The Life and Loves of a She Devil (10 page)

‘Your poor daughter,’ said Ruth, ‘seems to be working so hard! Perhaps you can help her, Mrs Fisher. Had you ever thought of that? Perhaps a mother should be at her daughter’s side, if she possibly can. If it’s in her strength to get there.’

But Mrs Fisher just settled back into her new soft cushions, turned on the television and looked at Ruth in a sideways kind of way, and said sometimes she wondered what Ruth was up to, but she was on her side, whatever it was. Only she wasn’t going to go and live with her daughter.

She talked of a certain Nurse Hopkins, who’d been good to her, but who’d come into a fortune and left Restwood. After she’d gone Mrs Fisher had felt safer just staying in bed.

‘That Nurse Hopkins,’ said Mrs Fisher, ‘was short as a teaspoon but wide as a door, and strong with it. Of course you’re big as a house. That helps, round here.’

‘What became of her?’

Nurse Hopkins had gone to work in a hospital for the criminally insane, said Mrs Fisher, where she’d look no different from anyone else. Ruth would have got on well with her. Everyone could do with a friend. In the meantime she was
not
going to live with her daughter. Why should she do the little bitch a favour?

‘But you have to forgive. You could stay with her, just for a short time, surely? You could take a train and go and see her.’

‘I’m too old.’

‘You’re only seventy-four. It’s nothing.’

‘I suppose I could go,’ conceded Mrs Fisher. ‘One Sunday afternoon, say.’

‘I’ll put you on the train,’ said Ruth. ‘I’ll buy your return ticket, and telephone through and ask the manservant to meet you.’

‘Manservant!’ said Mrs Fisher. ‘I bet there’s hanky-panky there!’

‘I bet there is too,’ said Ruth.

‘She can’t hide anything from me,’ said Mrs Fisher. ‘I’m into everything! I’ll sort her out.’

One Sunday morning Ruth removed the placebo tablets from Mrs Fisher’s medicine bottle and replaced them with Valium and Mogadon. On Sunday lunchtime, when Mrs Fisher was in the dining room, Ruth emptied the contents of Ruby’s commode into Mrs Fisher’s bed, and brought in a vase of stale dahlias to mask any possible smell, at least for the time being. On Sunday afternoon Ruth put Mrs Fisher, dressed in her purple and green and dirty black best, on the train to the station nearest the High Tower. She went back to Restwood and rang Garcia from Mrs Trumper’s office and said she was calling from Restwood to let them know that Miss Fisher’s mother was coming down for the day and would Garcia meet the train. She was blunt and to the point and put down the receiver before Garcia could consult Mary Fisher.

Ruth sat by the telephone and waited for it to ring, which it presently did. Mary Fisher was on the line. She did not wait to learn whom she might or might not be addressing, but spoke at once in a rather more high-pitched voice than usual.

‘This is inexcusable, Mrs Trumper,’ said Mary Fisher. ‘In the first place, there is simply not a train back this evening. In the second, I should have had at least a week’s warning, and in the third, what do you think you are doing, allowing a senile woman to wander about the country in this way, taking trains at will? Anything could happen to her.’

‘This is not Mrs Trumper,’ said Ruth, in an assumed voice, one of impeccable gentility, ‘but a senior member of the staff. Mrs Trumper is at a funeral. If there is not a train this evening then the best thing for you to do is to keep your mother overnight and return her in the morning. We could not give you warning because your mother gave us none. She is a human being with full human rights, not a parcel, and can come and go as she wishes. Nor is she senile. She is wonderfully improved in health, lately, for which we are all heartily thankful, and you as her daughter surely must be so too.’

Mary Fisher put down the telephone without attempting any reply, recognising that on the other end of the line she had an equal opponent. Ruth waited. Presently Garcia rang, saying that Mrs Fisher would be back on the morning train the following day and requiring someone from Restwood to meet her at the Central Station.

‘Of course. Though, of course we’ll have to charge taxi fares to Miss Fisher’s account.’

She waited for the phone call to come that disputed the charging of the taxi fares, but none came.

Mrs Trumper returned from Mrs Sweet’s funeral at six thirty. Mrs Sweet had gone downhill rather rapidly since old Mrs Fisher had left the back room and joined the ambulants. Apparently Mrs Sweet required for her sustenance a diet of aggravation, resentment and resignation. Food alone was not enough. Mrs Trumper, finding Ruth in her office on her return, observed as much, reproachfully.

