The Things We Never Said (12 page)

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

The waiting room is dark and dingy-looking, with blistered, flaking paint covering the rough-rendered walls. The doctor’s receptionist is also his wife and, according to Dot who knows these things, the house is their home as well as his surgery. Dr Sarka, she says, is ‘coloured, but very nice’ while his wife, a statuesque middle-aged German called Herta, is ‘a bit of a Tartar’.

Herta presides over the waiting patients from a hulking oak desk in the corner. Periodically, she throws a dart-like glance over the top of her tortoiseshell spectacles to silence a coughing child. A heavily pregnant woman, also with a hacking cough, asks for a glass of water. With a click of her tongue, Herta grudgingly obliges.

Herta has what Maggie thinks is a knowing expression. Maggie has seen the family planning posters on the walls; she knows what the terrifying Herta probably assumes, seeing her sitting here with no obvious cough or bandage. Since she arrived in Sheffield she has learned that, in some people’s eyes, girls who work in the theatre and live in digs are little more than prostitutes.

There is a loud buzz from the metal box on the wall and a red light flashes.

‘
Miss
Harrison,’ Herta announces, ‘you will see the doctor now.’

Dr Sarka is a foot shorter than his wife and as broad as he is tall. The little hair he has left is combed, black and gleaming to disguise the baldness, and he is wearing the same spectacles as his wife. Maggie wonders whether this is deliberate, to make them at least match each other, even if they don’t match anybody else in this town.

Maggie lists her symptoms – fainting, blurred vision, nausea, a feeling of disorientation, and she tells him about the slate hitting her during the storm. He makes a note, asks if she ever suffered ‘these fits’ before that night. He picks up a miniature torch and stands over her, leaning his face down towards hers so she can see the hairs protruding from his cavernous nostrils. She flinches. He is not going to hurt her, he says; he just wants to see how her eyes react to the light.

She apologises. His tone is kindly, reassuring. But he is so near she can smell his breath, pear drops, overlaid with a faintly oniony tang. There is a hint of spice about him, and of male underarm odour, almost masked by the heady richness of his aftershave. She looks left and right as instructed, tries to relax.

She is holding her breath and her hands are clenched tightly together.

‘Something else is troubling you?’ he asks, putting the lid back on the torch, which looks just like a fountain pen. He takes his spectacles off and turns to face her, using the desk as leverage; his feet, she notices, do not quite reach the floor.

‘No.’ She shakes her head. ‘No, nothing else.’

He puts his spectacles on again and turns back to his desk. ‘Bowels okay?’

She nods.

‘When you pass water, any pain? Any burning sensation?’

She hesitates, shakes her head.

‘When did you last menstruate?’

She lowers her eyes. This is the thing she’s been trying not to think about. She’s read that missing one month is normal. It happens during times of upheaval, like moving away from home. That must be the explanation. But even as she thinks this, she knows it’s not so; everything is not going to be all right. They call it
the curse
, but it is surely the absence of her period that will damn her.

*

A week later, Dr Sarka confirms the thing that she has most dreaded, the thing that cannot possibly be true. She feels different somehow, not herself. The doctor suspects her funny turns may be connected: strange things happen to women when they’re expecting, he says, especially when the pregnancy is unplanned. He asks if she and the baby’s father are intending to marry, and she shakes her head. He raises his eyebrows as he looks at her.

Maggie looks at her hands.
Tell him what happened,
she urges herself.
He’s a doctor
;
just tell him.
But how can she tell him when even she doesn’t know?

The doctor looks at her again, not unkindly. ‘Maybe if you tell him about the child?’

Without looking up, she shakes her head again. ‘I – I don’t know where he is.’ She can feel her face colouring. What must the doctor think of her?

The doctor sighs. He writes the addresses and telephone numbers of three nursing homes on a notepad, tears off the paper and hands it to her.

There was a waitress Maggie knew at the hotel in Hastings who went to one of those places. It turned out to be more like a workhouse. She stuffs the note into her handbag, thanks him and scurries out through the waiting room, past Herta and her accusatory stare into the sleety March morning.

The doctor watches the door close, sighs again, and presses the buzzer for his next patient.

*

When Maggie wakes on Sunday morning, the appalling truth of her condition has crept across her brain and is hanging there like poison ivy. Usually, she enjoys Sundays; she doesn’t have to go in until lunchtime because it’s the day they strike the set, pack away the old props and lay out the new ones. Jimmy will be painting the flats and everyone will be moaning about having to read a new script while trying not to muddle the play they’ve been performing all week with the one they’re rehearsing.

