Fruitful Bodies (18 page)

It must be because she was pregnant again that she was wallowing in the past and that the recollection should be making her feel all blubby. Petronella couldn’t abide self-pity and of course it couldn’t have been all that bad. She wouldn’t have had Millie at all if it hadn’t been for that particular one’s generosity and it was nobody’s fault that he, and consequently Millie, had not lasted. How feeble of her to want to cry, but thank God the young were not here to see it. She had brought up Rupert and Miles not to be crybabies. That was so important, for their own sakes. She knew perfectly well that children who blub the minute they’re left at prep school really do cop it from the others, so she agreed with Hugh there. She had been jolly lucky. Really, it had made her more independent. Meanwhile she was once again, this time aged forty-one and accidentally pregnant, sitting in a car watching out for grey ponies and being driven somewhere she didn’t want to go.

Hugh took his hand from the steering wheel and patted her knee. ‘Buck up, sausage,’ he murmured. ‘Only one more.’

‘One more what?’ Petronella asked, still thinking about her pregnancy.

‘Visit, sausage. Visit to your mama. Just grit the gnashers, let her go on about toxins, listen to her symptoms and tell her she looks wonderful. After we’ve got it over with
we’ll be off to France and she can sit it out for the rest of August in the Sulis.’

‘I don’t know how you can be so callous. Poor Mummy.’

In the silence that followed Hugh felt like a brute, but dammit, it wasn’t as if Petronella wouldn’t, in another mood, say exactly the same thing herself. He did rather wish she would make her mind up about her mother. To know one’s own mind on most matters was the mark of a sound chap. Petronella’s ambivalence about her blessed mother was not the sort of thing one expected in a sound chap’s wife. Some days it was all Poor Mummy and how she, with her little-and-often history with men, had never received real love from anyone except Petronella. On others it was Poor Petronella, rejected because her mother had never really wanted her and had been too taken up with the men to give her any proper love.

He said, ‘But look, it’s not as if she’s not perfectly happy there, is it? Especially with the new admirer. She wouldn’t want to come with us.’

‘What was his name again? Warwick, that’s it. It’s sick.’

Petronella was fishing angrily in her Mulberry bag and brought out an envelope.

‘Don’t read it again, Pet. You know it just gets you all het up,’ Hugh said mildly. Petronella ignored him and unfolded the letter.

‘I should have known something funny was going on when she wrote at all. She’s only written me about half a dozen proper letters in my life. This is the bit—’ She began to read aboud but could have recited from memory.

Petronella waved the sheet of paper with annoyance.

‘She’s obviously going gaga. Look at her writing for a start, it’s gone so shaky. It never used to be shaky.’

Hugh recognised that his role in this conversation was
to play things down. As he had already said many, many times in the three days since the letter arrived, he said again, ‘She is in her eighties, now, Poppet. We have to expect things like shaky writing.’

‘But I really do think she’s going gaga. She can’t remember a thing she’s told me.’ She was still waving the letter. ‘I heard most of this last time we went anyway, before Warwick turned up to join us for tea. You remember, all about how she roped him into sitting for her stupid art therapy. “
Such a marvellous head
”, how stupid that sounds. What worries me is this talk of afterwards. She doesn’t say how long she’s invited him for, he could almost be moving in. God, Mummy is the limit.’

This last comment clarified things, a little. Two minutes ago it had been a Poor Mummy day; now there was a definite gust of Poor Petronella in the emotional weather. Must be because she was in pod again. Hugh braced himself for another eight months of mood swings and resolved to keep a closer eye on the barometer. Earrings and lipstick before nine and a morning of competent soup-and-bread-making meant invariably a spell of Poor Mummy, whereas dressing gown at noon, scowling at the Aga and fried eggs for Sunday lunch were all clearly indicative of Poor Petronella.

‘Well, it does mean we don’t have to have her with us. He’s doing us a favour, really.’

Petronella sighed with exasperation. ‘Oh, I know. But she really is the limit. He must be at least ten years younger than she is. I can’t think what he gets out of it.’

