soon as she started to talk she began to cry, a wailing sort of crying she’d never done before, which hurt her throat and made her have to blow her nose, and made her breath stick in her throat as if it were something she’d swallowed, a bone. “Please,” the nurse said. “Do you think you’re the only patient we have to attend to? Have some consideration for others—please!”
The thing it was necessary to say was where she’d got the T-shirt from; that she’d taken it out of a basket in the bathroom, where somebody had said dirty clothes went, but that was all the same to her, all her clothes were neither clean nor dirty but just what she wore, and it seemed to her the ones in the basket were just that, clothes. When the policewoman came back, she tried to ex-plain it to her. “Not out of her bedroom,” she said. “I never went in there.”
The woman frowned. “I’m sorry, darling, I don’t know what you’re on about. What T-shirt is this, then?”
“Shoplifting,” a nurse breathed. “I’ll just bet you.”
“Look, just don’t go on about it,” the policewoman said. “All right? I’m sure it’ll just be forgotten about, if you don’t keep on.”
Behind the screens the nurse said, “As if that were all she had to concern herself about.”
“She had a bag of clothes,” the policewoman explained. “New ones. That’ll be it. Couple of hours before she collapsed somebody saw her selling them.”
“Well, where did she get them from, you wonder? And did nobody do anything about it?”
“You see all sorts of things on the streets,” the policewoman said. “The first thing you learn in this job is to expect no assistance from passersby.”
Time passed; she could not guess how much. The nights were bright and full of action, full of squeaking wheels in the corridors and the squeaking of shoes as nurses ran. Days were indistinguishable. She didn’t know the day of the week, not that she ever had. They put her in a side room, said, “I should say you’re privileged, Miss.” She heard diagnoses, part diagnoses of her condition. Can’t or won’t eat. Can’t or won’t remember. Their voices were hard and bright, like knives.
She heard nurses gossiping, talking about an abortion, one that had breathed. Her own breathing became painfully tight, as if she were trying not to draw attention to herself, trying not to take up space. In the hospital there were sluices and incinerators. She lay in the ward’s half day, half night, deciding when and how to run.
Ralph drove to Blakeney. Ginny let him in, twittering nervously and offering him a drink. “I don’t think so,” he said. “I’d like to talk to Anna alone, I suppose that’s all right with you?”
Ginny waved him toward her drawing room. The shock of the vast window: the gray day flooded in, its monochromes intermingled, the dun mud of the creek and the shiver of gulls’ wings.
Anna sat with her back to the light. She was wearing a gray dress, and he noticed it because it was not hers; it was too short, too narrow, and even as he came in she was pulling at its neckline, straining it away from her white throat. Seeing him, she let her hand settle on her thigh. “I hardly recognize you,” he said.
“We have that in common.” He understood that she had been crying. Her voice was coarsened, blurred, at her elbow was a glass of dissolving ice.
At first, she didn’t speak. The moment spun itself out. Her eyes rested on his face. Then she spoke all at once, in a rush.
“Ralph, I want you to know that I don’t want anything. The house, everything, you can have it. At first—last night—I didn’t think that. I thought, this woman, whatever backwoods berry-picking life she’s been leading, I don’t want her to improve her position at my expense. But now I realize—”
“Anna, you’re exhausted,” he said.
“Yes. But I think now, what’s the point, what’s the point of hanging on?”
“You give me up, Anna?”
“What choice have I?”
“Every choice.”
“Every choice? I don’t think you will indulge me while I consider them.”
“It’s not a matter of indulgence. You have every choice. Trust me.”
“You have no right to ask that, Ralph. Of all the things you could ask, you have least right to trust.”
He nodded. “I see that. I suppose I meant, trust me for the sake of the past, not the present.”
“I shall have to go back home for a little while. A few weeks. To work out where I am going to go after that, and what’s to happen about a school for Rebecca. So what I want—I want to make this agreement with you —”
“Anna, this is not what I meant.” Ralph was panic-stricken. “You can’t just—reinvent yourself like this, people don’t do it. I thought we should sit and talk—”
“Too much of that,” Anna said. “So much talk, but here we are.” Again her hand went to her throat, trying to pull the neckline of Ginny’s dress away from her skin. “I want to make this agreement. That you will come home and get your things and do it all at once. I mean that you should get yourself organized and move out. I don’t want sordid to-ing and fro-ing with suitcases.”
“So that’s the decision you have made?”
“That’s the first decision I have made.”
Ralph looked away. “I wish you would get back into your own clothes.”
“I didn’t bring any.”
“Why did you come here?”
“Ginny’s a friend.”
