Paradise Lodge (19 page)

Lady Briggs was overwhelmed too but not because of an illegal romantic obsession. For her it was seeing the film and hearing the songs that she remembered and being part of this whole vibrant event. She sat quite close to the screen and kept talking and the other ladies didn't hold back on their disapproval. Miss Brixham told her to ‘belt up or go back upstairs'.

At the end, numerous folk were in tears and Lady Briggs was fast asleep with her mouth open and, because I hadn't got her to the toilet in time, she'd wet the chair.

An ambulance clattered into the drive.

‘It must be Mr Godrich,' said Eileen.

‘Since when do convalescent patients travel by ambulance?' asked Sister Saleem, and she went out to assess him before he was brought in. She then came back inside and telephoned the cottage hospital to ask about his condition. The sister in charge there told Sister Saleem that Mr Godrich's operation had gone fairly well, but he'd picked up something afterwards and had coughed so hard he'd broken a rib and it had gone a bit downhill from there. But he showed every sign of being on the mend now, and his family had wanted him to move on so that he could have Rick the dog with him and be that bit closer for their visits. Sister got off the phone to confer with Nurse Eileen. Neither of them wanted his lurgy coming to us and agreed he should not be admitted until he was off the antibiotics.

Sister spoke to the ambulance men and told them to take him back to hospital. And then phoned the hospital to let them know he was on his way back.

Shortly after that, the relatives arrived with Rick the dog. And began arguing politely with Sister Saleem. She told them she was very keen to welcome Mr Godrich, but not until he was a bit better.

‘We don't take patients as poorly as your uncle,' she said, ‘we're not a hospital, or hospice.'

‘No,' said Nurse Eileen, ‘patients come here to live, not to die.'

‘But, the dog?' said Mr Godrich's nephew, holding Rick up for all to see.

‘We're not a dog kennels either,' said Sister Saleem.

The owner butted in and said we'd be happy to take Rick while we waited for Mr Godrich, for a small fee—to be agreed with Sister Saleem. And so Rick moved into the owner's quarters. And we all clamoured for sightings of Rick. It turned out that Rick stank to high heaven, as if he'd rolled in something rotten. The owner was immune to it, for some reason, but the all-over smell made it difficult for the rest of us to pet Rick and in the end my sister gave him a Badedas bath and cleaned his teeth with Pearl Drops until he was like a Hollywood star.

It was lovely having a dog around. It always is—even a small, nervy one with minty breath. Rick brought the owner to life. He would pop him in the pocket of his dressing gown and take him for visits to the day room. And he would talk to him and say how sweet he was and how handsome. He was a huge hit, especially with Lady Briggs and Miss Brixham.

Sister Saleem felt differently. She had nothing against Rick, per se, but thought it indulgent to have dogs inside as pets. ‘Is he going to guard us against intruders?' she asked and, because it was rhetorical, answered herself, ‘No, he is not.' She tolerated Rick, though, because she was charging him £3 a week plus food.

Mr Godrich arrived finally, one morning, in a taxi this time, and Matron quickly asserted herself as a dog specialist and reclaimed Rick from the owner and told Mr Godrich she'd see to his feeding and toileting (Rick's)—thinking it the quickest way to Mr Godrich's heart. Which it probably would have been under normal circumstances, but I wasn't actually sure Mr Godrich was hearing her.

Mr Godrich, the man himself, was a bit of a disappointment. He had absolutely no vim in him. And apart from occasionally hawking up and spitting into a dish, he did nothing but lie in bed staring at the ceiling, propped up by a special catarrh pillow.

There was much discussion about his condition. Matron considered him to be on the mend, and truly believed he'd bounce back after one of her back rubs, but Sister Saleem began to suspect that he was much worse, health-wise, than his relatives had made out. And, if that was the case, there'd have to be a meeting with them and a recalculation—the fees having been calculated on the basis of him being in basic good health and with no extraordinary medical needs. Nevertheless, here he was at death's door—or so it seemed—and we'd banked on two months' money minimum and forced Lady Briggs into moving. Although, as it turned out, that was a good thing. And Sister said she didn't want Matron to give him, or anyone, a back rub.

At team talk one day Sister Saleem told us that Mr Godrich would never recover sufficiently to live independently. ‘That man will never be able to look after himself and a dog,' she said. And in all likelihood, he'd remain at Paradise Lodge.

