Paradise Lodge Page 3

  Miranda and the old Matron were now in the kitchen with Nurse Sally-Anne. Matron was wiping the edge of a tiny china cup with a piece of kitchen paper.

  ‘You’re to take this to Room 8,’ I said to Sally-Anne, thrusting the tray at her.

  ‘Why can’t you?’ she mumbled.

  ‘She wants someone more senior,’ I said.

  Sally-Anne took the tray.

  Miranda and I groaned at the thought of Miss Pitt and I told Matron what a tyrant she was and gave her lots of examples, like the time she’d given me a detention for saying ‘For coughs and colds take Veno’s’ and her absolute horror of anyone having the odd day off school for their real life, even in an emergency or for a funeral.

  At the end of the day, the Owner’s Wife gave us little brown wage packets, thanked us and said we might as well go and get changed out of our uniforms. Then, just before I’d left the kitchen, the cook asked me if I’d mind taking Mr Simmons his teatime sandwiches, cake and pills which had been forgotten due to him being a day early and not getting on to the lists. I had no choice, so I took the tray and prepared myself mentally for an encounter with the Deputy Head. When I got to Room 8 I was relieved to find Mr Simmons was alone. He’d fallen asleep in his chair, bent over like a hoop, with his head almost in his lap. I placed the tray on the little table beside him and he sat up, startled and disorientated.

  ‘Where am I?’ he asked.

  ‘Room 8,’ I said, and again it was like the start of a Hammer Horror.

  It was my first proper encounter with a patient—not just a natter on the way to the toilet—and I could tell Mr Simmons was in some discomfort. I pointed to the little cup of pills on the tray and he gulped them down.

  ‘Shall I put the telly on?’ I asked, thinking he might not have noticed the portable set on the chest opposite. ‘It might be The Two Ronnies or Des O’Connor.’

  ‘No thank you. I’m a bit tired for television this evening,’ he said, then quickly added, ‘but do put it on, if you’d like it.’

  It struck me that Mr Simmons seemed very young to be here and not at all like the other patients. And as I was thinking that about him he was thinking the same about me.

  ‘You seem rather young to be working here,’ he said, ‘if you don’t mind my saying.’

  ‘I’m still at school. Actually, I’m a pupil at Devlin’s School—where your relative works,’ I said.

  ‘Oh,’ he said, ‘bad luck.’ And we both laughed.

  ‘You seem much younger than the other patients,’ I said.

  ‘Yes, well, I’m not all that much younger, but I suppose the others here are mostly Victorian, whereas I’m from the modern age—that’s the difference.’

  ‘Oh,’ I said.

  ‘I’m aware of Elvis, for instance,’ he said, ‘Elvis Presley.’

  And we chatted more about the modern age.

  By the time I got back down to the kitchen the day was over. The Owner’s Wife was warming milk on the Aga for the bedtime drinks, I’d missed my lift home with Miranda in Mike Yu’s car, and the day nurses were getting ready to go to the pub. It was like watching a Play for Today where the actors are that good you can’t see the acting and though nothing’s actually happening, story-wise, you want to watch.

  The Crazy Baby tongs were passed from one to the other and newly formed curls sprayed with Harmony hairspray. Tubes of mascara bobbed in a Pyrex jug of boiling water, cigarettes were lit from other cigarettes and the room filled with smoke, eau de cologne and the sound of chatter, laughter and scraping chairs.

  The Owner’s Wife spoke to me while she arranged teacups on to trays. She told me that the nurses’ dresses in small sizes were like gold dust. ‘I should hang on to that one, if it fits well, and put your name in it.’

  ‘I’ll keep it on and surprise my mum with it,’ I said.

  ‘Good idea,’ she said, ‘and I’m definitely going to give your shampoo a try.’

  ‘Linco Beer shampoo,’ I said, just to make sure she’d got the name straight in her head.

  ‘Thank you, Lizzie, I know you’re going to be a real asset,’ she said, ‘I’m just so glad you’re here.’

  And, not knowing quite how to respond, I said, ‘And I’m so glad you’re here.’

