“If it wasn’t Rupert, then why did he leave another tearful message on my answer phone telling me he had behaved badly?”
“Another?” Roz stared at her hands.
“Does that mean he’s done it before?”
“With tedious regularity.”
“You’ve never mentioned it.”
“You’ve never asked me.”
Roz digested this for some moments in silence, then let out a long sigh.
“I’ve been realising recently how dependent I’ve become on him.” She touched her sore lip.
“His dependence hasn’t changed, of course. It’s the same as it always was, a constant demand for reassurance. Don’t worry, Rupert. It’s not your fault, Rupert. Everything will be all right, Rupert.” She spoke the words without emphasis.
“It’s why he prefers women.
Women are more sympathetic.” She fell silent.
“How does that make you dependent on him?”
Roz gave a slight smile.
“He’s never left me alone long enough to let me think straight. I’ve been angry for months.” She shrugged.
“It’s very destructive. You can’t concentrate on anything because the anger won’t go away. I tear his letters up without reading them, because I know what they’ll say, but his handwriting sets my teeth on edge. If I see him or hear him, I start shaking.” She gave a hollow laugh.
“You can become obsessed by hatred, I think. I could have moved a long time ago but, instead, I stay here waiting for Rupert to make me angry.
That’s how I’m dependent on him. It’s a prison of sorts.”
Iris wiped her cigarette end round the rim of an ashtray. Roz was telling her nothing she hadn’t worked out for herself a long time ago, but she had never been able to put it into words for the simple reason that Roz had never let her. She wondered what had happened to bring the barbed wire down. Clearly, it was nothing to do with Rupert, however much Roz might like to think it was.
“So how are you going to break out of this prison? Have you decided?”
“Not yet.”
“Perhaps you should do what Olive has done,” said Iris mildly.
“And what’s that?”
“Let someone else in.”
Olive waited by her cell door for two hours. One of the officers, wondering why, paused to talk to her.
“Everything all right, Sculptress?”
The fat woman’s eyes fixed on her.
“What day is it?” she demanded.
“Monday.
“That’s what I thought.” She sounded angry.
The officer frowned.
“Are you sure there’s nothing wrong?”
“There’s nothing.”
“Were you expecting a visitor?”
“No. I’m hungry. What’s for tea?”
“Pizza.” Reassured, the officer moved on. It made sense.
There were few hours in the day when Olive wasn’t hungry, and the threat of withholding her meals was often the only way to control her.
A medical officer had tried to persuade her once of the benefits of dieting. He had come away very shaken and never tried again. Olive craved food in the way others craved heroin.
In the end Iris stayed for a week and filled the sterile waiting room of Roz’s life with the raucous baggage of hers. She ran up a colossal telephone bill phoning her clients and customers at home and abroad, piled the tables with magazines, dropped ash all over the floor, imported armfuls of flowers which she abandoned in the sink when she couldn’t find a vase, left the washing-up in tottering stacks on the kitchen work-tops, and regaled Roz, when she wasn’t doing something else, with her seemingly inexhaustible flow of anecdotes.
Roz said her farewells on the following Thursday afternoon with some relief and rather more regret. If nothing else, Iris had shown her that a solitary life was emotionally, mentally, and spiritually deadening. There was, after all, only so much that one mind could encompass, and obsessions grew when ideas went unchallenged.
Olive’s destruction of her cell that night took the prison by surprise.
It was ten minutes before the duty governor was alerted and another ten before a response was possible. It required eight officers to restrain her. They forced her to the ground and brought their combined weight to bear on her, but as one remarked later: “It was like trying to contain a bull elephant.”
