No Drinking, No Dancing, No Doctors, page 5
‘No, it is not, Dr Kumar. She needs to be examined. Fell down off her chair if you don’t mind, while I was out of the department getting chemicals. If you look at her now, I can get on with the rest of them.’
‘Who is this?’ Dr Kumar asked respectfully. He was trying not to smile at Mrs Treadle, pawing the ground with her shiny shoes, ‘Mrs Beulah Kingston, in for X-rays of her hands. Fell off the chair while I was up in theatre.’
‘You really should have an assistant,’ said Dr Kumar to Mrs Treadle. Kneeling down beside Beulah, he held her wrist between his long brown fingers. A sweet musky cloud drifted over Beulah’s face. Dr Kumar was wearing perfume.
Chapter Six
The Poleites frowned upon perfume for women, they wouldn’t have dreamt of a man wearing it. Dr Kumar’s fragrance haunted Beulah for days. She knelt at the old stone trough outside the scullery, rubbing towels in Surf. Fabric conditioners were the nearest Beulah got to perfume; she liked Comfort best but it was good to change them around, the lemon and the spring, the primrose and the pine forest smells. Of the two sisters, Hester was the most concerned with Poleite thrift, so Beulah told her that fabric conditioners extended the life of materials. She didn’t believe it for a minute, she just liked the smell of them and the pretty pink, green and white plastic bottles.
‘Did I ever think I’d live to see the day!’ Hester liked to exclaim when she examined the price of them.
Beulah’s neck did seem stiff now and she had to lean back to relieve it every now and then. There was headache, too. It came and went, like someone opening and closing a vice, but she didn’t want to believe in it. Dr Kumar and Mrs Treadle had mentioned headache and stiffness and she feared that they had planted the idea of them in her mind.
After her fall, Dr Kumar wrote out another request form for X-rays of her skull and neck but Beulah refused. Once Beulah refused, Dr Kumar stopped looking at her and she almost wished that she had agreed so that he would look at her again. Over her head and with his face away from her, Dr Kumar asked Mrs Treadle to keep the form on one side in case Beulah changed her mind and decided to come back for the X-ray. She knew that he wasn’t being deliberately cruel. He had just lost interest.
Mrs Treadle hung the form on a bright yellow clip over her desk, ‘You only have to ring me up and I’ll fit you straight in.’
‘We’re concerned for you,’ Mrs Treadle insisted, as Beulah filled out the accident form they had produced. But Beulah shrank in fear.
‘I can’t draw any more of this on top of myself,’ she muttered. Dr Kumar and Mrs Treadle exchanged looks.
The Reverend Moylan was never far from Beulah’s thoughts these days. His predictions and pronouncements were beginning to sound irrevocably true. In her youth he had been a kind of large and tiresome fly. She had not given him much thought except to avoid him when she could. Now, he was foremost in her mind, his blue eyes bulging. They go into hospital with a cold and come out in a wooden box!’
Beulah’s thumbs ached, she thought that they were beginning to look distorted. But exercise helped. Joe Costello had told her so and she wanted to believe it. She wished that she had stuck to the old Poleite ways. ‘Work those limbs,’ said Reverend Moylan. ‘Pains are imps that have been sent to try us, give into them and they have you in their thrall.’
Beulah stood up to relieve her aching neck and her knees seemed to give, she wanted to cry but she didn’t give in. Apart from needing to remain strong for herself, Hester was likely to come upon her crying and she would have to endure Hester’s kind of comfort, a frantic fussing that was no comfort at all.
Standing up, she could see over the wall to where the stream ran through the garden on its way to the whitewashed trough. Hester was the gardener, she spent as long weeding and planting as Beulah spent washing. But even before Hester had moved in, that garden had been beautiful. More beautiful when it was wilder, before Hester came and cut back the straining fuchsia hedge. She remembered the dark night, feeling her way through the high grass and bushes. The way she had sat on the wooden seat under the water-wheel and the long blades of grass came up as far as her shin bones.
The touch of an infidel, the smell of grass and pine that was nothing like the perfume of fabric conditioner. The music coming from Danny Fox’s gramophone, crackling under the trees. Forbidden music, they could do nothing about because it came from the other side of the big stone wall.
Poleites were not allowed radios, gramophones or television. Not even hymns. ‘Who needs songs when we’ve got King David singing like a thrush from the pages of the Bible,’ Reverend Moylan spat with excitement and his hands trembled on the Bible as he swayed like a black loose-feathered crow.
