Riley, page 32
‘I’m sorry.’
‘Don’t be silly; don’t talk about being sorry. I’m thinking of her and the child, of course, and I know what you’re thinking, you should be there. Well, you can’t be, can you? So come on, make the best of it. So much depends upon you. Especially tomorrow night. Yet don’t worry about it. If you have to go on Thursday, Tom is pretty well primed in your part, although he won’t be you and the audience will be disappointed. But still, that’s life, and they’ll understand. So come on.’ His voice changing, he added, ‘Connie’s just come in. She’s like a teenager looking forward to her first party. D’you know what she said to me yesterday? She said that this venture had taken ten years off her; in fact it has given her the youth she never had. You know, Riley, she may be very rich but she’s never been very happy so far as I can gather. Anyway, she wants to see you. Come on.’
As he walked through the broad, carpeted foyer, he was asking himself if anyone was really ever happy. One thought one was, then life produced one of its tangents and brought you to your knees. With him, it was Yvette, and now he wasn’t only carrying a load of guilt but a fear of meeting up with her again, for she had opened a door in him that he couldn’t close.
Thirteen
‘You must get some rest, woman.’
Nyrene turned her face up to the doctor, but she didn’t answer him, and he went on, ‘McIntyre and your woman are quite capable of seeing to him; they’ll let you know whether there is any change.’
‘How long do you think?’
‘I couldn’t say…a few hours. He’s in God’s hands now; I’ve done all I can, and you more than enough. You’ve contacted your husband?’
‘Yes.’
‘Well, I think he should be here.’
She turned her face up to him again, saying, ‘It’s the opening night of the theatre; he couldn’t possibly leave. I…I really should be there.’
‘You shouldn’t be there; you should be here with your son, and so should he.’
He turned from the bed, and picked up his bag, then said, ‘It’s four o’clock now. I have a surgery at five, if you need me after that, give me a ring at home.’
She stood up and said, ‘Thank you, thank you very much.’
He was making for the door when in his abrupt fashion, he said, ‘Don’t thank me until he’s out of the wood.’
She made no reply, but when the door closed on him she sat down again and looked at her child. The bedclothes were heaving on his small chest, his face was bloated, the eyelids half-closed. She stroked the damp hair back from his brow, then put a moist pad on it.
The boy now had a bout of coughing, and when he brought up some dark phlegm she said, ‘That’s right. That’s right, darling. Get rid of that nasty stuff and…and you’ll soon be better. Yes, you will, yes, you will, darling.’
The door opened quietly and Mrs A entered carrying a tray, which she placed on a side table before tiptoeing to the bed, where Nyrene turned to her and said in a whisper, ‘You should be in bed, woman, you should be asleep.’
‘I’ve had three hours, ma’am. I went off straight away, so I’m perfectly all right. You’re the one who should get some sleep; it’ll be you who’ll be in bed next, I’m telling you. Thirty-six hours and you’ve hardly moved out of this room. It can’t go on. Look, have this cup of tea’—she motioned to the tray—‘then go and have a couple of hours.’
‘No. No, I’ll be all right. But I’ll tell you what I’ll do. I’ll have the tea and then I’ll have a shower.’
‘A shower’s not going to keep you awake.’
There was a pause before Nyrene said, ‘It’ll keep me awake as long as possible, Mrs A. He…he can’t go on much longer like this. I think the doctor might be back later.’
‘I must say this, ma’am’—it was a lower whisper still—‘I had never had much room for him, but I’ve had to change my opinion these last few days.’
Nyrene nodded then she again stroked her son’s hair back from his forehead and stared at him for a moment before she rose from the chair, saying, ‘I’ll take the tea next door.’ Then she picked up the tray and went into her room. Presently, seated in an armchair, she looked towards the ceiling and said aloud, ‘Spare my child. Please spare my child. If I am to lose one, I…I will understand; but spare my child, please. Please.’
She was sitting by the child again. She glanced at the clock. Just after seven.
