The Walking Stick

  CONTENTS

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER ONE

  The man had been eyeing me most of the way home, and even happened to leave the bus at the same stop; but as soon as I got off he lost interest and walked away hunching his shoulders against the disappointment and the rain. I walked home, up Holly Hill, the wind beating against my back and legs. The road glimmered like wet polythene. I was late. It would soon be dark.

  We lived in one of those big early Edwardian houses, built without taste, but roomy and square and made to last. It had too many steps up to the front door, a semibasement, two floors above, sash windows, an iron gate that wouldn’t shut, and an old street lamp immediately outside. This showed up the brass plate which read J. Douglas Dainton, MRCS, LRCP.

  I opened the front door with my key and went in. They were both at home, and supper was nearly over. We always ate in the kitchen, winter and summer, and even when we had company. It was a long trainlike room, with plenty of space for cooking at one end and eating at the other. It had most of the latest gadgets, for Erica loved gadgets: washing-up machines, mixers, toasters, infrared grills, slicers, potato peelers, bottle openers, electric coffee mills, so that its business end looked like a stand at an Ideal Home exhibition. Cellophaned down one long wall were a selection of paintings and crayon sketches done by all the children, but chiefly by my elder sister, Sarah, whose vision at an early age had been the most primitive and therefore the most prized. The other wall had modern glass cupboards which were full of cooking spices and exotic Chinese teas and highly polished non-used copper moulds and steaming pans.

  Apart from my bedroom it was the only comfortable room in the house.

  When I got in, Dr J. Douglas Dainton, MRCS, LRCP, was just scraping the last of a Boursin cheese out of its silver paper and spreading it on a Ryvita biscuit. Propped against a toast rack was The Informed Heart by Bruno Bettelheim, which he was trying to read at the same time. Dr Erica Dainton, MB, ChB, was stirring her coffee and reading an egghead paperback I couldn’t see the name of. When she saw me she pushed her glasses up her nose and said: ‘You’re so late. Have you been to a party or something?’

  It was always her expectation somehow that I was going to break out into a gay life of my own.

  ‘No, there was some work I wanted to finish. Is there anything left?’

  ‘Of course. But it’ll be cold. The whole thing was served up before Minta left.’

  My father looked across from his silver paper and smiled at me clinically. ‘You’re wet, Deborah. Thank God I haven’t to go out tonight.’ He picked up the clean knife he was keeping for the purpose and turned over a page of his book.

  I went to the stove and helped myself to the remains of a congealed stew. In silence I began to eat. My mother said: ‘Did you come by tube?’

  ‘No. Bus. It’s almost as easy.’

  ‘But so much longer, my dear, when you’re late.’

  ‘I like it better.’ She knew this already. She knew that I didn’t like confined places, tunnels, compartments, boxes, cupboards, caves.

  ‘Sarah rang up about half an hour ago. Asked to speak to you.’

  ‘Oh . . . What did she want?’

  ‘To invite you somewhere, I think. She’s never very forthcoming about these things.’

  ‘I expect she’ll ring again.’

  ‘Yes, she said she’d ring again.’

  That rather exhausted the immediate conversation. As a family, although we talked a lot, we were never good on the trivia. When she saw I had nothing to say my mother gratefully pulled her glasses down her nose again.

  I flipped through the pages of the evening paper. Sotheby’s were in the news again with £7000 paid for a Meissen tea and coffee service of forty-four pieces. Prices went ever up. There had been a murder in Kensington. The Minister of Health was advising doctors to exercise economy in their prescriptions. Wind and rain were forecast for the last week in April.

  The telephone went in the hall. They both looked at me. ‘I expect that’s Sarah now,’ my mother said; and my father said: ‘If it’s anyone for me, say I’m out and’ll call them back in fifteen minutes.’

  ‘Deborah,’ said the voice of my elder sister, when I lifted the receiver, ‘whatever time d’you get back these days?’

  ‘Thursday is sometimes a bit hectic. Why?’

  ‘I’m giving a party tomorrow to celebrate – just a couple of dozen people – eight o’clock. Any hopes?’

  ‘Well . . . thanks.’ I stared at myself in the dim hall mirror. I hadn’t combed my hair since coming in, and the rain had made rats’ tails of it. I looked an absolute fright. ‘Did Erica suggest me?’

  ‘Of course not, you ape. D’you think I take notice of her suggestions anyhow?’

  That was true. ‘What is it, a dance?’

  ‘In a three-roomed flat? But of course. With the band of the Grenadier Guards.’

  ‘Seriously. Shall I know anybody?’

  ‘Well, there’s me and Arabella. Fruits of the same womb. You’ll recognize me by the red rose.’

  I plucked at a bit of skin round my thumb nail and then bit it.

  ‘Well?’ she said impatiently.

  ‘Thanks. Thank you, darling. I’d adore to come. What sort of clothes?’

  ‘Moderately smart. I’m sick of these sordid affairs where everyone comes looking as if they’ve been washed up with the local sewage.’

  ‘Lovely,’ I said. ‘What time did you say?’