She puts her housecoat on and paces a little, smoking cigarettes as she tries to think what to do. Gin; there’s something you can do with gin and a hot bath. And mustard. She’s not even sure whether you’re supposed to drink the gin or bathe in it. And there are pills, she’s heard. Quinine? If she’s going to do the gin thing, she needs to do it soon. Who can she ask
?
For the first time since she’s been in Sheffield, she’s aware of how far from home she is. Back in Hastings, there are people she could talk to, but she’s been here for three months now, and apart from a couple of hurried postcards when she first arrived, she hasn’t been in touch with any of her old friends. She can’t just suddenly get in contact now and ask them if they know how to get rid of a pregnancy.

Later, when she’s packing away the rubber snake from the last play, it comes to her: Vanda! She gets the address from Una, and manages to slip away from the theatre that afternoon, ostensibly to search for props for next week’s play. As she walks up the hill towards Vanda’s, she almost veers into the road to avoid the passageways between the houses. Her heart beats too fast and her breathing is shallow. Halfway up the hill, she hears someone cry out as if in terror. She stops and flings her head around but the street is empty; then she realises, because its echo is still caught in her throat, the cry came from her own lips.

She tries to walk on but there’s a whooshing sound in her ears and she’s struggling to take a breath. Something is crushing her, a hot, suffocating mass, sucking the air from her lungs. The next thing she knows, she is lying on the pavement and someone is throwing water at her face. She gasps as she opens her eyes.

‘Come on, lass. That’s ’ ticket. Let’s get thee to tha feet.’ A solid, whiskery man who smells of pipe tobacco helps her up. A stout woman in a wrap-around apron dips her fingers into a glass and flicks more water into her face.

‘Give over, Florrie; ’ lass is coming round.’

The woman mumbles an apology and offers the glass to Maggie’s lips. A small crowd has gathered and someone suggests calling a doctor.

‘Thank you,’ Maggie says, taking a gulp. ‘I’m fine now, really.’

‘You passed out cold,’ the woman says. ‘I was cleaning me windows and I saw tha grab on’t lamp post, then tha dropped like a stone, didn’t she, Stan?’

‘Aye. Gave tha head a right crack, lass. How’s tha feeling now?’

The concerned faces make Maggie feel a fraud. She declines the offer of tea and a sit down and is assuring them she’s fine when she sees Vanda hurrying towards her.

‘Maggie, darling! What happened? I was nosing out of my window and I saw you sprawled out on the ground. I thought, I’m sure that’s young Maggie from the Playhouse down there taking centre stage.’

There is an audible click of the tongue from the whiskery man. ‘Lass fainted, Elsie,’ he says. ‘In’t it obvious?’

Maggie had forgotten about the name, and wonders whether Vanda has a completely different personality to go with ‘Elsie’. She thanks the neighbours again and allows Vanda to lead her up the road. As they walk down the passageway, Maggie realises she is holding her breath and gripping Vanda’s arm a little too tightly.

The yard is like a bomb site, with piles of rubble and broken fencing heaped all around. ‘The back wall and both fences came down in the storm,’ Vanda explains. ‘Could have been worse, I suppose. Next door’s chimney collapsed into their front room.’

Vanda fills the kettle while Maggie looks around, surprised at how different the house seems now the furniture is back. The room is an odd mix of old and new, dark and light. A glass-fronted oak cabinet stands next to a G Plan sideboard; the settee looks modern, with thin wooden legs and tweedy black and white covers, but the fireside chairs remind her of her grandma’s. Theatrical photographs cram the mantelpiece – Vanda and Boris, the chorus, a magician, and various other performers, all with great flourishing signatures. There’s one of a man who looks like James Mason. Maggie used to have a crush on James Mason, but that was a thousand years ago.

‘So.’ Vanda takes two cups and saucers from the kitchen cabinet, bright yellow with white polka dots – vivid, like Vanda herself. ‘What are you doing in this neck of the woods?’

‘I was coming to see you, actually.’ Maggie’s stomach is doing somersaults as she sits at the little Formica table watching Vanda spoon tea into the pot. ‘I need some advice, really. You see, I . . .’ She can’t make the words come.

‘Advice about what?’ Vanda shouts over the whistling kettle. ‘I haven’t found the secret of fame and fortune, if that’s what you’re after.’

‘No, it’s . . .’ She hesitates again.

