‘We might be a while. You should take a walk outside,’ the nurse said, resiliently cheerful. ‘It’s a lovely day.’
‘Yes,’ said Anneliese. Lovely day for throwing yourself over a cliff. What would the poor girl do if she said that? Probably find the on-call psychiatrist and tell him there was a mad woman in-house, and could they find her a bed, a straitjacket and a needleful of benzodiazepam.
She collected her bag and went into the corridor, not knowing quite what to do with herself. Somehow, she ended up in the small hospital coffee shop, at a table with a cup of frothy white coffee and a scone that looked hard enough to bounce off the walls. She wasn’t in the slightest bit hungry, but she buttered the scone anyway and bit into it.
Keep putting the fuel in, she remembered someone saying to her once. But why? Old worn-out cars got scrapped. Why couldn’t old, worn-out people get scrapped too? Why bother putting fuel in when the engine was gone?
She shoved the scone away and, to occupy herself, switched on her mobile phone. Brendan had sent her a text message. He was hopeless with phones, spent so long sending the simplest message that the time involved far outweighed the benefits of texting versus actually phoning.
Once, she, Beth and Izzie had laughed gently with him over his hopelessness in this area. Now, Anneliese wondered if she’d ever laugh at anything again. What did laughing actually feel like? Would she ever do it again?
Marvellous news. Izzie has arrived. She will be at the hospital by four.
No text shorthand for Brendan.
Anneliese thought of Izzie, who was strong on the outside and soft as a marshmallow on the inside, and how she’d cry at the sight of her darling Gran in the hospital bed. Then, she thought of Beth, who’d sobbed when she’d heard the news on the phone, but who couldn’t come until the weekend.
‘Of course, don’t rush,’ Anneliese had reassured her. Reassuring her daughter was what Anneliese did best. ‘Gran will be OK.’
Another lie. Who knew if Lily would really be all right or not? But there was method to her madness: the longer Beth stayed away, the more time Anneliese would have before she had to tell her daughter the horrible news about her parents’ separation.
It was ridiculous that she still hadn’t told Beth about her and Edward, ridiculous. Beth would be furious with her, but Anneliese just hadn’t had the heart to do it. As if telling her daughter would make it all true.
Anneliese knew she could not be strong enough for both Izzie and Beth.
That was what she’d wanted to tell Lily before the nurse interrupted them.
‘Beth doesn’t need me,’ she half-whispered to herself in the hospital coffee shop. ‘She has Marcus to look after her and he adores her. Nobody needs me any more. I don’t have to be here. For the first time ever, I don’t have to be here.’
It was both liberating and terrifying at the same time.
She didn’t need to be there. Be anywhere. She could jump off the cliff or walk into the sea and keep walking, and it wouldn’t really matter.
‘How did you manage, Lily?’ she wondered out loud.
She partly knew the answer: Lily had thrown herself into raising Izzie. She’d had to bury her own grief and deal with her granddaughter’s instead. But Anneliese had nobody to take care of. She had only herself and, right now, she didn’t care what happened to Anneliese Kennedy.
The first person Izzie saw when she went into the four-bed ward was Anneliese. Sitting by a bed with knitting on her lap and a far-away look on her face, she seemed so wonderfully familiar that Izzie had to bite her lip to stop herself crying again and ruining all the repair work she’d done with make-up on the way there.
Then she saw her grandmother, tiny and frail as a child in the bed, with no hint of the vital woman she’d known all her life. Shock leached the colour from Izzie’s face and her emotional armour came tumbling down.
‘Anneliese,’ Izzie gasped, grabbing her aunt’s hands in horror and stopping beside the bed. ‘Oh God, poor Gran, my poor Gran.’
Anneliese could do nothing but pat Izzie’s shoulders as the younger woman held on to the little body in the bed, sobbing ‘Gran.’
It was almost too private to watch, Anneliese thought, and she began to turn away, hoping nobody else would approach so that Izzie could mourn in peace.
‘Anneliese! She’s talking!’
‘What?’ Anneliese rushed to the other side of the bed. ‘She hasn’t woken up, Izzie, not since…We should call the doctor.’
‘Yes, Gran.’ Izzie wasn’t listening to Anneliese. She was bent close to her grandmother’s face, trying to decipher the faint words.
Lily’s mouth was moving and her eyes were open, shining out of her face with a vitality undimmed by nearly ninety years of life.
‘We’re here, Lily,’ Anneliese said gently. ‘You’re in hospital. You had a stroke, love, but you’re going to be all right.’
Lily stared up at the ceiling, as if she was looking at somebody neither of them could see.
‘Jamie,’ she whispered in a voice as faint as paper rustling on the wind. ‘Jamie, are you there?’
Izzie and Anneliese stared at each other across the bed. Jamie? Neither of them knew of a Jamie.
‘Jamie?’
‘Gran, it’s me, Izzie.’ Izzie stroked her grandmother’s cheek softly, but Lily’s eyes closed slowly shut and the brief moment of vitality faded from her face.
‘I don’t understand,’ Izzie said. ‘Dad said she was still unconscious…’
‘She was. She still is,’ Anneliese said. ‘That wasn’t really waking up, was it? Your voice reached her, for sure, but she wasn’t talking to us. She was seeing someone else –’
‘Jamie.’ Izzie sat heavily down on the chair beside the bed. ‘Who the hell is Jamie?’
October 1940
Lily Kennedy rested her stockinged feet against the base of the cream Aga in the huge kitchen in Rathnaree and sipped her tea from a flowered china teacup. It was early morning and the room was silent except for the ticking of the clock on the wall and the occasional crowing of the cockerel outside in the yard.
The ten-minute walk from the Forge to the big house had been cold, with Lily and Mam hurrying along in their heavy outdoor boots, the cool of dawn biting into their faces and a weak sun lengthening shadows in the dark woods along the avenue. Lily wasn’t afraid of the dark: a girl raised in the countryside had no fear of shadows, although there were plenty of stories about bogeymen and spirits that gave her pause on the nights she bicycled from
