There’s a soft knock on the door and she starts. It’s nearly nine o’clock. No one comes to the rooms this late. None of the other women stirs, so Nora tiptoes to the door.
There stands Janet, smiling, with an envelope in her hand.
‘I brought you a card,’ she says softly, stretching out her hand and peering past Nora at the sleeping women. ‘I thought it would be nice if we just had a few minutes together because you’ll be so busy in the morning. Shall we just walk down the corridor for a while?’
They stroll in a companionable silence until they reach a window and stop, looking out into the night. The moonlight sparkling on fresh snow has created a wonderland across which a fox has walked, its footprints in a perfectly straight line directly towards and out, through those gates that Nora felt would always imprison her, to the freedom beyond – the path that Nora will follow in just a few short hours.
‘Nora,’ Janet says, ‘I want you to know just how proud I am of all you’ve done, but the most important thing is that you’re proud of yourself. I know you can do this. It won’t always be easy, but just keep remembering how far you’ve come, and keep going.’
And as easily as if it had always been, Janet slips an arm round Nora’s shoulders and squeezes while they both continue to look straight ahead, as if into the future.
‘I’m inspired by your courage, to say nothing of your wisdom and your beauty as a human being. Sometimes places like this destroy those things, but even though you’ve lost so much, here you are, whole, standing on your own. From tomorrow, you can choose.’
Janet holds her palms together, steps back, nods again and is gone.
It’s five in the morning, and Nora has been awake for hours. A spark of excitement dances somewhere deep within her and she can hardly believe that this is the last time she’ll wake up here. She doesn’t want to disturb the others, so she grabs her cardigan and wraps it around her shoulders. She folds her arms then silently moves to the window where, with a single finger, she lifts the curtain. She knows that when she goes through those gates this morning, she’ll be leaving much more than Hillinghurst behind her. There are almost fifty years of memories here, the shadows of people long gone: Peggy, Joe, Gladys, Stan, Dr Stilworth, Dr Mason, Sister Cummings and many more. Recollections of pain, and some pleasure too. And Angela . . . She’ll be the hardest to leave.
Fenshaw still twinkles in the distance. Whenever she’s allowed herself to think that leaving might be possible, she’s imagined returning home there. She’d fantasise that her mother would be so happy that she’d cry; her father would have forgiven her and would hold her in his arms for a long time, his cheek on the top of her head, saying nothing, but breathing her in with the pride she always knew he felt. And they’d sit around the table and eat a special meal and tell stories and laugh. Then, after dinner, they’d play the piano and sing. Robert would be there, and Auntie Isabel, too. Mrs Lampeter would live in the same little house on the outskirts of the village where, as a child, Nora would go if she needed to hide.
But she won’t be returning to Fenshaw. Not ever.
She lets go of the curtain and surveys the room. The other three women are dark mounds of sadness, proof of life lost. At some time, they must also leave, but Nora knows that none of them is as well or as lucky as she is, and she wonders what will become of them. She hopes that they will all survive.
Under her mattress, she has a collection of tablets, wrapped in sheets of toilet roll. Her dilemma is whether to dispose of them or take them with her. Like the razor blade, they’ve been her insurance policy and her potential escape route for years, and knowing they were there has helped her cope. They’ve been moved to so many different hiding places, and she’s amazed they’ve never been discovered – how they escaped attention when her room was searched recently, she’ll never know. In fact, she’s had them for so long that they probably wouldn’t work anyhow. She’ll flush them down the toilet.
It’s hardly light when Nora sneaks out, her coat wrapped tightly around her and her woollen hat pulled down. Her gloved hands are buried in her pockets and her head is bowed, butting into the frosty morning air. She walks as fast as she can, enjoying the squeaking and crunching of snow beneath her boots. She’s on a mission and doesn’t want to be seen, but she can do no more about her tracks than the fox could about his.
She puts her weight against the door through the garden wall and snow falls from a swaying branch onto her head. She shivers. Not far now.
