‘Go on in, have a look.’
‘What about the sisters?’
‘Just open it, you coward,’ she said.
I pushed the door open and crept inside. It was empty. The beds had been stripped and pushed against the walls. There was nothing on the nightstand. The walls were bare brick, there was one small porthole window and a wardrobe built into the eaves. I could hear the pigeons on the roof. The place was tiny. The roof in that part of the building was very narrow and there was just a little strip in the middle where we could both stand up full height. It was a room for miniature people, barely big enough for one Aisling, let alone a gangly Susannah as well.
‘Sister Chase is transferring to a hospital in Leicester to be nearer her mother, and Sister Eccleston has been promoted and has a room in the new block, nearer Matron. It’s ours, Susannah! Just us! I arranged it with both of them weeks ago – got in there before anyone else.’
‘Did you have to fight some elves for it?’
‘I’m going to ignore that comment because I know you only said it for the craic. Yes, it’s small – but it’s all ours. What do you think?’
I was exhilarated by the prospect of having so much freedom. There would be no intrusive eyes on us, watching us too closely; there would be privacy and space. At the same time, I was petrified because now, in an altogether different way, I had nowhere to hide.
‘What is it? What’s wrong? Don’t you want to be with me?’ she asked.
‘Yes, I do want to be with you, but…’
‘Let’s simply concentrate on getting on.’
‘Agreed.’
Aisling was so untidy, it always looked as if there’d just been an explosion, as if one of those elves had managed to get into the wardrobe and throw everything about. We began to fantasise about running away – always to somewhere with pirates and jungles and, oddly, a British regiment. Aisling’s brother had been a soldier in India and had returned with the wildest tales, which she would recount to me. We didn’t want to stay within our four walls and wait for a man to come home and describe the world to us – we wanted to touch it and feel it ourselves. We would finish our contractual obligation at the hospital, then take jobs in India. I liked the sound of that.
‘We can go anywhere,’ said Aisling, leaping onto the bed with her legs crossed, wild eyed like a child. ‘Anywhere but rainy old England, which is no better than Ireland, only it has more buildings and more people, and less peat and less Church. We can go somewhere where no one knows who we are or where we’re from, where they’ve never heard of Ireland or Reading and don’t care what class we are. We’ll be the exotic ones, instead of just the plain old boring poor. And the freaks.’
She lay down next to me and rolled over like she had that day in the field. I held my breath again.
‘Wait a minute,’ she said. ‘I know…’ She pulled her blanket over our heads so it was dark underneath, then whispered, ‘Now shut your eyes. What you can’t see coming, you can’t be guilty of.’
During those few months we had together in our little attic room, we fell into a rhythm, and I forgot to be shy. We used to have to remind ourselves that we were not a usual couple; it was easy to forget and not be as vigilant as we should about the little nuances that might give us away, but we were not the only pair, there were more than a few among us at the hospital. We made efforts to be discreet, and everyone else made efforts not to see. In the evening we would push the beds together, and in the morning we’d knock them apart as naturally as making them. My only regret is that the time we had was made so brief, and I wasted a huge sum of it, being full of self-doubt, so frightened of being wrong.
I managed to keep a few things that belonged to Aisling in an old sewing box. Personal items that wouldn’t be missed. I had her textbook, Matron’s Lectures on Nursing, with her exotic winged loops in the margins. She’d written her name inside the cover. I used to tease her for her flamboyant writing with all its extravagant flourishes. It was my decision, she told me, if I chose to leave a dull mark on the world. My own handwriting was a rigid apology.
When I moved into the Chelsea house, I wrapped the sewing box in a shawl and put it at the bottom of the wardrobe in my bedroom. I hadn’t sought it out for a while, but one morning I woke with a jolt from another dream about Aisling and had a desperate urge to go through the box and hold its treasured contents. The dream had upset me. I had felt her skin against my dry lips. I could smell her and, if I’d wanted to, I could have rolled over and kissed her shoulder, but when I woke I found I had forgotten her scent; the memory was missing. I was gripped by a terror that I had lost another part of her.
I dashed out of bed and scoured my wardrobe for the box, but it wasn’t there. I found the shawl, which had been folded and was exactly where I expected it to be, but the box was gone. There was no possibility I could have mislaid it. I never lost or misplaced anything, and especially not
