Blaming (Virago Modern Classics) (19 page)

“And how are you, Ernie?” one evening she heard Gareth inadvisedly asking.

The sitting-room door closed, and she hastened to her dressing-table and combed her hair and put on more lipstick.

Downstairs, Ernie was being only too eager with his reply. “My leg’s playing me up, been a bit chronic the last few days.”

“Sorry to hear that.”

“Not to worry … all in the day’s work,” Ernie said, with a fine show of courage. “It runs in the family. Madam will be down in a jiffy, sir. Yes, my mother suffered, especially towards the end. Her leg crept right up. When it reaches the thigh, it’s supposed to be curtains. But, of course, doctor, you know more about that than I could ever learn in a month of Sundays. I used to pooh-pooh it. ‘Old wives’ tales,’ I’d say.”

He glanced for an admiring nod of assent from this modern doctor, who now seemed to be poking
a splinter from his finger with an unsterilised pin; and then he put his unsterilised mouth to the small wound and sucked it. “Certainly hope your leg’ll be better,” he said, and then looked up and smiled with relief as Amy came in.

“How are you?” he asked her, when Ernie had gone out, and this time was interested in the answer. It is a question which doctors – and other people – avoid asking for self-protective reasons.

“I’m worried about not hearing from Martha. And I am beginning to blame myself. James has blamed me all along. She’s been here a fortnight now, and I’ve heard nothing from her.”

“She’ll be all right”

“I wish you’d tell James that.”

“Perhaps she didn’t come after all.”

“I hadn’t thought of that. It could be easily checked. But I have a feeling she came. I wish I hadn’t.”

“Not. .to. .worry,” he said, in his most
Under Milk Wood
voice, rolling his ‘r’s.

“I know she’s been…was… a help to me,” Amy said, her voice rising, as if in denial of something, “but I didn’t ask for that help, and wouldn’t have. If only it had been you, not she, in Istanbul.”

Frowning, he had started to pick at his finger again.

“What’s wrong?” she asked.

He shook his head dismissingly. “Nothing.”

“She’s taken, and she’s given.”

“What life’s about,” he said, like the Reverend Patrick Padstowe.

She thought that he must have had a trying surgery to make him talk so, people snivelling in and out with
sore throats and palpitations. His poor mind must be numbed with the boredom and misery of it all. She viewed his profession, as he himself could never have viewed it (or would not have chosen it), with horror and distaste.

“Do you want a sterilised needle or something?”

“No.” He put his hand in his pocket, and she returned to the subject of Martha. “She had sudden impulses, both for giving and taking. Just getting off the ship like that. Giving me the painting. She gave me that, you know,” she said, although she wasn’t to have told a soul. She nodded in its direction. “Yes, I know. What did you give her?” “For instance…” Amy paused, not liking to mention anything as petty as taxi fares… “I paid for the air-trip back from Istanbul If trip you can call anything so depressing.”

He did not say, as James would have said, “which was made necessary only by your predicament.” James would also have added,
“And
she missed Ephesus.”

Gareth had found, some time ago, that he did not love her less for her inconsistencies. Perhaps he loved her more because of them. Anna had been strong, direct, like his Welsh mother – in fact, like most of the women he had ever come across, except patients whom he perhaps saw at their worst, or what they feared to be their worst. Amy was not strong, but she was tenacious. He saw – from his own strength – a danger in that. He could have made a good job of taking care of her, he thought. She was unreasonable, and he was sure of being capable of dealing with that.

“You are the only one who hasn’t blamed me,” she said.

“Two people at most can have blamed you.”

“Others will.”

“But for what?” he asked, almost exasperated.

“For anything that may have happened… any inconvenience…”

“Why on earth did she marry him? Couldn’t she have found out long before what she felt about him?”

“She once said she was sorry for men.”

“A good enough reason for many things; but certainly no reason for marriage.”

He couldn’t imagine Amy’s acting from any motives of pity for him; there was nothing for him, he realised, along those lines.

