'It's from the television people,' Howard said. He showed us the envelope with the name of the television company in posh lettering in the top left-hand corner. 'They've been long enough about it,' he said.
'Oh, Howard,' I said angrily, and I stamped my foot under the table, 'do open it and see what it's about.' So then he opened it and he read it very slowly, eating his breakfast with his fork in his right hand, in the Yank way of eating. Then he passed it to me without saying anything, and I read it and I saw what he meant by saying they'd been long enough about it. For Howard had been very sly, and he'd written in to be on the Over and Over quiz programme, oh, nearly a year before, and now at last here they were saying he was to be on it in just a fortnight's time and that they'd pay his fare to London and they wished him every success in the show. 'Well,' I said, gasping, 'that's marvellous, isn't it? Isn't that marvellous, Howard? That's wonderful, isn't it, Myrt?' But of course Myrtle didn't know what I was so excited about till I handed the letter over to her. She read the letter but she didn't get excited at all. She gave Howard a sort of sour look as if to show that he'd no right to put on the sort of frightening midnight performance he did and then come down not to a punishment but to a reward, for reward it was in a way, Howard being a good man all the time and deserving some such little break for having worked hard for his wife and his home, and he must have suffered too, somewhere deep inside him, otherwise we wouldn't have this walking and talking in the still watches of the night. I said, pretending to scold, but very very pleased really, of course:
'Why didn't you say, Howard? Why did you never breathe a word of it to your own wife? Just writing off slyly like that and not saying a thing about it.'
'Well,' said Howard, 'I didn't want you to think me a fool, which you might have done, the odds against a chance to appear on such a show being very long. And I was a bit ashamed myself, really, writing off. I'd never done such a thing before.'
Myrtle sort of sniffed and said, 'Books it says here. It says you'll be answering questions about books and their authors.'
'That's right. That's my idea.'
'Well, what do you know about books?' That was nasty, really, but Myrtle had the idea that books were all right for a man like Michael, her husband, who worked in a typewriter shop, but were all wrong for somebody who sold used cars. And it was true we didn't have many books in our house, while Myrtle and her husband belonged to some Book Club which sent you books you might or might not want to read every month or something. But Howard went to the local library sometimes, but I never knew what books he read, because I was never encouraged at school to be very interested in books. And you could see that Myrtle was jealous as anything at Howard being on the TV when she herself could have shown off her glamour and her low-cut bosom, flapping her eyelashes, but that sherry-coloured hair, of course, would not be able to be seen, TV being only black and white so far. Anyway, it was up to her, wasn't it, to write off to the TV people like Howard had done, but she didn't have the brains for a quiz show (no, that's silly to say that, when you see what people you get on those shows). No, she was lazy, that was it, too lazy to do anything, quite ready to believe that somebody might stop her in the street and say, 'My God, that face, that figure. You must be on TV right away,' and then shout 'Taxi, taxi.' Everything must be done for her, she do nothing herself. Howard said:
'Enough. I've read a bit. What I read I remember. Besides, I look a lot at those big books in the library, books full of facts. With any luck at all,' and he said this more gloomily than pleased, 'I shall get through to the thousand pounds.'
'Oh, Howard,' I cried, leaving my cornflakes untouched, 'won't that be marvellous?' Myrtle said:
'Perhaps you'll be able to pay some big doctor or other to cure you of carrying on in your sleep, such not being covered by the National Health.' That was a nasty thing to say. Howard looked a bit bewildered, not quite understanding. He said:
'I don't quite get that. What do you mean by that?'
'Hardly got a wink of sleep with your talking all night,' said Myrtle. 'I had to take three of these tablets.' Then she pulled out of her housecoat pocket a really huge bottle of brown tablets, there must have been about a hundred of them. I said:
'Now stop it, Myrtle. We don't want any of that, not first thing in the morning we don't.'
'If you don't like me talking in my sleep,' said Howard, in the very tough way he could have at times, 'you know what you can do about it. It's my house, this is, and I'll do what I like in it, waking or sleeping.'