‘Maggie darling, do spit it out. I’m dying of curiosity.’

Maggie takes a deep breath. ‘I’m pregnant.’ It sounds harsh and vulgar, but
expecting
or
going to have a baby
don’t seem right at all. ‘I’ve seen a doctor so I know it’s definite.’ Just get to the point, she thinks; just ask her. ‘And I was wondering whether you knew, well, I don’t have much money, and I know there are pills you can get to bring on your monthlies but I don’t know what they’re called.’ She is babbling now, the words spilling out like water from a leaky gutter. ‘And I was wondering if you knew how to, you know, there’s that thing you can do with gin, isn’t there? But I don’t know how much you need or whether you have to use mustard as well . . .’ She stops. While she has been talking, she has ripped the tissue she was holding to pieces. She looks down with some surprise at the little bits of white, dotted like snow over the lino. She kneels to gather them up, failing to notice that Vanda has fallen silent in the kitchen and has stopped fussing around with sugar bowls and spoons.

‘And what makes you think I would be able to help you?’ Vanda is standing very still with her back to Maggie, her arms spread and her hands resting on the wooden draining board. Her voice has a steely edge; her back is rigid and seems to crackle with tension. Maggie gets to her feet.

‘I just thought—’

‘Did you think I was a prossie or something? Some sort of loose woman, just because I show a bit of leg on stage and I don’t have a husband?’ Vanda turns to face her, and she’s shocked at the black lights flaring in Vanda’s eyes.

‘No, no. I didn’t think that.’ She says it clumsily. She
has
made assumptions; not what Vanda thinks, but maybe not that far off. And based on what? The make-up? The flamboyant clothes? The fact that Vanda is older? She can feel her face flush.

‘You listen to me,’ Vanda almost spits. ‘It’s not my problem that you’ve gone and got yourself into trouble, and I have no intention whatsoever of helping you to get out of it.’ She turns away again, pours the tea so it slops into the saucers and says, icily, ‘Sugar?’ She stands with the sugar bowl in her hand, apparently impatient for an answer.

‘It’s not quite like that.’ Maggie looks down. ‘I’m sorry I’ve upset you. I didn’t know who else . . .’ But she is making things worse. ‘I’d better go.’ Mumbling apologies, she opens the back door and says goodbye. She walks quickly through the passageway, feeling her breath quicken. Despite the chilliness of the morning, she is aware of a fine sweat breaking out on her forehead.

*

That night, Maggie does not sleep, not at all. She lies in her little bed, eyes wide open in the darkness, thinking. If Vanda won’t help her, she decides, she’ll have to do it alone. She spends the morning sitting on her bed, smoking, waiting for the off-licence to open. At ten to eleven, she puts on her coat and headscarf, grabs her handbag and hurries down the four flights of stairs to the hallway, pausing to check that Dot has definitely gone out. She heaves open the door to the basement. The damp, mushroomy smell triggers a wave of nausea, but when it has passed, she goes down to light the copper so that by the time she gets back with the gin, the water should be hot enough. There’s a sense of urgency now, a need to get this
thing
out of her. She has begun to picture it, its face grotesque, pitted and gnarled like something that’s been in the sea for days.

*

Drink a lot – no tiny tot!
Where did she read that? She takes another gulp. She can hardly see to turn off the water, partly because the steam is so dense, and partly because she is so drunk. Drunk as a skunk, as Leonard would say. At first, she’d poured it into a glass and lit a cigarette to go with it, but now she’s swigging it straight from the bottle and telling herself it’s medicine. She holds it up to see how much she’s drunk, but there are two of everything. She tries what she’s seen Leonard do when he’s really sozzled; she puts her free hand over one eye, and it works! The two bottles move back into one and she can see she’s had just over half. Surely that should be enough? She puts the bottle on the floor and lurches forward, almost falling into the bath. This gives her the giggles. She fumbles with the tin of Colman’s mustard powder, and the lid comes off so suddenly she drops the whole lot into the water where it billows out like deadly yellow bath salts. She positions the wooden chair next to the bath so she can reach the bottle, takes another gulp and starts to undress. But as she pulls her sweater over her head, she loses her balance and stumbles, knocking the chair and the bottle onto the floor. She curses, grabs a towel and bends down to try and mop up the gin, but the room begins to spin and she hears a roaring in her ears before she is overtaken by nausea. She tries to stand but the room won’t keep still, so she crawls through the puddle of gin on the lino to the sink in the corner.