Nowhere Girl Page 5

  It was warm and very safe in the bathroom. I stood on the cork mat and washed my face in cold water, leaving it to run down my neck and shoulders in small tickling streams. Then I squeezed red and white striped toothpaste onto my brush. It spilled over and fell squashily into the bowl of the basin, a pretty, abstract, pattern. I added more toothpaste to the pattern. Then, with the brush, I lifted up peaks of the paste, testing it like beaten egg-white. The edge of the basin was hard against my hipbone, but I didn’t move. I decorated the rest of the bowl with toothpaste flowers: they spread out in a fan-shape from the first, central splodge. Each flower was perfectly formed and took a long time to achieve. For six hours I had done everything fast. Now, time didn’t matter.

  The basin hurt my hipbone; the toothpaste tube was almost flat. A great dazzling heat sprang into my eyes and the petals of the toothpaste flowers blurred, and merged into one large scarlet and white pattern.

  ‘Can’t you squeeze the tube from the bottom?’ Jonathan asked every morning. Roman-attic Jonathan with toothpaste nicely squeezed.

  ‘What are you doing?’ I quickly turned. Joshua was standing at the door, naked. Behind him the bedroom was in darkness. He looked into the basin, and then at the brush and empty tube in my hand.

  ‘Why are you crying?’

  ‘I’m not,’ I said.

  ‘All right then, you’re not.’ He stepped towards me, took the things from my hands and laid them on the edge of the basin. Then he picked me up in his arms like a child and carried me towards the darkness he had come from.

  Chapter Five

  The rain was no longer black and silent as it had been the night before. It scratched and pattered against the window panes and a diffused grey light pressed through the unlined curtains. Joshua was still asleep, his back to me. On the table his side of the bed a metal, schoolboy alarm clock and a thin gold watch both said ten to eight. Leaning over to see them I woke him.

  ‘What’s the matter? It’s too early.’ He turned to me and ran an unsleepy hand through my hair and down over my body. I curved towards him. The telephone rang. Joshua swore and flung his other arm out of bed to answer it. I could just hear a high, fast voice on the line.

  ‘Oh Christ,’ he said, when the voice at last stopped. ‘Well, as a matter of fact she’s here. Yes, it does make it easier.… I tell you what,’ – he was pinching my thigh – ‘I have to be on location to-day, but Clare could have my car and take you down there. No, I’m sure she wouldn’t mind. Well, if you’re up and dressed already, why not come round here and she will meet you downstairs in twenty minutes’ time?’ He put down the receiver. ‘Fuck Mrs Fox.’

  ‘What’s happened?’

  ‘Her sister’s had a heart attack and she wants to go down there straight away.’

  ‘Why couldn’t she go by train?’

  ‘She thought it would be quicker by car.’

  ‘So I’ve got to take her? In twenty minutes?’

  ‘I’m afraid so, you poor love.’ He kissed me. ‘I may go back to sleep.’ He turned over and immediately slept.

  I got up and dresssed, tense with the alert, empty feeling that comes after a sleepless night. The toothpaste flowers in the basin were hard and cracked. I washed them away. Through the kitchen window the sky was a hood of unbroken grey. Rain fell regularly down. The buildings far below were hardly visible. I drank black coffee.

  Downstairs Mrs Fox was standing outside the glass doors under her umbrella. The rain dripped and spiralled round her. She wore the same coat and hat as usual, but two goose feathers replaced the poppies and flags. When she saw me she ran down the steps to the car, which was parked some way down the road. I hurried after her and unlocked the door. Inside, I turned on the wipers and pulled out the choke. The car smelt of dank, airless leather, and the rain beat noisily against the windscreen and the soft roof.

  ‘I got this telegram very early this morning,’ said Mrs Fox, as we pulled out into the street. ‘I knew you wouldn’t mind taking me in an emergency.’

  ‘Did they say how she was?’

  ‘No. You know how cruel telegrams are. I think she’s bad.’

  We sloshed and skidded down the early London streets, through the persistent greyness and the warm rain. The windows of the car steamed up and the de-mister didn’t work, so our progress was slow.

  ‘Please hurry,’ said Mrs Fox, at a red traffic light. A little later her hand reached for the knobs of the radio. I turned it on for her, loud, and a moment or so later the skin of her face unclasped its tight hold over her bones.

