Tirra Lirra by the River Read online

  ‘I got Doctor Smith. He’ll come as soon as he can.’

  My helplessness has quite cured her shyness. She is brisk and competent. ‘Don’t bother with that list. We’ll get you the basic things.’ She puts the back of her hand on my forehead, and we both keep dead quiet for a while, as if expecting some audible result. Then she says, ‘H’mmm,’ and tucks the bedclothes firmly round me. ‘He says that in the meantime you’re to stay in bed and keep warm. Are you warm enough? Are you sure? I’ll stay here till he comes.’

  ‘No,’ I say. And then, to qualify my curtness: ‘My dear, what harm can come to me alone? I’ll just go to sleep.’

  She looks worried, but says, ‘All right, if you prefer. I’ll leave the front door open for him. He’s used to that. And we won’t be long anyway.’

  As soon as she goes I fall into a fluttering shallow sleep, and when I wake, still alone, I feel again that heavy insistent cold behind my ribs, and wonder if I am about to die. I hold my left wrist in my right hand and reflect that I could hardly have chosen a more appropriate time to die. But this indifference is immediately demolished by a sharp anger. I know this anger well. It concerns Colin Porteous, but is directed less against him than against vile wastage, vile wastage. Feeling very gloomy indeed, I turn my head and see in the sky a white half-moon. It is made of exquisitely thin porcelain but is discoloured where age and use have worn off some of the glaze. Liza used to say that she saw her past life as a string of roughly-graded beads, and so did Hilda have a linear conception of hers, thinking of it as a track with detours. But for some years now I have likened mine to a globe suspended in my head, and ever since the shocking realization that waste is irretrievable, I have been careful not to let this globe spin to expose the nether side on which my marriage has left its multitude of images. This globe is as small as my forehead, yet so huge that its surface is inscribed with thousands, no, millions of images. It is miraculously suspended and will spin in response either to a deliberate turn or an accidental flick. The deliberate turns are meant to keep it in a soothing half-spin with certain chosen parts to the light, but I am not an utter coward, and I don’t mind inspecting some of the dark patches now and again. Only I like to manipulate the globe myself. I don’t like those accidental flicks. In fact, there are some that I positively dread, and if I see one of these coming, I rush to forestall it, forcing the globe to steadiness so that once more it faces the right way. I have become so expert at this, so watchful and quick, that there is always a nether side to my globe, and on that side flickers and drifts my one-time husband—and, I have often thought, a very good place for him too. But when I say that Colin Porteous is on that side, I mean, of course, the real Colin Porteous, because he has—or do I mean, had—an edited version that I kept on the light side to present to chosen audiences. In fact, at number six he was one of our favourite characters, him and his girl Pearl.

  And as well, I have always had an understanding with myself that my evasion about the real Colin Porteous was to be only temporary, and that one day I would turn the globe round and have a good look at him. It occurs to me now that if I am about to die I have no time to lose. It has sometimes happened that I have kept certain events and persons on the nether side and later have found there to have been no need, no need at all. This house, for example, and those early years of waiting and walking. They have been turned to the light now, and what harm have they done me? It is surely bizarre to suppose that they have made me ill.

  Before I can decide the matter I fall into another half-transparent sleep, and this time I am awakened by a man who introduces himself as Doctor Rainbow, and says he has come instead of Doctor Smith, who has been called to a confinement. He is a tall man with a heavy inflexible-looking body, a slow walk, and black, low-growing hair. I want to ask him if he is Dorothy Rainbow’s son, but he begins immediately to examine me.

  ‘Breathe. Go-od. Again. Go-od. Now, this side, please. That’s right. Breathe …’

  He takes my temperature, counts my pulse, then pulls down the bedclothes and looks at my legs.

  ‘Feet ever swell?’

  ‘Sometimes.’

  ‘One or both?’

  ‘I’ve never noticed.’

  ‘Can’t be bad then.’ He prods the calf of my leg. ‘That hurt?’

  ‘I don’t think so.’

  ‘If you don’t know, it doesn’t.’ He prods the other calf. ‘How about that?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Ah.’

