The Facts of Life (23 page)

But Edward was examining his hands, lost in thought. Around him murmurs rose to open-voiced discussion. Hands touched his arms and shoulders, spread fingers passed back and forth before his eyes. A doctor was sent for and – a sure sign of crisis – the technicians emerged from their soundproof layer. A motherly viola player conjured up a cup of strong tea for him but she had to take it back, kindly tut-tutting, when he threatened to let it slop all over his lap. He wanted to thank her, to explain, but mustering words had suddenly become an overwhelming effort.

It was as though he were slithering into a waking dream that held him tight as a bog; to struggle would make things worse but if he relaxed, the panic in his gut might soon pass. He kept his eyes lowered, lest they betray him by showing him more substanceless horrors. A studio nurse arrived with a commissionaire and, as they led him from the room, he heard the woman with the tea say, ‘Well, of
course
he was in a camp, poor love. In Poland somewhere, I think it was. It would take years to get over it. It’s a wonder he’s as sane as he is.’

When a studio car brought Edward home, Sally’s heart turned over.

‘He’s been overworking,’ she told Jerry Liebermann. ‘Sometimes he’s been so frantic to meet your deadlines that he’s done without sleep altogether. No-one can keep that up for long. I insist he takes a complete rest.’

A doctor nominated by the studio’s insurers drove out to The Roundel and concurred with her opinion. Edward was freed from contracts for two cheap war films and a lavish Shakespeare project. Jerry sent him flowers, as did the studio orchestra. Myra Toye actually sent flowers to Sally, a big bunch of yellow roses. The card, which Sally was obliged to show to her mother, her father, the Richardses and countless other fans in the coming weeks said, ‘
Take good care of him, Mrs Teddy. We need him back in one piece and
soon
!!
Yrs. Myra Toye
.’

Edward was indeed tired. Sally made herself up a bed in a room on the other side of the gallery and moved Miriam’s cot in with her so that they would not disturb him during the night. He slept whole days away. He was too tired to read and turned off the radio moments after he had turned it on, muttering about there being ‘too many voices’. Even music seemed to disturb him, and repeatedly Sally found windows she had left open closed again, as though birdsong too was an insufferable stimulus. When Miriam was being affable, which was usually just after a feed, Sally took her in to visit him but he was uneasy holding her – often shaking his head and hiding his hands in wordless refusal.

Invariably the baby soon picked up on his tension and began to grizzle.

One day he seemed to feel stronger, for he dressed and came downstairs. Sally dared to imagine a steady recuperation, with him beginning to work again sporadically, clad in his fetching silk dressing gown, and her serving him small, eggy lunches on a tray. Although she knew they needed the money, a part of her enjoyed having him all to herself again.

The effort of staying upright, however, or even making conversation, soon proved too much for him and he became as immobile and withdrawn in an armchair as he had been in bed.

She shut the piano lid one day while she was dusting and it remained shut.

Meanwhile she was amazed at how her fascination with Miriam never seemed to lag. If anything, her needless panic over the baby’s mysterious fever had made time with her all the more precious. She could watch her, play with her, hold her for hours. Since the birth she had felt no need of adult company beyond Edward’s and with him away at work so much, would often spend days on end wrapped up in her daughter’s emerging abilities. Fellow adults, particularly childless ones, only made her embarrassed at her preoccupation. Visitors no sooner arrived than she longed for them to be gone.

‘I’m becoming quite bovine!’ she wrote to Dr Pertwee. ‘I’ll never lose all the weight I put on, I move so little and I swear I move at half the speed I used to. My head seems fixed at forty-five degrees from the vertical I’m so obsessed with her. The other day I’d just given her a bath and I caught myself sucking at one of her little feet like some great, hungry cow. Reassure me. Can this be
natural
?’

She could not understand Edward’s reluctance to hold their child. It seemed to her that if he only let that soft, vulnerable creature sink on to his lap, let her pull myopically at his jacket buttons, let those milky blue eyes fix on his, then all his secret pains would rise to the surface and evaporate in love. She began to find herself guiltily drawn to spend more time with Miriam and less with him. At the slightest sound from Miriam, she dropped her novel and ran from his side with as much eagerness as concern.