  I concentrated on driving. The faulty exhaust, the engine, and the thumping music on the wireless made too much noise for us to speak. We arrived at Herne Bay sometime mid-morning. Reluctantly, Mrs Fox turned down the wireless a little to direct me.

  It still rained hard. In the wet, the buildings of the town were the ugly red of sodden chickens. Despondent black streets ran through rows of cheerless stucco houses. Their owners seemed to have given up the battle against ugliness, and painted the window frames and doors in compromising shades of gloomy greys, browns and greens.

  ‘It’s nice here earlier in the summer,’ Mrs. Fox said. ‘Sometimes they used to wheel Edith down to the front. She liked that.’

  The Gulliver was a grey-black house of hideous proportions standing in a row of others identical to it in all but the merest detail. It was approached by a red tile path cut between two patches of scurvy lawn. On one was a large wooden notice which announced in elaborate lettering: The Gulliver Home for the Aged. All Comforts. For terms please apply to the Matron. Round the word Comforts the sign painter had put four primitive daisies, and their gold paint had run down to Matron.

  Mrs Fox pranced up the wet path, tapping it distastefully with her umbrella, and rang a rusty handbell. It was answered by a small dark-haired maid with unshaven legs.

  ‘I’m Mrs Fox. My sister, Edith Smith…’

  ‘Oh yes, one moment.’ The girl hurried away and left us standing in the porch. In front of us was a hall papered with a dim, nubbly paper reminiscent of cheap brocade. The only furniture was a large polished hat-stand and a gilt-framed message that said Love Your Neighbour in a whirl of maroon peonies.

  ‘Judging by this hall you might think the place was clean,’ said Mrs Fox, prodding the multicoloured tile floor with her umbrella, and spattering it with drops of rain. ‘That’s why they receive visitors here and don’t like them to go any farther.’

  A door off the hall opened and a thin, hunch-shouldered woman came towards us. She had rimless glasses and a hairy face. She wore a dress of mauve crotcheted wool, and under this small lumps of breasts, knotted straps and suspenders stood out obscenely.

  ‘Miss Fox,’ she said, ‘good of you to come. It wasn’t worth getting her to hospital, she won’t live the day.’

  ‘I’m Mrs Fox. – This is Matron.’

  ‘A relation?’ The Matron smiled up at me, stretching her thin bloodless lips over a crowd of ill-formed teeth. ‘Would you like to come and see Miss Smith too?’ I said no, I was not a relation and I would wait in the hall. But Mrs Fox plucked quickly at my arm.

  ‘Do come,’ she whispered. ‘Edith would like to see you again.’

  The Matron led us down a brown linoleum-covered passage which bulged out at the end into a shapeless inner hall or room.

  ‘The lounge,’ she said brightly. With a little clipped movement of her skinny hand she gestured towards a huddle of old people in arm-chairs round a gas fire. Seven pairs of faded eyes moved listlessly towards us. ‘They’re waiting for their dinner. I always say they’re just like farm animals, you know. Up at the gate before the farmer gets there with his basket.’ She laughed at her joke and clattered up a flight of narrow wooden stairs. On the landing at the top stood a pile of slop pails, wet rags and chipped enamel bowls. There was a smell of disinfectant.

  ‘Didn’t you move her room?’ asked Mrs Fox, nodding towards a white door. ‘You said you would, last time I was here. You kne
w she never liked the one she’s in.’

  ‘My dear Miss Fox,’ the Matron replied, ‘if I succumbed to even a fraction of the whims of the people in this place I’d be running round on my hands and knees twenty-four hours a day. You ought to be grateful we didn’t send her to hospital.’

  ‘My name is Mrs Fox.’

  The Matron scratched at the white door and opened it curtly. She beckoned us to follow her in.

  The blinds of the narrow room were drawn, so that when we first left the beige light of the corridor it was difficult to distinguish anything more than a few weak shapes.

  ‘Hello, Miss Smith. Feeling better?’ The Matron’s voice vibrated through the semi-darkness. ‘How is she, Lillian?’ A young girl in nurse’s uniform came into focus by the low, narrow bed.

  ‘Not so bad.’

  ‘We might as well let the light in, in spite of the rain, yes?’ With the stealthy speed of a cat who knows its way in the dark the Matron moved to the window and snapped up the blind. The square of wet grey light rang through the room with a suddenness that almost shocked. The nurse looked up at us, as we stood cautiously by the bed, and smiled. She had large teeth that squatted on a plump vermilion lower lip. In the dim room the redness of her mouth was dazzling.

