“Dad, please!”
He was silent.
Now he laid his napkin next to the empty plate. “I’m off to bed. The master of the house is tired.” He looked around sarcastically. “Hovel seems to me a better word… If you’re planning to stay, Mister Herbert…”—he spoke the words with an exaggerated British accent; he had clearly got wind of something—“my daughter will build you a nest. Good night.”
They shook hands. He gave me a kiss on the forehead. When he had almost left the room, he turned, looked at us in turn and said in a good-natured tone: “And be good. I’m still your father.”
I arranged some blankets and pillows on the sofa downstairs. There weren’t enough mattresses in the house. When I had finished I saw to my astonishment that my husband simply nestled on the seat and started unbuttoning his shoes.
I pulled him with me. “Idiot…”
“What? It’s me bed, isn’t it?”
“Only in the morning, honey. You’re sleeping with me…”
I pushed him upstairs, past my father’s bedroom. I could hear his regular breathing. He was deeply asleep, didn’t react at all when my husband stubbed his toe on the foot of the chest of drawers and let out a powerful swear word.
I pushed him into my room, one floor higher, closed the door behind us and peeled his shirt, his trousers, his underpants and socks off him like a fruit skin.
“Christ, Helen, it’s freezing up here. Could lose me nuts any minute…”
He caught his breath when I squeezed them in my palm.
It had started to rain, a friendly licking and pattering against the window. We lay listening to the town, where the din of the festivities abated only slowly, occasionally giggling when below us in the street a drunk wandered burbling down the footpath, in a drink-sodden medley of numerous national anthems.
“I’m knackered, ma’am.”
I giggled, drank in the sharp smell of his armpits. His head rested on my breast.
“And now?” I asked teasingly.
“Off to Brussels in the morning. Be back in a couple o’ days… Rather fancy the idea of setting me gear up in the cellar…”
“And then?”
“Dunno. Stay here. Shan’t go back. No way, love. Job with the press perhaps… Suppose that’d be nice. No need to worry, for the time being…” He raised his head, gave me a playful bite in the skin under my chin. “Mummy’s allowance, remember? And you, love?”
I was silent. Thought. “Studying,” I said. “Reading. Seeing the world. You must show me the world…”
“If you say so, love.”
“And I want your child, eventually…”
“Oh God…” He gave a sigh and cuddled up still closer. “Better start with ham and eggs then, in the mornin’…”
I laid my hand on his cheek. Kissed him on the crown of his head. In his hair.
He was soon asleep.
V
“YOU HAVEN’T RESTED AGAIN,” Rachida chides me when she pushes open the door of the room to check whether I’m still snoozing, and now she sees that I’m wide awake she contracts her eyebrows into a frown of feigned anger. She can never get angry with me, and she knows that I know, and also that I’m quite capable of exploiting it.
She walks round the bed, meanwhile laughing and wagging her finger: “You’re a rascal, Mrs Helena.”
“Thank you, child. Always have been.”
In passing, on her way to the window, where she opens the blinds, she catches sight of the exercise book at my side. “You should turn the light on if you want to read or write. You’ll ruin your eyes otherwise.”
She opens the window. The smell of the summer evening. The residual warmth of the day in the stones on the front of the building. The scent of asphalt, grass, the acid aroma of the tame chestnut trees in the street without a breath of wind.
“I’m as blind as a bat anyway, child.”
She takes the tray off the bedside table, stops at the edge of my bed and gives a leisurely, theatrical sigh. “Again you’ve not eaten anything… just half a sandwich this morning and now just some cold soup. You must eat, Mrs Helena.”
She walks round the bed again, towards the door. “Eat and sleep. That’s what Dr Vanneste says.”
*
Dr Vanneste. The new one. Fresh from university, still wet behind the ears. God knows what’s happened to the old one. Perhaps he collapsed or tripped over his bag on the stairs and broke his neck. One can but hope.
The new one came in, put out his hand and said, undoubtedly because it’s in the course on How to Break the Ice with the Patient: “Hallo. I’m Yannick Vanneste.”
“And I’ve got migraine,” I said.
“I’m doing a practical internship.” He put the pressure gauge round my upper arm and pumped the air in so hard that my lower arm almost came out of the elbow socket. “But next year I shall be qualified.”
Twenty-six or twenty-seven. Solid, tall. A real hunk, but in his head there was a little boy throwing walnuts. When he pushed the thermometer into my mouth I instinctively sucked down on his fingers with my whole palate and he muttered something like “those little chompers of yours are still in good shape, little lady”—meanwhile checked the blood pressure and said to Rachida that it was on the high side: “Fifteen…” He took the thermometer out of my mouth. “And you’ve got a wee bit of a temperature…”
Wee bit of a temperature. Little lady. Baby talk: verbal dummies. If I were his age, I’d give him a proper temperature.
“Is she eating enough? Is she sleeping enough?” He asked Rachida. Then bent over the bed and winked: “Let’s have a listen.”
He slid the stethoscope across my ribcage over the thin material of my nightdress. Those fingers. The intent listening. The supple wrinkles on his forehead, which do not yet make lasting furrows.
“Looks good.” He took the stethoscope out of his ears. “Is her liquid intake sufficient?”
I ostentatiously coughed up some phlegm from my windpipe and muttered: “I have been suffering from vaginal dryness for quite some time.”
I saw Rachida’s jaw muscles tensing, her eyes didn’t know where to look. Dr Vanneste went pale.
“You’re blushing, doctor.”
He blinked, recovered and opened his bag. “I’ll prescribe diazine, for the blood pressure. One tablet twice a day… There you are.”
Rachida took the prescription and let him out.
“Liquid, liquid… If I were sixty years younger, I’d have shown him what liquid is… What do you say to that, child?”
“You were very very naughty, Mrs Helena,” she says, putting the tray down and coming and sitting on the edge of my bed. “I’ll boil an egg. I’ll pour you a glass of milk and do you a sandwich. And then…” She pats the blankets with the flat of her hand. “Then I shall come and sit with you and I shan’t go away until you’ve finished everything… Otherwise we shall get very angry.”
She gets up. Pulls me upright. Arranges the pillow behind my back. “I’ll tell a story. While you eat, I’ll tell you a story for a change.” She pulls the sheet over my legs and smoothes it out. “Is that OK? The story of Said with the Lovely Eyes.”
“Who’s that? A desert prince who turns old women into salamanders?”
She giggles. “I shall tell his story the way my mother always told it to me. But if you stop eating…” She takes her hands off the sheet and holds them at shoulder height with fingers spread wide… “Then I’ll stop talking at once. You’ll have to decide for yourself how it ends.”