'It's not your house,' said Myrtle, stupid and bold as brass. 'You pay rent to the Council for it, same as we do for our flat. You're lucky in your neighbours, that's all I can say.' She said no more, and a good thing too. You could see that this TV letter and Howard going to answer quiz-questions about books had riled her properly. She'd gone too far, I thought, without her saying any more, so I said, not wanting a row:
'Enough, enough. Let's get these dishes in the sink, I've got to be at work at half-past eight.' I hated to come home to unwashed dishes but I wasn't going to ask Myrtle to earn her bit of keep by doing them. In a way you had to feel very sorry for Myrtle. I think Howard saw too that she had a lot to be unhappy about while we two were as happy as pigs, for he said nothing more, he just smiled in a faint sort of way and buckled to with the dishes.
Well, this was an eventful day, or anyway the front and back ends of the day were exciting. The middle chunk, which was most of the day, was just work. But when Howard and I came home for our dinner we found that Myrtle had gone out but had not left a note to say where she'd gone or when she'd be back, which was rude. In the evening when we came home we found that Myrtle had come back in the meantime (she had Howard's key) and was sitting sobbing by the fire. I asked her what was the matter and Howard was very kind and gentle too, but we couldn't get a word out of her for quite a time. So I got the tea ready and Myrtle consented to have a cup, crying into it. And then bit by bit we managed to drag the story out of her, which was that she'd gone back to their flat to get her bottle of after-bath freshener, at least that was her story, and when she got there she found a big piece of paper written on by her husband Michael, saying IF YOU THINK YOU CAN JUST COME BACK WHEN YOU FEEL LIKE IT YOU'RE MISTAKEN FOR IF I NEVER SEE YOU AGAIN THAT WILL BE TOO SOON. Well that seemed to have got her good and mad for she went straight round to the shop where Michael worked and raised all hell in the shop before the customers too, which was a silly thing to do but understandable. Anyhow, according to her it was all over now between them, but you could see that wasn't really so or she wouldn't have been in such a state. Howard and I tried to comfort her, but she wouldn't have any of that, she just wanted to be left alone with her grief, as she put it, but later on she had another cup of tea and even one quarter of a Harris's Pork Pie. We got her calmed down a lot and then we had the TV on, thinking it might distract her mind a bit, but it was unlucky that all the programmes that evening were the same sort of thing. There was the series COPPER'S NARK, and in it this week a woman tried to do herself in because her husband had gone off and left her, and that started poor old Myrt off again. Then there was a bit of a variety show which Howard said was really depressing, though I thought it was rather pretty and funny really, then we had this play and it was the same sort of thing as the COPPER'S NARK thing we'd just had, with a husband and wife quarrelling like mad and throwing the milk jug and then the husband took a knife to her and she ran away from him screaming and then she fell through the banister-rails which were broken. This time Myrtle watched very calmly and her face looked very pale and all washed-out in the light that was coming out of the TV. And then she said she'd like to go to bed and try to sleep a bit, so we said that was perhaps the best thing for her to do so we said good-night to her and I started to get supper for just Howard and me. And then Howard said:
'Funny girl, isn't she? A real suffering soul I'd call her, the sort of girl that's never been happy in her life.'
'Oh, we were both hap
py together,' I said, 'when we were kids. A real tomboy she was then. Happy as the day is long.' But, as I was making the toast, I couldn't help feeling that it seemed very queer Myrtle just going up quietly to bed like that and lying quietly upstairs, as if there was nobody upstairs at all. At least, that's what it felt like. But then I found I was letting the toast burn so I got on with making the supper and left Myrtle to her own devices, as they say. So Howard and I had our supper which was spaghetti romana tonight on toast, and then I went to the kitchen to bring in some chocolate biscuits of a new kind I'd brought home that day (chocolate one side and like icing sugar on the other). But I couldn't help feeling that something might be a bit wrong with poor Myrt, so I went upstairs and found Myrtle lying in bed with the full light on, though she herself was out like a light and snoring in a very peculiar way. By the side of the bed was this bottle of brown tablets that had been nearly full that morning and now a fair number of tablets had gone out of it. It wasn't hard to put two and two together and I didn't like the look of this at all, nor the sound of this very peculiar snoring either. 'Howard, Howard,' I called downstairs, leaning over the banisters, 'come up here quick.' He could tell there was something wrong, because he came leaping up, shaking the whole house. He came into Myrtle's bedroom and sort of nodded as he saw her there, snoring away in this quiet way, lying on her back with her best nightdress on. He said:
'I see what she's done. Poor girl. She looks really peaceful now.' He put his thumb in her eye to lift up the eyelid and see what was going on underneath, and the eye looked very blank towards the head of the bed. He sort of nodded again. 'Just look at her face,' he said. 'All the worries and the anxieties ironed away. All her cantankerousness and jealousies and dissatisfactions with her mode of life. She looks sort of beautiful now, at peace if you see what I mean.'
