by Julia Gray
Sarah Cousins had various announcements to read out before assembly.
‘Those of you doing English, coursework must be handed in before midday to Ms Sullivan’s pigeonhole, or sent electronically if you prefer.’
I froze. I’d forgotten – not only to bring in my coursework, but also to finish it. It was almost impossible to believe that I could have done such a thing.
‘All right, Nora?’
I nodded. I’d have to go and find Anneka Sullivan and explain. Perhaps I’d say that I’d been ill, or – better – that a family member, like my Nana, had been unwell over half term; Ms Sullivan would surely believe me, if I were convincing enough, and extend the deadline. Quietly, I started running over the exact way that I’d express myself – a little distracted, on the verge of frustrated tears, but not overplaying the distress. Yes. I barely listened as Sarah Cousins read out the rest of her notices. There was an announcement about next term’s Lower-Sixth play, which was to be Ibsen’s A Doll’s House, advising us that auditions would be in the first week of April, and a note of thanks from a local charity for which Lady Agatha girls had recently raised money.
As I stood in the chapel, twenty minutes later, half singing some plodding Lenten hymn, I found myself looking cautiously along the pews, trying again to sense which girls, if any, were looking at me differently. It would be too much to hope that no one had overheard that conversation between me and Sarah Cousins. Even though the swimming pool had been an echo chamber of shrieks and splashes, there was still a chance that we had been witnessed. And if it had, there would be rumours. And those rumours could have spread like measles over the half-term break.
Sarah Cousins called Nora Tobias a liar. It must be to do with Mr Trace.
A little liar, she said.
Lori Dryden was reading Closer inside her hymn book. A couple of people were coughing into Kleenex; the school was a petri dish of diseases. Only Megan Lattismore looked up as my gaze swept along the line, and she did look back at me with a funny quizzical stare, the emotion of which I just couldn’t place. I looked for Bel, who would be standing with the Upper Sixth at the back of the chapel, but remembered that she’d said it was unlikely that she’d come into school before the performance. There was too much preparation to do, she said. The hymn slowed to a ragged close and I shook myself, mentally, promising that I would never again forget to finish a piece of work. As Caroline Braine at the lectern intoned something from the Bible – Jesus in the wilderness – I began to rehearse my lines for The Belle of the Ball.
It was just as I was leaving the chapel that I stepped into the path of Mr Drake, the Director of Studies, a kind of second-in-command to the headmistress. He apologised, the way people do after a near-collision.
‘So sorry,’ he began.
And then he did a double-take, obviously realising who I was. It was impossible to misread the disapproval on his face as he hurried past me. Looking around, to see if there had been any witnesses, I caught sight of a couple of girls, hands cupped in readiness to whisper. They saw me and shrank back into the shadow of the cloister. In a red rush of embarrassment, I made my way out, as quickly as I could. I began to rehearse my lines again.
I took the tube on my own to St Michael’s hospital, as soon as the school day was over. Riddled with nerves, I sipped repeatedly from my water bottle. I fiddled with my hair, my nails. My right hand, always the less steady, shook as I fanned my script. As I often did at times of stress or boredom, I anagrammed words at random. I have always liked anagrams. Unlocking the secret meanings in things gives me an odd kind of satisfaction. My father showed me how to do it.
Annabel Ingram, I wrote.
Banana Gremlin.
Darian Ingram.
Daring Airman.
By the time I got to the children’s ward, I felt calmer. I did not know much about hospitals in the UK; Evie and I never required their services. Since my tale about the poisonous oyster was a work of fiction, I’d never been inside a French hospital either, other than to have my tonsils removed, aged four, something I scarcely remembered. St Michael’s seemed like a place where all the senses were on high alert: the overhead lights were bright; the smell of disinfectant and a hint of something darker and more morbid seemed to seep from all surfaces; voices chimed over the ping of the lift doors. Up to the fourth floor and along a walkway I went, and then down a short flight of stairs, and when I saw Zubin and Jess at a water fountain I was relieved to see people I knew.
Zubin said, ‘Everyone’s in there, setting up.’
