Isobel on the Way to the Corner Shop (22 page)

The next time Val was out of the room, she hid her notebook and her pencil in the deep pocket of her dragon coat.

She was behaving like a school child planning a prank, but after all that was her exact situation at the moment.

So she became a rule breaker, one of the naughty ones, the smokers, the jokers, the truants.

To be caught would be calamitous, humiliating to her and also embarrassing to Wang. The risk made her nervous as well as cautious, but she could not give up those interludes of quiet, when she sat on the stool beside the bathtub and wrote, creating her mythical insect, the small bright-winged David which slew the monster madness as it died.

She had to ponder, too, a link between the meat pie and the love-light she embodied in the dragon-slaying insect.

Breath and light, both died…

She was so absorbed that she forgot to watch the time. On her third excursion, she looked at her watch and saw, with real fear, that she had been away from her bed for twenty-five minutes.

She put her notebook and her pencil in her pocket and made haste back to the room, trying not to look furtive. ‘Where have you been?’ asked Val.

‘Oh, just about the place.’ She added, trying in vain to seem casual, ‘Has anyone been looking for me?’

No. She had got away with it.

‘You’re getting to be as bad as Lance.’

Isobel had an answer from Tom Fenwick: a parcel with two back issues of
Seminal
and two copies of the
New Yorker
and a note that read: ‘What rotten luck. Shall keep up the reading matter. Please keep in touch and report progress. If I can help in any way, let me know. I mean
PLEASE
. T. F.’

It would be no trouble to respond to that one. She felt she was entitled to the services of people like Tom Fenwick. She had only to deserve them, an obligation she could not in any case avoid.

On the verandah a stranger appeared and approached the poetry-reading circle. A tall woman of imposing figure, silver hair plaited and coiled in a coronet around her well-poised head, approached them with small, slow steps.

Doctor Wang got quickly to his feet, crying, ‘Mrs Soames! Elsa! You should not be walking, surely.’

He pushed his chair forward. The lady sat, with dignity, settling the skirts of her splendid gown of royal blue velvet in graceful folds.

‘I took it slowly, doctor. I have come to no harm.’

Her voice was threadlike, but clear. Her serenity withstood reproach.

‘You must not walk back again.’ He looked to Boris, who nodded cheerfully.

‘I shall fetch a chair. I am becoming a very good driver.’

‘Thank you.’

Mrs Soames nodded to Boris.

‘We are having a poetry session,’ said Doctor Wang.

‘So I heard. That is why I have come to hear for myself.’

‘You must not come again, I am afraid. It simply won’t do. Mrs Soames is recovering after a thoracoplasty,’ he explained.

All those present looked with awe at Mrs Soames.

‘But may I stay now that I am here?’

Doctor Wang sighed and yielded.

‘Isobel and I are having an argument which perhaps you can settle. She had read a love poem of John Donne which I refuse to call a love poem. Isobel?’

Isobel read:

Mrs Soames nodded to interrupt her.

‘I know the poem.’

‘My objection to the term “love poem” is that one believes more in the poet’s pleasure in the brilliance of his paradoxes than in the sincerity of his passion.’

‘Say “joy”, not “pleasure”,’ said Isobel, ‘and I’ll concede the point. But why should his joy in his power of expression detract from his love?’

‘Love is self-forgetfulness, not self-expression,’ said Wang.

Mrs Soames recited in her whispering voice:

‘Now that,’ said Wang, ‘I consider a truly Oriental love poem. Who is the poet?’

‘Hilaire Belloc.’

‘Hey,’ said Eily. ‘That’s neat. I like that.’

Doctor Wang was amused.

‘Are you taking to poetry, Eily?

‘Beats some of the stuff you hear around here.’

‘Well,’ said Isobel, ‘it’s just as clever as Donne. Only sneakier.’

‘We are back to our old argument. The art is to conceal art. Though I admit you have converted me to Hopkins. There is a difficulty there worth the struggle. Love is a simpler subject.’

‘In art but not in life,’ said Mrs Soames.

