Emotionally Weird(82)

After a long wait, during which I engaged in the most desultory of conversations with Dr Dick – mostly about his childhood ailments (measles, German measles, whooping cough, chickenpox, mumps, glandular fever, plague) – a nurse came and said, ‘Dr McCrindle will see you now,’ and took Dr Dick into a cubicle to be examined behind garish flowered curtains that must have offended his taste.

A lot of time passed without anything happening. The peeling beige paint on the waiting-room walls was relieved only by a poster encouraging me to brush my teeth after every meal. Dr McCrindle came out of Dr Dick’s cubicle and smiled at me wolfishly. More time passed. A student nurse ran down the corridor, shouting, ‘Jake, come back.’ More time passed. I read my way through a pile of the People’s Friend , looked through my George Eliot essay, which had got as far as, James’s dislike of George Eliot’s stylistic method is rationalized into the strange statement that, ‘Its diffuseness . . . makes it too copious a dose of pure fiction ’, which wasn’t very far at all and, finally, I wrote some Hand of Fate –

‘Good morning, Rita,’ Lolly Cooper said cheerfully, ‘lovely morning, isn’t it?’ Cooper’s was an old-fashioned sort of bakery, the baking still done at the back of the premises by Lolly’s husband, Ted. Rumours abounded in Saltsea about Ted’s terrible temper. He was a dusty, flour-clad presence, a kind of éminence blanche, who whistled all the time in a manner that Madame Astarti found faintly menacing. Lolly, on the other hand, was a frilly sort of woman with fluffy hair who wore Peter Pan collars or big soft kitten bows tied at her neck. Madame Astarti always imagined that Lolly Cooper kept a very neat house with a well-stocked fridge and sets of matching towels, something Madame Astarti herself never expected to achieve.

‘What are you after today, Rita?’ Lolly said, wringing her hands together like a woman with a dreadful secret even though the expression on her face was one of extreme, almost excessive, cheerfulness.

‘Small white farmhouse, please,’ Madame Astarti said and then laughed and said, ‘maybe I should go to an estate agent’s for that?’ but Lolly just looked at her blankly with a fixed smile on her face.

‘Never mind,’ Madame Astarti sighed.

‘And a bit of a treat for elevenses?’ Lolly said, and together they conducted the ritual of surveying the trays of iced fancies and cream cakes.

‘Jam doughnut?’ Lolly said. ‘An Eccles cake?’ The thin strain of a slightly wobbly whistle could be heard coming from the back. It sounded to Madame Astarti like ‘Oh Mein Papa’. She’d never thought of it as a frightening tune before.

‘Chelsea bun?’ Lolly went on, a mad look on her face. ‘Chocolate eclair? Iced teacake? Cream puff?’

I closed my eyes and when I opened them again the woman who had been watching me in Balgay cemetery was standing in front of me. I flinched and stood up too suddenly, making myself dizzy.

‘Why are you following me?’ I demanded. Close up, I could see the alcoholic’s skin, mottled like a reptile, see the lines in her sun-cured face. Her hair looked brassy and green as if she spent too much time in over-chlorinated swimming-pools.

‘Excuse me,’ she said, her accent hard and tight, South African perhaps, or Rhodesian; ‘I wonder if you can help me – I’m looking for my daughter?’

‘Who are you?’

‘Effie.’

‘No, I’m Effie,’ I said. I was beginning to feel sick. It was too hot in the hospital, like an overheated greenhouse.

The woman laughed but in a strangled, off-key kind of way and it struck me that she might be insane.

I struggled to make sense of her. ‘You’re my mother’s sister, Effie? You’re dead,’ I added, rather impolitely.

‘No,’ she said, ‘not her sister.’ But then a nurse walked briskly up to me and said, ‘You can go in and see your dad now if you like.’

‘My dad?’ I repeated, bewildered. The woman began to walk away, her too-high heels stabbing the hospital linoleum. ‘Wait!’ I shouted after her but she had already pushed her way through the swing doors and disappeared.

I felt weak, as if I was going to faint. I was probably the one who ought to be admitted to a ward, not Dr Dick. (But who would I put as my next of kin? My mother is not my mother. Her sister is not her sister. Her father is not her father. My father is not my father. My aunt is not my aunt. Et cetera.)

‘Cubicle three,’ the nurse said.

Of course I knew it was Dr Dick in cubicle three not my anonymous father choosing a bizarre location in which to come back from the dead, but for just a moment, as my hand went out to draw the curtain back, I felt a little shiver of excitement. If it was my father lying there what would I say to him? More importantly what would he say to me?