Hugh swallowed a snort at Petronella’s apparent
naïveté
. He said, ‘Perhaps he’s in love with her. Plenty of men have been in love with her, after all, according to you. Perhaps it can happen, even at their age.’

There was a depressed silence until Petronella said, almost as if she had been taking the suggestion seriously, ‘Not even Mummy could marry again at eighty-one.’

Hugh sighed and went on driving instead of asking out loud,
Oh couldn’t she?

After another three miles Petronella suddenly announced, ‘Look, Hugh, we’re mad going to France. We can’t afford it. We should have cancelled when I found out about the baby, never mind the pig prices. We can hardly manage next term’s fees. And soon there’ll be
three
lots. And that’s without,’ her voice rose rather wildly, ‘a new oboe for Rupert. And not counting Miles’s orthodontics.’

‘Poppet, we’ll find a way. Everybody goes away in August and we need a holiday. I’ll have a quiet word with ma-in-law today and get her to set up a trust for this one, too. That’ll help.’

‘She’s not
made
of money, Hugh. I know she’s done it for Rupert and Miles but she’s not expecting to do it for another one.’

‘Darling—’ Hugh searched his lexicon of un-mercenary euphemisms for a way to say that actually his mother-in-law
was
made of money, but found it empty. He contented himself with thinking that at least Petronella was an only child and Bunny wasn’t immortal, and by saying, ‘You’ve got to look on the bright side. Don’t want little sproglet in your tum-tum getting upset, do we? They can sense it, you know.’

Hugh had read something once in
Horse and Hound
about a mare’s temperament affecting the hormones reaching the fetus in the uterus and was terribly pleased that the memory of it came to his aid now, and rather proud that he had managed to find the nursery terms, sproglet and tum-tum, that Petronella preferred when her
own gynaecology was under discussion. So often he could not remember the point he wanted to make nor, even if he did, find the right way of putting it. In fact, it sometimes seemed to him that the more deeply he felt or believed in a thing, the less able he was to say a word about it.

S
ISTER
Y
VONNE STOOD
fuming at the window of the empty drawing room and watched the progress of the black Saab up the rain-soaked drive. She had just reached a bad-tempered impasse with Hilary about what should be done about Bunny Fernandez and was still too cross to be curious about whose car it was and why it should be making its way towards the front entrance of the clinic and not heading for the small visitors’ car park nearer the gate.

Five minutes ago Hilary had raised both hands pompously and said, ‘Yvonne, it is not good for me to be having this conversation. I have been hurt by some of the things you have said, and I am going to leave the room now. You have the right to tell me that you are angry, but you do not have the right to insult me or my work. I shall come back when you are calmer. Goodbye.’

Bloody Hilary. The matter of Bunny Fernandez was quite clear. If Dr Golightly was not on the premises then she, Sister Yvonne Cartwright, the only other medically qualified person on the staff, was entitled to judge whether or not a patient required his attention. Not Hilary Golightly, who was not a nurse, who was nothing
but a failed artist. Bunny Fernandez did not need the doctor and it was she, Yvonne, who was the one to judge, and having judged should have been listened to. But oh no, Hilary Golightly puffs herself up and suddenly she’s the one arguing the toss and thinking she should be making the decisions.

Acrid bile rose in Sister Yvonne’s throat. She reached into her uniform pocket for a couple of indigestion tablets because something, perhaps the bacon and egg butty she had bought at the garage halfway down Bathwick Hill on her way to work and eaten for lunch, had started striking matches in her intestines and was trying to set fire to itself. Not strictly along clinic guidelines, that sandwich (white bread, butter, smoked streaky, egg and mayo) but it wasn’t as if the clinic employed her stomach, was it? And it wasn’t as if she ate in secret, she just ate very quickly without bothering anyone in the basement staffroom while the others were busy preparing for the patients’ lunch. And it was not strictly along clinic guidelines either to stoke up on Rennies throughout the day but this place got to you sometimes. She popped the tablets into her mouth, bit on them sourly, and as they crumbled in her copious saliva she went over the conversation with Hilary again. Although, Yvonne considered, it was not just a matter of what had been said, it was a question of what had been implied.

