The only acceptable sweet treats, she said, were proper Belgian truffles (Neuhaus, nom de dieu; only tourists bought those nasty chocolate seashells) or plump Medjool dates from the souks of Tunis, both of which were rather difficult to source in our local Spar. There was a time, shortly before . . . the incident . . . when she shopped only at Fortnum’s, and I recall that in that same period she was in regular correspondence with Fauchon over perceived imperfections in their confiture de cerises. I remember the pretty red stamps on the letters from Paris: Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité. Not exactly a credo of Mummy’s.
I folded my pillow in half to support me as I sat up. Sleep still felt far away, and I was in need of soothing. I reached down into the gap between the mattress and the wall and sought my old faithful, its edges rounded and softened with years of handling. Jane Eyre. I could open up the novel at any page and immediately know where I was in the story, could almost visualize the next sentence before I reached it. It was an old Penguin Classic, Ms. Bront?’s portrait gracing the cover. The bookplate inside read: Saint Eustace Parish Church Sunday School, Presented to Eleanor Oliphant for Perfect Attendance, 1998. I had a very ecumenical upbringing, all told, having been fostered by Presbyterians, Anglicans, Catholics, Methodists and Quakers, plus a few individuals who wouldn’t recognize God if he pointed his electric Michelangelo finger at them. I submitted to all attempts at spiritual education with equally bad grace. Sunday school, or its equivalent, did at least get me out of whatever house I was living in, and sometimes there were sandwiches, or, more rarely, tolerable companions.
I opened the book at random, in the manner of a lucky dip. It fell open at a pivotal scene, the one where Jane meets Mr. Rochester for the first time, startling his horse in the woods and causing him to fall. Pilot is there too, the handsome, soulful-eyed hound. If the book has one failing, it’s that there is insufficient mention of Pilot. You can’t have too much dog in a book.
Jane Eyre. A strange child, difficult to love. A lonely only child. She’s left to deal with so much pain at such a young age—the aftermath of death, the absence of love. It’s Mr. Rochester who gets burned in the end. I know how that feels. All of it.
Everything seems worse in the darkest hours of the night; I was surprised to hear that the birds were still singing, although they sounded angry. The poor creatures must hardly sleep in summer, when the light glimmers on and on. In the half dark, in the full dark, I remember, I remember. Awake in the shadows, two little rabbit heartbeats, breath like a knife. I remember, I remember . . . I closed my eyes. Eyelids are really just flesh curtains. Your eyes are always “on,” always looking; when you close them, you’re watching the thin, veined skin of your inner eyelid rather than staring out at the world. It’s not a comforting thought. In fact, if I thought about it for long enough, I’d probably want to pluck out my own eyes, to stop looking, to stop seeing all the time. The things I’ve seen cannot be unseen. The things I’ve done cannot be undone.
Think about something nice, one of my foster parents would say when I couldn’t sleep, or on nights when I woke up sweating, sobbing, screaming. Trite advice, but occasionally effective. So I thought about Pilot the dog.
I suppose I must have slept—it seems impossible that I wouldn’t have dropped off for at least a moment or two—but it didn’t feel like it. Sundays are dead days. I try to sleep as long as possible to pass the time (an old prison trick, apparently—thank you for the tip, Mummy) but on summer mornings, it can be difficult. When the phone rang just after ten, I’d been up for hours. I’d cleaned the bathroom and washed the kitchen floor, taken out the recycling and arranged all the tins in the cupboard so that the labels were facing forward in zetabetical order. I’d polished both pairs of shoes. I’d read the newspaper and completed all the crosswords and puzzles.
I cleared my throat before I spoke, realizing that I hadn’t uttered a word for almost twelve hours, back when I told the taxi driver where to drop me off. That’s actually quite good, for me—usually, I don’t speak from the point at which I state my destination to the bus driver on Friday night, right through until I greet his colleague on Monday morning.
“Eleanor?” It was Raymond, of course.
“Yes, this is she,” I said, quite curtly. For goodness’ sake, who did he expect? He coughed extravagantly: filthy smoker.
“Erm, right. I just wanted to let you know that I’m going in to see Sammy again today—wondered if you wanted to come with me?”
“Why?” I said.
He paused for quite a while—strange. It was hardly a difficult question.
“Well . . . I phoned the hospital and he’s much better—he’s awake—and he’s been moved into the general medical ward. I thought . . . I suppose I thought it’d be nice if he met us, in case he had any questions about what happened to him.”
I wasn’t thinking very quickly and had no time to consider the ramifications. Before I quite knew what had happened, we had arranged to meet at the hospital that afternoon. I hung up and looked at the clock on the living room wall, above the fireplace (it’s one I got in the Red Cross shop: electric blue circular frame, Power Rangers; adds a kind of rakish joie de vivre to the living room, I’ve always thought). I had several hours until the rendezvous.
I decided to take my time getting ready, and looked cautiously at myself in the mirror while the shower warmed up. Could I ever become a musician’s muse? I wondered. What was a muse, anyway? I was familiar with the classical allusion, of course, but, in modern-day, practical terms, a muse seemed simply to be an attractive woman whom the artist wanted to sleep with.
I thought about all those paintings: voluptuous maidens reclining in curvaceous splendor, waiflike ballerinas with huge limpid eyes, drowned beauties in clinging white gowns surrounded by floating blossoms. I was neither curvaceous nor waiflike. I was normal-sized and normal-faced (on one side, anyway). Did men ever look in the mirror, I wondered, and find themselves wanting in deeply fundamental ways? When they opened a newspaper or watched a film, were they presented with nothing but exceptionally handsome young men, and did this make them feel intimidated, inferior, because they were not as young, not as handsome? Did they then read newspaper articles ridiculing those same handsome men if they gained weight or wore something unflattering?
These were, of course, rhetorical questions.
I looked at myself again. I was healthy and my body was strong. I had a brain that worked fine, and a voice, albeit an unmelodious one; smoke inhalation all those years ago had damaged my vocal cords irreparably. I had hair, ears, eyes and a mouth. I was a human woman, no more and no less.
Even the circus freak side of my face—my damaged half—was better than the alternative, which would have meant death by fire. I didn’t burn to ashes. I emerged from the flames like a little phoenix. I ran my fingers over the scar tissue, caressing the contours. I didn’t burn, Mummy, I thought. I walked through the fire and I lived.
There are scars on my heart, just as thick, as disfiguring as those on my face. I know they’re there. I hope some undamaged tissue remains, a patch through which love can come in and flow out. I hope.
9
Raymond was waiting outside the front door of the hospital. I saw him bend down to light the cigarette of a woman in a wheelchair—she’d brought her drip out with her, on wheels, so that she could destroy her health at the same time as taxpayers’ money was being used to try and restore it. Raymond chatted to her as she smoked, puffing away himself. He leaned forward and said something and the woman laughed, a harridan’s cackle that ended in a prolonged bout of coughing. I approached with caution, fearing the noxious cloud might envelop me to deleterious effect. He spotted me coming, stubbed out his cigarette then ambled toward me. He was wearing a pair of denim trousers which were slung unpleasantly low around his buttocks; when his back was turned I saw an unwelcome inch of underpant—a ghastly imperial purple—and white skin covered in freckles, reminding me of a giraffe’s hide.