Judge me, O Lord; for I have walked in mine integrity: I have trusted also in the Lord; therefore I shall not slide. Examine me, O Lord, and prove me; try my reins and my heart. . . Beulah’s reins and her heart had been found wanting.
A Poleite was not allowed to look upon his wife’s face during the terrible act. It was assumed that a wife wouldn’t even want to look and Beulah didn’t. Sex was not a modern thing, and certainly not invented by doctors, but Samuel Pole and all Poleites were afraid of it. Maybe it was because it led to childbirth, which could lead to death and Poleite wives were often hard to replace. Or more likely it was because it might become enjoyable, like sugar and cake. It could lead to dangers like music or dancing. Furthermore, Poleites covered up their bodies so much by day, it would be too much of a shock to see each other completely divested by night. Bodies were deadly, they had to be suppressed and covered. ‘Poleites have to be propagated, but you musn’t look,’ Hannah repeated the Reverend Moylan’s words to Beulah a week before she got married. ‘See no evil,’ Hannah said then after a few minutes of puzzled silence from Beulah.
Beulah closed her eyes and breathed in lilac, the water-wheel clanked rhythmically. The trees rushed this way and that, casting curly-headed shadows, cows lowed, a late train went by down at the bottom of the next field. The noise stood out sharp and staccato, the way it always did when there was rain coming.
The next day, Beulah joined in fervently with the Reverend Moylan in the parlour, so fervently that it made him look at her. No one was allowed to outdo the Reverend. The smell of lilac came in the parlour window. ‘The Lord’s perfume’, said the Reverend Moylan.
I am a worm and no man . . . Many bulb have compassed me: strong bulls of Bashan have beset me round. I am poured out like water, and my bones are all out of joint: my heart is like wax; it is melted in the midst of my bowels . . . They part my garments amongst them . . . Deliver my soul from the sword, my darling from the power of the dog.
Beulah had got rid of all the dogs on the farm. Years and years of dogs on Kingston’s farm and Beulah silenced them all. Bertie was broken-hearted afterwards, ‘Look at the way the cats are multiplying,’ he said.
Joe was like King David’s Lord, his ‘lovingkindness’ was before her eyes. Soon he would be qualified, sitting in his father’s surgery, taking and giving life. ‘With no divine right to do so,’ said Reverend Moylan.
When Beulah met Joe down at the Cross, he always stopped to talk. And in front of Danny Fox too. Danny Fox was less dirty then, his hair in an oiled ripple combed back from his forehead. Hanging around the Cross with a Woodbine permanently stuck to his wet lower lip. He cast brazen looks at Beulah, ‘Do you notice the evenings are drawing in?’ he asked her.
‘No, I don’t,’ said Beulah.
Joe stood next to Beulah and stared Danny down while saying hello and enquiring in his neighbourly way about Danny’s mother. The mention of Danny’s mother always knocked the leer out of Danny. Beulah wondered if that was why Joe mentioned her even though Joe seemed to be genuinely interested in people’s ailments.
‘Everything boils down to science,’ he told Danny. Beulah stared at the way two fervent lines appeared between Joe’s eyebrows when he became serious.
Danny’s mother suffered from gout. ‘Oh, the high living is right!’ went Danny, and then to annoy Joe, ‘But you can’t beat the home cures though!’
When Danny had walked on, Joe told her different bits of news. Who had been elected. Who was going off to Templemore to train as a guard. How Danny had broken his ankle doing the jitterbug at the Savoy. Yes, that’s what the dirty white thing on his foot was. A plaster of Paris cast to set the broken bone.
Plaster of Paris. Penicillin. Surgery. Subconscious. . . Beulah listened to the strange words. It was only two or three minutes at the Cross. His donkey-brown eyes, the shining white parting in his turf-coloured hair, his chocolate-coloured suede gaiters. Beulah tried to hide her big black shoes under her long dress.
Once when Joe came up to her outside the shop, Beulah was carrying a bag with six loaves of bread, the Reverend Moylan having given her special dispensation from baking because Louis was ill. Joe’s face was white, ‘Glenn Miller is dead. He was killed in a plane crash.’
‘Who?’
‘Glen Miller, the jazz man.’
