Isobel on the Way to the Corner Shop (21 page)

Isobel forgot her shortcomings. She lay holding the bundle, letter, manuscript and envelope against her chest, like a small girl cuddling a doll.

Then she roused herself to look at the date on the letter. Nearly three months ago. Was it too late? Had he taken offence? Had he changed his mind?

She folded the letter into the envelope, addressed it and stamped it, and laid it on her cabinet. The first D grade visitor who dropped in would put it in the box for her.

Val was watching. She was however still so daunted by the ferocious snub Olive had dealt her that she did not venture to ask a question.

Overflowing with love for all, Isobel would have liked to make a peace offering of information. ‘An editor who published two of my stories wants me to write a novel.’ No, it wouldn’t do.

She said instead, ‘Would you like a biscuit and cheese?’

Val accepted the offering.

She did show the letter to Doctor Wang next day when he called in to return her copy of Donne.

He shared her excitement to a gratifying extent.

‘It could be managed, you know. When you make D grade. We could find you a place to work.’

‘Yes,’ said Isobel. ‘When I make D grade.’

There was no question in her voice. She would not condescend to question him on the matter when he came to visit.

Val said, ‘Doctor Wang!’

‘Yes?’

He was all polite attention.

‘I get this funny jerking feeling in my legs at night. It makes it difficult to get to sleep.’

‘Indeed. That must be most uncomfortable.’

‘Speaking of Donne,’ he said to Isobel, ‘there seems to be the same intimacy with his God as you spoke of with Hopkins. I do think this strange.’

Did he know how cruel he was being? For that matter, did Val know it? Isobel remembered her resolution, to avoid the arrogance of thinking and feeling for others. Otherwise she might never make D grade.

When the doctor had departed, Val said, ‘He was really nice about it, you see,’ but her tone was defiant and her expression uncertain.

‘Yes,’ lied Isobel.

*

It was Lance who put a stop to the unofficial visits of Doctor Wang. Lance had acquired a set of joke teeth, which fitted over his front teeth and projected like Dracula fangs over his lower lip. With fangs projecting and a thumb dragging at the outer corner of each eye to convert it to a sinister slit, he put his head in at the doorway shrilling, ‘Me Wun Bung Lung.’

Doctor Wang got up from his seat at Isobel’s bedside and walked out through the inner door into the corridor.

Isobel spoke in fury.

‘You disgusting little beast. You ever work a trick like that one again and you will not step into this room ever again. I shall never have another word to say to you.’

‘I didn’t know he was there.’

Lance didn’t tell lies as a rule. He did not see the need. That he was prepared to lie on this occasion was a hopeful sign.

‘That makes no difference. It was disgusting behaviour and it would be disgusting whether he saw it or not. You’ve no right to come here disgusting us.’

Lance wrenched the joke teeth out of his mouth and said sulkily, ‘It was a joke.’

‘Then keep your jokes for those who share your sense of humour.’

Val sprang a surprise.

‘How do you like it when people make jokes about Jews?’

Lance stood transfixed.

‘You never told me you were Jewish!’ Astonishment had replaced anger in Isobel’s voice. ‘But then why would you? That’s got nothing to do with the price of fish, I suppose.’

Lance said bitterly, ‘Some people know without being told.’

‘The way they know that Doctor Wang is Chinese? Don’t start feeling sorry for yourself. There weren’t any prejudices around here until you started it. You should be proud of being Jewish, anyhow. I often wondered where you got your brains from. Not that you make much use of them. Get back to bed. Just go hide your face. We’ve had enough of you.’

Lance shuffled away, resentful but shaken.

Isobel said to Val, ‘Who told you he was Jewish?’

‘Nobody told me. You just have to look at him. You don’t notice much, do you?’

Val was smug, Isobel reflective.

Doctor Wang did not visit in Room 2 again.

Next morning he joined Isobel on the verandah, pulling up a vacant chair to sit beside her.