Under the trees, there’s not much snow, and all the little markers proudly poke their heads above it. Her feet know the way, and the rest of her takes in every bit of what might be her last visit here.
‘Angela, I’m not really leaving you,’ she says as she clears a space around the marker with her gloved finger. ‘I’m taking you with me in my heart.’
She kisses her gloved hand and puts it flat on the very spot she imagines Angela’s heart to be. From under her coat she produces her snow globe, which she shakes, then stands it on the grave. The snow covering Angela and the snow in the globe seem to mingle. She holds her hand flat on the grave for one last time, then she turns and heads back to Rowan, hoping she hasn’t been missed.
Audrey’s car turns north. Nora looks out of the back window at the gates she has been behind all these years, and now, at last, they are behind her. Then she gazes back down the road beyond the gates, in the direction of Fenshaw. A single tear runs down her face and she brushes it away smartly as she catches Audrey’s eyes upon her.
‘Are you all right?’ Audrey asks, smiling gently.
‘Yes,’ says Nora, though her voice is breathy and uncertain.
‘It’s going to be fine,’ Audrey encourages.
‘Yes.’ She lifts her hand and places it flat on the car window in a gesture of goodbye. She bites her bottom lip, determined not to cry. She managed to stay dry-eyed throughout the farewells from staff and patients alike, but was glad that she and Janet agreed yesterday that there’d be no goodbye today since they’ll see each other in a couple of days when Nora comes for day care.
Now she sits stiffly, staring straight ahead, hardly trusting herself to even look out at the stark trees, beautifully back-lit by the low March sun, their spartan trunks rising proudly out of the snow-covered fields. On her lap, carefully wrapped, is her music box. Her letters, painstakingly sorted into date order, are with all of her other belongings in the little brown case. She also has a new handbag and a blue purse, a twenty-pound note and some coins, and is wearing her warm coat and new shoes that aren’t very practical but look better than her wellington boots.
In the last month, Nora and Audrey have taken this drive several times, initially going back to Hillinghurst in the afternoon. However, twice now Nora has stayed overnight at the group home, to get used to her new bedroom with its sunny yellow paint, its pine bed covered with an orange and yellow candlewick counterpane and white-painted chest of three drawers. The wardrobe has a mirrored door, just like the one she had when she was a girl. Six coat hangers are waiting. Her letters will go in the drawer of the little wooden cabinet by her bed.
In her mind, she reruns Janet’s words of last night and smiles as she glances down and frees the hand cradling her precious ballerina to tug on her sleeve and hide her wrist. Her fingers stray to the healing scars. Interesting that Janet wasn’t really angry. Not like the last time. But it hasn’t been mentioned since each of them apologised the next day, when the stitches were removed and papery tags of skin were still trying to dislodge themselves as new cells pushed up from below. Janet said that, just like that, there’ll still be parts of herself that need to be dislodged before she can be truly healed of Hillinghurst, so they’re going to continue to work on that.
She pulls Janet’s card out of her handbag and reads it again.
Thank you for the journey so far. You’re one of the most inspirational women I’ve ever met and you’ve graced my life. Go out now and grace the world. You can do this, No
ra.
She blinks and looks straight ahead.
Yes, I can.
Nora sits on her bed in her yellow room, where the counterpane has been drawn back in welcome. Her ballerina is perfectly poised opposite her, beside some fresh daffodils. She kicks off her shoes and lies down, staring at the ceiling, then whispers into the room, and to whomever might be listening, ‘Thank you.’ She closes her eyes and allows silent tears to run down and well in her ears.
After forty-seven years and four months, she is free.