Beulah had heard that jazz was the devil’s music and she knew that Danny Fox played it in the cowhouse where his mother couldn’t hear it.
Joe stared at Beulah, ‘I’ve got his records,’ he said. She nodded slightly, sensing Danny Fox approach, his voice harsh and cracked between them, ‘Have you heard the news, hah? Shot down in the prime of his life, hah?’
Beulah’s heart hammered all the way home as she wondered if the plane was shot down or was it a figure of speech. She knew that Danny Fox was fond of figures of speech. ‘There was a gale out last night, t’would whip the fingers off you and come back for your hands!’
Sometimes Beulah heard the music rise like a brass cat, coming on a breeze over Danny Fox’s stone walls. Dead man’s music stretching and crackling from across the farmyard.
Beulah knelt to her sudsy towels once more. Dead men’s music always on the farm and a dead dog barking too. A border collie appeared in the yard three years after Louis’s death.
It was a hot day, Beulah had given Leah and John a special treat. She put them right into the stone trough with a bar of Sunlight soap and some enamel cups and jugs. They were happy there in the shade of the porch, making bubbles, pouring and emptying from the white and navy-blue enamel vessels.
Beulah was shelling peas, her big feet angrily swollen from the heat and the weight of wool clothes that she had to carry. She jumped when she saw the dog appear across the cobbled yard. How could she have not heard it? At first she thought that it was Rex, Danny Fox’s sheepdog. It was also a bit like Ranger, Louis’s dog that was poisoned two years before she got married. Han had Danny Fox down for the poisoning, but Louis would never hear a word against Danny Fox then. Even when he was leering at Beulah, Louis said that Danny was just shy.
As it came closer she could see that the dog had different markings from Rex and Ranger. Then she saw the tiny white tip to the tail, exactly the same as her own dog Shep who had been put down two years before. The dog approached the stone trough noiselessly, its mouth grinning with thirst, but when Beulah ran up to drive it away, the dog erupted into piercing yelps and her hand went right through its disappearing form.
She could have pretended that it was the heat, her imagination and her uneasy mood that made her see Shep, if only John hadn’t started screaming with fear, shaking and shrieking before she had time to get a towel. As she picked up his drenched body, which was plastered with big soft lumps of Sunlight soap, a fragment of soap got into her eye and stung fiercely. She pulled his wet body against her heavy wool dress, as if she could press the images away from his mind completely.
But for days afterwards, John was afraid to go anywhere on his own. He said that he was afraid that the dog with the long mouth would come back.
It seemed to Beulah that the more she remembered the past, the more her thumbs ached. But that was in her mind too. Her thumbs, her neck, her head and a ribbon of pain at the base of her spine.
She stood up again, and as she did she heard Hester calling. ‘Beulah, Beulah.’ She sounded excited. Beulah tried to jump up quickly, but the pain in her back tugged at her quickly as if she was a dog on a leash. She groaned and staggered, then pulled herself up anyhow and ran to the house.
She saw them standing in the garden, Hester and the tall girl. They both had their backs to her and she could just catch the end of Hester’s sentence, ‘. . . very worried about the X-ray. Of course as Dr Costello says . . .’
‘Hester!’ shouted Beulah in a hoarse voice.
The girl turned around first. She was quaint-looking, familiar too. Her hair was braided into two long plaits that nearly reached her waist and she wore a long dark skirt with a woollen plaid shirt buttoned up to her cream-coloured throat. Beulah stared at the girl and the girl looked back at her, shyly, as if she was expecting something.
Hester had turned around now as well, she caught hold of the girl’s hand and brought her forward, ‘I had no notion, myself. Who is this big tall girl? I was asking myself.’ Hester nodded at Beulah, also looking expectant.
Beulah stared back, ‘Are you one of the hippies from Ballinamona?’
Hester gave a nervous laugh, Tor the Lord’s sake, Beulah, it’s Beccy, your grandchild. Can you not see she is the head off yourself?’
‘Beccy,’ said Beulah. Her back was on fire.
Beccy took a step forward, Beulah took a step forward. Beccy put out her hand, Beulah shook it solemnly.
‘We haven’t seen you since you were three,’ Hester said. ‘Do you remember us at all?’
‘I can only remember a man in a long grey coat,’ said Beccy, her voice was low and rhythmical, like someone humming under her breath. Beulah didn’t want her to stop talking.