  ‘Edith …’ Mrs Fox put out a gloved hand and poked at the wan lumps under the blanket. Her fingers trailed up the sharp ridge of a leg, stopped at a peak of knee bone. Then, slowly, she made her eyes climb up over the undulations of the shrunken body till they reached the head, propped up on pillows.

  ‘Edith, I’m here.’ Edith gave no flicker of recognition. Her milky eyes hovered and trembled under the half-shut lids. The skin of her burned-out face raged under a mauve flush.

  ‘Perhaps we had better leave them together,’ suggested the Matron, cheerfully. She clacked her fingernails against the clutter of gauze-covered enamel bowls on the bedside table.

  ‘Yes, you go,’ said Mrs Fox to me. With an effort, she moved nearer to her sister. Edith’s hand was lying on the blanket, a small bundle of bones tied up in a rag of spotted skin. Mrs Fox picked up this hand and shook it at me.

  ‘Malnutrition,’ she said, and let it fall back on to the blanket. Edith blinked very slowly.

  The Matron tugged at my sleeve and we left the room.

  ‘They get such funny ideas,’ she whispered, spitting, as we went downstairs. ‘Sometimes, the relations turn out to be as daft as the inmates.’

  In the lounge, the seven old people were seated at a table now, eating some kind of stew out of soup plates. The table was covered with a squashy checked oil cloth, made soft by a blanket beneath. There was a napkin ring in front of each plate; seven plastic glasses, and plastic salt and pepper pots shaped like mushrooms. The room was very quiet, except for the hiss of the gas fire and the slopping noise of gravy being sucked out of spoons.

  ‘Perhaps you would like to wait here for a while,’ said the Matron, ‘while Mrs Fox makes up her mind what she’s going to do.’ She indicated a flowered arm-chair. I thanked her, sat down, and picked up a copy of the Radio Times from the floor. She went away.

  As soon as she had left, with one accord the old people edged round in their chairs to look at me.

  ‘Is Edith gone?’ asked one old woman, finally. She wore an apple green cardigan worn smooth as felt from washing. Her chin rested on her bowl of soup.

  ‘No, her sister is with her.’

  ‘If you ask me, she’ll hang on for weeks,’ said an old man. ‘You might think you’ve come down here for the day, but you might have to stay weeks, or months.’ He chuckled to himself. A streak of brown gravy ran down his pitted chin.

  ‘Did she speak to you?’ asked the first old woman.

  ‘No, she didn’t say a word.’

  ‘She hasn’t addressed anyone with a word, let alone a civil one, ever since she’s been here. I would have liked to have met someone who had heard her utter.’ The old man clawed at the elbow of the green cardigan, shaking with laughter.

  ‘Don’t carry on like that, George. Edith was very fond of her sister.’

  ‘I never said she wasn’t,’ replied George, crumbling into another laugh. ‘Anyhow, how could you tell who she was fond of, if she didn’t speak?’

  ‘You just could,’ said the old woman, dabbing at her eye with her napkin.

  The maid came in with a Pyrex dish of prunes and a sauceboat of custard. An old woman nearest to me looked up sharply. She had a pointed head, like a turnip, and a thin clump of white hair crowned the point – the kind of hair that can be snapped off a vegetable with one small gesture before boiling. She wore mittens on her hands. All the time the maid changed the plates and doled out helpings of prunes and custard this old woman followed her with hatred in her spiky eyes. When at last the maid left the room, she banged on the oil cloth with a clenched fist. The noise was no more than a muffled thud.

  ‘In my day,’ she said, ‘we would rather have gone out to the kitchens and helped ourselves than be waited upon by foreigners.’

  ‘Shut up, Avis,’ said George, at once. Avis crooked her finger and picked up her spoon. Opposite her, another white-haired old woman whose skinny neck was pricked by a hundred ropes of sharp black beads, and who looked permanently indignant, chipped into the fight.

  ‘You with your folly de grander,’ she said, shaking a custardy spoon towards Avis. Then she gave Avis a huge, toothless grin. She had long gums the whitish colour of condensation in a polythene bag.