I watched Matron taking all this in as she buffed up her china teacup and saucer.

‘He needs round-the-clock care,' said Sister Saleem.

Sister Saleem wanted us to make the most of ourselves. Not just regarding our looks, but professionally too. She'd often ask if we were satisfied with our work or whether we thought we could improve etc.

Sister Saleem wasn't afraid to tackle even the thorniest of issues. She was disappointed that our love lives were so immature and there were no wedding plans. No one asked her for her status, we thought of her as neutral.

‘You girls are all swollen and fat because of your contraceptive pills and drinking so much alcohol.' It was true, the nurses were all chubby due to being on the pill—except for Carla B who was on a low dose specially devised to not cause weight gain. But she didn't tell everyone—it giving her the advantage, figure-wise.

‘What medications are you taking?' she asked Matron.

Matron looked mortified at this. ‘I beg your pardon,' she said.

‘I have been wondering what you are taking, I notice your skin is sensitive to sunlight and you have some muscle twitching,' said Sister Saleem.

‘That's none of your business,' said Matron, and she bustled out of the room.

I was thrilled one day when the talk turned to facial features and Sister Saleem said I had nice eyes. Having nice eyes, she said, was a great thing and could make up for awful defects.

‘If you have pretty eyes,' she said, ‘you can get away with a flat behind or hairy arms or even spots—but having not very nice eyes is a curse.'

We all discussed this and agreed, the worst kind of eyes being dead eyes which don't sparkle. The deadest I knew of were Nurse Hilary's, which looked like a fish's eyes, or Miss Pitt's—who looked like she'd poisoned you but you didn't know it yet. The nicest eyes were almond-shaped, but not like Sister Saleem's which, although almond-shaped, had purple skin all around—which my sister said was the colour of a man's resting genitals, but not in front of her.

Anyway, even with mediocre eyes you could improve them with care and a bit of make-up and putting your chin down, said Sister Saleem, and not looking down your cheeks at someone.

Sister Saleem said the most alluring look for any type of eyes was the ‘on the brink of weeping' look but not with actual tears, just the facial expression. Smiling was nice but could be off-putting and look crazy.

I vowed not to smile quite so much at Mike Yu. I didn't want him to think I was crazy, but then again I didn't entirely like the idea of looking as though I was ‘on the brink of weeping'—especially as I often was when looking at him and could easily tip over.

It wasn't my style to linger, try to get into a conversation or angle for a lift or in any way do anything treacherous or flirty. But I can't deny I did look at Mike Yu too often and for too long and hard and full in the eyes and I knew he knew. I thought he looked at me a bit too hard as well. Although it's always difficult when you think someone's staring at you and makes you stare at them and then they think you started it, or they might think that. Ditto with people in general. So I was going to try this weepy look the next time I saw him, and I knew exactly what time he pulled up into the drive every day to collect Miranda in his Datsun. I might find an excuse to wander out into the courtyard and go, ‘Oh, hi, Mike, how are you?' and look as if I was on the brink of tears and look at his face while he answered something like, ‘Hi, Lizzie, how are you?'

Miranda and Lady Briggs had an altercation. Lady Briggs had become quite outspoken since coming downstairs and she'd told Miranda, again, that she actually
wasn't
in love with Mike Yu and wasn't in love with anyone—she could tell by her eyes (like everyone else, she was obsessed with a person's eyes). Miranda had been annoyed by Lady Briggs poking her nose in and called her a gormless old idiot.

Later, Miranda told me the reason she'd been so upset by it was that it was true. She
had
cooled off towards Mike Yu and found herself pulling away from his barely-there kisses and not finding his hand-holding and finger-squeezing so erotic, or erotic at all, and it was just fucking weird.

‘Are you going to drop him?' I asked.

‘God, no,' she said, ‘but I am going to get this other boy out of my system and I know I'll go back on to Mike Yu.'

‘What other boy?' I said, furious.

‘Just some boy,' she said. ‘I'm just using him for the sex because Mike won't.'