They’d all be on stage now. She could see them, the whole row of them, with Lord Very standing out in front. The place would be crowded. People would be standing at the back of the stalls; they would be sitting on the circle stairway, and the gallery would be chock-a-block. She could hear the applause; it was thunderous. She saw the curtain go up; she heard the orchestra strike up; she saw the play begin. Adam and Eve in their fishnet tights and the serpent hanging from the tree. She knew that the first scene would bring a great peal of laughter, especially when the serpent, which was actually hanging upside down from a branch, a very strong painted cable, shook his pointed fanged head, then took a handkerchief from beneath his scales, wiped his eyes and blew his nose, while Adam and Eve below, oblivious of him, continued their chase amid the trees, strongly constructed posts but truly representing trees, at least from a distance. She had read the script and discussed it with Peter, and even without the fishnet figures and the serpent she had been brought to laughter. Peter always excelled in a comedy part and, as Eve, Lily herself had turned out to be a real comedienne.
She hadn’t heard Hamish come into the room and when his voice came at her shoulder, whispering, ‘He looks at boiling point, ma’am; the crisis won’t be long,’ she couldn’t say again to him, I’m told that with the antibiotics they don’t have a crisis; well, not as they used to, because once Hamish got anything into his head, it was as hard to move it as it was to make him believe that 103° to 104° Fahrenheit was much the same as 39° Centigrade: they were all newfangled ideas and not to be trusted…
For the next two hours the child took her whole attention: he coughed until it would seem his small lungs would burst, but at least with each bout he brought up the darkish phlegm from his chest.
It must have been about eleven o’clock when Mrs A woke her. Nyrene realised that she must have been dozing. The last time she had looked at the clock it was just on ten, at which time she had thought the play would have finished and the congratulations would have begun.
She blinked and looked down on the child, and Mrs A said, ‘I think he’s easier.’ And when he croaked, ‘Mummy,’ Nyrene said eagerly, ‘Yes, darling? Would you like a drink?’ and with this she held a feeding cup to his lips. But when he tried to swallow he choked and coughed again; but it wasn’t so harsh as before.
After handing the cup to Mrs A she took a soft towel and wiped the sweat from Charles’s body; then, again stroking the tangled blond hair from his brow, she leant her head against the high padded back of the chair and looked across the narrow bed to where Mrs A was now seated, busily folding handkerchiefs into strips prior to their being moistened with witch hazel. In the pink-shaded nightlight, Nyrene could make out only the ends of Mrs A’s fingers as they moved backwards and forwards over the bedside table, and it was their continuous motion that caused her eyelids to droop and her head to drop to the side and deep and much needed sleep to overtake her …
She was conscious of someone saying, ‘God be praised! God be praised!’ And when she tried to stretch out her legs she groaned and Hamish’s voice came clearly to her, saying, ‘Now, now, don’t try to get up for a minute. You must be in a cramp. Sit where you are till you have a cup of tea. The child doesn’t need you; he’s fast asleep, natural-like.’
With an effort, she turned her head and looked towards the bed, and when she saw her son was sleeping peacefully, the relief caused her to slump inwardly. ‘What time is it?’ she said.
‘Ten minutes to five, ma’am.’
‘What!’ She had spoken so loudly that she put her hand over her mouth; then eased herself to the edge of the chair and repeated, ‘Ten minutes to five. I can’t…I can’t have slept all that time.’
‘Yes, you did, ma’am. Yes you did, as sound as a bell’—it was Hamish again—‘and the further you went over the more I knew you’d have a devil of a cramp when you woke up; and I was right, wasn’t I?’
The only answer she could make was, ‘Oh, Hamish.’
When Mrs Atkins said softly, ‘Go down and fetch a tray up,’ he said, ‘Gladly. Gladly,’ only to be stopped by Nyrene saying, ‘Not yet, Hamish, thank you. First, I’ll have a bath and change.’
Pulling herself up from the chair, she stood for a moment gazing down on the sleeping child. The little chest was still heaving but without that awful dragging effort. She put out a hand and gently touched his hair; then, her walk almost like that of someone drunk, she stumbled out of the nursery and into her own room, where, dropping into a chair, she again looked ceilingwards, saying, ‘Thank you. Thank you.’ But the wave of relief was now threaded with a feeling she could not put a name to: it was as if she had made a bargain, for which the price had still to be paid.