‘The purpose of life should not be its prolongation,’ said Ruth, ‘but the manner of its living.’

‘That’s all very well,’ said Mrs Trumper, ‘but it leaves me with an empty bed and a too rapid turnover of residents. It doesn’t look good.’

Ruth told Mrs Trumper that Mrs Fisher was to be away all night, at her daughter’s request.

‘So long as she doesn’t ask for a rebate,’ said Mrs Trumper, ‘she can do as she likes. Not that I won’t miss the old trout. She’s not as boring as the rest. In a place like this you could die of boredom. Well, many do. Look at Mrs Sweet! But at least she left her mattress in a good state.’

‘I thought I should tell you,’ said Ruth, ‘that Mrs Fisher’s bed has been a little damp lately.’

‘Damp?’ cried Mrs Trumper. ‘How damp?’

‘Very damp.’

‘Incontinence!’ cried Mrs Trumper, changing her favourable view of Mrs Fisher, and moved at once to action, lurching to her feet.

‘If what you tell me is true,’ said Mrs Trumper, as she plodded up the stairs, ‘this is a serious development. It is my duty to investigate. No one shall say that Restwood is either careless or callous!’

Mrs Trumper felt and smelt Mrs Fisher’s mattress.

‘This is long-term leakage,’ Mrs Trumper said, ‘I can always tell. How long has this been going on?’

‘About a month,’ said Ruth. ‘I didn’t like to tell you. Poor Mrs Fisher. She can’t help it, after all.’

‘You’re fired!’ cried Mrs Trumper, incensed and impetuous. ‘Look at the state of this mattress!’

It was indeed sodden. Ruth had lately been bringing lager in to Mrs Fisher, in some quantity, instead of sherry.

Mrs Trumper rang Mary Fisher and said that on no account was Mrs Fisher to be returned to Restwood, either the following day or ever. Restwood was a residential hotel for the elderly, not a nursing home for the incontinent.

‘I understand there will be higher charges for sheetage and so forth,’ said Mary Fisher, ‘and I suppose I have no option but to pay them. But I regard it as blackmail.’

‘You don’t seem to understand,’ said Mrs Trumper. ‘This is cards on the table time; chickens coming home to roost. Your mother is home to roost, Miss Fisher. I will not take her.’

‘Then what am I to do with her?’ wailed Mary Fisher.

‘What I’ve done with her for the last ten years,’ said Mrs Trumper. ‘Look after her and put up with her.’

‘But I’m not a nurse.’

‘She doesn’t need nursing. She needs TLC.’

‘What is that? A new drug?’ For the first time an element of hope could be heard in Mary Fisher’s voice.

‘Tender loving care,’ said Mrs Trumper, letting the laugh show in her voice.

After a short silence Mary Fisher, who was paying for the call, said, ‘But Bobbo and I were going on holiday.’

‘Take her with you. She loves new places, new people.’

‘Don’t be absurd,’ said Mary Fisher.

‘Then stay home,’ said Mrs Trumper. ‘Do you know how long it is since I had a holiday?’ And she settled down one-handed to listen to what she called the relative’s recitative. With the other hand she cunningly opened, and then poured from, a bottle of gin. Mary Fisher presently gave up the attempt to persuade Mrs Trumper to keep her mother, and asked for the name of a nursing home where incontinents were welcome.

‘There is none,’ said Mrs Trumper, in triumph. ‘There are one or two that will take them in, at a substantial extra charge, but they have waiting lists of from five to ten years.’

Mary Fisher openly wept. Mrs Trumper, satisfied, concluded the conversation. She went up to Ruth’s room to say that she was reinstated, but found Ruth already packing.

M
ARY FISHER LIVES IN
the High Tower and considers the nature of love. She does not think it’s so easy now. The stars wheel and the tides surge and the salt spray beats upon the thick plate-glass, but Mary Fisher’s eyes are turned inward; she no longer delights in these things. She could live in Nightbird Drive, or anywhere, for all she notices the glory of nature.

Mary Fisher lives in the High Tower with two children and an angry mother and a distracted lover and a sulky manservant. She feels they devour her living flesh. These days champagne gives Mary Fisher acid indigestion because she can no longer savour each sip, but has to gulp it down before meeting the next domestic emergency.

Smoked salmon is too salty for Bobbo, whose blood pressure is slightly raised, and although Mary Fisher explains that smoked salmon is not in fact a food with high salt levels he will not believe her, and does not like to see her eating what he does not. Tuna sandwiches are frequently served, here as anywhere.