  I wished I hadn’t said that because it seemed to choke her and later I couldn’t think why I’d said it at all.

  On the way out, through the corridor at the back, I took another peek into the morgue. This time there was something on the bench. I peered in and gasped as I realized it was a body covered with a sheet. A bluish foot poked out. The paper luggage tag hanging from the big toe read: Cresswell.

  3. Home Life

  It was true about the Linco Beer shampoo—it really did make your hair feel lovely—and of course I was going to get my own little barrel at my earliest convenience, and other items previously mentioned. But now, knowing I could just walk into Boot’s the Chemist and buy it and have enough change for a Bronnley lemon soap-on-a-rope, it seemed less urgent. And then, acknowledging that somehow led me to face up to the fact that things weren’t going terribly well, school-wise. I’d got into a bit of a mess and no amount of decent coffee or shampoo was going to help. I’d taken a few days off—for personal reasons—and found myself irretrievably behind in some subjects. Being behind at school is an uncomfortable place to be, especially if you’re not used to it. The eagerness to please that had spurred me all through primary school seemed to evaporate every morning—either as I had my first cigarette of the day in bed, or on the nauseating bus ride.

  The teachers were mostly too busy with the day-to-day to single me out for practical help. My exceptionally nice tutor, Mr Mayne, was exasperated by my seeming lack of ambition. He did his best to encourage me but was busy in the extreme with a handful of tricky tutees—who needed him just to get through the alphabet—and I imagine he looked at me and thought, ‘Lizzie Vogel will be all right in the long run,’ which was a huge compliment (if that was actually what he thought).

  My mother and Mr Holt were too busy—driving vans and running a laundry depot, trying to make ends meet with a new infant and trying to launch a pine-stripping venture—to notice I was struggling. My sister was gearing up to leave home for university. An anglepoise lamp and a striped cotton rug in a Habitat carrier waited in the hall for her departure and acted as a daily reminder that she’d soon be gone. In the meantime, she worked odd hours in Woolworth’s and hung around with a girl from Mauritius called Varsha. And had no idea what I was doing. Or not doing.

  My sister’s smoking ban in our shared bedroom had ruined our relationship. She made the far-fetched claim that I was poisoning the air and giving not only myself deadly diseases, stunting my growth and dulling my skin and brain, I was inflicting all that on her too—as she slept. This had driven her to make a permanent bed in the living room and take away all her records except one. ‘The Killing of Georgie (Part I and II)’ by Rod Stewart. Which she couldn’t bear to listen to because (a) it was sad (Georgie gets killed by a New Jersey gang) and (b) she couldn’t stand the image it conjured of Rod prancing around in a white suit. I loved Rod in his white suit and was glad when she gave me the record but then listened to it so often I stopped liking it too.

  All in all, I was ready for a new place to be, to start again and be wanted and needed. If I wasn’t going to be fussed over by doting parents or singled out by an intuitive teacher—who saw something unique in me—urging me to go for Oxbridge, I’d settle for doing the minimum at school—attending just often enough to get through and not have my mother arrested by Mrs Hargraves, the truant lady. I’d pop in for science and maths and when I needed to attend, and at other times I’d help old ladies fasten their corsets and thread their embroidery needles and I’d earn enough money to buy an ongoing supply of John Player tipped in the blue pack with a matching lighter, a bottle of Paco Rabanne, and seven pairs of new knickers in pastel colours with the days of the week printed on them—like a woman in an Edna O’Brie
n.

  I thought all this through as I walked and skipped home in the nurse’s dress. These were my reasons for wanting the job. Not as exciting as Miranda’s but more complex than wanting nice shampoo.

  Approaching my house, I straightened my cap and hoiked up my Pop Sox and made an entrance through the back door. My mother was playing a Clementi sonata on the piano while Danny chewed a crust in his Babygro. I wanted her to look round so I coughed. She turned and saw me in my uniform and burst into tears.

  It wasn’t that she was sad (or angry or happy). She was moved and she told me not to get changed until she’d found her camera, which she never did. But I had to not get changed until Mr Holt got home, and when he did he smiled and said something about Florence Nightingale and hoping I wasn’t going to start skiving off school again.

