Cry to dream again, p.26
Cry to Dream Again, page 26
Shirley, who was forcing herself at the insistence of Sister Kenny and the other members of her staff to concentrate on retrieving her willpower by thinking only positive thoughts, could not help being increasingly irritated by these constant reminders of troubles that, once they had been rehearsed for her mother’s benefit, she would henceforth much rather forget. The worst of the illness was over, she kept telling herself; she was thankful to be alive, despite losing the use of one leg, and was resolved to try hard to make the best of whatever future awaited her.
Suppressing her profound despair at all the golden opportunities of which she had had a tantalizing glimpse but which were now to be denied her, was the hardest possible challenge. It was inevitable that she often found herself sinking to the depths of self-pitying hopelessness, but, over and above that, the pity of others, even of her own family, was unwelcome and undermined her efforts. All that was needed was a sympathetic initial acknowledgment of her misfortune. She would have much preferred to hear about France and the farm and her friends there, albeit without ignoring the sadness that had occasioned her mother’s return to her native country.
Unaccountably, Maman was not inclined to talk much about France – apparently there was nothing new to convey – nor did she dwell on her own recent sorrows: the pain of her mother’s death, the organization of her funeral, the wake with all the messages of condolence, the visits from well-wishers, the funeral itself – with the cortège led by the black-plumed horses pulling the hearse as it snaked its way down to the village church. Nor did she tell her daughter about the numerous and complex legal entanglements she had had to sort out, and all the arrangements she had subsequently made to keep the farmhouse running and in good order to enable her father to continue living there alone in the place he loved best.
All she said was: “We must be grateful that Mémé did not suffer for very long. She’d had a hard life and thankfully she passed away in peace.” Here tears came into her eyes, but she persevered. “And as for Pépé, well, you know him: he seems to be carrying on much as usual, but her death really affected him deeply and he refuses to talk about it, although a stranger might think he’d hardly noticed that Mémé had gone.” She paused and turned to the window to hide the moisture in her eyes, before resuming more brightly: “But he did say how much he is looking forward to having Edward working on the farm, and he does hope that you will both go and stay for the summer. And of course you will be well enough by then!”
Shirley was struck by this latest turn in the conversation. What did Maman mean by saying “you” and not “we”? “Won’t you be coming with us, Maman?” she asked.
“Oh, I expect so,” her mother replied, gazing out of the window at nothing in particular.
It was only on about the third day, once the emotion of the reunion had started to subside, that Shirley began to sense a deeper degree of unease in her mother’s behaviour, as though something greater even than mourning for her dearly loved mother and anxiety about her daughter had extinguished her customarily optimistic and sunny nature, as though the inner spring that had given her the energy to do her part in the Great War, marry an English husband who had been so badly damaged by it and bring up a family in a none-too-welcoming foreign atmosphere, had finally snapped. “And how was your father while I was away?” she tentatively enquired of Shirley.
“Mostly he was fine,” Shirley replied, keeping quiet about Pa’s panic attack on the evening of the thunderstorm. “In fact, he coped well, and was quite cheerful. He looked after me very well when I started to fall ill.” Then, after a brief reflective pause, she added, “Of course he missed you, Maman, and was so much looking forward to your return. He kept saying he couldn’t wait for you to come home.”
“Ah, I see,” Maman replied absent-mindedly. Shirley tried to recall if previously she had ever seen her mother in this distracted state. Eventually, after the latter had gone home, she recalled that day with Maman in central London where she had introduced her to that man M. Lavasseur, who had obviously been deliberately waiting in Lower Regent Street. She cringed to think that he might in some way be connected with Maman’s apathy and preoccupation.
