The Real Thing (7 page)

Eight beds in a large room, four on either side and too close to each other. This was a shabby Victorian hospital in North London, and probably the room had not been designed as a ward. But it was decent, with pink flowery curtains at the windows, and on runners to separate the beds for moments needing privacy. Because the room was tidied for visiting time the long decorous swathes of pink were tied back. A lot of people sat about on chairs or on the beds. Mothers and sisters, brothers and cousins, friends and children had been coming and going since two in the afternoon. Not the husbands: they would be in later. But there was one husband who sat close to the head of a bed where a pretty woman of about forty-five lay turned towards him. She gazed into his face while he held both her hands, one in each of his. They were large hands, and he was a big man, wearing good clothes, tweedy grey jacket and a white shirt that dazzled, like those in the advertisements. But he had taken off his tie, which hung on his chair back, and this gave him an informal look. The intensity of his concern for his wife and her imploring gaze at him isolated them as if a curtain had gone up on them in their own home.
Certainly neither was aware of the visitors who came and went.

He had brought her in at midday and had been sitting with her ever since, before formal visiting hours began.

This was a ward for gynaecological problems, or, as the women joked, a womb ward. The seven other women had had or would have operations or other treatment. No one was seriously ill, and more joking went on than in any other kind of ward, yet low spirits were never far away, and the nurses who were always in and out kept an eye open for a woman weeping, or one silent for too long.

At six o’clock the suppers were brought in and most visitors went home. No one had an appetite, but the husband coaxed his wife to eat while she protested she did not want to. She cried a little but stopped when he soothed her like a father, and she sat obediently with a bowl of custard in her hand while he fed her with a spoon from it, sometimes putting down the spoon to blot her eyes with a large old-fashioned very white handkerchief, for she could not keep back the tears for long. She wept like a child with little gulps and snuffles and heaves of her chest, always watching him with her wide wet blue eyes. Blue eyes meant to be happy, for crying did not suit her.

The other women watched this scene. Sometimes their gazes met, commenting on it. Then husbands came in after work, and for an hour or so the room contained couples in close practical talk about children and domestic matters. Four husbands had come. One old woman sat alone, turning the pages of a magazine and watching the others over it. Another, Miss Cook, had never been married. She, too, watched what went on, while she knitted. The third who had no man beside her read a book and listened to her Walkman. She was ‘the horsey one’. (Whether she was horsey or not no one knew: she was presumed to be, being upper-class.)

Then it was time for the men to leave, and they went: kisses, waves, see you tomorrow. The woman who had come that day clung to her husband and wept. ‘Oh don’t go, don’t go, Tom, please don’t go.’ He held her and stroked her back, her shoulders, her soft grey nicely waved hair, now in disorder. He repeated, ‘I must go, dear. Please stop crying, Mildred, you must pull yourself together, please, dear.’ But she saw no reason to stop. She lifted her face to show a mask of tragedy, and then she laid it against her husband’s shoulder again and cried even harder.

‘Mildred, please stop. The doctor told us he didn’t think it would be anything much. He told us that, didn’t he? I said to him that we had to know the worst, but he said there wasn’t any worst. You’d be out in a week, he said …’ He went on talking like this in a soothing firm voice, and stroked her, and made concerned noises, and she burst out in worse sobs and clung and then shook her head to say she wasn’t crying about her medical treatment, but for reasons he knew about yet wilfully chose to ignore.

So noisy were her tears that a nurse came in and stood staring, but did not know what to do. The husband, Tom, looked gravely at the nurse. This was not a helpless look, far from it: rather, he was saying, There’s no more I can do and now it’s your job.

‘Mildred, I am going now.’ And he disengaged himself, pulling down her arms which instantly flew up again around his neck. He finally got free, laid her back on her pillows, stood up, and said genially (not apologetically, for this was not a man who would easily see a need for apologies, but giving an explanation they were entitled to have), ‘You see, my wife and I have never been separated, not even for one night, not since we were married, not for twenty-five years.’ Hearing this his wife nodded frantically while the tears rained down all over her pretty pink
jacket. Then, seeing him stand upright there, refusing to bend down to her again, she turned her gaze away from him and stared at the wall.

