There too a frantic mood held sway. I would arrive in Adele’s room and find her with Felix and Father Plomer, all three of them bright-eyed and breathless somehow, as if at the end of some wild romp. The priest was a frequent visitor, he would put his head around the door with a conspiratorial smile, and enter on tiptoe, plump and large in his black suit and embroidered stole, his glasses flashing. He clasped his hands and laughed, showing his white teeth and gold fillings. He was like a big awkward excited girl. He loved to be there. Let’s have a little party! he would say, and he would get one of the kitchen girls to bring up a pot of tea and plates of bread and butter. Before he sat down he would remove his stole reverently and kiss it, closing his eyes briefly. Then he would lift his hands heavenwards and softly say:
— Ah, freedom!
Felix he treated with a sort of tremulous familiarity, prancing around him nervously and tittering at his jokes.
— Oh, you have a wicked wit, he would say. A wicked wit!
And Felix would look past the priest’s shoulder and catch my eye, smiling, his thin lips stretched tight.
Adele sat up in our midst, with her stark white face and her fright of hair. She had changed her slip for a satin tea-gown with roses and birds, it made the room seem more than ever like an aviary. She laughed more and more too, but more and more her laughter sounded like the first startled screeches of something that had blundered on widespread wings into a net. Her eyes grew dull, a faint, whitish film was spreading over the pupils. She complained about the light, it was not bright enough, but when the venetian blinds were drawn up, or another lamp was brought, she covered her face and turned away from the glare.
Outside her door after one of our visits Father Plomer hung back with an air of solemn excitement and spoke to Felix and me.
— I mean to save her, you know, he said. Oh yes, she’s agreed to take instruction.
Felix reared back from the priest in wide-eyed wonder.
— Oi vay! he breathed, and put up a hand to hide the thin little mocking smirk he could not stifle.
Then for a while that romping air I used to find when I arrived in her room gave way to a tense, reverential atmosphere, in which something seemed to vibrate, as if a little bell had just stopped ringing. Once I even came upon them in the act of prayer, the priest down on one knee, a hand to his forehead and his missal open, and Adele lying back on the pillows with her hands folded on her breast and her eyes cast upwards, wan and waxen in her satin gown, like a picture of a drowned maiden laid out on the flower-strewn bank of a brook. But it did not last. One day she snatched the prayerbook from him with a laugh and flung it across the room, and although he hung about in the corridor with a wounded look she would not consent to see him any more.
— Don’t worry, padre, Felix said to him jauntily, she’ll find her own way to the light.
That night she was gay, she sat with her ankles crossed under the covers and an ashtray in her lap. She had put on lipstick and mascara, and painted her fingernails scarlet. She waved her cigarette about, fluttering her lashes and pouting like a vamp.
— He tried to put his hand under my clothes, she said. Imagine!
Felix fairly whooped.
— Oh my, oh my! he cried, clutching himself. So much for salvation, eh?
When he was gone she sat and plucked at the bedclothes, frowning. She would not meet my eye. She picked up a magazine and flipped through it distractedly.
— Listen, she said, you’ll have to get me something. That bitch will only give me that stuff, that method stuff, what do you call it, it’s no good.
She ceased turning the gaudy pages and sat quite still, her head bowed. There was silence. She dropped her cigarette into the ashtray and watched with narrowed eyes the thin blue plume of smoke pouring upwards.
— I can’t, I said. How can I.
For a moment she said nothing, and did not stir, it was as if she had not heard.
— Yes, she said quietly. That’s what he says, too. And then he laughs.
She looked up at me and tried to smile. The sore patch at the corner of her painted mouth was raw. Her lower lip was trembling.
— She gives you things, doesn’t she? she said. Pills, those things? You can ask her. You can say it’s for yourself.
She struggled up, overturning the ashtray, and knelt on the edge of the bed and clasped her arms around my neck and pressed her trembling mouth on mine. She began to cry. Lipstick, smoke, salt tears. That taste, I can taste it still.
