she retraced her steps towards the outside world, Amy saw the hospital quite differently. Passing the wards, she peered in and saw the people in the beds, old men and children and one room lined with babies’ cots, all different and all needing different things. She looked at the nurses’ preoccupied faces under the stiff white pleats of their caps, and wondered if any of them would become a friend. A senior doctor with a flotilla of juniors behind him brushed past her, and one or two of the young men glanced back curiously at Amy.
The hospital wasn’t just a grim Victorian pile smelling of illness. It was a world in itself, occupied with the realities that she knew she was missing at Bruton Street. In four weeks’ time she would be joining it.
Outside there was a single circular flowerbed crammed with egg-yolk yellow wallflowers in the macadamized strip that separated the hospital from the busy main road. Amy beamed at the hideous flowers and then up at the building’s red-brick height towering above.
‘I’ll be seeing you soon,’ she said aloud and then she turned and almost danced out of the gates into the traffic.
The hospital was across the river, in a part of London she hardly knew. No one she knew had ever had any connection with the hospital or the area it served, and it was for those reasons she had chosen it, although Matron must never know that, Amy reminded herself. Matron, of course, believed it was the Lambeth’s distinguished reputation that had attracted her.
A cab, heading back to the West End and civilization, accelerated towards her. Amy almost hailed it, and then she stopped herself.
‘Begin as you intend to continue,’ she ordered. She let the cab sweep past, and then with her hands in her pockets she began to walk towards Westminster Bridge. The sun, with the first heat of summer in it, shone on her head, like a blessing.
*
On the evening of Amy’s interview at the Royal Lambeth, Isabel was sitting alone in her drawing room at Ebury Street.
She looked up at the clock on the mantelpiece. It was a pretty clock with an enamelled face, a wedding present from one of the Jaspert cousins.
Eleven o’clock.
She folded up her embroidery without glancing at the soft blues and purples of the pansy she had completed this evening. Peter hadn’t telephoned, but that could mean anything. If he had gone to the House he might be attending a debate, or meeting colleagues from any of the committees he served on. If he had gone on to his club from the City, he might be drinking with his friends, and simply have forgotten the time. Either way, she would not wait up for him. It was a decision Isabel was making increasingly often, and as it always did it brought both relief and a twist of regret.
Slowly she went upstairs and made herself go mechanically through the routines she had laid down for herself, creaming her face and hands and brushing out her hair until it crackled under the bristles. When she had finished Isabel looked at her face in the mirror. It seemed that the roundness of girlhood had disappeared and the new face was hollower, and sadder. Perhaps if she had her hair cut off, so that she looked as sleek and shiny as enamel, it would give her back some of the confidence that seemed to be ebbing away with every day of her marriage.
Isabel glanced at the door of Peter’s dressing-room, connecting his bedroom to hers, and suddenly heard the silence of the house. It had been with her all evening, ever since the solitary formal dinner she had eaten with Peter’s place laid and unoccupied at the other end of the table.
Yes, she would have her hair cut off.
The silence stretched on, mockingly unpunctured by her small decisions. It wouldn’t make a fraction of difference, Isabel thought, whether she cut her hair or not.
She was lonely here, amongst her pretty furniture and her china and pictures and flowers.
Isabel hung up her robe and got into bed, and then lay quietly looking round the room before turning off her light. It was all just as she had expected it would be, and yet in the midst of all the things, nothing like it at all. Usually when her thoughts ran on like this Isabel forced herself to turn them aside, but tonight a new fear made her want to confront them.
She had never tasted loneliness before she was married, and she had never dreamed that it would be lying in wait for her. She had believed, in all her innocence, that marriage would be a communion between herself and Peter forever. She had imagined that they would live in their lovely house, well provided with friends and families, but still within a core containing just the two of them.
It wasn’t like that, Isabel had discovered. The core was rotten.
When she wasn’t lonely, when Peter was with her, what she mostly felt was fear.
She made her racing thoughts slow down so she could consider that.
She was afraid of her own husband, and she had been afraid of him since their wedding night. The fear bred the loneliness, and the loneliness increased her fear. It had grown all through their time in Italy. The loveliness of the place had made it worse for her because the beautiful days only faded and brought the nights again.
None of the careful descriptions she had read, nor Adeline’s little talks, had prepared her for those nights. When she had imagined it, Isabel had thought that married love with Peter would be gentle and slow, a tender expression of his feeling for her. He had been careful of her during their engagement. And yet, once she was in his bed he took her body as if it was his by right. And her body recoiled from the coarse touch of his hot flesh, from the taste of his breath and the weight of him pinning her down, and his painful, blunt invasion of it.
At first she had tried to tell him that the things he did hurt and frightened her. Embarrassment, and a reluctance to hurt him, made her explanations vague and faltering. Peter had been embarrassed too, and his embarrassment made him angry. Isabel began to see that he didn’t know how to control himself when he was aroused, and he simply deflected with anger and impatience all the questions they might have asked one another.
Worse, as the weeks of their honeymoon went by, Isabel understood something else about him. Her very reluctance, and the way she shrank from his big body, only aroused him further. When he saw that she was afraid, he seemed to need to take her more violently still. She knew that he would never admit that, even if he understood it himself.
So Isabel protected herself with a barrier of passivity, a pretence that she felt nothing. Now that they were at home again she had devised a set of wifely rules that she made herself obey every night. If she could do everything she was supposed to do in preparing for bed, without hurrying or skipping anything, and still be asleep before he lumbered into her room, well, then, that was perfectly fair. But she mustn’t pretend. If she was still awake when he came to her, she would let him, and she would stare over her husband’s shoulder into the soft darkness. She would lie still and try to fight back the nausea, and suppress her longing to scream out and struggle away from underneath him.
In the beginning, the daytimes were better. There were enough times when they were comfortable together, as they had been before the wedding. Peter was simply her husband, as she had dreamed he would be, on the evenings when they entertained successfully, or sat quietly together in their drawing room with the clock ticking. At those times Isabel had felt that their lives could, after all, be salvaged. Then the nights came, and the weight of her guilt at her sexual inadequacy and her revulsion, inextricably connected, came down on her again. There weren’t many comfortable times now.
They couldn’t talk about it. It seemed, already, much too late.
There
