The Facts of Life (2 page)

‘Wasn’t that you playing the piano yesterday?’

‘Yes. It’s very out of tune.’

‘It’s all we’ve got. Play all you like. It’s a treat for the others. Presumably there wasn’t a piano for you at Horton Down.’

‘No.’ His face hardened. ‘There was nothing.’ For the first time his choice of words sounded foreign, a little too precise – like a spy in a film. His light accent was entirely English; a parson’s or a solicitor’s. ‘I couldn’t even get proper paper. At least this is large enough but …’

‘But what?’

‘Well. I have to draw in my own lines to make up the staves and it gets confusing because they overlap with the lines already printed. You see? I need proper score paper with the staves already printed in.’

‘Would a stationer sell that? There’s one down the road, in Wenborough.’

‘No. You have to go to a music shop. I mean, one would have to. I didn’t intend that you should …’

She pushed back her chair, closing his file.

‘Let me see what I can do,’ she told him. ‘But I can’t make promises. And don’t tell anyone, or I’ll end up running errands for the lot of you.’

As he said his thanks, she could feel him reassessing her as all the men there did. Seeing a white coat and stethoscope, tidy brown hair and un-made-up face, their first reaction said spinster. When she healed or calmed them, dealt with their pains and assumed responsibility for their helplessness, they looked at her again and their second reaction said mother. Generally they saw the nurses as angels of mercy, the doctors as angels of death. The female patients, inured to such nonsense from the cradle, were more tolerant of her status but also more shy.

She found a music shop on her next free afternoon when she rode on her motorbike into Rexbridge to find new slippers for her father’s birthday. They had only five books of score paper left, handsome things with green marbled covers and black spines. She was unsure how many he would need, so she squandered her money and bought all five. She had to haggle slightly – the assistant sensed her ignorance and tried to ask a stupid price – and still it was more than she could afford. Money was short – the hospital paid her meagrely – and she had decided to be quite brisk about presenting him with a receipt and asking for her money back. But instead, she surprised herself by telling him to repay her by taking her to a concert once he was discharged.

‘Yes,’ he said, as they laughed, both startled at her boldness. ‘Yes. I will. I should enjoy that. But you must let me give you the money too.’

As for so many women, the war had brought her a spell of social freedom, and with peace came a disappointing return to convention and what was suddenly declared to be a woman’s proper sphere. She had returned to her parents’ house because they lived conveniently close to the hospital, it was cheaper than living on her own and because reasoning with them as to why she should do otherwise was too daunting a prospect.

Sally’s father had been laid off from work as a mechanic when she was still a child. A hoist had given way and a lorry engine had fallen on him, crushing his pelvis. He could still hobble about, with two sticks, but going back to his old work was out of the question. He kept himself in beer money by fixing small household appliances – toasters, alarm clocks, gramophones – which he dismembered across the kitchen table. The compensation settlement from his employers had been derisory and her mother was forced out to work at a canning factory where she put in long shifts, sickened by glue fumes as she stuck labels on cans of the rich local produce – apple slices, pears in syrup, rhubarb, peas and beans. Her father had got Sally ready for school, washed, fed and dressed her. When her mother was on night shifts, Sally would not see her for days on end, going about the little terraced house on tiptoe for fear of waking the short-tempered breadwinner. When she worked during the day, her mother would return exhausted and fractious and, more often than not, would nod off in her chair half-way through Sally’s account of events at school.

Sally did well, very well by her parents’ standards. She won a place at Rexbridge Grammar School – entailing long walks and bus journeys and even earlier rising – and there caught the attention of one of the school’s governors. Dr Pertwee, the formidable unmarried daughter of a famous suffragette, singled Sally out as one who could go far. Heedless, it seemed, of what the child herself might want, much less the child’s parents, she used her influence to find her scholarships, thinking this would stop her parents resenting any stretching out of Sally’s education. She encouraged her interest in science and she coached her, in person, for a place at Rexbridge’s medical school.