Chapter Seventeen
Nora is amazed at how quickly she is able to establish a new way of life. After years of regimentation, rules and rigid discipline, she has made a fairly smooth transition into a new groove that’s still being carved out for her. There have been moments when doubt has grabbed her by her ankles and tried to pull her down but, in the main, she’s coping well. However, the oddest things can thrust her back into the past, and into a murky puddle of memories she’d prefer to forget. But similarly, minor miracles thrill her. Someone being cheerily kind on the bus; the conductor who greets her with, ‘Good morning, young lady,’ as she pays her fare; the robin that seems to wait for her in the mornings, sitting atop one of the concrete posts at the entrance to the front garden; the hedgehog in residence in the back garden, watching with her; and the gymnastics of the squirrels as they try to get into the bird feeders.
Nora, aided and abetted by Mrs Singh’s children, Dakshar, aged four, and Maaran, a sturdy boy of seven, has taken over the job of filling the bird feeders with seeds and peanuts. The children warm her heart every time she sees them, in their bobble hats with ear flaps and snuggly gloves, brown faces glowing with delight. They’ve named the collective feeders ‘The Singh Breakfast Bar for Birds’, and they report to each other daily about how many regulars and how many new visitors show up.
Nora often watches Mrs Singh with her children. These are the first children with whom she’s been in close contact all these years, and they’re helping her to remember some of the sweetness of her own childhood. The gentle pleasure of picking strawberries with her mother; shelling newly gathered peas for Sunday lunch; burying their noses in the sweet peas and sniffing their wonderful perfume until she felt quite dizzy. And sometimes good memories of her father too. Collecting pinecones – some to decorate, and some to light the fire and fill the house with their crisp fragrance; his pride as she played the piano. And, of course, she thinks about Robert. Dear, lost Robert. Snatches of conversations; giggles as, at ten and eight respectively, they practised duets on the piano and fell into riotous laughter when their four hands seemed to get into a tangle. She’s rewriting her past, nurturing her child and adolescent self, and trying to forgive herself for having set in motion the dreadful avalanche that concluded in the destruction of their family.
But, of course, sometimes she still lies awake in the silvered moonlight, imagining what could have been – how old Angela would be now; how she would have looked at Dakshar’s age. She might even have had grandchildren by now. Such mischief of her mind offers pleasant warmth initially, but if she lingers too long, the memories of what she has lost start to burn.
‘Nora, are you going to live with us for ever?’ Dakshar asked last Sunday.
‘I don’t know,’ Nora replied, and that simple question opened the door to the breathtaking possibility that maybe, just maybe, she could some time have a flat – a home – of her own.
There are still times, of course, when the pain rears its head again, though they’re less often these days. Whenever it does, she wraps herself in a crocheted blanket, curls up with her feet up beside her – now there’s no one to say she mustn’t – and watches television. And no one shouts at her when she sits all day working her way through a shelf full of books. Paradise!
Mrs Singh hovers occasionally and makes that wonderful Indian movement with her neck and frowns, ‘Nora, Nora, no smile tonight? I bring you some hot chocolate,’ and pads off into the kitchen; always spoils her with a biscuit too. Whenever this happens, Nora is reminded of the beautiful Peggy and a very special biscuit that changed her life.
She concentrates on the joy of hot showers, scented soap and soft, colourful towels that don’t tear at her skin, and hopes she’ll never become complacent and forget how lucky she is.
And she has her routine. Off to catch the eight twenty-five bus to Hillinghurst for day care on weekday mornings. With Iris’s help she’s making a sampler for Janet, rekindling her adolescent love of embroidery. She’s also learning to paint and has sessions with the art therapist, who sees things in Nora’s paintings that Nora herself had never thought of. Then, twice a week, she has an appointment with Janet. At the group home she takes her turn on the evening cooking rota and, on Sunday mornings, she helps with the baking. Last week, she made a cherry cake according to a recipe that she’d copied into her notebook before she left Hillinghurst. Mrs Singh was very complimentary and asked if she might take a slice upstairs for each of her children, which thrilled Nora immensely. This weekend Mrs Singh is going to teach her to make a curry, something she’s never tasted, though the smell of the spices tantalise her when Mrs Singh is cooking. Life is better than she could ever have imagined, as long as she keeps busy and doesn’t think too much.
