And so they go until she finally leaves and Henry returns to his perch at the back of the shop. Maybe there’s more to it than I can tell, things being transmitted on some frequency I can’t hear.
* * *
Mrs. Roo works at the laundrette across the street. Sometimes she comes in and tells me about her husband’s ulcer, her daughter’s boyfriends, her son who never came back from the war—not dead, just enamoured of Paris and Berlin. Works in bars and restaurants, lives as a bohemian, plays the saxophone, wants to write. Neither of us has ever been outside of England. “Let’s go,” she’ll say, looking out the foggy window, up and out, past the city, “We’ll build ourselves a hot-air balloon, launch it from the roof, and float away to Bangkok.” Mrs. Roo has more of an affinity for life than I could ever hope to have. I wonder if she holds me in contempt for it. I know just by looking at her that in spite of her troubles she’s never had sadness take hold of her the way it does me. They way it travels down my limbs, making it hard to walk, hard to comb my hair. It would show in her eyes, if it did. Or around the eyes, rather, in shades of red and dark blue. Like mine. I wonder if she will miss me when I’m gone.
The new doctor has given me pills. Henry waited in the lounge with an issue of Punch while we met in the office near Hampstead Heath. His name sounds like a country manor: Dr. Hazelwood. I think going there makes Henry feel more English. He heard about him from one of his gentile friends down the pub, who also had a wife who’d gone a bit ‘funny.’ It was a lovely day. Birds twittered outside the window as Dr. Hazelwood, a jolly old git around Henry’s father’s age, explained what a difficult time women like me sometimes have, what with raising small children and fulfilling the duties of a modern wife, and so on. What an utter prat. The pills induce a general torpor that is not altogether unpleasant, and I’m to take them whenever and wherever I should fancy doing so, he says. They’re free, after all. I am part of a government-sponsored control group. I can spend every minute engulfed in a thick fog for all they care—it’s just to see if the stuff will make me sprout antlers or turn barmy. Or hurt the baby.
“Throw them away,” states Rose. Easy for her to say.
“Easy for you to say.”
“You can’t possibly believe all that bollocks he tried to sell you about being a modern housewife. For God’s sake, Penelope, show some sense.”
“He’s a doctor. He wouldn’t do me any harm. He swore an oath. A hypocritical…no. Hippocratic.”
“Well, I can think of a few oaths I’d like to swear right now.”
“Lucy the baker’s wife takes them too.”
“Now there’s a fine example of a woman.”
“What’s wrong with Lucy?”
“Nothing’s wrong with Lucy, Penelope, but I’ve never witnessed much that was particularly right with her either.”
“Well, I mustn’t stop taking them on my own. I’ll have to ask the doctor.”
“Wonderful. He has you well and addicted already. All we need when there’s another war about to start: state sponsored chemically sedated women. Surely this is exactly what Karl Marx had in mind when he dreamed of a socialist revolution.”
“You’re being sarcastic, aren’t you.”
“Too right I am.”
But the pills, it turns out, are a weapon, too. I know they aren’t as innocuous as the doctor wants me to think. For example, were I to take a full day’s maximum recommended dose all at once, mixed with a little rum, I could induce a coma, and if I added a few more pills I could probably do myself in entirely. The idea is quite seductive, I’ve discovered, like a tiny little animal that’s adorable to look at but lethal when provoked, and late at night while Henry snuffles and snores I take it out and play with it, gently so that it doesn’t swipe me with its sharp little claws. Attracted and repelled, drawn in am I, by the sparkling vistas of possibility that open up before me on the other side of my own demise. No, that’s a pretentious lie. What really attracts me about death is how restful it would be. Like Oliver Cromwell’s death mask at the Museum of London—how happy and calm he looks. It’s all behind him.
There’s a new shop opening on Brick Lane. It will be a ladies’ shoe store, with all sorts of flashy new models. Some are even meant to be worn with trousers! Iris says Rebecca West has a pair of trousers and has worn them with great success at intellectual gatherings both in Europe and in America. Imagine. If I live to be 95 I don’t think I’ll ever get up the courage to go about in trousers. Henry would laugh until he choked. Also the shape of my body would make them look awful I’m sure; perhaps of I were still young, with my slender, bendy body, but that seems so far away now. Maybe after the baby I can try and slim down. Rose says she dropped a stone by taking part in vigorous discussions at her meetings. And it’s true; she could be a perfect gar_onne if she fancied, she’s as hale and trim as a country duchess who ranges the moor with her greyhounds.
They’re modernizing the paraffin shop, bringing in modern new stock, taking away the glass cases, the lamps and the sconces and the chandelier. They told Henry no one would want them now, but that in twenty or so years people would see them as novelty items, so he is making room for them in the new factory. “To remind us of how far we’ve come!” he says. Crows, rather. He really is over the moon about the factory. Walks around with a proud gleam in his eye, a new strut in his step, the stocky little thing. Though I’m not tall either, of course.
We shall put the chandelier in the new house on Barn Rise, I say. Not that the neighbourhood has seen a barn in centuries, if ever, though you can reach the green at the top of the hill. I wonder whether there was some pagan barn erected in the vicinity thousands of years ago. Some strange interregnum urban farmscape? It must have been countryside at some point; perhaps Chaucer’s pilgrims would stop near here on their way to see the Archbishop of Canterbury. A visit to the library at Cricklewood proves the theory partially correct—indeed the A5 runs along the eastern side of the borough of Brent, following the road laid down by the Romans. It continues past the abbey at St. Albans, and then trundles on through Hertfordshire, Bedfordshire, Buckinghamshire, and several shires more, avoiding Wales as much as possible but for the briefest of pauses at Bangor, ending at Holyhead where the post or such travellers as may desire to do so may then catch a ship to Ireland and beyond.
December 15, 2008
Goose Lane Editions Launches New Online Media Resources
December 15, 2008
New From Gaspereau Press
