In the waiting room, half a dozen people, relatives of other recent casualties, similarly abandoned, sat gazing into space. Occasionally, a door would open and they would sit up hopefully as a nurse appeared and then slump back again as she passed through without breaking her stride.
In one corner an elderly clergyman was trying to cough discreetly into a handkerchief, his lungs bubbling and crackling. Opposite Jean was a young man, with quiffed hair and a cigarette behind his ear, dressed up as though for a night out. He seemed hugely self-conscious and ill at ease, his neck red with embarrassment, one foot tapping uncontrollably. Jean remembered the awkwardness of youth and pitied him.
One woman was attempting to distract a grizzling infant with nothing but a door key on a leather fob. Within seconds its potential to fascinate was exhausted and the child’s whining redoubled. The woman stood up, hauling him onto her hip, and began to pace.
“He’s not mine; he’s my daughter’s,” she announced with a preemptive glare.
The young man looked up and Jean recognized him now as the Romeo from the print room. She nodded at him and he nodded back, but not before she saw a flicker of alarm cross his face—a fear of being acknowledged in public by a middle-aged woman. Jean sighed. The cigarette behind his ear reminded her that she had smoked her last one with Howard at lunchtime, a lifetime ago. The realization that she had none left and tomorrow was Sunday brought on an unassailable craving.
Leaving the hospital, she crossed the road to the pub. It was dark outside and cold, too, after the heated stuffiness of the waiting room, and she shivered in her thin raincoat. The pub was bright and crowded with drinkers enjoying their Saturday night. Jean bought twenty Players. Even though she often ran out and had no intention of giving up the habit, she couldn’t quite bring herself to buy in bulk. It seemed to demonstrate too hubristic a faith in the future.
By the time she got back to the hospital a nurse had appeared and was calling her name. Her heart lurched in fear, but the news was reassuring: her mother had been admitted to the geriatric ward and was drinking a cup of tea. She was cold and bruised but otherwise uninjured. There were signs of a chest infection, which needed monitoring.
“Can I see her? Does she know I’m here?”
The nurse looked at her watch. “Visiting hours are over now. You can come back tomorrow at three.”
“All right. Will you give her my love?”
The nurse smiled and turned to the next name on her list.
Jean was letting herself into the house for the second time that day when her neighbor Mrs. Bowland came hobbling up the drive to intercept her.
“My dear, is there any news of your mother?” she asked with her head on one side in an attitude of concern. “I saw the ambulance.”
She must have been sitting by the window all evening, hoping for a tragedy to feast on, thought Jean, and then felt unworthy. Her mother was not popular in the street, having frozen out all early attempts at friendship, but the Bowlands had certainly tried, so perhaps her sympathy was genuine.
“She fell over in the garden earlier and gave herself a bit of a knock. Nothing broken, apparently,” she replied, finding herself adopting the same brisk tone as the nurse.
Now she wouldn’t need to bother telling the other residents of the street. Once one knew, they all knew.
“Well, it’s so easy to fall at our age. And it rather knocks your confidence,” Mrs. Bowland remarked.
“Oh dear—she never had much of that to begin with,” Jean said.
Once inside, the door closed, she felt suddenly weary and sat down hard on the stairs. It was nine o’clock; she had eaten nothing since those sardines at lunchtime and her stomach growled. There was a time when the prospect of an empty house would have been precious beyond imagining; a whole evening to spend or waste in solitude just as she chose. But she was too tired and anxious to enjoy it and her feet were so sore from walking in shoes that pinched that she could think of nothing more luxurious to do than collapse on the couch and examine her worries, one by one.
28
When Jean arrived on the ward the following afternoon for visiting time she found her mother sitting up in bed with an expression of rapt concentration on her face as she eavesdropped on the whispered conversation taking place at the next bed.
“Shh!” she said, cutting off Jean’s greeting. “I’m trying to listen.”
“Well hello to you, too,” said Jean, relieved to see her mother’s spirit undimmed by her surroundings.
She had brought with her a carpetbag containing slippers, shawl, the brushed-cotton nightgown from Peter Jones and a tablet of lavender soap delivered that morning by Mrs. Melsom. News of the accident had spread via the Bowlands to the congregation of St. Mary’s, at which Mrs. Melsom was a volunteer. She had hurried around directly with her gift, wrapped in blue tissue paper.