The Swimming Pool Season (15 page)

Miriam walks to the kitchen and begins to stir Leni's soup.

In the night she's woken by Gary.

“Mother's had a fall, love. Afraid you've got to get up.”

“A fall?”

“On the landing. She was dizzy, she said. I heard her go. I was reading. Luckily.”

Miriam tugs on the warm dressing gown that has replaced la robe. Gary has carried Leni back to her bed. Her face has the pallor of bone.

“Dr. Wordsworth's coming,” Gary whispers.

Miriam sits on Leni's bed, takes one thin hand in hers. There is sweat on Leni's forehead. She draws sharp, shallow breaths.

“I'm so sorry, Miriam . . .” she murmurs.

Gary, his hair wild, his thin body sumptuous in a black quilted gown, rebukes her.

“Ssh, darling. Don't utter.”

Miriam turns to Gary. “Is there pain, Gary?” To Miriam's irritation, Gary turns straight to Leni and asks her: “Where's the pain, sweet?” Leni's lips tremble as she answers: “Foot.”

We're a strange flock of nightbirds, Miriam thinks, a tryptich of pain and devotion talking in whispers round the lamp. Outside the night is starry and cold. Gary crosses to the electric fire and turns it on. Even in his quilt, he's shivering. Tea, Miriam decides. This is an English emergency; we'll drink tea. She strokes her mother's hand and lays it down. “I'd like tea, Gary,” she says. “Will you make it or shall I?”

“I,” says Gary and flits like a silky bat out of the room. As he goes down the stairs, he thinks, in seven hours I'll be teaching
Heart of Darkness
to IVb. He wonders if this night vigil will help or hinder him. To him, darkness today and yesterday has meant Gabriel. He knows he's in love. He will be as jealous of this black Othello as the character himself is jealous. The way between this night and the winter is strewn with strawberry handkerchiefs.

Gary makes a tray of tea and takes this up. Leni's lips are blue with pain. Miriam offers her tea, but she shakes her head. Gary and Miriam nibble Bourbon biscuits and drink the tea sweet to keep themselves awake. Once, Miriam suggests that Gary goes back to bed and tries to sleep, but he's settled himself on the other side of Leni's bed like her lover and he won't be moved.

He's still there, with his white, shapely legs stretched out beside the invalid, when the doctor arrives. Only the request that he goes out while Leni is examined dislodges him. He mooches back to his room and turns on Ella Fitzgerald:
Miss Otis regrets she's unable to lunch today
 . . .

To the accompaniment of this old, old song Dr. Wordsworth, a clean and ruddy man of sixty, informs Miriam and Leni that Leni's ankle is broken. She pouts with frustration. “I'm not going back to hospital, Dr. Wordsworth.”

“There's no alternative, Mrs. Ackerman. The ankle must be set.”

. . .
and from under her velvet gown, she drew a gun and shot her lover down
 . . .

“I don't want to go back in that hospital, Miriam.”

“Oh, it won't be for long, Leni. Will it, doctor?”

“No. Now I'm going to give you something for the pain.”

“What? What are you giving me?”

Dr. Wordsworth is filling a syringe.

“Just a mild painkiller.”

“That means some kind of dope. They give cocaine and heroin all the time in hospitals now. They just call it by some other name, dia-something. Is that what I'm getting, coke and heroin?”

“Just an effective analgesic.”

. . . When her Ma came and got her and dragged her from the jail . . 
.

“You'd better come with me to the hospital, Miriam. I'll be spaced out. You must come and make sure they plaster up the right bit of me.”

“Of course I'll come, Leni. I'll go and dress.”

“No, don't go yet. Let me hold your hand while I get my fix. Do you remember
Long Day's Journey
? ‘Caught her in the act with a hypo!' What a dreadful line! I never admired that play.”

Leni is turned on her side and her bottom punctured. Streams of cold anaesthetising poison enter her blood. She looks startled and her hand holding Miriam's relaxes its grip. Dr. Wordsworth, struggling against the effects of the sleeping pill taken two hours ago, telephones for the ambulance. Gary tiptoes back to Leni's door and strains to listen.

Miss Otis regrets she's unable to lunch today . . 
.

