Work Text:
We’re lucky with the weather, so games going on full swing. Some promising girls; you should see the amount of ruckus in our training period. Hope you’d come and see, actually.
The postcard shows a beautiful old building inside a garden; the writing is rather clumsy and childish. There’s also a postscript, pencil-written and almost unreadable to anyone who’s not used to this sort of handwriting:
Innes, just answer already.
Mary Innes finishes sorting the mail, then carries the postcard to her chest of drawers, to put it into a small stack of similar cards in the top drawer. Then she goes to the kitchen to help her mother make tea.
Not that her mother wants her help. “I’m used to this, Mary; I can manage, Mary; you should get some rest, Mary.”
Mary doesn’t tell her that her workload in the clinic doesn’t even register as tiredness, not after Leys; it’s no use at all. And she knows perfectly well that her mother can manage.
“I just like to keep busy, Mother,” she says each time.
This, after all, is the perfect truth.
It’s just difficult to keep busy twenty-four hours a day, especially when you don’t get tired enough to fall straight asleep in the evening. Mary turns her light off, not wanting to worry her parents, but she doesn’t even bother undressing.
She needs no light to reread the postcards: by now she knows them almost by heart.
She just tries not to do this every night.
We have a girl in the fourth form just like Dakers. Yesterday she managed to lose her boots on her way from the dormitory to the gym; it took half of the girls from her form to find them. I think they were just curious to see how she managed it. I am not sure whether such stuff is more or less amusing now that I am a teacher. I wish you could have seen them searching. I wish you were there. You would have loved it here, especially after Leys. And Arlinghurst is even better.
The last sentence is crossed out, and then boldened out again.
And this is actually a letter, not a postcard. Mary leaves it in its envelope.
The patients keep talking to her, even though she rarely asks questions or provides much encouragement. Father says it’s useful to be a good listener. Mary supposes she did become a good listener, though she is not quite sure how and when.
This is the heaviest physical work she does these days: helping to lift people up, stretching them, pressing, showing them exercises at which to work. From time to time male patients try to tell her not to strain herself, they’ll manage, they’ll raise themselves, they can get on the table by themselves, this is too heavy work for a young woman.
Mary doesn’t smile; she just lists this as a sign of them getting better – and wonders when she started missing sports.
It’s her body that misses sports, of course: that’s annoying, but bodies can be trained out of any habit and made to learn any new one. She’s not getting to a gym or a games field any time soon. Perhaps never.
We still haven’t gone to Norway, you know?
My parents are asking about you. I think my father wants to know what I did wrong.
The sentence about Norway is in the second line of the letter, the bit about Mr and Mrs Nash, in the fifth. There’s six lines in the letter, and most of them are illegible even to Mary.
She smooths the writing paper and puts it back into the envelope, not thinking about Mr Nash at all.
Her parents stopped inquiring about Beau Nash fairly quickly. She thought her father would ask; did she hope he would? He never did. That would have been like diagnosing one of his patients, Mary imagines.
Her mother, Mary knows, believes she came home to hide. Mary doesn’t dare to tell her how far from a safe haven this town feels to her.
Then again, Mary makes herself acknowledge, perhaps maybe her mother is right, .
She starts taking long walks, finding them an acceptable form of exercise, and she comes to love the chances for home visits – one or two people not well enough to come to the clinic, several children unable to walk anyway.
It starts slowly: there’s this boy, her father says one day. They don’t have enough to pay for a full course of therapy, and he’s hardly likely to walk properly again, anyway. But massage would help. If you have time to spare, Mary. If you have strength to spare.
She actually smiles when she says yes; and she realizes it only by noticing her father’s startled face.
The Robsons do bring their boy to the clinic, every two weeks. Mostly the father carries him, though sometimes the mother wheels him in a cart. He is a quiet boy, that’s what Mary notices. Too quiet and obedient; these, for her, are the signs of someone who is unwell. She stretches and bends his legs with the movements so familiar to her that they do not require thought. She looks for things to think about and watches the Robsons.
Martha does not come to the clinic. She first learns of Martha’s existence when she comes to the Robsons’ for a home visit.
This is actually her idea, not her father’s: she watches, and listens, and perhaps she really became a good listener, because she hears the worry in Mrs Robson’s voice, sees Mr Robson’s apologetic grimace. He will have to be away in time for the next visit, Mary learns; and the weather lately has been bad enough for wheeling a nine-year-old through a town which doesn’t have the best roads.
