And which am I, Belinda? he asked her once.
Her reply came back: ‘Don’t be either, Timon. I don’t want you to be either real-fake or fake-real. Both types spend their energy on seeming genuine. I want you to give me all your energy instead.’
Wendy wrote to him: “But do you believe in her visitors? How can you love a woman you think is mad?”
He said he would believe in whatever her picture of the world was like. He wrote:
‘I always understood that these visitors weren’t absolutely real, in the everyday, measurable, empirical sense. (Sorry, they may yet be real, for all I know, and eventually we could have to get used to the everyday sight of visitors walking up and down the high street. But not yet.) I always understood, I think, that these visitors were the stuff of metaphor, and realised as such by the people who longed for them to come. They were sticky, cobwebby stuff, vaguely associative and from the same source as our collective feelings about things beyond what we can touch. It used to be stars, stars of Hollywood musicals, that we dreamed about, and before that, saints.
‘I don’t know what the difference is between visitors and stars. We use the idea of them to the same ends. At least, I think, Belinda does. It’s why I love her story of being kidnapped with Marlene Dietrich. The visitors taking out Dietrich’s womb and Belinda’s womb and hoarding them in their spacecraft’s freezers. It’s an image that appals and delights me. Belinda has made me see herself and Marlene swishing in white furs up and down the impersonal Escherlike corridors of that visitor craft. I can see them pausing to peer out of a portal, at the permanent twilight of the Polar Cap. Belinda has made it all natural to me.
‘She has this view of the sublime—of everything that exists beyond herself—and written herself into it. That woman’s got guts.’
I had never heard before the detail of Belinda’s and Marlene’s twin hysterectomies. With each telling the story became more lurid.
I decided to try common sense. To Timon I scribbled a note:
‘I don’t care if you believe in space men or not. Just lay off Belinda. She’s vulnerable and could do without falling for the likes of you.’
Next morning Belinda came to me looking excited, frightened, and as if she had been crying. She had another of those postcards showing a yellow, almond-eyed alien.
“He’s coming here!” she chattered. “He’s coming to see us all. Writing can only go so far, he says. He wants to see me!”
Timon was about to become Belinda’s visitor.
TWENTY-TWO
If she sat back and enjoyed the later afternoon here, the jazz they were playing over the café speakers, the sun slanting in and lighting up the pink chalices of the lilies on her table, Aunty Anne could almost imagine she was here out of choice. But this was the hundred minutes or so between visiting hours at the Royal Infirmary. She was attending both hours today and so, when the first was up, she had found herself blinking outside the stark black frontage of the hospital, and decided to while her time in the smart café across the road.
She ordered quickly, and was given fat poached eggs on toast soaked through with salty butter. Flecks of parsley had been thrown over the whole lot, over the crisped bacon, too. Looking round at what others were being served, it seemed that this was the habit of the kitchen here: they shook a handful of green bits over everything. She ate hungrily, digging into the soft yellow bulge of her egg. Under the heavy knife is felt like an eye. She mashed a spiky, decorative tomato into the toast, enjoying the spoiling of the dish, reducing it to yellow smears and black crumbs.
Pat had said he might try for a little nap during her absence. The sister of his side ward said that, if she really wanted, Anne could stay all afternoon with her husband. But they decided it was best if she went away and came back a little later, refreshed and full of new topics of conversation. What they didn’t want, after all, was to be sat staring at each other while they were on the ward.
At about this time they’d be bringing food round on a trolley. They would give him his two usual cardboard cartons: one of a clear brown soup, the other, a runny, raspberry jelly. Pat said it was a very strange thing, not to feel at all hungry. He was letting the drips in his arms, the snaking tubes that punctured his wrists in tiny bites, do all his feeding for him. Anne watched him take a mouthful of the purple jelly and its tartness surprised and repulsed him. After only a week he was out of the habit of tasting things.
Anne had asked his named-nurse Sandra, a big girl who wore her apron tied too high on her waist, what time opening hours would be finishing tonight. Sandra laughed at her. “Opening hours! Like a shop!” Anne coloured and tried to smile. She was only asking because she would have to catch the store later one. There was nothing to eat in the flat. With the old man gone it had become like a poor person’s flat, with nothing in the fridge and no one willing to phone up delivery services or takeaways to bring them mobile banquets in cardboard packages on the back of motorcycles. “Banquet for six, sir!” These last few weeks Pat had developed a passion for home-delivered Chinese food. He said he liked it because it never took much chewing or digesting. He wouldn’t be getting anything like that in the Infirmary, not sticky spicy ribs or duck in plum sauce. He seemed to be lapping up the attention, though,
