The Shortest Journey

SMASHWORDS EDITION

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PUBLISHED BY:

Copyright © 2010 by Hazel Holt

Published by Coffeetown Press

PO Box 95462 Seattle, WA 98145

Contact: [email protected]

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Cover design by Sabrina Sun

Copyright © 2010 by Hazel Holt

ISBN: 978-1-60381-055-5 (Paper)

ISBN: 978-1-60381-057-9 (ePub)

ISBN: 978-1-60381-056-2 (Cloth)

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‘Is a good family,’ Mrs Jankiewicz said, ‘but there
is no title.’

She was silent for a moment, contemplating this
insurmountable flaw and I said quickly, ‘But Sophie is very happy
with him.’

‘Oh, happy.’ Mrs Jankiewicz shrugged.

‘And,’ I pursued, ‘he is Polish and a Roman
Catholic.’

‘Is true,’ she admitted. ‘Zofia’ – she gave her
daughter’s name its proper pronunciation – ‘is a good Polish girl.
She would not marry a foreigner.’

We both sat quietly drinking our tea. It was a
conversation we had had many times. Zofia Jankiewicz (now Zofia
Borowska) was no longer a girl – she was my contemporary and I was
now in my middle fifties – and she had been married for twenty
years. But to the elderly no topic of conversation is ever quite
finished; it can be brought out again and again, and each time a
little more can be added to it.

‘His father was a captain with General Zajac in
Tehran. His uncle was an attaché in London. Was a good family.’

She was silent again and I looked round the room with
my customary feeling of sadness. It was quite a good-sized room and
had a nice view of the sea (that was one of the pleasant features
of West Lodge, which made it superior to the other nursing homes in
Taviscombe) but it was woefully inadequate to house all the objects
that Mrs Jankiewicz had brought with her from her large house in
Park Walk. Mrs Wilmot, the Matron, had tried to protest as, under
Mrs Jankiewicz’s brisk supervision, ornamental rugs were nailed up
on the walls, large pieces of ornately carved furniture were heaved
into place and a multiplicity of heavy silver objects was
distributed about the room. But such was the force of the old
lady’s personality (although half-blind with cataracts and
practically crippled with arthritis) that she was allowed to create
around her in this unpromising setting a sort of little
Poland-in-miniature. True, the staff muttered a little as they
moved the objects to dust – but they did so under their breath,
since Mrs Jankiewicz held autocratic views on domestic staff and
they were all decidedly in awe of her.

‘Do you want some more tea, Sheila?’ she asked. ‘I
will ring for the girl. Alas, I cannot give you proper tea in this
place.’

We both turned our heads and looked at the silver
samovar sitting on a small table. That had been one battle she had
not won. I regarded the samovar with affection. When I was a girl
and had gone to tea with Sophie – we had been at school together –
it had always seemed to me the most glamorous object imaginable.
Indeed, the whole household was so different and so much more
exciting than any other I had ever known. Dr Jankiewicz was a
delightful man, quiet and agreeable, amused, I thought, by his
exuberant wife, whose exotic conversation and foreign ways
fascinated me. Sophie was simply my friend. English at school and
‘a good Polish girl’ at home, she led two lives, as all
second-generation refugees seemed to do.

But now Dr Jankiewicz was dead, and Sophie, who had
also become a doctor, was married and living in Canada with her
husband. Sophie had wanted her mother to go to Canada with them,
but Mrs Jankiewicz had been firm.

‘Not another country.’ she said. ‘First was Poland,
then Siberia, then Persia, then Lebanon, then England. I stay in
England.’

With her usual resolute practicality she had sold her
house, forced a large number of objects upon a reluctant Sophie
(‘Honestly, Sheila, it’s going to cost more to ship them out to
Nova Scotia than all our fares put together! And where on earth are
we going to put them in our apartment?’) and settled herself in at
West Lodge. Here she rapidly gained ascendancy, so that after only
a few months she was recognised as Chief Resident and both the
other residents and the staff were, on the whole, proud of her,
rather as one might be of a cumbersome but rare and valuable piece
of furniture whose prestige compensates for its awkwardness.

I was very fond of her, not only because I had
reached the age when I valued things and people connected with my
youth, but also for her own unique blend of warmth and
eccentricity.

‘Mr Williams’s son came yesterday.’ she said. ‘Is a
bad man, not good to his father. He comes only when he wants
something – money, of course, for that business of his. But is
throwing the good money after the bad – he will never make it pay
because he does not work hard. Is wrong to give him more and I tell
Mr Williams this, but he not listen to anyone, even to me.’

Mrs Jankiewicz had channelled her still considerable
energy into evolving an information system that made MI5 look like
pitiful amateurs. She called it taking an interest. But hers was a
benevolent autocracy; she was always on the look-out for wrongs
done to any of the other old people.

‘Someone must see to their rights,’ she would say.
‘Is only me; their children do not care. They were not brought up
well, like my Zofia.’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I saw Mr Williams’s son the last time
he came to see the old man. He struck me as a nasty piece of work,
smarming round Matron and saying how lovely everything was.’

Mrs Jankiewicz snorted. ‘He cannot have seen the dust
in his father’s room. I went in there last week to tell him to come
down to dinner with me and it was terrible. Was thick, everywhere.
Is that girl Glenda, lazy, only thinking about boys! I have to tell
her many times about the dust.’

For someone with a sight problem Mrs Jankiewicz had
an apparently miraculous ability to spot dust, grimy paintwork or
the wrong shade of blue in a bed-jacket purchased at her command by
one of the staff.