Since he had played a mother’s role, Sally underestimated and overlooked her father, as her friends did their mothers. When he relinquished his sticks for a wheelchair, she found she ceased to even think of him as a man.

She was always torn, however, dreadfully torn, between the antithetical worlds education and her family represented for her. She frequently went straight to Dr Pertwee’s rooms in Rexbridge after school. Dr Pertwee served her nutritious sandwiches, fruit and milk like any mother and pressed her through her homework but she also encouraged Sally to discuss subjects like death, politics, religion and marriage that were tacitly accepted as undiscussable at home. Dr Pertwee lent her books outside the school syllabus, and taught her the facts of life in the same calm fashion she used to explain the reproductive systems of horse chestnuts and crested newts. She gave her tea out of bone china cups so fine Sally saw the light through them, and took her on weekend excursions to examine Greek vases and doomy Pre-Raphaelite paintings in the Sadlerian Museum. Sally harboured the curious images and forbidden subjects, the crustless sandwiches and perfumed tea like things stolen and therefore unsharable. What else could she do with them? They sat as awkwardly on her home life as a mink cape would on her narrow, bony shoulders.

For better or worse, her home life was still the one she was born with and demanded a kind of genetic loyalty. She was as keen to please her parents as any child and as eager for their love. With the onset of adolescence and her mother’s hasty lessons in how to wear the uncomfortable belt that held her Dr White’s towels in place, she longed to emulate her mother’s poise and savvy. She knew enough to suspect that her mother’s chic was a cheap thing, worked up from images of Gloria Grahame and Lana Turner, but at the age when everything about her own body appalled her, she sensed too that her mother’s way of inhabiting a dress or lighting a cigarette might, in certain circumstances, prove a stronger currency than Dr Pertwee’s unsensuous wit and desiccated culture. Looking back on those days, Sally was astonished that the two women had never met. Sally’s mother had no time to waste at school open days or prize-givings, even had she wanted to attend them, and Dr Pertwee was hardly going to join her mother for a darts match. Sally dared not suggest they invite her for a Sunday lunch, the way they sometimes did her parents’ relatives, for fear of creating extra work for them to complain about.

In becoming her friend and patroness, however, and in opening Sally’s eyes to a wider realm of possibilities than her parents’ outlook dared encompass, Dr Pertwee alienated her from her home. As she grew towards school leaving age, Sally found her parents increasingly prudish and ignorant, while their pride in her achievements was tempered by an almost superstitious fear of what they took for arrogance and ambition. Around her sixteenth birthday, she finally raised the subject with Dr Pertwee during one of the discussions Sally no longer found so daring.

‘I don’t mean to upset you, Sally,’ Dr Pertwee said. ‘I would never
ever
aim to
supplant
your mother. But you must see that a sapling sometimes needs to be transplanted a little way off from the parent tree if it is to grow to its full potential. Would you rather I saw less of you?’

‘No!’ Sally exclaimed. ‘Of course not,’ and the heat of her denial made her accept that whatever changes Dr Pertwee had wrought within her were as irreversible as if the perfumed tea and cucumber sandwiches had been the tools of bewitchment.

Sally had not quite qualified as a doctor when war broke out, but staff shortages were acute. She served her houseman years in the Red Cross. First in London amid the horrible thrill of the Blitz, then on the hospital ship in the Mediterranean, then in a military hospital in Kent. From there she was transferred to the old isolation hospital on the East Anglian coast at Wenborough, a few miles’ motorbike ride from her childhood home.

Her mother had spent the war working at a munitions factory on the other side of Rexbridge. The pay had been far better than her wages at the canning plant and, Sally guessed, her social life had improved commensurately. Evacuated from Hackney, her sister-in-law had moved in, with children, for the duration, and had been happy to keep Sally’s father company. Her mother stayed in digs with her new ‘girlfriends’ and used petrol rationing as the perfect excuse to cadge a lift home with a gentleman friend only every third weekend. This she did with a headful of new songs and a suitcase crammed with black market trophies. Now she was back at home to an unsatisfactory husband, who could never take her dancing, and a tedious, poorly-paid job packing sugar beet. The advent of peace saw mother and daughter picking up the pieces in a domestic game whose rules no longer suited them.

