If They Knew

by Joanne Sefton

  The heels of Helen’s ankle boots clipped loudly on the few steps between the ward door and Barbara’s cubicle, and she peered anxiously into the gloom, hoping she’d not woken up any of the other patients. The nurse left as soon as Helen was settled in the chair, closing the ward door carefully behind her and slipping off, rubber-soled, into the shadows. Helen had no chance to ask her anything.

  Barbara lay there like a storybook invalid, her head back against the semi-propped pillows, eyelids lowered and hands folded on the blanket. Her skin had an oniony look, translucent, papery, unhealthy. It was as if the operation had somehow removed a layer of her. Helen was shocked by the difference from the previous day, when she’d looked whole and wholesome – give or take the odd liver spot and the dark circles under her eyes.

  She sat down in the plastic armchair and laid her hand over her mother’s. She couldn’t decide if Barbara was too cold or if she herself was too hot. Barbara’s eyelids didn’t flicker. By now, Helen had tuned in to the shallow sound of her breathing. She let herself fall into its rhythm.

  June 1963

  Katy

  The honeysuckle made no difference; Katy couldn’t tell them anything.

  The builders and their machines had changed the very shape of the earth. It had been moulded and flattened and moulded again, like the sandpits in the infant school.

  ‘Well, did you come in to the left of the oak, or the right of the oak? The damn tree’s not moved!’ The sergeant with the moustache was making no effort to hide his annoyance.

  Katy could remember there being trees; she didn’t know if the one he was waving at had been one of them. She wanted to tell him that she’d been terrified and panicking. That she’d barely slept and it was the furthest she’d ever gone from home on her own. When she thought about that day, it was through a fog of guilt, the horror of what she’d done weighing down on her with each day she got older, each day she spent at Ashdown. Mr Robertson might understand, but she knew this man never would.

  ‘I only remember there being a road sweeping up ahead of me,’ she said, and the muscles round her mouth twitched oddly as she fought back tears. ‘There was a bank of loose earth and stones. That’s where … that’s where …’

  ‘It’s okay.’ Miss Silver stepped closer, patting her arm.

  ‘It’s bloody well not okay,’ interjected the policeman. ‘How far from the site perimeter was this road? How far did you have to walk to get to it?’

  Katy shook her head. She couldn’t answer.

  ‘How was the road orientated? Which direction did it go in?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ Her lips formed the words, but there was no voice.

  The man’s face was in hers now. She could see the smattering of ginger hairs in his brown moustache, and the spittle catching at the corners of his lips.

  ‘There were signs bloody everywhere; what did the signs say? How high was this banking? How far were you from the building itself?’

  Eventually it was over. The little group picked its way across the field and back to the car park, the policeman muttering darkly about not having any more of this sort of little jolly. Katy managed to keep her silence, though a few tears escaped down her cheeks. They didn’t sting like they had in the cold of January. The inspector went ahead to where Etta Gardiner stood, the same constable still by her side. Katy couldn’t hear what he said, but she heard Etta’s loud gasp and saw the inspector’s white handkerchief flutter as he pulled it out to comfort her. Although they kept a good distance away, Katy’s cheeks burned as they walked past, feeling Etta’s gaze track her all the way to the Austin.

  That was it. They wouldn’t be back in time for dinner and would have to get something on the road, Mr Robertson noted with a strained cheerfulness. For a moment, Katy imagined running. Never having to go back to Ashdown with its menace and melancholy and stink of boiled cabbage. She could bury her face in the smell of the wet earth and go to sleep cradled in the scent of honeysuckle without ever waking up.

  She didn’t run. It would give the creep with the moustache too much satisfaction.

  As Mr Robertson made heavy weather of turning the Austin, she caught a final glimpse of Etta through the window. There was a man beside her, his slim, slightly hunched figure unmistakable. Simon Gardiner handed his wife a posy of white narcissus and linked arms with her to walk towards the fence where Katy guessed the flowers were to be laid. Etta leant in to him as they walked the few steps, almost collapsing in his arms as they drew to a pause.