A pair of swing-doors bore a sign above them saying ‘Playroom’. Through the tinted glass I could see Bel, in her green kimono. I pushed through the doors. Bel was ordering Chris and Thurston to rearrange the long pink-and-blue sofas. Her hair was piled on top of her head and she was wearing glasses, which reflected small white stars from the overhead lights. She saw me and waved. Darian knelt in the corner, where a television on a trolley had been pushed away from the wall. Cody was nowhere to be seen.
‘I want them as close to a semicircle as you can get them,’ Bel was saying.
Paige and Azia were flipping different switches on and off, while Bel issued further instructions. Everyone was talking at the same time.
‘Going to need another four-way adaptor …’
‘Try now.’
‘That won’t work. What about an extra lamp, just offstage?’
‘Does anyone have a small table?’
I decided there were too many people helping already for me to usefully offer my services. In the biography of Phyllis Lane that I was reading (Life in the Fast Lane, it was called) it said that before a show, Phyllis would always, without fail, take a moment alone to prepare. I sat in an orange armchair in which a plush Elmer the Elephant was resting, and studied my lines.
At twenty past five the children came in. Some were dressed; others wore dressing gowns and slippers. Some bore the obvious signs of unwellness – a shaven head, a plaster cast – though no child coming had a high risk of infection, Azia had explained to me. I had been so absorbed in the play that I had not given much thought to the children. Now, I was overcome with shame that they had not been in the forefront of my mind at all times. Nurses with name-badges pinned to their chests were helping them onto the sofas; those that could not walk were wheeled in their chairs to the front. Paige and Jess were handing out little programmes on folded pink cards.
‘Come and sit here, Felix,’ said a nurse, helping a pale boy onto a sofa.
To hear my father’s name, so unexpectedly, made me jump.
He’d have been pleased to see me perform, but of course he’d never had the chance. I thought about Evie, and what she’d said, that night back in October – how she’d gone to the Psychic Awareness Course because she’d thought, somehow, that she’d find out how to ‘reach’ him. At the time I’d been, I suppose, shocked. When Felix died, Evie at first was angry, not sad. Sadness came later, and lasted longer. But never before had Evie wanted to try to ‘reach’ him, as far as I knew. But now I was beginning to see how she might be feeling. My parents had loved each other. I’d loved them. They’d loved me. We had been a perfect triangular unit. To want my father to be somewhere, somewhere reachable – to want to be able to find him, through whatever means – that was, perhaps, quite understandable.
I looked at the little boy, Felix, and hoped that the play would not disappoint him.
‘Practising your lines?’
It was Azia, smiling down at me. Her hair was in two plaits today, perfectly symmetrical.
I nodded. ‘Is that your mother?’
A tall, elegant woman was standing at the back of the room. There was a grey-haired man beside her, partly in shadows, and I realised that it was Bel’s father.
‘Indeed,’ said Azia. ‘Only for these kids would she allow me to take a break from my A-levels.’
I have learned enough about performing, by now, to know that it goes by more quickly than you would imagine. Bel
– a totally transformed Bel to the one who pranced and sulked, who stole money and danced on tabletops – motioned us into our places, and someone turned down the lights, and the children were hushed.
Then Azia, dressed in a black T-shirt and jeans, stepped forward and said:
‘Won’t you listen, if you please,
To a tale of magic and mysteries,
A tale of wishes, love and dreams –
Where nothing is quite as it seems.
Long ago, it all began:
There was a kindly, widowed man …’
And on it went. Even now, months later, I can remember every word of the script, but of the performance itself I find I cannot remember much. Those twenty-five minutes went by in what seemed like a flicker of a racing pulse. I remember only small things: the audience bursting into laughter at Bel, galumphing around in stepmother garb, and a thrill of excitement when the slipper fit onto Cinderella’s foot; how the music seemed to fit the actions on the makeshift stage so perfectly. And how dark it was in the audience, with the two bright lamps in our faces. There was no need for a proper stage, or professional lights or speakers. The room was alive with make-believe.
Lady Agatha’s, and all it contained, seemed incredibly distant.
