The Things I Know(77)
‘Keep us posted, little love, and take care.’
And then, gripping her man’s hand, she had stumbled once or twice on her twisted foot as he strode purposefully through the throng of people, all oblivious to the urgency he felt. He was preoccupied, understandably so, but still, this felt a lot like returning to reality, coming up for air, as if they had been living underwater in a bubble of rural perfection where they made protestations of love, put cards up in the farm wholesale store, planned for the future and reached for each other’s hand. It was a shock to her system – noisy, sharp and cold. The sea change unnerved her.
Grayson, leaning on the table in the chair opposite hers, rubbed his forehead. As the carriage rocked along the tracks, he kicked out a couple of times, as if the leg room were inadequate, running his finger under the collar of his shirt, suggesting that the carriage temperature was too hot and progress a lot, lot slower than he was happy with.
‘We’ll get there as soon as we can, Grayson. Try to take a deep breath.’
He nodded, breathing in through his nose and out through his mouth. And for a second, peace seemed to come over him, before his leg started jumping and his fingers fidgeted with the edge of the train ticket, flicking the corner back and forth, back and forth.
‘I just want to get there.’
‘I know.’
According to his sobbing Auntie Joan, his mum had had a heart attack, been whisked to Barts Hospital and was on the brink, hooked up to tubes and wires and machines . . . It intrigued Thomasina that the embarrassing exchange of a few weeks earlier no longer mattered in the light of this new crisis. Nothing did. As is often the case in an emergency, everything was forgiven, the slate wiped clean, and all that did matter was getting Grayson to his mum, either to reassure her or to say goodbye. And Thomasina would be there by his side, offering support, should the worst happen.
‘I’ve thought about my mum dying,’ he said as the train hurtled past Swindon.
‘I think everyone does that,’ she said, to console him. ‘It’s how we try to cope with the scary stuff before it actually happens, like an emotional trial run.’
‘I suppose so. I think what it will be like afterwards – my aunts so sad, drinking, no doubt. And I think about what the flat might be like, plunged into silence. And I know it sounds terrible, Thomasina, but I think about that life of quiet, without the trickle of words from my mum, on constant send, voicing her interior monologue like the man on the radio giving the shipping news.’ He gave her a brief smile. ‘I’m ashamed to say that the idea of that quiet used to fill me with a little relief.’
‘I don’t think that’s terrible.’ She again pictured Mrs Potts’s anger and her spiky turns of phrase. ‘Not at all.’
‘And yet now there’s a very real chance of her not making it, and I don’t feel relief at all. My heart’s racing and I feel guilty.’
‘Why do you feel guilty?’ she asked softly.
‘Because she didn’t ever want me to leave her, and now, whatever has happened to her, she had to face it alone.’
‘You’ll have a chance to make it up to her, I’m sure of it,’ Thomasina offered, forcing a smile. This was not the time to voice her opinion that he deserved some respite from the chaotic and demanding life in which his mother had ensnared him.
The hospital was hectic and she hated the smell, the bright, bright lights and the glimpses of the sick and injured. She was no stranger to hospitals, and it was impossible for her to walk the pastel-painted corridors without recalling the many operations on her gut, foot, heart and the painful, painful ones on her mouth when she was a kid. She felt a surge of sickness at the memory.
Grayson ran around, misreading signs and in a state close to panic as he tried to find the ward, the details of which he’d written down on a piece of paper and on the palm of his hand, lest he should forget. Still holding tightly on to his hand, as his flat-soled shoes squeaked on the highly polished floors when he rounded the corners, it was all Thomasina could do to keep up. With his satchel clutched to his chest, his fright seemed to cloud his sense of where he was. Eventually, he put a call in to his Auntie Joan, who gave them directions towards the ward. She and Eva were huddled over cigarettes outside the building, without any hint of how inappropriate this was.
‘Can I come in?’ Grayson pressed the buzzer and spoke to the kindly, slightly robotic voice on the other end of the line.
‘Patient’s name?’
‘Mrs Ida Potts, but I don’t know why she still calls herself Mrs Potts – she’s been single for far more years than she was ever married.’ Nervous energy took over his tongue, and Thomasina kissed his hand.
‘Everything is going to be okay.’ She liked the way her mum’s mantra sounded at this moment, understanding now how this warm and comfortable platitude was a little like emotional cotton wool to stuff into the edges of one’s mind when emotional turmoil left gaps.
The door unclicked slowly open.
She felt a sudden wave of unease, as if she should be elsewhere, as Grayson walked briskly along the ward, peeping into rooms where the doors were ajar and hovering outside curtained beds, until a noise or a voice told him it was not his mum loitering within its flowery confines. A fat nurse with a fixed smile and an iPad approached him.
‘Can I help you two? Who is it we are looking for tonight?’