London Observed

  Soon they were all washed, brushed, tidy, and in bed. The night nurse, another fresh young woman, came to look them over. She had heard from the nurses going off duty about the difficult patient, and now she gave the sobbing Mildred Grant a long, dubious inspection, and said, ‘Good night, ladies, good night.’ She seemed as if she might try admonitions or advice, but went out, switching off the light.

  It was not dark in the room. The tall yellow lamps that illuminated the hospital car park shone in here. There was a pattern of light and dark on the walls, and the pink of the curtains showed, a subdued but brave note.

  Seven women lay tense in their beds, listening to Mildred Grant.

  Her bed was near the door. In the two beds beside hers were matrons in the full energies of middle age, who commanded children, daughters-in-law, sons-in-law, husbands, relatives of all kinds, and these were always dropping in with flowers and fruit in what seemed to the others like a continuing family party. Mrs Joan Lee and Mrs Rosemary Stamford demanded the movable telephones several times a day to organize dentists’ and doctors’ appointments, to remind their families of this or that, or to ring up grocers’ or greengrocers’ shops to order food the happy-go-lucky ones at home were bound to forget. They might be in the hospital with womb problems, but in spirit they had hardly been here at all. Now they were forced to be here, to listen. The fourth bed on that side held the joker, Miss Cook. Opposite her was the very old woman, the widow. Beside her, ‘the horsey one’, a handsome young woman with the high, clear, commanding voice of her class, who was neither chummy nor standoffish, defended a stubborn privacy with books and her Walkman. Atavistic dislikes had caused the others to agree (when she was out of the room) that her abortion on the National Health was selfish: she should have gone to a private hospital, for with those clothes and general style she could certainly afford to. Next to her a recently married girl who had miscarried lay limp in her bed, like a drowned girl, pale and sad but brave. Next to her and opposite Mildred Grant was a dancer, no longer young, and so now she had to teach others how to dance. She had fallen and as a result suffered internal hurt. She was depressed but putting a good face on it. ‘Laugh and the world laughs with you!’ she often cried, full of vivacity. This was her motto, and, too, ‘It’s a great life if you don’t weaken!’

  The women were shifting about in their beds. Their eyes shone in the lights from the car park. An hour passed. The night nurse heard the sound of weeping from outside, and came in. She stood by the bed and said, ‘Mrs Grant, what are you doing? My patients have to get some sleep. And you should, too. You’re going to have an examination in the morning. There’s nothing to be afraid of, but you should be rested.’

  The sobbing continued.

  ‘Well, I don’t know,’ said the nurse. ‘If she doesn’t stop in a few minutes, ring the bell.’ And she went out.

  Mildred Grant was now crying more softly. It was a dreary automatic sobbing and by now it was badly on their nerves. In every one of them dwelled the unappeased child with her rights and her claims, and they were being forced to remember her, and how much it had cost them all to subdue her. The pale girl who had miscarried was weeping. Silently, but they saw the tears glisten on her cheeks. The gallant dancer lay curled in a foetal position, her thumb in her mouth. The ‘horsey one’ – she, in fact, loathed horses – had slipped the Walkman’s earpieces back on, but she was watching, and probably unable to stop herself listening through whatever sounds she had chosen to shut out the noise of weeping. The women were all aware of each other, watched each other, afraid that one of them would really crack and even begin screaming.

  Mrs Rosemary Stamford, a tough matron, the last person you’d think would give way, said in a peevish end-of-my-tether voice, ‘They should move her into another ward. It’s not fair. I’m going to talk to them.’

  But before she could move, Miss Cook was getting out of her bed. She was not only large and unwieldy but full of rheumatism, and it took time. Then, slowly, she put on a flowered dressing gown, padded because she said her room was cold and she couldn’t afford what was needed to keep it heated, and bent to pull on her slippers. Was she going out to appeal to the nurses? To the toilet? At any rate, watching her took their minds off Mildred Grant.

