The Limits of Enchantment Page 12

  And then, quite apart from his looks, there is the matter of his carriage: if he holds himself wrong, or leans too far forward or back, or lists to one side, or slumps at the front. All of these things can be mighty discouraging. But after those things comes, for me, the way that a man sounds.

  How does his voice enter the ear? And if Arthur smelled good enough, I’m not sure he sounded quite right. There was a reedy quality to his voice, a slight trilling. Is it possible that one could ever be relaxed in the company of a man who trills, even slightly? There was another thing: his elbows flapped against his jacket. That was a noise and a distraction.

  Was I being too picky? I wondered. Would anyone, anywhere, ever measure up? It was no good. Every time I tried to think of Arthur in the best possible light, I found myself heaping more and more objections up against him. And I had more or less invited him to take away my virginity.

  Then, travelling at great altitude seemingly amongst the stars, I saw what I knew to be a satellite. ‘Look,’ I said to Judith. ‘Maybe it’s a sputnik. Like the one that carried Valentina Tereshkova.’

  ‘Who?’

  I had to explain who Valentina was. Shouldn’t every woman know?

  Judith squinted up. ‘How do you know this stuff?’

  ‘I know where to look. It comes round every night at almost the same time. Maybe it’s one of those with a dead dog in it.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘The Russians sent dogs and monkeys up there. They died of course. They’re still going round.’

  ‘What, with dead monkeys inside them?’ Her mouth open, Judith continued to track the silent passage of the satellite in the sky.

  I regretted telling her this. There are some things you tell people and it changes their world for ever. I switched subjects. ‘After this is over, this thing with Arthur I mean, I’ll be ready to Ask.’

  Judith turned her gaze from the skies and squinted at me. She was about to speak, but I was ready for her with a look that said, Don’t you dare.

  For Judith, as it would have been for Mammy, my willingness to Ask was an article of faith. It was as if – despite all my protestations to the contrary – I lived, like her, within a belief. But I did not. I did not believe. Not all, at any rate. Not in the way that she and Mammy and the other few believed.

  The truth is I was prompted by desperation. I had lost Mammy’s guidance for a while, and now I was about to lose my home and my way of life. And who knew what else besides? I could retreat behind the skirts of what Mammy wanted me to be; or I could reject all of it and start out on a new way of life, in a scrubbed place of antiseptic and diplomas where illumination and imagination had no part. Though my brain shuttled between those two extreme venues, my heart remained with Mammy, and blind loyalty was winning out over rational objection.

  All this time, the thing I was agreeing to do was not something to be treated lightly.

  The Asking.

  I would need at least one helper, possibly two. In matters such as these it is important to have those around who will, as it were, hold your coat. By now Judith was someone on whom I felt I could rely.

  The next evening I had other things to keep my mind occupied: namely my first evening class at the College of Midwives. I went out somewhat sooner than usual, planning to visit Mammy earlier and leave her in good time for my class. As it happened I couldn’t seem to get a ride, so I used willpower to stop a car.

  It’s not as difficult as people think. I’d often practised from behind my school desk or on a bus. All you do is concentrate on someone’s neck to get them to look round at you. Eventually they have to. In a similar manner I succeeded in getting a driver to stop for me and I was just climbing in the passenger seat when I saw Arthur roaring up behind on his motorbike at my normal time. He zoomed by, but not without my seeing the look of collapse and anguish on his face.

  The driver, a middle-aged man who smelled of a metal-works factory, told me about his disappointment over a missed job promotion. Perhaps I wasn’t listening hard enough to him, but he dropped me outside of town and I had to walk the last mile. It was a fresh spring evening and dusk was falling on the city as I approached. Lights were pricking on all over the town and I felt a thrill at taking control of my new life. As I came down the London Road a flag on a pole flapped happily, and a man in a car tooted his horn.

  ‘Did you bring the gin?’ Mammy said.

  ‘Yes. Another pint.’ We had gallons of it. Mammy used to make it in the bath-tub. Then she’d use sloe berries to disguise the awful taste.

