The Ecliptic (27 page)

Nobody will teach you this at art school, but there are many ways to paint a room from memory. You can construct it from delinquent parts: take a fixture from the ceiling of
your childhood bedroom, a fall of light from the refectory of a hospital you once attended with your mother, a carpet borrowed from a rented flat in Maida Vale, and assemble them like scraps. You
can add flesh to a skeleton of facts: keep the magnolia tiles you know for sure were there and colour them in grey; thicken the mist with candle wax; steal the women from the first-class poolside,
paint them lounging chest-down on those tiles in swimming costumes, shine their hair, fatten their legs, shade their backs a different pink. With enough thought and industry, you can paint a room
that has no visible joins, which reveals more truth than any photograph could capture, because who could ever dispute what you have seen with your own eyes? Only by painting it this
way—grinding it to powder and rebuilding it, particle by particle—can you fully understand what a room means to you. But, sometimes, all this does is reconstitute a whole that would be
better left in fragments, like fixing up a shredded letter just to read your old bad news. If you construct a room in paint, you haunt it. Your life rests in every stroke. So paint only the rooms
that you can bear to occupy forever. Or paint the stars instead.

Sitting down to lean my head against the tiles, the tension in my breast began to ease, and I could feel the heat drawing the dirt of London from my body the way that sunshine
teases oil out of tarmac. The caldarium was almost empty. On the tiled shelf that skirted the far wall, two women lay frontwise with their arms bent out, their heads a yard apart, just close enough
to talk without raising their voices. I could not see their faces, only the scoured pinkness of their backs, the long wet knots of hair that fell over their shoulders. There was a soothing scent of
rosewater, a kindness to the light. And it occurred to me that I had found the one space on the ship where I could be at peace: a priestly kind of sanctum between decks, not quite silent, not quite
vacant. So what if it was hot enough inside to raise a soufflé?

I spread a towel upon the shelf and lowered myself onto it. The air was thick as plaster and I had to concentrate on breathing. Ten-second inhalations through the nose, out through the mouth. As
the rhythm of my heart slowed down, so did my mind. I shut my eyes, surrendered to the heat. It was as if my thoughts started to pearl and separate, like a paint that rests too long inside a can.
Everything relaxed: my limbs, my tongue, my neck. And soon I was envisioning things in the bleary heat. I was outdoors, walking in a field beneath the high noon sun. There were fairground rides in
the distance. A rag-and-bone man was ambling up the grassy slope towards me, his horse beleaguered, nostrils steaming. It was pulling a cart with a pile of old rocking chairs and balusters. And
then I heard the women stirring near by, and this picture fell away.

My pulse felt like a dripping tap, and I was strangely cool inside. The ship’s engines were juddering the shelf I lay upon. And the attendant was calling over a loudspeaker:
‘
Would you describe it as an aggravating scarf, madam? Is it meek and insubstantial?
’ The tiles looked greyer when I opened my eyes.

Such heat.

In through the nose, out through the—

My body was laced in sweat—strangely cool—but mostly it was underneath me, in the creases of my thighs. I tried to sit up, and I felt the bones lurch out of me, slip right through my
skin— ‘
Let me show you the On Highs, madam. We’ll soon have those kinks worked out of you
’
—
or perhaps I had just skidded off the shelf and dropped
onto the carpet—‘
There, there
’
—
because, when I glanced up—strangely cool—Dulcie was standing right over me, wrapped in a towel, squeezing my
hand—‘
Don’t you ever stop criticising? No, it’s a permanent vocation
’
—
and she was padding my forehead with a cold flannel, and saying,
‘I’ll wait with her. You go.’

The sweat between my legs was heavy, cloying, cold. I thought I gave an answer: ‘No, it’s just a cheap thing from the market, not even real silk,’ but I must not have got the
words out. I must only have murmured something meaningless. And she shushed me— ‘
There, there, darling, your work will get better
’—and padded my brow and squeezed
my hand tighter. Then, reaching down, I felt my belly sink and spill.

‘Ellie, don’t move now, you hear?’ Dulcie said, and she tore off the towel from around herself and pushed it on my thighs. I did not understand. What difference did it make? I
was not seasick any more. ‘Just lie still,’ said Dulcie. ‘The doctor’s coming.’ She was a scrawny, chicken-boned woman, old Dulcie, but she had a lot of
strength—‘
No doubt she’s tenacious
’
—
and she stopped me touching what was all over my calves and ankles. I thought I answered her again: ‘She
never even used that icing knife, you know.’ But I did not hear the noise come out of me, and the next face I saw belonged to some man I did not recognise. He said, ‘Miss Conroy,
I’m just going to slip these off you now, all right?’ Then I felt him cut the sides of my swimming costume briefs and watched as he slung them, red and heavy, like the tresses of a
butcher’s mop, onto the rolling floor that held us.

Another room, a different ceiling. The ship was full of them. I woke up in the hospital bay with the doctor and a po-faced nurse about my feet. My mouth was parched, my lips
felt raw. It took effort just to hold my eyelids open. I was curtained off in blue. A tube was in my arm, feeding me what looked like seawater, and the quiet consultation of the voices at the end
of my bed was giving me the sense that I had not yet fully come to.