  He sits down and takes his prescription pad from his bag. ‘You have pneumonia. Mrs Cust said she will get you anything you need. I’ll leave you two prescriptions. Give them to her, please. She’ll get them made up. Keep warm, and stay in bed all the time.’

  ‘Why should I get pneumonia? I haven’t had a cold.’

  He has begun to write and does not reply until he has finished.

  ‘You can get it without that.’

  ‘Why did you look at my legs?’

  ‘Checking for signs of thrombosis. Found none. How did you get that scratch?’

  He must have seen it while he was counting my pulse. I pull the cuff of my nightgown over it. ‘From a cat.’

  ‘How long ago?’

  ‘Three weeks.’

  ‘It ought to be healed by now. I’ll give you something for that as well.’

  He sits down and writes again, and as soon as he stops I ask him if he is Dorothy Rainbow’s son. He nods and gives me the third prescription.

  ‘I knew her when she was Dorothy Irey.’

  He is putting things back in his bag. ‘Did you?’

  ‘She was so beautiful,’ I say.

  He nods again. ‘Have you had any operations?’

  ‘A curette.’ I always call it a curette. ‘But good heavens, so long ago.’

  ‘Any others?’

  The facelift is irrelevant; I shan’t mention the facelift.

  ‘No.’

  ‘What illnesses?’

  ‘I used to get severe bronchitis. But I haven’t had a really bad attack for a long time now. Arthritis is my present worry. Hands.’ I display them. ‘Elbows. Knees. You must be Dorothy’s youngest.’

  His failure to reply disconcerts me. He must have heard. Almost timidly I say, ‘Aren’t you?’

  ‘Yes.’

  The word is so reluctant, so guarded and nearly hostile, that it chills me. I stare into his eyes and ask no more questions. But I wonder. When he goes, I begin to wonder. Dorothy died just after the war, so it can’t be that I have blundered on the tender spot of a recent bereavement. I try to recall what my mother’s letters, and Grace’s, told me about Dorothy over the years. It adds up to very little. Bruce Rainbow ‘doing so well in the bank’, Dorothy’s children ‘all such nice youngsters’, additions to their house making it ‘the best home in the street’, Dorothy’s eldest boy passing an examination ‘with flying colours’, Dorothy being ‘a bit down in the mouth’, and Grace taking her to work at the Red Cross, which ‘quite took her out of herself’.

  These and other phrases were all typical of the letters Grace and my mother wrote to me, and of those I wrote in return, for it seemed that whenever one member of our family sat down to write to another, the very act invoked a spell compelling us to present our lives and our surroundings as utterly, impossibly, banal. There were occasional exceptions, however, when under the attack of some emotion unexpectedly felt while writing, this strange rigidity would relax for a moment, and life would leap in. I recall one such instance now, in a letter of Grace’s.

  ‘The Rainbow house is up for sale. It makes me weep to pass it.’

  Did I ask for an explanation? I am sure I got none. But then, our later correspondence was so irregular that it was possible for questions to be asked, and then for the questioner to forget even what she had asked.

  I go to sleep again, and wake to see Betty and Jack Cust standing in the doorway. He is carrying a carton of groceries, and both are looking at me with serious eyes.

&nbs
p; ‘Has he been?’ asks Betty.

  ‘Yes. He says I have pneumonia.’

  ‘That’s no good!’ says Jack with great heartiness.

  ‘But not too bad either,’ says Betty, coming in. ‘Not these days.’

  Jack goes to the kitchen with the goods. ‘Betty,’ I say, ‘what happened to Dorothy Rainbow?’

  ‘What?’ She picks up the prescriptions. ‘Oh, I see! It was Gordon Rainbow.’

  ‘He was rather strange.’

  She nods. ‘Very reserved.’

  ‘No. Strange when I mentioned her.’

  ‘Well, he doesn’t.’

  ‘Doesn’t mention her?’

  ‘No. Never. It was the shock.’

  ‘Was she killed in an accident?’

  The hand holding the prescriptions falls to her side. ‘Nora, I don’t understand this. You must know about it.’

  She gives me no time to say that I don’t. ‘Grace told you about it, I know that. I remember it distinctly. I came up here one day, and she was writing a letter, and she told me she was writing to you about Dorothy.’