I could come for a home visit, Mary says. If you don’t mind it.
They pause, startled: Mary doesn’t talk much, except for sometimes murmuring encouraging nonsense to the patients themselves.
Her father doesn’t quite smile, but she thinks he wants to. She thinks she became rather too well attuned to the kind of looks that her parents have been directing towards her.
“Do let her come,” he says. “I won’t have time to, but you won’t need me, and if there are any changes in Simon’s state, Mary’s qualified to notice it and take immediate measures.”
So she goes. That first time, Mrs Robson comes to meet her at the clinic: worried, Mary thinks, that she’d get lost. Or that she wouldn’t come after all. Or just generally worried.
They walk together, Mary trying to pace herself by the older woman: she is used to walking alone. Or, to think of it, with someone as fit as she is. They try to talk, that is, Mrs Robson tries: mostly she speaks about how grateful they all are to Dr Innes. Mary nods, and smiles, and agrees: before Leys, she had too many such talks, too many assumptions of Mary herself growing up into the same kind of selfless work.
And now, there she is.
Finally, though, Mrs Robson talks about her son, about his getting worse, and better, and worse again, and about what he did yesterday, and the day before that. Mary asks questions and tries to distinguish symptoms.
The Robsons’ home is as neat as she expected it to be. Simon waits in what she supposes to be the drawing-room, sitting on the sofa in a clean shirt. There’s a girl standing next to the sofa, looking to be about twelve or thirteen. “My daughter Martha,” Mrs Robson says, and Martha nods politely but silently. Mary likes that.
There is a card posted from Norway in the mailbox. It is not inscribed. Mary puts it on her dresser and stares at the view of a fjord. It was she who first wanted to go there, and the view is still soothing.
She still puts the card away in the evening, into the growing stack of cards and letters.
Next time she goes to the Robsons’ by herself: much as she values distraction, she’s better off not having to talk. She comes, she knocks at the door — the room is as neat and clean as before, but this time Simon’s shirt is a little less new, much more like something habitually worn at home.
Mrs Robson lets her in and disappears: she has something on the stove, as far as Mary can understand from her mumbled apologies.
Martha stays in the room.
Mary pays her no attention as she works, kneading and pulling and stretching Simon’s body. Only the second time, and she already feels a kind of familiarity here, a kind of routine. She’s been quick in establishing routines lately; hasn’t she been afraid of this, of getting caught in this particular kind of routine? It’s so soothing, she thinks now; not Mrs Robson’s gratitude, but the work itself. Is it how it goes for her father? Mary doesn’t think she’s quite ready to ask him. Asking would mean looking for something to enjoy. Not what she promised to do.
She notices Martha’s presence almost without looking. It feels normal, working with a patient with someone else looking on. Almost like in Leys.
Is Leys the measure of normality for me now? she wonders.
She’s putting her coat on when Martha comes out too, yelling: “I have to run out, Mum!” Mary is almost surprised to see her not being silent.
She was right to be surprised, Mary thinks later. Martha doesn’t like to talk, she feels, and it’s a strange conclusion, perhaps, about a girl who walked almost twenty minutes with her, talking.
It took till the corner of the street for Martha to start talking. “Sorry to bother you,” she mumbled, not quite looking at Mary.
“Did you want something?” Mary asked her, honestly surprised: up till that moment she assumed that the girl was out on some errand and was just shy from having to walk near a complete stranger.
“I just… I thoughtmaybeyoucouldhelpme… I really want to be a doctor!” Martha blurted out, looking straight at Mary, and then fell silent again, not taking her eyes away, though. And then the rest of their walk was mostly filled with Martha’s questions, initially shy and stumbling, then more insistent and curious, and Mary trying to answer what she could, with the girl staring at her even more avidly than during Simon’s massage session.
Is it a doctor that she really wants to be, Mary wonders, or does she just want to help – her brother, her parents, somebody, anybody? Is this what she herself lacked, not wanting medicine? Does it ever matter what we want?
In any case, she knows she has to help Martha. She promised to do good, to change things, and this is unquestionably a chance to do good. Only this somehow is hard, harder than making unpaid visits or planning courses of therapy. This particular good thing feels too personal. Too close.
