The First Cut

18 Kirsten

The doctor insisted that Kirsten leave the hospital in a wheel-chair, though by then she was quite capable of walking unaided. The demand was made even more ridiculous when she reached the top of the front steps and had to get up out of the chair and walk down them.

Her father’s Mercedes was parked right outside. With Galen in front, carrying her things, and one parent on each side, Kirsten made her way toward it.

At the car, Galen-who, true to his word, had visited her almost every day that week-shook hands with her father, said good-bye to her mother, who inclined her head regally, and gave Kirsten a peck on the cheek. He had learned, she noticed, not to expect too much from her physically, though she still hadn’t told him the full extent of her injuries.

“Are you sure I can’t offer you a lift anywhere?” her father asked him.

“No, thank you,” Galen said. “The station’s not much of a walk, and it’s out of your way. I’ll be fine.”

“Back or front?” her father asked Kirsten.

“Back, please.”

In the spacious rear of the car she could stretch out, her head propped up against the window on a cushion, blanket over her knees, and watch the world go by.

“Are you sure you want me to go ahead?” Galen asked her through the open window.

Kirsten nodded. “Be sensible, Galen. There’s no point missing the start of term. If you do that, you might as well not bother.”

“And I can’t persuade you to come with me?”

“Not yet, no. I told you, don’t worry about me. I’ll be okay.”

“And you’ll join me soon?”

“Yes.”

She had finally managed to convince him to go to Toronto, partly by insisting that she was fine and needed only rest, and partly by promising to join him as soon as she felt well enough. When he agreed, she wasn’t sure if it was due to the logic of her arguments or because she had given him an easy way of getting off the hook. He had acted a little stranger each day-distant, embarrassed-and Kirsten had come to believe that perhaps there was something in what Sarah had hinted about men friends turning “funny” when women became victims of sexual attacks. Also, Hugo and Damon had sent more flowers and messages through Sarah, but they hadn’t visited again. Kirsten was beginning to feel rather like a pariah. In a way, it suited her, for at the moment what she wanted above all was to be left alone.

Galen stretched his arm through the window and patted Kirsten’s hand. “Take care,” he said. “And remember, I want to see a full recovery soon.” Kirsten smiled at him and the car pulled away. She watched him waving as the Mercedes headed down the road, until it turned a corner and she could see him no longer.

Her father cleared his throat. “I suppose you’d like to drop by the flat first and pick up a few things,” he suggested.

Kirsten didn’t, in particular, want to set foot in her tiny bedsit again, but neither did she want her parents to think she had lost all interest in life. Even if some of her deepest feelings were numb and her instincts were beyond her control, she could still make an effort to behave in the normal, accepted manner. They seemed dispirited enough as it was. Her mother had more or less accused her already of not trying hard enough to “snap out of it,” and her father had become more and more resigned and distant. If she showed no interest at all in her possessions, they would only worry more. So she said yes and offered directions. Appearances were important to her parents.

The car slid smoothly away from the gloomy Victorian hospital and toward the student area of town: rows of tall, old houses in which entire families and servants once used to live. Blackened by two hundred years of industry, and emptied by a succession of changes-the breakup of the family unit, the Great War, the Depression, the inability of most people to afford servants-they had fallen into the hands of local businessmen, who transformed the once magnificent rooms, with their high ceilings and fixtures where the chandeliers used to hang, into small flats or bedsits-as many to a building as they could manage-and rented them to students.

Kirsten had an attic room in a cul-de-sac near the park. After spending her first year feeling miserable in a bright, noisy student residence, she had been happy there for the last two years. As the three of them got out of the sleek, silver-gray car, she noticed people along the street looking out through their curtains. It must be quite a spectacle, she supposed, finding a Mercedes parked in such a place, where the cobbles still stuck through the various attempts at tarmac.

Torn newspapers, chip wrappers, empty cigarette packets and cellophane paper littered the pavement and gutters; weeds and unmown grass consumed the garden. In the hallway, which looked as if it hadn’t been swept for a month, neat piles of mail lay on a rickety old table.

The time-switch Kirsten pressed revealed a bare bulb on each landing and cobwebs in the high cornices. The walls were painted a color somewhere between eggshell blue and institutional green-painted, that is to say, some years ago-and the high ceilings were puce-what Sarah called “puke.” In the light of the unshaded sixty-watt bulbs, the place looked even worse than it was.

As they climbed the stairs, Kirsten was aware of her mother’s stiff disapproval. On entry, she seemed to have held her breath and not let it out for fear of having to breathe in again.

Feeling foolish as she did so, Kirsten knocked on her own door. She still had a key, but the room was officially Sarah’s now and she couldn’t just barge in. She hoped Sarah didn’t have a naked man in her bed.

