Is this the life she wanted? We wanted? Isn’t it pathetic, creepy, giving so much help to a helpless case? Like my mother with Grandfather, with Mavis. Isn’t it a way of giving up on that other, bigger life we should be living? Shirley is intelligent, attractive, valuable.
‘Is this the life you wanted?’ I ask.
‘It’s the life I’ve been given,’ she says mysteriously.
‘You sound like my mother now.’
‘What’s so bad about that? Your mum’s okay.’
I don’t say it, but I think, At least my mother’s wounded can walk. For some reason I think of the Filipino girl.
The fact is that although Mother hardly ever comes since that day I told her to leave, Shirley spends anything up to an hour on the phone with her every other day. Talking about me no doubt, and about Hilary’s ‘progress’. Meanwhile, at the office, I draw up the following flow chart:
What Heroes
I find it pretty funny frankly that it took an atheist like me to think of faith-healing. Still, weird things do happen. It would be foolish to pretend otherwise.
‘But you don’t believe in it,’ Shirley protests, laughing.
I remind her that we have tried all the consultants, we have flown to Houston and to Geneva. We have blown upwards of fifteen grand. It’s simply a case of trying to cover every angle. ‘That’s my way.’
She gives me her narrow look. ‘What exactly,’ she asks, ‘is Hilary preventing you from doing in life that you would otherwise like to do? Why keep hunting for a solution you know isn’t there? Come on. Tell me one thing she’s preventing you from doing. Nothing. You see. You can’t think of anything.’
I tell her: ‘Look, Shirley, if Hilary wasn’t here, I’d be happy to have another child. We could adopt one. I do believe we would be happy.’
‘What do you mean, “wasn’t here"?’
She knows perfectly well what I mean. Nevertheless, I say: ‘If she went into a home.’
‘But we’ve been over that a million times. She wouldn’t get any attention. She’d make no progress.’
‘She’s not making any progress as it is.’
‘Yes she is.’
My own inclination is to be honest about these things, however brutal it may seem. All the same, I say:
‘If she were being looked after, you could get a job.’
‘I don’t want a job.’
‘But you must want to get out of the house sometimes. Don’t you?’
‘Of course I do, but I can’t and that’s that, so what’s the point of moaning about it.’
‘You’re denying yourself.’
‘Yes.’
‘For a creature who has no hope, no future.’
She pauses. She bites her lip. ‘Not perhaps in the narrow way you define those concepts.’
‘So how does Shirley Harcourt define them.’
‘I don’t. I just get on with things, that’s life.’
‘Oh, mysterious life again.’
‘Right.’
Then she says: ‘Anyway, what future do you have, George Crawley?’
‘Oh come on.’
‘You see.’
‘I’m sorry, but I don’t.’
‘And didn’t George kill the dragon to save the damsel, not vice versa.’
‘What on earth is that supposed to mean?’
‘I’ve seen your scrapbook,’ she says, ‘okay? And it’s inhuman what you’re thinking.’
I turn away. ‘Only too human to go by what’s written in those articles.’
I persuade her, after the ten consultants, at least to go and look at a home. Check it out. We drive up to the Penelope Hardwick State-assisted Charity School for the Severely Handicapped in Enfield. In the car she says chattily: ‘I honestly can’t understand what’s eating you so much. I’m doing everything with her now. You have all the time in the world to do whatever you want. Leave earlier in the morning if you like, come home later. Work weekends. The world’s your oyster, George. Go get it.’
I realise she is telling the truth. I mean about not understanding. She can’t understand. This is the crux, she can’t understand me. Otherwise she wouldn’t say these things.
‘And if you want some fun at least get yourself snipped so we can make love. I could do with some action too, you know. Then we could go out occasionally if you want. Your Mum is willing to babysit. So’s Charles, though I’m not sure I could trust him.’
‘I don’t want to see my mother any more than is necessary.’
She says not to be such a big baby. What does it matter if she knows we screwed around?
She doesn’t understand.
‘You’re hung up,’ she tells me then.
‘Perhaps I am. But at least one should be able to count on one’s wife to respect one’s hang-ups.’
And when Enfield’s one-way system at last allows us to find it, the home really is pretty awful. One storey, yellow brick, the windows blue metal-framed, black lino floors, walls green to waist height, white above, firedoors at regular intervals down an interminable corridor reeking of disinfectant; in short, the spaces, shape and general utilitarian meanness of any institution, rendered poignant in this case by worse than usual childish scribblings pinned on the walls, by a background smell beneath the disinfectant of shit, by the cluttering paraphernalia of the handicapped: wheelchairs, walking frames, lifting devices in the bathroom. And then, inhabiting this ersatz fluorescent-lit environment, the fifty hopeless, slavering, contorted, clamouring, spastic, clumsily-dressed, unkempt basket cases. I know, I know, but what else do you want me to call them? Do we have to be pious? Except that sometimes the eyes are so intelligent, the gaze so piercingly clear as they register your panic. One little Asian boy in particular. A tiny, horribly deformed monkey with huge gorgon eyes. Amused. He laughs when he sees me in my suit and tie.
But Hilary is not one of those. Her eyes don’t see.
The white-coated staff are kind, bored, complacent, addressing the children with the same slightly sharp, patronising voice one might use for untrained pets or for the senile. Irritation, one senses, is kept at bay only by professional resignation. How else could it be? Much flustering to get a certain overweight Thomas to renounce a pen he is in danger of jabbing in his eye. ‘Come on, Tommy, you’ve been such a good boy this morning.’ Judging by his bulk, he’s at least eleven, ugly and belligerent.
Shirley smiles readily. She doesn’t seem to have the same difficulty simply looking that I have. Her manner reminds me of our pre-natal courses; she’s fresh, gregarious. Immediately she plunges into earnest conversation with one of the younger ‘teachers’ on the kinds of handicaps, the types of treatment. How many hours of this and that do they do, staff/children ratio, frequency of parental visits. ‘This child has Horner’s syndrome.’ As if we were connoisseurs. ‘Yes, it’s so exciting to see the progress they make, the way they come out.’ What were they like before? A spastic boy, wrists unnaturally twisted, is incessantly fingering pouted lips, his face blank in front of a morning TV programme showing how tennis balls are made. The TV is high up on the wall, out of harm’s way. In the corner a boy with only flippers protruding from his shoulders is trying to turn the pages of a comic book.
Of course these people must be looked after.
We are invited to stay to watch the children eat their lunch. I quickly invent a business appointment.
Silence in the car. I don’t even bother persuading. Shirley is kind enough not to say told you so. What she does do though is whistle as we inch down Ponder’s End High Street. She doesn’t often whistle. I recognise: ‘New every morning is the love’. She has recently joined the choir at St Barnabas. Apparently she sits at one end of the stalls with Hilary in her special chair on the chancel steps to the right. It is one of her illusions that Hilary appreciates music.