The children clapped with real pleasure at the end. We took another bow. The boy called Felix was sitting absolutely still, and gazing at me with a kind of quiet reverence. It made me feel uncomfortable at first. I smiled at him. He stared a moment longer, and then smiled back, and it looked like a tiny sunrise.
‘And now,’ said Bel, ‘we must have an after-party.’
‘Certainly not. It’s Monday,’ Azia said. ‘I have stuff to do tonight. Mum will take us to Pizza Express. Is that after-party-ish enough for you?’
It was not.
Cody was carrying armloads of props to the car. Bel turned to him.
‘Darling, call Giacomo. See if he’s in.’
‘Bel, you can’t expect him to—’
‘It’ll just be a few of us. We’ll bring our own booze. We’ll be quiet as … hibernating hamsters.’
Her lip was beginning to tremble. This was little-girl Bel again. The hospital car park was growing dark. The others said their goodbyes and disappeared.
‘Nora,’ said Bel, throwing her green arms around me. ‘You’ll come out and party with us, won’t you? I know! How about that place in Waterloo where they do the jazz improvisations? Darian can play for us. We’ll drink whisky sours and toast the performance. It’s bad luck not to. You must, you have to. Without you, the play wouldn’t have existed!’ Her fingers clutched, almost painfully, at my shoulders. ‘You were marvellous too,’ she added.
I replied: ‘No. You were.’
‘We’ll have you home by midnight, with a coach and footmen.’
I feigned a moment of deciding, and then I said, ‘Sure. I’d like that. Just let me text my mum.’
I looked in my bag for my phone, thinking: Pass Go. Collect £200. In Monopoly, that’s all you need to survive another round. To pass Go, and collect £200. I didn’t care where we were going: a boat, Pizza Express, a jazz club or a prison cell. It was all the same. I would make it so that there was a next time, and another £200.
But when I turned on my phone to text Evie, I saw that she had already texted me.
Azia was saying, ‘One hour I’ll come for. No more.’
‘You can come for five minutes,’ said Bel. ‘Nora, honey, you ready?’ Her American accent was back: a sign that she was happy.
I looked at their expectant, beautiful faces.
I said: ‘My grandmother’s very unwell. Nana. In Scotland. I’m sorry. I have to go home.’
8
From one hospital to another in twenty-four hours.
To my embarrassment, I cried all the way out of London, hot loose tears that I was unable to control. My shame was rooted in the fact that I knew I was crying for several reasons, and it felt wrong to use my Nana as a pretext. I was crying for Nana, of course. But I also cried because I wasn’t sure if I had done enough to cement a friendship between me and Bel. She’d barely smiled when she said goodbye, jumping into the car with no backward glance, no further farewell. I must have offended her by leaving, even though I’d had a very valid reason. I felt almost frantic with despair. And while Evie drove and the rain sewed seams down the windscreen, I cried more.
Nana’s frailty had crept up like a weed, subtle and binding. Dwarfed by her curtained cubicle and hi-tech bed, she seemed frailer still. Her cheeks had been bleached of their usual rosy blush. I thought of Nana’s arteries, sludgy with her beloved dulce de leche; I thought of her battered Mars bars – Nana and Evie were the only people I knew who willingly ate battered Mars bars.
Nana was awake when we got to her bedside, and quite lucid. She held out a hand for each of us, and we kissed her on both cheeks, one at a time.
‘You can’t bring flowers in here,’ said the hefty duty nurse. ‘They spread diseases.’
‘Then you shouldn’t have a sodding flower shop on the ground floor,’ said Evie, but she stowed the cellophaned daffodils under the bed. We had also brought grapes and dried cherries, Private Eye and Hello! magazine. We sat on either side of the bed and willed Nana not to die. But we could see that she wasn’t far from it; they might discharge her in four days or a week; there might even be some kind of operation they could do, but she was going to die, sooner rather than later. One of the reasons we knew this is because she seemed so at ease with the thought; in her small accountant’s notebook she had written a list of hymns and the telephone number of her vicar.
And now it was Evie’s turn to cry.
‘Evelyn,’ said Nana softly. ‘I want you to know that I was quite, quite wrong about your wedding dress. I told you on no account to get married in black.’
