The Jeweller's Skin (24 page)

He paid at the counter and put his arm round her as they came out onto the street.  A taxi was passing and he whistled for it, four fingers in his mouth like a small boy.  Inside he drew down the blind and kissed her, and spent the rest of the journey recounting in a whisper what he would like to do in the hotel room.

*

The next day, amongst the pile of bills and letters from suppliers, there was a blue envelope with the now-familiar careful writing.  She took it into her office and locked the door.

Dear Mrs Humphreys

Mrs Humphreys! she thought, and felt her eyes smarting.

Thank you for your letter of 27
th
March. If it is suitable for you, I will come to Holywell Hospital on Sunday 15
th
at 2.0pm to meet you.  Please let me know if this is not possible for you.  I am working Monday to Saturday, but I could come at another time on that day, or meet you somewhere else if you would prefer. 

I look forward to hearing from you.

Yours sincerely

Violeta [Humphreys]

There was no other good enough

To pay the price of sin

The English voices rose together, trailing behind the thumped piano, out of tune. The chaplain seemed to be mouthing the words.  From time to time a baritone made itself heard, a rich full voice, singing a little fast.

It was a terrible tune, Narcisa thought; whining, insistent.  There seemed to be an endless number of verses.  She could see Matron, in the first pew, her hymn-book held out at the level of her bust, with Dr Bosanquet and his wife beside her.  June and Peg were by the wall, standing close.  There was Colin, the maintenance man; and the two male nurses she’d met at Victoria station; and Esme, in a row of tired-looking patients, swaying to and fro slowly as she sang.

It had been a stupid idea, to come to chapel.  They like it, she thought; it makes them feel at home.  But they had no choice: they were required to attend.  Being a foreigner, she was exempt.  Or she assumed that was what they thought; at any rate, she had hardly ever come here, and no-one had ever told her that she should.  It was only that today was Palm Sunday.  Rosaleen Shaw had made a point of it: ‘Such a lovely custom, I always think.  I expect we’ll all be going to church together.’ 

Something had come back, not then but afterwards: some memory of Easter in her childhood, the midnight service with the whole church darkened, the statues covered; then the explosion of bells and singing just at midnight, candles that were lit one from the other.  Even her father had come to the Easter vigil, and stood on the left-hand side of the church with the other men.  Had she really thought it would be like that?  

The hymn had stopped; the congregation, packed rows of staff and patients, sat back down with a kind of sighing rustle.  There was a faint smell of unwashed clothes and dust.  The chaplain moved over to the brass lectern; a thin man with an oddly bouncing walk.  Someone at the back muffled a sneeze.

In just a week her daughter was coming to see her.   Narcisa sat still, the prayer-book closed between her hands, the worn red cloth gritty against her palms.  Had Violeta realised it was Easter? 

She would come to the main door, all the way up the drive, up the steps and ring.  Who would go to answer?  If no-one was passing it could take some time.  Would she try again?  Perhaps I should wait in the entrance hall, Narcisa thought.  At least then not everyone will know.  She looked down, ashamed, and traced the black lettering -
Book of Common Prayer
- with a gloved finger.  It’s true, she thought.  I don’t want them all to know it’s my long-lost daughter.

The chaplain’s deep, rather mournful voice broke off its chanting.  Narcisa looked up.  A woman had pushed her way out of Esme’s pew, and was standing in a drab blue dress out in the aisle. She looked around her and began to scream, a wordless yelp that made Narcisa shiver.

A male nurse came quickly from the back.  ‘No!’  the woman yelled, and kept on, rhythmically, ‘No!  No!’  She ran flat-footed up to the front, and turned.  The chaplain stepped hastily back from the lectern. 

The woman’s plump fingers were at the neck of her dress.  ‘There!’ she yelled and wrenched it open in one movement, down to the hem.  A button rattled down the marble steps.  ‘There!’  she shouted again, triumphant, struggling her arms out of the sleeves.  The dress fell in a blue semi-circle around her feet.  She stood, a little overweight, her fair hair rumpled, in a dingy white petticoat, looking out at the congregation. 

The male nurse reached the front and hesitated.  The woman was bending forward, both hands on the hem of her slip, her face flushed.  She had the shoulders of a farmer’s wife.  A man’s voice from the back muttered, ‘Get on with it!’  and stopped abruptly.  The Matron turned round to the church and called out something.  A female nurse shuffled out of her pew, and walked purposefully towards the woman, who straightened up and pulled the petticoat over her head, then waved it in one hand, cackling with laughter.

