Paid and Loving Eyes

“Indeed I did!” with a shade too much relief for my liking.

“What sort of clinic? What is wrong with her, anyway?”

“She’ll tell you, Lovejoy,” Almira reprimanded. “It’s lucky we were so near! Don’t pry.”

The motor-car numberplates had that cramped French look. Or Belgian? Dutch? German? Why was I worrying where exactly we were? Nothing I could do about it. I couldn’t read the road signs. We hit no motorways. We must have been somewhere pretty rural because I didn’t see a major road. The villages we passed were memorable for postcard-style fetchingness and unmemorable names.

“Anyway, nothing wrong with a holiday,” Almira added.

No money, clothes only what I stood up in. I could hardly make a run for it.

“Very little,” I said, to show how good I felt except for my deep nagging concern over poor old Cissie.

As we drove into this small town, I glanced at Paul, under cover of turning round to say inconsequentials to Almira. I’d never really seen him this close, never to take a real shufti. He was a worried man. I could tell. His posh sort never really sweats, just becomes behaviourally focused. Were he a man of action, he’d be taut, lantern-jawed, keen of eye. But he wasn’t, kept looking at his watch, other cars. And even once let his speed slacken a few miles. Making time a shade too good? He’d been ordered to arrive dead on. I wondered who by.

The hospital was small but genuine. Nurses, people waiting, an ambulance or two, some poor soul in blankets being trundled between the devil and the deep blue sea. Pain in any amount’s really authentic, isn’t it? I waited with Almira while he did the bonsoir bit with a starched clerical lady at the longest desk I’d ever seen in my life.

“We can go up,” he said. An audience with the Pope. I felt quite cheered up because his drone had come back. Until now his voice had taken on a near-human quality, really strange.

It’s hard to walk along hospital corridors. Not because they’re uneven but because your feet feel guilty all of a sudden, as if they’d no right to defile the shining surface. I hung back, letting Paul and Almira go first. Genuine all right.

The wing we reached—two floors up and a nurse with a mortician’s look—was quiet to the point of stealth. No din. No rattles of equipment. Doors closed, frosted glass, charts looking pessimistic as charts always do. Along three corridor doors, no less, and me finally really apprehensive. With this degree of care, Cissie was for it. No bonny Lysette, like you get in the Whittington at Archway, I felt with a pang.

“Please wait,” we were told. Paul was admitted. Then I was beckoned, and in I went.

It chilled me. Why every grim hospital interior has to be aquarium-lit I don’t know, but it scares the hell out of me. The room held one bed, Cissie inside it, pale, her legs under a blanket. Nearby, but mercifully unconnected, were those bleep screens, gasp machines with paired cylindrical concertinas poised to squeeze, tubular glass valves, silvery switches. It looked like a rocket launch. The one honest light barely made a single candlepower. She seemed asleep.

Paul wakened her, after asking the nurse if it was all right. Cissie opened her eyes.

“Hello, er, love,” I said. Nowhere to sit. Doc Lancaster once told me that hospital telly soaps always go wrong in making their actor doctors sit on the edge of the bed, and approach the wrong side of the bed. I crouched to peer at her, trying to work out what I was for.

The nurse warned, “One minute.”

Cissie’s eyes opened, surprisingly clear. “Lovejoy,” she whispered. I was shaken. I didn’t know she could whisper. I must have recoiled, expecting her honing voice. “Paulie,” she whispered. “I want to speak to Lovejoy alone.”

“Right, right, dear.”

“The nurse too,” Cissie ordered, with a trace of her old asperity. She groaned, shifted slightly with the nurse’s help.

The nurse left too, glaring as if this was all my fault.

Five minus three left me and Cissie. Her eyes closed for a little while, some sort of pain.

We’d lived marital a fortnight, then six weeks for intermittent skirmishing before the separation. It was the fastest divorce on record. She’d married Paul on the first permitted legal morn.

“Lovejoy,” she whispered. “I wanted to say I’m sorry.”

“Eh?” I straightened, honestly found myself edging away. Abuse, yes. Hatred, aye, sure. But an apology? I felt I’d walked onstage in the middle of The Quaker Girl. That unreal.

“I know you must hate me, Lovejoy,” this whispering stranger said. She seemed to sleep a few seconds, blearily came to with appalling effort.

“No, er, Cissie,” I whispered along.

“Yes.” She fixed me with unnaturally bright eyes. “I was cruel. I was wrong.”

Wrong? Cruel? Sorry? It was beyond my experience. “No, er, don’t worry. It’s all…” In the past? Did one say things like that, times like this? ”It’s okay.“ When of course it wasn’t. Okay for Lovejoy, not quite okay for somebody dying.

“I want you to do something, Lovejoy. If it’s too much, then please say no. I won’t bear any grudge.”

Please too? “What?”

She wanted to move on to her side a little, and signed for me to move her round a little.

“I’ll get the nurse,“ I said, worried sick.

“No, Lovejoy. I don’t want her to hear this.”

I held her, found myself cradling her body in an embrace that would have seemed like old times, except we’d