Quartet in Autumn (3 page)

The girl waited nervously, her smile fading, but like Letty she was hypnotized by the marmoset eyes behind the thick glasses. And now promising young men who might have been induced to buy flags were slinking by into the station, pretending to be in a hurry.

'I, too,' Marcia repeated, 'have had
something removed
.
'

At that moment an older man, attracted by the sight of the pretty flag-seller, approached and cut short Marcia's attempt at conversation, but the memory of her stay in hospital lasted her all the way to the office.

Marcia had been one of those women, encouraged by her mother, who had sworn that she would never let the surgeon's knife touch her body, a woman's body being such a private thing. But of course when it came to the point there was no question of resistance. She smiled as she remembered Mr Strong, the consultant surgeon who had performed the operation — mastectomy, hysterectomy, appendectomy, tonsillectomy — you name it, it was all one to him, his cool competent manner seemed to imply. She recalled his procession down the ward, surrounded by satellites, her eager observation and anticipation until the great moment when he arrived at her bed and she heard him ask, 'And how's Miss Ivory this morning?' in that almost teasing way. Then she would tell him how she was and he would listen, occasionally asking a question or turning to Sister for her opinion, the rather flippant manner replaced by professional concern.

If the surgeon was God, the chaplains were his ministers, a little lower than the housemen. The good-looking young Roman Catholic had come first, saying how we all needed a rest at times, though he did not look as if he could possibly need such a thing, and how being in hospital, unpleasant though it was in many ways, could sometimes prove to be a blessing in disguise, for there was no situation that couldn't be turned to good, and truly you could say that every cloud had a silver lining
.
.. He went on in this vein with such a flow of Irish charm that it was some time before Marcia could get in a word to tell him that she was not a Roman Catholic.

'Ah, then you'll be a Protestant.' The violence of the word had a stunning effect, as it must to anyone used to the vaguer and gentler 'Anglican' or 'Church of England'. 'Well, it's nice to have had this chat,' he conceded. 'The Protestant chaplain will be along to see you.'

The Anglican chaplain offered her Holy Communion and although she was not a practising churchwoman Marcia accepted, partly out of superstition but also because it gave her a kind of distinction in the ward. Only one other woman received the ministrations of the chaplain. The other patients criticized his crumpled surplice and wondered why he didn't get a nylon or terylene one, and recalled their own vicars refusing to marry people in their churches or to christen kiddies because their parents didn't go to church, and other such instances of unreasonable and unChristian behaviour.

Of course in hospital, and particularly when the chaplain visited her, the question of death did come into one's mind, and Marcia had asked herself the brutal question, if she were to die, having no close relatives, would it matter? She could be buried in a pauper's grave, if such a thing still existed, though she would leave money enough for a funeral; but her body could be shovelled into a furnace, she would never know. Might as well be realistic. Of course she could donate certain organs to assist in research or spare-part surgery. This last idea had an irresistible appeal, linked as it was with the thought of Mr Strong, and she meant to fill in the form at the back of the booklet they had given her when she entered the hospital. But in the end she never got round to it and anyway her operation had been a success and she had
not
died. 'I shall not die but live' — there had been a poem that came into her mind at the time. She didn't read poetry now, or anything else for that matter, but sometimes she remembered the odd tag.

As she waited on the platform that morning Marcia noticed that somebody had scrawled in crude capital letters,
KILL
ASIAN
SHIT
. She stared at the inscription and mouthed the words to herself as if considering their implication. They brought back another hospital memory, of a man who had wheeled her on the trolley to the operating theatre, bearded and with a remote, dignified beauty, his head and body swathed in bluish gauze. He had called her 'dear'.

The three others looked up as Marcia entered the room.

'Late, aren't you?' Norman snapped.

As if it had anything to do with him, Letty thought.

'There's been some delay on the Underground this morning,' she said.

'Oh, yes,' Norman agreed. 'Did you see that on the blackboard at Holborn station? Trains were delayed "due to a person under the train at Hammersmith", it said. A "person" — is that what you have to say now?'