  It was strange being at school the following Monday. Being treated like a child again after having been treated like a twenty-year-old at Paradise Lodge—having seen an ancient, naked lady with a bedsore, who might die any minute, and having taken an emery board to a lady’s upper denture, where it was causing an ulcer.

  I ran into Miranda and a couple of her followers in the toilets—applying kohl to their inner eyelids—getting ready for the lunchtime discotheque. Miranda mentioned Paradise Lodge and before I knew it I’d said it was a privilege to be among elderly people and them having a lot to teach young women like us.

  Miranda frowned at me via the mirror (this obviously wasn’t the line she was taking in the group) and was clearly annoyed to hear me talk like that.

  ‘You’re joking, aren’t you?’ she said.

  She didn’t really like being among elderly people. Seeing them all so sad and old, struggling along, clanking their walking frames, made her want to scream and push them over, she said—not to hurt them, and not that she didn’t like them, just that the feelings they provoked in her were so at odds with the feelings she had about Mike Yu (a company director aged only nineteen) and life in general. The patients were contaminating her mind, she said, and making her hopes and dreams seem pointless.

  ‘I mean, how fucking depressing at our age, spending all day with people who are just around the corner from death, and you know it and they know it,’ she said, ‘and having to pretend everything’s normal.’

  I reassured Miranda that they didn’t see themselves as around the corner from death. They saw themselves as around the corner from a nice cup of milky coffee and a Lincoln biscuit or a trip to the lavatory. And actually, was that any different from us here now, in these toilets, me having a cigarette and her around the corner from a vending-machine Kit Kat and the lunchtime discotheque?

  Miranda tutted and said she’d never use the vending machine. She then cheered herself up by describing a three-piece trouser suit she was saving up for from Richard Shops—halfway between the boardroom and the bedroom, taupe chalk stripes, halter-neck waistcoat with plunging neckline and trousers you couldn’t wear pants with. It was going to blow Mike Yu’s mind.

  It sounded quite nice, except I wasn’t so keen on chalk stripes and would always want to wear pants.

  ‘If my mother wasn’t such an old bag,’ said Miranda, ‘and yours wasn’t such a mess, we wouldn’t need this grim fucking job!’

  I don’t think I blamed my mother for my needing the job. I blamed her at school for my truanting but I didn’t want to be the sort of idiot that gives up on their academic career because their parents don’t give them enough attention—I hated kids like that—but I couldn’t deny that my lack of direction coincided with our mother breaking an agreement with our newish stepdad, Mr Holt.

  Mr Holt had been gently training our mother to be careful with money—after years of frivolity (hers)—but in spite of the two of them making a ‘no more babies’ agreement, our mother had deliberately got herself pregnant and had a baby in 1976. She denied she’d done it deliberately and denies it to this day, but of course she had.

  I felt sorry for Mr Holt. He was a clever and intuitive man and had taught himself much about the world. He knew more than most people learn at even the most expensive school just by using his brain and reading. The one thing he’d failed to understand, though, was that our mother was never going to stop wanting to have babies—however many agreements she made. She couldn’t help herself.

  My mother didn’t tell Mr Holt about the pregnancy to begin with and then, just when she thought perhaps the time had come, he accidentally saw her in the nude, sideways on, and he’d said ‘Jesus H. Christ’ under his breath.

  He hadn’t intended to hurt her feelings but he had, and she’d cried in dismay and said what a bad person she was—relying on the fact that when you tell someone you’re a bad person, the other person tends to say, ‘No, no, you’re not!’ etc.

  But this wasn’t Mr Holt’s style. He agreed (yes, she was a bad person) and went on to remind her she already had plenty of children, and very little time and even less money and about the ‘no more children’ agreement they’d made at the outset.

  And of course that made my sister and me think he was a bad person for not rejoicing at the idea of his very own, imminent little baby and we all ganged up on him behind his back and called him hard-hearted and uncaring. And our mother said what did she expect, taking up with someone called Harry? (Which was Mr Holt’s first name.) And she recited William Blake’s ‘Infant Sorrow’.

  My mother groaned! my father wept.

