TURBINE | KAPOHAU

MIRIAM BROWN

Extract from Teshuvah

JOHN GALLAGHER
January 1942

Dr John Gallagher takes his thirty-minute route to work in the half-light. The sky becomes perfused with orange and lilac and heralds his day ahead. Something weighs down on him. He has left his wife alone, when his sadness will be buried by the fullness of his day.

He passes Kenning Park—the sun is higher now and reveals knee-high blades of grass and crimson tulips. Hills roll down to a solitary boat on the lake and in its reflection, he sees himself. In the distance, rows of battered houses start to appear one by one, half-hidden behind the smog. Above the rooftops of the more fortunate, smoke escape the chimneys. Curtains are drawn – his patients are in their bedrooms with acrid smells in porcelain pots stored up overnight from children too fearful, adults too cold, to venture to their outside privy. His steps falter – his patients have damp houses. They cling to work in hostile factories that pay a pittance and leave their tables bare. Tonight, he’ll return for roasted beef in a sweeter part of town. He wishes he was smaller somehow.

It must have rained in the night – the cobbles are slippery underfoot. John grasps the rail as he ascends the steps. The door looks noble with its brass sign ‘Dr John Gallagher General Practitioner MBChB’. It still takes him by surprise. His father left Dublin to work in the mines and John was once destined down in the pit.

‘Good morning, Dr Gallagher.’ Sylvia smiles and passes him a list.

‘Thank you.’ John walks to his consulting room. A cotton sheet is spread on the examination couch, the dispensary stocked, blades and sutures ready, hypodermics cleaned. Sylvia is a fine nurse and does so much since it all happened. He wonders if he shows his gratitude enough. He puts on his white coat and places a stethoscope around his neck. The door is ajar, the waiting room full of expectant faces – cloth-capped, ruddy-cheeked, snotty-nosed; all united in their trust of him. He loosens the knot of his silk tie.

The challenge today won’t be these patients but keeping his mind free of Velma. This morning, he resisted kissing her cheek in case it woke her to her vigil. Once she’d walk along the Serpentine at Hyde Park or go to the National. He sighs, that used to be her favourite gallery. Oh John, The Bathers at Asnières is so splendid, I felt my heart rise up, I really did.

The first few patients make it effortless. He loves his stethoscope – it makes him feel like an artisan. He hears a murmur low and rumbling, fine crepitations at the bases of the lungs and a pleural rub with the distinctive sound of shoes crunching in the snow. He feels a delight, his skills allow him to detect a butterfly rash and permanent stains of vitiligo on the skin. He rolls the Latin terms around his mouth erythema ab ignae and bullous pemphigoid. Yet he is summoned by the human component of it all, needs to do nothing more than listen. That is when he feels the privilege of the confessional component of his role.

‘It’s the war – so many dead, endless lists of fine young men and –’ The vicar stares at the floor.

John listens and his nod says go on.

‘The concentration camps. What Maker is this that can allow such evil?’ he tugs at his clergy collar. ‘Dr Gallagher, I can’t minister to my people when I no longer believe in the Lord.’

Since the casket left their house, John feels abandoned in the same way. He offers soothing words and arranges to talk again at the same time next week.

Gwen reaches for her hanky and Charlie stares at the parquet floor when John says, ‘I’m afraid it is now in the bones.’

He has no more to offer than the reassurance of morphine to ease impending pain. He sits with them in silence for a while.

‘Dr Gallagher it’s time for the abscess and there’s three more to see on the same street,’ says Sylvia.

‘Alright, I’ll start my rounds.’

He checks his doctor’s bag is well stocked before heading outside. The sun is high in the sky as he pushes on. Velma is alone in the kitchen where she’ll barely eat. Last week he heard her talking to herself and he couldn’t sleep at the thought of what she had mumbled she might do. The images are strong – Velma on London Bridge, leaning forward, her belly pressed against the barrier. She looks at him before leaping into the Thames. Velma taking tablets from the bathroom cupboard, Velma stealing them from his doctor’s bag, Velma with her head in the oven. He grasps the lamppost—the urge to run home is powerful.

During the first visit of his rounds, he holds open a boy’s mouth and with a slither of cold metal gently pushes down his tongue. Then, swift as a peregrine falcon, he lances a quinsy. The mother’s sigh of relief is his payment. He will refuse to accept the sixpence – it’s not her fault that her husband’s stroke keeps him at home.

He moves along the street. He laughs when a child sits uninvited on his lap, when he is greeted by a goat in a kitchen. Kids whisper under tables, play hide and seek and hopscotch in the yard. He is offered a biscuit, a blackcurrant jam sandwich, is given carrots from the farm or cut flowers ‘for the wife’. Time slips by. He hopes Velma has opened some windows and let in this fresh spring air.

At the corner house, the baby is breech. The room is full of promise. He savours exquisite moments like this before a baby is born. The mother’s moans are muffled. Her husband holds her hand, and John watches the newborn’s legs swinging like the pendulum of a grandfather clock. No one speaks – even the children know to stop their chatter. The midwife helps the after-coming head, forceps clasped around it to slow it down. John feels humbled by the enormity of her skill. A cry pierces the silence. Delight erupts.

‘Mam, can we hold it?’

‘Wait a minute, let your mother come right.’

As he examines the child’s delicate fontanelle, he recalls their baby and Velma saying, ‘she has your nose.’

‘Your lips, Velma. And look at her foot, it’s so small – it fits in the palm of my hand.’

He checks the heart, the hips, places the baby in a blanket-lined drawer. He takes a last look at the cold house – the two rooms shared by eight. The shilling in his hand feels icy – it will take the father a month in the factory to earn it back.

