Страница 29 из 74
She scooped the packets off the bedside table, the full ones as well as the empties, and flushed them down the toilet.
The undertaker’s men were big local lads, former students, a bit more flustered than they wanted to show. The doctor was young, too, and a stranger-Lewis’s regular doctor was on holiday, in Greece.
“A blessing, then,” the doctor said when he had been filled in on the facts. She was a bit surprised to hear him so openly admit that, and thought that Lewis, if he could have heard, might have caught an unwelcome whiff of religion. What the doctor said next was less surprising.
“Would you like to talk to anybody? We have people now who can, just, you know, help you sort out your feelings.”
“No. No. Thank you, I’m all right.”
“You’ve lived here a long time? You have friends you can call on?”
“Oh, yes. Yes.”
“Are you going to call somebody now? “
“Yes,” said Nina. She was lying. As soon as the doctor, and the young bearers, and Lewis, had left the house-Lewis borne like a piece of furniture wrapped to protect it from knocks-she had to resume her search. It seemed now that she had been a fool to restrict it to the vicinity of the bed. She found herself going through the pockets of her dressing gown, which hung on the back of the bedroom door. An excellent place, since this was a garment she put on every morning before scurrying to make coffee, and she was always exploring its pockets to find a Kleenex, a lipstick. Except that he would have had to rise from his bed and cross the room-he who had not been able to take a step without her help for some weeks.
But why would the note have had to be composed and put in place yesterday? Would it not have made sense to write and hide it weeks ago, especially since he didn’t know the rate at which his writing would deteriorate? And if that was the case it could be anywhere. In the drawers of her desk-where she was rummaging now. Or under the bottle of champagne, which she had bought to drink on his birthday and set on the dresser, to remind him of that date two weeks hence-or between the pages of any of the books she opened these days. He had in fact asked her, not long ago, “What are you reading on your own now?” He meant, apart from the book she was reading to him-Frederick the Great by Nancy Mitford. She chose to read him entertaining history-he wouldn’t put up with fiction-and left the science books for him to manage himself. She had told him, “Just some Japanese stories,” and held up the book. Now she threw books aside to locate that one, to hold it upside down and shake the pages out. Every book she had pushed away then got the same treatment. Cushions on the chair where she habitually sat were thrown to the floor, to see what was behind them. Eventually all the cushions on the sofa were dispersed in the same way. The coffee beans shaken out of their tin, in case he had (whimsically?) concealed a farewell in there.
She had wanted no one with her, no one to observe this search-which she had been conducting, however, with all the lights on and the curtains open. No one to remind her that she had to get hold of herself. It had been dark for some time and she realized that she ought to have something to eat. She might phone Margaret. But she did nothing. She got up to close the curtains but instead turned out the lights.
Nina was slightly over six feet tall. Even when she was in her teens, gym teachers, guidance counselors, concerned friends of her mother’s had been urging her to get rid of her stoop. She did her best, but even now, when she looked at photographs of herself, she was dismayed to see how pliant she had made herself-shoulders drawn together, head tilted to the side, her whole attitude that of a smiling attendant. When she was young she had got used to meetings being arranged, friends bringing her together with tall men. It seemed that nothing else much mattered about the man-if he was well over six feet tall, he must be paired off with Nina. Quite often he would be sulky about this situation-a tall man, after all, could pick and choose-and Nina, still stooping and smiling, would be swamped with embarrassment.
Her parents, at least, behaved as if her life was her own business. They were both doctors, living in a small city in Michigan. Nina lived with them after she had finished college. She taught Latin at the local high school. On her vacations she went off to Europe with those college friends who had not yet been skimmed off to marry and remarry, and probably wouldn’t be. Hiking in the Cairngorms, she and her party fell in with a pack of Australians and New Zealanders, temporary hippies whose leader appeared to be Lewis. He was a few years older than the rest, less a hippie than a seasoned wanderer, and definitely the one to be called on when disputes and difficulties arose. He was not particularly tall-three or four inches shorter than Nina. Nevertheless, he attached himself to her, persuaded her to change her itinerary and go off with him-he himself cheerfully leaving his pack to their own devices.
It turned out that he was fed up with wandering, and also that he had a perfectly good Biology degree and a teaching certificate from New Zealand. Nina told him about the town on the east shore of Lake Huron, in Canada, where she had visited relatives when she was a child. She described the tall trees along the streets, the plain old houses, the sunsets over the lake-an excellent place for their life together, and a place where, because of Commonwealth co
They had left it rather late to have a child. And she suspected that they were both a little too vain-they didn’t like the thought of wrapping themselves up in the slightly comic and diminished identities of Mom and Dad. Both of them-but particularly Lewis-were admired by the students for being unlike the adults around home. More energetic mentally and physically, more complex and vivid and capable of getting some good out of life.
She joined a choral society. Many of its recitals were given in churches, and it was then that she learned what a deep dislike Lewis had of these places. She argued that there often wasn’t any other suitable space available and it didn’t mean that the music was religious (though it was a bit hard to argue this when the music was the Messiah). She said that he was being old-fashioned and that there was little harm any religion could do nowadays. This started a great row. They had to rush around slamming down the windows, so that their roused voices might not be heard out on the sidewalk in the warm summer evening.
A fight like this was stu
Can’t you tolerate people being different, why is this so important?
If this isn’t important, nothing is.
The air seemed to grow thick with loathing. All over a matter that could never be resolved. They went to bed speechless, parted speechless the next morning, and during the day were overtaken by fear-hers that he would never come home, his that when he did she would not be there. Their luck held, however. They came together in the late afternoon pale with contrition, shaking with love, like people who had narrowly escaped an earthquake and had been walking around in naked desolation.