The White Family (22 page)

Just at that moment the doors flapped heavily and May hurried through, screwing up her eyes, looking for him, peering, anxious, breaking into a beam when she saw his face, and all his anger leaked away into relief. She was wearing her smart blue coat for once. Then he saw how pale and tired she was.

He hadn’t any time to make her welcome. There was something vital to talk about. He couldn’t leave it to the doctors to tell her. Why ever did he think he would? – In any case, he needed comfort. Only May could comfort him.

‘Thomas is here,’ he said fretfully, as if she couldn’t see that for herself. ‘I thought you’d get here early, May.’ But they took each other’s hands, like magnets, halves of a whole springing back together.

‘I’ll leave you for a moment,’ said Thomas, after a pause. ‘I’ll take a stroll along the ward.’

‘Thomas,’ said May. ‘You’re a good boy.’

And he was gone; tall and young. Leaving the ward with that casual ease. How Alfred longed to follow him.

They looked at each other, and both guessed at once the other knew what there was to know.

‘Have they told you, then –?’Alfred began, and May at the same moment stumbled through ‘Did they say anything? Did the doctor come –?’

She sighed slightly with pain as she rotated her arm, the one which had the worst arthritis, to put it gently round his shoulders, and she stroked his head, she touched his bare scalp, she had never got used to the bareness of his scalp, how naked it felt, how intimate.

‘They told me Thursday,’ she said. ‘On my way out. I haven’t slept a wink since. Oh Alfred, love … I can’t believe it.’

He lay there unable to speak for an instant. Their two skulls touched; they were one in grief. Their hands squeezed gentle and unconscious as a heartbeat. Somehow her love would keep him alive. But then he thought, nothing can keep me alive, if the doctors give up and say I’m a goner. She was sniffling, quietly, like a little dog, a heartbreaking sound like the puppy they had when they were first married, a black-and-white mongrel which got run over. He’d had to carry it into the house. He was the man. It was up to him.

I don’t want to leave her, he thought, suddenly, it’s nonsense, how ever could we say goodbye? But he brushed the thought away. He had to be strong.

‘What are you crying for?’ he asked her. ‘People will look,’ and from the corner of his eye, he saw Pamela clutching on to someone’s armchair, concentrating on her balance, one stop on her long hard journey back. Not that he cared about Pamela. Liked her, yes, no more than that; but you had to keep up appearances. He didn’t want May to let herself down.

‘Oi up, my darling,’ he said more kindly. ‘We haven’t got anything to cry about yet. I could go on for another ten years –’

But he saw from her face that she didn’t think so.
Perhaps they told her more than me
. That thought injected a brief spurt of anger.

‘It’s just that I
–
I need you, Alfred … I don’t want to be alone.’

Which moved him, because all their life together he’d known she longed to be alone. To get away from him and the kids and the housework and read her books and write her poems. But now in the end it seemed she didn’t. Which softened his fear, unreasonable, real, that secretly people would, well, be glad. That the kids didn’t like him, and nor did May. That he was somehow a burden to them.

‘I’m not going to leave you, May, darling. You’re …’

He struggled. Now words had to be said, for May loved words. She needed them. When things had gone wrong in their life over the years, she had sometimes looked at him – ‘Say something, Alfred’ – with the eyes of someone staring out at the desert, hoping against hope that something would come, but all too often he had left her thirsty, hating himself and pitying her. Then the only thing he could do was be angry – ‘Talking won’t mend it,’ he would snap at her. So how was she to guess he would have loved to talk if the words hadn’t locked themselves away? That was why she needed the other Alfred, he thought to himself, her secret lover – and he smiled at her with old affection, and gave up the thing he could never quite say.

‘You should have been married to Alfred Tennyson. What good have I ever been to you? You deserve better, with your books and your poems.’ But it wasn’t enough. She didn’t smile back, and her big blue eyes were full of pain, not so different, he thought, from when she was a girl, their rounded lids, their funny pale lashes. A surge of emotion lifted him up. ‘You’re … a good wife, May. A lovely wife. No one could have been a better wife.’

He had never said such a thing before. To his slight alarm, she turned her face so it couldn’t be seen from the ward around them, turned her face against his neck, and leaned against him, she was quite a weight, she felt bigger than he was, now he was brought low, and the tears ran down and soaked his pyjamas.

