Mandy slipped out of her shoes and pulled off her socks before the attendants saw her.
“Feel the grass between your toes.”
Grace looked around to make sure nobody could see her and did the same.
“It tickles and it is damp,” Mandy whispered.
“Do you think if we run, they will panic?”
“Are you mad? Walk slowly, let’s trudge, and they won’t know the difference.”
“Why are we even doing this?”
Mandy lifted up her skirt, like she had just walked into the sea. “Because we can. There is so much, girl, we can’t do. We might as well get any snip of pleasure we can.”
Bertha was standing at the central flowerbed. “My husband is visiting on Friday,” she mumbled, yanking the tight pink rose blooms and tapping the spent flowers so that the petals scattered across the ground.
The caretaker rushed over. “Missus, can you just stop doing that? You are making more work for me.”
Bertha looked at him. “My Barry buys the biggest bunch of flowers.”
“Don’t be touching the roses, please.”
“They are my flowers and I will touch them if I want.” Bertha took a swipe at the rose bush nearest and a flurry of rose petals dropped away. The caretaker shouted, making the attendant scoot over.
“She can’t be doing that. I don’t know what ye are doing bringing this lot out here. It is a recipe for disaster. The man is coming in to cut the grass, so ye better move back inside.”
Bertha reached over and snapped a rose at its stem. The caretaker shouted louder this time, making the gateman bolt down.
“We had better get these in, before they cause any more trouble,” a nurse said. One of the attendants walked slowly in circles, her arms out, herding the women like they were sheep in a field. When Bertha refused to move, the caretaker and gateman grabbed an arm each, half pulling and half carrying her.
Mandy and Grace quickly stepped into their shoes and stuffed their socks in their pockets. “Pity the old bag had to make a scene, otherwise we could have stayed for longer,” Mandy sniped as they were told to hurry towards the door.
Back on the ward, Grace sat by the window. From here, the rose petals looked like small dots on the green grass. Vikram had promised to sow grass seeds for her at their home in India: “I will order the servants to water three times a day, so you can feast your eyes on green grass.”
Closing her eyes, she tried to make out in her head how it could have been different.
When she had come downstairs to the drawing room that morning, the judge was sitting bolt upright on the couch, his arms folded across his chest. Aunt Violet was perched beside him, leaning over her walking stick.
“Aunt Violet has told me. Is it true, Grace?”
Hardly able to answer, she pulled her silk dressing gown around her and sat in the armchair near the fireplace. “I was hoping to talk to you on your own, Martin.”
Violet, snorting loudly, raised her stick. “You are still my responsibility, young lady. I am here to ensure that no more shame is heaped on our family.”
Martin stood up and leaned an elbow on the mantelpiece. “I appreciate your concern, Aunt Violet, but I would like to talk to my wife on her own.”
He stood and waited for Violet to excuse herself from the room, which she did, huffing and puffing and sighing deeply, knocking her walking stick loudly on the wooden floor. Martin Moran waited to speak until he heard Violet on the stairs.
“Grace, I wish I had first heard this from you. This is a right mess.”
“You were home so late last night and I was so tired.”
“I know of your condition, if that is what you are wondering. Who is the father?”
“Vikram Fernandes.”
“The doctor?”
“Yes.”
Martin Moran reached into his pocket and took out his pipe, placing it in his mouth and pushing down the tobacco with his thumb. He cracked a match and lit the tobacco, taking short, sharp puffs. After a few moments, he took the pipe out of his mouth and gazed directly at his wife.
“What do you intend to do, Grace?”
Grace stood up beside him. “You should never have married me and I should never have married you. I love Vikram. I am going to India with him and we will raise our family there.”
The judge puffed on his pipe.
“You are forgetting, we married till death do us part.”
Grace walked to the window looking out on to the park, where John McDermott was sitting with his wife, watching their young son play among the flowers.
“I want an annulment, Martin. You know I can apply.”
He did not answer for several minutes. The room was so quiet she could hear the ticking of the grandfather clock below in the hall. They both heard the third stair down creak and they knew that Violet was trying to listen in. Outside, a man whistled loudly at his friend and shouted to him to get a pint of milk in the corner shop.
Martin cleared his throat. Grace sat down, a bar of sunshine crossing over her so that he thought she looked even more beautiful than usual. He spoke softly. “I have neglected you and for that I am truly sorry. I was giving you time to get to know me, even to love me.”
He stopped, aware that Violet was eavesdropping.
“An annulment is completely out of the question. We will raise your child as our own. You will not see this man again.”
A scuffle on the stairs and the sound of Violet’s stick tapping indicated that Violet McNally had heard enough and was making her way to her quarters.