  I see myself, not long after the war, picking up a small pile of letters from the mat inside my door, impassively tearing each of them open, crumpling the paper unread, throwing them in the grate. Opening and crumpling them only so that they would burn the better. There had seemed no point in reading them.

  ‘Some mail did go astray about that time,’ I tell Betty.

  ‘That must be it then. Never mind about it now. I’ll go straight up to the chemist and get these made up. We can talk another time. You’re sick.’

  ‘I am sick. Isn’t it strange what one forgets to ask doctors. Always something. I forgot to ask if I am dying.’

  Does she laugh because she thinks I am joking, or because she thinks I am not? I am really very sick. In the next few days she and Jack come in and out bearing all kinds of offerings—food I can’t eat, tea, fruit juices, glucose drinks. Doctor Rainbow looks worried and speaks of sending me to a hospital, but after a consultation in the hall with Betty Cust, he decides to leave me where I am. Two girls in uniforms and panama hats appear beside my bed. I ask them what school they go to, and they laugh and say they aren’t schoolgirls, they’re district nurses. When I ask them why in that case they wear school hats, they laugh again, and when I tell them that our school hats weren’t quite like theirs, but were lined with brown crinoline, they can hardly stop laughing. Next time I see them I recognize them as nurses, and tell them that I don’t need to be washed every few hours. But they laugh again, and say that they come only once a day.

  Doctor Rainbow is often by my bed.

  ‘Now, breathe …’

  I tell him I want to ask him something, but have forgotten what it is. ‘Then keep on forgetting it,’ he says. ‘Come along now. Breathe …’

  Apart from the laughing nurses, I see another young woman. She has inquisitive eyes and a big mouth with a simian bulge. I watch her as she stands with her back to me, examining my hair brushes and toilet articles. As if feeling my eyes on her, she turns suddenly. I shut my eyes and pretend to sleep.

  At times I am detached from the scene about me, and yet perceive it with a greatly heightened lucidity. Betty Cust sits in a cane chair. She knits, she darns socks. Jack Cust passes the door, or frowns as he unwraps a parcel of medicine. They seem close and brightly lit, yet too distant to address. It is like being in a stationary train at night, making a chink in the blind of one’s sleeper and seeing people standing in a waiting room as bright as day. Only a few yards away, but unreachable. It is like that. The white porcelain moon is growing, but I never see the yellow moon at night. I watch the white daytime moon, and in the very next second, it seems, I open my eyes and see a dark sky and a few weak stars.

  It becomes possible to reach and speak to the people about me, but I hear myself saying irrational things.

  ‘What has happened to all the stars, Mr Cust?’

  ‘It’s the electricity, Mrs Porteous.’

  ‘But stars aren’t worked by electricity, Mr Cust.’

  ‘I mean the electricity down here, Mrs Porteous.’

  One night I put on my spectacles and the stars become thicker and brighter, but still, not nearly as thick and bright as they used to be.

  ‘It used to be a great blaze,’ I tell Betty Cust. ‘I found it hypnotic when I was a girl. I used to lie on my back on the grass and stare and stare. You’ve no idea how cross it made Grace.’

  Betty holds her knitting up and regards it seriously. Fred used to say he couldn’t bear people who never say anything nasty about anyone else. ‘That mixture is too bland,’ he would say in his explosive way. Betty continues with her knitting. ‘Grace altered such a lot towards the end of her life, Nora.’

  There is a reflective grief in her voice. The mixture is not too bland. And nor is there evidence of another of Fred’s bugbears—the sugar that hides the evil taste.

  The white moon becomes a full disc. ‘If you don’t respond better than this,’ says Doctor Rainbow, ‘it will be hospital after all.’ To avoid hospital, I compel myself to vivacity, and almost immediately begin to feel better. The wound on my wrist no longer displays its thread of blood, and I begin to write to Hilda and Liza in my head.

  My dears, I am sick, and have an enormous glum doctor on the model of Frankenstein’s monster …

  I have had no letters from Hilda and Liza. There is a mail strike. I read about it in the newspaper each morning. I hold this paper in a gingerly manner because much ink comes off on my fingers.

