Part 15 (1/2)

”Catherine,” he called out, in a voice that surprised her by its richness, its theatricality. ”Catherine, my love, might I be an awful pest and trouble you for just a bit more sugar?”

”Hang on a tick, Reg,” said the blonde nurse. ”I'm taking Mr. Nelson's blood pressure.”

”Oh, Lord,” said the man called Reg, and let out a luxurious stage groan.

The man the nurse had referred to as Mr. Nelson closed his eyes as his blood pressure was taken, as if the procedure were somehow shameful. He was a beautiful old man, with a clean, fine skull; his blue flannel bathrobe was immaculate, and his slippers, a reddish brown leather, spoke of style. ”Thank you so very much,” he said, bowing slightly to the nurse when she removed his blood pressure cuff. His voice was low and Andrea could hear (although she told herself she was a stranger and might be wrong) the breeding in it.

Next to Mr. Nelson was a tan old man with a grizzled cap of hair. He sat slumped over in his chair, asleep. His posture looked precarious and Andrea wondered if she should warn the nurse that he might be in danger of falling out of his chair. On his bedside table was an opulent a.s.sortment of fruit: pineapples, grapes, oranges, apples, figs. The man's legs were swollen and mottled; dark blue spots punctuated the s.h.i.+ny stretched red flesh. Andrea looked away; she wanted to pull the curtains around Paul to protect him from contamination. From the others. Their sickness and their age.

”Where are you from in the States?” asked Reg in his plummy voice.

”A suburb of New York,” she said. ”A town in Westchester called Hastings.”

”Ah, Hastings, 1066 and all that. The Battle of Hastings, you know. William the Conqueror.”

You must think I'm an idiot to imagine that you would have to explain the Battle of Hastings, she wanted to say and then wondered if he was one of those Englishmen who thought all Americans were idiots. She felt affronted and then surprised, because she'd never thought of herself as patriotic; as a matter of fact, she thought, defending herself against some unknown accuser, some of her friends teased her about being downright Anglophilia ”I studied history at university,” she said, carefully and misleadingly adopting the English usage in a way that she knew probably called up a misunderstanding, an a.s.sumption of graduate education, whereas in fact she only had a B.A from the University of Michigan.

”How fascinating. And what was your speciality?” he asked, giving his last word an extra British syllable.

”The Spanish Civil War,” she said, calling up the subject of her long-forgotten senior thesis.

”Utterly fascinating, history,” Reg said. ”Shakespeare's histories are my favorite. There'll never be another Hal after Olivier. Lovely man, Olivier. Absolutely lovely. Charmed everyone, high or low, didn't matter a particle to him.”

”Andrea, can you help me,” Paul said, in a petulant tone she'd never heard him use before. ”Pull the curtains, will you?”

He motioned her closer to the bed. ”Don't talk to that old horror, he doesn't shut up when he's started.”

”Catherine, oh Catherine, might I trouble you for the tiniest thing,” Reg said.

Andrea hoped that when there was something really wrong, he wouldn't have used up all his nurse's goodwill.

Paul slept a lot. They would be holding hands and talking about something inconsequential, their garden at home, the gardens they'd intended to visit but would not now, and suddenly he would drop her hand and his eyes would be closed. It wasn't as if he closed them; it was as if something or someone closed his eyes for him, not unpleasantly, not aggressively; it was a task done simply, among other tasks needing to be done. But by whom?

She didn't know what to do with herself while Paul was sleeping. What she wanted to do was, she knew, unthinkable. She wanted to lie down on the bed beside him, to place her body against him, to position herself against his body as they did every night, to rest her head on his shoulder, on his chest, impaired now, damaged- must she think of it in danger? But she couldn't do that, of course; she had to sit up and seem to be calm and alert, ready for something, but in no way alarmed.

She would walk up and down the corridor, pa.s.sing the old women, stretching her fingers, bending them backward from the palm, an exercise she'd learned at work to prevent carpal tunnel syndrome. She picked up one of the magazines in the guests'waiting room. She read an article t.i.tled ”My Boyfriend Made Me Fat.” It was about a woman who realized that she could only lose weight if she dumped her boyfriend because he wanted to keep her fat so he could hold on to her without anxiety.

When Paul woke, she helped him select his lunch from the menu left by Catherine, and sat with him while he ate. ”Would you mind if I went out for lunch?” she asked.

”Of course not,” Paul said. ”Take your time.” But she could tell that he didn't really want her to take her time; he wanted her back as soon as she could. She understood that; he didn't want to be alone among the dying and the old. But he would never say something like that; they had always been careful not to let their marriage press too hard against their personal freedom. What would happen when they had a child? There was no sense, she told herself, in thinking ofthat now.

Outside the hospital, she was surprised at how the sun blazed, how blue and cloudless the sky seemed after the colorless air of the ward. The stones on the building took on luminosity, the leaves, still green but drying out with the approach of autumn, turned themselves over in the vigorous wind and showed their silver undersides.

