Tread Softly (8 page)

Especially if you're anaesthetized for four solid hours, Lorna had bitten back.

Sergeant-Major Phil, however, dismissed the idea out of hand and continued relentlessly with her drill. ‘Take more weight on the arms! No, don't grip the crutches so tightly. Relax, relax! You're far too tense. And look up, not down. Bend your knees. You're holding them too stiff. Take smaller steps. There's no need to stride out like that – you're not competing in a marathon.'

Nor ever likely to. Any increase in pace was simply to propel herself back to her room so she could flop out on the bed. They were nearly there, thank heavens.

‘Right, I'll see you tomorrow, Mrs Pearson. And don't forget: practice is essential.'

And so is a rest from my labours, Lorna thought, undoing the special shoe on her bad foot. Provided by the hospital, it was a monstrosity in air-force blue, a cross between a trainer and a sandal, but fastening with Velcro straps and made large enough to fit over the bandages. Not exactly this year's fashion sensation.

Her foot was throbbing and burning, and her back hurt so much it was impossible to get comfortable. In fact she felt worse today than she had all week – exhausted whether upright or flat out. And her lunch had gone cold, of course. It was an unwritten rule in the Princess Royal that, whenever a meal arrived, someone or something would turn up almost immediately and disrupt it. Thus Phil had appeared thirty seconds after the duck in port-wine sauce and chocolate soufflé. The soufflé had collapsed and the port-wine sauce was edged with an orange frill of solidifying fat. Not that it mattered – she wasn't hungry anyway.

Too lethargic to read, she lay slumped against the pillows, gazing at the implausibly blue sky above the sun-kissed poppy-fields. The real sky outside was leaden, and this morning's forecast had warned of floods in Wales. Clare was in Wales, which meant she couldn't visit. They might have had a good laugh together. Or more likely a good cry.

Lorna counted on her fingers – fourteen days till Clare was back, eight till Christmas Day. Much of her time was spent counting days: two until she left hospital, twenty-one until the stitches were out, forty until she could dispense with the crutches, a hundred and eighty until she could walk really well, three hundred and sixty before the second operation, which she didn't dare to contemplate. She thought of the charts she had made at school, ticking off the days to the end of term – although memories of school were best avoided. She had been a pariah then: an orphan, to be shunned, as if the condition were catching. Often she had lain awake in the dormitory terrorized by images of car crashes: her parents bleeding in a tangle of wreckage. Had they suffered dreadfully? Would she see them again when
she
died?

Ralph seldom mentioned his schooldays, yet from what she could gather he had been equally miserable. And it had forged between them a bond no less powerful for being unspoken. He was the only person she had met who understood the pain of a lost childhood, and who'd also been forced to come to terms with grief before he knew the meaning of the word.

‘It's a pity you can't be more stoical, like he is. Now get up and practise your walking, as Phil told you.'

‘But it
hurts
, Aunt Agnes.'

‘I don't wonder, child, with all this lying around. God gave us our bodies to use.'

With a groan, Lorna reached for her special shoe again. (One thing she had learned was to keep everything close at hand, otherwise it meant hopping – strictly forbidden by both physios.) Doing up the ordinary shoe on her good foot, she stared dejectedly at the mismatch: the left foot a wodge of white bandage in an ugly, clumping blue thing; the right pink-socked in a black lace-up. As she leaned forward for the crutches they fell to the floor with a crash.

‘
Damn!
' she muttered. When you were immobile, picking up things you had dropped was a struggle. Several of her possessions had already vanished under the bed: a book, a pen, a handkerchief, one of the pink socks. The cleaner – a manic-depressive Spaniard, Dolores – didn't appear to have noticed: too busy complaining about her husband. (‘He bad news. He go with other women.')

Having retrieved the crutches, Lorna crawled on her hands and knees to recover the other items, then rested with her head on the floor. This was a baby's-eye-view of the world, nose to the carpet, aware of its smell and feel, and dwarfed by beetling crags of furniture. Babies had it easy – sleeping all day, with no little Hitlers bossing you about. Cooed at by strangers. Cuddled by your mama.