  White for innocence, Katy thought. If only you knew, Etta Gardiner.

  The Austin wheeled round abruptly and the tableau was gone.

  Katy made a silent vow. One day I’ll show her what he is. One day I’ll show everyone.

  August 2017

  Helen

  Giving up on sleep, Helen had gone to get a coffee. It was after two a.m., but there was a twenty-four-hour kiosk in the main foyer. She strolled around the deserted tables to stretch her legs, nodding to a couple of medics on their break. She paused to look at a gaudy poster about the fundraising efforts for a new cancer centre.

  Not wanting to be away for too long, she returned to Barbara’s ward, still clutching her paper cup, and slipped through the doorway. A nurse was bent over paperwork at a small desk that had been empty before. She lifted her head to smile and Helen caught the faint scent of toothpaste as she walked past. The late shift at the hospital was giving way to the early one.

  In Barbara’s cubicle, the figure in the bed looked exactly the same as when Helen had left her: still lying on her back, the same shallow breathing lifting the cellular blanket only a touch with each inhalation. Helen felt an unexpected surge of relief.

  She settled herself, then simply sat and held Barbara’s hand, just as she had done before. She was achingly tired, and her mind felt dull. How many people were awake in this building just now? she wondered. There must be babies being born here – as she had been born here. There must be other grown-up children holding the hands of parents and wondering if their time together was coming to an end. Did any of them feel only numbness instead of the grief and worry that she’d expected to feel? Did this distance and lack of feeling make her a bad daughter? No, ‘bad’ was the wrong word – an unnatural daughter, that was more what she felt. And if she was an unnatural daughter, was it her fault or Barbara’s?

  She swept back through her memory, looking for moments of love, special times that she and Barbara had shared, trying to conjure some missing fondness, almost in the way that, as a child, she found thinking of her neighbour’s dead cat helped to stop her getting the giggles when she was in trouble with a teacher.

  There were certainly happy images. Her disbelief when she was allowed the biggest chocolate sundae in the world at an ice cream shop in Italy. Jumping the waves on a beach in France the day after a thunderstorm. Her tenth birthday party, which had been a surprise, with all her school friends jumping out from behind the sofa when the family returned from a ‘grown-up’ celebratory pub lunch.

  Her childhood, on the whole, had been a happy one. But in every mental picture her dad’s face was clearer – shining with joy, sharing her laughter, showing tender concern about some childhood malady. Neil had worked full-time until his retirement. Barbara worked on the newspaper only two days a week when Helen was in primary school, a little more after she went to the high. Those hours together had made little imprint on her memory, it seemed. The best she could recall was that they were filled with books and TV and homework. That she kept out of her mother’s way, without really knowing why. Or was it Barbara who had been keeping out of hers?

  There was a movement from the bed and the limp hand Helen had been holding gripped back. When it was clear that Barbara was waking up, Helen manoeuvred the bed and the pillows to prop her up a bit, and then held the glass that she’d filled to her mother’s lips.

  ‘So how do you feel, Mum?’

  ‘Okay,’ she said, then sipped again. ‘Sore.’
r />   The nurse from the desk appeared, gently tugging the curtain back.

  ‘I heard your voices,’ she said. ‘Doing okay this morning?’

  ‘Just sore,’ Barbara repeated, and the nurse nodded sympathetically. ‘There’s a painkiller in your drip, but I can get you a tablet too if you can take it. And breakfast will be around in an hour or so. I’ll tell them just to try you on some toast for now.’

  Helen wasn’t sure if Barbara had heard. Her eyes closed slowly and the rhythm of her breathing changed.

  ‘She’ll be dozy after the anaesthetic,’ said the nurse, a little unnecessarily.

  Helen nodded. She was so tired that she was still nodding to the nurse’s back as she replaced the clipboard in its holder and walked off down the ward.