The door opened. Kirsten noted with relief the empty room behind Sarah, who wasn’t even wearing one of her calculatedly offensive T-shirts that day. Instead, she wore white trousers and a baggy blue sweatshirt with UCLA printed across the front.

“Kirstie, love!” she yelled. Her fine, porcelain features broke into a smile anyone would have expected to shatter them, and she flung her arms around Kirsten.

Kirsten returned the embrace, then broke away gently. She didn’t react as badly as she had to Galen’s touch, but she still felt herself drawing back inside, holding in.

“My mother and father.” She stood back and introduced her parents, who hovered in the doorway.

“Cup of tea?” Sarah asked.

“That’d be lovely.” Kirsten looked at her father, who nodded. Her mother shook her head slightly and looked at her watch. “Not for me, thank you, dear. We really must set off soon if we’re to be home this evening.” She directed the comment at her husband.

“Oh, we’ve time for a cup of tea,” he said, smiling at Sarah and sitting down in the scuffed red armchair with winged arms. It was Kirsten’s favorite, the spot where she had sat to do her reading and make notes for essays.

The L-shaped room was just about large enough to hold four people: all it contained was the two matching armchairs in front of the gas fire, a three-quarter mattress on the floor beneath the window, a small clothes cupboard set in the wall, and a desk and bookshelves by the other wall. A portable stereo cassette player stood on one of the shelves beside a rack of tapes. Sarah was playing Bruce Springsteen singing “ Nebraska.” She turned down the volume before she went to put the kettle on in the kitchenette, which was tucked away in the short end of the L and separated from the rest of the room by a thin red curtain.

Kirsten sat on the mattress, which had always had to double as a sofa when she had guests. She gazed over at the poster on the wall above the pillows-a print of Van Gogh’s Sun-flowers-and remembered the first time she and Galen had made love on that very mattress the night after the English Department Christmas dance at the start of their second year. As she thought about it, and about all the other wonderful times they had slept there together, her loins ached with longing and loss. She could still see him standing by the roadside waving. Of course, she would never see him again. It was for his own good.

Her mother made a point of standing by the window with her arms tightly folded. Whether it was the sight of the park-the scene of the crime-at the end of the street that intrigued her, or whether she was just keeping an eye on the Merc, Kirsten didn’t know. She could sense her mother’s disapproval of the bedsit. Nose in the air, she seemed only a hairbreadth away from running her finger down the wall to see how much dirt came off. If she did that, Kirsten thought, she would run off screaming for the maids in two seconds flat.

Her parents had never visited the room-or even the city-before. The rough-and-ready atmosphere and basic living conditions must have been just as much of a shock to their tender southern sensibilities as they had been to hers at first. Over two years, though, she had had a chance to get used to it. At her age, too, she was more concerned about parties, books, films, plays and love than she was about living in a spotless mansion. Unlike her mother, Kirsten had never been particularly house-proud. Even her room at home had always been a mess. Surfaces hadn’t mattered too much as long as she had been having fun. She washed the dishes regularly, dusted and went to the launderette once a week: that was it. Besides, these houses were so old and decrepit you couldn’t do much with them even if you tried. They were only temporary: places to pass through, not to make nests in.

Sarah came back with the cracked teapot and three mugs. Kirsten’s father accepted his sugarless tea graciously, and her mother continued to stand like a statue by the window. Her father made small talk with Sarah while Kirsten made a pretense of searching the room for the things she was supposed to want. She picked up the small pile of mail-mostly junk-from the desk and shoved a few clothes and a random selection of books into the old suitcase in the cupboard. Then she sat down to finish her tea, which had cooled by then.

“Is that all you want?” Sarah asked.

“For the moment. I’ve got plenty of stuff back home-clothes and that.”

“But the books…?”

“Hang on to them for me, will you? I think I need a rest from literature.”

Sarah eyed the shelves, still more than three-quarters full. “I suppose it’s about time I read Shelley and Coleridge,” she said, smiling. “Though I’d planned on a summer with Thomas Hardy and George Eliot. I don’t know about the linguistics and phonetics stuff, though. You know I never could understand all that.”

Kirsten shrugged and took one book down for her. “That’s a good one. The prof who wrote it is supposed to be able to tell what village you come from just by your accent. They say he’s usually accurate within ten miles or so. I never got as good as that, but…”

“Thanks,” said Sarah. “I’ll give it a try.”