‘Lance seems to think I am physically repulsive.’

His voice was tremulous with hurt and offence.

‘Lance is repulsive. He got such a roasting that he actually stayed in bed all day. I think he figured that it was the only safe place for him.’

Doctor Wang refused to smile.

How vulnerable he was and how young! Hardly older than herself.

‘He’s only a pathetic little larrikin, you know. And you don’t have to take notice of him. And believe me, if Chinese people are slit-eyed and fang-toothed, then you must be a notable exception to the rule. You are a very good-looking young man. That is, according to Western standards. I don’t know how you rate in Hong Kong.’

Indeed, the only details of his appearance that might offend the Western eye could also be considered beauties: a sprite-like cast of countenance which would prevent his ever looking mature and a redness of lip which combined with the honey colour of his skin gave a disagreeable hint of the epicene quite alien to his character.

Fearing that sympathy had led her into impropriety, she added in haste, ‘Is your wife a beauty?’

‘I think so.’ His face lightened. ‘And my son is particularly handsome. For his age.’

Little Wang was six months old. The doctor’s joy in him transformed his face.

‘Look,’ she said urgently, ‘I know Lance is a blight. But look at his situation. He doesn’t seem to have anyone to care about him or think about his future. He honestly is very bright and responsive if you can get to him. I’ve tried to get him reading. I gave him
The Old Man and the Sea
. And he loved it.’

Lance had brought the book back woebegone.

‘Ah, kid, dem bloody sharks! I was with him all the way! Poor old bugger!’

Just the sort of response that Hemingway would have liked.

Doctor Wang had ceased to listen.

‘I should like you to read this poem aloud if you don’t mind. I cannot really appreciate the metre until I hear it.’

The literary talk was transferred to the verandah, where it drew others to listen.

Boris came first, ready to be of service.

Surprisingly, Eily drifted close, said, ‘Any charge for admission?’, drew up a chair and attended in silence.

Isobel looked up once to find an audience of six listening while she read aloud Byron’s ‘When we two parted / In silence and tears…’ It was quite like the ideal of life in a sanatorium, inviting the soul.

Quickly, it became a settled arrangement. If Doctor Wang was busy, he came to apologise, briefly, before he went about his duties.

The weather was good that spring. Mornington lay below a ridge, sheltered from the wind. There were few rainy days; on those rare occasions, Wang did not appear. Isobel missed the poetry hour intensely.

She wanted to write. The urge to write was beginning to torment her. She thought she might take advantage of the rainy mornings, when Val went down to talk to Gladys, but solitude never lasted long.

Rain or shine, Isobel had her own visitors.

There was Madeleine, a small, neatly made woman who told the serial story of her strange, episodic marriage to the handsomest taxi driver in Haberfield.

‘That’s what he used to say, love. Look at himself in the glass when he was shaving and say, “Who’s the handsomest taxi driver in Haberfield, Maddy?”’

‘Not a wide field.’

‘No, there wasn’t that much competition. But you see, love, he is always looking for a woman who sees what he sees in the glass.’

‘And it never lasts?’

Maddy shook her head sadly.

‘Never. I wish to heaven it did, so he could settle. Last time he left, he told me he’d only come back out of pity. I said to him, “Keep your pity for yourself, mate. You’re the one who needs it.”’

‘Would you really take him back again?’

The taxi driver had written her an affectionate letter, asking after her health. Madeleine shrugged. The gesture seemed to say, without enthusiasm, ‘What else is there?’

The taxi driver had been the study of Madeleine’s life, the only story she had to tell.

There was Peter, who worked in the laboratory with Ron, lived in one of the chalets, which were Isobel’s dream, did tapestry and longed for love.

He would set out for Sydney at the weekend, expecting that the skies would open and send him a lover, coming back on Sunday night dejected and needing comfort.