Mrs Fernandez’ daughter and son-in-law had come for the day. That was the crux of the whole thing. They had sat with her during lunch—the daughter had even had a bowl of that chilled green soup, for some reason that must have been unrelated to either enjoyment or hunger—and almost straight afterwards Bunny had complained of feeling
strange. She was a madam, that one. Yvonne had not bathed, massaged and pandered to her for all these years without spotting that. As she chewed and fumed, Yvonne’s anger with Hilary writhed, rose up and grew tentacles which curled around and squeezed Bunny too, in a most satisfying way. The symptoms she had complained of had been delivered with her usual imperious certainty, but had been vague. With her head drawn back, she had described ‘a sort of irritation’ in her spine. She could sort of see things that she knew could not really be there: bright colours and sort of flashing lights. She was cold but sort of hot, thirsty and sort of wanting to go to the loo at the same time, restless and sort of wanting to sleep. Sort of asking for a smack round the face was Yvonne’s professional opinion. Bunny was either getting a bit senile and confused or she was being a manipulative, attention-seeking old haddock and Yvonne knew which, and she could tell by the look she had exchanged with that Petronella that that was what she thought, too. Nevertheless Yvonne had taken her patient off to bed and Bunny had fallen into a half-sleep, or was faking it. She was definitely faking the occasional jerking of her limbs under the covers. The daughter and husband had followed, she looking guilty, he bemused, to sit with her.

It should have been the start of a quiet afternoon. The other patients had all taken themselves off to rest by the pool or in their rooms, leaving Yvonne and Hilary alone. But then in had jumped Hilary with her hand-wringing, clucking Yorkshire nonsense about how it was not like Bunny to miss her afternoon art therapy, especially now that her head of Warwick was coming along so strongly. So she must be really ill, and Dr Golightly (though of
course Hilary said ‘Stephen’ with special emphasis) should be called in. Honestly—head of Warwick! Warwick was another one that Yvonne felt she could cheerfully drown in the hydrotherapy pool. The only head of Warwick that Yvonne could have cared anything for would be one on a platter with a kiwi fruit garnish, the fraudulent old goat. Not like Bunny to miss working on her head of Warwick, her arse. According to Yvonne, and she could tell Petronella Cropper agreed, it was
exactly
like Bunny to mount a little guilt-inducing drama for her daughter and son-in-law’s benefit on the last visit they would make before going on holiday for three weeks.

The black car had now stopped and a lean, dark-haired woman dressed in jeans and an expensive-looking white shirt was getting out, making a wry face at the rain which was tipping down steadily. Yvonne thought she recognised her as Mr Ballantyne’s friend, the one who’d visited yesterday. She was obviously bringing in some of his things (though what would James want with another table lamp, especially that one?) in anticipation of a long stay, so presumably her conversation with Dr Golightly the other day must have left her thinking that her friend was not going to be getting better any time soon. Well, she’d be disappointed if she wanted to see him today. Yvonne softened as she thought about poor Mr Ballantyne who really was quite poorly, so much worse than yesterday that he was having a day’s juice fast and bedrest. That was the sort of patient she liked, a really ill one. There were hardly ever any properly ill people here, just over-indulged, hysterical hypochondriacs whose families didn’t want them and who could blame them.

Now there was another woman, much older, and—oh
Jesus, Mary and Joseph—a dog. They were unloading so much stuff from the car it looked as though the three of them might be moving in. Yvonne sighed, supposed dimly that she should go to help and stayed where she was, just out of sight behind the tasselled turquoise curtain. Her thoughts returned to Hilary and with them returned a sense of grievance which began to swell and burst like yeast bubbles in fermenting dough, because this old woman outside, now that Yvonne could see her properly, looked very like another of Dr Golightly’s lame ducks.