— I’ll let you do it to me, she moaned. Everything, everything you want. Everything …
23
I STOLE IT FOR HER. I knew where to look, what to take. Matron was not at her desk, the key to the dispensary was in her drawer. I walked upstairs. It was teatime, no one paid me any heed. In a hospital even I could go unnoticed. I locked the dispensary door behind me. How quiet it was there suddenly, like being underwater, amid all those shelves of greenish glass, those phials brimming with sleep. I found what I had come for, but still I lingered, leaning by the window. It was a gusty twilight. A sky full of wreckage flowed overhead in silence. Down in the grounds a cherry tree whipped and shuddered, its fallen blossoms washing in waves back and forth over the grey grass. How many moments had I known like this, when everything faltered somehow, like a carousel coming briefly to a stop, and I saw once again with weary eyes the thing that had been there all the time. I pressed my forehead to the glass. To stay here, to stay here forever, like this. To have it over, finally. She was up pacing the floor, holding herself tightly in her arms. She flew at me, where had I been! I handed her the tiny plastic ampoules. She thrust them into a pocket of her gown and stood a moment motionless, with a sort of vacant grin, gazing at nothing. Then she frowned. No, she muttered, no, the room wasn’t safe, there was no lock on the door, anyone could walk in. Besides, her things were not here, she had hidden them. She paced again, talking to herself, one hand stuck in her hair and the other tearing at the sore on her mouth. Then she halted, nodding.
— There’ll be no one there, she said. There’s never anyone there at this time, it will be all right.
She clutched my arm.
— Yes, she said, yes, it will be all right.
It strikes me suddenly how like cloisters were those corridors, with their arched ceilings, their statues and their lilies, that quiet that was not quite silence. She hurried ahead of me, keeping to the wall, a barefoot wraith. She led me to the chapel. It was a little vaulted cell hung with flags and pennants and holy pictures in big brown frames. A stained-glass window, from which the last light was fading, depicted the assumption of the Virgin in pinks and gaudy blues. There were daffodils on the miniature altar. A brass oil lamp with a ruby-red globe was suspended from the ceiling on a heavy chain. The place, festooned and dim, had a jaded, vaguely sybaritic air, like the tent of a desert chieftain. There was a smell of wood and wax. The silence here too was somehow murmurous, as if thronged with lingering echoes. Adele reached behind a picture of a skewered St Sebastian and brought out a plastic bag that had been taped with sticking plaster to the back of the frame. We stood for a moment in the holy hush, with our heads together, admiring her treasures. There was a little bottle and a spoon, a rubber dropper, and a disposable syringe, its needle bent, that she had salvaged from a waste bin. I was thinking of another occasion, when we had stood like this, in each other’s warmth, our breath mingling. Outside the wind was blowing. Her hands trembled. The wounded saint considered us with his level, sad, lascivious gaze.
She knelt at the step in front of the altar to blend her brew, while I sat on a bench and watched. She worked with loving, rapt attention, biting her lip and frowning, forgetting herself. I hardly knew her, kneeling there, transfigured, lost in her task, a votive priestess. Now and then she had to stop and wait for the shaking in her hands to subside, and looked about her dimly, with unseeing eyes. She lit a stump of penny candle and set it on the step and warmed the mixture in the spoon. Then she sat back on her heels and rolled the sleeve of her gown to the shoulder. Her naked arm glimmered in the fading light. She found a vein, and squeezed and squeezed until it stood up, plump and purple, gorged with blood. At first the needle would not penetrate, and she prodded and pushed, making a faint mewling sound and arching her back. Then suddenly the tip went in, and the swollen skin slid up around it, like a tiny pouting mouth, drawing the fine steel shaft deep inside itself, and she pressed the plunger slowly, while the pulsing vein sucked and sucked, and at last she leaned her head back, her eyelids fluttering, and exhaled a long, shivering sigh.