Paid and Loving Eyes

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

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Maybe it’s the ambience—or one of those other words that sound full of the ineffable—but foreign hospitals seem more scary. Our own always smell of overboiled cabbage, resound to the clash of instruments and lifts whirring down to green-painted underground corridors with lagged pipes chugging overhead. Hideous but knowable. Hideous and unknowable is worse.

The day slid into dusk as we drove. What little I could see of the countryside was sculptured. Quite classic, really. From a prominence in a small lane you could see the line of sea with a small ship, though I’m bad on direction. Almira sat in the back, talking Poor Cissie’s Ordeal and occasionally sobbing, though women’s tears are often not. I dithered between doubt and doom. I mean, I didn’t even want to be here. I wanted home.

“How come you’re here really, Paulie?” I asked in a straightish bit. Don’t distract the driver.

“Ah,” he said. He hadn’t been told what to say when cross-questioned. But it still didn’t mean fraud. Like I said, he’s thick.

“In France,” I said. “If we are in France,” I added to rub it in. Then I thought, hey, hang on. What had I just said? If we were in France and not in some other country! But once you’re out of your home, you’re roaming, right? What did it matter? I wish I could remember details of the flight in with Almira.

“Well, ah, you see, Lovejoy,” Paulie was saying, lost, when Almira put her oar in.

“Didn’t you mention you were coming over for Cissie’s health, Paul? That clinic, Marseilles?”

“Indeed I did!” with a shade too much relief for my liking.

“What sort of clinic? What is wrong with her, anyway?”

“She’ll tell you, Lovejoy,” Almira reprimanded. “It’s lucky we were so near! Don’t pry.”

The motor-car numberplates had that cramped French look. Or Belgian? Dutch? German? Why was I worrying where exactly we were? Nothing I could do about it. I couldn’t read the road signs. We hit no motorways. We must have been somewhere pretty rural because I didn’t see a major road. The villages we passed were memorable for postcard-style fetchingness and unmemorable names.

“Anyway, nothing wrong with a holiday,” Almira added.

No money, clothes only what I stood up in. I could hardly make a run for it.

“Very little,” I said, to show how good I felt except for my deep nagging concern over poor old Cissie.

As we drove into this small town, I glanced at Paul, under cover of turning round to say inconsequentials to Almira. I’d never really seen him this close, never to take a real shufti. He was a worried man. I could tell. His posh sort never really sweats, just becomes behaviourally focused. Were he a man of action, he’d be taut, lantern-jawed, keen of eye. But he wasn’t, kept looking at his watch, other cars. And even once let his speed slacken a few miles. Making time a shade too good? He’d been ordered to arrive dead on. I wondered who by.

The hospital was small but genuine. Nurses, people waiting, an ambulance or two, some poor soul in blankets being trundled between the devil and the deep blue sea. Pain in any amount’s really authentic, isn’t it? I waited with Almira while he did the bonsoir bit with a starched clerical lady at the longest desk I’d ever seen in my life.

“We can go up,” he said. An audience with the Pope. I felt quite cheered up because his drone had come back. Until now his voice had taken on a near-human quality, really strange.

It’s hard to walk along hospital corridors. Not because they’re uneven but because your feet feel guilty all of a sudden, as if they’d no right to defile the shining surface. I hung back, letting Paul and Almira go first. Genuine all right.

The wing we reached—two floors up and a nurse with a mortician’s look—was quiet to the point of stealth. No din. No rattles of equipment. Doors closed, frosted glass, charts looking pessimistic as charts always do. Along three corridor doors, no less, and me finally really apprehensive. With this degree of care, Cissie was for it. No bonny Lysette, like you get in the Whittington at Archway, I felt with a pang.

“Please wait,” we were told. Paul was admitted. Then I was beckoned, and in I went.

It chilled me. Why every grim hospital interior has to be aquarium-lit I don’t know, but it scares the hell out of me. The room held one bed, Cissie inside it, pale, her legs under a blanket. Nearby, but mercifully unconnected, were those bleep screens, gasp machines with paired cylindrical concertinas poised to squeeze, tubular glass valves, silvery switches. It looked like a rocket launch. The one honest light barely made a single candlepower. She seemed asleep.