She confided in me that she had started seeing her ex, Big Smig, the boy from Market Harborough who her parents really liked. Big Smig was a nickname. His real name was something like Rupert Smith-Browne. There was also a
Little
Smig in Market Harborough—Miranda was at pains to make clear that her Smig was the big one. Big Smig had a Kawasaki Z1B 900 and though it wasn't as convenient as Mike Yu's Datsun, especially in rainy weather, the Kawasaki was much sexier in Miranda's eyes. Big Smig had taken the baffles out of the exhaust to make it that bit louder than it already was and it meant everyone looked at him as he roared by, in fact it was so loud everyone looked at him as soon as he started it up. Miranda explained that taking baffles out of a Kawasaki exhaust was the male equivalent of wearing a very enticing outfit—say, a low-cut blouse or a bum-skimming mini. Or a bird having colourful plumage or an interesting call. And Miranda found that exciting. He was the exact opposite of Mike Yu, who was modest and dignified and whose ambition wasn't to turn heads but to live a happy and fulfilled life and do no harm and to start a foil container business and employ over one hundred people and breed sighthounds.

I realized then that dignity was what I admired most in a man—that, and a love of dogs. It did slightly worry me that Mike Yu might be planning to cook and eat the dogs he hoped to breed, but that was just a horrible racist thought of the type that everyone had back then. Even decent people, and I'm ashamed of thinking it.

The news about Big Smig was troubling and thrilling. While undoubtedly bad for Mike Yu it made my feelings for him slightly less wrong and illegal, and that was good for me. And I felt it took me a tiny step closer to Mike being my boyfriend, and thinking that was incredible. I'd only ever had one boyfriend and it hadn't gone well. I'd realized pretty quickly that this boy and I were incompatible (because of everything he said and did), so I told him it was over. It took months for him to get the message. It was so excruciating, I thought I was going to have to pay someone to kill him.

But I was normal and neither a nympho, like the Owner's Wife, nor asexual, like poor Carla B who never got the urge or imagined sex except to ward off car sickness—it is such a good warder-off of car sickness, better even than imagining winning the pools (for me anyway). But you have to start thinking about it as soon as you start your journey. There's no point waiting until you're a mile down the road and feeling queasy, you can't then suddenly try to get in the mood for sexual thoughts. If you feel sick, it's already too late and your best bet is to look out of the front window.

Anyway, Mike was semi-free of Miranda and that was overall a very happy-making thing.

I went into town on the County Travel with Miranda and Sally-Anne, who were going to look at clothing, but I had to leave them at lunchtime to meet my mother and sister at Green's the Jeweller on Church Gate—to look at wedding rings. I was to represent Mr Holt and choose a ring for him. ‘Shouldn't Jack choose?' I'd asked but Jack had said, ‘No, thanks, I hate choosing other people's wedding rings.' Which was one of the funniest things Jack had ever said and made us all die.

And Mr Holt made it nice by saying, ‘In any case, Jack's needed at the Snowdrop depot.'

I interviewed Mr Holt to find out his taste in wedding rings and he said all sorts of witty things that I wouldn't be able to repeat to my mother. And in the end he just said, ‘No nonsense, love.' Which made my job easy but boring.

My mother and sister were already in the shop when I got there. They were looking at the pendants—my mother was holding a great ugly cross up to her throat, with a thorn-crowned Jesus on it.

I got straight down to business and approached the shop assistant—a little fellow with an onyx ring on his right-hand ring finger, which seemed too big for his delicate hand and I thought must mean he was homosexual but could equally have meant he got a discount. ‘We're choosing wedding rings,' I told him, ‘for a man and a woman. The woman,' and I pointed to my mother, ‘will want one of the nicest ones but the man wants something very plain, no nonsense.'

The shop assistant went to the glass cabinets flanking the walls and returned. ‘These are the plainest gentlemen's,' he said, placing a velvet-covered tray on to the table in front of me. ‘And these,' he said, placing another, ‘are the nicest ladies' rings.'

I called my mother over. The chunky crucifix was now resting on her sternum. We gazed at the gentlemen's rings. ‘They're very plain,' she said.

‘He doesn't want any nonsense,' I reminded her.

We looked at the ladies' tray—a collection of diamond-cut, engraved and fussy rings in different colour golds. ‘This one is yellow gold—a golden gold—and this is rose gold. This is pink gold and this, this is lovely, it's rhodium-coated white gold.'