It was three days later that the letter came from Simon, posted in New Ludlow, Minnesota. He wrote that he had received from the British police a copy of a letter from Martha, left in a small, and – as he was later to discover – squalid hotel in Paddington where she had died of an overdose of sleeping tablets, taken at an hour of depression, of pain, of loneliness and futility; of, worst of all, she said, of having let him down. She had begged for his forgiveness, who had nothing to be forgiven, he wrote. In some way — he knew not how, and could not rest for wondering – he had failed her. He was flying at once to London for the inquest and funeral, and would be in touch with Amy as soon as possible. He regretted the shock he had been obliged to give her, but had thought
it better to do so by a letter.

Shock it was. God, don’t let him come here, was her first thought. He must already be in England. Don’t let me ever have to see him again. Her ostrich reaction, as James would have said, if he had known. So she – Martha – had had two escape routes, she thought – the grandmother’s money, and the pills.

She felt both belief and disbelief. She began to shiver. She called down the stairs for Ernie – someone to tell, someone not (in words, at least) to blame her. He came quickly, sensing urgency, drying his hands on a small towel, and from habit, pushing back cuticles.

She told him.

“Go and sit down, or go out and take a breath of air,” he said, as he had sometimes advised drunk customers in the pub.

She went into the sitting-room and sat down. The hall was where she had stood, reading the letter. To her relief, Ernie began to blame the husband. “I can’t put a cause to it, but I couldn’t take to him. All that trouble I… we went to for the dinner-party, and him just sitting there sulking. And that silver wedding-ring! Pretending it was platinum, I suppose.”

“No, it’s not true. She preferred silver to gold. No pretending about that.”

“All the same… my blood runs cold. It’s strange, I thought that was just a colloquialism, but it’s true. My blood literally
is
running cold.”

“Mine, too, Ernie.”

“It’s a pity it’s so early. You could have had a drink.”

“This isn’t a pub, you know. But all the same, I don’t want one.”

“Coffee?”

“I’ve only just finished some.”

“He must have treated her in a cavalier fashion.”

“Perhaps. Perhaps not. I certainly did.”

“You, madam? Who could have been kinder?”

“I didn’t go to the airport to meet her, to see that she was all right.”

She was coming out with the admission as a sort of trial run. Others would, no doubt, react to it differently. In a way, she was appeased by saying such a thing to Ernie, who would not, could not – outrightly – criticise her, no matter what he inwardly thought.

“You took the trouble to phone up her old landlady.”

This was true. The afternoon before, with guilt pressing on her, Amy had telephoned Mrs. Francis.
But she
knew nothing, she had said coldly; no attempt at contact had been made.

“I did try,” Amy said, running the tip of a finger under her eyes. “No one can say I didn’t.” But she knew that there were those who would.

“I’ll say you tried.”

“But I didn’t do my best,” she said bravely; trying out this statement, too.

“It was others that didn’t do their best. That’s as clear as a nutshell. Why don’t you ring up the doctor? He might be able to give you something.”

Such as a clear conscience? Amy wondered.

Certainly not that; but comfort she could rely on. She went to the telephone. She would ask Gareth
to tell the news to James that evening: for she could not. And he would come and assure her that she was not to blame any more than anyone else; that there had been many assembling circumstances all contributing their share to the disaster.

But surgery was over early this morning, and Gareth had gone off on his visits.

“Ernie, I do believe I’m going to marry Dr. Lloyd.”

“My congratulations, or I believe I should express it as ‘felicitations’ in the case of a lady.” He spoke very quietly, busying himself unnecessarily about the room. He asked, his head bent as he arranged things on a table. “You’ll be leaving Laurel Walk, then? At some later date.”

“Leaving Laurel Walk?”

She hadn’t considered such a thing, had really not carefully considered marriage itself – perhaps was being as rash as Martha had been, but from weakness and not strength, with a longing to be comforted and upheld, not to do the comforting and upholding. In the last few days, Gareth had become a necessity to her, and the idea of marrying him had re-arranged itself in her mind, something now almost inevitable, and to be done for old times’ sake.

“Leave Laurel Walk to go and live in Park Road?” she said. “I can’t see any sort of point in that.” (And I’m not that sort of in love, she thought. Not to make awful sacrifices.) “My dear friend, Mrs. Lloyd, hated that dark house, and so bang on top of that frightful recreation ground. I’m sure I should hate it even more than she did.”

