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EVERYONE'S TOGETHER, TRY NOT TO WORRY
Valentina was off work for the rest of the week. The older Shnellbrot-Thomas children were home from school for the Easter holidays and Emily had casually mentioned the morning before that the one that hadn't been feeling well, had chicken pox. (When Emily said the little girl wasn't feeling well and asked her to collect her tray from her room, Valentina had assumed it was an ordinary cold.) Now it seemed all the children had it. Valentina had never had chicken pox! Emily assumed everybody had chicken pox when they were children. 'Hadn't they? No, she was certain Valentina had had the illness and had just forgotten.' Valentina assured her that she had not.
While they may have been lax about formal documents related to the outside world, her guardians were painstaking in involving her in the issue of and her own health and responsibility she had towards it. There was probably added concern due of her childhood heart condition and perhaps also because they took their duty to her parents so seriously (or possibly because none of the women had had children of their own and therefore viewed them as more 'breakable' than real parents might... or maybe just because she was the closest being to offspring any of them had ever had and they loved her so dearly). Whatever the reason, every illness Valentina had ever had was met with alarm, discussed in detail and even recorded.
There were rules: she was not to go outside without her throat covered until mid spring, at least. She always had to wear a slip and an undershirt – even in summer (and they checked). Everything she came in contact with had to be washed THOROUGHLY. She was neither to drink nor eat after another person... and so on. They would be horrified to see how she was living now! Thinking back about it all, it was lucky she hadn't developed some major type of phobia! (She was probably ready for the loony bin by now, but that was another story.) The concern was to the point that if she got a fever or a sore throat there was near panic in the monastery. The guilt that arose from 'allowing herself' to become ill actually felt worse than the painful effects of most of the illnesses themselves.
Initially she had been a bit of a tomboy. However, the bruises and scrapes that other children got were met with such scolding and (much worse) silent disappointment that the natural wildness in her quickly waned. The lectures and fuss that followed eventually finished the job – all long before her parents died and she moved in with the nuns on a permanent basis. She fell out of a tree once on early summer visits and she was rubbed down with aromatic alcohols and put to bed on sugar water and teas of bitter herbs for two days! Everyone was so upset, she scarcely wanted to climb a ladder afterwards. (The tree was promptly cut down.) And so, the habit of viewing her own wellbeing with enormous gravity was instilled in her from an early age. (The lack of it was of course the main source of her current overwhelming anxiety.)... The outcome to all that coddling had been that she went from being the fairly clumsy and adventurous child to being an unusually graceful and precautious, if not excessively self-aware and annoyingly fastidious, youth. The exacting conscientiousness spread out into the other aspects of her life, where it was often misunderstood as judgement against others, rather than the stringent demands on one's self that it was and would work to ruin of many of her adult acquaintanceships.
At any rate, whether the coddling had been to her benefit or to her disadvantage, she could say with certainty that she would have known if she had ever had chicken pox.
Emily 'felt terrible'... for a little while (a very little while). Her concern instantly turned to annoyance when Valentina said that she could not come back while the children were still contagious. Emily needed certain things done before they left for the Easter holiday in Scotland and felt very hard done-by that Valentina was being "such a bore over such a silly thing". With Emily's insistence, Valentina spoke to her doctor. Blanchard was very brief: he confirmed that if she hadn't had the highly contagious illness before, she was indeed likely to get it and that it was often quite severe in adults. From the tone of his voice, she could tell that the doctor found it completely idiotic that she was even considering exposing herself to the illness, especially with her weakened immune system. She was too ashamed to explain to Blanchard how she had come into contact with the infected children to be able to further explain that she hadn't really had the choice. Emily questioned Valentina on who her doctor was and what exactly he had said and wondered if she could speak to the man herself. 'It was only chicken pox after all; it might do her some good. Anyway she was sure the girl had had it before and was just being awkward. It was all such a bore – quite inconsiderate really.'