She does not know what to talk about with Martha. All this listening, and she seems to have forgotten how to talk to people. Good thing that Martha, her intentions finally and fully declared, keeps having questions.
She tells her parents about Martha. Father is interested; Mother is… Mother is happy, somehow, Mary realizes with surprise.
They should have had a daughter like Martha, she thinks for a moment; that would have been easier on everybody. But it’s not fair thinking like this, of course; Martha wouldn’t be quite what she is if she were a doctor’s daughter, just as Mary herself would be someone else growing up with the Robsons; just like Beau wouldn’t… No; Beau, she thinks, is so unchangeable. It’s impossible to imagine Beau being different, no matter where she grew up.
"I’m going to find some of your old books for that girl," mother says, and Mary smiles gratefully, glad to return to practicalities.
We won! We won the quarterfinals! We haven’t done that since I was a firstie, so it wasn’t all in vain.
Miss Browning is still no use for discussing games intelligently, though. Wish you’d been there, for all your stubbornness.
The word before ‘stubbornness’ is blacked out, and the following three and a half lines are, Mary thinks, not so much crossed out as written over and corrected too many times.
There is a single rather large-lettered Sorry scribbled down in the end.
Mary wonders whether she should have sent Beau a Christmas card. And whether she’d be up to sending one next year.
Surprisingly, she can imagine next year quite well: old Mrs Wharton’s arthritis, certainly several people recovering from broken arms, Simon Robson and two more children like him, Martha and her next school year.
Martha is a walker like Mary herself; at least once a week she waits for Mary near the clinic and walks with her on her home visits, crouching outside and reading while Mary works.
Perhaps, Mary thinks, she should check which patients wouldn’t mind Martha watching and learning.
She is already teaching Martha some simpler versions of everyday massage for Simon.
“Miss Innes, did you always want to do medicine?” Martha asks one day. “To work with your father?”
Mary pauses. It’s so simple to say yes; one thing that definitely wouldn’t require further explanation.
“No,” she says finally. “I didn’t. It just happened like this.”
“What did you want to do, then?”
Martha’s eyes are full of curiosity. Don’t be like me, Mary wants to say. Don’t put your trust into anyone. Instead she searches for an answer that the girl would understand. She taught Martha to not hesitate asking questions, after all; she can’t let the girl slide back to shyness.
She also can’t say “I wanted things to be different”: it sounds weak and meaningless to her ears.
And in the end she settles for “I wanted to teach at school”, and they switch to discussing Martha’s school and whether Martha will need to learn Latin.
It’s even mostly true, about teaching at school, she thinks in the evening, staring at her chest of drawers, not opening the top drawer. She really imagined herself at Arlinghurst or another school like this. Somehow it seems very distant; somehow their regular clinic is the one part of Leys she recalls the most.
Mary’s returning from another home visit, actually buoyed by the fact that today Paulie Spratt sat up almost by himself, when she hears the voices in the living room. Guests, she thinks resignedly — what she actually wants most of all is half an hour with her old notes from clinic.
And then she enters the living room and thinks, I forgot how blindingly Beau can smile when she wants to.
She is suddenly tired.
They talk for a while in the living room; the talk mostly consists of Beau describing school life to Mary’s mother. Beau has a lot of funny and charming stories; even Mary almost smiles once or twice. But most of the time she watches. She also thinks her father is watching too, and this is making her nervous: what does he see? What would he diagnose? Does he notice, like Mary herself finally does, how Beau is watching her?
For Beau, for all her charm, is actually tense, more so than before an exam, and that somehow makes Mary feel glad. Glad and sad at the same time, for Beau’s habitual easy certainty is such a part of her.
Then she remembers the crossed-out lines in the letters, and wonders whether this has changed. Whether Beau changed.
Strange how, in all this time after Leys, the one thing that never changed in her mind was the image of Beau, calm and easy and only getting annoyed when Mary wouldn’t agree to go to Arlinghurst. Annoyed, not angry.
Perhaps, Mary thinks, I should have sent her a Christmas card. She always wanted people reacting to her. Me reacting to her.
It’s Mary’s mother who tells her to take Beau upstairs, to let her freshen up before tea. This all sounds very grown-up and formal, and Mary is grateful for the refuge of formality, at the same time hating that she is hiding behind her parents.
Beau keeps silent as they go upstairs.
“How long do you plan to stay?” Mary asks; the words seem distant and rude.