  ‘Eight or thereabouts. Don’t eat because we’ll eat.’

  After hanging up I was a minute or two doing something about the rats’ tails before going back into the kitchen. Late invitation for a party? Someone fallen sick? Bitchy. Give Sarah credit for honesty: if she’d wanted me as a stop-gap she would simply have said so.

  Pity there always had to be this thing between me and my family. They trying to compensate and be nicer than they wanted to be. Me on guard and not wanting them to be nicer than they wanted to be.

  I went back into the kitchen to my father and mother and told them what was on. Douglas was relieved that it wasn’t a call for him; Erica made a gallant attempt to be interested in what I should wear, but after a minute or two, when I’d picked up the paper again, she went back to her egghead.

  So silence fell, and Erica finished her coffee and Douglas made himself a pot of Soochong tea, and I scraped out the coagulated dish – not all to eat, but chiefly into the waste disposal unit – and sat down with a cup of Maxwell House and we all read.

  We had all had a tiring day.

  My father at this time was fifty-eight, but I don’t think he looked it. He was a very hairless man, of head, eyebrow, chin, legs, chest; and even a photograph of twenty years before showed him to have been just the same then. Otherwise he would have been very handsome, with a clear complexion, a fine profile and smiling frank blue eyes. I don’t really know that he was more honest, more direct, more true, m
ore trustworthy, more sincere than anyone else, but he gave this impression of shining candour. If there had been warmth in his eyes as well he would have looked a saint. But there wasn’t warmth, or not much, or not much more than the professional man could afford to give off to each patient. To those who knew him well I think even this much was a little too smoothly and evenly spread. You felt if you went to him medically you’d get much the same sympathy whether you had indigestion or angina.

  In his youth he’d been a pretty good athlete, and he had kept his figure even today. He always looked astonishingly clean – even when he wore a dirty suit you got the impression that his body was clean inside it; perhaps it was partly this lack of hair. His hands were always cool, like his voice. He never perspired. You could hardly imagine him ill or not in command of a situation – though of course his command was that of someone on the General Staff, not in the field of battle.

  Some people thought him lazy.

  When the Welfare Service came in they were both quite young, with a growing family and practising together, since it was against Erica’s principles to give up her profession to raise children. Douglas had taken one look at the new régime and had opted out of it right away. For eighteen years he had gone on with a tiny but rich private practice, claiming that he made as much outside the Service for a quarter the work. Erica, reacting the opposite way, had at once gone into partnership with three women doctors with a shared surgery in the newer and less prosperous part of Hampstead; no private patients were accepted, and the practice was conducted on strictly business lines, with each doctor having specified hours of work and leisure and no nonsense about personal relationships between doctor and patient.

  My mother was a tall woman and a clever one. She had qualified the year of her marriage. I’d heard her say: ‘Of course I adore children, but they have to be kept in proportion to one’s own life. Otherwise at forty-five or fifty you’re a dead letter. It’s not civilized.’

  My mother’s most stringent criticism was if a thing was not civilized.

  She’d been good-looking too, but in a different way from Douglas, and, unfairly, it hadn’t been as durable. The fresh complexion was cottage-womany in a good light. Her curly hair was grey and looked marvellous just after it was done each Friday afternoon. But by Saturday the texture was going and for the rest of the week it was as light and spiky as straw. Her big brown eyes were narrowed with having to make constant decisions, and these constant decisions, because they had to be authoritative, had given her a bossy look.

  I suppose you could say they both belonged to the Hampstead intelligentsia. They believed in asepsis, Freud, Aldermaston, the four-letter word, the Berliner Ensemble, the anti-novel, Joan Littlewood, the Observer, co-educational day schools, and the use of Christian names between parents and children.

  For Heaven’s sake, I’m not trying to be cynical or to suggest these things are necessarily either right or wrong; I’m only trying to describe my home as it was, so that what happened can be seen against its proper background.

  Perhaps some clever people will be able to see a connection. Or perhaps it was inevitable anyhow.

  You could say in a sense that my father and mother were even old-fashioned in some things. After all they were married and had stayed married for twenty-nine years. At least from when I was old enough to take notice, I don’t think they ever slept with anybody else. They never drank to excess, or took drugs more awful than the occasional secconal or rogitin – even when packaged and supplied free by the manufacturers. If they were out of temper, their temper hadn’t a lot of bite (which is more than I can say of myself). They were never in debt, except to the bank. They paid their taxes, schedule D and E respectively. They’d somehow reared three daughters, who were now all, or soon would be, respectably self-supporting. They performed a valuable service for the community. And they took a month’s holiday abroad each year, always apart.

  They were in fact two highly successful figures in urban society; and if they had any failure to irk their justifiable satisfaction, it was me.

  I often wondered why it bothered them so much. I suppose they looked on it as a reflection on their own professional competence.