They must all, Kirsten thought, be conscious of her mother looming over them, radiating waves of discomfort. Were the circumstances different, she might have gone into one of her “Why did you have to leave a clean, decent home?” spiels. Even her father might have reminded her of how he had tried to persuade her to go to a university closer to home instead of moving so far away. But she’d had to fly the coop. She knew she wouldn’t have been able to stand living at home while all the other students were free to live their own lives for the first time. How humiliating it would have been to have to run off back to Mummy and Daddy’s in time for tea after the Milton lecture. And the further the better, she had thought, while offering convincing arguments about the quality of teaching and the reputations of professors.

“I think we really should go, dear,” her father said finally, looking for somewhere to put down his mug.

Kirsten got up, took it from him and carried it into the kitchen. She was ready, too. She’d had enough of this tension and pretense. If everyone was going to treat her as if she were made of glass for the rest of her life, then she wanted out. She began to get an inkling of what the physically handicapped must feel like: everyone acting so embarrassed, condescending and pitying, and trying so hard not to offend them or refer to their disability in any way. Sex and babies would now be unmentionable subjects back home, she realized, along with all the other dirty words. Taboo. “Don’t mention you-know-whats,” her mother would whisper to visitors at the door, “or you’ll upset poor Kirsten.” She was tired. All she wanted to do was crawl in the back of the car and be chauffeured home quickly and quietly.

Sarah came down the stairs with them and hugged Kirsten again on the doorstep. “Don’t worry,” she said, “I’ll take care of everything. Oh, I forgot, what about your tapes?”

“It’s all right, Sarah, you hang on to them. I’ve got as much music as I want at home.” And it was true. She had a deluxe stereo in her spacious bedroom, the one her father had bought her for her eighteenth birthday. It was too bulky and expensive to cart all the way up to university, so she had made do with the portable system and kept the other at home to enjoy on holidays.

Sarah said she would write soon and come down to visit when she could, and with that they were off. Necks craned behind windows to watch them go. Perhaps, Kirsten thought, it’s not so much the posh car as her new celebrity status: “There’s the girl that nearly got herself killed by that maniac,” they would be saying to themselves. How odd the words sounded in her mind: “Got herself killed.” As if what happened had been, somehow, her own fault.

Her mother was clearly relieved to be out of the room and back in the more congenial and appropriate environment of the Mercedes. The two of them had, her father told her, been staying in the big hotel near the station all the time she had been in the hospital. Poorer or less powerful people, Kirsten knew, would have been able to spare neither the time off work nor afford the luxury. She had always taken her family’s wealth and status for granted, as the young do, but now, for the first time, she was conscious of privilege: the private room in the hospital; the family home, a renovated Tudor mansion in Brierley Coombe, near Bath; and the comfortable Mercedes that glided down the M1 toward it.

Through a thin drizzle, she watched the dull South Yorkshire landscape of slag heaps and motionless pit wheels flash by, and soon they were passing turnoffs for Nottingham and Derby. Kirsten’s father was a motorway driver as a rule; even if it meant more mileage, he would generally stick to the motor-ways and drive as fast as he could get away with. But this time, she realized, as he turned off the M1 near Northampton, before it swung southeast toward London, they were taking the scenic route. Perhaps he thought a good dose of the green and pleasant land would prove therapeutic. As if to prove the point, the rain slackened off and the sun burst through before they had even skirted the south Midlands.

Kirsten was comfortable in the back. The Mercedes seemed to float on air without making a sound, and after a few attempts at making conversation, her parents had fallen quiet, too. Her father switched on Radio Three and Kirsten relaxed to the Busoni piano music that was playing. They passed through Banbury and Chipping Norton and soon entered the Cotswolds. By then, it was indeed a perfect day in the English countryside: blue sky, one or two fleecy white clouds drifting over, rounded green hills and quaint villages. Sunlight warmed the weathered limestone cottages, with their flagged roofs and gardens full of roses.

They drove straight through Stow-on-the-Wold, which was jam-packed with parked cars and tourists, and finally stopped for a pub lunch at a small sixteenth-century inn near Bourton-on-the-Water. Kirsten’s mother seemed at ease there, back in her natural environment of gentility and well-polished brassware. Kirsten picked at a ploughman’s lunch. After the intravenous drip and so long on hospital food, she seemed to have lost her appetite.

After lunch, they took a stroll around the town, walked along by the river, and then set off for the last leg of the journey.

Kirsten dozed uneasily as an interminable Mahler symphony played, disturbed even during the clear daylight hours by her dreams of the dark man and the light man cutting at her body, and then, on the long hill that wound down into Bath, she felt the first twinge of fire deep in her loins. She ignored it and looked on the familiar city, its light stone glinting in the sun below. But before they even reached Pulteney Road, the fiery, shooting pains between her legs had her almost doubled up, gritting her teeth in the back of the car.