  ‘Tip it in that vase. No one will see. Bring another pint in tomorrow.’

  ‘Another? Are you getting through it that fast?’

  Mammy giggled. ‘I’m selling it.’

  I looked across the ward. Two old girls with white hair and powdered faces made a thumbs-up sign to me. At the bedside there was a red vase containing three long-stemmed plastic roses. The ward was clear of nurses so I did as I was told and emptied the sloe gin I’d smuggled in with me into the vase. Then I replaced the plastic roses. ‘Them girls run it to the men’s ward for me. Here.’ She pushed a pound note and a few shillings – the profit from her unlicensed trade – into my hand, and I wondered if she knew.

  But Mammy was very tired. She didn’t seem to be listening as I told her about the antics of the hippies at Croker’s. I left out the thing about the mushrooms and the out-of-season fly, because it would disturb her. She didn’t seem to object when I left a few minutes before official visiting time was over.

  *

  Including myself the class was made up of nine women, and I seemed to be one of the youngest. Called thither by the baby-boom, some of the ladies were returning to the profession after a long absence; though they were made to feel they had even more to learn than the rest of us. The class was tutored by Mrs Marlene Mitchell, a stern lady of senior years who wore her nursing uniform in which to teach and who stood like a plaster saint on a raised dais at the front of the class. Mrs Marlene Mitchell sensed her elevation keenly. I was instantly plunged back into the shrinking shyness of my school years.

  Fortunately it was easy to remain invisible even in so small a class. Mrs Mitchell liked to talk and did not like to be interrupted for anything. And since I could listen for all the world, that was exactly how I liked it; I calculated early that I could flap my ears through two terms of instruction, collect my diploma in silence and continue to practise midwifery still according to Mammy’s tested precepts.

  MMM, as we pretty soon came to call her, addressed us from the front on that first evening. I remember a vase of daffodils stood on a table at the side of the classroom, beneath a window open to the spring evening air. MMM had a shocking overbite, even worse than Greta’s, and this was a shame because one of her front teeth was chocolate-brown. I remember thinking, Imagine that looking at you as you pop out of the womb. The first thing you see on this earth. A cruel thought, unworthy Mammy might have said, and I tried not to keep it in mind but it would keep coming back.

  She addressed us from a stiff standing position, hands clasped lightly in front of her. She would break this pose only occasionally, lifting her heavy, black spectacles off her nose to inspect the watch pinned to the breast pocket of her starched, midnight-blue uniform. These moments created the only break in her monologue in which someone – not I – might interrupt.

  ‘Can I ask something?’ said the fidgeting lady next to me, whom I came to know as Biddy, during one of these pauses.

  MMM didn’t exactly say yes, but she made a small gesture with her open hand, as if to say: The floor is all yours but briefly please.

  ‘You said that in the course we were going to be talking about formula. Well I have to say I don’t hold with formula, so where does that leave the likes of us who don’t hold with it?’ Biddy was a stocky woman with a kindly, ruddy face. She looked around the class for support; most kept their heads down.

  Before answering Mrs Marlene Mitchell checked her list of names. �
�Mrs Carter. You are with us this evening to learn that some major changes have taken place over the last fifteen years. Major changes. I’m afraid you’ll find it’s not a question of what you or I hold with, it’s a question of nursing policy. That’s a phrase you’ll come to hear more and more over the next few weeks. Nursing policy.’

  ‘So am I to tell women what I don’t believe in myself?’ Biddy said jovially, folding her arms.

  MMM wasn’t jovial. ‘This we’ll discuss in the fullness of time. Meanwhile you’ve committed yourself to come to an understanding of what’s best for mothers. That’s the point of these classes. Not you. Not I. Mothers.’ And when she said ‘mothers’ she tapped the air in front of her with her index finger. Satisfied, she lifted her glasses from her nose and consulted her watch again. ‘Now time is against us so let me run through what will be expected of you.’

  MMM swung back into her monologue. Biddy turned to me and made cross-eyes.