Fourteen
As if they were returning from a party where the drinks had flowed, they stormed out of the small station bus to be met by Hamish’s admonishing tone: ‘Will you whisht a while, please. The child is still poorly up above.’ He thumbed towards the upper windows of the house, and it was Ken who said, ‘Sorry, Mac. But we’re all still living last night. It was a wonderful time. Where’s Mrs Riley?’
‘If you turn your head, sir, you’ll see her at the front door awaiting you,’ said Hamish tersely.
Like softly buzzing bees, they swarmed towards Nyrene.
‘Oh! My dear, my dear, how are you?’
‘Oh, we did miss you.’
‘It’s been wonderful! Wonderful! You’d have been so proud of him, proud of them all.’
‘There could never have been such a night in that town. This morning’s local paper was full of it. We have one with us.’
They were in the sitting room now and no-one, Nyrene remarked to herself, had asked after the child. Mick Brown was saying, ‘I’ve never laughed so much in my life, Nyrene, never. That first scene was a wow. How they did it I’ll never know.’
Angus Clarke said, ‘And the opening was really excellent. He’s a good speaker, that Lord Very. And they mentioned you, yes they did, Nyrene. The owner, he said there was one person missing tonight who really should be there. He said you had been the bulwark of the Little Palace Theatre for years and everyone in the town knew you. You were Miss Mason then, but now you were Mrs Riley, and you know, they applauded. Yes, they did, didn’t they?’ He nodded towards the others.
Nyrene made no answer to all this; she was helping Mrs A to hand round cups of tea.
Claire Brown now put in, ‘There was a wonderful do afterwards. Of course, you couldn’t get stirred, and they must have had barrels of champagne, the way it flowed. And then there were the photographers.’
At this Ivy cried, ‘And Ken and I were taken with your friends, you know Fred and Louise. There was a group of us; Fred’s sister was there with her daughter. By, she was something! All the men were oohing and aahing at her. Her dress was nobody’s business; it fitted where it touched.’
‘Well, who wouldn’t gape?’ put in Ken now, ‘when you could almost see her backside at the top of those legs?’ which created loud laughter, only for this to be hushed by Ivy’s warning finger and her saying to Nyrene, ‘How is he?’
‘He’s better than he was, thanks, Ivy.’ Nyrene’s reply was flat.
The quiet member of the party, Arthur Maine, put in, ‘You’ve got a nice flat there, Nyrene,’ only to be almost shouted down by Ken, saying, ‘I don’t know how you could see it, Arthur, it was so crowded. But by that time, you were probably seeing double, we were all seeing double.’ He looked at Nyrene now. ‘I don’t know how we all got in there. There were Peter’s people and his friends and the boss David and his partner, Miss Connie. She’s a dainty piece, isn’t she? and full of fun. And they were all still there at two o’clock when we left. By, it’s been a night to remember! The only thing’—his voice dropped now and the expression on his face changed and he looked around the company as he said—‘we all say the same, Nyrene; you were missed, definitely you were missed and, I can tell you, mostly by Peter. He kept asking after you and the boy, and the last words he said to Ivy, here, were, “Tell her I’ll soon be home.”’
‘Yes, I was going to tell you, Nyrene, yes, that’s what he said to me, “Tell her I’ll soon be home.”’
There was a great lump in her throat. She had been disliking this crowd of merrymakers as thoughtless individuals, but now the feeling had gone, they were her friends. She wanted to go to Ivy and lay her head on her shoulder and cry; but that certainly would put a damper on things, and so she forced herself to say, ‘Last night, sitting by the boy’s bed, I followed the performance right through from seven o’clock,’ but her tone changed into one of jocular censure when she added, ‘but then I wasn’t invited back into the flat to join the ceilidh.’
They were all laughing again until Mike Brown, getting up, said, ‘You know something? Here’s one for home and bed. I shall fall straight into it without taking my boots off.’