How sad her flesh looks, Narcisa thought.  The arms were pale and shuddered slightly.  The skin seemed slack.  Then she saw the large bruise high on the woman’s thigh, and recognised her.  The bruise had that look of rotting vegetables.  This was the woman from the corridor, the day Dr Whitchurch had sent for her. 

The female nurse took off her navy cape and went to put it round the woman’s shoulders, calling her name: Irene, come on Irene.  The man moved forward at the same moment.  Irene, in white cotton vest and shapeless knickers, darted away.  She waved her arms above her head, laughing.  Someone in front of Narcisa did the same, and was slapped by a nurse.  ‘Quickly!’  Matron called out, and clapped her hands.  Dr Whitchurch came striding from nowhere, holding up a hypodermic.  Irene tried to knock it out of his hand, but he dodged to one side.  Narcisa saw the white flesh of the woman’s thigh dimple as the needle went in deep.  The crowing voice turned to a yelp of pain and slid down the scale, like a gramophone needle slipping.

Once the little group had gone, Irene drooping on the arms of the two nurses, the chatter broke out.  ‘My friends,’ the chaplain began, and stopped at once.  ‘Nurses!’ Matron called sharply, and a general hushing and settling down began.  A young woman sobbed loudly and was led away, a nurse gripping her by the upper arm.  Dr Bosanquet stood by the chaplain and cleared his throat.  ‘If you please,’ he said.

The chaplain took his place back at the lectern.  There was silence. 

They are going to pretend it didn’t happen, Narcisa thought.  ‘Excuse me,’ she said, standing, and pushed roughly past two of the laundry staff to reach the aisle, then turned and walked swiftly towards the door, hearing her heels beat on the tiles, till she could lift the latch and get outside, into the sunshine of a spring morning.

*

She walked quickly away from the main buildings, past the dark brick house where Dr Bosanquet lived, and out through the ornate gate by the west lodge.  The porter looked up from his book and nodded.  The force of what had been anger kept her moving; now she couldn’t have said what she was feeling, except for physical energy, restlessness.  After the chapel, the breeze was tantalising, cooling her neck, lifting the weight of her hair.  The chestnut trees were coming into leaf.  She noticed with some other part of herself the leaves not yet unfolded, like paper hats; a bird chirruping high up out of sight; a squirrel that stopped a few yards in front of her, squarely on all fours, testing the scent of something, its tail bent in a deep curve over its back.

The road branched after the farm buildings.  She took the narrower fork and headed uphill, feeling the effort of movement in her thighs.  There was a smell of slurry from the fields, sickly, but she held her breath and passed it.  Her petticoat was sticking to her back; her collar was damp.  A tractor came slowly down the lane towards her; the space between the high hedges was all taken up by its noise, the insistent rumbling.  As it passed her the man ducked his head in greeting.  Behind him two children, a boy and a girl, stood against the high wheels, staring ahead.

At the top of the hill she stopped to get her breath.  A five-bar gate made a break in the hedgerow.  She stepped carefully over the muddy wheel-tracks, and stood looking out over the fields.  In front of her the new crop - wheat, she supposed, - was two or three inches high, and brilliant green.  The hedge down on the left was flowering white.  She leaned both arms along the top of the gate, and rocked it to and fro on its hinges.  The sun spread warmth over her neck and shoulders.

So what was so terrible?  It was nothing new.  A woman had gone manic, as they said; the nurses hadn’t managed to calm her down; Dr Whitchurch had given her an injection.  In the chapel: that made it more shocking, no doubt, even for an unbeliever, even in that ugly unreligious building, with its low barrel-vaulted roof and smell of polish.

She rubbed her chin gently along her arm, pushing the sleeve back, feeling the fine hairs.  It was because she had recognised the woman.  No: because she had recognised the bruise.  That plump, unvitalised thigh with its poignancy, its scant recollection of energy and desire; and the yellowing mark, whatever that demonstrated. 

Narcisa looked out over the sloping fields.  Farther down, a hawthorn was in flower, a bouquet of red in the middle of the field, the tractor-marks still on the bare soil, skirting the base of the tree in careful curves.  Was it the bruise, then?   It is hardly news that nurses hit patients, she thought.  She felt herself shake; the lichened wood of the gate dug into her hands.  A place on her calf twitched in recognition.