Paul wakened her, after asking the nurse if it was all right. Cissie opened her eyes.

“Hello, er, love,” I said. Nowhere to sit. Doc Lancaster once told me that hospital telly soaps always go wrong in making their actor doctors sit on the edge of the bed, and approach the wrong side of the bed. I crouched to peer at her, trying to work out what I was for.

The nurse warned, “One minute.”

Cissie’s eyes opened, surprisingly clear. “Lovejoy,” she whispered. I was shaken. I didn’t know she could whisper. I must have recoiled, expecting her honing voice. “Paulie,” she whispered. “I want to speak to Lovejoy alone.”

“Right, right, dear.”

“The nurse too,” Cissie ordered, with a trace of her old asperity. She groaned, shifted slightly with the nurse’s help.

The nurse left too, glaring as if this was all my fault.

Five minus three left me and Cissie. Her eyes closed for a little while, some sort of pain.

We’d lived marital a fortnight, then six weeks for intermittent skirmishing before the separation. It was the fastest divorce on record. She’d married Paul on the first permitted legal morn.

“Lovejoy,” she whispered. “I wanted to say I’m sorry.”

“Eh?” I straightened, honestly found myself edging away. Abuse, yes. Hatred, aye, sure. But an apology? I felt I’d walked onstage in the middle of The Quaker Girl. That unreal.

“I know you must hate me, Lovejoy,” this whispering stranger said. She seemed to sleep a few seconds, blearily came to with appalling effort.

“No, er, Cissie,” I whispered along.

“Yes.” She fixed me with unnaturally bright eyes. “I was cruel. I was wrong.”

Wrong? Cruel? Sorry? It was beyond my experience. “No, er, don’t worry. It’s all…” In the past? Did one say things like that, times like this? ”It’s okay.“ When of course it wasn’t. Okay for Lovejoy, not quite okay for somebody dying.

“I want you to do something, Lovejoy. If it’s too much, then please say no. I won’t bear any grudge.”

Please too? “What?”

She wanted to move on to her side a little, and signed for me to move her round a little.

“I’ll get the nurse,“ I said, worried sick.

“No, Lovejoy. I don’t want her to hear this.”

I held her, found myself cradling her body in an embrace that would have seemed like old times, except we’d never done this before, not with each other anyhow. Her face was close to mine, her eyes huge.

“What is it, love?”

“Paulie’s a fool. Not a patch on you, Lovejoy.”

Not exactly the time to say I’d always known he was a pillock. “Oh, well,” I managed.

“Please. I want you to help him, Lovejoy. Is it too much to ask, Lovejoy?” She coughed a bit. I tried to cough for her like a fool, holding myself stiff at an awkward angle.

“I don’t know what it is I’m to do. Nobody’s told me anything. Is it this Troude thing, something about silver shipments?”

“Paulie’s in too deep with Troude. He’s so desperate for it to succeed. All it is, they are storing some antiques, for export somewhere. It needs a divvy. Say you will.”

“Maybe,” I said, instinct keeping it so I could escape moral bonds should I want to off out. Gentleman to the last.

“I can’t blame you, Lovejoy. It was all my fault.” She slipped away then a while, came too after an inward struggle. “I’m frightened, Lovejoy. And leaving things in such a mess for Paul makes it worse.”

“I’ll do it, Cissie,” I said. Instinct yelled to steer clear of the phrase at the last second, failed.

She drove it home. “You promise, Lovejoy?”

“Promise, love.”

She sank back with a profound sigh. I was just taking my arms away when the nurse came in to say I had to leave, it was time for Mrs Anstruther to rest.

“Blood transfusion due in ten minutes.”

“Right, right.” I looked at the still figure breathing so shallowly, thinking of her in a plastic tent, the mask going over her face, drips being adjusted. “Bye, Cissie love.”