“Yes, madam.” So muted, so unquestioning, Ernie. He was thinking that the Doctor might move in here. A point in his – Ernie’s – favour. He versus Miss Thompson. He brightened. “When is the happy event
to take place?” he asked. He had already decided on his wedding-present to them, while rubbing over with a duster the onyx eggs.

“Oh, ages, probably. Nothing at all settled. But I wanted to tell you nearly first of all, Ernie.”

“I appreciate that very much.” He was feeling more and more in a strong position. There could be a happy ending. Patients might – certainly must – come knocking on the door, hobbling in, admitted and assisted by himself, in his short white coat, immaculate, sympathetic, courteous. He had experienced the other thing – at the dentist’s, for instance.

He imagined it all happening quite soon, so that, on a quiet evening, when off duty after surgery, Doctor would come down to the kitchen to have a look at his foot. The ankle, which seemed weak, had almost let him down when shopping at the supermarket, and that, in spite of witch-hazel, crepe bandage and safety-pin. His own doctor – with rather rude indifference – had advised an elastic binding, which had proved itself inadequate.

He went downstairs, sat down, took off his shoes, and then slowly raised his feet to the same level. There was definitely (one of his favourite words; he often used it instead of, or as well as, ‘yes’) a slight swelling, just below the ankle bone and towards the left, and a bluer vein than on the other foot. Well, that can’t be all in the mind, he decided.

He suddenly realised that now Amy would change her doctor. They might even swop doctors. It was what he needed – unhurried, constant and expert advice, and under this roof.

“I shan’t go to the crematorium,” Amy said. “It hasn’t happy memories for me.”

James said, “Those places hardly exist for people to have happy memories of. It’s not at all what they’re for. And I think you should – even must – go, for her husband’s sake. I’ll take you.”

“But you’ll be at work.”

“I can have time off for a funeral.”

“Of someone you met once?”

“Of someone I feel I owe something to.” He shut up at once, having said this, for Gareth had warned him off recriminations, and it was, most certainly, to his advantage to keep things smooth between his mother and Gareth. “In any case,” he added, “I don’t have to give reasons.”

Amy sighed. Then she said, in a bright voice, “James, I do believe that Gareth and I are going to be married.”

A whole load of worry fell from him: unbelievable relief swam through him.

“You don’t think it’s too…?”

“No, no,” he said robustly. “It’s exactly what Father would have wished.”

No one knew this, or could imagine Father being faced with it, so those two said no more.

In the end, Amy did go to Martha’s funeral, and James went with her. “Otherwise,” he had said, “there might be just one person – and in a foreign country.”

“That’s exactly what you seem to have wished for your own father,” Amy said bitterly. “I suppose I could rustle up Ernie, and that Mrs. Francis, perhaps,”
she added, knowing that she had gone too far. “She – Martha, I mean – knew other people here; but I never knew who they were. I certainly never met any, and she scarcely referred to them. She talked mostly of painters who were dead, or people in books who were never alive. And, you know, it wasn’t a foreign country to her. And for that reason, she returned to it.”

“I was thinking of the poor husband.”

There were, in fact, only the three of them at the crematorium. This, somehow, did make it worse for Amy, and she knew that James had been right, that they could not have let Simon be there alone. Trying to keep her mind off Nick’s funeral, she could not keep it off Anna’s. She remembered the large church filled with people in mourning – so few years ago, this seemed to be taken seriously. Some of the women (it was winter) wore fur coats, which appeared to count The undertaker had worn absurd black kid gloves, bursting at the button-holes, she remembered. She remembered his hand clasped behind his back, like Gareth’s, but from obsequiousness, not proud bravery; for Gareth had looked very stern, even – about his mouth – contemptuous. As at other funerals, at this she behaved automatically; stood, sat, sat forward inelegantly instead of kneeling, and shaded her eyes with one hand. She had taken a quick look at the light oak coffin with its spray of roses, and then had switched her mind off. She had also taken one swift look at Simon, who was sitting apart from them in a front pew. He seemed worse than a desperate man; he seemed like a man stunned far past despair. He did not
know when to stand or sit or kneel, although gently guided by the unknown parson.