She sat down, taking care to avoid the chair which had always been her mother’s, the one which afforded the best view of the garden.
Without seeming to be, she was aware of Camilla watching her, aware of the younger girl’s faint relaxation as Sage said calmly to Faye, ‘I think you’re going to have to take over Mother’s job of pouring the coffee, Faye. I never did get the knack of doing it without dripping the stuff everywhere…’
‘Gran told me that it used to be a test that would-be mothers-in-law set for their sons’ girlfriends: to make them pour the tea,’ Camilla informed them.
Sage laughed. ‘So that’s why I’ve never managed to get myself a husband. I’ve often wondered.’
They all laughed, the atmosphere lightening a little. Sage left it to Faye to inform Camilla that they were all going to visit the hospital together. While she was doing so, Jenny came in with a cardboard box, full of newspaper-wrapped shapes, which Sage realised must be her mother’s Sèvres breakfast set.
‘I’ve put in a packet of her favourite tea, Russian Caravan, and some of those biscuits she likes so much…’
‘Is that for Gran?’ Camilla asked Jenny curiously.
‘Yes, Sage thought that Liz would enjoy having her tea out of her favourite Sèvres breakfast set and she asked me to wrap it up so that she could take it to the hospital.’
‘Oh, yes… Gran loves that set, she always said…says…’ Camilla faltered, darting a quick, anxious look at her mother ‘…that it makes her tea taste extra specially good.’
‘Well, it will be a long time before she can actually use it,’ Sage warned her, not adding the words all of them felt—a long time, if ever…
‘Sage will want to make an early start,’ Faye informed her daughter. ‘She’s standing in for your grandmother at tonight’s meeting of the action committee and she wants to spend later this afternoon going through Liz’s files, so as soon as you’ve finished your breakfast I suggest you go upstairs and get changed.’
‘And then I think that perhaps from tomorrow you can go back to school,’ Sage suggested quietly but firmly, pretending not to see the grateful look Faye gave her.
When asked for her opinion Camilla had objected to being sent away to boarding-school, and instead had asked her mother and grandmother if she could attend a very good local day school. She was now in her A level year, with a good prospect of getting to Oxford, if she worked hard, and on this subject at least Sage didn’t need to wonder what her mother would have wanted Camilla to do.
‘I know you’ll be anxious about your grandmother,’ she continued, seeing the words already springing to Camilla’s lips, ‘but if you’re honest with yourself, Cam, you’ll know that she’d have wanted you to continue with your school work. She’s so proud of you… Every time I see her she tells me how thrilled she is that you’ll probably be going to Oxford. The last thing she’d want would be for you to neglect your studies—and don’t worry. We’ll make sure that you get to visit her, even if it means my taking you in to London myself.’
‘I wish she were closer to us… Can’t she be transferred to Bristol or Bath?’
‘Not at this stage,’ Sage told her, adding gently, ‘She’s in the best possible place, Camilla… The facilities at St Giles’s are among the most advanced in the country. Perhaps later when she’s recuperating…’
She wondered if she ought to do more to prepare her niece for the visual gravity of the intensive care ward with its machinery and tubes, its high-tech austerity and the shocking contrast of one pale, frail human body among all that alien machinery, and then decided not to do so. Camilla was of a different generation, a generation for whom machinery, no matter how complex, was accepted as a matter of course. Camilla might not necessarily find the sight of the intensive care ward shocking as she had done, but rather reassuring, taking comfort from the knowledge that the most advanced techniques were being used to support the frail thread of life.
∗ ∗ ∗
Sage was driving through the heavy London traffic when Camilla suddenly asked her, ‘How are you getting on with the diaries…? I meant to ask you last night, but I’d gone to bed before you’d finished.’
‘I haven’t finished the first one yet,’ Sage lied, knowing that she was making an excuse for not yet having passed the diary on to Faye as they had arranged.
‘What’s in it? Anything interesting?’
Sage had no idea what to say. Her fingers tensed on the wheel and as she fumbled for words, for something to say, Faye unwittingly came to her rescue by telling her daughter, ‘Liz wanted us all to read the diaries separately…to learn from them individually…’
‘Yes, that’s right, she did.’
‘Will you finish the first one tonight, then?’ Camilla pressed.
It was almost as though she sensed her caution, her reluctance to discuss the diaries, the fact that she was deliberately withholding something from them, Sage recognised.
Only she knew how much she had been tempted to go back downstairs last night to go on reading… As for finishing more of the diaries tonight… She had no idea how long the meeting would go on for, but what she did know was that she would be expected to make copious notes…to record faithfully every detail of what had taken place for her mother’s later assessment, if not for the rest of the committee.
Odd how, now, when her mother could not physically or emotionally compel her to act in the way she considered right and proper, she was actually compelling herself to do so… The details of her own work, her own commitments, she carried around with her in her head, much to the irritation of her secretary—she had never been methodical, never been organised or logical in the way she worked, always taking a perverse and contrary delight in abandoning routine and order to follow a seemingly careless and uncontrolled path of her own.
And yet here she was meticulously planning to follow in her mother’s orderly footsteps, as though in doing so she was somehow fulfilling some kind of sacred trust, somehow keeping the flickering flame of her mother’s life-force alive.
Ridiculous…emotional, idiotic stuff…and yet so powerful, so strong, so forceful was its message within her that she was compelled to listen to it and to obey.
‘I HADN’T realised—it was almost as though Gran wasn’t there at all.’ Camilla shivered, despite the centrally heated warmth of the hospital.
‘She’s heavily drugged, Cam,’ Sage told her gently. ‘The nurse said that it was to give her body a chance of getting over the shock of the accident and her injuries…’
Camilla swallowed visibly, suddenly a child again as she pleaded anxiously, ‘She isn’t going to die, is she, Sage…? I don’t want her to die…’
Sensing the hysteria lurking beneath the plea, Sage turned to her and took her in her arms. ‘I can’t answer that question, Cam. I only know, as you do, that if anyone can survive this kind of thing your grandmother will do so…’