Pa came to visit in the evenings. He would arrive looking tired and drawn, but his happiness at witnessing his daughter’s recovery from the illness, if not yet from the paralysis, soon overcame his own weariness. “It does my heart good to see you sitting there and chatting away with not a care in the world,” he said on his first visit, although in Shirley’s estimation this was a considerable exaggeration of her present state. A couple of days later, he announced, “There are so many people who want to come and see you, Shirl, including Ted, of course. Oh, and that Miss Patience, your dance teacher, but the powers that be say that they don’t want you to be overwhelmed by visitors just yet, so it’s just your mother and me to start with, and then Ted will be coming next week. By the way, they’ve given him a clean bill of health and he’s completely out of even the longest possible quarantine! What’s more, I’m allowing him to drive the car so that he can come whenever he wants to! I know he hasn’t passed his test yet, but he is a better driver than me, so I don’t suppose he or my precious Lanchester will come to any harm.” He gave a broad smile, having delivered the good news, but then had nothing more to say, and his smile quickly reverted to the dejected air that he wore every evening on arrival at the hospital from work. Oddly enough, except as a passing reference, he did not once speak of Maman, whose return he had so eagerly awaited and upon which he had placed so much hope.
On those first occasions there were long periods of awkward silence between father and daughter that lasted until Shirley decided that she, the patient convalescing from a serious illness, would have to do the talking in an effort to animate what was in danger of becoming a tedious and uncomfortable daily chore. She tried asking questions. Had they been out to Richmond Park? she enquired, thinking that that was one subject that would be certain to awake her father’s interest.
No, he said, there hadn’t been time.
Had he been to his model railway club lately? was her next question. No, he hadn’t, because the season was over and it had closed down for the winter. How was the garden; what was in flower? she asked. Not much, only a few chrysanthemums, he replied, reminding her that it was late November and winter had already come in with a vengeance, bringing sharp frosts and icy mornings. The garden was dank and brown with fallen leaves and dead stalks. She vaguely remembered having heard the bangs and the whizzing of fireworks as she lay in the white room; she had opened her eyes and was wondering what the noise was about when flashes of coloured light penetrated the half-closed blinds and she had realized that it must be Guy Fawkes Night. She searched around for more topics, and asked about his work, at which he buried his head in his hands. This was answer enough.
Visiting time became easier and livelier when, one evening about a week later, Ted appeared with his father, though on their arrival Shirley was immersed in the copy of Madame Bovary that her mother had brought her from home and did not notice her brother until he was standing in front of her. She was at that moment debating whether to sympathize with Emma on account of her stultifying existence with the boring and inept but good-natured Charles Bovary, or criticize her for her wilfulness, her ambition and her deception of her husband, though she wasn’t exactly sure what was going on with the other men in Emma Bovary’s life. “Hey, sis! It’s me!” Ted called out, waving his hand in her face. She glanced up in brief incomprehension and a touch of annoyance at being dragged out of nineteenth-century France, but quickly returned to twentieth-century England when she saw her brother.
Reggie, who had come with Ted to show him the way, discreetly took himself off to an armchair on the other side of the room. Brother and sister were truly thrilled to be with each other again and talked non-stop. “It’s been such a long time, Ted!” Shirley cried, and he nodded as words failed him.
“Well, you’re getting better, so you’ll soon be home and you can boss me about as much as you like. I won’t mind!” he stuttered as soon as he found his tongue. “So, tell me what are they doing to you here?” he asked, uncertain whether to enquire how his sister was or how she was feeling. Having followed every twist and turn, every crisis and deterioration in her critical illness through his father’s daily reports, he was surprised at her decisive answer:
“Well, to tell the truth, here in rehab it’s not bad at all.” But her expression darkened when she continued: “The illness was ghastly, although I don’t remember very much about it because they tell me I was very ill and they put me in an iron lung to keep me breathing, and it was horrible on the ward with all those stiff, strait-laced women who treated us like parcels. It’s different here. Sister Kenny is lovely. She is so nice. She calls me ‘Shirley’, instead of ‘Miss Marlow’, unlike all the others back there.” She gestured in the direction of the ward. “And when I told her I was a dancer, she said I might not be a prima ballerina, but she reckons I might one day manage to dance in the corps de ballet! Can you believe it? Or, failing that, I’ll be able to teach, so you see she’s totally convinced about the treatment she’s invented.