“I’ll leave on the evening train today,” Beau answers quietly. “Mother wants me tomorrow for some tiresome visit or other.”
She is afraid, Mary thinks; as afraid as I am. Why did she come, then?
In Mary’s room Beau walks around, inspecting everything. “You didn't like the fjord picture?” she asks lightly, looking at a seascape card tucked into the mirror.
Mary feels annoyed, though she is not sure whether at herself or at Beau: she would have put that card onto the mirror if looking at it every day were bearable.
“You know I did,” she answers curtly.
“Do I?” Beau asks. Her voice sounds plaintive. She feels hurt, Mary thinks, by things not going her way. Or by Mary not appreciating her card. Or… Mary feels tired; she thinks she would like to run away, but she already did run when she came here. Now there’s no place to hide or to run, and not much to lose.
“Why did you come here?” she says. “You know I…”
“Girls!” her mother calls from downstairs. “Tea is ready!”
Unsaid words keep churning in Mary’s mind; she makes an effort to swallow them and not to look at Beau. Her parents do not need to know any of this.
Beau can still make Mother laugh, Mary thinks at tea. She tries not to look at Beau too much, but it’s inevitable: the room is small, and there are only four of them at the table.
Beau looks older, she thinks, though this is probably due to tension: not enough time has passed since they have last seen each other. Still, she notes, it disturbs her when she notices changes in Beau. It is easier to relegate her to the memories of Leys, focused on her as the brightest thing there. Even of Leys, she had tried not to think too much in these past months: not in details, for the memories always brought her to that boom.
But it was impossible to see Beau at their tea table and not to remember all those other teas with Beau: in her room, in Beau’s room, in the garden… Once, Mary thought with a small grim smile, having Beau nearby was very much a thing of comfort — and that memory, apparently, was still with her, waiting and wanting to be let out, even just for a moment.
“There,” her mother says, “you even made Mary smile.”
“No,” Beau answers with a small laugh, “I think I've lost that knack.”
Once they finish tea, Mary’s mother gets up. Mary starts to rise too, then pauses: they finally made it a habit to put things away together after meals , but Beau is her guest and she ought to stay.
“Go on,” Dr Innes says, “help your mother. I think I’ll manage to entertain Beau for a while.”
Drying up the cups, Mary can’t help wondering what her father and Beau are talking about. What her father thinks about Beau’s visit. She knows she won’t ever ask him. She and Father don’t ask each other questions like this.
When she goes back to the living room, they aren’t talking, just sitting across from each other, father looking at Beau thoughtfully. What does he see in her? Mary wonders. Some kind of illness? Or is it me who is ill?
She realizes that she had been standing in the doorway for a while when she sees them both looking at her. She thinks she sees something similar in their eyes, and it disturbs her.
“Shall we go upstairs?” Mary says.
Beau follows her with a smile and nod to Dr Innes.
Once in Mary’s room, Beau sits down comfortably on the bed, and it’s as if the time after Leys never happened.
Mary goes to stand near the chest of drawers. She lost the anger that she had accumulated before tea, and now she doesn’t know what to say, how to speak.
It’s Beau who actually speaks.
“You asked why I came,” she says in a low voice. “I came to ask you something. Why have you never written back? I thought you got angry about me insisting over Arlinghurst, and I understood why you didn't want to go to Norway then, but you're still angry. Is it so awful, me wanting the best for you? Why?”
“Arlinghurst?” Mary repeats, and it comes out as a whisper, because she suddenly has no voice. “Arlinghurst?”
She was not angry, not for the last half an hour. She is angry now, though.
“What, then?” Beau looks like she is ready to spring or to go for a winning goal.
It is only just, Mary thinks suddenly, that she will, after all, have to say things that she never wanted to say, avoided voicing all that time after her talk with Miss Pym — or, to be entirely honest, even during that talk.
“Rouse,” she whispers hoarsely, and then, finding her voice, repeats more clearly: “Rouse.”
“Rouse?” For a moment Beau’s face is blank, uncomprehending, and that spurs Mary on.
“She did not have an accident, did she?”
Beau breathes out. “Damn. Damn. You just had to learn that, hadn’t you…”
“What did you think would happen if I hadn’t? Life would just go on as you see fit?” She tries hard not to be too loud, not to let the anger carry her on.
