The front door opened into a large hallway. The wooden floor was covered with a selection of fine rugs in jewel colours. A stairway, with elaborately carved newel posts, curved from it to the upper floors. On this floor, closed doors were tantalising me. I desperately wanted to look behind each one, see what secrets lay there.
A house like this, there had to be secrets.
26
Carol looked up the stairway, then grabbed my arm. ‘Listen, I don’t want Mrs Wallace getting the wrong idea.’ She pulled me towards a door. ‘Would you wait in here until she’s gone. She’s always ready to leave for her golf as soon as I arrive, so I’ll give you a shout in a minute or two.’
It seemed unnecessarily cloak and daggerish to me. I was about to say so when it hit me what was really concerning Carol. She didn’t want Mrs Wallace to get the idea that the agency didn’t have sufficient staff and perhaps take her business elsewhere. Carol didn’t want to lose her coveted job. ‘Fine,’ I said. It wasn’t as if she was giving me much choice, her grip on my arm was vice-like and she was edging me towards the door as she spoke. Then before I could object, she opened it and shoved me, none too gently, inside.
I wouldn’t have minded so much had it been a room I could explore but the silly cow had shoved me into a cloakroom. One small window gave sufficient light, but apart from the pockets of the few coats that were hanging there, there was nothing else of interest, and nothing in any of the pockets apart from grotty paper tissues.
Carol was correct though. Within a couple of minutes, I heard footsteps on the wooden treads of the stairway, then a loud clunk as the front door was shut. I waited till I heard the second set of descending footsteps before I opened the door and peered around its edge.
‘Thanks,’ Carol said with a grin. ‘I told you it wouldn’t be long.’
I was tempted to point out that it was three or four minutes out of the ten I’d promised her, but I’d already decided she had no sense of the ridiculous and would probably have taken me seriously. I didn’t want her to change her mind and decide to leave the poor old soul in bed for the day. Not when I’d come this far. Not when I had the chance of seeing more than the inside of a cloakroom.
‘We’d best get a move on; the clock is ticking.’ As if realising I wasn’t joking, she turned and ran up the stairs. I followed at a more sedate pace, my eyes flicking over the paintings that lined the walls. I’d noticed the beautiful ornaments on the tables in the hallway too. I wondered about the hours when there was no nurse. It suddenly struck me as strange. There didn’t seem to be any shortage of money, or maybe all the money they had was here, in these… things.
‘The night staff nurse ensures he’s sitting upright for breakfast,’ Carol explained as she pushed open the bedroom door. ‘Mr Wallace has difficulty swallowing so Mrs Wallace prepares special easy-to-swallow meals and feeds him with a teaspoon. It takes about an hour, but she says it gives her quality time with him. It’s the same in the evening. I make sure he’s back in bed and sitting up before I leave at six, and she’ll give him his evening meal. Then the night nurse comes back at ten.’
The bedroom we entered was massive, probably three times the size of my entire home. Double bay windows gave a stunning view over the rooftops and gardens of the valley that fell away behind the house. The wooden floor was bare, the rugs that had once covered it rolled up and resting slumped against the wall like they’d had the life beaten out of them. The heavy carved wardrobe and a matching chest of drawers were beautiful and too big for most modern homes.
Maybe there had once been a matching four-poster bed. Certainly there would have been something more elegant than the hospital bed that stood in the middle of the room, positioned deliberately to allow access from all sides. It looked as incongruous as the ugly hoist that was waiting to be used to transfer Mr Wallace from his bed to the nearby chair.
The man in the bed was obviously ill. I thought the doctors had been very optimistic with their ‘months, maybe weeks’。 I’d looked after many terminally ill people by then and I’d have guessed days, if not hours. But who was I to question the doctor?
Mr Wallace said a weak ‘hello’ when he saw Carol. She bustled around him, keeping up a stream of sickly platitudes. If I’d been dying, they were the last things I’d have wanted to hear. If I’d been dying, I’d have gathered up every ounce of energy and told her to fuck off.
There were framed photographs on top of the dresser. As Carol bustled around getting organised, I strolled across and had a look. Lots of photos of the happy couple. A few included older people I assumed to be relatives of one or the other. No photographs of anyone younger. ‘They don’t have children?’ I asked.
Carol was preparing the chair, moving its position, plumping cushions. Faffing. She stopped and looked at me, squinting in the sun that poured through the windows. She kept her voice low as she answered me. ‘No, they don’t have any. They’re only married a few years. She was married before. Widowed young, I believe, but there were no children from that marriage either. It’s tough, they should have had many years together.’
I arranged my features into a suitably sympathetic expression. ‘So, he’s not that old?’
‘He’s seventy, she’s younger, maybe late fifties, sixty at the most.’ She pointed towards a door to the back of the room. ‘I just need to get a few things, and then we’re good to go.’
Considering the ten minutes I’d volunteered had long since passed, it was just as well.
From curiosity, I trailed after Carol, my eyes widening at the large, surprisingly modern en suite bathroom. I guessed that sometime in the past it had been converted from a smaller bedroom. From the free-standing roll-top bath in the corner, to the super-sized shower cubicle with the largest waterfall showerhead I’d ever seen, it was obvious that no expense had been spared. Carol waved a hand in front of a sensor and water gushed from the wall-mounted spout into a heavy, curved glass basin positioned on a marble counter.
‘Nice,’ I said. It was an understatement, but I wasn’t willing to allow her to see how impressed I was, how envious that she was working in such surroundings. ‘Can we get on though? It’s been a lot longer than ten minutes.’
Carol couldn’t afford to be offended by my tone, but I could see by her tight mouth that she wasn’t impressed with me. Tough, I was working for free which didn’t sit easily with me. I was also shattered and needed to get to my bed.
Back in the bedroom, Carol repositioned the reclining chair, pressed the locks on its castors, and drew the hoist over to the bed. ‘Mr Wallace, we’re going to get you out of bed now, okay?’
I’d have loved if he’d said he didn’t want to get up, that he wanted to be left in peace to die in the comfort of his bed, not to be put into a chair and forced to look out at a world he was never going to be able to join again. But he was past being able to make that decision. Carol was working for his wife, and she wanted him out of the bed and in that chair.
He was a tall man. Not heavy, at least not any more, but his length made transferring him safely from bed to chair an awkward manoeuvre. Using a hoist to transfer was designed to be a two-person procedure. Like most nurses, I’d often been forced by circumstances to act alone, but I would have struggled with Wallace’s gangly unwieldy frame.