Her eyelids fluttered. She said nothing. Paul came. And Almira, who said she wanted to say goodbye to Cissie. She was in tears. Paul was silent. I went along the corridor and watched the night outside with its strings of lights along distant roads through the darkness. It had come on to rain.

The way out was hard to find. I managed it third go. Only once did I discover something strange, and that was more by misjudgement than anything. It gave me pause. I stayed among a crowd of visitors getting something to eat down a corridor off a sort of outpatients’ place. I heard an odd laugh, odd because it was familiar and shouldn’t have been there. I sidled out and stood under the canopy thing looking at the rain.

An ambulance bloke came past, smoking to advertise the benefits of sickness.

“Pardonez-moi, Monsieur,” I got out. “What is this that is this country, silver plate?” My French just made it.

“France.” His voice mocked my sanity. He strolled on, adding a critical suffix about foreigners, especially me.

As if it mattered, like I said. Except that Cissie was going to die in France. I’d seen the terrible diagnosis written plain as day on her chart. Diseases strike terror into me. Pathetically, I wondered guiltily if it was catching. How long ago had it been? I tried to work out. Could a disease lurk, only to spring out…? Gulp. I’d been pretty tired lately. But coping with the rapacious Almira would have weakened a randy regiment, so there was no telling. Three silhouette nurses talked inside the porch across the forecourt. A tubby girl gave an odd whoopy laugh, cut it for professional reasons. Matron would scold.

“All right, Lovejoy?” Almira, at her most sympathetic.

“Aye, love.”

“Lovejoy,” from Paul. “I’m sorry. I…”

He looked so lost I even felt sorry for him. “It’s all right,” I said, wondering what the hell I was saying. I was reassuring him that I was fine. “I mean I’m sorry.” Even that didn’t sound right.

“We should get back, Lovejoy,” from Almira. Paul said he’d drive us.

We finished the journey in almost total silence, except for Almira saying if there was anything we could do, Paulie, just get in touch, not to bother giving any notice. How, without a phone? I didn’t ask. He nodded, kept glancing at me as if I was somehow more injured than him. I tried to force myself, but couldn’t reach out and shake his hand. He didn’t offer, either, so that was all right.

“Cheers, Paul,” I said as we did that silly look-at-the-floor shuffle folk do at such times. “Be seeing you.” Would I?

“Yes,” he said, brightening. He went downcast, probably realizing that it was Cissie’s dying wish that was possibly going to get him out of some scrape.

“Not coming in for a nightcap, Paulie?” Almira asked.

He seemed to lighten in hope for a second, then something in her expression clicked and he shook his head with the nearest he could manage to resolve, and dutifully got back in the Jag. Once a serf, nowt but. A night bird did its barmy whoop noise. It sounded so like a girl with a funny laugh.

“Better get back,” he said. “Thanks.”

Almira bussed him farewell. “Give our fondest love to Cissie.”

“Lovejoy.” He was trying to say something as he fired the engine. “Thanks, old chap. I really do mean it, you know.”

“That’s okay,” I said.

Me and Almira waved him ofF. He had the radio on as he turned up among the trees, headlights a cone of light dragging him swiftly away. It was that clarinet tune that hit the charts practically in the Dark Ages, something about a carnival.

“Poor Paul.” Almira said. “Poor Cissie.”

“Yes.” Something felt very odd. That night bird whooped.

“Lovejoy.” She stood close, under a night sky fast clearing of scudding cloud. Stars were showing, and a moon they call a night moon where I come from, thin as a rind and reddish-tinged.

“Yes?”

“Cissie… It’s no reason for us to be any different, is it? She’d want us to live exactly as we are.”

“Would she?” Odd, strange, queer, weird.

“Yes.” Very vehement. “There’s very little holiday time left. Just let’s remember that, darling.”

There is something in this relief theory, that the misfortune of others shoots us so full of relieved thank-God-it’s-not-me sensations that we instantly go ape. That night Almira and me really did go over the top, cruelty melding passion and desire in a frenzy so near to madness there was no telling where lust began and delirium ended.

The night seemed to last a week. Which was just as well, because holiday time was over, and fighting time was come.