“And then?”
“He died.”
“Of course. Well …” Ginny breathed smoke. “You see, with Ralph, you’ve been married all these years, and now you’re in a position to renegotiate. I say it won’t last, because they don’t— these affairs between men of fifty, and young girls.”
“She’s hardly that.”
Ginny looked hard at her. “Comparatively.”
“Oh yes—comparatively.”
“You see, there’s a pattern to it. These men of fifty—they never fall for women of their own age, you notice. It’s always someone who makes them feel young.”
“How comforting to be part of a pattern,” Anna said. “I always wanted to be.” It struck her, then, that Ginny did not know the course of her life, not in any detailed way; that if she had ever known, she had forgotten it. “But Mrs. Glasse,” she said. “I haven’t an idea of what her attractions might be. And so, I have no idea how to combat them.” She picked up her drink. “Well now, Ginny, you said there were three courses I could take.”
“Yes. Bearing in mind that it won’t last, you can negotiate with him. You can ask him to live with you and let him see her when he wants. That may prolong the agony—it did for me. Or, you can let him stay with her for the while, and sit it out—keep your home and finances intact, and prepare for a return to normal on the day he says he wants to come back.” Ginny ground her cigarette out. “Or, of course, you can give him the push.”
Anna shook her head. “I’m not patient, Ginny. I couldn’t sit it out. What do you do, while you’re sitting it out?”
Ginny reached for another cigarette, flipped it into her mouth. “This,” she said. She flicked a nail at her glass. “And this. Alternatively, you can count your blessings. Think of people less fortunate than yourself. Cripples.” She smiled. “Women who work in launderettes.”
TEN
The child had been scraped up off the streets. She was drowsy and confused, her speech slurred, her eyes unfocused. Her mouth was bleeding. She hadn’t a penny to her name.
She remembered jabbing a fist out at some woman who leaned over her; it was a face she didn’t know, and that was enough to provoke her. Then the rocking motion of a vehicle, an interval of nothing: and a rush of light and air that hit her—like a drench of cold water—as they carried her from the ambulance into casualty. She bent her arm and laid it over her eyes, to protect herself from this brightness and cold; a nurse saw the scars on her inner arm. “What’s this?” she said. “Silly girl!”
That was how they talked to her. As if she were two years old and yet at the same time a piece of filth off the street, something they had got on their shoes. They shook her to try to keep her awake, to make her talk. They tried to keep her eyes open. This tortured her, and she didn’t know why they wanted to do it. She wanted just to slump on the hard hospital trolley, to melt into it: to give way, to give way to the covering darkness, to pull over her head the blanket of death. “What was it?” they shouted. “Tell us what you’ve taken. You silly girl! Nobody can help you if you don’t help yourself.”
Their voices were very loud and hard, the edges of their words shivered and blurred; but she could hear whispers too, nurses talking behind screens. “I never could have patience with suicides.”
Her head lolled. To buy some peace for herself she gave them the address—or an idea of the address—at first able only to describe a house set in fields, with many staircases and people, many huts and sheds and small buildings around it, so that they said, “Some kind of camp, could it be?” and for a while there was a respite. A policewoman in uniform appeared at the end of the bed. When she saw this she tried to climb out. “Your drip!” a nurse yelled, and another nurse and the policewoman dumped her back into the bed and held her there while they rearranged the stand and the tube they had put in her arm.
“Why don’t you let us help you?” the nurse said. “Just your name, my dear.” But there was no love in the words, no my dear about it.
“Where’s my clothes?” she said.
“Why? You don’t want them. You’re not going anywhere, are you?”
“That T-shirt’s not mine,” she said. “That pink top, it doesn’t belong to me. You had no right to take it.”
She meant to say that they had done wrong, double-wrong, taking from her what she didn’t even own.
But one thought disconnected itself, unplugged itself from the next, and her words slid out through bubbles of spittle that she felt at the corner of her mouth but was too weak to wipe away. One of the nurses mopped her mouth for her, with an abrupt efficient swipe: as if she were not aware that her lips were part of a living being. Suddenly, memory flooded her; this is what it is like to be a baby. You are a collection of parts, not a person, just a set of bones in flesh, your hands grasping and your mouth sucking and gaping; you are a collection of troubles, of piss and dribble and shit.
Her mouth stretched open for air. She was sick; she was sick and sick and sick. First on the blanket, which they dragged away from her legs, then in a metal bowl which she held herself, so hard that the rim dug into her fingers. The nurses stood by approving of this, of the awful corrosive fluid that poured out, the stained water and yellow bile.
For a time after that she lay back stiffly, her arms wrapped across her body. Perhaps she slept. Then the door opened, rousing her, and Mr. Eldred came in. He stood at the end of her bed without speaking, just looking at her. She looked at him back for a minute, then turned her head away. There was a crack in the plaster of the wall. She studied it. Eventually he spoke. “Oh, Melanie,” he said. “Whatever next?”
Sometimes she woke up and the man was there. Sometimes she slept. Sometimes she woke up and he was not there. She shouted to a nurse—her voice surprising her, issuing from her mouth like some flapping, broken- winged pigeon—and asked where he had gone, and a nurse said, “He has more than you to attend to, Miss.”
She raised her hand, the one without the drip, and scrubbed her wrist back and forth across her forehead. She looked down at her legs, lying like dead white sticks; her body was hot and clammy, so she kicked the covers off, and then, tight-lipped, they dragged them back again. “Look, I want to talk to you,” she shouted to a nurse, but as