When he began to have fits of crying she was appalled. She kissed him, held him to her, rocked him in her arms, begged him to tell her what the matter was. But he could never say or, if he spoke at all, it was only to mumble an apology and say it was nothing, nothing at all.

‘But it must be. Don’t be daft. Edward, I
love
you. You can tell me. What is it? What’s wrong?’

At last her persistence would drive him from the room. If she pursued him, she felt brutal, if she stayed away, she felt callous. The sound of him weeping quietly in another room wrenched at her vitals as insistently as her baby’s wailing. She knew she could never stand by and let Miriam cry and, at first, the same seemed to be true of Edward’s pain. With Miriam, however, she could still the cries, offer milk or a comforting shoulder, rock her back to sleep or bring her down to play. With Edward, it seemed, her approaches were useless. After many failed attempts to comfort him, each one leaving her more depressed at her impotence than the one before, time gave her lessons in hardness. She found, to her disgust, that she could stare at his sob-distorted face across a room without flinching. If, midway through one of the many meals during which she provided most of the conversation, she looked up to see his eyes red with trickling brine, she could politely overlook it as one might somebody’s runny nose. Her parents called a few times, bringing flowers and fruit, as to the conventionally sick, but she could tell they found the situation alarming and she saw the willingness with which they accepted her suggestion that they leave him in peace.

Sometimes she stirred at night, aching for his touch, his sleeping grasp on the underside of her breasts, the pacifying weight of his thigh between hers, the soft, slow stages by which their somnolent shifts beneath the bedclothes could warm into lovemaking. Then she felt the chaste confines of a single bed around her or heard Miriam making her muffled, sucking, baby sounds and remembered. Twice, maybe three times, she had tried to kiss him or run a hand across his neck with more than an everyday, nursing tenderness, but she felt herself rebuked at his stiffening, as though her touch chilled him to the marrow.

Gradually her compassion for him came to be coloured by irritation; a change insidious as the arrival of mildew on the dining room ceiling. He broke a plate on his slow progress about the kitchen and her angry words were out of all proportion to the event. When a heavy cold made him adenoidal, she became unreasonably disgusted at the noise he made by trying to munch toast and breathe at the same time.

‘
Must
you do that?’ she cried out, when she could bear it no longer. He stopped chewing, stared at her for a moment, replaced the piece of toast on his plate and, murmuring, ‘Sorry,’ left the room.

‘Edward? Edward don’t be silly,’ she laughed. ‘Come back.’ She followed him to the door, but he had vanished into the fabric of the house as completely as any chastened child and she was left alone with the rays of heartless morning sunshine and his uneaten breakfast, an accidental ogress.

The day she finally came to accept the worst began with her losing her temper again. Miriam was fractious with the cutting of a tooth and had woken her repeatedly through the night. Pink and cross from boiling up nappies, Sally was carrying the steaming linen out to the garden to hang it when Miriam’s cries rang out through the house again.

‘Damn!’ she swore as she opened the door. Edward was sitting in an armchair, hunched and sniffing. Even the way he sat made her angry, because she sensed he was trying to shrink from her view. More tired than her work as a doctor had ever made her, worried about how long the insurers would continue to pay his salary, and intensely frustrated suddenly with being the only one in the house who did any work, she snapped at him bitterly.

‘Oh for Heaven’s sake, why can’t
you
shut her up for once?! You
are
her father, after all.’

He turned his sad, blank look on her as she stamped out to the washing line. He would not move, of course. Not to help, at least. He might slip into another room out of her way, go upstairs and lie on his bed to stare at the ceiling like some miserably captive ape, but help his wife? Take a small part in caring for his daughter, his own flesh and blood? Oh no. That was asking too much. Sally hung out the nappies, stabbing the fury out of her with clothespegs, until she was calm enough to be dismayed at the kinship in rage she was beginning to feel with her mother.