It is only with his last patient he feels undone. The house is candle-lit, draughty, but the child is flushed. a strawberry tongue, a sandpaper rash – scarlet fever. This little one will recover, unlike his daughter with her purple patches that didn’t press away, her neck stiff from meningism, her temperature off the scale.

‘Keep young Susan’s fever down. Let her ride it out.’

He notes the hope returning in her mother’s eyes and thinks of Velma’s gaze turned only inwards now.

‘Thank you so much, Doctor.’

‘I’ll visit tomorrow.’

John walks home to Velma in the dark, his tears tucked away like the scalpel in his doctor’s bag. What can be salvaged from the ruins of their loss? And what of the part of the marriage that departed with the casket? Drizzle coats his beard. He pulls up his coat collar to cover his neck. He has forgotten his umbrella but doesn’t mind getting wet.

*

VELMA LEVIN
February 1942

Velma wakes and realises she has left the realm where Caroline still splashes in the waves or perches on John’s shoulders and tries to touch the clouds. She sits up – the shutters are open; the glare intrudes her world. It must be mid-afternoon already. There is solace in that – the faster the day speeds by the better. She swings her legs over the edge of the bed and rests her toes on the wool rug by the bed. She pauses –  the urge to lie back down again and enfold herself in the eiderdown is strong. People chatter as they promenade past the window. Velma heads to the kitchen to get away from them. Without slippers, the stone floor is cold, but any punishment is good.

Wilted roses scent the room. She should bathe her matted hair, get back her own perfume. She pours tea in a china cup – a wedding gift from Sylvia – and slices lemon. Juice seeps into a scratch on her fingertip and makes it sting. She envelopes it with her lips, coats it with saliva and fights an image of Caroline sucking her thumb.

Baskets of dusty potatoes stand unwashed in the larder. John will be home soon hungry from his work, but she puts the knife in the sink. Taking her cup of tea, she wanders to the dining room table and rests her head in her hands. She can still see Caroline in a wooden highchair eating her first baby rusk dissolved in creamy milk. Velma and John laughing at the way their baby smacked her lips. A year later Caroline held fistfuls of sliced apple in her mouth. Four-year-old Caroline with a knife and fork, chasing carrots around the plate. Velma leans back and sips her tea. It’s tepid and tastes bitter.

In the lounge, the bookcase is piled high with Zola and Flaubert, the gramophone offers Mozart. Memories of Caroline stop her focusing on the pages. And won’t the sonata just make her weep? A mountain of unopened letters clutters the desk. Next to it, her cello in its case, half-hidden, seems reproachful – over eleven months since you have played me.

‘Alright,’ she says, ‘I’ll at least get you out.’

She sits on a stool, in her brushed cotton nightie. On the sofa are a pair of John’s wool socks. She puts them on her feet and presses them into the carpet, then places her left foot slightly forward, clutches the cello in her hands and guides the lowest peg behind her ear. The hips of the cello slide between her knees which steady it, and the neck rests softly against her sternum.

’I had forgotten,’ she says.

Eyes shut, she turns the pegs, plucking the strings and tightening her bow. The feel of the horsehair comforts – a familiar tickle on her nose. A few arpeggios, some pizzicato. Then, with barely any warm-up, Velma launches into the masterpiece. She plays, from memory, all the opening bars of the slow movement of Elgar’s cello concerto. She is fully absorbed in its soulful tones; she opens to its intimacy and in turn offers the most delicate of emotions. She finds a power; is transported, loses herself. She wobbles her fret finger to make a vibrato; rich notes emit. The instrument vibrates as she executes a buildup of lilting tones. And, through its poignancy, she feels the release of the piece – a surrender. The final bar resonates around the room. Velma flings her bow in the air then she and the cello fall silent.

As if she were back in the Wigmore Hall, she has played with perfect precision – had a precious ten minutes as the woman she was before it all.

Velma lowers the cello back into its case like a baby into a crib.

*

JOHN GALLAGHER
February 1942

John opens the gate of 54 Woodacre Road. Something seems different in their ground floor flat – the lights are on. He takes the path by the side of the block and opens the back door. On the kitchen table, dinner is ready for him – mutton and beans and potatoes. The dishes aren’t piled high in the sink. A vase with sprigs of lavender from the garden brightens the windowsill. He presses his hat against his chest as if it were a child in his arms. Music leads him to the study – Velma has placed a record on the gramophone, a simple waltz by Johann Strauss. The room is warm, and she stands by the fire.

‘Darling, you’re back,’ she says.

‘Yes, here I am.’ He walks towards her. He doesn’t speak. In one hand he takes hers and places the other on her waist. She smells of the scent they bought in France. A delicate perfume she hasn’t worn before. They start to move in silent unison – they both know how. For the first time in a year, they dance.

When the music ends, Velma’s head rests against his chest. John looks across to the mahogany sideboard and sees a gold-framed photograph of a five-year-old child. She has little black shoes, folded ankle socks. She is sitting on a gate, an apple in her hand. Behind her, an expanse of grass and poppies. To her side a piebald mare that seems intent on being in the picture. John wonders when Velma placed it there – it has been in the bottom drawer for such a long time.

‘Let’s dance again,’ he says as he moves the needle back to the outer edge of the record.

She doesn’t resist him – they glide around the lounge, execute each step perfectly, their absorption complete. On the bookshelf all their unpolished medals and dusty cups from ballroom competitions. Could he suggest it’s time for them to go out and dance again? Perhaps they could learn the Jitterbug – a new dance called one of his patients told him about. Maybe somewhere, despite the war, a venue will be up and running. Maybe Velma is ready.