  *

  Neil turned up about half past ten. Darren had picked up the children as arranged and Neil had jumped in the car the minute they’d gone. He was just in time to see Barbara’s third session of dry-heaving. Just the smell of the toast had set her off and she’d not had much peace from it since.

  ‘Oh, love,’ he said, bending down to hold her shoulders as she shuddered over the paper bowl. ‘That’s it, that’s it, there you go.’

  When it was done, she fell back on his arm and let him lower her down to the propped-up pillows. A thread of spit trailed from the corner of her mouth, and she was too exhausted this time to even take a sip of water.

  ‘It’s the anaesthetic,’ Helen told him. ‘The nurse says it should pass in twenty-four hours.’

  Neil grilled her for more information that she didn’t have. The consultants hadn’t done their rounds yet and it was pretty obvious that Barbara wasn’t really in a state to take anything on board anyway. Helen really wanted to ask him about Darren and the kids, but he brushed off her first attempt, telling her they’d both slept like troopers and gone off happily this morning – Darren was taking them to some soft play centre apparently. She didn’t want to seem uncaring, focusing on her own children rather than on Barbara, so she bit her tongue.

  It was a shock for Neil to see his wife looking so fragile, Helen could tell. Having been there since Barbara woke up, she’d had more of a chance to get used to it. If anything, Helen felt there was perhaps a little bit of colour coming back to her cheeks – when she wasn’t throwing up, obviously. But Neil looked dismayed, and even as Helen filled him in on what time Barbara had woken up and what the nurse had said, she could see his wide eyes darting back to the bed, taking in every detail.

  Eventually, Barbara opened her eyes, smiled at him, and gestured for the water.

  ‘You never could keep away,’ she whispered.

  ‘Of course not. Oh, Barbara …’ he bent to kiss her cheek, ‘… you’re looking wonderful, love. You’re going to be out of here in no time.’ He said it fiercely, as if he could wish it hard enough to make it true. Helen couldn’t meet his eye, but she saw that Barbara did. She wanted to be happy for her mother – for them both – but all she could think of was that Darren wouldn’t be there to say that if it was her.

  They made some desultory conversation about the weather and then about the two new families in Neil and Barbara’s street and the building work they were planning. Barbara could nod, or make the occasional comment, and Helen and Neil felt like they were entertaining her. After a while, the trolley came round with some pasta and tomato sauce – nominally this was lunchtime – and Barbara managed not to be sick, although she asked them to swap it for toast. A little later, she even ate a few mouthfuls.

  ‘We could bring you something in,’ offered Neil. ‘Some nice biscuits, or a jam sandwich? Those cheesy crackers? What would tickle your fancy?’

  Barbara looked a little green.

  ‘I think she just needs a day or so to recover her appetite,’ Helen said. ‘We’ll have plenty of time to bring stuff in.

  ‘Shouldn’t you be getting back to the children?’ Barbara asked, probably just to try to change the subject away from food.

  ‘Darren’s taking them out for the day. To be honest, though,’ Helen said, taking her opportunity, ‘I could really do with a shower. Do you both mind if I—’

  ‘No, no, no,’ her parents flustered in unison. ‘You get home, love,’ continued Neil. ‘Get a bit of kip if you can – it’ll do you good.’

  *

  In the bathroom, she saw Barbara’s cake of Chanel No. 5 soap sitting on the windowsill. It was carefully placed on a folded flannel, drying in the sunshine so that she could rewrap it in its embossed tissue paper and slip it back inside the plastic soapbox and then its cardboard box; but she must never have gotten round to completing the task. The sight of it caught Helen off-guard; she’d forgotten all about that little ritual of her mother’s.

  She didn’t have to pick up the soap to smell it; the perfume still hung heavy in the warm, close air. Gulping it down as her breathing turned ragged and the tears came, somehow the scent had thawed the numbness that had consumed her in the hospital.

