The Drying Rooms - Chapter Nineteen

The San

Audio version of Chapter Nineteen

‘When Aslan was tied down on the stone table, she was there, weeping alongside Lucy and Susan.’

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I am sitting up in a bed in a room flooded with sunlight and silence surrounded by empty beds waiting for other sick children. The day threatens to be a clock-ticking infinity of boredom.

I remember The San as being an out of bounds place, a normally not-allowed place, approached by a little drive. It was never called the sanatorium, yet that’s the word at the edges of my association whenever I read about alcoholism and addiction. I see a rock-bottom addict getting out of a car, leaving the real world of fresh air and green-leafed trees and entering The San, straight into its windowless thick-walled corridor.

The corridor is bleak, fearful. It is the beginning of incarceration. The walls are painted shit-brown to the halfway mark, insipid tan above. Like the entrance to the cold corridors of a convent run by cruel nuns.

But the sunny room with the empty beds is not bleak or fearful. It’s lonely and cut off, yes, but it’s not incarceration. Although there is a fearful San memory. Agony and terror, actually. When I had mumps and was confined to a tiny attic room and the pain woke me up crying in the dark of the haunted night — for we all knew a ghost lived in The San. Maybe that’s the link with the cruel nun corridor.

But the sunny room … that’s like a separate memory. It has its own register. Lighter, more peaceful. Only I know it wasn’t separate. Both the corridor and the light sunny room were definitely in The San. For a large, cold bathroom was down that corridor — and I remember the loo, with a long, clanking pull-chain.

I have no memory of wetting the bed in The San. I guess The San matron allowed me to go to the loo when I needed to. The San matron is a hazy figure — in a cardigan, maybe. Apart from knowing she was not unkind, she is barely present in my memory.  Except for the welcome sound of her footsteps in the corridor heralding the event of lunch.

Cruel Matron never penetrated The San. It was beyond her force field.

The sunny room with the empty beds was its own remote island of isolated safety. Life on hold.

There is another memory that keeps interrupting, trying to insert itself.  Thirty years later … another bed, another silence. The memories are reaching towards each other like magnets.

IRELAND 1992

She is sitting up in bed, propped against several pillows angled for comfort, staring at the vast fresh sky. Silent, apart from the occasional passing cry of a curlew.  There is a pile of books on the little table by her bed. She is working her way through them, one by one, on a mission to distract herself from the sadness of the event unfolding inside her.

She had known something was wrong when a few days before she and her then husband and her four-year-old daughter were picking blackberries along the empty country road by the sparkling waters of the huge lough below, quotidian in its familiarity and transcendent wonder. The happiness of the moment was instantly replaced by a bolt of sickening anxiety when she felt something wet discharging into her knickers.

Seamlessly, but no longer present, she carried on picking blackberries. She can see her daughter’s sweet magenta-stained mouth and careful little fingers avoiding the thorns. She must have said something in code about maybe miscarrying to her husband, for she remembers they hastened their return home. By then, home had already been two years in a huge crumbling gentry house in Donegal with a staggering view of lough and sky; the nominal caretaker rent had enabled them to leave their life in London. 

The doctor ordered bed rest for at least two weeks in the hope that the blood was a false alarm and that all would be well. This Victorian ‘rest and keep your legs up’ solution seemed odd to her, but she accepted the doctor’s orders with relief. Being absolved of all responsibility wasn’t her decision so she didn’t have to feel guilty. But she was worried about her daughter and she was worried about her husband coping with the domestic stuff; the childcare stuff. For she was the main controller of the mother-ship; he was the one putting in the hours to earn their daily bread, while she occasionally earned some trimmings: proof-reading; the odd travel article commission (her old job); or, rare joy of joys, the publication of a short story. But while she lay in bed, reading one book after another or staring at the sky and listening out for curlews and oyster catchers, her husband coped fine. And he didn’t bother her with stuff. He just got on with it. She felt cared for. He brought up meals to her on a tray.

Extract from Maudie

“Open wide,” said Mrs Compton, the San matron.

Maudie opened her mouth wide and felt the cold hardness of a glass thermometer being pushed under her tongue. Maudie hated having her temperature taken. The thermometer always felt awkwardly placed, like it was about to slip out.