  As I came out of the College of Midwives building I saw Biddy swinging her large bottom over the seat of a bicycle. She called out to me, ‘Not much change out of her, eh? Lot of air. No hardship though, eh? Stick with us old broilers, you’ll be fine. See you next week!’ And she was away, pedalling her bike unsteadily before I had a chance to reply with a single word.

  But I was too flooded with the moment to be concerned with Biddy’s opinion of our teacher. I’d come prepared to listen hard, and to measure everything that was said against what I knew and what Mammy had taught me. To be learning again, I felt, brought me to the wall of life; and even though I’d not fitted in at school I realised that evening how badly I still wanted to learn, and how learning from Mammy always made the world anew. Learning refreshed the roots of life, it seemed to me. Or perhaps it was like peeling a layer of skin from an onion, to find another, brightly coloured skin underneath, then one golden or glittering or iridescent beneath that. And as I thought these things I saw that the city itself had grown a new skin of darkness illuminated by neon and sodium electrical light as I walked away hugging my exercise book. I managed to thumb a lift easily enough and I barely noticed the driver or heard his story, so entranced was I by the prospect of learning. I was ready for anything.

  ‘I can’t carry this off,’ I said to Judith.

  ‘Keep still! How do you expect me to fix your hair when you keep tugging away from me? And leave those hairgrips alone. You don’t need them.’

  ‘But why do I have to have my hair pushed around at all? I thought the idea was to discourage him! Ouch!’ I felt Judith was deliberately being mean with the brush. She was parting my hair in the middle when I’d parted my hair at the side all my life and it felt like she was removing my scalp in order to do it.

  ‘He needs to find something worth going after before he can be discouraged. When did you last put a brush through this lot? You look like some kind of hedgerow witch.’

  I’d gone to Judith’s house immediately after the school day had finished. She wanted to ‘prepare’ me for my evening with Arthur. She had a bath with proper taps, so much more luxurious than my zinc tub filled from pans boiled on the stove. I soaked in the bath, listening to the sound of Judith’s obsessive vacuuming downstairs. But after having me bathe she now wanted me sweetened, like a suckling pig with honey sauce for a gala dinner. She’d got her lipstick and her mascara and her blusher and all those things that make a painted clown of a woman, and I wasn’t standing for it.

  ‘I don’t want to be too attractive to him!’

  ‘Don’t bloody well flatter yourself, girlie! We won’t get a silk purse out of it!’

  ‘Ow! Stop yanking my hair! We’re not all sluts, Judith! We’re not all loose.’

  By way of reply, and quite deliberately, Judith dragged the brush really hard on a knot of hair. I screamed, turned, and slapped her face. She dropped the brush and put a hand to her cheek. I’d imprinted five red finger-mark welts there. They were already fading before she flushed red with anger. She lifted her own hand and slapped me back, hard, and with double the stinging force. It was my turn to hold my face. I tried to return the slap again, but she danced backwards out of my reach and I nearly toppled forward.

  Then we were overcome with the ridiculous spectacle of each other and we both started cackling. Judith picked up the brush and gently resumed the grooming of my hair.

  ‘Slut,’ I said softly.

  ‘Vixen,’ she answered.

  ‘Tart.’

  ‘Witch.’

  I put my hand out to stop the brush strokes. ‘Judith, I’m scared of doing this.’

  ‘Look little mouse, it will be all right. After what we’re going to give him he’ll be lucky to even find it in his trousers never mind stick it inside you. I’ll make it disappear.’

  ‘But what if it doesn’t work?’

  ‘If that happens – and it won’t – then you just make him pop with your hand. Have you never done that, really?’

  I shook my head.

  ‘Every girl should know that. If you’re under pressure just bring him in with your hand. Unless he’s a swine; most men just want to go off pop and they don’t much care how. Use your hand or if it gets too hot then use your mouth.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Give it a suck. He’ll be so busy writhing about he won’t want to put it anywhere else, I tell you. I know men.’

  I was horrified! ‘But won’t it taste of piss?’