‘That is the last word, I think. And now you must go back. And you must not do this again. We shall wait for your promotion, to join us.’

Boris had left them, unobtrusively, and was now returning, pushing a wheelchair. He and the doctor together raised Mrs Soames from her chair and settled her in the wheelchair. Boris propelled her away, through Room 2 to the inner corridor. Isobel had always found trips by wheelchair humiliating; Mrs Soames managed to give this one the appearance of a royal progress.

She looked to Wang for further information about the visitor. He, however, was leaving them as well. He had been gazing with a troubled face after Mrs Soames.

On the verandah, Lance walked past the poetry group, unseeing, wrapped in grievance. The mental gymnastics by which he had transformed himself into an innocent victim were beyond imagination—but, as Isobel had to remind herself, he was in all things the victim of fate.

She was relieved when after two days he resumed his illegal visits to Room 2, though they restricted her own freedom, making it more difficult to escape to the bathroom.

There was a change in him. Though he perched as usual on the end of her bed and resisted as usual her attempts to get him to go back to bed, he was silent, apparently sunk in thought, but observing her with an attention which made her uneasy.

‘Izzy?’

‘Yes?’

She looked up from her book.

‘Your face. It gets me. Something about it just gets me.’

Isobel knew her own face well and could envisage it with all the intimacy of dislike: the small, full-lipped mouth—some people might call it a rosebud mouth but in moments of self-hatred she had an uglier name for it—round chin, heavy straight eyebrows set in a permanent frown. Illness had reduced the full cheeks she had likened to a baby’s bum. She hoped they never came back.

She said sourly, ‘I wish it got you back to bed.’

(And that, she thought later, was her first error. The proper answer would have been, ‘Don’t talk such bloody rot,’ or something just as decisive.)

‘Izzy, I mean it.’

He slid from his perch and came to kneel beside her bed, advancing his face to subject hers to a closer scrutiny.

She wanted to dodge. She had to control the disgust she felt at the closeness of his sick body. Poor little devil, she had to spare him that.

She said gently, ‘Don’t be a little ass, Lance. Go back to bed now.’

He got up and went, still thoughtful.

Who am I, she thought, to feel disgust? If he is diseased, so am I.

She hoped he would not come so close again, for all that.

The next day, he came closer. He came in and knelt beside her bed, brought his face close to hers while he peered with intensity at her features one by one, and she forced herself to control her dislike of the proximity, then with a purring sound he pressed his lips to her cheek.

She was paralysed by a conflict of emotion; the disgust she felt as his thin lips climbed her cheek like a small rodent was inhibited by the pity she felt for the fever smouldering in his flesh.

She withdrew to Czechoslovakia.

You would go to bed with any Tom, Dick or Harry who asked you, and you make a carry-on when a sick, unhappy kid kisses you on the cheek?

Yet what she wanted most to do was thrust him away, with violence.

It could be the final rejection, the blow that would finish him.

The look on his face as he withdrew was strange, remote, with an almost religious serenity.

Was that good?

Why was it so difficult to tell the difference? Why could one not have some sort of litmus test for right and wrong?

She could not take the responsibility of rejecting that physical contact. After all, there wasn’t much to it, was there? Nothing you’d really call disgusting, nothing sexual about it.

So she endured, trying to talk herself out of the disgust she felt at his touch.

Enlightenment came one day in the corridor. An arm went round her shoulders and pulled her into a cheerful and careless hug.

‘Love that dragon of yours!’

‘It comes from Hong Kong, just like you.’

The arm released her and Wang went on his way laughing, leaving her with an important fact about body talk.

It was good or bad, like eggs, oranges or voice tones. There was no need to rationalise it. In Wang, good. In Lance, bad.

Bad above all because it did not communicate. Wang’s hug spoke directly to her; Lance’s body talked to itself.

Val would not have been fooled for a moment. Nor would Tamara. ‘If he lays finger I smack hard, no worries.’

The next time Lance, on his knees beside her, closed his eyes and advanced his face to hers, she dodged and said firmly, ‘Don’t do that! I don’t like it!’

