In the Light of What We See

by Sarah Painter

‘I don’t know where the spares are, but I’ll pop them round.’ Mark’s voice was reasonable. The mask had slipped back over his face. I could almost convince myself I heard the ‘click’ as it locked into place.

  I was going to change the locks that afternoon, but I nodded. ‘Thanks.’

  Once I was outside and Stephen had helped me to navigate the steps to the pavement, I began to shake. ‘Quicker than an ambulance,’ I said to him, to cover my weakness. ‘Very impressive.’

  ‘I was on my way before I got your text. Are you sure you’re all right?’ Stephen was ignoring Mark, which felt strange. I was used to his hyper-polite professionalism. But then I realised that he wasn’t so much ignoring Mark as remaining completely focused on me.

  ‘We’re outside,’ I said, stupidly. ‘I’m used to seeing you inside. In the hospital.’

  ‘I’ve seen you outside,’ he said, smiling a little. ‘In the garden that time.’

  ‘I forgot about that.’ I felt disconnected. Like nothing was real. We were chatting about the crappy patients’ garden while the man who’d put me in the hospital was hovering behind us.

  Stephen stayed close to me, looking at me very carefully with a professional, assessing gaze. ‘Let me get the car door.’ He opened the passenger door and pushed the seat back before helping me inside. He didn’t look in Mark’s direction once. Neither did I.

  When the car was moving and I could look around without fear of seeing Mark or the house, reality seemed to slip back. ‘Thank you,’ I said.

  ‘No problem.’ Stephen was concentrating on the road and didn’t look at me. I was grateful for it and watched him drive.

  As my thoughts began to stop tumbling, something Stephen had said caught up with me. ‘You said you were already on your way.’

  He nodded, not looking at me. ‘I just had a bad feeling.’

  ‘About me?’

  ‘About Mark. I wasn’t even meant to be in today. Day off. But I was visiting one of my old dears and then Natalie told me you’d gone home. She assumed I was in to see you.’

  Before I could digest that, he added: ‘Should I take you to the hospital?’

  ‘No,’ I said quickly. ‘I’m fine. I swear. I just want to go home.’

  ‘No problem,’ Stephen said, and went all the way around the next roundabout, doubling back to take the road leading to my flat.

  After a few minutes, I said: ‘You haven’t asked me what happened.’

  ‘I thought you’d tell me if you wanted to,’ he said. ‘You’re safe and that’s all that matters.’

  Safe. I liked the sound of that and, better yet, I realised that was exactly how I felt. Safe enough to talk. ‘I’ve remembered the accident.’ I pulled the seat belt so that it wasn’t pressing against my sore shoulder. ‘Mark was in the car with me,’ I said. ‘When I crashed.’

  ‘Oh, Christ,’ Stephen said. ‘And he hadn’t told you?’

  ‘No.’ I let the bitterness take over. It was easier than all the other feelings. ‘He omitted to mention it.’

  I could feel the questions that Stephen wanted to ask, floating in the air between us. I tried to sort out my thoughts. I couldn’t articulate the way I felt because it was so mutable. Just when I thought I had hold of a feeling, it slipped away.

  ‘Bastard,’ Stephen said. ‘Why didn’t he tell you?’

  ‘We were arguing,’ I said. ‘He grabbed me. Pulled my arm and the car swerved out of the lane. I know I hit the barrier, but I still don’t remember doing that. Probably for the best.’

  Stephen’s jaw went tight. After a moment he said: ‘He made you crash. How the hell did he walk away from that?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘I guess he was just lucky. He’s that kind of guy.’

  ‘Are you going to tell the police?’

  I liked the way he asked me what I was going to do. Mark would’ve said, ‘You’ve got to tell the police.’ Pat would’ve said, ‘You’ve got to keep your mouth shut and marry the doctor.’ Or, I realised, maybe she wouldn’t. I couldn’t keep assuming the worst about her, it wasn’t fair. I wasn’t a teenager any more.

  ‘He could’ve killed you,’ Stephen said, his voice small. Upset.

  ‘He could’ve killed us both,’ I said.

  ‘That doesn’t make it okay.’

