The White Family by Maggie Gee

Author:Maggie Gee
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781846591372
Publisher: Saqi

29 • May

May managed to keep the smile on her face until she was halfway down the stairs. If she showed her grief, the whole ward would know … Perhaps the rumour was already out. She knew how hospitals preyed on death. When she had gone for her hysterectomy after the problems that followed Dirk’s birth, there was always whispering, when people were goners –

(Alfred’s a goner. No, not possible.)

– the ones whose cancer had gone too far, the ones whose operations had gone badly –

(They won’t even operate. He does deserve that. He deserves a chance, but he isn’t going to get it. Because we’re too old, so they think we’re no good.)

Her face twitched and writhed with the urge to weep, but she forced the tears back, made herself smile.

(Alfred is dying. No, never.)

For May had always tried to be brave. She wasn’t self-pitying, or self-indulgent … They made her wince still, the cruel long words her father had used against her mother, her father who had educated himself enough to use long words like wooden paddles … Mum who had no learning at all. She washed for thirteen children by hand …

(Alfred, Alfred. I’ll be alone … Alfred, my darling. Alfred, duck.)

I was the youngest. Then the only one left. How can they be gone, my big laughing sisters?

(Just me and Alfred. Alfred and me. I suppose we thought we would go on forever.)

(Without Alfred I – No, don’t think it.)

I mustn’t complain, I’ve been very lucky.

My father criticized. My clothes, my hair. ‘You’re a pretty girl. Why must you look so scruffy? Can’t you make something of yourself?’ I didn’t know how to answer him. I suppose my mother never taught me to dress. She didn’t give a moment’s thought to her looks. How could she, poor woman, with thirteen children? And I’ve never known how to get myself up. I try for Alfred, but I never get it right. Except when Shirley buys me something.

(Will Shirley forgive him … when she knows he’s dying? The final lap. The final slope.)

It was sinking in in a different way from the conversation she had had with the doctor. On her own, it had all seemed dream-like, wrong.

But as soon as I saw his face today. As soon as our eyes met, we knew. We shared it, didn’t we? We shared the fear. And after that it will always be true –

May pushed it away. She could not bear it.

It didn’t do to dwell on the bad things, did it?

My father was sometimes very sweet to me. Softer on me than all the others, my mother told me, when she was dying. I was the youngest, his baby girl, and he loved me helping him in the shop, and was proud of me for being clever at school, though it never occurred to him I could go further. Of course it didn’t; he had raised thirteen, and he’d paid for the boys’ apprenticeships, so the girls had to marry, and that was that, yet he wasn’t happy about losing me to Alfred.

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