I sought to change the subject to one less
controversial. ‘What lovely flowers! Those chrysanthemums are such
a beautiful shade of dusky pink.’

Her face softened. ‘Are pretty – from Mrs Rossiter.
She went shopping yesterday and bought them for me for a present to
cheer me up, she said, because today is ten years since my poor
Stanislas is dead. Mrs Rossiter is a kind person. You are kind,
too,’ she said, taking my hand in hers. ‘You come to see me because
you remember.’

‘He was such a dear man,’ I said. ‘I was so fond of
him. And I know that one never stops missing them.’

I too am a widow. My husband, Peter, died three years
ago.

‘I do not think Mrs Rossiter misses her husband.’ Mrs
Jankiewicz said. ‘That man was not a nice person at all.’

I thought of Colonel Rossiter, a cold, unfriendly,
ill-tempered man, and said, ‘No, he was horrid; she was well rid of
him. I did think that after he died she might have managed to have
a more enjoyable life, but then she developed this heart
trouble...’

Mrs Jankiewicz snorted again. ‘Is not trouble,’ she
said. ‘She is quite able to do things but they do not let her. If I
have no more than that wrong with me then I would not be in this
place but in my own home.’

‘But Thelma was very concerned about her mother –
living in London and with a career, she couldn’t get down very
often. She thought her mother would be safer here, where people can
keep an eye on her.’

‘Too many people keep an eye in this place,’ Mrs
Jankiewicz said. ‘Is no privacy.’

I reflected that Mrs Jankiewicz’s own eyes (albeit
dimmed with cataracts) contributed considerably to the residents’
lack of privacy.

‘Never,’ she continued, ‘does she have any choice,
poor Mrs Rossiter, never any
freedom
.’ Her voice rose on
this evocative word. ‘Always she must be doing what other people
tell her, first her husband – that nasty man – now her children. Is
no life, and now she is old and has never known freedom. I would
not have been so. In Siberia I was more free than she is.’

I was used to Mrs Jankiewicz’s tendency to dramatise
things but I felt this was going a bit far.

‘Oh, I don’t think it’s that bad. I’m sure she
doesn’t mind being here too much. I mean, she’s quite active and
can get about. She gets a taxi to go shopping in Taunton. She even
went up to London to a matinee last year. Thelma met her at
Paddington – they went to Covent Garden. She had a lovely day.’

‘She did not want to go to Covent Garden.’ Mrs
Jankiewicz said. ‘She does not like the ballet. She want to see a
show by that man Noel someone...’

‘Noel Coward?’

‘Is in some small place, not grand like Covent
Garden. Thelma not like places that are not grand.’

‘Still, it was a day out for her.’

‘But not what she want!’ Mrs Jankiewicz rounded off
her circular argument, as she so often did, triumphantly.

‘Well, anyway...’ I gathered my gloves and bag and
prepared to depart. ‘I thought I’d just pop in and see her now,
while I’m here.’

‘Is good. She will enjoy to see you,’ she said
benevolently.

We embraced each other warmly and I went out into the
corridor and up the stairs to Mrs Rossiter’s room. I knocked and a
low voice murmured something which I took to be an invitation to go
in.

The room that I now entered was in complete contrast
to the one I had just left. Where Mrs Jankiewicz had surrounded
herself with reminders of her past, Mrs Rossiter’s room seemed
almost bare. True, it was comfortably furnished, as all the rooms
in that very expensive nursing home were, but the general effect
was impersonal, like a well-designed hotel room. The only pieces of
furniture that she had brought with her from her old home were a
small desk of Regency design made of some dark wood with little
gilded sphinxes for feet, a footstool covered in petit-point, a
rather beautiful eighteenth-century French clock, a watercolour of
Table Mountain in a simple gilt frame and a small ivory figure of a
gazelle. The only other personal touches in the room were several
pots of flowering plants and two photographs. One – the larger of
the two – was a studio portrait of her daughter Thelma, a
strikingly handsome woman with dark hair and large dark eyes. The
other was a framed snapshot of a nondescript-looking man, youngish,
fairish, unremarkable. This was her son Alan. She was sitting in a
chair by the window but got to her feet to greet me as I came into
the room.

‘Sheila!’ she cried. ‘What a lovely surprise.’

As I gave her a hug I was dismayed to feel how much
more frail she seemed since the last time I had seen her.

‘How are you?’ I asked with real concern.

‘Oh, I’m splendid,’ she said, ‘absolutely
splendid.’

‘You look rather pale.’

‘I’ve had a bit of a cold and that’s kept me indoors.
Now that I can get out and about again I’ll soon perk up. Just a
little walk along the beach and I’ll be right as rain.’

‘It doesn’t look too inviting at the moment,’ I said,
looking out of the window at the long stretch of sand, deserted and
raked by wind and driving rain, and at the iron grey waves breaking
in white lines on the shingle further along. ‘You’re better off
indoors today.’

‘Yes, indeed. I’m very lucky to be here all safe and
snug and warm, when you think of how some poor souls of my age have
to live...’

Her voice, which was always soft and hesitant, died
away.

‘You’re settled in all right, I see.’

‘Oh, yes. Everyone has been so good – Thelma arranged
everything. So difficult for her, having to come down from London
every time. And Gordon has been wonderful. He came when Thelma
couldn’t get away – though of course they couldn’t both be away
from the office at the same time.’