cherries, soft and lovely and shining. And I stood one side of it, and poor Johnnie stood on the other, and we were trying to lean up and reach the cherries, and we tried and tried, but no matter how we pulled the boughs down, they sprang back, and the cherries were out of reach … And we stood there, Johnnie and I, and we were crying.’
Long after Johnnie was a grown man and had gone to America, where he vanished, and forty years after Laurie had left her, stealing her child, Maudie wrote a letter to her husband, asking him to meet her. They met on a bench in Regent’s Park.
‘Well, what do you want?’ he said.
‘I was thinking, perhaps we could make a home for Johnnie,’ she said to him. She explained that they could find a house – for she knew he always had money, wheeling and dealing – and make it nice, and then an advertisement in the paper in America.
‘For Johnnie has never had a nice home,’ she explained to her husband.
‘And what did he say?’
‘He bought me a fish supper, and I didn’t see him for five years.’
A marvellous hot blue day.
I said to Phyllis, ‘Hold the fort,’ and I ran out of the office, to hell with it. I went to Maudie, and when she answered the door, slow, slow, and cross, I said, ‘I’m taking you to the park for a treat.’ She stared at me, furious. ‘Oh, don’t,’ I said to her. ‘Oh, darling Maudie, don’t, please, don’t let yourself get angry, just come.’
‘But how can I?’ she says. ‘Look at me!’
And she peers up at the sky past my head. It is so blue and nice, and she says, ‘But … but … but …’
Then suddenly she smiles. She puts on her thick black-beetle coat and her summer hat, black straw, and we go off to the Rose Garden Restaurant. I find her a table out of the way of people, with rose bushes beside her, and I pile a tray with cream cakes, and we sit there all afternoon. She ate and ate, in her slow, consuming way, which says, I’m going to get this inside me while it is here! – and then she sat, she simply sat and looked, and looked. She was smiling and delighted. Oh, the darlings, she kept crooning, the darlings … at the sparrows, at the roses, at a baby in a pram near her. I could see she was beside herself with a fierce, almost angry delight, this hot brightly coloured sunlit world was like a gorgeous present. For she had forgotten it, down in that ghastly basement, in those dreary streets.
I was worried that it would all be too much for her inside that thick black shell, and it was so hot and noisy. But she did not want to leave. She sat there until it closed.
And when I took her home she was singing dreamily to herself, and I took her to her door, and she said, ‘No, leave me, leave me, I want to sit here and think about it. Oh, what lovely things I have to think about.’
What did strike me, when I saw her out there in the full sunlight: how yellow she is. Bright blue eyes in a face that looks as if it has been painted yellow.
Three days later.
Another gorgeous afternoon. Went to Maudie, said, ‘Come to the park.’
She said irritably, ‘No, no, you go, I can’t.’
‘Oh come on,’ I said, ‘you know you like it once you get there.’
She stood holding to the door handle, distressed, angry, dishevelled. Then she said, ‘No, oh dreadful, dreadful, dreadful,’ and shut the door in my face.
I was furious. I had been thinking, as I drove to her, how she sat in the rose garden, crooning with delight. I went back to the office, furious. Worked till late. Did not go in to Maudie. Felt guilty, as I wallowed about with the hot water making me new again: kept seeing how she stood there, holding herself up, heard the mutter, Dreadful, dreadful …
A week has passed, it is dreary and chilly again. End of summer? Maudie seems to me, perhaps, really ill? … I know so little about old people! For all I know, all this is normal! I keep setting aside a time to think about her, but I am so busy, busy, busy. I rush in to her, at all hours, I say to her, I’m sorry, Maudie, I’ve got so much work. Last night I went in late and fell asleep in her chair. This morning I rang up the office and said I was not feeling well. In all my years there I think I’ve been ill twice, and I never take days off.
Phyllis said, ‘That’s all right, I’ll hold the fort!’
Maudie’s day.
She wakes inside a black smothering weight, she can’t breathe, can’t move. They’ve buried me alive, she thinks, and struggles. The weight shifts. Oh, it’s the cat, it’s my pretty, she thinks, and heaves. The weight lifts, and she hears a thud as the cat arrives on the floor. Petty? she asks, for she is not sure, it is so dark and her limbs are so stiff. She hears the cat moving about and knows she is alive. And warm … and in bed … Oh, oh, she says aloud, I must get to the toilet or I’ll wet the bed again. Panic! Have I wet the bed already? Her hand explores the bed. She mutters, Dreadful, dreadful, dreadful, dreadful, thinking how, a few days ago, she had wet the bed, and the trouble and difficulty of getting everything dry.
But it is as if her hand has disappeared, she can’t feel it. She clenches and unclenches her left hand, to know she has hands, and waits for the tingling to begin in her right. It takes a long time, and then she pulls out the half-numb right hand from under the clothes and uses the left to massage it awake. She still does not know if she has wet the bed. Almost she sinks back into the black bed, black sleep, but her bowels are moving and she smells a bad smell. Oh no, no, no, she whimpers, sitting there in the dark. No, dreadful, for she believes she might have shat in the bed. At last, with such effort and trouble, she climbs out of the bed, and stands beside it, feeling in it to see what is there. She can’t be sure. She turns, carefully, tries to find the light switch. She has a torch by the bed, but the batteries ran low, she meant to ask Janna to get new ones, and forgot. She thinks, surely Janna would think to look for herself, she knows how I need the torch! She finds the switch, and there is light … and anxiously she inspects the bed, which is dry. But she has to get to the toilet. She never uses the commode for more than a pee. She must get herself to the outside toilet. But there is a hot wet thrusting in her bowels and she gets herself to the commode, just in time. She sits there, rocking herself, keening. Dreadful, dreadful, for now she will have to take the pot out, and she feels so low and bad.
She sits there a long time, too tired to get up. She even sleeps a little. Her bottom is numb. She pulls herself up, looks for the paper. No lav paper, because she doesn’t use it in here. She cannot find anything to use … At last she struggles to the cupboard, her bottom all wet and loathsome, finds an old petticoat, rips off a piece, uses it to clean herself, and shuts down the lid on the smell – and worse, for while she does allow herself a fearful peep, she refuses to let her mind acknowledge that there is something wrong with her stool. Dreadful, she mutters, meaning the stuff her bowels seem to produce these days, and shoves the curtains back off the windows.
It is light outside. But it is summer, it could be the middle of the night still. She cannot bear to think of the difficulties of getting back into bed, and then out of it again. Her little clock has its face turned away from her, she doesn’t want to cross the room to it. She pulls around herself an old shawl, and huddles in the chair by the dead fire. No birds yet, she thinks: has the dawn chorus been and gone or am I waiting for it? She thinks of how, a child, she lay with her sisters in the bed in the cottage of the old woman in the summers, and woke to the shrill violence of the dawn chorus and slept again, thinking of the lovely hot day ahead, a day that had no end to it, all play and pleasure and plentiful tasty meals.
And so Maudie drifts off to sleep, but wakes, and sleeps and wakes for some hours, each time remembering to move her hands so that they don’t stiffen up too much. At last she wakes to the cat rubbing and purring around her legs. Which are stiff. She tests her hands. The right one gone again. With the left she caresses the cat, Pretty, petty, pretty pet, and with the right she tries to flex and unflex