“I won’t stay here.”
Martin Moran swung around. Grace’s face was strained, he thought, but he saw too a look of defiance and it angered him.
“No, best not for a while anyway. I will arrange for Aunt Violet to take charge and take you away for a period. Hopefully by the time you come back, this man will have given up and moved on to the next foolish woman.”
“I am never going to change my mind about Vikram. I love him and I want to spend the rest of my life with him. I know he feels the same way.”
“What absolute nonsense. You are my wife and you can be thankful I will bring up the child as my own. If God is merciful to us, we should be able to do that. Grace, this is a terrible situation, but believe it or not I care deeply about you and I won’t let you go.” He stepped towards her. “I won’t let you ruin your life with a man who is going to throw you over at the first sign of bother. We will continue to be married, be man and wife, and do our best to be good parents to the child you are carrying.”
Grace began to sob loudly, but he ignored her.
“This is terrible for you now, but in time you will see the sense of the decision. Violet will take you to a hotel down the country, where you can rest and take time to think. Maybe then you will be more willing to be a wife and mother.”
He was so close she saw the nerve at his neck pulsing, the hand down by his side slightly shaking.
“You don’t love me, Martin. You know that.”
He sat down beside her. When he attempted to put a hand across her shoulders, she shrugged him away.
“You want me to bring up my child in a loveless marriage. I will run away first.”
Martin jumped up. “I love you, Grace. I am sorry you have not been able to find some way to love me.”
“You can’t keep me prisoner here. Vikram is the man I love. Nothing will stop me going to him.”
Martin clapped his hands together. “Grace, the fact is we are man and wife and nobody can come between us. I understand you are upset, but the truth is that this Indian gentleman has no intention of taking you to India. He has made a fool of you. I am telling you, we can put it in the past, try and move on together, as man and wife and soon-to-be parents.”
“I am leaving with him and you can’t stop me.”
Martin Moran walked to the door and turned the key in the lock. “Grace, I don’t want it to be this way. But until you can see sense, it is necessary to protect you from yourself. I have sent a message telling this doctor to stay away from you. In the next hour, you and Violet shall travel to a small place I know in the west. You will stay there until we can sort this mess out and, frankly, until you can see the sense of the situation. I am doing this for your own good.”
“I won’t go. You can’t make me.”
Martin Moran walked towards his wife. “That is true, but I can say to you I will do everything in my power to make sure that Vikram Fernandes is made to feel very unwelcome if you don’t abide by my wishes.”
The tone of her husband’s voice stopped Grace saying any more. They stood beside each other in the locked drawing room in angry silence for several minutes before a knock at the door made them both jump.
Aunt Violet was standing, her coat already on. “I have called a taxi for the station. It will be here in ten minutes. Grace, I have packed your clothes. Go and tidy yourself up.”
When Grace did not move, Violet marched into the room.
“Young lady, if you don’t do as I say, I will force you and not even your husband will be able to save you.”
She raised her stick and was about to strike out when, from behind her, Martin Moran reached across, grabbing the walking stick so fiercely Violet nearly fell over.
“Mrs McNally, you will do no such thing. My wife is pregnant and deserves the respect that entails. I will have it no other way. I have instructed my good friends at the Falls Hotel to report back to me on the health of my wife. I do not expect to hear reports of any unpleasantness.”
Violet, who was leaning against the velvet couch, straightened up and shook out her coat. “The girl needs to see sense and to begin behaving like a wife should.”
“She will see sense in time, I am sure of it.”
Grace slipped past the two of them to her room. Aunt Violet had cleared most of her day clothes into a case and thrown her toiletries into a vanity case. Grace took a notebook and pen from her dressing-table drawer. She would write to Vikram and ask the hotel to post it. It was as much as she could do now.
As she saw the taxi swing in the front of No. 19, she grabbed the photo-booth shot from its hiding place under her mattress. For one moment, she paused. It made her stomach lurch to see the two of them in a twinkling of happiness. Hearing the taxi man at the front door, she hurriedly stuffed the photograph in her coat pocket.
Now, Grace scrunched her eyes, trying to conjure up the image. Vikram’s head touched hers; they were laughing and she could see the width of his smile. Violet might have snatched the picture and torn it to shreds when it dropped out of her pocket on the train, but Grace could still feel Vikram’s arms around her.
“Dreaming again, Gracie. A basket of hankies for you. The super says he wants them by noon tomorrow. That should occupy you nicely,” the attendant said as she dropped a brown wicker basket with one hundred roughly cut squares on the floor beside Grace’s chair.