We picked up certain rings and tried them on and after a short while my sister said she had to go on an errand and she'd be back in a few minutes. I secretly knew she was looking at a second-hand wedding dress in the War on Want on Granby Street and we gave each other a sisterly look. The minute my sister had stepped out of the shop, Miranda and Sally-Anne appeared. I wished to God I hadn't told Miranda that we'd be there because she completely took over the event and, though my mother had never thought much of Miranda, she very much enjoyed the way she conducted the whole thing, saying, ‘Look at the way it catches the light,' and, ‘You'll only have one wedding ring,' and, ‘It's a symbol of your love,' and all that kind of thing that I imagined my mother was beyond.

It was easy to see how much time all this was taking since clocks kept chiming the quarter-hour and Miranda was not for speeding things up but kept asking for different trays to be brought out and saying which wedding ring she liked best—not that she was planning to buy hers there at Green's but at Mappin's of Bond Street, London, or even Tiffany's in the
US
of A (her words)—and also that she was planning to get her dinner service from there, a replica of the one ‘Lady Bird' Johnson commissioned Tiffany to design for the White House, featuring ninety flowers and all sorts of fronds and leaves.

This sickened me. Not only because it was supposed to be my mother's wedding ring event but because it made me feel funny about her trapping Mike Yu with yet more disgusting plans and status symbols.

In the end, there was no wedding ring my mother liked. Not a single one. The main problem being she hated the idea of marriage but truly loved her husband-to-be and no ring the shop assistant showed us (or Miranda chirruped about) no matter how it ‘caught the light' quite matched my mother's feelings and though I'd seen a nice plain band for Mr Holt, she thought it bad form to buy his and not hers. So, we decided to call it a day and Miranda and Sally-Anne left.

My mother took off the crucifix, we thanked the assistant (who had been extraordinarily nice) and started to leave. On our way out my mother's eye was caught by a tray of mixed trinkets in the porch window.

‘What are these?' she asked the fellow.

‘That tray is entirely second-hand,' said the assistant, ‘but there are a couple of handsome rings amongst it.' And there were.

My mother fell in love with a traditional Irish Claddagh ring—a crown with two hands holding a heart and which represented love, loyalty and friendship (the hands: friendship, the heart: love, and the crown: loyalty). This ring had come from Galway and had a mark on it to say so. This appealed. My mother adored Ireland, especially the west, and said it had all the best creative minds and that for every brilliant writer there was a sister who could paint like anything and an even better poet cousin and that they could all build canoes and tame animals to boot, and then the assistant said he was from County Kildare and had raced horses at the Curragh and my mother pretended to know it and then changed the subject.

Sitting quite close to the Claddagh on the second-hand tray was a plain gold ring. ‘What's this one?' asked my mother.

‘It's a nine-carat utility ring from the war years,' said the assistant, picking it off the velvet and peering at it with his tiny telescope, ‘so called because it weighs less than two pennyweights. The two rings came together.'

‘You mean that these rings were married to one another?' my mother asked.

‘I believe they were, madam,' said the assistant.

‘Oh, my God,' said my mother, ‘that's incredible, don't you think, Lizzie?' and I said I supposed it was.

‘Don't you think that's the most romantic thing in the world?' she asked the assistant, and he said it really was very romantic indeed. And my mother had to dab her eyes.

My mother couldn't fully decide until my sister came back. ‘I must just check with my daughter,' she said. ‘I always need her seal of approval.'

I was stunned. She'd had
my
seal of approval, why did she need my sister's? I thought I was the top seal of approval. I was the one most like her, who understood her. I'd said I thought the rings were romantic etc. And she herself fucking loved them and had cried real tears over the idea of them and now we had to wait for my sister to come back and give the final seal.

And when she did, two minutes later—with a bag—the assistant showed her the Claddagh and the utility ring and she said they were so perfect and meaningful she might cry, even though she wasn't the type, and the assistant looked relieved.

‘Wait a minute,' I said, ‘I'm not sure about the ladies' ring, I'm not sure I like the little hands, they're a bit monkey-like.' But the assistant and my mother and my sister didn't even hear me.

Anyway, my mother paid for them with cash and left Mr Holt's there to be engraved with a secret message. Before we left the shop my mother asked what was in the bag and my sister took out a silky dress and it was as though someone had thrown a jug of cream across the carpet. She held it up and there were embroidered vines and twisted silk for straps and the bottom was fluted like a slim, cream lily.

‘What's that?' asked our mother.

‘It cost one pound-fifty,' said my sister, which didn't answer the question but seemed like good value.