Smut: Stories (8 page)

‘Things in the café are fine,’ said Ollie. ‘It is all organic, isn’t it, love?’

Geraldine nodded.

‘Not bread,’ said Geraldine.

‘Not bread,’ said the boy. ‘It’s wholemeal but it’s not organic. What was Mr Donaldson like, your husband?’

‘Ex-husband,’ whispered the girl.

‘Why?’ said the boy. ‘They weren’t divorced.’

‘He’s dead,’ whispered the girl as if this were a shameful fact.

‘I know he’s dead,’ said Ollie, ‘but that doesn’t mean he’s an ex-husband.’ He smiled at Mrs Donaldson and mouthed, ‘Sorry.’

‘Maybe,’ he said, ‘you don’t like to talk about him.’

Mrs Donaldson didn’t, particularly in these circumstances, but she just smiled as if it was of no consequence.

‘How long were you married?’

‘Twenty-five years.’ It had actually been thirty.

‘Nice.’

He eased down the sheet a little and the girl used the slack to cover her face completely.

‘Gerry is a bit shy.’

‘That’s all right,’ said Mrs Donaldson. ‘So am I.’

‘Hear that, Gerry? Mrs Donaldson’s shy too.’

He stretched out his leg and rubbed Mrs Donaldson’s knee with his foot. It was a nice foot, she thought, and more adult-seeming than his face. The toes were strong and sensible and the little toe not just an afterthought like hers. She was about to stroke his foot when Geraldine suddenly turned over and put her arm round the boy in the process dislodging the sheet altogether.

‘Whoops,’ said Ollie and quickly clapped his hand over his crotch and then laughed.

‘I don’t know why I bothered to do that,’ he said, ‘in the circumstances,’ and took his hand away.

Mrs Donaldson smiled and tried not to take too much interest though registering he was more excited than he had let it appear.

‘Your turn,’ he said to the girl and unwound her from the sheet while she hid her face in his chest as he stroked her back saying, ‘Easy, lovely. Easy.’

‘Are you sure this is all right?’ said Mrs Donaldson.

He nodded reassuringly and began fondling Geraldine with more purpose, kissing her shoulders and running his hands down her back to her bum.

‘You don’t mind if we just get on with it?’

Mrs Donaldson shook her head, he gave her a thumbs-up sign and applied himself to the girl.

‘This is what she likes,’ Ollie said.

‘No, I don’t.’

‘You did yesterday.’

‘She doesn’t want a running commentary.’

‘Maybe she does,’ said Ollie. ‘Do you want a running commentary because I’m just about to slip my hand between my girlfriend’s legs.’

She screamed, though Mrs Donaldson was relieved that it was with laughter.

Whereas Laura had flashed Mrs Donaldson the occasional smile and even winked at her over Andy’s shoulder Geraldine, sternly and wholly absorbed with the job in hand, seemed in no mood for such incidental pleasantries. She never once even looked at the older woman and had Ollie not made up for it Mrs Donaldson might have felt a touch unwanted. But Ollie made every effort to row her into the proceedings, politely pushing Geraldine’s knee down, for instance, so that the onlooker should have a better view of the action. And when he had Geraldine kneeling on all fours he leaned across and gave her hand a little squeeze saying to no one in particular, ‘I really like this.’

The end when it rather lengthily came was less lighthearted with Ollie grim-faced and purposeful and Geraldine shaken by great shuddering sobs and the long despairing wail Mrs Donaldson had heard occasionally through the wall.

The action over, Geraldine went straight off to the bathroom as Ollie lay on the bed.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘We should have had a pill first and she’d have been more relaxed. How was it for you?’ And he grinned.

‘It was nice,’ said Mrs Donaldson, politely. ‘I enjoyed it. Thank you very much.’

‘I’m not sure it was value for money,’ the young man said. ‘I’d have liked a touch more abandon. Which there would be normally you know, one to one?’

‘It’s understandable,’ said Mrs Donaldson.

He pulled the sheet back over him.

‘How did it compare with Andy and Laura?’

‘I think,’ said Mrs Donaldson, ‘that they’d done it before. Had somebody there, I mean.’

‘Yeah? This is a first for us, as you could probably tell. Were we a bit awkward?’

‘Oh no,’ said Mrs Donaldson, ‘that was what was refreshing about it. It was…genuine.’