Edward Pepper asked Sally out to a concert in Rexbridge chapel just four days after the hospital had discharged him. He telephoned her at work. They had talked inconsequentially enough several times since their first encounter, but she had discounted his promise to take her out as mere politeness. Standing in a corner of the crowded staff room, she blushed at his proposition. She accepted quickly, almost curtly.

‘If I come on my bike, I can get in at about quarter to,’ she said. ‘Shall I meet you at the concert or somewhere else?’

‘Neither,’ he laughed. ‘I’ll pick you up. I’m borrowing a friend’s car. What’s your address?’

As she told him, she felt afresh the difference in their ages.

‘What are you all tarted up for?’ her mother asked her over tea.

‘I’m going to a concert. A friend’s taking me.’

‘Which friend?’ her mother asked. ‘One of the nurses, is it?’

‘What kind of concert?’ added her father and was silenced with a slap on his arm from his wife, who reiterated, ‘Which friend?’

‘Edward. Edward Pepper. You don’t know him. I met him at the hospital.’

‘Oh. Is he another doctor, then?’

‘No, he’s … erm … Well. I’m not sure what he does, really. He writes music’ Feeling a little light-headed, Sally took a slice of stale dripping cake.

‘So he’s a patient, then,’ her mother perceived.

‘Was. He’s one of the lucky ones.’

‘Eh, Sal, he didn’t have TB, did he?’ her father asked.

‘Do you know what you’re doing?’ her mother added, frowning.

‘Of
course
I know what I’m doing.’ Sally dropped the last piece of cake on her plate with a clunk. Her mother was staring at her, eyebrows raised. ‘I’m a grown woman, Mum.’

‘I was wondering when you’d notice.’

‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

‘You’re not getting any younger, that’s what. How old’s this man of yours?’

‘He’s not a “man of mine”. Mum, for pity’s sake, we’re just going to a concert together.’

Her father snorted, whether at her naïveté or poor taste in entertainment it was hard to say. Her mother merely kept her eyebrows raised and took another, deliberate, sip of tea.

‘I bought him some notebooks for his music and I suggested we go to a concert,’ Sally explained.

‘So you threw yourself at him!’

Sally pushed back her chair as her mother laughed.

‘I can’t sit here explaining all evening,’ she said. ‘He’ll be here any minute and I’ve got to polish my shoes.’

‘Which are you wearing?’

‘The black.’

‘Don’t you think the blue’d go better with that dress?’

‘I’m wearing the black.’

‘Suit yourself.’

‘They match my bag.’

‘Suit yourself.’

A car pulled up outside the terrace; a rare enough occurrence to silence everyone and send her mother scurrying to the window to peer around the curtain. Sally glanced at the clock.

‘Oh God! That’ll be him. Let him in, would you, Mum? While I do my shoes. Please?’

‘He’s a kike!’ her mother exclaimed, turning back from the window. ‘He’s a bloody kike and you’re a cradle snatcher!’

The revelation that he was German, thought Sally, could wait for another occasion. If one should arise, that was. As her mother walked, hair-fluffing, into the hall, Sally dived into the kitchen and rubbed fiercely at each shoe with a tea towel. She could hear Edward’s voice.

‘Hello. I’m Edward Pepper. You must be Sally’s mother.’

He said it too precisely, of course.

‘He sounds like a bloody spy!’ Sally hissed under her breath and stopped to dab a little vanilla essence behind each ear. Edward was ushered into the front room where he was joined by Sally and her father. Sally made formal introductions then her father started to ask why they were wasting money going to a concert and she herded Edward back into the hall, out of the front door and into the waiting Wolseley.

‘Don’t wait up,’ she told her father. ‘I’ve got my key.’