She says the last thing you should do with a paralysed leg,” here she unselfconsciously tapped her left leg, “is to strap it in an iron calliper. I can’t tell you how relieved I was to hear that! ‘How can anyone walk with irons strapped round their legs, let alone dance?’ she says. So we all have to do our exercises morning and afternoon and she makes me try to put this leg on the ground and use it. At first I had to hop along between bars to strengthen all my muscles because they were weak after being in bed so long; then she held my left leg down so that it had to stay on the floor and she made me stand on it; then I had to take a couple of steps using it, and today I thought I felt a muscle twitching!” Shirley smiled, and that gleeful smile helped encourage her brother to smile too. Previously the tale she told had been so upsetting he had had to keep his eyes on his hands to avoid showing how deeply affected he was by it.
“Sister Kenny says that being a dancer helps a lot,” Shirley went on, taking up the thread again, “and the more careful exercises I do, the better. It’s just like doing ballet warm-ups, though with one leg missing, or that’s how it feels at present. Sister Kenny says I’m lucky to have both my legs the same length. Apparently some people come out of this illness with one leg shorter than the other. Can you imagine?” There was a lull while Shirley drew breath. “If you like, I’ll show you what I can do?” she offered.
“OK,” Ted agreed rather nervously; he was not sure that he wanted to be responsible for this fragile creature with a will of steel.
“If you’d give me a hand to stand up,” Shirley entreated, “and then stand on my left with your hand under my elbow, I’ll show you. Maybe we’ll aim for those chairs over there near where Pa is sitting.” She nodded to a couple of empty chairs under the window near where their father was dozing. Slowly, with halting steps, they made their way across the room. “There! What did you think of that?” she asked when they made it as far as the chairs. “Though, of course,” she added, “you haven’t seen how bad it was a couple of weeks ago, so you can’t really appreciate how far I’ve come.” Ted found it hard to reply, because at the forefront of his mind he held the image of the agile, featherweight little dancer who had given such a staggering performance on the stage at Sadler’s Wells some weeks earlier and was now reduced to hobbling at a snail’s pace across a hospital lounge.
“That’s very good. You’re doing so well,” he said, lying through his teeth.
“I can’t believe how exhausting all this exercise is!” Shirley exclaimed. “Let’s sit down on these chairs for a bit, shall we?” Ted helped her lower herself onto one of the seats and then sat down beside her. “Oh, Ted, silly me! I’ve forgotten my blanket! I’m so sorry. Could you please fetch it for me? I’ve left it on the chair over there,” she begged him. Ted was about to reply that it was no trouble at all, since the chair was within easy reach, but he stopped himself in time in case that sounded dismissive of all the superhuman effort that she had put into crossing the room, so he quickly got to his feet, bounded over to the group of chairs where they had been sitting and picked up the blanket, which he wrapped round his sister’s knees. “Sister Kenny says we must keep warm,” she said. “It’s part of her treatment. She puts hot-water bottles and warm compresses on the paralysed muscles – to wake them up, she says. It’s very comfortable and I do think it’s beginning to work.”
Sensing that an encouraging comment was required of him, Ted remarked, “I dare say you’ll be back in the shop quite soon, Shirl. The Salvatores have asked after you every day, and they’ve sent you a pile of magazines. I’ve brought some of them with me.” He pulled four magazines out of his pockets. “Did their get-well card arrive?” he asked.
“Yes, not only a card but flowers as well,” Shirley replied. “They are so kind. Please thank them for me and tell them how much I’m looking forward to being back.”