Evie smiled through tears. ‘You certainly did. You threatened not to come to the wedding.’
Nana blinked her pale eyes. She went on, taking trouble with each word as it came: ‘You were the most beautiful bride. In your long black dress. Like a mermaid, you were.’
‘I was wearing white underwear,’ said Evie.
The woman in the bed opposite looked at us over the top of her paperback.
Now Nana turned to me. ‘And you,’ she said. ‘Dearest Nora. Never stop being yourself, duckling.’
‘Dearest Nana,’ I replied.
I folded both my hands into her outstretched one, thinking how many times I had done this before: held my Nana’s hand. I thought of the years she spent with us, sleeping on the sofa, living out of her suitcase, looking after me and the flat while Evie was unable to function. There was no problem that couldn’t be solved with prayer, or a piece of shortbread. Nana had secured us, solid as an anchor, for those anchorless years after my father had died. And now she was unsecured, and floating. Now her hands needed the strength in mine, and not the other way around.
We stayed overnight in a small hotel near Glasgow Royal Infirmary. I discovered when I unpacked my bag that I had not brought my phone – I would have to wait until we got home until I could speak to Bel again. And I could have cried again, for disappointment.
When I woke up the following morning I knew, somehow, that Nana was dead. I stood at the window, not wanting to wake up my mother, wanting the last sleep she had before learning this news to be a long one. The rain was coming down again, slate-grey and slanting. My reflection appeared to me in the glass, and she looked to me like a stranger, casually inquisitive, peering in.
But Nana was not dead, not yet. The hospital would keep her a while, making changes to her medication, monitoring her progress. We waited to be told things, not knowing when or how each piece of information would come. It altered our perception of time: now each day was a milestone, bringing new hope or new despair, and the days were nameless and numberless. Evie booked me a flight home at the end of the week, since I couldn’t miss too much school. She herself would stay as long as she had to.
Then we went to Aunt Petra’s house.
It was not too far – perhaps three quarters of an hour from the hospital. We drove through Dunbartonshire to Argyll and Bute, around rocky coast and through dormant villages, while the rain drummed on the roof of our ancient car. Evie was calm, but her fingertips tapped at the steering wheel, keeping time with the rain. I kept an eye on her pallid profile as the sea lochs stretched out alongside us, silently asking her the questions I’d been asking, on and off, for ten years.
Are you OK?
And: What will we do if you’re not?
I rolled my head to the side in a pretence of sleep. If Nana died – when Nana died – I would lose my only ally. Without Nana, there would only be me, checking whether Evie was OK.
We followed the edge of the Gareloch, dotted with sailboats and the odd yacht, then we passed a naval base – so huge and forbidding that all I could think of was the unstoppable onset of war. After a while, the roads grew narrower and more winding; we came through two or three smaller villages, turned off the road down a tarmacked drive, and came to a gate marked ‘Seat of Tranquillity’. Reedy grasses grew up around the gateposts; here and there an army of nettles had been cut back, to make way for those who needed to cross the threshold.
‘We’re here,’ said Evie. She reached over and hugged me. ‘It will all be all right,’ she said. ‘I’m all right. I promise you.’
But I am not the only one in my family who can tell lies.
9
My ability to tune into the feelings of my mother is strong. Blame the fact that I had no other company after the death of my father. Blame the fact that our flat on the eighth floor of the housing estate is small and spaceless; blame the fact that her grief nearly gobbled her up, and it scared me.
People talk about ‘getting over’ the death of a loved one. As though death is a hump in the road that you leave behind. I did not think death was like that. From what I’d seen, death was sticky, like semi-dried blood; it got all over your hands, whether you liked it or not. And the more that you loved someone, the stickier it was. I loved my dad. I sat under his desk while he worked; I brought him his small cups of coffee, and his much-adored palmiers. But Evie loved him more. Of course, I am not Evie, but I think I can say that: she loved him more. And although she didn’t speak about him very often, and although we left France behind, and although she had made no tomb of his possessions, there was no question of her forgetting him, or getting over his death.