She had no real sense of her mother, despite the photographs – which, somewhat disconcertingly, portrayed a younger version of Agnes. Occasionally she invented a different mother, with no resemblance to Agnes in either looks or temperament. But on the whole she preferred to stick with her father – an only child, as she was. She liked to imagine him free of
all
ties, except the one to her: she his wife, his love, his enchanting little princess.

Safe in his arms, she stretched out full-length on the carpet and closed her eyes, barely registering the knock on the door.

‘Mrs
Pearson
! Are you all right? What happened? Did you fall?'

‘No, I'm … fine.' Scarlet-cheeked, Lorna heaved herself to her feet. Didn't it just have to be Nurse Ingrid, a humourless harridan who had already caught her talking to a potted plant earlier in the week?

‘Let me help you back to bed. Good gracious! You're extremely hot. Has someone taken your temperature? No? I'll do it then. You stay there and rest. I'll be back in a second.'

She was, with a thermometer and an air of agitation.

‘It is rather high, Mrs Pearson,' she said, shaking down the thermometer. ‘We'd better let Mr Hughes know. Fortunately he's just along the corridor, seeing another patient.'

‘Another emergency, no doubt,' the Monster gloated. ‘I expect all his patients develop fever and delirium.'

Lorna kept her eyes on the get-well cards clustered on the window-sill. She had friends. They cared. Clare had even sent a bouquet of pink tulips (miraculously spring-like in midwinter), although the poor things were drooping in the heat.

‘Watch out! – here he comes, the strutting little quack. I wouldn't trust him an inch. Remember those scandals about botched operations and mix-ups with the –'

‘Good afternoon, Mrs Pearson. I hear you're not so well.'

‘Er, no.'

‘How's the foot feeling?'

‘It's been hurting a lot more today.'

‘Have you a cough?

‘No.'

‘Or any problem with your waterworks?'

‘No.'

‘We'd better take the dressing off. Nurse!'

Lorna could hardly bear to watch as Ingrid unwound the crêpe bandage, revealing a disgusting layer of other, blackened, bandages encrusted with dried blood, which had to be prised off with hot water. The gauze pad beneath was sticking to the wounds and proved even more painful to remove. But the sight of her foot was the real shock. It resembled some grotesque exhibit in a sensationalist avant-garde art show – hugely swollen, with the black stitches standing out against the deep puce of the flesh, and yellowish pus oozing from two red and puffy toes.

Clearly Mr Hughes was no happier than she was. ‘I think this might have been brought to my attention a little sooner,' he remarked, his irritation evident despite the measured words. ‘And Mrs Pearson's temperature chart doesn't appear to have been filled in for the last couple of days.' His raised eyebrows signalled further reproof, although he was graciousness itself as he turned to speak to her. ‘I'm afraid it is a bit infected, Mrs Pearson.'

‘A
bit?
' the Monster spluttered. ‘The whole thing's a mass of gangrene!'

‘So I think we'd better keep you here a few more days.'

Her first thought was for Ralph. Already he was pushed to meet the deadline on the Staplehurst job and had to fight his way across London to see her every evening on top of a hard day's work. Last night he had looked washed out and did admit he wasn't feeling well. Perhaps it was just the pressures: letters piling up unopened, invoices not sent out, and clients annoyed at getting the answering-machine instead of her personal attention. If she told him she had to stay in hospital when he needed her so desperately at home he might –

‘Nurse, take a swab from those toes,' Mr Hughes instructed. ‘And get the RMO to put a drip up. We'll give Mrs Pearson some intravenous flucloxacillin. Keep her on bed-rest, with the foot elevated, and I want a four-hourly check on her temperature and pulse. I'll look in again first thing tomorrow.'

‘Why bother,' shrugged the Monster. ‘She'll be dead by then.'

‘Here we are then,' said Colin. ‘Safe and sound.'

Lorna felt neither as she peered through the ambulance window. Oakfield House seemed singularly ill-named, with no sign of a field or an oak (or indeed of any tree): just an austere expanse of tarmacked drive darkened by the rain, and a grim grey-stone façade that reminded her unsettlingly of boarding-school.

‘No, don't move, Mrs Pearson. We'll help you out.'