He went at once into comic mode, whining, ‘Izzy, don’t you love me?’

She had given much thought to this and had her answer ready.

‘The point is that you don’t love me. This isn’t what kissing is about. Some day you’ll want to kiss somebody for the right reason, so keep it till then. Okay?’

The change in his expression was slight but startling, that trance-like serenity dissolving, his lips tightening and his eyelids opening to reveal rage.

He was baulked of revenge. She had aligned herself with authority, she was bitch Lawson, helpless and available for insult. This was the tin kettle in the Christmas gift wrap and she had been forced to accept it—but now, like bitch Lawson, she was escaping.

She looked at him in dismay while he got control of his rage, seeming literally to swallow it.

With his instinct for saving himself at the edge of the pit, he said thoughtfully, ‘I think I’ll go look for dumber company.’

He got up from his knees and walked away, for once without shuffling.

He won’t find much dumber than I am, thought Isobel morosely.

‘I don’t know why you let that go on so long,’ said Val.

Out of sheer damned stupidity.

She wouldn’t give Val the satisfaction of telling her so.

The search for dumber company did not keep him away for long from Isobel’s bedside. He returned next day, but with a significantly changed demeanour. He perched silent and thoughtful on the end of the bed and seemed to be looking for words in which to speak new thoughts.

Perhaps he had got new insight into his behaviour. Perhaps this was the time to tell him…tell him what? What prospect could one offer?

Better to have left him alone than to set him considering questions to which she had no answer.

She felt guilty and inadequate, but relieved not to have that insect mouth hovering round her face.

Oh, but she was tired of contemplating problems she could not solve.

Doctor Stannard lost patience with Isobel’s fever chart.

After staring irritably at it, he picked up her latest X-ray, frowned at it, put it down and picked up the chart again.

‘I can’t understand this fever, Sister. Why isn’t it settling down? There has to be some reason for it.’

Sister Connor could not offer a reason. Nor could Isobel.

Val spoke.

‘She gets out of bed! She says she’s going…’ About to commit the impropriety of mentioning the lavatory to a doctor, she halted. ‘She stays away sometimes more than half an hour and she won’t say where she’s been. She just says, “Oh, about the place.” She does it every day.’

She inhaled a breath of righteous indignation, expelled it and sat proud and defiant, having done her duty in spite of all obstacles.

‘Oh, indeed.’

Doctor Stannard turned his eagle gaze on Isobel. She met it with all the aplomb of a school prefect caught smoking in the lavatory block.

‘Mmm. That will be B grade and bread and water, Sister, until further notice.’

The mischievous grin had been fleeting, almost subliminal, but it registered with Isobel, and also with Sister Connor, whose exasperation was far from subliminal. She suppressed it quickly out of respect for the white coat, but her expression boded ill to Isobel.

Doctor Stannard moved on, looked at Val’s X-ray, asked after her health and departed. Doctor Wang followed him, avoiding Isobel’s eye, avoiding everyone’s eye.

Isobel hid her face on the arms she had crossed and supported on her propped knees. She did not stir or speak.

Val remained defiant, though she had done the unthinkable. Wog does not eat wog. Patients do not peach. One protects the smoker and the truant, since one does not know when one’s own hour of need may come.

As soon as the doctors were out of range, Lance came running to Isobel and put his arms round her shoulders, grievances forgotten, the embrace expressing only sympathy.

He said to Val, ‘You beast. You beast. Putting Izzy in. Getting her back on B grade.’

Isobel could not raise her head. She could not show her face. What she was hiding was not misery, but the shining of her eyes. A small, discontented animal which had long been prowling her mind had lain down, curled up and gone to sleep.

Picturing that grin again, she told herself, I’d do anything for him. I’d follow him anywhere.

She had not known that helplessness could be so exquisite a sensation.

Time to sober up, to bury this—in the heart, wasn’t that the traditional burial place for such things? She must sober up and face the world.

She raised her head.

‘It’s all right, Lance. I’m not really on B grade. He was joking. Just B grade would have meant something. B grade and bread and water doesn’t mean a thing.’