house that night seemed colourless and smaller and overfamiliar and my mother even quieter than usual. ‘What did you do?’ she asked, as she brushed my hair. The sheets on my bed were smoothed down and I knew without looking that my hot-water bottle with the rabbit cover was in its proper place.
‘Drew some pictures,’ I answered evasively. I didn’t want to share the experience, even with her.
‘That’s nice.’
I didn’t ask about her day’s absence. Maybe she had been to see the doctor about her headaches. Sometimes they made her eyes red and swollen so she had to lie down on the double bed, a small shape hunched up on the green candlewick cover with her back turned to the door.
‘It wasn’t boring,’ I told Ted now. ‘I loved it.’
‘He was a good perfumer, the old man, a craftsman. I learned everything I needed to know from him. No business sense, though. None at all.’
I had to lean closer to catch his words. His voice seemed to be fading to an echo of itself and his eyes were gradually falling shut. I thought he might be drifting into sleep and I had to stop myself from grasping his hand and shaking it hard to keep him with me. I watched the shallow rise and fall of his chest under his pyjama jacket.
Then his eyes snapped open again and he struggled to sit upright. ‘It stinks in here,’ he complained. His nostrils flared and deep lines pulled the corners of his mouth downwards. I sniffed the air and caught a whiff of vomit and a faint fecal undertone. If even I could smell it, the ward must indeed stink to Ted’s sensitive nose.
I sandwiched his hand between my two. ‘We need something stronger to block it out. I’ve got an idea. Shall I go out and buy some perfume to spray round?’ I could hear the cheeriness in my voice cracking and shivering like the sea ice, with grief welling up from beneath. ‘What would you like? Joy? Vent Vert? Or one of your own? How about Black Opal or Iridescent?’
‘I’ve smelled enough perfume for one lifetime,’ Ted said irritably.
I bent my head and waited. And then, when I finally stole a glance at his face, I saw that this time he really had fallen asleep.
I went down to the hospital visitors’ car park, where I could use my mobile phone, and called Lola to relay the news.
‘Oh God, Mum, I’m sorry. Poor Grandad. I’d better ring in and cancel my shift,’ she said at once. Lola worked in a bar during university holidays. At least she’s at home, I told myself, not up in Manchester as she was all term-time. We agreed that she would collect Jack from school in her car and they would come straight up to the hospital.
‘Drive carefully,’ I warned her. ‘Of course I will.’
Next I telephoned Penny at the Works, as we call the book bindery and small print shop we jointly own. Penny and I have been business partners for twelve years. I have always loved the physical weight and dimensions of fine books, the texture of paper, and the variety and intricate grace of typefaces, and Penny possesses the rare combination of design flair and business acuity. We work well together and although there are no great riches in what we do, we make an adequate living out of our leather bindings and hand-set printing.
‘Don’t worry,’ Penny told me. ‘Don’t even think about anything here, I’ll handle it. And I’m here if you need me, okay?’
Next I spoke to Caz. Caz has been my friend since we lived in adjacent rooms in a decrepit student house thirty years ago. We were married in the same year, and she and Graham had their two boys in quick succession, not long after Tony and I had Lola. We have shared the quotidian details of our lives ever since, to the extent that if I think of myself as having an extended family, Caz and Graham and their children are it.
‘What can I do?’ Caz said, as soon as I told her the news. If there is ever a favour to be done for someone else, an empty slot in a rota or a spare pair of hands required, Caz is always the first to volunteer.
‘Will you have Jack, if I have to stay over at the hospital? If Lola can’t hold the fort, that is?’
Jack didn’t currently get on all that well with Dan and Matthew, Caz’s boys, but in this emergency he would have to make the best of it.
‘Of course,’ she assured me. ‘Anything else? What about some shopping? Or listen, I’ve got a chicken, I can roast it and bring it over …’
Caz and I both use food as shorthand for love. With Mel and me it’s more a matter of romance and theatre.
Caz was saying, ‘It’s very sudden. He wasn’t ill before, was he?’
‘Yes,’ I agreed. ‘It is very sudden.’ I don’t think that even Caz, whom I have known for all these years, has ever really noticed how little I actually talk about my father or about the past.
‘I’ll be thinking of you, darling,’ she said in her warm voice. ‘Call me as soon as there’s any news.’
Finally I dialled Mel’s office direct line. After I had told her what had happened she said, ‘That’s quite strange, isn’t it? The way we were talking about him last night?’
‘Yes.’
‘Do you want me to come up and keep you company?’ It was a generous offer. Mel worked for a big headhunting company and I could guess at the rapid mental diary reshuffling she must be doing, although there wasn’t the faintest hint of it in her tone.
‘No. But thank you.’
‘Sadie?’
‘Yes?’
‘You can’t change or even affect what’s going to happen, you know. You just have to accept this, for him and for yourself.’
Mel understood me well and my need to control what went on around me. She knew that it was disturbing for me to feel powerless, as I did most of the time where Jack was concerned, although she didn’t know what had made me this way.
‘I know,’ I murmured.
After she had rung off I sat down on the low wall of the car park. The morning was grey under a monochrome sky, with none of the luminous quality of the evening before. Cars rolled through the entrance and circled past me, looking for slots. A young man in a Peugeot skidded into an empty place and leaped out, clicking the remote locking as he sprinted towards the hospital doors. His wife must be in labour, I thought. I watched an old couple extricate themselves with difficulty from their Honda. The wife took a pair of sticks from behind the passenger seat and gave them to her husband, waiting with exaggerated patience while he shuffled himself into the ‘go’ position. They set off on the journey towards the doors together, without having exchanged a word. A big Asian family filed past, followed by a white girl who looked younger than Lola pushing a baby in a buggy. All these people had their different reasons for coming here, to this place of crisis, and all of them brought with them the weight of their anxiety or the bubble of hope. Ted was dying, but so were other people behind the stained concrete façade, and at the same time others were struggling with pain or dreaming of recovery, and babies were fighting their way out into the light. Being part of this random community made me feel less isolated and the walls that contained my feelings seemed to grow thinner, as if they might rupture and I might be able to give way to grief.
A
