne had only cleared it with her shortly before the class began, treating it as some sort of trick he wanted to play on the students rather than as a proper teaching exercise. Mrs Donaldson hadn’t cared for the sense of conspiracy in which Ballantyne had cloaked the manoeuvre (‘Our little secret’), preferring always to know well in advance what it was she was supposed to be suffering from so that she could have all the symptoms at her fingertips. True, this pretend cerebral accident only involved her passing out but were there other warning signs…a headache for instance, which she could have referred to beforehand or more plainly counterfeited? Ballantyne brushed these considerations aside, even giving her a squeeze of congratulations afterwards, so that as with some of his other antics she felt the whole thing had less to do with the enlightenment of the students than with getting on a more intimate footing with her…something he had not yet managed to do.

‘You can understand it,’ said Delia. ‘You’ve lost your husband, he’s lost his wife. A son in Botswana apparently and the daughter’s married an optician. He’s probably lonely.’

When Mrs Donaldson got home Laura was in the kitchen.

‘To tell you the truth,’ said Laura, ‘I felt a bit sorry for you. He’s so disgusting.’

‘Terry?’ said Mrs Donaldson. ‘Yes, he is.’

‘No…or rather yes but Terry’s just a creep. I meant Ballantyne. All that, “You can get up now, dear lady.”’ She pulled a face. ‘I’m surprised you go along with it. Don’t you ever get embarrassed?’

‘He’s a man,’ said Mrs Donaldson. ‘And I only had to faint. Besides I should be grateful; the money comes in so useful.’

This was not an unconsidered remark.

Ideal though the young people were, in one respect (and that not the least important) they were both a disappointment and a worry since they were regularly behind with the rent. It did no harm, Mrs Donaldson thought, occasionally to remind them that householder though she was and with her own little car she was not exactly flush and that their contribution to the housekeeping, if and when they chose to make it, was not just a bonus; it was essential.

Had her daughter been made aware of the young people’s payment record Mrs Donaldson would never have heard the end of it, and so contentious an area was it she had the sense to keep it to herself, never in this or any other respect expressing less than satisfaction with what Gwen still referred to as ‘the lodgers’.

To be fair, the children, as Mrs Donaldson thought of them, were not unconcerned about their own fecklessness. They did not want to be reported to the lodgings syndicate still less thrown out and Laura had made up her mind to speak to Mrs Donaldson just at the time Mrs Donaldson had determined to speak to her.

Laura got in first taking the older woman’s hand.

‘About the rent,’ she said.

‘Yes?’ said Mrs Donaldson.

‘What’s this, what’s this?’ said Andy coming into the kitchen. ‘Holding hands?’

‘I was just telling Mrs D. We’ll get there in the end. With the rent.’

Andy took her other hand.

‘Yes. We’ll work something out.’

Mrs Donaldson didn’t think there was much to work out. They owed her money. It ought to be paid.

But Laura had made her a cup of tea and Andy volunteered to change the Hoover bag so the moment passed.

Mrs Donaldson’s next session at the medical school was with a duodenal ulcer, a complaint which she had no need to read up on as Mr Donaldson had suffered from it for most of his adult life. She knew all the symptoms, the site of the pain and what brought it on, which, in the case she was presenting, she decided was stress from her job as personal assistant to a captain of industry. What had brought it on with Mr Donaldson she couldn’t think; herself, she wondered sometimes, but if so he had never let on.

These were the first year and the diagnosis involved some inexpert kneading of her diaphragm, the students so vigorous in their application that Mrs Donaldson’s cry of pain when they hit the spot was scarcely feigned at all.

Ordinarily Dr Ballantyne would have been quick to protect the proto-patients against overzealous interference by the students if only because it was almost a ritual opportunity for heavy sarcasm (‘Has difficulty in swallowing, Mr Horrocks? Hardly surprising when you’ve got your fist down his throat’). Today, though, it was different as he was wholly taken up with a new weapon in the clinical armoury, a camcorder with which he was recording the proceedings.