With self-imposed restraint, she added: “Oh, and if you should go anywhere near the studio, please would you thank Miss Patience for her get-well card and her letter and tell her that I shall call and see her one day.” She did not say, as she might have in other circumstances, “Tell her that I can’t wait to be back in the studio!” or “I can’t wait to dance again!” Instead she kept her mind on her correspondence. “And if you see Granny, please thank her for her card and the box of soap. That was certainly a surprise!”
“Yes, I thought so too,” Ted said, “but, you know, she was very worried about you. I suppose if you are very worried about someone, then you realize that they do mean a lot to you.”
Shirley considered these words of wisdom. Then turning to look Ted full in the face and leaning towards him, with her hand shielding her mouth, she asked him in a whisper, “Do you know if there’s something wrong at home, Ted? Maman and Pa have been acting so strangely since they’ve been visiting me here, I couldn’t help but notice. They never come together, except, I remember, when Maman came home. At first I thought that was deliberate – so I wouldn’t be left alone – but I’m not so sure, because they hardly mention each other.”
Ted raised an eyebrow. “I was hoping you wouldn’t ask that,” he said, also whispering for fear of waking their father, “but since you asked, I suppose I ought to tell you so that it’s not too great a shock when you’re discharged. The truth is the atmosphere at home is terrible, and I don’t know why – well, only partly. You see, the trouble started when Francesca left.”
Shirley flinched. “Why did she leave?” she asked, interrupting Ted’s narrative.
“Oh,” he said, “I don’t know, but it must have been at least four weeks ago, or longer; I think it was soon after you fell ill. She came once then never again. The Salvatores said they hadn’t seen or heard from her, and didn’t know where she was until the cousin who she had gone to live with in Battersea told them a few days later that she had gone back to Italy; and so she had, apparently, taking all her belongings with her. The cousin said she was afraid of catching infantile paralysis. And of course the Salvatores were shocked at that, because they didn’t know that that was what you were suffering from, so Pa and I had to try very hard to assure them that you hadn’t brought the germs into the shop.” They weren’t too pleased, but they’re all right now, because no one else has fallen ill.
Shirley wrinkled her nose as if she had smelt a bad odour. The nose wrinkling had nothing to do with a bad odour or with the Salvatores’ anxiety about infantile paralysis, but arose from a strong suspicion of what Francesca had taken with her in her belongings; nevertheless, there was no point in worrying about that now, especially because that diamond pendant had brought only trouble. She was almost glad if it had gone.
“The problem was,” Ted continued, “that without you and Francesca, Pa and me, well, we weren’t too good at housekeeping and washing and that sort of thing, so it all began to pile up, and when Maman came home a couple of weeks later, she was furious with us, mainly with Pa, because she said he ought to have known better. I’ve never known her make such a fuss. I offered to help with the clearing-up and the cleaning, but she wouldn’t hear of it, although she keeps saying she’s au bout du rouleau, which I think means she’s at the end of her tether. She just kept on blaming Pa, and then he started having nightmares again, and she said he was making her too tired to do her work properly at the Embassy. And poor Pa, because he was so flustered and tired, he forgot to take his pills and his hip got worse, so either he was groaning in pain, or he was hallucinating. In the end, I went to call the doctor. He’s a good chap; he came to visit straight away and told Pa he had come on the off-chance, just to check that all was well, which I thought was very good of him – and he gave him some new pills, so the situation is improving a bit, but, as you probably can see, Pa is exhausted. I’ve heard him say that this time he certainly is going to have to look for a new job.”
“I’m glad you’ve told me,” Shirley said. “I knew something was wrong, but I still don’t understand why Maman is so emotional. I know dear Mémé’s death affected her deeply, and I’ve been critically ill, but usually Maman would be the best, the most level-headed person; instead she seems so depressed and weepy. I don’t understand why and sometimes I wish she wouldn’t come visiting, because all she seems to do is to sit there crying. And Pa too, he’s pretty miserable.” She thought it best not to tell Ted her suspicions about M. Lavasseur in case her imagination was running away with her from reading too much Madame Bovary.