‘A man,’ said Hester, putting her hand up to her girlish brow. ‘A man! That’s a puzzle now. There hasn’t been a man here since, Lord, your daddy passed away.’
‘I remember him,’ insisted Beccy. ‘A big tall man. He had cubes of sugar in his pocket for his donkey and he used to give some of them to me.’
‘Oh, Danny Fox!’ exclaimed Hester in a relieved voice. ‘Do you remember his old donkey. What was she called?’
‘Rose was the name of the donkey,’ said Beulah, making a sour face. ‘What was he doing around you? How did Leah allow you?’
‘Leah liked him,’ Beccy said, in an injured voice.
‘Yes, they were pure mad about each other when Leah was young,’ Hester agreed. ‘Do you remember the two of them playing forty-five on the top of the small stone wall? That was around the time you were teaching John to ride his bicycle, I suppose.’
Beulah looked at Hester, ‘We’ll go and make the tea,’ she said.
She would have liked to have kept holding Beccy’s hand. Did Hester mean to hurt her, she wondered, reminding her of John like that. She could never forget those long evenings up and down the lane. The sun and the shadows of lime trees, travelling over and back across John’s face.
‘Mama, Mama! Don’t let go of the saddle, Mama!’
‘I’m holding it, I’m holding it.’
‘You’re not, I can feel it.’
But he always got it wrong. She waited for him to relax and forget about whether her hand was off or on. When she did finally take her hand off, he cycled off down the lane as graceful as a young showjumper. She ran quickly after him, she couldn’t wait to tell him when he got to the end that he had been cycling all on his own. Just as he reached the turning for the farmyard, a big shadow fell across him. A tree falling. Beulah screamed and covered her eyes. But when she opened her eyes again, there he was, cycling round and round in circles, ‘I’m all right, Mama. What’s wrong with you? Have you noticed at all? I’m doing it myself, you don’t need to hold the saddle anymore.’
Beulah kept looking up at the trees, she couldn’t believe that there wasn’t one down.
‘Mama, Mama,’ John kept saying, until she put her arm around him and told him that he was the best boy in the whole world. Leah passed by, shuffling a pack of cards, ignoring them and John behind her shouting, ‘Leah, Leah, I can cycle!’ Leah hugged him tight when he was away from Beulah. Leah loved John too. They all did.
But after that evening Beulah lived in dread of the trees. They creaked in the wind all the time. She held her breath every time one of the family passed up the drive. She would have asked Danny Fox to have a look at them only she was too proud. And she couldn’t say anything to Hester about it because Hester would have called Danny Fox like a shot. Beulah dreamt about the trees falling, her life a secret misery for a whole year. Bad dreams and holding her breath. Drowning in a brown and green forest and she couldn’t even talk to Hester. Then John died and she forgot all about it until now.
‘Your whole life flashes in front of your eyes!’ Louis told her when she was ten and they were playing in the barn. Beulah was supposed to be drowning and she had to call out the key moments in her life while Louis swam through the hay to rescue her. ‘Shep learns to give the paw, Rose the Friesian is killed in a flash of lightning, the Reverend Moylan brings us a chocolate cake from Bewleys of Dublin. The Reverend Moylan eats half the chocolate cake himself by mistake.’
Beulah thought maybe she was going to die now, the way she was remembering everything. Except it was not in a flash, it was intermittent, like when she had the car wipers down to the lowest mark and she didn’t think they were wiping at all and then they’d strike across the windscreen suddenly. Remembering was a sign of old age.
‘Remember in Louis’s mother’s time when the orchard was a real orchard!’ said Hester, clasping her hands. ‘Plums and cherries and apples. What I wouldn’t give to have the strength to bring it back.’
The table was covered with cups and saucers because Hester wasn’t able to count with the excitement of seeing Beccy. Five packets of biscuits were placed on top of five plates. Beulah saw that Hester wasn’t able to take the biscuits out of packets and arrange them on the plates, because her hands were shaking too much. Beulah would have helped if she could, except that Beulah’s own hands were shaking so much, she had to keep them hidden right under the table. Beccy’s face was too rapturous, Beulah thought. Her face lit up as she listened to Hester’s account of plums and cherries. She stood up, thoughtfully putting the biscuits out on plates. There were far too many biscuits, they all knew it but they were afraid to say anything that might highlight the shaking of the old women’s hands.