  My sister Sarah was a brilliant young woman and had just added another degree to those she had already got, which was what the party was about. After four or five more years in the hospitals she intended to specialize in gynaecology. She was tall and a bit big generally but very good to look at, with those blue eyes in which even the whites seem to take the colour. She had been engaged twice and had always got some young man about her, but the link-up never seemed to last long, maybe because she was too high spirited to stay in the shafts. There was so much in life apart from love. She was probably very much like my father when he was young.

  My other sister, Arabella, was only just twenty and was reading medicine at London University. She was as tall as Sarah but much slighter, and rather delicate looking, with very sexy blonde hair hiding one side of her face and one eye, and a lovely figure. If she got through her studies without being ravished – which seemed unlikely – she would probably go into research, as she was clever enough but hardly had the face or figure for medical practice.

  Although I am myself above average height, I always feel a dwarf in my family, with my mother the next shortest at five feet nine.

  When I got to Sarah’s flat in Ennismore Gardens about half a dozen people were already there. Two of them I knew slightly, the others were already busy talking and drinking happily.

  ‘Hi,’ said Sarah, pecking down at me. ‘Lovely to see you. You know Philip, don’t you? And Greta? Oh, that’s the door again. Could you go and help Arabella pour the drinks?’

  There were shouts of welcome behind me as I went across to the table where the bottles were. Arabella had a new young man called Bruce Spring, who was a Registrar from the Middlesex and had odd Edwardian side whiskers, a hairy mole on one cheek, and pronounced some of his words as if they were corks being drawn out of wine bottles.

  The room began to fill up, but as Sarah had said, this was no shabby bottle party with corduroys and woollen shirts and patched jeans. Sarah shared the flat with a girl called Virginia, and they had converted their big bedroom into a dining room for the night. For the first hour we drank and talked in the sitting room, and Arabella and I were pretty busy pouring the drinks. Just as we were about to go in to eat and Sarah had given me the nod not to refill any more glasses, two late arrivals came. One was David Hambro, a young surgeon I’d seen before. The other was a man called Leigh Hartley.

  When you get to know someone very well it’s often hard to remember first impressions, they come like Morse signals and you don’t take the trouble to unscramble them. I remember most his curly hair, his common voice, his look of tormented vigour. He was not tall, but somehow wasn’t overlooked by taller men; he had heavy eyelids which could droop over his eyes to give the italics to some word or look; his nose was too narrow for the broad face; his mouth was big and sensitive, the teeth as white as high-gloss paint.

  Not handsome. But it was a face that meant quite a lot in a world where so many are anonymous.

  The first words he said to me, I remember, were: ‘Burnt umber.’

  I looked at him – he was smiling – but I didn’t reply, not seeing the joke.

  ‘Break it with Naples yellow,’ he said, ‘because of that light coming from overhead. You Sarah’s sister?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Crikey, three sisters all so attractive! I only met Sarah three weeks ago. Last week it was Arabella. Now you.’

  ‘Can I get you a drink?’ I said.

  ‘Sure. Lovely. Just what I need.’

  I waited. ‘Well, what?’

  ‘What?’ He blinked with his heavy lids. ‘Oh, you mean to drink. Well anything that’s going. How’s the tap water? Is it a vintage year?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘but this side of the valley only.’

  ‘Pour me half a glass then and
dilute it with a dash of Scotch.’

  While I did this he looked me over. I suddenly found myself angry with Sarah for putting me behind a table where I couldn’t properly be seen and with myself for falling for the trick; or angry with coincidence if that was all it was.

  ‘Seriously,’ he said, ‘I do think your hair’s great.’

  ‘Was that what it was about? Well, thank you.’

  ‘Does it ever get out of place?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Your hair.’

  ‘Oh, frequently.’

  ‘It shines, you know.’

  He sipped his drink and I sipped mine. Arabella was laughing with her new boy friend.

  The young man said: ‘Maybe I talk too much.’

  I half-smiled but did not look at him.

  ‘What’s your name?’

  ‘Deborah.’

  ‘Mine’s Leigh. Spelled with a gh. Leigh Hartley. You a doctor?’

  ‘No. I work in the West End.’

  ‘The only unmedical Dainton, eh? Thank God. I’m always scared of doctors, even those I know well. And women doctors frighten me even more.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Why? Oh, I don’t know. Because they’re somehow the wrong sex for the job, I reckon. And people who are the wrong sex for a job are always slightly more sinister than people who are the right sex . . . like male nurses, f’rinstance.’

  Sarah was leading the way into the bedroom for supper.

  I said: ‘Your ideas are a bit Victorian, aren’t they?’

  ‘Old-fashioned, maybe. But why blame the poor old Queen? There weren’t any women doctors in Edward’s day, were there? Or the earlier Georges or the Stuarts or—’

  ‘Well, they burned them then,’ I said. ‘Perhaps you think that’s a good idea.’ I picked up my stick. ‘Supper’s ready.’

  ‘Can I sit with you, d’you think?’

  I smiled. ‘No. I have to help. You follow Arabella and then you won’t lose your way.’

  He smiled back at me and turned away, glass in hand. Before he could move far I deliberately came out and limped beside him to the bedroom door. ‘In there. I think there are enough seats, but I’m afraid it’s going to be crowded.’