The fear left him, then. For she must really love him, a thing he had known for over forty years, but always needed to know again. He realized she would never leave him. He’d thought all their life that she might leave him, because he’d gone bald, because he wasn’t handsome, because he had never got the Park Keeper’s lodge where they’d dreamed of living when they first got married, because he lost his temper with the kids (and all right it sometimes went further than that, but he wasn’t a brute, there were far worse than him), because she was pretty (though she wasn’t vain and didn’t often make the most of herself), because she was sensitive and a lady, not by birth but in every sense that mattered, because she was educated and refined, because he farted whenever she cooked cabbage, because she had to wash his underpants. And now he saw that she would not leave him, would never leave him, now, till he died, and with that knowledge a great fear was conquered, a fear as strong as the fear of death, and for a few brief moments he felt safe and warm, for a few brief moments they were both quite happy, each clutching the gift that the other had given.

I’ve been a good wife, after all.

If I die first, I shan’t be alone
.

After a few moments, May sat up and blew her nose, briskly, modestly, still turned away from the sight of the ward.

‘We’ve been through a lot, together, Alfred,’ she said, and her voice was firmer now, the old crisp May, putting strength into his bones, fire in his belly. ‘We’ve been through a lot, and we’ll come through this. Together we’re … unbeatable.’ Her voice went funny when she said ‘unbeatable’, but then she managed to smile at him, as if life was a joke,
it’s all right, Alfred
, as if they could laugh at it together.

‘That’s right,’ he said. ‘That’s right, my duck ….’ He patted her hand. It would all pan out.

‘Are you going to tell the children?’ she asked. ‘We don’t want to upset them, do we?’

‘Maybe not Dirk. Dirk’s too young.’

‘He’s not as young as we think, you know. But I don’t see the point of upsetting them yet. It might all come to nothing, Alfred.’

‘Do you think the doctors are making it up?’ He dropped her hand, suddenly annoyed. Sometimes her mouth was not connected to her brain. ‘The children have a right to know. For instance, Darren might decide to stop home. He might even bring my grandsons to see me –’

‘– not forgetting your granddaughter,’ May put in, correcting him in the way he hated.

‘Of course I haven’t forgotten her. “Grandsons” obviously included Felicity.’

For a second he could see she was ready to bicker, but then her softer side prevailed. ‘It would be nice to see them, wouldn’t it? Better than photographs at Christmas.’

‘He does his best,’ Alfred said staunchly. ‘The pressures of fame –’

‘Extraordinary, isn’t it?’ May said, softly. ‘That one of our children is actually famous.’ Their hands sneaked across the blanket again and held each other, held and squeezed.

‘When you think how poor we were. We didn’t do badly with those kids. You were always a good manager.’

‘I taught them to read,’ May said, pleased. ‘All three of them could read before they went to school, though I had the devil of a job with Dirk. I helped all three of them with their homework.’

‘So did I,’ said Alfred, untruthfully, and waited for her to contradict him, but she looked at him indulgently, said nothing, and so he was able to continue, ashamed, ‘Although it was mostly you, I admit.’

‘There’s Thomas,’ she hissed, ‘coming back again. He’s a good boy. Let him have a word.’

‘We’ve had our chat,’ Alfred said, briskly. ‘I feel a lot better for it, duck.’

‘Would you like a paper? I’ll get you one. I’ll go and have a cup of tea while you two talk.’

And things seemed almost normal again, hearing her comfortable, ordinary voice talking of comfortable, ordinary things, and the stone in his heart was manageable. Thank you, May, he said to himself, watching her familiar figure tack off down the ward like a brave little tug boat, her thick grey hair, her rounded back, her determined set against the tide of blue nurses,
thank you, God, for a wife like May
.

May managed to keep the smile on her face until she was halfway down the stairs. If she showed her grief, the whole ward would know … Perhaps the rumour was already out. She knew how hospitals preyed on death. When she had gone for her hysterectomy after the problems that followed Dirk’s birth, there was always whispering, when people were goners –

(
Alfred’s a goner
. No, not possible.)

– the ones whose cancer had gone too far, the ones whose operations had gone badly –

(They won’t even operate. He does deserve that. He deserves a chance, but he isn’t going to get it. Because we’re too old, so they think we’re no good.)