  It was to Mildred Grant she went. She settled herself in the chair that had been occupied for all those hours by the husband, and laid a firm hand on Mildred’s shoulder.

  ‘Now then, love,’ she said, or commanded. ‘I want you to listen to me. Are you listening? We are all in the same boat here. We’ve got our little troubles, we have, all of us. I had to have a hysteriaectomy’ – so she pronounced it, as a joke, for while she was a real old-style working-class woman, unlike the others here except for the widow, she knew quite well how the word should be said. ‘The way I see it, it’s not fair. What’s my womb ever done for me?’ Here she raised her face so the others could see that she was closing her left eye in a wink. Always good for a laugh, that’s me, said this wink. Now she said loudly, to be heard over the sobbing, ‘Look, dear, if you’ve had someone to say goodnight to every night of your life, then it’s more than most people have. Can’t you see it like that?’

  Mildred went on crying.

  They could all see Miss Cook’s face in the light from the window. It looked strained and tired, the jolly clown notwithstanding.

  She laid her arm around the weeping woman’s shoulders and gently shook her. ‘Now, my dear,’ she said, ‘don’t cry like that, you really mustn’t …’

  But Mildred had turned and flung her arms around Miss Cook’s neck. ‘Oh,’ she wept. ‘I’m sorry, but I can’t help it. I’ve never had to sleep by myself, not ever, I’ve always had my Tom …’

  Miss Cook put her arms right around Mildred, cradling and rocking the poor bereft little girl. Her face was, as they say, a study. She seemed to be struggling with herself. When at last she spoke, her voice was rough, even angry. ‘What a lucky girl you are, aren’t you? Always had Tom, ‘ave you? And I’m sure a lot of us wish we could say the same.’ Then she checked her anger and began again in a soothing monotonous tone. ‘Poor little thing, poor little girl, what a shame, is that what it is, then, oh dear, poor thing …’

  The other women were remembering that Miss Cook had not had children, had never been married, and lived alone, and apart from her cat had no one to touch, stroke, hold. And here she was, her arms filled with Mildred Grant, and probably this was the first time in years she had had her arms around another person, man or woman.

  What must it feel like, being reminded of this other world where people hugged and held and kissed and lay close at night, and woke in the dark out of a dream to feel arms around them, or were able to reach out and say, ‘Hold me, I’ve been dreaming’?

  But her voice was going on, kindly, impersonal, firm. ‘Poor little thing. Poor little girl. What a shame, but never mind, you’ll have your Tom back soon, won’t you …’

  This went on for a good quarter of an hour. The sobbing stopped. Miss Cook laid down the exhausted woman, letting her limbs and head flop gently into a comfortable position, as one does with a child.

  When she stood up and looked down at the sleeping woman, Miss Cook’s face was, if possible, even more of a study. She went to her bed, removed her flowery gown and her slippers and lay carefully down.

  The women communicated without words.

  It was necessary for someone to say something. It was she, Miss Cook, who had to say it. ‘Well,’ she remarked. ‘You live and learn.’

  Soon they were all in their own worlds, fast asleep.

  Principles

  I was driving up one of the roads in Hampstead which, as we all know, were never designed for cars, were not long ago lanes that accommodated horses and people walking. In front of me a knot in the traffic. Hardly unusual. I stopped. I had to. In front of me was a Golf, and in front of that a blue Escort was blocked by a red van, nose to nose. If the red van reversed no more than a couple of yards, then the E
scort could drive past. But the red van wasn’t going to budge, although for the Escort to let him through meant that the woman – yes, yes, a woman driver – would have to reverse past a parked car and then abruptly at an angle into an empty space too small for it, so it would stick out anyway. If the Escort did this, yes, there would be room for the red van to go past, but only just. The sensible thing was for the red van to reverse.

  It was evident that this was a question of Principle. Principle was what we were up against. The red van was faced with a woman driver who wouldn’t give way. The Escort was faced with an unreasonable bully of a man. The woman driver was damned if she was going to go through this ridiculous business of reversing and then going sharply back into a silly space that wouldn’t even hold the Escort, when for the van to reverse would be the work of seconds.

