Smut: Stories by Alan Bennett

textbook spot. They’d no excuse.’
    Ballantyne had had supper with Mrs Donaldson on several occasions but without ever touching her. Now, because she is or has been ill, he feels empowered to take her hand and stroke it therapeutically.
    ‘I blame myself. I should have been there. Still, it will do them no harm to have come that close to killing someone so early on in their careers. I made a lesson of it this morning and I said…’
    Ballantyne having taken advantage of his position as doctor Mrs Donaldson now takes advantage of hers as patient and, seemingly weary, closes her eyes.
    ‘You’re tired,’ says Ballantyne, reluctantly releasing her hand and falling back into the traditional doctor-speak he was always mocking in his students. ‘Try and get some rest. We’ll soon have you out of here.’
    Scarcely had he gone when a more enlivening visitor arrived in the person of Ollie bearing an eccentric posy from the garden consisting of two sweet peas, a dandelion, a sprig of privet and a pigeon’s feather, an assemblage which, having put it in her tooth glass, he proceeded to draw while sitting on the end of her bed. He took her hand, too, which made her glad he wasn’t with the listless Geraldine, who, unsurprisingly, had a thing about hospitals.
    Ollie wanted to see her scar and was disappointed to find it was still hidden by dressings or he might have drawn that too.
    ‘Never mind,’ he said. ‘Plenty of time for that,’ and promising to keep the house tidy, was off.
    Gwen was her other visitor and though the full circumstances of the students’ negligence had been kept from her she renewed her efforts to get her mother to find employment elsewhere or, better still, abandon employment al together. This was in between floods of tears since, as she took pains to make clear, this visit was for her particularly poignant as she had not been in the hospital since her father died. She was explaining this to her mother, but, as she told her indifferent husband later, ‘Mother seemed very tired. Slept most of the time I was there. It reminds you she won’t always be with us.’
    Back at home for a brief convalescence, to begin with Mrs Donaldson resisted the temptation to resume her nightly routine. After that first unsatisfactory evening it seemed unlikely that there would be a repeat performance and no necessity for it either as Ollie had paid the rent on time and in full.
    Perhaps her brush with mortality ought to have turned her thoughts to worthier objects, but it hadn’t. What was putting her off was Geraldine. Her diffidence and the general drabness of her disposition displeased Mrs Donaldson if only because it tended to take the edge off her nocturnal vigils. Though still occasionally en poste she was now less conscientious about it, once knocking off in the middle of an encounter that gave no sign of coming to a conclusion and since she knew the conclusion was likely to be Geraldine’s melancholy, long withdrawing wail she felt she was better off in bed. Also, she told herself, she’d had an operation.
    She reflected that what had briefly been almost suffocatingly exciting was now routine, as routine in fact as it had been when Mr Donaldson was alive and she was still a participant. She didn’t like to feel like this – it seemed a portent of age. Morality had nothing to do with it.
    It meant though that any relief from her mural duties was welcome and when Geraldine had to go over to Halifax to stay with her sister Mrs Donaldson was glad to get back to an early bed and a nice read.
     
     
    EARLIER THAT EVENING she and Dr Ballantyne, or Duncan as she was now licensed to call him, had been out to supper. He talked about his life and his career and when it got to the coffee stage he asked her to marry him.
    She had been expecting this and while she could not give him an immediate reply she had an answer ready which was that, flattered and grateful though she was, this proposal had come as such a