Ballantyne insisted on wielding it personally (‘It’s a therapeutic tool. One needs to know where to point it. A camera to me is like a knife to a surgeon’). That he often pointed it at her notwithstanding, Mrs Donaldson thought it more of a toy than a tool but this was because her husband had been prey to similar passing technological fancies which were equally jealously guarded. The lawnmower had been a proscribed area, the CD player and even the electric carving-knife, all of which his death had liberated for her promiscuous deployment, one of the several joys of bereavement being that she no longer had to play the little woman.

Mrs Donaldson was also sceptical of the filming process itself since she felt the camera brought out the worst in the Simulated Patients, tempting them to dramatise and show off, an assessment with which Delia tended to agree.

‘How can you be natural with that thing poking up your nose?’

There was Terry, for instance, who that afternoon had been diagnosed with terminal cancer. Now whenever he felt the camera in the offing he looked into the middle distance as if contemplating his tragic future and the coming beyond.

Miss Beckinsale, though never one to underplay, was in this instance unimpressed. As she pointed out to Mrs Donaldson she was no stranger to the camera, as her presentation of dementia was so highly thought of she had even done it ‘on a proper camera’ in Glasgow and taken it to a case conference in the Isle of Man.

As it was, Mrs Donaldson’s scepticism over the camcorder seemed fully justified. The following Thursday she had Crohn’s Disease but by this time the instrument had lost much of its appeal and seemed no longer to be the vital weapon in the fight against disease it had been the week before.

To be fair, this was not due to Ballantyne’s light-mindedness. He thought highly of his little troupe who were in their way pioneers. But when he came to review the material he had shot Ballantyne was depressed to find how unconvincing so much of it seemed; it was lengthy, flat and wholly without form. Presentations which at the time he had found real and natural, on tape seemed stagey and contrived.

Some of this could be put down to the inexperience of the patient simulators where the camera was concerned but in fact all that was wrong was that the tape needed editing. With nobody to put him right Ballantyne gave up on the whole experiment and since he could scarcely explain or account for this to the group it seemed to confirm Mrs Donaldson’s unkind presentiment at the start.

She at least had come over well on tape, or so the doctor thought, while at the same time aware that he looked on her with a kindlier eye than he did on any of her colleagues; if the truth were known he was also slightly afraid of her. Had she been aware of this she in her turn might have felt kindlier towards the doctor, but, as it was, all she and Delia saw was that the toy of the week before now spent much of the session confined to the top of its tripod where it surveyed what went on with its single Cyclopean eye.

‘And then they say they’re underfunded,’ said Delia.

At home the matter of the rent remained unresolved with the young people now four weeks in arrears. Cyril would never have put up with it, she told herself, though he would never have had lodgers in the first place and her own resentment made her feel both a bore and a spoilsport. Still she determined to speak out.

Actually she hadn’t seen them for several days, both keeping out of her way she imagined, but coming in from the hospital one evening she found them together in the kitchen and it was as if they had been waiting for her.

Andy made her a cup of tea. (That was the way they were good, she thought, though knowing that Gwen would just tell her she was naive.)

‘What did you have today?’ said Laura.

‘I presented with another boring duodenal ulcer but there was some suggestion from Guess Who that it might be a hiatus hernia. Heartburn anyway.’

‘Worry?’ said Laura.

‘Probably,’ said Mrs Donaldson, ‘though the most recent research suggests that it can be bacterial.’

‘That’s right,’ said Laura. ‘I’m supposed to know that. About the money.’

‘It’s four weeks,’ said Andy.

‘Is it?’ said Mrs Donaldson. ‘I’m not sure,’ and pretended to count. ‘Yes, it’s four weeks.’

‘We’ve got one week,’ said Andy and put an envelope on the table. ‘We can’t manage any more right now and the thing is we wondered if we could come to some agreement about the rest. Do something…’ and he examined the inside of his teacup, ‘in lieu.’

‘You do so much for us,’ said Laura. ‘We wondered if we could do something for you for a change.’

‘In lieu,’ said Andy again.

Mrs Donaldson’s thoughts were running to housework, gardening and even painting and decorating, none of which she needed help with and certainly not to the tune of three weeks’ arrears of rent.

‘We talked it over in bed last night,’ said Laura ‘and it occurred to me that having seen you down at the hospital demonstrating we wondered if you would like it if…’

‘We put on a demonstration for you,’ said Andy. ‘In lieu.’