  I didn’t reply and we made the rest of the journey in uneasy silence. I half expected Stephen to turn the car around yet again, drive me to the police station and force me to make a statement. Of course, then I remembered – he wasn’t Mark. Or Pat. Or even Ger. He had never done anything except exactly what I’d asked of him. He’d never pushed. Never forced. He was the kind of man I’d always dismissed as weak. Certainly as ‘too nice’ for me. But now, suffused with gratitude at the sight of my building, and the quiet calm of Stephen’s presence, I realised I’d been an idiot. More of an idiot than I had ever previously realised.

  Stephen opened the door and helped me out. ‘What can I do? Do you need anything?’

  ‘Come inside? I don’t want to be alone.’

  ‘Of course,’ he said. ‘Although, as your doctor, I think I should check you over.’

  ‘You’re not my doctor any more.’

  ‘Good thing, too,’ he said, grinning suddenly. ‘I’d be struck off.’

  I stared at him for a moment before saying in my best Pat impression: ‘Dr Adams, are you flirting with a woman who has just come out of hospital?’

  He flipped the switches in the hallway and took my arm to help me inside. ‘That depends on how you feel about it.’

  ‘Pretty good,’ I said quickly.

  ‘Well, then. Answer’s yes.’

  The afternoon sunlight was coming through the French doors, casting squares of golden light on to the floor in the living room. I limped to the purple couch and sat down. It might not have looked as good as the one I’d imagined, but in that moment it felt like heaven. The adrenaline was leaving my body and I felt slightly sick.

  Stephen was giving me his worried look again. ‘Flirting aside, I would actually like to check your vitals. May I?’

  ‘Be my guest,’ I said, lying back and closing my eyes. I felt his fingers gently grip my wrist and even though I knew he was just taking my pulse, I let myself believe he was holding me.

  GRACE

  When Grace was admitted into the Royal Sussex with a broken hip, aged ninety-seven, she wasn’t surprised. As she explained to the slip of a girl who was inexpertly washing her face, ‘I always knew I’d end up back here eventually.’

  The girl didn’t seem to understand or perhaps she didn’t want to make conversation. Or, and this was entirely possible, Grace’s words hadn’t come out clearly. They did that these days. She opened her mouth and a terrible jumble fell out. Grace didn’t mind; she was very tired and her hip was sore. She slept.

  While she slept she dreamed of her nursing days. The days before she’d telephoned Thomas and told him he could take her out to the Blackbird Tearoom. The days before they’d married and she’d become a housewife and a mother. Days that, in truth, she seemed to think about more and more. She couldn’t seem to keep the names of her grandchildren and great-grandchildren straight in her mind, but she could remember conversations with Evie word for word.

  It was a sign of being very old, she knew. She’d cared for enough old dears in her time to know that. People always regressed to their earlier memories. Sometimes, these days, she found it hard even to picture her lovely Thomas, and had to look at his photograph on the sideboard. He had been so handsome. There had been fun with the children and lemon cake and tea out of the good cups, but for some reason her mind kept going back to scrubbing the floor and those bally bedpans.

  She was remembering patients, too. A parade of the sick and injured. So many that she nursed to health and so many that she lost. Like Billy. She could see the toy train running over his bedclothes and his sweet face as he watched it, just as if it was happening right in front of her. It wasn’t though, Grace reminded hersel
f. That was a long time ago. Besides, Billy had succumbed to a chest infection and had never gone home. ‘You can’t save them all,’ Grace whispered. Somebody had said that. Grace couldn’t remember who.

  Her breathing didn’t feel quite the thing. There was a gurgling in her chest. ‘Pneumonia?’ she asked the doctor (who, in truth, looked no older than a schoolchild – how had she ever been so frightened of them?). He patted her hand. ‘’Fraid so.’

  ‘Well, that’s me done for,’ Grace said. She wasn’t sure whether she’d said the words out loud – little things like that kept slipping past her now – but her doctor smiled. ‘Nonsense. Antibiotics will sort that in no time.’ He was a nice man. Sometimes she mixed him up with one of her grandsons and he had to say ‘No, Grace. I’m Dr Adams’, and then she felt foolish.

  Grace looked around at the ward. It was very different, of course, but she recognised the worn black strip running around the room. It was simply covered in scuff marks and, she hated to admit it, Sister had been right. ‘It looked better polished,’ she said, and almost choked. She had forgotten that a girl with lots of little plaits all over her head was trying to spoon soup into her mouth and she spat some on to the table. The girl tutted and got another spoonful, but Grace closed her lips tight.

  She couldn’t taste anything and she just wanted to go back to sleep. Her dreams were so much more interesting than being awake although, quite honestly, she could no longer be entirely sure which was which. She was tired, though, so she let her heavy eyelids shut.

  She’d had the feeling that there was something she was meant to do, one last thing. There was always one last thing. Just when you thought your shift was over and your legs were aching like the devil and you were so tired you thought you would faint at any moment. Always the way at the end of your shift. You’ve got one foot out of the door and plans for your off-duty and that’s when someone decides to sick up some blood or Sister is just being awkward for the sake of it and calls you back to refold the bandages.

  ‘Bandages?’

  The girl’s voice seemed to come from far away.

  Not bandages. But a girl. Young thing. Grace felt a stab of fear for her. There were so many awful things that could happen to a young girl. You had to be so careful. Be so good. One slip and everything unravelled. Like a load of ironed bandages falling out of the linen cupboard and rolling over the floor. What a mess.

  Sister was shouting at Grace. She’d forgotten something again. Not her cuffs. Not the bedpans or the drinks round. There was a girl lying in a bed. Grace watched her sleeping, wondering what she was supposed to do for her, wondering what she’d forgotten.

  ‘Sister will have my guts for garters,’ she said to Evie.

  ‘Don’t worry, old stick,’ Evie said. ‘I’ll cover for you.’ It was Evie as she was then. Young and beautiful and full of mischief. Not the old lady who’d exchanged letters with Grace right up until she died.

  Grace felt her breath rattling in her chest. It was like trying to breathe the soup that girl had been feeding her. Thick, gelatinous mushroom soup. She’d never liked the stuff, but she didn’t feel in the slightest bit frightened . . . At once, she knew that she didn’t have to be frightened of anything at all.

  She was wearing a dress made of silver and she knew she was beautiful. She thought she was in the mirror, wearing a hat with funny spikes and a lance-thing with streamers pouring from the top. She smiled at herself and Evie’s lipsticked smile shone back at her.

  MINA

  There was a buzzard over the field on the left. As we flashed past, I caught just a glimpse of the bird hanging on an air current, surveying the ground for prey. I half expected to see it a moment later on the bonnet or, perhaps, sitting on the back seat amongst our coats, but when I turned to check, there was nothing there.

  ‘You okay?’ Stephen glanced at me then looked back at the road. I still liked how careful he was, how measured.

  ‘Perfect,’ I said. The buzzard hadn’t appeared in the car because it had been a real bird, not a ghost. I had a feeling that they had gone for good. I’d told Parveen about them over lunch at the Blackbird, a vintage-style tearoom, and had been amazed by her matter-of-fact acceptance. ‘The dead watch over us,’ she said. Like it was something everybody knew, as self-evident as the pretty china teacups on the table or the scone she was busy demolishing.

  It took Stephen and me almost five hours to get to the village. We argued amicably about music and listened to comedy podcasts and didn’t talk about Mark or Geraint or my accident or any of it.

  I watched his face as we put Swansea behind us and drove on to the peninsula. The roads narrowed and the sea appeared on our left, glittering and vast. To the right, we passed the long ridge of Cefn Bryn and I looked up at it, remembering the cairns and standing stones, the secret hollows and the endless bracken and prickly gorse of summers past.

  Stephen switched off the iPod as we got closer and I gave him directions. The roads narrowed further, the thick foliage raking against the sides of the car, and Stephen slowed to a crawl. Then, like bursting out from a tunnel, we dropped down a twisting road and into the village. The shop on the main street looked the same, the post box was the same and the old red telephone box, one of the originals that hadn’t yet been upgraded or carted away, still stood on the corner.

  ‘Bloody hell,’ Stephen said, looking around. ‘I didn’t know you’d grown up in the nineteen fifties.’

  ‘Down here,’ I said, indicating a side road. I was tense now, couldn’t really cope with the overload of memory and familiarity, coupled with the terror of bringing Stephen home. I’d never brought anybody home. I’d remembered the arguments with Mark about it. I’d refused to go home, let alone take him there. The shame and the guilt and the fear I’d felt had coalesced. The mass of it had weighed me down, anchored me to London and then Brighton. I felt lighter now, even with the heavy strapping on my leg and the ache in my back. I was still terrified, though.

  The village was a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it cluster of houses and ours was further down the road. We turned the oh-so-familiar corner, caught the slice of green leading down to the hidden bay and the sea beyond, before the view was obscured by trees, and then there it was. The whitewashed house I grew up in.

  I had a photograph of my mother standing in that same front garden. She was heavily pregnant and had one hand up, shading her eyes from the sun. For a moment I could see her there with her long blonde hair piled up on top of her head. Pat was in the photograph, too, squinting painfully but keeping her hands demurely crossed in front of her body. Although I’d always thought of them as wildly different, they looked in that picture like true identical twins. They were the same height, they had the same features and the same colouring. I was the same height as Pat now, and if Mum were still alive we’d make a little cluster of short, slight women with messy hair.

  I added Grace, my ghost-nurse, to the little group. She would have the neatest hair of any of us, and the sweetest smile. I couldn’t help but picture her in black and white, even though she’d appeared to me in colour. I knew that she’d been trying to warn me about Mark; she had watched over me as if I was worth saving and I would never forget that kindness.

  Stephen was next to me, looming as always. It wasn’t as if he could help it, the poor guy, and he wasn’t in the slightest bit intimidating. He seemed uncertain, leaning backwards in his efforts not to impose. I grabbed his hand and pulled him forwards, through the little gate and to the front door. ‘Thank you,’ I said. ‘For bringing me home. For coming with me.’

  ‘No problem,’ Stephen said, his cheeks flaming red. He was a blusher and I found it completely adorable.

  I lifted my hand to ring the bell but the door swung open.

  ‘All right there, bach?’ Dylan was on his way out. He had his gun hanging by his side and for a moment my heart skipped a beat. He looked Stephen up (and up and up) and, for a split second, I thought he was going to shoulder his weapon.

 
‘This is Stephen,’ I said.

  ‘Good to meet you.’ Stephen held out his hand.

  ‘The doctor,’ Dylan commented. He nodded slightly and said, ‘Stay for dinner.’

  Stephen nodded politely. He was probably thinking that he had had no intention of driving back to Brighton without eating, but he didn’t show any sign of it.

  Dylan walked down the path, patting my shoulder as he passed. He set off towards the beach and, once he was a good distance away, Stephen leaned down and whispered in my ear: ‘Does your uncle always greet people with a shotgun in his hands?’

  ‘Only the boys,’ I said.

  ‘It won’t help,’ he said, normal volume.

  ‘What do you mean?’ I turned to face him, tilting my head so that I could look into his eyes.

  He smiled down at me with such fondness that I felt my heart squeeze almost painfully. ‘I couldn’t stop loving you if I tried.’

  ‘Have you tried?’ I managed.

  ‘Not particularly. Why? Did you want me to?’

  I paused. There had been so much pain in the last few months. So much fear and so much uncertainty. He was part of all of that. It wasn’t his fault, but he was always going to be mixed up with the hospital and the accident and the fresh grief over Geraint. The good feeling I had around him was always going to be rooted in pain and loss. ‘No,’ I said. ‘I think I can live with it.’

  He put his arms around me then, and touched his lips to my cheeks, my forehead, until I shifted my head and caught him in a proper kiss. We stayed like that until I heard Pat’s voice from the hallway, carrying through the open front door.

  ‘Mina Morgan! Are you canoodling on my front step in front of God and all the village?’

  I smiled against Stephen’s mouth and let my body relax against his for a moment. He tightened his arms and then let me go, settling me securely, checking that I was balanced.

  Pat appeared, wiping her hands on a checked tea towel. ‘Well, at least I know you’re feeling better. Back to your usual shameless self.’ Then I turned to face the house and, with Stephen’s hand clasped tightly in my own, I went home.