'Poor soul,' said Edwin. 'One does wonder sometimes how these tragedies occur.'

Letty was silent, remembering her own upsetting experience. That woman might find herself under a train one day. She had not mentioned it before but now she did.

'Dear me,' said Norman, 'that looks like a good example of somebody who's fallen through the net of the welfare state.'

'It could happen to anyone,' said Letty, 'but there's really no need for anyone nowadays to get into that sort of state.' She glanced down at her tweed skirt, old but newly cleaned and pressed; at least one could keep up reasonable standards.

Marcia said nothing, but stared in her disconcerting way.

Norman said almost chirpily, 'Oh, well, that's another thing we've all got coming to us, or at least the possibility — falling through the net of the welfare state.'

'Don't keep on about it,' said Edwin. 'What with being found dead of hypothermia, you seem to've got it on the brain.'

'Dead of starvation's more likely,' said Norman. He had been to the supermarket on his way to work and now proceeded to check the items in his shopping bag — a 'psychedelic' plastic carrier, patterned in vivid colours, hinting at some unexpected aspect of his character — against the printed slip he had received at the check-out. 'Crispbread 16, tea 18, cheese 34, butter beans, the small tin, 12,' he recited. 'Bacon 46, but that was the smallest pack I could find, smoked oyster back, they called it, not really the best You'd think they'd do it up smaller for people living alone, wouldn't you. The woman in front of me spent over twelve pounds — just my luck to get behind somebody like that at the check-out,' he droned on.

'I should put the bacon in a cooler place if I were you,' said Letty.

'Yes, I'll pop it in one of the filing cabinets,' said Norman. 'Don't let me forget it. You read of elderly people being found dead in the house with no food — dreadful, isn't it?'

'There's no need for that,' said Edwin.

'It is possible to store tins,' said Marcia, in a remote sort of way.

'But then you might not have the strength to open them,' said Norman with relish. 'Anyway, I don't have much storage space.'

Marcia glanced at him thoughtfully. She wondered sometimes about Norman's domestic arrangements but of course nobody had ever seen his bed-sitting room. The four who worked together did not visit each other or meet after office hours. When she had first come here, Marcia had experienced a faint stirring of interest in Norman, a feeling that was a good many degrees cooler than tenderness but which nevertheless occupied her thoughts briefly. Once at lunchtime she had followed him. At a safe distance behind, she had watched him as he picked his way through the fallen leaves and called out angrily after a car which had failed to stop at a zebra crossing. She found herself entering the British Museum, ascending wide stone steps and walking through echoing galleries filled with alarming images and objects in glass cases, until they came to rest in the Egyptian section by a display of mummified animals and small crocodiles. Here Norman had mingled with a crowd of school children and Marcia slipped away. If she had thought of making herself known to him, the time and such questions as 'Do you come here often?' were obviously inappropriate. Norman had not revealed to any of them that he visited the British Museum, and even if he had would never have admitted to the contemplation of mummified crocodiles. No doubt it was a secret thing. As time went on Marcia's feeling for Norman waned. Then she went into hospital and Mr Strong entered her life and filled her thoughts. Now she hardly considered Norman at all, except as a rather silly little man, so his fussing with his shopping and his reading out the things he had bought only irritated her. She did not want to know what he was going to eat — it was of no interest whatsoever.

'That reminds me, I must get a loaf at lunchtime,' said Edwin. 'Father G.'s coming in for a bite before the
PCC
meeting and I'll do one of my specials — baked beans on toast with a poached egg on top.'

The women smiled, as they were meant to, but Edwin was known to be a competent cook and it was not as if they had anything much grander for their own evening meals, he thought, as he came out of a teashop that sold bread, carrying a large white loaf wrapped in a paper bag. He had had a light lunch, snack really, in the teashop whose decor had changed distressingly, though the food was the same. Edwin and the other regular patrons felt themselves out of place among so much trendy orange and olive green and imitation stripped pine. There were hanging lights and shades patterned with butterflies and over it all soft 'muzak', difficult to hear but insidious. Edwin didn't like change, and now that Gamage's had been pulled down it was a relief to do his lunchtime church crawl, though even the Church, the dear old C of E, was not immune to change. Sometimes he would slip in for a prayer or a look round and a read of the parish magazine if there was one, but mostly he studied the noticeboards to see what was offered in the way of services and other activities. Today he was attracted by the announcement of an austerity luncheon in aid of a well-known charity, but rather surprisingly 'with wine' — that might be worth a visit.