‘And what about Andy? How does it compare? You know, the thing itself?’

‘Oh, I think they’re much of a muchness,’ she said untruthfully. And then she heard herself saying, ‘I’d have to see them side by side.’

‘Steady on.’

At which point Geraldine opportunely returned from the bathroom and Mrs Donaldson said good-night, going back to her bedroom feeling rather pleased that she had managed to be a bit cheeky.

That apart, though, she didn’t feel the session had been a success or quite the adventure she had been hoping for. Maybe the encounters were losing their novelty.

Waking in the small hours she thought she heard the girl crying.

A FEW (UNEVENTFUL) WEEKS LATER Mrs Donaldson had a morning session. She was now working virtually full time, though having gone through the repertory of symptoms and situations, her homework at least was less burdensome than it had once been and she was seldom if ever at a loss.

A new term had begun and since this was the first year Mrs Donaldson scarcely knew any of them and nor was Ballantyne there to help. The initial stages of tuition had always interested him the least. True, the ignorance of the students gave him umpteen opportunities for sarcasm in which he was happy to indulge except that having begun by showing off a good deal he had got the idea (rightly) that this wasn’t a side of him Mrs Donaldson much cared for. So with his self-restraint not always reliable he sometimes, as today, chose to absent himself from these early sessions altogether, which was easier when, as on this particular morning, the SPs were old hands. Terry was here with a strangulated hernia and another outing for his tangerine underpants, Delia with chest pains that might be a heart attack but which would turn out to be indigestion and Mrs Donaldson who had a bunch of indeterminate symptoms with which she regularly presented herself as suffering, she was certain, from cancer.

Mrs Donaldson wasn’t feeling all that clever herself this morning and just before leaving the house she had been sick. She had taken a couple of tablets but now they were beginning to wear off and with Terry and Delia having been briskly disposed of she found herself lying on a trolley in a hospital gown with two students in attendance and not feeling at all well, even, she discovered as she felt her tummy, in actual pain.

Without warning Mrs Donaldson suddenly began to shiver uncontrollably and so violently she might have been attached to a machine.

‘That’s a “rigor”,’ said the girl.

‘How does she do it?’ said the boy. ‘It’s amazing. Look, she’s even sweating.’

‘No worries,’ said the girl. ‘She’s the crafty one apparently. Someone in the third year told me. Now dear,’ and she bent over the trolley, ‘what seems to be the trouble?’

‘I’m ill,’ said Mrs Donaldson, her teeth chattering. ‘I was sick this morning. Get help. Get Dr Ballantyne.’

‘All in good time. We’ll just examine you.’

The boy fumbled his way round.

‘Try and keep still if you can.’

He laid his hand on her abdomen and pressed at which she screamed out so suddenly he recoiled as if he’d been bitten.

‘Bloody hell. No need to overdo it.’

Mrs Donaldson had left her folder on the chair and thinking to cut short the process the girl sneaks a look at what this quite spectacular bundle of symptoms is meant to represent.

Light dawned.

‘No worries,’ she said. ‘It’s all psychosomatic,’ and suddenly she bawls in Mrs Donaldson’s ear, ‘You’ve not got cancer. This isn’t cancer.’

‘I’m so cold,’ whispered the patient. ‘Can I have a blanket? Get help.’

‘We are help,’ said the boy. ‘This is what she does apparently. She is brilliant.’ Shivering and shaking and with her belly on fire Mrs Donaldson dimly remembered she had had to present something like this once before and she feebly beckons the girl closer.

‘I think…I think it’s acute appendicitis.’

‘Really? Well that’s good. At least it isn’t cancer.’

‘Help me.’

‘Time’s getting on,’ said the boy. ‘I’m supposed to be on a ward round in five minutes. Knock it off now, love. We’ve got the message. Oh God, she’s pretending to be unconscious. Well, we’re going to leave you to it.’

The students head for the door but as they are going the girl comes back and whispers in Mrs Donaldson’s unconscious ear, ‘It isn’t cancer. Not cancer.’

Making his leisurely way back through the hospital Ballantyne ran into a distraught Delia who, thinking to collect her friend for coffee, had found her laid out on the trolley unconscious and unattended.

‘You’re a victim of your own reputation,’ said Ballantyne visiting her on the ward the next day. ‘But you were quite right. It was appendicitis. The rigor should have told them that, particularly when the pain was in the textbook spot. They’d no excuse.’