Mrs Donaldson did not immediately understand.

‘A demonstration? What of?’

Andy took out his diary.

‘THIS USED TO BE OUR ROOM,’ said Mrs Donaldson, ‘when Mr Donaldson was alive.’

‘We like it,’ said Laura.

It was a few nights later and Mrs Donaldson had just drawn the curtains and with as much care (though for a different reason) as her mother would once have drawn the curtains in the blackout.

With regard to what was on offer Mrs Donaldson was still having difficulty bridging the gap between her first misapprehensions on the lines of bob-a-job and the something more…grown-up that was now in active preparation. She was far from looking forward to the prospect but was finding it hard to put off these well-meaning young people without seeming ungrateful.

‘Have you ever seen anyone making love?’ said Laura.

‘To tell you the truth,’ said Mrs Donaldson pretending to cast her mind back, ‘I don’t think I have.’

‘Oh good,’ said Laura. ‘We were bothered it might not be much of a novelty.’

‘Oh no,’ said Mrs Donaldson, ‘it would. It would.’ Though given the choice she still wasn’t sure she might have preferred marigolds. ‘No, I’ve never done anything like this before.’

‘We haven’t either,’ said Laura. ‘We’ve done it with other people around obviously, the way you do, at parties and so on, but never by prearrangement. Not…not…’

‘Formally?’ suggested Mrs Donaldson.

‘Formally, that’s it.’

‘Oh it won’t be formal,’ said Andy coming in only in his shirt and underpants and with a bottle of water. ‘It’ll be very relaxed. Though I wouldn’t want you running away with the idea we do anything particularly adventurous. It’s good wholesome stuff, nothing…esoteric. We’re not into that, are we, Lol? Not yet anyway.’

‘Well the way I look at it’, said Laura, firmly, ‘is that there is plenty of time for that in due course. Don’t you agree?’

‘Oh yes,’ said Mrs Donaldson. ‘All in good time.’

‘Now, candles, candles,’ said Andy and went out.

‘Where would you like to sit?’ Laura said.

‘I don’t mind,’ said Mrs Donaldson, who was all the time thinking that there must come a point when she would pluck up courage and call a halt. ‘I can sit here if you like.’

She perched on a chair at the foot of the bed.

‘Fine, if you’re happy with that,’ Laura said, who suddenly had no top on or bra either so that seeing her Mrs Donaldson had to rummage in her handbag for a tissue.

‘Except,’ said Laura, ‘the drawback with sitting there is that you’re going to get an awful lot of Andy’s bum and not much else. I think you’d be better off here.’ And she patted the chintz-covered stool that stood in front of the dressing-table mirror on which, when she and her late husband inhabited this room, Mrs Donaldson used to perch every night to apply her cold cream.

‘If you sit there,’ said Laura, ‘you’ll see him and you’ll see me like, you know, interacting.’

She disappeared into the bathroom leaving Mrs Donaldson sitting by the bed. At which point she had (and almost heard) that slow deep pumping of the heart she had not felt since she was a girl. ‘Life,’ she thought.

Andy now came in with three candles which he lit and disposed around the room, one of them Mrs Donaldson noted in a bowl they had been given as a wedding present, but she didn’t say anything. Andy switched off the light.

‘That’s better.’

He took off his shirt though not his pants and lay on the bed, his hands clasped behind his head.

‘This is awfully kind of you,’ said Mrs Donaldson, wondering at the same time if they were going to take the coverlet off first.

‘Don’t worry,’ said Andy. ‘We’d be doing it anyway. It’s not just for your benefit.’

He looked down his flat narrow belly to his exiguous underpants.

‘Nothing much doing at the moment, I’m afraid. It’s not a problem but I’m finding that’s often the case these days. I have to wait until the dog sees the rabbit.’

At which point Laura came in bra-less as she had been before but now with no pants on either. Naked in fact. Mrs Donaldson blew her nose as Laura lay down on the bed on the side nearest Mrs Donaldson.

‘This is nice,’ said Andy, lifting up his knees and arching his bum as he slipped off his underpants. ‘There. See what I mean?’

Mrs Donaldson smiled in kindly acknowledgement of this new component of the scene.

Laura’s left hand now rested lightly on Andy’s right thigh.