I looked at Howard astonished. 'Aren't you going to do anything about it?' I said. 'She might be dying for all we know. Oughtn't we to force something down her throat to make her bring them all up or something? I don't like this at all.'
'We can't do anything now,' said Howard. 'She's too far gone. Whatever she's got down there in her stomach - which, of course, as you can see, is those tablets - won't come up without using a stomach pump on her.'
'Well, then,' I said, dancing up and down, 'ring up the doctor or, get an ambulance, do something. She's my sister.' Without thinking I got down on the bed and started to shake poor Myrtle as though that might bring her awake, saying, 'Wake up, love. Come on, love, Janet's here.' Howard said:
'Who are we to interfere with people's decisions? She'd made up her mind to put an end to it all, and that's what she has done. No more trouble for her. No more worry about her husband or her looks or her clothes or the cost of fish. No more dirt and tripe and corruption from the TV and the Daily Window. She's well out of it all now. She's been a very brave girl and she's made the right decision.'
Howard was just standing there, swaying a bit, looking a bit as he looked in those sleep-walking acts of his, a bit glazed round the eyes. There was also something a bit like a hypnotist's look about him so that I stood there for it might have been a whole minute looking at him with my mouth open. Then I snapped out of it. I said, 'Aren't you going to do anything? Aren't you going to ring anybody up? Or are you going to leave it all to me?'
'She won't thank you for disturbing her rest,' said Howard. 'Quiet sleep and a sweet dream when the long trick's over. A right trick it is, too. More of a joke than a trick, but a trick it is, too, a dirty trick of somebody or other.' And he just stood there, sort of fascinated, looking down on poor Myrtle.
'Oh, you--' I said, and I dashed out and downstairs and got my coat and my handbag and went out, the telephone box only being at the corner of the street. I'd never done this sort of thing before, but I'd seen enough TV to know that I had to dial 999, which I did, and I asked for the ambulance service and please hurry, and I gave our address. Then I found I had no coppers to ring up our own doctor, who was Doc Kilmartin, only sixpences and other bits of silver. But coming down the street were a couple of lads in Italian suits and winkle-pickers and all the rest of it, so I put my head out of the phone-box and said, 'Can you give me change for sixpence, very urgent?' One of these lads, very pimply and blackheady, poor boy, said I was a slick chick or something, but there was no harm in either of them, poor lads, and they managed to give me four pennies in exchange for sixpence. So then I rang up Doc Kilmartin.
I got back to our house and there was Howard still standing in Myrtle's bedroom, smoking a cigarette though, and Myrtle was even deader out than before, because you couldn't hear any of that snoring. Howard was sort of drinking her in, muttering to himself, and for the first time since we'd married, for the first time since I'd known him for that matter, I felt that there was something in Howard that I didn't understand and that I was a bit afraid of. Doc Kilmartin came round and spoke in a very severe Scottish way about what Myrtle had done and it was reprehensible or some such word, and then the ambulance arrived in all its glory, bells ringing away and lights flashing, and two men came up with a stretcher. So Myrtle was taken away to Bradcaster Royal Infirmary, lying as still as death and not knowing what was going on at all, and I went with her, leaving Howard at home. The people in the street didn't come out to see what was going on, as they would have done in the old nosy days before TV. They were too busy watching. Emergency Ward Ten would be far more real to them than any real emergency like this one.
Chapter 4
When Myrtle was admitted into Bradcaster Royal Infirmary they got the stomach-pump to her and got it all up, but she stayed dead out. A young doctor with glasses and very Brylcreemed glossy black hair came into the sort of lobby where I was waiting and rang up some other part of the Infirmary to say they were admitting a bad case of barbarous or barbituric or something poisoning, then they asked me for details about Myrtle and where was the bottle of tablets that she'd tried to do herself in with. Back home, I said, which wasn't much help, and then I remembered that Michael, her husband, had better be got in touch with. They weren't on the phone, Michael and Myrtle, but the police station was just round the corner from their flat, so the station was rung up and told to send a copper round to tell him she was in hospital, but to break the news in a gentle sort of way. And then I asked if they were going to get the police to take any action, remembering that this attempted suicide was still a crime, but they said no, there was far too much attempted suicide these days and the probation officers would be run off their feet dealing with them, having far more important business to deal with, especially the gangs who didn't want to die, far from it, just the opposite in fact.