This was mysterious, since Peter was a personable young man, somewhat slight in figure and slightly feminine, though not effeminate, in face.

He blamed the sanatorium for his lack of success in courtship.

‘As soon as I say where I work, they start running.’

It was a dilemma.

He would not take up with a
wog
. Never. Yet he could not summon up courage to leave his job, his chalet, his security.

Isobel never had the courage, or the brutality, to ask him if he were
one of us
.

She could not use the word ‘wog’. Doctor Wang had in a rare assumption of authority banned it.

‘You will not use that word again, please. It is not necessary to out-Roman the Romans.’

Isobel grinned, guiltily, and complied.

There was Tamara, who did not visit formally, but lingered after she had made the beds to relive her spectacular life story of forced labour and bombings in Berlin, and of her passion for her son, Georgy, not her husband’s child, the fruit of an earlier marriage or encounter.

Her great drama had been the struggle with the baby-sitter who had tried to rob her of Georgy.

‘She say, “You young. You young! You have more children!” And my Georgy, he grow up, think mother is bish go leave him.’ Tamara shook her head in fury, facing the kidnapper again. ‘I pull, she pull, she pull my hair, I kick her shins, grab my Georgy and run. Left his good coat.’ She frowned at this memory.

Tamara was the one narrator whose story Isobel truly enjoyed.

Tragic, comic, tough or tedious, she relived it with a gusto which raised the spirits of the listener.

Privacy was hard to find. Sometimes she felt that she was being eaten alive in very small mouthfuls.

*

‘Sometimes,’ said Val to Geoff and Pauline, ‘I think Isobel is out of her head. The muttering and the mumbling she goes on with!’ Her monotonous, mosquito voice rose to a high whine. ‘It’s enough to drive me crazy. You would think she might have a little consideration for other people.’

Geoff and Pauline, as usual the unwilling medium of Val’s resentment, were sealed in a moment of embarrassment, unable to speak.

Isobel could not speak either.

What Val said was true.

It was the unwritten poem to Robbie that was escaping from her control like a live animal.

She had decided that her best approach to that moment with Robbie was in a monologue in the style of Browning’s ‘Men and Women’.

‘Larks’ tongues’ and ‘poison’, that was all right.

The difficulty was with the look of love, the light of love in his eyes, which she had killed and must now give life to…it had to be an insect which stung and died.

The trouble was that the only insects durable enough to destroy monsters were more in the nature of dung beetles or white ants, which did not in any case sting and die.

She had been so happily engrossed in her thoughts that she had no idea she was murmuring them aloud until Val had said sharply, ‘What on earth are you talking about? Dung beetles! I don’t believe you know what you are talking about yourself half the time.’

Isobel too had been shocked.

It had seemed so clear cut, if not easy. Keep to the rules, do what they tell you and you’ll get better. But what was the point of a healthy body if the mind couldn’t keep up with it?

Poor Val. First a foreigner and now a madwoman and no use complaining about a madwoman who consorted with doctors.

Isobel had said, ‘I’m sorry.’

It was no use resolving to renounce poetry. It would not go away.

She must somehow find the opportunity to write. Not a novel, of course, but a poem. One poem wouldn’t wreck her health; it might save her reason.

The only available sanctuary was the bathroom. It was in use from six o’clock till ten, closed for cleaning until eleven and out of bounds, therefore empty and unvisited, for the rest of the day. Once when she was waiting for the lavatory to be vacated, she had stepped in there and enjoyed a moment of peace and silence. She had not done that again, finding the contrast with her living conditions too painful, but now she thought of it as escape.

She would have to take care. Discovery would be too humiliating; she could not expect Val to cover for her.

She would have to vary the times of her escape and limit the period of absence, say to ten minutes. If Sister Connor or anyone else came looking for her, she could always explain away an absence of ten minutes. Nobody would enquire too closely into what might still be a prolonged trip to the lavatory. They wouldn’t have a clock on her after all.