The question of whether, after the Bergman film, Dr. O. should spend the night with Bernice is one that begins to torment him as soon as the film nears its end. It still torments him as he walks out into the cold, clear night with Bernice at his elbow, he striding, she taking little running steps to keep up with him.

Dr. O. inhabits the top floor of a house in Plum Street off the Woodstock Road, not far from Rothersmere Road; Miss Atwood has two rooms in Cattle Street, almost within uneasy sight of Blackwell's. Between these two identically shabby residences their love affair walks back and forth. Neither has ever suggested flat-sharing. Bernice has this recurring dream: Dr. O. buys a Jacobean hall arranged round a courtyard not dissimilar to that of the Bodleian Library. On cold flagstones he lays her down. He places a Book of Hours on her breasts. On this, he swears to love her for ever, and to make her mistress of his house. She wakes up satisfied and content. Even if she wakes up to find herself alone in her Cattle Street bed, this dream seems miraculous and right. She doesn't doubt the bonding and binding of Dr. O. to her. One day, they might put their book collections together in one room. Say some vows, even, though she scorns what men and women make of marriage. Her love is not domestic. It's ancient and profound and will not be interred in trivia. Only a hall or a castle might give it stern enough shelter.

Bernice knows and Dr. O. suspects that, had they not found each other, they would have led virtually celibate lives. Bernice was a virgin the night Dr. O. drove her home from the opening of a heraldry exhibition in his Morris Traveller and invited her in for coffee. His rooms smelled of the must and dust of pre-war time. Newspapers and journals in bundles. A ream of blotting paper. Leathery classics from skirting to cornice. A gas fire. A candlewick bedspread. Ink. Parchment shades. Washing on the fireguard. Dr. O. poured water on Nescafé with a shaking hand, but Bernice was calm. She walked about, touching things. If she had any fear at all it was the thought of conceiving a child. All lay so anciently, so silently in the room, so silently in her small womb, she didn't want it disturbed with new limbs and mewling and milk. She wasn't certain how children were prevented. She'd heard there was a pill. She'd heard there were rubber things you push up. Over the coffee, she said simply: “The only thing I don't want is a baby,” and saw Dr. O. nod his agreement. So she trusted him and thought no more about it. When she saw him unroll a little transparent balloon onto his hard prick she thought simply, that must be it, and waited with her legs spread lovingly wide for the first immersion of a man in her blood. The pain is ecstatic, she thought. She mourned the pain the moment it was past. Later she examined the spatter of blood on the sheets. My gift, she thought, given and received. From this night on, her life was entirely happy.

Now, without her knowing it yet, as they walk from the cinema to Dr. O.'s car – the same Morris Traveller that once conveyed the virgin Bernice to Plum Street – this happy life is being taken from her.

“Did you like the film?” asks Bernice. She senses Dr. O. is grave and distant and wonders if the film depressed him.

“I've seen it before,” is all he says.

They get into the car. The windscreen wipers grind, though there's no rain. Dr. O. is absentminded about the noises and movements his car makes. He feels sick from the Toblerone and his head aches. He drives to the corner of Cattle Street and stops.

“I'm sorry,” says Bernice, “I didn't know you'd seen the film before.”

“On television,” he says and she nods.

He waits, afraid and sick, for Bernice to get out of the car. He's no longer tormented by indecision but cruel in his determination to spend the night alone, dreaming of Miriam. Bernice never bullies him. She doesn't need to. Both of them like to be alone from time to time. So, almost tragically unaware of the misfortune about to fall on her, Bernice places a chaste little kiss on Dr. O.'s cheek, gathers up her capacious handbag and leaves him. If she feels a moment's sadness, it quickly leaves her, and when she hears the Morris start up again, she turns and waves.

