After his return from the hospital I lost track, somewhat. It was as if I were waking from a dream of my life and realizing that the passing of the years had not been real. Time reeled me back and set me down at a stage that more properly belonged in childhood or adolescence, though I had not experienced then, nor at any period in my life since, what I was now feeling. I think it was adoration, simply.
My life now pivoted on a single fulcrum. Arthur’s appearances and absences and habits were my entire study, all their tiny modifications and variants, the balances and counterbalances governing my every move. A sudden disappearance to the sitting room might mean he wanted me to change his sheets. A discarded sweater would prompt me to open windows. I scrutinized every act for clues that would enable me to preempt his desires, laying out the minutiae for interpretation: salt left on the side of his plate, three not two wet bath towels, a cup of tea left unfinished: what did these tell me? With diligent sycophancy I amassed scraps of data and archived them in my mind in lists of every aversion and predilection.
I began to concern myself again with his weight. Every night by candlelight I laid out his meal in the dining room and on my way back to the kitchen I would swing my hand gently across the wind chime in the hall to let him know it was time to eat. He didn’t always come down very promptly, and he didn’t have much of an appetite. Occasionally I had to sound the wind chime again, rather insistently, but I was determined he should not let his dinner go cold. He was a conservative and fussy eater, even a suspicious one. When he finished what I had given him I was grateful, as if a delicate creature had fed from my hand; if something remained untasted, my displeasure was intense. It called for patience. Gradually I learned his likes and dislikes. He left beetroots right in the middle of the plate along with some potato and a piece of ham that were stained bright pink with them. I concluded that his loathing of beetroot extended to anything that touched it.
I was both watchful and exhilarated, nervy and tearful, and also astonished to find that living in such a state of anxious devotion was quietly satisfying. But I did not want to be satisfied, I did not want to be rewarded. He could never forgive me for what I had done, of course, but the thought that he might allow me to comfort him reduced me to tears, and then I was ashamed at having been moved by the idea of my own gratification. I craved only his permission to enter the circle of his grief and the chance, thereby, to prove it not utterly unyielding, its widening rings not unstoppable.
During the day I stayed up in the attic, sleeping or drowsing, and often brooding about the nurses I could hear downstairs. They had taken to arriving in pairs so that, I had no doubt, one could attend to Arthur while the other snooped around. I resented their unearned and undeserved power to administer to him. I imagined their irreverent hands on his skin and fumed at the squandering of such a privilege; they were ignorant of the value of what they were being allowed to touch.
If I had happened to sleep through until the evening, I could tell as soon as I woke that they had been in the house. From the top of the stairs, the eddying of Arthur’s lately unheeded protests tautened the air; I would follow the wraith of his spent distress wafting from room to room. The wrong doors would be hanging ajar, chairs disarranged. I could also tell at once where in the house Arthur had chosen to lie to recover from their invasions. He didn’t make any noise; I knew his whereabouts from waves of silent keening, as if from someone contemplating his wounds after the aggressor has moved casually on. This was when he would be at his quietest and most elusive. Not until I had got to work and begun to wash the memory of the intrusion out of the place would he be able to stir. Then I would hear him come back to life, creaking along the landing to the bathroom in his slippers, dropping papers, whistling birdcalls above the noise of running taps.
The nurses also kept leaving letters and forms and leaflets to do with evaluations and qualifying for things such as transport and home care. There was no end to it. On most of them they had already done the filling-in except on the line awaiting Arthur’s signature, which they fenced at each side with bright red crosses. Arthur left these out for me, next to his letters, and after I’d read them I tore them up and threw them away, as he clearly intended I should.
SHE’S