‘Miss Conroy, good evening,’ the doctor said. He stepped onto my starboard side and strapped me with a blood pressure cuff. ‘You’ve had a bit of an ordeal, my dear, but
everything will be fine now.’ He told me his name—Dr Randall—and explained that he was making his very first voyage as the ship’s physician. ‘I thought it would be
easier than joining the Navy,’ he joked. ‘I was wrong.’ Smiling, he pumped at the rubber bulb inside his fist until there was a tightness in my arm and the flesh beneath my elbow
seemed as numbstruck as the rest of me. He waited, nodded slightly at the reading on the dial, and hummed. ‘That’s looking better.’ The pressure released, tingling my fingers.
‘You know, if you’d made someone aware of your condition,’ he went on, all the good humour fading from his voice, ‘they could have warned you against the Turkish baths.
It’s such a shame this had to happen to you.’

I did not want to disagree with him, and my tongue was too dried up to speak anyway.

‘Would you like some water?’ said Randall, watching my attempts to quench my palate. The nurse filled up a beaker for me. She left it on the table, just within reach.

It tasted like metal, but I glugged it all down.

Randall stood there, fiddling with his tie. ‘Do you understand what’s happened to you, Miss Conroy?’ he said. When I did not answer, he cornered his eyes at the nurse.

‘Do you know where you are, dear?’ she said.

‘I think so.’

‘Where?’ The little watch on her uniform was hanging upside down, confusing me.

‘On the
QE
,’ I said. ‘The hospital.’

This seemed to come as a relief to them. ‘Good,’ said Randall. ‘That’s good.’ He was fidgeting so much with his tie that the knot was getting smaller, tighter.
‘I don’t think you’ll require surgery. You’ve passed a lot of blood and tissue on your own. But we’ll keep you in overnight just to be sure. It should be fine to
disembark tomorrow with the rest of the passengers—but I won’t rush you out of here, if your fluids are still down.’

‘Where’s Dulcie?’ I said.

‘I don’t know who that is, I’m sorry.’

‘Mrs Fenton,’ said the nurse.

‘Ah, yes. I believe she went up to her room to change. I can have somebody reach her, if you like.’

I nodded. ‘We’re supposed to have meetings in New York tomorrow night.’

‘Well, I’m sure you can postpone. It’s no small thing you’ve been through here.’ He gave me a kindly look, tapping my feet. ‘Bed rest for a few days, I should
think.’ Then he backed out through the curtain.

The nurse refilled my beaker. She checked the steady drip of fluid in my tube. ‘Don’t you worry, my love,’ she said, rocking my shoulder. ‘My sister lost hers at seven
months. It’s just about the worst thing that can happen, it really is, but she’s had two since then, and never had no trouble. So don’t you worry about anything like that.
You’re going to be fine. Here you are—drink this—let’s get keep those liquids up. We can’t have you stuck on this old boat forever now, can we?’

Dulcie felt so guilty about her part in things that she withdrew from the final of her squash tournament and came visiting me in the hospital bay twice that evening, and once
more the day after. I would have preferred to be left alone. I did not blame her, or anyone else, for what had happened, but she was insistent on claiming responsibility (‘I should never have
made you go for that drink with him . . . We should probably have flown . . . I should never have forced you to come down to the baths. What was I thinking?’). Honestly, I could not abide
this type of self-involvement, as though the entire balance of the world hinged on the probity of one person’s actions. I was grateful for her sympathy, of course, and for the way she had
looked after me in the caldarium. But the longer I spent in Dulcie’s company, the harder it became to ignore the blankness of her personality, and I wanted—more than anything—to
stay friends.

So I let her sit at my bedside, chuntering on about the gall of Wilfred Searle, and how she was going to personally see to it that he never set foot in the Roxborough again: ‘I don’t
care
who
his uncle is—it’s about time someone taught him how a real man should behave.’ That evening, she brought in copies of
Life
magazine and read aloud the
captions from the photo essays for me, speaking in superior tones about the people in them. She made no mention of the blood and tissue that had spilled out of me just a few hours before, the human
thing that I had lost and could not reconcile my feelings for. It was not her fault, of course. Even if she had tried to broach the matter, I would not have wanted to listen. Because I was not yet
sure what I needed to be consoled for—the life I had evacuated, or the one I was forced to continue. And so, to prompt her into leaving, I pretended to fall asleep on each of the occasions
that she visited. I could not bring myself to answer any of her questions, and spent long moments gazing into space.

‘You really mustn’t worry,’ Dulcie said. ‘I know we all keep telling you that—and it probably sounds like a lot of molly-coddling—but, really, you
will
get over this. Things will get back to normal. Elspeth, darling, are you listening? Please. I can’t bear to see you in this state.’

Evacuated
. That was the word the physician had used. A horribly clinical term—compassionless—and yet it captured how I felt about myself for so long afterwards: as though I
were a danger that required escaping. I wondered if it was truly possible to feel bereft of something I had never wanted. Part of me had hoped to be rid of Wilfred’s burden, and I had
speculated, once or twice, if I possessed the wherewithal to throw myself down a flight of stairs to make it happen. Of course, these instincts had been overruled by that other part of me, the one
that had pathetic notions of bringing the child to term, of loving it, raising it to be a fine member of society just to spite its father. But there was no denying the fact that I had
chosen
to lie down in the heat of that caldarium—it was no accident or oversight—and perhaps that is why I was overcome by such torpor that I could barely lift my head from the
pillow. I could not blame Wilfred Searle any more for my misfortunes. I had
chosen
to put myself where I was, and there was no forgiving it.