The Collected Novels Volume Two by Elizabeth Jane Howard

Author:Elizabeth Jane Howard
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Open Road Media
Published: 2017-07-27T00:00:00+00:00

4

DAISY

‘Are you quite comfortable, Daisy?’

She nodded weakly and smiled. When they went away she shifted so that the weight was completely off her left shoulder, which intensified the cramp in the right one. While she waited for them to tell her that the ambulance was ready to take her to the airport she reflected how much people harped on anything in short supply. Elizabethan poems about the lover’s perfumed breath, freedom in places where there wasn’t any, truth allowed by politicians and governors to emerge in much the proportions that icebergs were visible, and comfort in hospitals – some relative degree of it was constantly alluded to.

‘Quite comfortable’ had come to mean for her only that she was not wanting to scream from pain. People had lived for centuries with rotting teeth, lack of any choice about their lives, in various travesties of democracy and only with what truth they could make out of the whole thing for themselves. And pain, like terminal illness and death, was shoved into the background where everyone hoped it belonged and would stay. She started to consider what acceptable degrees of all these things were confronted, but then the amazing adaptability or resilience that she had observed patients displaying in both of the hospitals she had been in intervened: it was impossible to gauge other people’s pain against one’s own. Talk of low thresholds, of couragè, of good behaviour or not complaining, of never wanting anything, varied hopelessly from patient to patient, so the word ‘relative’ wrote the whole thing off as insoluble.

The worst bit had been the fall and lying in scorching sun while various tourists milled helplessly about her. There was not a doctor on the pyramid and several well-meaning people tried to help her to her feet until she fainted. She came to strapped to a stretcher in an ambulance that jolted and blared its way along the road, at a speed that took no account of the potholes. Someone gave her an injection and the pain retreated.

The next thing she remembered was lying on a bed or trolley – something that had been moving anyway – in some passage or anteroom, with a nurse asking her questions in Spanish that she did not seem able to answer satisfactorily. She managed her name and her date of birth, English, on holiday. No, she was not with anyone, she was alone. Where was she staying? She tried to remember the name of the hotel, but could not. ‘Amigos, familias,’ the woman repeated, putting her face nearer and speaking loudly as though this would make her understand better and produce them, but the thick lenses on her spectacles made her eyes menacing, and the gold rims glinted intolerably from the fluorescent lights.

Her head was throbbing, her mouth parched. She asked for water, but the woman shook her head, ‘Agua niente,’ and went away. Time passed and the pain seeped back – her foot, her leg. It crept up her body, her left side.

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