  ‘I’m sure it is a splendid newspaper,’ I say to Lyn Wilmot. ‘So nice and black.’

  Lyn Wilmot is the young woman I saw examining my hair brushes. She reminds me—I realize it suddenly—of Una Porteous. She has an unfortunate effect on me. I am a toady in her presence, thanking her too much and suavely admiring her hair and her dresses. She is my next door neighbour, and Betty has engaged her to come in twice a day.

  ‘She needs the money, Nora. Her husband’s on strike, and with two children they’re going through a hard patch.’

  So what could I say?

  Young, strong, and fat behind the knees, Lyn Wilmot takes off her cardigan and in a short dress of orange and cyclamen cotton very slowly dusts my room.

  ‘I don’t suppose I should say this, but I don’t like Doctor Rainbow. Doctor Smith’s the one I like.’

  She lingers over each object she touches, sometimes forgetting me in her engrossment. But at other times she remembers me, and looks at me two or three times, rapid reflective glances, before speaking.

  ‘I wonder if you’ll find money goes further here than in London.’

  ‘I’m sure I hope so.’

  ‘Things are dear here.’

  ‘And there.’

  ‘They say it’s hard on pensioners here.’

  ‘I suppose it is.’

  ‘But of course, if your husband left you comfortably off …’

  I say nothing. If she wants to know, she will have to ask.

  She shifts my handbag. ‘You have nice things.’ She hums a scrap of a tune. Dee-di-dee. ‘And actually how long have you been a widow, Mrs Porteous?’

  ‘I am not a widow, Mrs Wilmot.’

  ‘Oh?’ she says. She gives me plenty of time, but I say nothing. ‘What are you then?’ she blurts out.

  ‘I am a divorcée.’

  She makes a long-drawn guttural noise, inquisitive yet knowing—such a familiar noise that I can’t resist telling her at last how much she reminds me of my former mother-in-law.

  ‘Una Porteous was a very fine woman,’ I say piously.

  The sugar that hides the evil taste. ‘But that’s different,’ Fred would have said. ‘You know you’re doing it.’ It would be possible to maintain that I am all the worse for that, but Fred always made infinite allowances for his friends. For them he would topple all his preferences, and turn his opinions inside-out. Which is why the débâcle in April was such a shock to us all.

/>   Lyn Wilmot’s duster, which looks to me like an old singlet of her husband’s, lags meditatively on my dressing table. ‘Actually how long were you married for then?’

  ‘My dear girl, I would have to work it out, and I am much too sick. What pretty colours in your frock.’

  That night, feeling safe and detached, and relishing my weakness in the warm bed, I remind myself of my mortality and determine on an inspection of Colin Porteous. Having always assumed that I would only have to take this decision to make the globe whizz round, I am disconcerted when all I see is the usual figure, the version I edited for the entertainment of my friends.

  ‘The substitute,’ I say aloud. And immediately, the globe turns. I see Colin Porteous, with camels and pyramids behind his fair head, smiling and checking by touch the corner of a handkerchief protruding from his breast pocket. I know I must be there too, facing him for the first time, but instead I materialize in the garden of the house he stands in, so that he, like an actor improvising to cover the late entrance of another, must continue to smile, and touch his white handkerchief, while I approach through the garden. The house, at Southport, belongs to Olive Partridge’s aunt, and the occasion is Olive’s farewell party. Next week she sails for Europe. I am wearing a sleeveless dress of apricot georgette and I am hurrying back from the lavatory to the dancing. The house is a flimsy box shaking with music and set with yellow squares which are crossed and re-crossed by rapidly jogging heads and torsos. The jacaranda boughs are swinging and the paper festoons and streamers on the verandah are trilling and fluttering in the ocean wind. Suddenly infected, too exalted to blink, I leap on to the low verandah and rush into the hall. But here are people, perhaps twenty, grouped in twos and threes, talking. I am slowed down at once by their immobility, and become stupid and blundering. Still, I will dance. I am making my way through them towards the dancing when I come face to face with a dark man, thin and not young. I see him standing with one foot extended, reaching with a thumb and forefinger into the pocket of his waistcoat. He draws something out, perhaps a watch. ‘Why are you looking at me with such horror?’ he asks.