  There was no point in trying to stop it – Helen let her crying keen out unchecked through the empty house. The ugly, screeching noises seemed to scratch at the walls like trapped wild beasts. In some distant, unmoved part of her mind, she registered mild surprise that she could sound like that. Then she carried on anyway.

  The shame of it was that the crying wasn’t for Barbara, or even for Neil, though that was part of it. She was crying for herself; for the loss of her mother, for the sort of mother she’d never had in the first place, for the family that was slipping away from her. She’d never bargained for this. She didn’t deserve it. She wailed, like Alys might, simply because it wasn’t fair.

  The shower helped, though, and once she was calmer, there was some small comfort to be had in being able to take time to dry her hair properly, to smooth on some body lotion and file her nails, but she was constantly remembering that the time was hers only because Barney and Alys were with Darren. She tormented herself with the thought of what a wonderful time they would be having, of them not wanting to come back, and, worst of all, of the inevitable moment in the future when Darren would insist on them meeting her. Whilst she could just about stomach the thought of the kids being happy in the company of their father, she felt very different when she pictured a perfect, nuclear family unit that she wasn’t part of.

  Gradually, the thoughts took on a relentless, tinnitus-like quality, thrumming incessantly through her over-weary mind. She tried to take a nap but was too strung out to sleep; then she picked up her novel, but put it down again after reading the same paragraph three times.

  Barbara and Neil still had a VHS player. Eventually, Helen put on a second pair of socks, retrieved a pack of custard creams from the kitchen and looked on the shelf for her old copy of Dirty Dancing. She had to blow the dust off the case before she opened it. It felt surreal, putting on a film (and not a cartoon) in the middle of the day, with the sunlight streaming in the window, but she just prayed that her teenage favourite would give her racing mind a break.

  The custard creams were finished before Johnny and Baby even got to the watermelons. It worked as well as Helen could have hoped, suppressing the thrumming of worries in her mind.

  Then the call came from Neil.

  ‘Helen?’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘It’s your mum – you’ve got to come quickly.’ The panic was clear in his voice.

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘She’s being sick—’

  She felt her shoulders relax a fraction and jumped to reassure him.

  ‘They said it was the anaesthetic, Dad. I think it’s normal, for some people anyway. Have you spoken to a nurse?’

  ‘It’s not normal, Helen, she’s bringing up blood. They’re talking about intensive care. You need to just get here.’

  ‘I’m coming.’

  It was a fifteen-minute drive to the hospital, but it took an eternity. Her heart pounded all the way, with the thought of Barbara in pain and Neil anxious and afraid. She had no i
dea whether she really should be panicking. Nobody had suggested things could go badly once Barbara had come out of the recovery room and back to the ward – at least not in the short term. Surely she was in the best place and whatever it was they could hook her up to a machine and get it ‘stabilised’, as they always said on the TV?

  Helen had recognised from that first trip with them to Mr Eklund that Neil was finding the hospital difficult, that he felt out of his depth and – there was no other word for it – terrified. She still had hope that her dad had just had a panic, that she’d get there to be told it was a fuss about nothing, and her parents would be sitting in the cubicle happily watching some quiz show or cookery repeat on the mini bedside TV.

  She found a parking space near the main door – she’d already bought a weekly permit for her own car and insisted on doing the same for Neil’s – and hurried in.

  They weren’t watching TV. As soon as she entered the ward, she could see the hubbub of people around Barbara’s bed. There were eight or nine of them clustered into the little room, some bent over her, two holding IV lines, and Neil standing a couple of footsteps outside the door, looking smaller than she’d ever seen him.

  ‘Helen!’

  She gave him a hurried hug, and then turned to look through the glass at Barbara. If she’d looked bad before, she looked deathly now. Her skin was chalk-like, paler than the white sheets that she was lying on. She was wearing a breathing mask, which seemed to cover most of her face, but her eyes burnt out above it, bloodshot, widened and, above all, scared.

  Neil pulled Helen back when she tried to step into the room.

  ‘They said not to. They need the space.’