  There were cars on the other side of the red van, a line stretching all the way up the hill.

  They hooted. The Golf in front of me hooted to keep them company. Then the man in the Golf got out and walked to where he could stand by the window of the Escort and talk to the woman, and after that he went to the window of the red van.

  He turned and slowly came back. He had decided to find it entertaining. His face was all resigned, amused philosophy. He was waggling his hands, palms down, on either side of his thighs in the way that says, ‘Here we have a pretty kettle of fish! However, let’s keep calm.’ He shrugged and got into his car. Then he stuck out his head and signalled to me to reverse. Just behind me on my left was a street going off up a hill, but a girl in a Toyota blocked the way. She was in trouble with a lorry, behind her. The man in the lorry was shouting that everything was the fault of the woman driver up in front, but the Toyota girl wasn’t going to have that. She said nothing, but sat smiling, a tight angry little smile. The man in the lorry jumped down, shook his fist at the Toyota, then – for good measure – at me, and strode smartly up past us both and past the Golf, and reached the two vehicles standing nose to nose. He had not been able to see from the cab of the lorry that the red van – male – was more in the wrong than the Escort. He shouted a little at the woman in the Escort, just for the look of the thing. She was now smoking so energetically that it seemed the driver’s seat was on fire. He did not bother to speak to the driver of the red van, from which one could deduce that he could see it would do no good. He came back, not looking at the man in the Golf who – he could now see – was not going to be an ally, but probably regarded him as at fault, then past me, then past the girl in the Toyota. He climbed back into his cab and looked to see how he could reverse to let the Toyota go out left. But behind him now were several cars. He shouted at them to reverse, and while we couldn’t see them it was evident they were furious too, because they were hooting. At last he was able to reverse a short way. Then the woman in the Toyota began complicated to-ings and fro-ings to get herself out into the leftwards street. Then she had gone, and I wanted to reverse, but the lorry had already come forward. This made the Golf in front of me start a frenzied hooting. He shouted at the lorry to go out left. But the lorry wasn’t going to leave the scene, because one or other of the two contenders for being proved in the right of it ought to give way, and he was going to wait until he, or she, did. Now this man tried to reverse again, to let me and the Golf out, but meanwhile other hooting cars had pressed up behind him. It took time for him to slowly press back and back so that I could reverse, and go off into the side street. The man in the Golf reversed the very second he could, which meant he was going slowly back towards the lorry that was coming slowly forwards. As I left the scene the two were shouting at each other.

  I drove up the street. You can, if you want, turn so as to rejoin the street I had just extricated myself from. Why did I decide to do this? The spirit of obstinacy had entered me too. Besides, I didn’t see why I had to drive half a mile out of my way. In short, no, there’s no excuse. I rejoined the street about twenty yards past where the red van stood obstinately in front of the Escort. Now I could see the face, or rather, the profile of the driver of the red van. He was elderly, overweight, and his cheek looked as if it had been washed in the water beetroot had been boiled in. A candidate for a stroke. Out of the window of the Escort billowed smoke. I could just see her face: the strong features of a woman who would stand to the death for common sense and her rights.

  Behind the red van the long line of blocked cars was trying to dissolve itself by backing up the hill and then turning off right into the street parallel to the one I had come from. That meant that I and the cars behind me, including the Golf, had to wait while all these cars reversed and manoeuvred. All the time cars were adding themselves to this line, and hooting, and people were shouting at each other, because they had not understood the seriousness of the situation with the red van and the Escort. The man in the Golf, the one who had waggled his hands in a gesture of world-weary tolerance, could not see what was holding me up now. He leant out and shouted at me and I leant out and shouted that there were about fifteen cars ahead sorting themselves out. He finally cracked. He yelled, ‘Oh Christ, would you believe it!’ and gestured to the cars behind him that he was going to reverse. There was just room, and he went forward into the drive of a man who came out of the house to shout that his drive was not a public roadway.