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Valentina was not looking forward to missing the pay, but he was looking forward to sleeping in on Tuesday morning. However at 8:30 there was a knock at the door. The driver who had stopped to help her herd the goats in three months earlier passed by to say that, three geese had somehow bizarrely stowed away in his van and that he assumed they were hers. He had been out of his normal round that day and lived quite far away, so he apologised that he hadn't come earlier. He explained that he hadn't been able to bring the geese back as he was working, but that he was happy to offer her some money for them (although they had cost a fair bit to keep over the time). 'He liked a nice goose for Easter and the other two could go in the freezer.'
After the courier reassured a horrified Valentina he hadn't killed any of them (yet...) and that they were all in good health, she was so happy, she kissed him on both cheeks and hugged him, in spite of his murderous leanings. Before leaving, the courier promised on his mother, he wouldn't kill any of the birds and refusing all of Valentina's repeated offers for money to cover their care, left her with his address. The next day she drove the three and half hours to pick up Monsieur Thomas, Ermengarde and Evangeline. Once there, she declined the driver's fervent offers to stay for dinner, to the relief of his rather inhospitable looking wife, who was annoyed that her husband hadn't accepted the money for their inconvenience – considering that there wouldn't be a goose on the table for Easter. Valentina instead left a bottle of some nettle cordial and after many more thank-yous, set off with the three full grown geese in the small back space of the little two seater Mercedes.
It was mayhem on the way back. Valentina tried continually to soothe the geese but was ineffective. She had raised them since they were fluffy little goslings, but being an exceedingly nervous sort of animal, they completely panicked most of the 340 kilometres. Monsieur Thomas, who was very large and normally an aloof and typically proud gander who went about with his beak high up in the air and never letting anyone –not even Valentina– touch him, was the most afraid and wanted to sit in her lap the whole way. He squawked and squawked and tried to open his wings, causing the two females to squawk even louder. He kept nibbling with his serrated beak at Valentina's ears to get her attention. At one point he managed to somehow step on her head, almost getting the claw of his huge, webbed foot in her eye, in his persistent effort to get over to her. Fearing a road accident, she finally stopped to put him in the passenger seat as a compromise and to try and sooth them, fed them the cake she brought for her lunch and gave them some water... (Feeding them was probably a bad idea.) Ermengarde and Evangeline then also wanted to be in the passenger seat and Monsieur Thomas still continued to try to sit in Valentina's lap – often ending up over the steering wheel and window –therefore frequently blocking the view or otherwise impeding her control of the vehicle– throughout the journey.
At least the people on the motorway found it amusing and showed how much, by driving alongside of her for miles laughing, pointing and honking their horns. The police stopped her, although by a stroke of good luck didn't give her a violation, or notice she hadn't displayed the compulsory sticker indicating the origin of the car's foreign registration, so that was something. With a poor sense of direction at the best of times, Valentina got lost, so it took them six hours to get home. This caused her to be paranoid the geese would dehydrate, or die of sudden shock from their extended upset and so she kept stopping to give them drinks of water –more of which ended up in the car than down their throats– and pieces of bread to pacify them. She couldn't drink or eat anything herself, because she knew she would have to stop and go to the toilet and was too worried of leaving the animals alone in the car... She only just narrowly escaped running out of petrol.
"Don't worry. No one has been left. We're all together. Everyone's together. Don't worry. Try not to worry." She said the same sentences over and over again, the whole way home. (Little comforted by her reassurances, the geese squawked at the top of their lungs all the way there.)
Valentina needn't have worried that the three hadn't been fed before they left; they must have actually eaten quite a lot and saved it up instead of expelling it while they were outside. By the time they got back, the inside of the car was smeared from carpet to roof with grassy, watery goose defecations and slimy bread and cake mash. Stumbling out of the car, looking shell shocked and feeling more grateful than she had felt in a long while to still be alive, Valentina too was smeared in goose excrement and bursting for the toilet herself; she had also gotten her period, which was soaked through her jeans.
She would have to worry about the car another time. She fed the animals, put them to bed and wearily went inside.