Colin set up the wheelchair while Jack got down from the driver's seat and opened the doors at the back of the ambulance. She found it acutely embarrassing to arrive with a uniformed escort: Colin holding her case and crutches, Jack wheeling her down the ramp and up to the front door. Not that there was anyone to notice. The entrance hall was empty, the reception desk unmanned.

‘Are they expecting you?' Jack asked.

‘Mm.' She was eight again, blinking back the tears as the hated school engulfed her. Big girls didn't cry.

‘I'll give a shout.'

Jack's ‘Hello there!' was answered by a long, low, desolate wail. Had they come to the wrong place – a torture chamber rather than a nursing-home?

‘Ah, here's someone,' Colin said, as a scraggy woman in a badly ironed blue uniform walked into the hall. ‘Can you help us?' he asked. ‘We've brought Mrs Pearson from the Princess Royal. She's staying here over Christmas.'

‘I don't know nothing about it.'

‘Well, can you find someone who does?'

Another unearthly howl echoed from the floor above. Lorna fought an overwhelming urge to seize her case and bolt. Even now she hadn't quite accepted the fact that she was a prisoner of her chair. If she wanted to go anywhere beyond a scant fifty yards, someone had to wheel her.

Nervously she glanced around the hall. The grey lino and beige walls did nothing to raise her spirits. The only splash of colour was the Christmas decorations: paper-chains in red and green, and a lopsided Scots pine planted in a red plastic bucket and hung with garish baubles. The Princess Royal seemed a palace in comparison. However, despite the aftermath of her infection, she had been summarily discharged from there. Over Christmas and New Year they kept only emergency cases, being reduced to a skeleton staff. She pictured gaping skulls leering as they brought patients' medication, jangling bones lurching along the corridor.

‘I see you're admiring our Christmas tree.'

Lorna turned to see another blue-uniformed woman – a definite improvement on the first: not only neatly dressed but actually smiling. And pretty, too, with short, dark, curly hair and grey-green eyes.

‘Hello. I'm Sister Kathy. Mrs Pearson, isn't it?'

‘Yes, that's right.'

‘Welcome to Oakfield House. I'll take you to your room.'

Lorna felt strangely bereft as she said goodbye to Jack and Colin. They had become friends in a friendless world, Jack chatting to her all the way from London and even confiding that he, too, was dreading Christmas. She pressed a £10 note into his hands – an over-generous tip, maybe, but as well as thanks it represented a plea for them not to abandon her in this ghastly place but take her back with them to normality.

Alas, it was not to be. Sister Kathy picked up her case and wheeled her down a corridor that smelt depressingly of urine. Through open doors Lorna caught glimpses of white hair, white faces, white cardigans, dead eyes. As they paused a moment outside the lounge, she gazed in at a circle of chairs, each occupied by an inert ancient female. The only sign of animation was a bouncy girl on television prattling away to the impervious stares of her audience.

‘You're on the top floor,' Kathy said, manoeuvring the chair past a trolleyful of incontinence pads, then standing back to let a tottery man on a Zimmer frame weave his slow way to the lounge. ‘I'm afraid the rooms are rather on the small side up there, but we're chock-a-block over Christmas and it was the only one we had free.'

‘That's OK.' At least it might be quieter away from the screams of the demented. Counting blessings should prove a doddle here. Compared with the inmates she had seen so far, she was not only in the prime of life but in the pink of health. Coming towards her was a poor wretch in a wheelchair, his face porridge-pale, his hands blotched with purple bruises, his whole body jerking and twitching. Lorna's tentative smile of greeting was met with a hostile glare. Perhaps people kept themselves to themselves, and friendly overtures were discouraged. If only she knew the protocol. Shades of school again – that frightening first day when all the other girls seemed years older than her and she had no idea what to say, how to be and whether she would ever find her way around without a permanent guide.

‘Lousy weather, isn't it?' Kathy remarked as they waited for the lift.

‘Yes, awful.' She had hardly noticed the weather – she had too much on her mind. Besides, in a hospital there wasn't any weather, only endless fug. Weather belonged to one's visitors, along with functioning feet, outdoor clothes and an interest in turkey and mince pies.

As the lift groaned and shuddered upward, she tried to curb her fear. Lifts, heights, the Underground, deep water – all could bring on palpitations. To avoid every source of panic she would have to enter a nunnery (and then suffer claustrophobia).