  Into the dangerous world I leapt:

  Helpless, naked, piping loud:

  Like a fiend hid in a cloud.

  Struggling in my father’s hands:

  Striving against my swaddling bands,

  Bound and weary I thought best

  To sulk upon my mother’s breast.

  But to be absolutely truthful, I wasn’t overjoyed myself. The whole thing had surprised me—the pregnancy and then the not being overjoyed. Some of the most joyful times in my life up to then had been when our mother was pregnant, it always seemed as though everything was going to be all right. And the saddest, most awful times had been when she suddenly wasn’t pregnant any more, for whatever reason.

  I’d reached that self-conscious age and, to me, my mother seemed a bit on the old side to be having a baby, so I kept the news to myself. Even our mother kept it quiet.

  Compared to her others, this pregnancy was joyless. Her pregnancies with our biological father in the 1960s, with my sister and me and our little brother, had been cause for great celebration: the ordering of a private midwife and blankets from Harrods, the housekeeper’s husband asked in to paint the nursery in a neutral, rich cream, new maternity smocks in Liberty prints and the borrowing of the Benson swinging cradle that dated back to the birth of Tobias H. Benson in 1812—which had such ornate carvings it had to be polished with breath and a feather and certainly not Pledge and a yellow duster—and the thinking ahead to the christening, the godparents, the engraved glass and birth mug. And the names.

  And the pregnancies after her marriage to our father had—as previously mentioned—been intense and joyful and sorrowful.

  This one, though—in 1976—was half hidden, it was disapproved of, ignored, made light of and cried about. Even our mother who’d deliberately caused it was so sad she’d spoon Horlicks straight into her mouth from the jar and, because she didn’t smoke a single cigarette and drank nothing but econo-coffee with tons of sugar, she ballooned in weight and had to put her feet up on the piano stool to soothe her veins and when she stopped work she could hardly fit behind the steering wheel of the laundry van.

  Mr Holt was so disappointed, anxious and despondent he could barely bring himself to speak to her.

  And then, at dawn on the day after George Best’s birthday, our mother’s waters broke just as Mr Holt was making himself a cup of tea and listening to the 5 a.m. news on the wireless. She asked if he would mind driving to work via the Royal Infirmary. He nodded and waited while she put her shoes on. He watched her struggle for a moment and then bent down a
nd did up her laces for her. She thanked him and put her hands on his shoulders and smiled for the first time in weeks, and he said, ‘Well, we’d have been here all day.’ And off they went.

  My sister and I got up for school and found a note: Gone to the Royal to have baby. And on the note she’d drawn a baby and a horse’s head. She always drew a horse’s head because it was the only thing she could draw and it showed she was happy.

  In spite of the horse’s head, I was upset that she’d gone off on her own. But my sister said, ‘We’d only be in the way—and would you really want to see the baby come out?’ which were both good points.

  We went to school on the bus as usual and none of us mentioned it. Then, in my last lesson, for some reason I told a girl called Julia Dwyer that my mother might have had a baby and she said, ‘Yuk! How old is she?’ and I shaved two years off her to make it seem less revolting. And regretted the whole thing—the telling and the pregnancy.

  Back at home my sister, my brother Jack and I sat watching telly and had forgotten all about it when the phone rang and it was our mother calling from a phone box.

  She’d had a baby boy called Daniel John Henry Holt but we had to promise not to shorten it to DJ or Danny. He was Daniel. And they came home that evening in the Snowdrop van with Mr Holt.

  That was the start of Danny, who—after being so faintly drawn—burst into our lives in full colour, like the sun shining through expensive curtains. We all sat around that first evening kissing his tiny hands and feeling the perfect little weight of him and I realized the world would go on and on forever. Everything was exactly the same—Mr Holt telling us to put our shoes on the rack, and our mother tutting—and yet everything had changed.

  This little baby—who’d been deliberately got but then regretted and slightly denied, who was the embodiment of irresponsible, selfish actions and the reneging on an agreement, and the cause of so much sadness just by existing at all—was held aloft and adored by everyone, and chuckled at and dandled. Quite rightly so, as he was pure delight.