some doing to make it out. It was Dr. Furness that hit on it when he was doing the ward round, course he’s had an education.”
“But is it usual to think that you’re a member of the royal family? I mean—”
The nurse gave Florence a sideways look. Every variety of madness was quite usual here, as was every degree of decline and dilapidation. “Dr. Furness said it was a benign delusion. It’s not unusual, as these things go. There was a poor old lass came in with hypothermia, last winter it would have been, that thought she was her present Majesty. Used to knock her drip bottle about, thinking she was launching a cruise liner. The thing is, we were so short of beds we had to put her on A Ward, temporary. We think perhaps that’s what gave your mum the idea, she did use to give her some funny looks.”
“She gave people funny looks? That’s more than we ever got.”
“Perhaps she was beginning to come round then, do you see? Only perhaps it was a bit cold for her, and she went back in till spring.”
“What happened to her? The other old lady?”
“She passed on.”
“But she left a legacy,” Colin said. Delusions were handed on now like tables and chairs; shabby furniture from vacated brains.
On B Ward (Female), two long rows of ancient ladies faced each other, propped up by pillows; solid slabs of pillows, which bolstered their brittle bones. There was an air about them of tenacious and bottled vivacity, like the faces of those tribeswomen, bowed and wrinkled, who are surprisingly revealed to be only thirty years old. Their skeletal fingers, jigging on the bedcovers, seemed to be playing with strings of beads. Sometimes, a line of spittle running from their mouths, they would call out to each other in the querulous voices of the deaf; when a nurse passed they would hail her, and point with an imperious downward finger to troubling bits of their anatomy hidden under the sheets. As Colin and his wife and sister walked down the ward, their beaky heads swivelled, like a row of birds on a telegraph wire; their little voices piped in exclamation, and the sleeves of their bedjackets fluttered. They were all showing signs of upset; it was nearly time for the tranquilliser trolley.
“Hello, Mum,” Colin said. His heart sank. He noted her tight lips and her ramrod spine, and he knew she was back. Propriety had always been her obsession; she looked him over, and looked at Sylvia and Florence, and spoke in a dry and peremptory tone: “Ladies, where are your gloves?”
Florence took a step back, colliding with the nurse.
“Steady up,” the nurse said.
“I can’t do it,” Florence said. “I know what the end of this will be. You’ll want to send her home. I can’t take care of her, not any more. I gave up my career at the DHSS for her, and I’ve only just got myself under way again, after all these years. I won’t do it, you’ll have to keep her.”
Sylvia put her hand on Florence’s arm. “Okay, duck, don’t get ahead of yourself.”
“Anybody would think you weren’t glad to see her better,” Sister observed. “We’ll probably pop her on C Ward for a bit, see how she goes. Though we’ll have to get her on the go a bit, they need to be mobile. We don’t know what the future holds, do we?”
Mrs. Sidney’s face was quite altered: altered almost beyond recognition. In her younger days she had been fond, Colin recalled, of royal reminiscences, of the memoirs of escaped nannies and underfootmen. I shall have to watch my own reading matter, he thought; check myself over for signs of what I might become. He regarded her, aghast. Florence produced a tissue from her coat pocket and shed a tear. Sylvia frowned.
“Never mind gloves for now,” Sister said to her patient. “Aren’t you going to have a bit of an Audience?”
“Do you mean to say you go along with her?” Sylvia demanded. “You encourage her?”
“Put yourself in our place,” Sister said. “Any response from her is welcome to us. What do we care who she thinks she is? If we can say to her, turn on your side, Your Highness, while I put this cream on your bottom, that’s a sight better than heaving her over, a dead weight. And when we bring the cocoa round, and she thinks she’s at the Lord Mayor’s Banquet, she gets it down her, doesn’t she? She’s eating like a champion, she’s twice the woman she was.”
“It’s such a shock.” Florence pressed the tissue to her lips. “I can’t take it in, can you, Colin?”
Colin turned and walked away, down the ward to the window. He peered out into the enclosed court below. It was a dingy back area, a tangle of pipes running across the scarred red brick, slits of windows with frosted glass open an inch to the sultry air. If there were a fire, he thought, how would they get them all out? A chalked sign on a wall said MORTUARY. Colin’s gaze followed the direction of the arrow. A hospital cat stalked across the cobbles, leaped into a pile of boxes, and disappeared from view.
In the side ward off B Block (Male) Mr. Philip Field had decided to upset his daughter Isabel. He lay in bed, his eyes half closed, his hands folded across his belly. His daughter sat rigidly on a hard hospital chair at some distance from the bed, her face downcast.
“I think I might have a psalm,” he said. “Yes, I think I’ll go for ‘The Lord’s My Shepherd’ after all.”
“You aren’t going to die,” Isabel said.
“You know what Dr. Furness said. I could go at any time.”
“How do you know that?”
“I listened in.”
Isabel turned her face away altogether and gazed at the door, as if hoping for but not expecting relief. “Eavesdroppers never hear anything good,” she said. “Nor do they deserve to.”
Mr. Field tugged at the blanket fractiously. “I might have ‘For Those In Peril On The Sea,’” he suggested.
“Whatever for?”
“For other people. There’s no need to be selfish at your funeral.”
“It seems a bit late to turn over a new leaf.”