This week, Nora’s appointment with Janet has been moved to the acute unit since the other office isn’t available. Nora is almost at the door but, suddenly, she stops in her tracks. There in front of her, aged but still recognisable, is a face from the past. Her mouth opens and words tumble out before she can stop them. ‘Bill Oldbury? Good heavens.’
He peers at her through smudged, speckled glasses that Nora itches to clean. Then he frowns, clearly trying to place her, and she can see on his face the moment he does. ‘Nora Jennings?’
‘That’s right.’ An elated laugh escapes her as she struggles to reconcile her memory of him with the man standing before her.
‘Good God. It must be forty years.’
‘Nearer fifty . . .’
‘I thought you’d left the area years ago. Are you back here now?’
‘Er, y-yes,’ she stammers. ‘Yes. Yes, I am.’
But now, even though this tall, thin man actually bears little resemblance to the beautiful boy she remembers laughing with her and Robert at the church gates after choir practice, elation morphs into panic as memories start to swirl in her mind, dredging up with them emotions long repressed. With them comes that sickening, dizzying surge of nausea and the desire to escape. She puts out a hand to the wall to steady herself.
‘What are you doing here?’ he asks but, without waiting for an answer – for which Nora is immeasurably grateful – he goes on. ‘I’ve been here ages. I got really sick and they brought me in here, but I’m about to go home any day now.’
Of the many questions she may have wanted to ask, only one emerges. ‘Are you better, then?’
‘You wouldn’t believe it,’ he says.
She tries to smile, despite the fact that she’s losing her grip by the minute. Neither would you.
‘A couple of months ago I thought I was dying. My thyroid had packed up. Amazing what they can do these days. But I’m going to complain that they put me on a psychiatric ward – there’s nothing wrong with my mind.’
‘They must have thought there was,’ she blurts out, and then blushes at her own rudeness. But he doesn’t seem to notice.
‘Have you caught up with Robert since you got back?’ he asks.
Nora feels as though the air has been sucked out of her lungs, and she can’t speak or even breathe, but again, Bill appears to be completely unaware.
‘I haven’t seen him for a long time,’ he goes on.
‘Nor me,’ she somehow manages, the world now spinning.
‘He’s far too big for us now.’ His mouth turns down in a spiteful grimace. ‘They say he’ll be a minister in the next shuffle.’
Nora desperately wants to leave, to run. ‘I’m . . . I’m sorry, I have to
go now,’ she says, and tries to turn, pressing against the wall for support.
‘I thought he was better than that,’ he presses on, and the judgement in his tone slithers into her brain and ignites a fire that shocks her back into the present. She turns, bristling, her chin jutting forward. ‘Better than what?’
‘Well, we picked up again maybe thirty years ago. All that kids’ stuff between us was over.’
‘What kids’ stuff?’
‘You know – choir boys and all that. A bit of . . . well – you know.’ But he watches Nora pale. ‘My God – you didn’t know, did you?’ He laughs incredulously, spite in his eyes.
The room is spinning again and Nora’s breath catches in her throat. She doesn’t really want to know what he means, yet maybe she does. She wants to scream at him, or even hit him. She searches the corridor, hoping for help, needing to escape.
She catches Dale’s eye through the observation window and he’s on his feet immediately and hurrying through the office door towards her. ‘Are you all right, Nora?’
‘I’m, er, I’m, I’m . . .’
‘Bill, why don’t you go along?’ Dale says with a flick of his head to encourage him into motion. ‘And Nora, come with me for a minute.’
But Bill doesn’t move. ‘I know her. We were kids together,’ he says. ‘I had a fling with her cousin, that’s all. But she’s a prig, like all of that family.’
Nora looks away, clutching her hand to her mouth as tears start to brim.
‘All right, Bill, all right,’ says Dale firmly. Then he turns to Nora and puts an arm around her. ‘Nora, come.’
The Girl Behind the Gates Page 27
