How long would it take for her to starve to death? Would anyone even notice if she did? Would she end up in the Thames, swept into the murky waters on the outgoing tide, along with the morning rubbish?
Freda’s self-assurance had taken an awful battering. A lesser girl, in her opinion, might have given up by now. She was not a lesser girl. A lesser girl might consider selling themselves on the street, the choice of last resort. She was not that lesser girl either. Not yet.
* * *
—
By great good luck, on the way out of the gardens she spotted a sixpence glinting from a crack in the pavement. She could have cried with happiness. It was true that Vanda always used to say, “Find a coin, pass it on or bad luck will follow,” but Freda didn’t see how her luck could get much worse and so she pocketed the coin.
In a café in Neal Street that opened early for the market’s porters, the sixpence bought the solace of a sausage sandwich and a cup of tea, and as sugar was free, Freda stirred spoon after spoon of it into her tea. She ate the sausage sandwich as slowly as she could so it would last as long as possible, but eventually, as she knew she would be, she was kicked out of the café. “Oi, miss,” the owner said, “this isn’t a library. You can’t just sit there all day without spending money.”
Freda left reluctantly, hauling her suitcase along the Mall towards St. James’s Park, where she alighted on another bench. Wary of park-keepers, she tried to look as if she were merely enjoying watching the ducks. She had no bread with which to feed them. If she had, she would have eaten it herself.
A pelican waddled along the path towards her. What a peculiar bird. Freda was sure they had none of them in York. Was it even British?
As the pelican drew nearer, a horrified Freda could see that it had a pigeon in its mouth. It stopped in front of her and, as if putting on a performance, made a great show of gulping the bird into its pouchy beak, where Freda could see it still struggling to escape. To live. The pelican regarded Freda with a cold eye, as if daring her to censure it. Hideous creature! Freda jumped off the bench and sped away, feeling an unfortunate kinship with the poor pigeon, for she, too, had been snared and devoured by a beast of prey.
Visiting Time
“You’ve had a small operation but you’ll be as right as rain,” an artificially cheerful Nellie said to Edith. The unconscious Edith said nothing. Perhaps she knew, in the depths of anaesthesia, that the operation had not been so very little. （“Removed the lot,” the surgeon told Nellie with unwarranted satisfaction.）
Edith had been admitted to a small private hospital in the early hours, quietly but urgently, the Bentley stealing through the gates in the middle of the night. Nellie was furtive by nature, she didn’t like anyone knowing of any weakness in the family.
Now they had all arrived to cheer on the invalid. All apart from Niven, who had already been discharged from duty. Edith was not in the clear, it was still touch and go, the crisis far from over, and the surgeon had intimated to Nellie that now might be the time for final farewells from her family, but Nellie had decided not to pass on this information to them. Edith, Nellie said, had “women’s trouble,” a diagnosis that covered a multitude of possibilities, many of which could have been more metaphorical than medical in Nellie’s opinion, although not in this case.
“A serious infection,” she added, leaving open the possibility of catastrophe but not inviting it.
“Is she dead?” Kitty whispered.
“No, she’s had an anaesthetic,” Nellie said. “She’ll start to come around soon, I expect.”
“And will she be better?”
“Yes,” Nellie said stoutly.
Betty and Shirley looked doubtfully at the pale figure of Edith in the stark hospital bed. She didn’t look like someone who was intending to improve. They had expected tubes and fluids and other unpleasant things, but Edith was unadorned by anything medical and looked as though she was awaiting the embalmer.
Kitty reached over and gently pawed the back of the hand that was lying lifelessly on the pale-green jacquard bedspread. She hadn’t realized until now that she cared for Edith. The thought made her feel slightly sick.
They had been sitting around the bed for some time. Growing accustomed to the sight of the corpse-like Edith, they began to speak at a normal volume instead of the funereal murmurs they had been employing up until now. The novelty of hospital visiting was being slowly replaced by the fatigue of hospital visiting.
Edith would probably have been dead by now if maternal intuition had not led Nellie to the bathroom when she returned from the docks in the small hours. She had discovered Edith lying lifeless on the bathroom floor, her lips bloodless and the sheen of a cold fever on her skin. Nellie had woken Niven, whom she knew had the soldier’s gift of moving instantly from the depths of sleep to the heights of readiness for combat.