Her face twitched and writhed with the urge to weep, but she forced the tears back, made herself smile.

(
Alfred is dying
. No, never.)

For May had always tried to be brave. She wasn’t self-pitying, or self-indulgent … They made her wince still, the cruel long words her father had used against her mother, her father who had educated himself enough to use long words like wooden paddles … Mum who had no learning at all. She washed for thirteen children by hand …

(
Alfred, Alfred. I’ll be alone … Alfred, my darling. Alfred, duck
.)

I was the youngest. Then the only one left. How can they be gone, my big laughing sisters?

(
Just me and Alfred. Alfred and me. I suppose we thought we would go on forever
.)

(
Without Alfred I
– No, don’t think it.)

I mustn’t complain, I’ve been very lucky.

My father criticized. My clothes, my hair. ‘You’re a pretty girl. Why must you look so scruffy? Can’t you make something of yourself?’ I didn’t know how to answer him. I suppose my mother never taught me to dress. She didn’t give a moment’s thought to her looks. How could she, poor woman, with thirteen children? And I’ve never known how to get myself up. I try for Alfred, but I never get it right. Except when Shirley buys me something.

(Will Shirley forgive him … when she knows he’s dying? The final lap. The final slope.)

It was sinking in in a different way from the conversation she had had with the doctor. On her own, it had all seemed dream-like, wrong.

But as soon as I saw his face today. As soon as our eyes met, we knew. We shared it, didn’t we? We shared the fear. And after that it will always be true –

May pushed it away. She could not bear it.

It didn’t do to dwell on the bad things, did it?

My father was sometimes very sweet to me. Softer on me than all the others, my mother told me, when she was dying. I was the youngest, his baby girl, and he loved me helping him in the shop, and was proud of me for being clever at school, though it never occurred to him I could go further. Of course it didn’t; he had raised thirteen, and he’d paid for the boys’ apprenticeships, so the girls had to marry, and that was that, yet he wasn’t happy about losing me to Alfred.

I hear him still. Angry, cold. He read all the papers, he had opinions, he’d hoped his daughter would find someone better. I cried when I told him. I knew Alfred wouldn’t suit.

Yet he is a better man than my father
.

May held her face on red alert, smile against sorrow, smile at the world, an effort of will all down the ward.

Halfway down the stairs, which were cold grey stone, she found that she had sunk to her knees, on the first-floor landing, clutching the wall, hands held flat against cracked cold plaster. Tears came flooding down her cheeks.

She didn’t care what people thought. She – didn’t give a curse about her father. Damn him, damn him, we hated him.

But I can’t go and sit in the café like this. I can’t go and sit there with everyone gawping –

So perhaps she did still care, a little. Scrubbing her handkerchief over her face. She had never worn make-up, and now she never would.

(Will anyone ever think me pretty again? No one could be as blind as Alfred. I asked him a few weeks ago if he thought that film star Sharon Stone was pretty. We were watching her in a telly thing. He said, ‘Not half so pretty as you. Anyway, she’s a bit past it, isn’t she?’ – Sharon Stone’s thirty years younger than me!)

His kind of love. His kind of fondness. He was slow with words, but his eyes said it, and the way he patted me, and held my hand, and the way he looked when I wore the blue dress he likes so much, that matches my eyes … I never doubted that he loved me.

How many people can say as much?

It can’t be over. Alfred, Alfred
.

She had wandered down the steps to the corner of the corridor that would have taken her down to the café. She stood there, sniffing and trying to breathe normally, clutching her wet hanky in her hand so tight that by the time she noticed it her fingers were numb.

A glass door led out into a little wild garden in the middle of the block. It would be locked, of course; it was a rule of life that all doors were locked, the ones you wanted to go through, at any rate. She turned the handle; it grated, refused. She started to cry again with frustration. Oh all her life the doors had been locked, her mother was weeping, May could never not hear it, her father was storming, she couldn’t get away, and then there was Alfred, shouting at table when she’d forced herself to make a nice lunch, and the children screaming when she tried to read, or Dirk, once, sobbing in that animal way because she had forgotten his birthday (but she’d had Asian flu, she’d been in bed, Dirk’s grief wasn’t reasonable, was it? No) –