And as Miriam rides to hospital with Leni, Dr. O. indulges his dreaming. Leni tells Miriam she's in fairyland after that injection, “all lighty and flitty, darling,” and Dr. O. lies in the dark in the fairyland of his future. Throughout the night he hears bells chime the hours. Oxford. His city. Miriam is in Oxford. Safe in Leni's house once more. Where she has always belonged in his mind. Today he held her. When her crying stopped, she said: “I remember now what a kind person you are. My father was so fond of you.” So the love affair to come will be homage to David Ackerman. David Ackerman, bone under the earth, worn thin in his lifetime with Leni's soirées and parrot parties. Now, his daughter and his former pupil will plant their flowers of love in his departed soul. Leni will die and they will inhabit his very house. In the bed where love was made to the unsurpassably beautiful Leni, and the child, Miriam, began to grow, in this same bed will the wizard spend his magical seed. Not to make children. Not to alter the future, but to alter the past. The years of plain, cumbersome Bernice crumble to nothing. Separately, in separate lives, Dr. O. and Miriam have waited them out. Now Leni, the witch, near death, her body shedding flesh, paring itself to neat and tidy bone to be with David under a marble book – Jews turned gentiles as the Oxford cloisters cloak them in ancient pieties – Leni, the sorceress, summons them out of separateness and binds them in desire. Before yielding them her bed, she inhabits it, watching, knowing. Death keeps them waiting, wanting. Burning for this death, they wait, still not joined. Leni smiles. Her eyes are wells of soft darkness. “Wait,” she whispers. They reach out from either side of the deathbed, but their hands don't touch. The bed is too wide. “Wait,” she instructs again. So they sit as silent as they can with this aching of desire in them, silent as they can, but dying of their longing to drink from mouths, to drown in their own touch. And at last she goes. The eyes stare up, blind. The hands freeze. And together, they lift her aside. Together, they lie down in the softly tumbled sheets her body has kept warm for them and peel away the clothes that still hold them separate from their final joining. Then at last he is in her. Her gold hair streams. History bursts open like a white, decaying peach.

Morning comes. Leni wakes in an iron bed with a drip in her arm. She feels heavy, like colossal stone. Prone, weighted down with oblivion, she can see now that she's in a large ward. Other women, some young, some old, are eating cereal and wearing nighties. She vows she will say not a word to these women. She will say nothing, eat nothing, drink nothing, till she is moved to a private room. She will close like an oyster and they won't dare to knife her open. So they will have to give her her privacy. She curses Miriam for abandoning her to strangers. Miriam, she decides, with that husband of hers who thinks all the wrong thoughts, dreams all the wrong dreams, has become tolerant of stupidity and mediocrity. She's forgotten what life used to be. Even in her work, she's become mediocre, ordinary, giving ordinary empty people the ordinary landscapes they want, the ones without meaning.

A nurse comes and inspects the colourless drip bottle. Leni asks, with a dry mouth, to be moved to a private room. The nurse picks up the arm without the drip and takes Leni's pulse. Leni asks again, unaware that her words are heavy as stone, like the rest of her. The nurse smiles, says nothing and walks away.

Leni sleeps. When she wakes, it's in the same bed in a ward that is now quite noisy with people. Someone is bending over her and shaking her. She doesn't mind the feel of the soft arms of nurses. She doesn't feel weighted down any more; she feels limp and light and yielding, like a baby.

“Mrs Ackerman. Mrs Ackerman . . .”

Leni stares up into a smiling Indian face: wide nostrils, heavy hair in a knot under the little starched hat.

“Mrs Ackerman, you have a visitor. Let's sit you up, love.”

The Indian nurse lifts Leni's head. Pillows are stuffed behind it. Her head lolls. They've put me in a pram, she thinks. She's hauled back onto the pillows. Her covers are straightened. She feels cold. All around the big ward, little clusters of people are talking. In the bed next to Leni's a young woman with wild dirty hair is holding a man's hand and weeping. The man looks embarrassed. He's brought chocolates.

“Okay, Mrs Ackerman?”

“Cold,” says Leni.

“You're cold, dear?”

“Yes.”

“Do you have a bedjacket, dear?”

Leni can't remember what she has, what she doesn't have. She remembers her warm, pretty room at home, the way Miriam sits on the bed holding her hand. Now Miriam has abandoned her.

“I'll look in your locker, love.”

The nurse searches quickly through Leni's belongings. She finds a blue crocheted shawl and she wraps Leni in this tightly.

“I'm sorry,” the woman next door is wailing, “I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry . . .”

Leni, bound in her shawl, looks away in horror from this spectacle and sees, at the corner of vision, an untidy familiar figure. He's waiting by the door, quite alone, carrying a parcel. Leni stares. Thomas. It's Thomas. Leni's heart leaps. So she isn't abandoned. Thomas has come. She lifts a hand and pats her hair. She feels hungry. They starve you in hospitals and your looks go.