Michael wasn't very long in coming, and he came rushing in as in some TV programme where the husband comes rushing in to see his wife who's just been admitted to hospital, and he looked handsome, as was the intention, but handsome in a sort of plump softy sort of way. He kept saying, 'My wife, my poor dear wife, oh, where is she?' like Armchair Theatre, but was told that he couldn't see her and wouldn't be able to till next morning, when it was hoped she would have come round, but they wanted to have a little talk with him, and you could see from their stern looks that they were going to blame it all on Michael. Before they took Michael away, though, Michael turned on me and would have turned on Howard if he'd been there (and I still say he should have been there) to say we'd no right to let her do a thing like that, she'd never done a thing like that in her own home, and it was very funny that she should only decide to try a thing like this when staying with us, and that we must have been upsetting her, and so on. I do wish that Howard could have bashed him for saying that, there and then, but Howard wasn't there and had let me down. Anyhow, I turned back on Michael and gave him a bit, so that things got very loud and we were asked to shut up. Then I left the Infirmary with my nose in the air and got a bus and went straight home, blazing.
Not to make too long a story of it (though that's the thing Myrtle would dearly have liked, to have this her stor
y and not mine and Howard's) Myrtle was let out of the Infirmary a few days later, right as rain, the psychiatrist having had a heart-to-heart with her, and with Michael also, and the two were all lovey-dovey once more. But it wasn't long before they were at it again, though I don't think Myrtle ever tried the suicide lark any more. For one thing, those tablets disappeared, God knew where to, and there was no gas in Myrtle's flat and she'd have been too much of a coward to try jumping out of the window or sticking the bread-knife into herself or slashing her wrists with Michael's razor-blades. (Anyway, Michael had an electric razor.) And I know for a fact that Myrtle's own doctor would not let her have any more sleeping-tablets, not even if she was rigid with insomnia, at least not as many as he'd let her have before, which had been foolish of him and I think he knew it. Although what I think had really happened was that there had been a mistake in the prescription, perhaps a nought being added where it should not have been. Or something. Anyway, I must get on with the story of Howard and me. (Or, as poor Miss Spenser at school would say, Howard and I.)
Howard spent a lot of time in the evenings with his books, and sometimes he would sit in the Public Library with the big books they wouldn't let him take away. But at home it was amazing to see him. He'd open a book at a page full of dates and facts and then just sort of photograph the page. Click, and you knew he'd got it. But he found time to relax, too. In fact, he seemed very confident of his chances in the quiz show, and it was me who got more and more excited day by day. One night, on the BBC TV, they had a programme about films and there was a visit to Hollywood. We were shown round the fabulous mansion on Sunset Boulevard of Miss Rayne Waters, who I've already mentioned, a very sunburnt bosomy star, a nice girl perhaps really, but you couldn't help not liking her silly giggle when she kept saying, 'I guess so,' and 'Surely, surely,' and 'Well, I guess that's just the way things arrre, he he he.' You'd think, though, watching her take this BBC man round her fabulous mansion, that she could have afforded to buy herself a brassiere, said she cattily. At the gates of her mansion there was an electronic thing for opening the gates automatically, and there was a telephone by which you could say who you were and ask if you could come in, and it was Rayne Waters herself who said, 'Surely, surely.' It didn't seem to me that the house was in very good taste, though, when we were taken round it. It was a sort of mixture of different styles of furnishing, with Chinese and Old English in the same room, and an indoor swimming-pool as well as an outdoor one, with hearts and arrows decorating everywhere, and I LOVE YOU done in diamonds on the wall of each of the twenty-four bathrooms. There was a TV set in every room, each TV set disguised as something else, such as a fireplace in one room, the whole house being of course centrally heated, and in another room the TV set was high up on the wall with a picture frame round it. (Why can't you say square it?) We watched this, and then Howard came out with one of his surprising remarks. He said: