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Herbert yanked the ambulance round in a violent, squealing arc, squinted through the gloom for a turning on the left, could not see one, and decided to trust in fate.

Hard left again, up onto the pavement, ready to dodge any onrushing walls… but no, somehow he had judged it correctly, and they were on what he was sure was St. Thomas’ Street, which meant that Guy’s was on their right.

Which meant that they had done it.

He pulled up outside the nearest building and was out of the door almost before the ambulance had stopped moving. Derek was already on the pavement, pulling Hannah with him. Derek motioned for Rodney to take the other end of the stretcher, and together they ran into the hospital, carrying Hannah like a sack of cement.

Herbert glanced quickly inside the rear of the ambulance, and felt a surge of relief to see that both surviving patients were, not to put too fine a point on it, still alive.

They stared at him.

“You’re a bloody disgrace,” the man said.

“You must really love her,” the woman said.

Herbert should have stayed to help them out of the ambulance and into the main building, but, God help him, he wanted to be with Hannah.

He took her cane from inside, gave the woman a weak smile, and hurried in the direction that Derek and Rodney had taken, slightly salving his conscience by telling the first orderly he found that there were two patients in an ambulance outside who needed urgent attention.

“We’re out of stretchers,” he shouted at Herbert’s disappearing back, and at any other time Herbert would have found the irony amusing; half the railings in London were made from old stretchers, the ends slightly curved to act as legs and the metal mesh between each side still intact. There had been a shortage of building materials after the war. Perhaps now, when there was a shortage of medical equipment, the process would be reversed.

Guy’s was even fuller than it had been on Friday, when Herbert had come to see his mother. There were signs on the walls declaring that the Emergency Bed Service had issued a white warning, signifying that hospital admissions were less than 85 percent of applications for beds. People were being turned away in their scores.

But somehow they found a bed, and a doctor, for Hannah. A curtain was pulled round her bed, a pair of nurses circling like buzzards.

Herbert sat in the corridor, staring alternately at the wall, the ceiling, and the floor.

He prayed to his god, and hers, and every god he had ever heard of, to let her be all right.

Time ticked past, and with each minute gone he wanted to run into the ward and pull back the curtain, to see what abominations they were committing on her.

Every time the door opened, he would start forward and slightly upward, before subsiding, a little sheepish, as nurses and visitors and doctors all bustled past without the slightest glance in his direction.

Herbert twirled Hannah’s cane around his wrist, flicked it from hand to hand, and worried his fingers up and down it. Still no one came to tell him what was going on.

Hospitals were considered a great leveler, Herbert thought; but he wondered whether there was any place on earth where people were so wrapped up in their own problems, to the exclusion of everyone else’s. Not the staff, of course, but the patients and their families. For instance, Herbert was here for Hannah alone, and her health was all he cared about, not that of the many others who might quite possibly be substantially more ill than she was.

No, he thought, he was not here for Hannah alone; he suddenly realized how near he was to his mother’s ward, and thought that he should perhaps go and see her, if only to do something and therefore take his mind off Hannah’s condition.

He went via the restroom, which was a good thing, for he was filthy, and his mother would not accept
something as banal as escape from a fire as a decent excuse for sloppiness in his appearance.

He cleaned himself up as best he could, scrubbing his face three times until the dirt was gone, and hoped that she would not notice the tidemarks on his clothes.

Herbert approached the swing doors which opened onto his mother’s ward, and peered through the circular windows which were set in the doors at face height and which always put him in mind of the viewfinders on submarine periscopes.

She was there, her face as long as a horse.

His mother was rarely less than jovial, but she could snap without warning, and on the odd occasions when her mood was bad, like the girl with the curl in the middle of her forehead in Longfellow’s poem, she was horrid.

Herbert sighed and went in.

“The prodigal son,” Mary snarled. “You come and see your old mother …”

She had been speaking rapidly, but now she stopped dead.

“No, I…,” Herbert began.

“… only when you feel like it?” she finished with a rush, and Herbert realized why she had been talking so fast and why she had ceased so suddenly. The first to get through the sentence before she ran out of breath, and the second because it had not worked and she’d had to wait for the air to return, rather like the refilling of a toilet cistern. “And don’t interrupt me,” she added.

Herbert looked closer. Her eyes were rimmed in crimson; she had been crying.

“I’m sorry I didn’t come and see you over the weekend,” Herbert said.

“Too busy running around after murderers?”

“Yes.”

“Why don’t you pay more attention to the living than to the dead?”

Herbert shrugged; there was no answer he felt appropriate.

“And what are you doing here so early?”

“I was in a fire. They’ve brought Hannah here.”

“You only came because you were here anyway?” She looked as though he had caused her mortal offense. “Good Christ, Herbert, that makes it even worse.” She paused. “Who’s Hannah?”

“She’s a friend.”

“A lady friend?”

“A friend who’s a lady, yes.”

“You know what I mean, Herbert.”

“I do indeed, Mama.”

Herbert had no desire to wind her up, but equally he felt that she had no right to pry.

Mary opened her mouth to continue, and then began to wheeze again. This time, Herbert knew better than to reply.

The wheeze grew louder, which momentarily alarmed him until he realized that it was the rush of air from her breathing more freely.

She coughed hard, hawking up a gobbet of phlegm which she caught in her hand and wiped discreetly on the sheets, decorous to the last.

There were several other people in the ward, all long past their best, if indeed they had ever had one. They stared into space or chatted in low voices. All were far too discreet, far too polite, far too British to step between a mother and her son.

“Perhaps we should take a holiday, Mama,” Herbert said.

“Where to? Somewhere with a better climate than here, I should hope.”

“Egypt?” Herbert had served some time during the war in North Africa, and now felt a sudden desire to be back in the desert, where the air was blistering hot, dry, and clear. “We could take a boat across the Channel, cross France by train, take another boat over to Egypt. Amble through the Cairo souks, go sightseeing in the Valley of the Kings. What do you say?”

“Will you be bringing Hannah?”

“For heaven’s sake, Mama.”

“That’s not an answer.”

Angela came in at her usual bustle.

“The prodigal son,” she said. The same words Mary had used, which was unnerving, but at this time spoken with jocular merriment. “Hope you haven’t been letting your mother bully you.”

“You’re the only bully round here, Angela,” said Mary. “Why won’t you let me out of here? For an hour or two? Why can’t you give an old woman some pleasure, ask the Lord?”

“Don’t be ridiculous, Mrs. S,” Angela said. “You’ll only make things worse, you know you will. Come on, let’s get you into position.”

She arranged Mary into a posture designed to help her breathe: turned onto her side, her head propped up on a couple of pillows, another pillow underneath her flank, knees bent. Mary put up resistance which started as halfhearted and quickly subsided to token. Bullies always knew when they were beaten.

Just as with Rosalind Franklin, Herbert couldn’t
help thinking that the world needed more Angelas in it; endlessly forgiving of her patients’ foibles, but absolutely intolerant of serious nonsense.

Maybe the sick were like children: they would try to get away with anything if you let them, but deep down they welcomed boundaries, they wanted parameters, and they knew that laying down the law did not equate to a lack of love.

Angela knew how to handle Herbert’s mother, which was more than he did.

“That’s better, isn’t it?” Angela said, when she had finished.

“Giving me a cigarette would be better,” Mary replied.

“Loathsome to the eye, hateful to the nose, harmful to the brain, dangerous to the lungs, and in the black stinking fume thereof, nearest resembling the horrible Stygian smoke of the pit that is bottomless,” Angela said.

Herbert and Mary stared at her in surprise.

“James the Sixth,” Angela continued. “A man who knew what was what, I can tell you. Now, I’d love to spend all day chatting, but as you can imagine, the place is bedlam right now, and I’ve got hundreds more patients to check on.”

“Hundreds?” Mary said. “Absurd.”