‘I’m going now, dear,’ said Tom, and went out, giving the nurse a look that silently commanded her to take over.

‘Well now, Mrs Grant,’ said the nurse in the cheerful voice of her discipline. She was a girl of about twenty, and she looked tired, and the last thing she needed was an old woman (as she would see it) complaining and carrying on. ‘You’re disturbing all the others, you mustn’t be selfish,’ she attempted, hopefully.

The appeal had no effect, as the ironical faces of the other women showed they had expected. But Mildred Grant was crying less noisily now. ‘Would you like a nice cup of tea?’ No reply. Only gasps and little sniffs. The nurse looked at the others who were all so much older than she was, and went out.

Nine o’clock. Soon they would be expected to sleep. In came a trolley with milky drinks of a sleep-inducing kind. Some of the women were brushing their hair, or putting in rollers, or rubbing cream methodically into their necks and faces. There was a feeling of lull, of marking time: the day shift had gone home and the night staff were coming on.

The old woman-the really old woman, whom the nurses called Granny-remarked brightly, ‘My husband died twenty years ago. I’ve lived by myself for twenty years. We were happy, we were. But I’ve been alone since he died.’

The crying stopped. One or two of the women sent congratulatory smiles and grimaces to the speaker, but then there was a fresh outburst from the abandoned wife.

A sigh from the old woman, a shrug. ‘Some people don’t know their luck,’ she said.

‘No, they don’t,’ said the woman opposite her. Miss Cook. ‘I’ve never had a husband at all. Every time I thought I ‘ad one nice and hooked, he wriggled away!’ She laughed loudly, as she had often done at this brave joke, and glanced quickly at the others to make sure she had made her effect. They were laughing. Miss Cook was a comic. Probably it was this very joke that had set her off on her career of being one, decades ago. She was a large, formidable, red-faced woman of about seventy.

Soon they were all washed, brushed, tidy, and in bed. The night nurse, another fresh young woman, came to look them over. She had heard from the nurses going off duty about the difficult patient, and now she gave the sobbing Mildred Grant a long, dubious inspection, and said, ‘Good night, ladies, good night.’ She seemed as if she might try admonitions or advice, but went out, switching off the light.

It was not dark in the room. The tall yellow lamps that illuminated the hospital car park shone in here. There was a pattern of light and dark on the walls, and the pink of the curtains showed, a subdued but brave note.

Seven women lay tense in their beds, listening to Mildred Grant.

Her bed was near the door. In the two beds beside hers were matrons in the full energies of middle age, who commanded children, daughters-in-law, sons-in-law, husbands, relatives of all kinds, and these were always dropping in with flowers and fruit in what seemed to the others like a continuing family party. Mrs Joan Lee and Mrs Rosemary Stamford demanded the movable telephones several times a day to organize dentists’ and doctors’ appointments, to remind their families of this or that, or to ring up grocers’ or greengrocers’ shops to order food the happy-go-lucky ones at home were bound to forget. They might be in the hospital with womb
problems, but in spirit they had hardly been here at all. Now they were forced to be here, to listen. The fourth bed on that side held the joker, Miss Cook. Opposite her was the very old woman, the widow. Beside her, ‘the horsey one’, a handsome young woman with the high, clear, commanding voice of her class, who was neither chummy nor standoffish, defended a stubborn privacy with books and her Walkman. Atavistic dislikes had caused the others to agree (when she was out of the room) that her abortion on the National Health was selfish: she should have gone to a private hospital, for with those clothes and general style she could certainly afford to. Next to her a recently married girl who had miscarried lay limp in her bed, like a drowned girl, pale and sad but brave. Next to her and opposite Mildred Grant was a dancer, no longer young, and so now she had to teach others how to dance. She had fallen and as a result suffered internal hurt. She was depressed but putting a good face on it. ‘Laugh and the world laughs with you!’ she often cried, full of vivacity. This was her motto, and, too, ‘It’s a great life if you don’t weaken!’

The women were shifting about in their beds. Their eyes shone in the lights from the car park. An hour passed. The night nurse heard the sound of weeping from outside, and came in. She stood by the bed and said, ‘Mrs Grant, what are you doing? My patients have to get some sleep. And you should, too. You’re going to have an examination in the morning. There’s nothing to be afraid of, but you should be rested.’