Mary Fisher looks at love and sees that it is complicated. For one thing, she is held in sexual thrall by Bobbo, as indeed quite often the heroine’s best friend is held by the hero at the beginning of one of Mary Fisher’s books, before a purer, more spiritual love strikes the hero and heroine, and best friend gets ditched or run over, like Anna Karenina, or obliged to munch arsenic, like Madame Bovary. Such is the fate of best friends. But Mary Fisher is not the best friend; she is the heroine of her own life, or wants to be. The more she has of Bobbo’s body, the more she wants it. She desires his good opinion: she will do anything to have it, even look after his children, her mother, grow old before her time. His good opinion means a good night in bed. Sexual thraldom is as tragic a condition in life as it is in literature. Mary Fisher knows it, but what can she do?

B
OBBO COULDN’T MARRY MARY
Fisher, because the law refused to divorce him from a wife he couldn’t produce, who indeed might very well be dead. But nor was the law prepared to declare her dead and himself a widower. Ruth had disappeared — traumatised, Bobbo claimed, by his departure and the accidental burning of her home. Bobbo no longer liked to hear Mary Fisher speak harshly of Ruth. Sometimes he even lamented the fate that led him to Mary Fisher, and true love. He did not deny their love nor wish it undone; just sometimes he could see it would be convenient if it had never happened.

And the High Tower itself was not the place it was. The children pressed dirty palms against snowy surfaces and kicked footballs against shiny glass and sprawled over the backs of sofas, breaking them, and stretched quilts to make trampolines, and tripped and sent family heirlooms flying. Andy, trying to play polo from the back of a Doberman, sent Mary Fisher’s great-uncle’s grandfather clock crashing to the ground. Mary Fisher wept.

‘It was all I had left of the past!’

‘Only possessions,’ said Bobbo.

‘The past my foot!’ shrieked smelly old Mrs Fisher. She was back on Mogadon and Valium, prescribed by the doctor, and was now indeed incontinent. ‘I remember the day your first husband brought it home from a junk shop, and so do you. Your husband who was mine by rights.’

And the staff tittered as Mary Fisher sat tearfully beside the fallen clock, its lovely bits and pieces all churned up inside, twanging and jangling faintly, still lively in death, like the carcass of a chicken once its head has gone.

And still Bobbo would not have the children confined, or restrained, or discriminated against, as he saw it. He thought they had suffered enough. He did not feel responsible for their suffering, but sometimes seemed to feel that Mary Fisher was. He had become a very concerned father, now that they had no mother.

‘This is their home now,’ he said, ‘and they must feel it. And you are their step-mother, in the eyes of God if not the law.’

And Mary Fisher was too confused by the feel of his lips nuzzling her ear to say, ‘But this is not what I meant. Not what I meant at all!’

Nicola managed to break the Bang & Olufsen hi-fi simply by leaning against it. Mary Fisher had learned not to weep but couldn’t help groaning.

‘Buy another!’ said Bobbo. ‘You can afford to, after all.’

But could she? Keeping the High Tower standing and a sensible edifice, now that its original purpose — the keeping of sailors away from rocks — was gone, was an expensive business. And agents have to be kept, and servants, typists, accountants —Mary Fisher was obliged to keep not only herself but a whole host of others, rocking gently on the sea of her dubious and possibly even temporary success. As Mary Fisher kept saying, ‘I am only as good as my last novel.’ And Bobbo knew that her novels were not ‘good’ at all, but merely saleable, a distinction she was afraid to make, for what is saleable today is unsaleable tomorrow.

And she had expensive tastes. Bobbo did like at least to be able to buy the wine but Mary Fisher’s palate was so sensitive it could get through $100 a night with no difficulty, and if there were guests more like ten times that amount.

Not that there were many guests, those days. Those whom Bobbo liked, Mary Fisher didn’t, and vice versa. Sometimes it was better just not to have anyone at all. And besides, there were the children, and Nicola had suddenly sprouted heavy breasts for which she was surely far too young. ‘She takes after her mother,’ said Bobbo. There was no getting away from it: she did. Nicola and Andy squabbled and shrieked. Such guests as there were left thankfully.

Bobbo stared out of the plate-glass windows of the High Tower on to the foaming sea, and contemplated life, and death, and justice and mystery, and someone had to be practical, so it was Mary Fisher. That, she began to understand, is what love does to woman. The material world surges in; tides of practical detail overwhelm the shifting sands of love. The bed creaks at night.