One after the other now they rose to their feet, and their goodbyes were warm and thoughtful, but the last couple had not moved far down the drive before Hamish was into the kitchen and, addressing his future wife, he said, ‘Friends, they say, friends. Thoughtless lot of tykes! Child ill upstairs and laughing their heads off, and she not able to be there. They could have kept their merriment until they got home.’
‘Oh,’ said Mrs A. ‘They wanted her to know how it went.’
‘Fiddlesticks! Thoughtless, and to my mind, I’m telling you, some of them looked still half-cobbled. I know what people are like when they go to parties and the drinks are free; I’ve seen men of whom I wouldn’t believe it, guzzling like pigs.’
‘But they’re always jolly, Hamish. You know they are.’
‘Yes, Mary, but there is a time and place for jollification, and that child upstairs is still ill.’
‘He’s slept through it. I’ve just been up. Now you go on up and sit by him for a time; I’ll be with you shortly.’
As Hamish passed through the hall, he saw Nyrene sitting on the edge of the couch reading the newspaper spread out on the coffee table before her. She did not raise her head, and so he did not speak.
In fact, Nyrene had not noticed him, for her attention was riveted on a photo in the paper showing her husband standing with his arm around Lily and hers around him, both in the fishnet tights. It must have been taken during the early scene. Somehow, it no longer looked funny, but merely crude. There were other photographs, and the glowing report ended with, ‘When Adam and Eve stepped before the last curtain, they really did bring the house down.’
She slowly folded the paper; then sat back on the couch and glanced at the clock on the mantelpiece. It was almost twenty hours since he had last phoned her. That had been around six o’clock last night. All morning she had made excuses for him: he would be dead beat after such a play, followed by all that entertainment. And yet, no matter what time they had finished he could have rung her; he would know she would be waiting, if only to know how things had gone. In any case, he should have rung to enquire after the child.
There was something wrong somewhere. Things were changing. She couldn’t actually put her finger on it, but she was aware of the change inside her. Why otherwise had she made that bargain with God?
Fifteen
He kept turning his head towards the phone table. He’d have to ring her; nothing had happened, not really, yet he was feeling so awful about it. He should have phoned her this morning when the house was finally clear, but instead, what had happened? Immediately after closing the door on the last of them, he had rushed to the sink and vomited his heart up. No, not his heart, just the overload of drink he had consumed. He should have eaten at the same time, he knew. And yet it wasn’t the lack of food, or even the drink, that had made him vomit; it was the feeling that had flooded him, the desire that had filled him only a short while before. He had gone out to move his car, to allow Nurse to get her car out and take his still-laughing family home, for his father, Betty and Harry had had the time of their lives. He had just moved his car back into the yard and was making for the kitchen door when the arms came about him. He was for digging his elbows into the owner when her voice came in his ears, whispering, ‘Peter. Peter, you know something? You’re wonderful.’
He had pressed her from him, but when he turned to face her, he found himself again in her arms, and now she murmured, ‘No-one can see, no-one can hear, they’re all sozzled back there. I’ve never seen so many tight people all together in my life.’ Her lips now were on his cheek and he had managed to mutter, ‘Yvette, give over; stop it! You’ve had a lot, and I’ve had a lot.’
‘I rarely drink, Peter. Have you not noticed that? I rarely drink. I sip at a glass; I can keep it going for hours just sipping. I keep my wits about me. Oh, Peter.’ Her body pressed him against the wall and her mouth was on his, and almost instantly he found himself responding.
The kiss seemed to bury deep into them both, until with a jerk, he thrust her around, and now she was standing with her back to the wall; and their bodies seemed to be about to merge when he gave a start as if someone had prodded him in the ribs. Then he was free from her, muttering, ‘God! Yvette, you’re awful; you’re the very devil. Why me? There are dozens who would give their’—he searched for the word—‘eye teeth to have you.’
Her whisper came to him now as thick as his, saying, ‘I know that, I know that, but I don’t want others. Strangely, Peter, I only want you. What a confession to make! But it’s true; I only want you. But don’t worry, I just wanted to kiss you; tonight at any rate. Come on, let’s go in.’