When she returned to the house he had, indeed, left his armchair and disappeared. Once again she was appalled that he was making her into someone best avoided. Miriam had stopped crying, which made Sally’s burst of anger feel even more unjust. She climbed the stairs in any case, to make the beds, then froze in the doorway to her room, amazed. Edward was leaning tenderly over Miriam’s cot, his hands lowered to rub her back to sleep. She had not known, until she felt this relief, how deeply his apparent rejection of the baby had wounded her. Then she took a few soft steps into the room to lay an apologetic hand on his shoulder and gaze down with him. He loved Miriam! Miriam would help him! All would be well!

But his hands were not stroking. He was holding a pillow over her little face and his hands were shaking with the effort of pressing down. Sally let out a kind of roar and ran at him, pushing him so hard he lurched to one side and fell, still clutching the pillow. Miriam writhed in the cot, bellowing and snatching at the air with angry fists. Sally picked her up and held her possessively to her shoulder. Edward was rising from where he had fallen. His teeth chattered.

‘Get out!’ she yelled. He raised a hand defensively. ‘You! You – just get out!’ Simply by running at him she was able to drive him from the room. She kicked the door shut with a bang and fumbled to turn the key in the lock, then she sat heavily on her bed and began to rock back and forth, calming herself as well as the hysterical baby. Slowly Miriam’s cries lessened. Sally brought her down to lie in the crook of her arm. She stroked her cheek and Miriam suddenly yawned. Sally looked up to see the two of them in the old, stained looking-glass which leant beside the wardrobe waiting for someone to rehang it. The tableau they made might have been soothing in its domestic normality were her face not pinched with fear. She looked back to Miriam and stroked the baby’s wispy hair.

Her surgical coats, boil-washed, ironed and redundant, hung on the back of the door. Her black medical bag crouched suggestively on a chair. With a supreme effort of will, she drew doctorly dispassion around her. Slowly her disorderly emotions – the fear, the dismay – fell away to leave rigid self-condemnation. What could she have been thinking of all these weeks? Edward was sick, not exhausted. It was pointless to rage at him for something so obviously beyond his control. It was she who had allowed their child’s life to be endangered by not snapping out of her milkily sentimental delusion earlier to find him qualified help. Resolve allayed her terror. Her world had not quite collapsed. Her child would live. Marriages had weathered worse storms.

Miriam was sleeping now, weighing heavily against her mother’s arms in her total relaxation. Sally listened to her baby’s deep breathing and forced a sigh. Then she listened harder, reaching beyond the door. There was no sound from Edward. Was he crouching on the landing? Was he listening too, perhaps, an ear to the other side of the door? She frowned then murmured, ‘Edward? Are you there?’

She stood and carefully settled Miriam back in her cot then let herself on to the landing, locking the door behind her and pocketing the key.

‘Edward?’

She had looked in all the other bedrooms and was on her way back to the stairs, irrational fears mounting the quieter the house seemed to become, when she heard the clatter of metal against enamel and saw blood welling out over the lip of yellow linoleum which protruded below the bathroom door. He had not locked himself in but was slumped against the door so she had to lean on it with all her weight to force her way in. His safety razor lay open and bladeless in the bath. He had already cut his wrists and, as she came in, was hacking above one of his ankles in an effort to open the artery there. He was lying in a great pool of gore.

‘No!’ she gasped and ran at him, slipping on the blood. As she tried to seize his arms he lashed out at her with the blade. It caught on the fabric of her blouse just nicking the skin of her forearm, then his wet fingers lost their grip on it and it fell into the blood. He stared at it for a moment, then held out his hands to her and gave out a single despairing wail which almost turned her stomach. His arms fell and his head dropped back against the door as his cry for help subsided into terrible sobs.

Sally ripped off her blouse, twisted it into a rudimentary rope and tied it so tightly about his bleeding calf that he yelped with the pain. Skidding in the blood which covered them both, she tugged a towel off the rail, slashed at it with nail scissors then, with strength born of desperation, ripped first one then another long strip from it. As she tied these with necessary brutality about his arms, she became so bloody that a casual observer could not have guessed which of them was the one in mortal danger.