“Guess what’s under that?” said Mrs Compton, pointing at the metal plate cover on the tray.

Maudie responded with a questioning shrug of her shoulders. Why did Mrs Compton always talk to her when she had a thermometer in her mouth?

“Sausages,” said Mrs Compton with a triumphant smile.

Sausages! “Yes!” thought Maudie.

But when she saw what was for pudding, her heart sank. Semolina and jam. Yuk! But she knew kind Mrs Compton wouldn’t make her eat it. Not like Axe.

“Mmm, your temperature’s not normal yet, Maudie. I’m afraid you’ve got at least another day or two here. I hope you’ve got a good book.”

Maudie held up the book she was reading, The Secret Garden.

“I’m reading it for the second time,” she said.

“That’s nice,” said Mrs Compton. “Just like the tray.”

It was true. The picture on the tray was of a lush garden, full of brightly coloured flowers.

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… while she lay in bed reading one book after another

The truth of that two weeks of doctor’s orders bed-rest in Ireland is that the book-reading binge holds far more significance in her memory than the miscarriage itself. (Maybe the memory would be different if she hadn’t become pregnant again a few months later, resulting in her son who otherwise would never have happened.)

She read those books as she has always imagined herself reading, the way she read as a child. There was something about the self-contained, lack of responsibility that enabled her restless mind to become wholly absorbed in thick books that she didn’t want to end.

Now she has books on her shelf that over the years have become a burden. Literary classics staring down at her like an unfulfilled longing that she doesn’t dare try to fulfil, for fear of failure. Or maybe she just can’t be bothered to try anymore:

for at my back I always hear/ time’s wingèd chariot hurrying near

“That bloody chariot!” — she can hear her father’s wry tone quoting that poem.

So now she will never be him — her father; that effortlessly well-read man, who used to re-read Conrad and Dickens like she re-read The Secret Garden and The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe when she was a child.

But in that room overlooking the lough with her husband bringing her meals on a tray, she was happily in the chandeliered drawing rooms of Moscow and St Petersburg in War and Peace. She can’t remember anything about Count Pierre Bezukhov except that she was him. Just as she was Mary Lennox in The Secret Garden and when Aslan was tied down on the stone table, she was there, weeping alongside Lucy and Susan.

And that lunch tray in The San burns bright in her memory. Not because of The Secret Garden — although it may be true that she was reading it the time. It burns bright because she remembers staring at it for what seemed like hours in that silent empty room and entering the garden in the tray. And, curious to know what lay beyond, she pushed her way with daydream intensity through the foliage at the edge of the tray and stepped into the unseen landscape that held the adventure in which she would be both victim and hero.

She still does this. She still daydreams herself through portals or beyond the frame.

Once, with the energy of a newly-qualified teacher, she took a group of thirteen-year-old ‘low achievers’, who hated writing, to Kenwood House on Hampstead Heath. Once there, before picnicking in the woods, they went into the galleries in the house and she set them a creative writing task of the type that she loves to do herself:

Stand in front of Vermeer’s painting The Guitar Player and write the answer to these questions on the sheet on your clipboard. The woman playing the guitar is looking at someone who’s not in the painting. Who is she looking at? Why is she looking at this person?  What’s going to happen next? The resulting stories written in the classroom the following lesson were, frankly, wonderful. Or so she congratulated herself.

A few years after retiring from full-time teaching, I read Annie Ernaux’s brilliant memoir, The Years. I’d never read anything by her before and I didn’t know that apart from being an esteemed Nobel-prize winning writer, Annie Ernaux had also been a teacher. There was a line in it that hit me with a fuck-me gut-flip: “Teaching was a continuous imperfection.”

Oh god. Yes.

That’s exactly what it was. An imperfection.  Because I wasn’t perfect at it. Because stepping through any school gates triggers a slightly phobic dread. Because — and here comes the oh god gut-flip bit — teaching ran imperfectly alongside a parallel life as a writer which I never lived. It’s only now, years after retirement but still teaching small children one to one, I have realised this is bollocks. I have no desire to reverse that bloody chariot. 

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