“Not absurd, Mrs. S, and kindly don’t take that tone with me. It’s true. Literally hundreds. We haven’t been this busy since the Blitz. Bronchial spasms, pneumonia, corpulmonale, myocardial degeneration; all made worse by this wretched fog. Senior citizens like yourself, Mrs. Smith, and young children, too. It’s terrible. So, if you’ll excuse me…”

“You can go, too, Herbert.” Mary flapped a weak hand toward the door. She looked like she was going to start crying again. “Go on. Get out.”

He did not even consider protesting. What good would it have done?

In the corridor outside, Angela took his arm.

“Maybe it isn’t my place to say this, Herbert, but I believe in telling things like they are, so … I see the way your mother is to you, all smiles most of the time and then sometimes like she is today, and I don’t fully understand why. I know she loves you and worries about you; she might not show it the best sometimes, but rest assured you’re not the first son I’ve seen who finds his mother difficult, and you surely won’t be the last. When all’s done and dusted, she’s your mother and she’s here for a reason—and she’s not going to be around much longer, not if this fog continues the way it is.”

How did one react, when one was told that?

“Are you sure?” Herbert said. “I mean … how long? Days? Weeks? Months?”

“Only the Good Lord can answer that one, Herbert. I’m a nurse, not a soothsayer. But for you to let her drive you away, it would be wrong. No matter how badly she behaves. You do realize that, don’t you?”

“Yes, I do.”

“And I don’t know you from Adam, but I see things in you, so if you’d let me give you a piece of advice, I’d be very grateful.”

Herbert nodded.

“The more you absolutely must not have or feel something,” Angela said, “the more certainly you’ll have or feel it. Make room for the darkness, when it comes. Open up a space for it, invite it to stay awhile.
My nephew used to have nightmares about monsters, you know. He would get them night after night; screamed his little head off. No one knew how to make it better.

“Then I told him that the reason the monsters were there was that they had nowhere else to go, so what he should do was keep a small box under his bed where they could stay. That’s all they wanted, I said; a little place of their own. I found him an old wooden box and we wrote ‘MONSTERS’ in red letters on the lid, and under his bed it went. He never had the nightmare again, would you believe? He had his space and the monsters had theirs. That’s all it’s about.” She touched Herbert on the shoulder. “See you next time, Herbert.”

He hurried back through the corridors to where Hannah was being kept.

When he got there the doctor was waiting, looking around to see where he had gone.

“Mr. Smith? I’ve examined your friend, and I’m pleased to say I think she’ll be all right, though perhaps not immediately. She’s suffered second-degree burns to her face, and we’ve applied ointment and dressings to those. The chest X-ray shows that her lungs have some quite serious smoke damage, and there’s also some internal burning in her airways. But her red blood count is good, as is her lung capacity; she’s young and fit, and I don’t see any long-term problems there.”

“Doctor, she had a seizure in the ambulance.”

“As the ambulanceman told you, this is not uncommon as a reaction to the unusual number of foreign bodies in the respiratory system. There seems to be no history of such fits otherwise, so I wouldn’t worry too much about a repeat. Just to be on the safe side, I’ve
given her some medication for that, as well as some ephedrine tablets with Adrenalin solution for her inhalation. Now, these have some side effects—they can raise both blood pressure and pulse rates, they might make her head thump and her pupils constrict, and since they’re diuretic, they’ll probably affect her bladder, too—but they’re perfectly safe.”

“She … er, she hit her head quite hard.”

“I know. An emperor-sized lump; lucky she’s got such long hair, to hide it.”

“No fracture?”

“No, no.”

“Do you need to keep her in overnight?”

“Very much so. Again, largely as a precaution, but precautions tend to stop dramas becoming crises. You can see her now, if you wish, but I would ask that you don’t stay too long. She’s very tired, and she needs some rest.”

Herbert pushed open the door and went over to Hannah’s bed. She had dressings on both cheeks and a bandage across her forehead.

Hannah pointed to the dressing on her right cheek. “You know what happen here?”

“What?”

“I am ironing, and the phone rings. It happen all the whole time.”

“And the other cheek?”

“They call back.”

First laughing, then crying, then laughing again, Herbert held her for as long as the nurses would let him; saying nothing, and feeling everything.