A line of cloud swelled up on the horizon.  She watched it develop, expanding like dough rising.  The sky above it seemed paler, faded fabric.  She stood straight and turned towards the lane.  The image of the woman Irene returned: leaning forward, her tow-coloured hair hiding her face, both hands on the hem of the dingy white petticoat, before she lifted it up above her head.  The chapel had been quiet.  At least the woman had captured their attention. 

She walked slowly back, picking her way across the deep tractor-marks.  She felt light-headed.  I am no longer a professional, she thought, and wondered what she meant.  I don’t know whether I can go on with this.  Then from the gate she saw the congregation leaving the chapel, the patients in two lines, male and female, the staff not on duty lingering in the sunshine.  Dr Bosanquet waited for Dr Whitchurch, and put a hand on his shoulder as they walked.  I don’t know, Narcisa thought again, with dread, and hurried on to unlock the kitchen.

*

She was waking up thinking of Violeta.  Each morning she had the sense of having dreamed, a remnant of bewilderment or dread, with no recollection of what the dream contained; and then as she woke fully, the sky behind her half-drawn curtains lightening, she knew again what it was she had to fear.

What is the worst that can happen? she asked herself more than once, when the queasy feeling came back to her, in the kitchen or in her office, or at night when she came back late to the same sparse bedroom, contriving to have no time to sit on her own.  But the question each time slipped away from her, as though it had been asked in the wrong language.  She was harsh with herself, saying again that she should be glad, that other women would welcome being found.  She felt how time had made her coarse and unfeeling.  It was possible, she told herself several times, that this encounter would free her from all that, redeem her in some way she couldn’t yet imagine.  It seemed to her sometimes that that was what she wanted, to be forced out of the calm of her routines, into something else, that she might have known once, some state of eagerness and intense feeling.  But that change surely had already happened.  The patterns of work had stopped being sustaining; she was unpredictable even to herself.  Perhaps I envied the woman in the chapel, she thought, and shivered.  That after all was the worst fear.

She worked with fierce energy all the week.  She decided on a spring clean of the kitchen, and organised the staff and the working patients to empty the cupboards and wash the stacks of china.  She herself climbed on borrowed stepladders to lift down jugs and tureens not used in years, and reached right to the back to scour the shelves.  All of them, Rosaleen Shaw, Peg, June and the other kitchen assistants, the extra patients she had had drafted in, saw the reckless force of her mood and buckled down, speaking little when she was there, pausing briefly to wipe sweat off face or hands.  Narcisa inspected, giving less praise than usual, nodding when the work was done as she wished, as if this were only to be expected; and when it was not good enough, if she found a shelf with grime left in the corners, or a plate was broken, simply pointing so that the woman saw, and blushed, reprimanded only by herself.  Once she caught sight of the Assistant Cook, raising her eyebrows to the sly Betty Dunlop.  So let them, Narcisa thought, and pointed out - they had all stopped to prepare the hospital tea - that the larder still needed doing, the heavy crocks of beans and salt and sugar moved out so that they could wash down the stone floor.

She was due for an afternoon off on the Wednesday; but the day before, Rosaleen Shaw came up, simpering with some erotic secret, and asked if she could have Wednesday instead of Friday - ‘family problems.’  Narcisa agreed at once, without questioning, and saw the woman’s face, half disappointed.  She thought at first that she would simply work on.  Then later, in the bath on Tuesday night, looking sleepily at her large strong hands, pudgy and pale in the bathwater’s refraction, she remembered Anthony.  Her body tensed in the water, anticipating.

The next morning she left the women at work, and went to her office to phone him.  It occurred to her briefly that someone might listen in, the hospital telephonist perhaps.  She asked stiffly for the London number, and waited.  The same diffident woman in his office answered, and seemed to know her name.  In a few moments he was there: ‘Good morning, Narcisa.’  He was apologetic; there was a client with him, in the other room.

She found the words awkward in her mouth; it was too much, what she was asking, he would be repelled.  Still she made herself say it.   ‘Anthony, on Friday I will have the afternoon off.  I would like to see you.’

She waited nervously while he found his diary.  ‘It’s Good Friday,’ he said.  ‘Bank holiday.  Of course you don’t get bank holidays off, do you?  My boys are home.’