Letty did her shopping on the way home, at a small self-service store run by Uganda Asians that stayed open till eight o'clock in the evening. She bought only tinned or packaged foods, feeling a doubt about anything exposed to the air. In her comfortable bed
-
sitting room, which had a washbasin behind a screen and a small electric cooker, she prepared a meal of rice with the remains of a chicken, then settled herself to listen to the wireless and continue working on a tapestry chair-seat she was making.

The house belonged to an elderly woman who took in, as the most refined type of lodgers, two others like herself and a Hungarian refugee, who had more or less adapted herself to the ways of the house — ones radio considerately turned down and the bathroom left as one would wish to find it. It was a comfortable enough life, if a little sterile, perhaps even deprived
.
But deprivation implied once having had something to be deprived of, like Marcia's breast, to give a practical example, and Letty had never really had anything much. Yet, she sometimes wondered, might not the experience of 'not having' be regarded as something with its own validity?

There was a play on the radio that evening, going backwards into the life of an old woman. It reminded Letty of the woman she had seen slumped on the seat on the Underground platform that morning, as if one might visualize her this time last year, say, then five years ago, ten years, twenty, thirty, even forty. But this kind of going back was hardly for Letty herself, who lived very much in the present, holding neatly and firmly on to life, coping as best she could with whatever it had to offer, little though that might be. Her curriculum vitae presented the kind of reading of so many like herself born before 1914, the only child of middle-class parents. She had arrived in London in the late twenties to take a secretarial course, staying in a working-girls' hostel where she had met her friend Marjorie, the only person she still kept up with from those far-off days. Like most girls of her generation and upbringing she had expected to marry, and when the war came there were great opportunities for girls to get a man or form an attachment, even with a married man, but Marjorie had been the one to marry, leaving Letty in her usual position of trailing behind her friend. By the end of the war Letty was over thirty and Marjorie had given up hope for her. Letty had never had much hope anyway. The immediate post-war years were fixed in her memory by the clothes she had worn on particular dates — the New Look brought in by Dior in 1947, the comfortable elegance of the fifties, and in the early sixties the horror of the mini-skirt, such a cruel fashion for those no longer young. And only the other day Letty had walked past the building in Bloomsbury where she and Marjorie had worked in the thirties — it had been on the first floor of a Georgian house — and found herself facing a concrete structure. Rather like the building where she now worked with the other three, but of course she never noticed that.

That night, as if inspired by the radio play, Letty had a dream. She was back at the time of the Silver Jubilee, staying with Marjorie and her fiancé Brian in the country cottage they had bought for £300. There was a friend of Brian's there too, intended for Letty, a handsome but dull young man called Stephen. On the Saturday evening they went to the pub and sat in the quiet musty saloon bar with its mahogany furniture and stuffed fish. It felt damp as if nobody ever used it, as indeed nobody did except timid visitors like themselves. They all had beer, though the girls didn't like it much and it seemed to have no noticeable 'effect' on them, except to make them wonder whether there was a ladies' cloakroom in such a primitive place. On the other side, in the public bar, there was light and colour and noise, but they, the four young people, were outside it all. On Sunday they went to Matins at the village church. There were bird-droppings on the altar and the vicar appealed for donations towards the repair of the roof. In 1970 the church was closed as redundant and the building was eventually pulled down as being of no architectural or historical interest. In Letty's dream she was lying in the long grass with Stephen, or somebody vaguely like him, in that hot summer of 1935. He was very near to her, but nothing happened. She did not know what had become of Stephen but Marjorie was a widow now, as alone as Letty in her bedsitter. All gone, that time, those people ... Letty woke up and lay for some time meditating on the strangeness of life, slipping away like this.