Ballantyne had had supper with Mrs Donaldson on several occasions but without ever touching her. Now, because she is or has been ill, he feels empowered to take her hand and stroke it therapeutically.

‘I blame myself. I should have been there. Still, it will do them no harm to have come that close to killing someone so early on in their careers. I made a lesson of it this morning and I said…’

Ballantyne having taken advantage of his position as doctor Mrs Donaldson now takes advantage of hers as patient and, seemingly weary, closes her eyes.

‘You’re tired,’ says Ballantyne, reluctantly releasing her hand and falling back into the traditional doctor-speak he was always mocking in his students. ‘Try and get some rest. We’ll soon have you out of here.’

Scarcely had he gone when a more enlivening visitor arrived in the person of Ollie bearing an eccentric posy from the garden consisting of two sweet peas, a dandelion, a sprig of privet and a pigeon’s feather, an assemblage which, having put it in her tooth glass, he proceeded to draw while sitting on the end of her bed. He took her hand, too, which made her glad he wasn’t with the listless Geraldine, who, unsurprisingly, had a thing about hospitals.

Ollie wanted to see her scar and was disappointed to find it was still hidden by dressings or he might have drawn that too.

‘Never mind,’ he said. ‘Plenty of time for that,’ and promising to keep the house tidy, was off.

Gwen was her other visitor and though the full circumstances of the students’ negligence had been kept from her she renewed her efforts to get her mother to find employment elsewhere or, better still, abandon employment al together. This was in between floods of tears since, as she took pains to make clear, this visit was for her particularly poignant as she had not been in the hospital since her father died. She was explaining this to her mother, but, as she told her indifferent husband later, ‘Mother seemed very tired. Slept most of the time I was there. It reminds you she won’t always be with us.’

Back at home for a brief convalescence, to begin with Mrs Donaldson resisted the temptation to resume her nightly routine. After that first unsatisfactory evening it seemed unlikely that there would be a repeat performance and no necessity for it either as Ollie had paid the rent on time and in full.

Perhaps her brush with mortality ought to have turned her thoughts to worthier objects, but it hadn’t. What was putting her off was Geraldine. Her diffidence and the general drabness of her disposition displeased Mrs Donaldson if only because it tended to take the edge off her nocturnal vigils. Though still occasionally
en poste
she was now less conscientious about it, once knocking off in the middle of an encounter that gave no sign of coming to a conclusion and since she knew the conclusion was likely to be Geraldine’s melancholy, long withdrawing wail she felt she was better off in bed. Also, she told herself, she’d had an operation.

She reflected that what had briefly been almost suffocatingly exciting was now routine, as routine in fact as it had been when Mr Donaldson was alive and she was still a participant. She didn’t like to feel like this – it seemed a portent of age. Morality had nothing to do with it.

It meant though that any relief from her mural duties was welcome and when Geraldine had to go over to Halifax to stay with her sister Mrs Donaldson was glad to get back to an early bed and a nice read.

EARLIER THAT EVENING she and Dr Ballantyne, or Duncan as she was now licensed to call him, had been out to supper. He talked about his life and his career and when it got to the coffee stage he asked her to marry him.

She had been expecting this and while she could not give him an immediate reply she had an answer ready which was that, flattered and grateful though she was, this proposal had come as such a surprise she would like to think it over.

Emboldened by her ambiguous response and also remembering what he had been told of her goings-on with the lodgers he went a step further and placing his hand on the inside of her thigh suggested that it might help her towards a decision if they were to go to bed together.

This proposal too, was not unexpected, her first line of defence her not long-removed appendix and the presumed need to treat her recently perforated abdomen with some consideration. This he lengthily pooh-poohed delivering a long lecture on the body’s recuperative capacities and pointing out that in any event there were other intimacies short of penetration that would involve no pressure on the particular muscles in question.

This she had not foreseen but fell back on the quick thinking she had learned in the classes saying that she might have been persuaded had not today been a special day, citing it as the (entirely spurious) anniversary of her late husband’s death. If only out of respect for Cyril could their encounter be postponed…Duncan?

Duncan put his hand over hers. ‘If there was anything you could have said that might make me respect you more this is it. Of course we will wait. We must wait.’