“No, life just isn’t fair, is it?” Beau says with a small, sad smile, and for a moment Mary sees not the Beau Nash sitting on her bed, but the one who finally found her on the day Rouse got called to Miss Hodge’s office. The one who brought her back.
“Why, Beau?” she whispers. “Why? How could you think that would make things better for me? What were you thinking?”
“I wasn’t,” Beau says dully, looking as if her mind was on something far away. What is she remembering, Mary wonders: their evening talk, the things Mary said, half of which she could not later remember? Or… the boom?
“Didn’t you ever play a stupid school trick on anyone, thinking of nothing except making someone pay for being nasty? Oh, what am I saying, of course you didn’t.” Beau looks at her now with the look she used to have sometimes, half admiring, half regretful.
It is so familiar, including Beau’s tendency not to think when she is angry. It is so familiar that it is pulling Mary back into those last days at Leys, and she feels almost as sick as she was at that moment on the boom.
Only, back then, she was sick from what she could not quite believe; and right now she feels sick from what she cannot escape.
“She’s dead, Beau,” she says, and manages to go to the window and open it.
Beau answers something, she supposes, but right now Mary can’t hear her from the thudding in her ears.
She knew it was like this, of course. It is Beau, after all, and she does know Beau, for all of these months spent thinking that she doesn’t. She knew Beau couldn’t mean it, and that probably meant that she couldn’t blame Beau. Except that she did.
“She’s dead,” Mary repeats, breathing in the cold evening air. “No matter what stupid trick you planned, she’s dead.”
This time she hears what Beau is saying. “I know! I know she’s dead, damn her! If I knew it would be like that… you’re eating yourself up much worse than after the Arlinghurst news.”
Mary starts laughing. “Why, Beau,” she manages, shaking, “do you want to play another trick to make everything better now?” She thinks maybe she isn’t quite laughing, but she can’t stop. “Who would you play it on?”
“I dunno,” Beau says, “who are you hating now? Me, or yourself? Stop it, Mary!”
“What does it matter?” Mary says, laughing. “She’s dead because I felt hurt over Arlinghurst!”
She does not notice when Beau gets up; suddenly the other girl stands next to her and slaps her face. Hard.
Mary hiccups and slowly slides down to sit on the floor.
Beau sits down next to her.
For several minutes they are silent.
“I didn't mean it, Mary, honestly,” Beau says. She sounds about twelve. Mary thinks distantly that in some ways Beau will always sound about twelve to her.
“I know,” she answers. “Does it really matter?”
“What does matter, then?” Beau says. “I mean, you didn’t go and say something at the inquest, did you?”
“I couldn’t,” Mary says. “It was my fault most of all, after all.”
“Don’t be stupid.” Beau sighs. “Oh Mary, why must you be so stupid? Is it your fault that you were so unhappy that day? And that I got so angry? And if you didn't go to the police and yet it doesn't matter that I didn't mean it, what then? Are you planning to eat yourself up until you get an ulcer and never talk to me again?”
“Never talking to you again doesn’t work, does it?” Mary snorts.
“I can’t give up,” Beau says matter-of-factly. Mary doesn’t look at her, but she just knows Beau’s hand hovers somewhere near hers. Beau doesn’t actually touch her, though, and for this Mary is grateful.
“And I can’t forget,” she says. Trouble is, she can’t forget anything, including Beau, no matter how much she thought she could. Beau is a part of her as much as Rouse’s death is. She’ll just have to live with this. She wonders how she will learn to do it.
And then she goes to take Beau to the train station, slipping out of the house carefully so as not to let her parents see her still-reddened cheek. They walk through the half-empty streets, and Beau talks about Miss Browning being too old-fashioned, and the headmistress listening to her far less than when she was Head Girl, and about lazy fifth-formers who won’t try, and does not mention Arlinghurst even once.
“Come see us next weekend?” Beau says when the train starts approaching the platform. “My parents would be happy to see you.”
“Don’t be silly,” Mary says evenly. Next weekend she’s taking Martha and two classmates of hers to the travelling exhibition in the next town.
“Oh well,” Beau grins, “I had to try.” And then, standing on the step board of her carriage, adds, “I’ll be coming back!”
She will, Mary knows, looking at the train leaving the station, and wonders just how much she’s afraid of that.
Then she returns home, thinking about how she still has some time to reread those notes from the clinic.