There but for The_ A Novel - Ali Smith [58]
Not that he scared May Young, she could see right through the likes of him, funny little chap who, in the very way he slammed his hand against the little plastic thing on the door with the stuff in it which gave out the antiseptic, made May Young want to say, at his disappearing back, in her most calm voice, foul words the like of which she had never said in her life, never even thought in her life, hadn’t even known till then that she even knew existed).
Which was all proof, which all went to show, that May Violet Young (May Winch as was, till she married Philip that June day in ’47, the river outside the church they got married in bright the length of itself with sunlight, and even the ruins themselves you could call the word beautiful then, with the grass growing and all the wild flowers nobody’d expected putting their pretty heads up all over the city) was not dead yet. She could prove for sure she was not dead yet because there, sweaty in the old claw of an old hand, whose old hand? her old hand, her own, go on, open it, proof: the balled-up tissue which held what she’d managed to get out of her mouth of the stuff they gave her to make her forget to remember the day, the month, the prime minister, make her drop her bowl with the custard in it, stuff which she had not swallowed, would not swallow, which she’d held under her tongue when the nurse, Irish-Liverpool, always a cheery word, gave her, and if it wasn’t Irish-Liverpool it was Derek the male nurse, lovely boy from the Caribbean, with May nodding and sending them on their way with a friendly eye.
May was also not dead yet because she had seen the future, and their future would not, while she had life in her, be her future.
Not Harbour House.
Well, she’d rather die, was the long and the short of it.
For in Harbour House (and even the very name was a lie, not even the ghost of a harbour anywhere near the place) she had, some years ago, visited a poor old lady. The poor old lady had been Mrs. Masters, and she was what you’d call a real lady, well-to-do, a long-time loyal client of Reading Flooring and Carpeting right from when Philip opened the business in ’52. Philip had sold to her and through her to her friends too, for decades, the woven wool and rayon and nylon lines, the latex backing lines, linoleum lines, variegated yarn, the Danish, the short twist pile, deep pile, the cut pile lines, right up to the time of the hardwood and laminate. Thanks to Mrs. Masters, Philip had floored the quality’s houses for years. Quality always brought quality with it. And Mrs. Masters was a fine clever lady, had been in Intelligence in the war.
May had sat in the Lounge of Harbour House with Mrs. Masters. She knew it was the Lounge because there was a sign, the kind you buy in Woolworths, stuck on the wall. It was cheap gold plastic and it said the word Lounge.
She had held Mrs. Masters’s hand and had looked down as Mrs. Masters dozed, at the old lady’s feet in their clean slippers on the carpeting of Harbour House.
The carpeting was an affront to those slippers. The carpeting was inadequate. It was patchy. It was none-too-clean.
In May’s other hand she had a brochure she’d picked up at the front door. The brochure said that prospective Residents of Harbour House were positively encouraged to bring one or two small mementoes with them when they came, and that the occasional (small) item of furniture was also permitted on request.
Someone, just then,