She stopped at a restaurant called Trattoria Siciliana. ”Buona sera,” said the waiter. He was a small man with very bad posture and a bad toupee. There was a mole the size of an English halfpenny under his left eye; his eyes were sad and doggy, a doggy reddish brown.

”Buona sera” she said to him. ”Un acqua minerale, perfavore.”

She hoped it wasn't an affectation, ordering in Italian. It was the second time in one day she'd had to suspect herself of intellectual fraudulence. Was it just being in England? Or was it that she felt so out of control that she needed to a.s.sert mastery in some realm?

”Inglese?” the waiter said.

”No, Americana.”

He asked why she was in England. She explained that her husband was in the hospital up the road. How kind his dark eyes were; how generous his sympathy seemed when he told her he hoped it wasn't serious. He sat down across from her. He told her to tell him all about her husband's illness. She began to cry when she told him about Paul's collapsing in the park. He said that she had gone through a very terrible time and that she must have a gla.s.s of red wine with her lunch, that insalata capreses was not enough for her to be eating, she must start with pasta, pasta arrabiata because chilies were good for the heart, and her coffee would be on him. He said that she must come to him for all her meals; it was terrible to be alone with illness in a foreign country. She enjoyed her lunch; he was right, the spicy pasta did seem to give her heart. But the wine made her head light; she rarely drank in the daytime. But in her lightheadedness everyone on the street seemed charming. She felt much older than the skinny boys and girls, pierced and tattooed, but she admired their playfulness, the quick tap of their boot heels on the street. She studied the haircuts of middle-aged women and felt that most had chosen well. Businessmen seemed exceptionally well tailored; businesswomen exceptionally well shod. She particularly admired the way one woman wound a scarf around her neck; it was a peach color that deepened, as it approached her throat, to a smoky rose.

She wanted to tell all this to Paul; she was disappointed to see him asleep again when she came by.

The dignified old man, whose name, she remembered, was Mr. Nelson, smiled at her as he walked to his bed from the bathroom.

”It must have taken quite a lot out of him, your husband I mean,” he said to Andrea. ”It's a very good thing for him to get his rest.”

She wanted to say, ”It has taken a lot out of me too. I am very lonely.

There is no one in this country who knows anything about me, who knows who I am.”

But she said, ”Yes, I'm glad to see him resting comfortably.”

”I do hope you won't think I was eavesdropping, but I couldn't help hearing you tell Mr. c.o.x-Ralston that you'd studied the Spanish Civil War at university. I was a member of the International Brigade. The P.O.U.M.”

”George Orwell's affiliation.”

”Yes, we were wounded in Barcelona at the same time.”

She felt shy; his silence made her think she ought say something, or ask some question; at the same time, she felt that, being English and reserved, he might experience any question as an intrusion.

”It was an experience I wouldn't have traded for anything, despite the bloodshed, despite the betrayals. All in all, I'd say it was a privilege to have gone through it. The young today have no political stamina, no sense of the long haul, the long struggle. I shan't be sorry to leave this world, you know. I'm ninety-three and I won't regret not being around to get the Queen's telegram.”

Mr. c.o.x-Ralston had been listening in.

”What he means by the Queen's telegram, my dear, is that if you reach your hundredth birthday, you get a telegram from the Queen.”

”Yes, quite,” said Mr. Nelson with an authority that made Mr. c.o.x-Ralston tuck his head in like a turtle, whereas before he had, in his eagerness to overhear, waggled it at the end of his neck like a goose at the edge of a fence.

”I shouldn't talk in such dark terms to a lovely young woman like you,” he said. ”I don't mean to be depressing.”

”She is lovely, isn't she, d.i.c.k?” said Mr. c.o.x-Ralston. ”She could be a film star. Rather reminds me of a young Deborah Kerr.”

”I rarely go to films,” Mr. Nelson said.

”Cinema has been my life,” said Mr. c.o.x-Ralston. He spent a long time on the last syllable of ”cinema,” p.r.o.nouncing it as if the word ended in ”ah” so that it finished in a drawn-out sigh.

”What was your work, Mr. Nelson?” Andrea asked, wanting to cut Mr. c.o.x-Ralston out of the conversation.

”I was a biologist. Plant genetics was my field. I worked trying to develop a new species of maize. Somehow I'd hoped I might be doing something to feed the hungry. None of it came to much, it seems.”

”Tea, everyone?” said an Indian woman pulling a heavy cart.

”Will you have some tea, Mrs. Jamison?” asked Mr. Nelson, and Andrea bowed her head, touched by his gallantry.

She didn't wake Paul for tea; she sat next to Mr. Nelson's bed to have it, wondering if she were being disloyal. But she told herself that she was doing the right thing: Paul was young; Mr. Nelson was old; she was with Paul all day every day and Mr. Nelson had no visitors.