  A woman from the manoeuvring cars behind the red van held them all up to walk down to the red van and the Escort, where she surveyed the scene, and then said to the puce-faced driver and the smoke-shrouded woman, ‘Well, I suppose you two are getting something out of all this.’

  And went back to her car.

  At last I was able to go fast enough ahead to get a place going up the hill before yet another car turned in front of me. At the top of the hill I slowed to look around and there was the red van, there was the Escort, and neither had conceded an inch.

  D.H.S.S.

  The young woman on the pavement’s edge was facing in, not out to the street, and she moved about there indecisively, but with a stubborn look. Several times she seemed about to approach somebody who had just come out of the Underground to walk up the street, but then she stopped and retreated. At last she moved in to block the advance of a smartly dressed matron with a toy dog on a leash that came to sniff around her legs as she said hurriedly, ‘Please give me some money. I’ve got to have it. The Social Security’s on strike and I’ve got to feed my kids.’ Resentment made her stumble over her words. The woman examined her, nodded, took a £5 note from her handbag, then put it back and chose a £10 note. She handed it over. The young woman stood with it in her hand, looking at it disbelievingly. She muttered a reluctant ‘Thanks’, and at once turned and crossed the street in a blind, determined way, holding up one hand to halt the traffic. She was going to the supermarket opposite the Underground station, but at the entrance stopped to glance back at the woman who had given her the money. She was standing there watching her, the little dog yapping and bouncing at the end of its leash. ‘Fucking cheek. Checking to see if I was lying,’ muttered the young woman. But she was a girl, really. ‘I’ll kill her. I’ll kill them …’ And she went in, took a basket, and began selecting bread, margarine, peanut butter, cans of soup.

  This incident had been observed by a man sitting in a shabby blue Datsun at the pavement’s edge. He had got out of the car and crossed the street just behind her, holding up his hand against the traffic to support her. He followed her in to the supermarket. He was a few paces behind her during her progress through the shop. At the check-out desk, when she took out the £10 note, her face tense with the anxiety of wondering if it would be enough, he interposed his own £10 note, forcing it into the check-out girl’s hand. By the time the girl he had been following understood what he was doing it was too late. ‘OK,’ he said, ‘let’s fight outside.’ She looked angrily at him, and at the check-out girl, who was already busy with the next customer. Then she followed him to the pavement. She was not looking at him to find what he was like, but how to quarrel with him. In fact he
was a man of perhaps forty, with nothing particular about him, and dressed as casually as she was. But he had all the carelessness of confidence. Her clothes were ordinary, that is to say jeans and a sweater, but she had a drab appearance, not so much dirty as stale. Her hands were nicotine-stained.

  ‘Look,’ he said, taking all this in, ‘I know what you want to say, but why don’t we have a cup of coffee?’

  She just stood there. She was frozen … it was with suspicion. She looked trapped. A few yards away a couple of tables with chairs around them stood outside a café.

  ‘Come on,’ said he, with a jerk of his head towards the tables. He sat down at one, and she did too, in a helpless, lethargic way, but as if she was about to leap up again. At once she started peering into the carrier bags for just-bought cigarettes. She lit a cigarette and sat with her eyes closed, and smoked as if trying to drown in smoke, pulling breaths of it deep into her lungs. He said, ‘I’m going to order. Coffee?’ No movement from her. ‘I’ll get coffee then. And I know you are hungry. What do you want to eat?’ No response. She went on drawing in smoke from the cigarette held to her lips in a childish grubby hand.

  He went into the café. His quick glance back showed he was afraid she would be off. But when he came back with two cups of coffee she had not moved. He sat down, putting the cups on the table, and she at once pulled one towards her, piled in sugar and drank it in big gulps. Before she had finished it, he went back in and returned with another cup which he put down before her.

  ‘Don’t think you’re going to get something out of this because you won’t,’ she said angrily.

  ‘I know that,’ he said, in a voice kept reasonable. He was sorry for her and could not keep this out of his face and eyes. But she had not once looked at him properly.