than crying, because crying isn’t something she does. And although my arm was pressed hard against the plastic edge of the chair, I didn’t move a muscle.
Outside, the distant tide of traffic continued to drift, in and out, punctuated occasionally by sirens. There’s something about hospital walls; though only made of bricks and plaster, when you’re inside them the noise, the reality of the teeming city beyond, disappears; it’s just outside the door, but it might as well be a magical land, far, far away. Like Milderhurst, it occurred to me; I’d experienced the same dislocation there, an overwhelming sense of envelopment as I passed through the front door, as if the world without had turned to grains of sand and fallen away. I wondered vaguely what the Sisters Blythe were doing, how they’d filled their days in the weeks since I’d left them, the three of them together in that great, dark castle. My imaginings came one after the other, a series of snapshots: Juniper drifting the corridors in her grubbied silk dress; Saffy appearing from nowhere to lead her gently back; Percy frowning by the attic window, surveying her estate like a ship’s captain keeping watch…
Midnight passed, the duty nurses shuffled, new faces brought with them the same old banter. Laughing and bustling around the illuminated medical station: an irresistible beacon of normality, an island across an unpassable sea. I tried to doze, using my bag as a pillow, but it was no use. My mum, beside me, was so small and alone, and older somehow than the last time I’d seen her, and I couldn’t stop my mind from racing ahead to paint detailed scenes of her life without Dad. I saw it so clearly: his empty armchair, the quiet meals, the cessation of all DIY hammering. How lonely the house would be, how still, how swamped by echoes.
It would be just the two of us if we lost my dad. Two is not a large number; it leaves no reserves. It’s a quiet number that makes for neat and simple conversations where interruption is not required; is not really possible. Or necessary, for that matter. Was that our future, I wondered? The two of us passing sentences back and forth, speaking around our opinions, making polite noises and telling half-truths and keeping up appearances? The notion was unbearable and I felt, suddenly, very, very alone.
It’s when I’m at my loneliest that I miss my brother most of all. He would be a man by now, with an easy manner and a kind smile and a knack for cheering our mother up. The Daniel in my mind always knows exactly what to say; not remotely like his unfortunate sister who suffers terribly with being tongue-tied. I glanced at Mum and wondered whether she was thinking of him, too; whether being in the hospital brought back memories of her little boy. I couldn’t ask, though, because we didn’t talk about Daniel, just as we didn’t talk about her evacuation, her past, her regrets. We never had.
Perhaps it was my sadness that secrets had simmered for so long beneath our family’s surface; perhaps it was a type of penance for upsetting her with my earlier probing; perhaps there was even a tiny part of me that wanted to provoke a reaction, to punish her for keeping memories from me and robbing me of the real Daniel: whatever the case, the next thing I knew I’d drawn breath and said, ‘Mum?’
She rubbed her eyes and blinked at her wristwatch.
‘Jamie and I broke up.’
‘Oh?’
‘Yes.’
‘Today?’
‘Well, no. Not exactly. Around Christmastime.’
A tiny utterance of surprise, ‘Oh,’ and then she frowned, confused, calculating the months that had passed. ‘But you didn’t mention-’
‘No.’
This fact and its implications brought a sag to her face. She nodded slowly, remembering, no doubt, the fifty small and smaller enquiries she’d made after Jamie in that time; the answers I’d given, all lies.
‘I’ve had to let the flat go,’ I said, clearing my throat. ‘I’m looking for a bedsit. A little place of my own.’
‘That’s why I couldn’t reach you; after your father – I tried all the numbers I could think of, even Rita’s, until I got on to Herbert. I didn’t know what else to do.’
‘Well,’ I said, a strange artificial brightness in my tone, ‘as it happens that was the perfect thing to do. I’ve been staying with Herbert.’
She looked baffled. ‘He has a spare room?’
‘A sofa.’
‘I see.’ Mum’s hands were clasped in her lap, held together as if she sheltered a little bird inside, a precious bird she was determined not to lose. ‘I must post Herbert a note,’ she said, her voice threadbare. ‘He sent some of his blackberry jam at Easter and I can’t think that I remembered to write.’
And like that it was over, the conversation I’d been dreading for months. Relatively painless, which was good, but also somehow soulless, which wasn’t.
Mum stood then, and my first thought was that I’d been wrong, it wasn’t over and there was going to be a scene after all; but when I followed the direction of her eyes I saw that a doctor was coming towards us. I stood too, trying to read his face, to guess which way the penny was about to drop, but it was impossible. His expression was the sort that could be read to fit each scenario. I think they learn how to do that at medical school.
‘Mrs Burchill?’ His voice was clipped, faintly foreign.
‘Yes.’
‘Your husband’s condition is stable.’
Mum let out a noise, like air being pushed from a small balloon.
‘It’s a good thing the ambulance got there so soon. You did well to call it in time.’
I was aware of soft hiccuping noises next to me and I realized Mum’s eyes were leaking again.
‘We’ll see how his recovery progresses, but at this stage angioplasty is unlikely. He’ll need to stay in for a few days longer so we can monitor him, but his recovery after that can be done at home. You’ll have to watch him for moods: cardiac patients often struggle with feelings of depression. The nurses will be able to help you further with that.’
Mum was nodding with grateful fervour. ‘Of course, of course,’ and scrabbling, as was I, for the right words to convey our gratitude and relief. In the end she went with plain old, ‘Thank you, doctor,’ but he’d already withdrawn behind the untouchable screen of his white coat. He merely bobbed his head in a disconnected way, as if he had another place to be, another life to save, both of which he no doubt did, and had already forgotten quite who we were and to which patient we belonged.
I was about to suggest that we go in and see Dad when she began to cry – my mother, who never cries – and not just a few tears wiped away against the back of her hand; great big racking sobs that reminded me of the time in my childhood when I was upset about one trifling thing or another and Mum told me that while some girls were fortunate to look pretty when they cried – their eyes widened, their cheeks flushed, their pouts plumped – neither she nor I were among them.
She was right: we’re ugly criers, both of us. Too blotchy, too snarly, too loud. But seeing her standing there, so small, so impeccably dressed, so distressed, I wanted to wrap her in my arms and hold on until she couldn’t help but stop. I didn’t though. I dug inside my bag and found her a tissue.
She took it but she didn’t stop crying, not right away, and after a moment’s hesitation, I reached out to touch her shoulder, turned it into a sort of pat, then rubbed the back of her cashmere cardigan. We stood like that, until her body yielded a little, leaning in to me like a child seeking comfort.
Finally, she blew her nose. ‘I was so worried, Edie,’ she said, wiping beneath her eyes, one after the other, checking the tissue for mascara.
‘I know, Mum.’
‘I just don’t think that I could… If anything were to happen… If I lost him-’
‘It’s OK,’ I said firmly. ‘He’s OK. Everything’s going to be all right.’
She blinked at me like a small animal for whom the light is too bright. ‘Yes.’
I obtained his room number from a nurse and we negotiated the fluorescent corridors until we found it. As we drew close, Mum stopped.
‘What is it?’ I said.
‘I don’t want your father upset, Edie.’
I said nothing, wondering how on earth she thought I might be planning to do such a thing.
‘He’d be horrified to learn that you were sleeping on a sofa. You know how he worries about your posture.’
‘It won’t be for long.’ I glanced towards the door. ‘Really, Mum, I’m working on it. I’ve been checking the