  ‘Not unless he’s weeing on you it won’t. Don’t you know anything about blokes?’

  ‘No,’ I wailed. The idea of sucking one of those things made me want to gag.

  ‘Come on,’ Judith said. ‘It won’t come to that. Now turn your head. Won’t you let me put just a little make-up on you?’

  I was sick with anticipation. Not simply apprehensive, not tummy butterflies, but sick as a dog. I vomited when she’d finished preening me. Then when she’d cleaned me up again she made me close my eyes. Carefully she led me to her dressing-table mirror.

  ‘Open,’ she said.

  I opened my eyes and a music-hall stranger peered back at me. Most shocking of all was not the small amount of blusher I’d allowed Judith to dust on my cheeks, nor the eyeliner that emphasised the whites of my eyes, nor the touch of shadow that drew attention to my eyelids, nor the delicate pink lipstick that budded my lips. It was the white parting down the centre of my head. It split me in two. I turned my face sideways on, so I could see only my profile. Could I be this other person? I thought.

  ‘You look gorgeous,’ Judith said. ‘Come on. We’ve got lots to do.’

  18

  We got back to the cottage and the first thing we did was to prepare the egg and bacon pie and slam that in the oven. Then Judith wanted to dress up the table with a fresh cloth and candles. I did complain that she was making a whore’s boudoir of the place and she retorted that I’d never seen a whore’s boudoir, which was true. We got two flagons of beer at the ready and Judith got busy with the saltpetre and the other things. I sipped at the ale, trying to assess whether you could get the tang of it, and Judith kept sprinkling the stuff in until I felt we’d hit the point. As for the egg and bacon pie, we wouldn’t know until it was cooked and we got to taste it. I shook in plenty of pepper to disguise. There was a fruit crumble for pudding, and that would be easy to mask with all the sugar.

  ‘He might not get what he wants but he won’t go away hungry,’ Judith said.

  Apart from that, Judith had also whisked up a salad dressing. ‘Isn’t that a bit fancy?’ I asked her.

  ‘It’s nothing,’ she said airily. Judith had once spent some time in France, where I think she may have found a Frenchman to give her these racy culinary ideas. ‘Just make sure it goes on his lettuce and not his dick.’

  It would be easy to hate Judith.

  When the meal was prepared I vomited again, but there was nothing left for me to bring up. Judith said I should settle my stomach with some more beer.

  ‘What, with all that stuff in it? You’r
e joking! I’ll have a drop of sloe gin.’

  ‘Come on now, Fern. We’ve got half an hour to get you dressed.’

  I was the same size as Judith in all respects and she had a complete outfit for me to go with my painted face. There was a figure-hugging neat white satin blouse that I loved, but the skirt she’d brought me showed far too much of my legs.

  ‘I can’t wear this!’

  ‘It’s a Mary Quant miniskirt. Just put it on.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Okay then, slip your old dress back on. Never mind that it was sewn in a prison cell.’

  I sighed and donned the miniskirt. ‘But I look ridiculous!’

  ‘It’s what I wear all the time, damnit!’

  ‘Exactly.’

  ‘Shut up and put these nylons on.’

  I’d never worn nylons before in my life. Judith had to show me how to take the black tights and roll them so as not to pop the nylon, starting at my toe, along the foot, up my calf and to the knees before stepping in with the other foot. I wanted to know how anyone was supposed to piss with these things on.

  ‘You just hoik them down, stupid. Why are you being so difficult? And anyway if things are working out, he’ll have them off you before you get to the apple crumble. I’m joking, Fern! Don’t look like that!’

  Though there was something about the dark nylon that I liked. It was like a soft breath on my leg as it rolled on. It whispered to my skin and it made me want to press my legs together at the thigh or at the calf. I liked the way the nylon swished. It talked. And it made my legs look long and shapely.

  ‘See,’ Judith said. ‘Now put these on. They’re not too high.’

  She handed me a pair of black patent-leather shoes. The heels lifted me an inch and instantly pushed my hips and thighs forward. My balance changed.