  ‘How can I expect you to understand?’ asked Avis benignly. ‘To begin with, you’ve never had any education. You’ve never been waited upon in the style my husband and I were accustomed to. Why, we had the finest china and silver and glass in all of Hastings. And Firebird, the butler, used to clean the silver with his thumb, you know….’

  ‘I said lay off, Avis,’ snapped George. ‘If your china and that had been that bloody marvellous, why didn’t you sell it? Then you could have retired to a Majestic Hotel somewhere, instead of here, and surrounded yourself with other fine-china ladies who would have appreciated you.’ He chuckled again and several of the others joined in.

  ‘You’re always sniping,’ replied Avis, with a little shudder, as if she was cold.

  They left the table and moved slowly back to the faded chairs. The three old men pulled tins of tobacco from the sagging pockets of their cardigans, and lit pipes. Three of the women picked up sewing or knitting. Avis pulled a small plastic sponge bag from down the side of her chair, took from it a silver-backed looking-glass, and dabbed at her white clump of hair. I read the Radio Times.

  Some time later Mrs Fox reappeared, stiffly upright and walking with a conscious quiet. She ignored the curious glances she attracted and came straight over to my chair.

  ‘I wouldn’t want you to wait for me here any longer,’ she said, in a voice not too low for all the listeners to hear, ‘I’ll direct you to the Golden Sands. You can make arrangements from there, and have tea. They have the television on nearly all the time,’ she added.

  She came with me to the front door and I promised to wait for her at the hotel. ‘It will only be a few hours,’ she said.

  The Golden Sands was clumsily built of black and greasy stone. It overlooked a long sweep of grey beach and a lustreless sea. Inside, the walls were the colour of old teeth and a sports programme on the television blared through the soggy atmosphere.

  I went to the reception desk and asked to use the telephone. The receptionist, dressed like a stage parlourmaid, directed me to behind a Japanese screen in the hall. When I explained I wanted to get through to London, she did not hold much promise for my call. She was right. The line wheezed and spluttered, and the girl on the exchange could barely hear me. Finally Joshua’s number rang, distantly, fifteen times. No reply.

  I went to the lounge. As there was no one else there, I turned off the television. I sat in a brown damask chair and lit a cigarette. The receptionist brought me a tray with a plate of rock cakes and a china teapot
painted to look like miniature bricks.

  ‘I’m everything here,’ she said, banging the tray on to the table. It was ten to four.

  Several years ago Richard Storm and I had stayed in a hotel similar to the Golden Sands in Portsmouth. The smell of old furnishings was familiar. We moved there after a bleak, cold honeymoon in a Dorset cottage.

  ‘It will be more convenient,’ Richard had said, ‘than a flat. The flats aren’t very nice in Portsmouth, and you won’t have to cook.’

  He had taken the best suite, a faded blue room with narrow twin beds and a noisy cupboard, and a pink bathroom where long brown stains ate into the deep bath.

  ‘A lovely view of the harbour,’ Richard had said.

  Every morning his alarm woke us at seven thirty and he sprang out of bed with a guilty fright that never decreased as the mornings continued. He had a bath, and dressed, as far as his shirt, in the bathroom. Then he returned to put on his naval uniform in front of me. He would ruffle my hair and say he was just off for a bite of breakfast, and take great strides towards the door that made the floor creak. Later he would return, smelling of egg or sausages on alternate days, kiss me on the forehead and wish me a good day. He left The Guardian on the bed.

  Nine o’clock until ten went by easily enough. I would read the paper and have a long bath; dress slowly and look at the harbour. Then I would go for a walk and buy a paperback, and not let myself look at a clock until I imagined that an hour or so had passed. Sometimes Richard would surprise me by coming back for lunch. He would jaunt into the lounge, where I was waiting-for the dining-room to open at twelve thirty, and kiss me on the forehead again. He would take my arm and guide me to the bar. People would look up at us from their drinks and I would feel rather proud. We sat on tall stools and drank a glass of medium dry sherry, and ate a plate of crisps, and the bar took on a small air of excitement which I never could recapture when he wasn’t there. He and the barman talked about the sea and winds and knots, and I gazed at Richard’s profile through the reflections of bottles and glasses in the mirror behind the bar. Then we would lunch in the stiff, white dining-room – Spaghetti Bolognese served on toast, with sprouts, – and I would listen to a story about a night he spent in a Tahitian brothel. At the end of those sort of stories Richard always laughed guiltily, and said he shouldn’t be telling his child wife such things.