The sobbing continued.

‘Well, I don’t know,’ said the nurse. ‘If she doesn’t stop in a few minutes, ring the bell.’ And she went out.

Mildred Grant was now crying more softly. It was a dreary automatic sobbing and by now it was badly on their nerves. In every one of them dwelled the unappeased
child with her rights and her claims, and they were being forced to remember her, and how much it had cost them all to subdue her. The pale girl who had miscarried was weeping. Silently, but they saw the tears glisten on her cheeks. The gallant dancer lay curled in a foetal position, her thumb in her mouth. The ‘horsey one’-she, in fact, loathed horses-had slipped the Walkman’s earpieces back on, but she was watching, and probably unable to stop herself listening through whatever sounds she had chosen to shut out the noise of weeping. The women were all aware of each other, watched each other, afraid that one of them would really crack and even begin screaming.

Mrs Rosemary Stamford, a tough matron, the last person you’d think would give way, said in a peevish end-of-my-tether voice, ‘They should move her into another ward. It’s not fair. I’m going to talk to them.’

But before she could move. Miss Cook was getting out of her bed. She was not only large and unwieldy but full of rheumatism, and it took time. Then, slowly, she put on a flowered dressing gown, padded because she said her room was cold and she couldn’t afford what was needed to keep it heated, and bent to pull on her slippers. Was she going out to appeal to the nurses? To the toilet? At any rate, watching her took their minds off Mildred Grant.

It was to Mildred Grant she went. She settled herself in the chair that had been occupied for all those hours by the husband, and laid a firm hand on Mildred’s shoulder.

‘Now then, love,’ she said, or commanded. ‘I want you to listen to me. Are you listening? We are all in the same boat here. We’ve got our little troubles, we have, all of us. I had to have a hysteriaectomy’ –so she pronounced it, as a joke, for while she was a real old-style working-class woman, unlike the others here except for the widow, she knew quite well how the word should be said. ‘The way I see it, it’s not fair. What’s my womb ever done for me?’
Here she raised her face so the others could see that she was closing her left eye in a wink. Always good for a laugh, that’s me, said this wink. Now she said loudly, to be heard over the sobbing, ‘Look, dear, if you’ve had someone to say goodnight to every night of your life, then it’s more than most people have. Can’t you see it like that?’

Mildred went on crying.

They could all see Miss Cook’s face in the light from the window. It looked strained and tired, the jolly clown notwithstanding.

She laid her arm around the weeping woman’s shoulders and gently shook her. ‘Now, my dear,’ she said, ‘don’t cry like that, you really mustn’t …’

But Mildred had turned and flung her arms around Miss Cook’s neck. ‘Oh,’ she wept. ‘I’m sorry, but I can’t help it. I’ve never had to sleep by myself, not ever, I’ve always had my Tom …’

Miss Cook put her arms right around Mildred, cradling and rocking the poor bereft little girl. Her face was, as they say, a study. She seemed to be struggling with herself. When at last she spoke, her voice was rough, even angry. ‘What a lucky girl you are, aren’t you? Always had Tom, ‘ave you? And I’m sure a lot of us wish we could say the same.’ Then she checked her anger and began again in a soothing monotonous tone. ‘Poor little thing, poor little girl, what a shame, is that what it is, then, oh dear, poor thing

The other women were remembering that Miss Cook had not had children, had never been married, and lived alone, and apart from her cat had no one to touch, stroke, hold. And here she was, her arms filled with Mildred Grant, and probably this was the first time in years she had had her arms around another person, man or woman.

What must it feel like, being reminded of this other
world where people hugged and held and kissed and lay close at night, and woke in the dark out of a dream to feel arms around them, or were able to reach out and say, ‘Hold me, I’ve been dreaming’?

But her voice was going on, kindly, impersonal, firm. ‘Poor little thing. Poor little girl. What a shame, but never mind, you’ll have your Tom back soon, won’t you …’

This went on for a good quarter of an hour. The sobbing stopped. Miss Cook laid down the exhausted woman, letting her limbs and head flop gently into a comfortable position, as one does with a child.