The second miracle of Sarah’s life had an edge as sharp as the first. Granny was lying in a bed in the nursing home under a thin, pale blue blanket. Her hands were all red and gnarled, laid out flat as though she had been smoothing things down, making her bed in the morning. Someone had brushed her hair so silver-yellow strands swirled on the pillow around her head. A mermaid, underwater. Her eyes were closed, her mouth open. This is it, thought Sarah, taking her turn at the end of the bed. Just a matter of time. She was a trainee teacher now, in her early twenties, but this was a study day. Granny shivered and Sarah realized she was waking up. Why did she shiver? The central heating was turned up too high – there was a thick odour, the smell of bladders not attended to, bodies wasting away. Through the window, behind Granny’s head, she saw a chestnut tree, branches jostling like the heads and shoulders of a waiting crowd. The memory of the blinding light returned. Sarah felt exhausted.
‘Hello, Granny,’ she said softly, not expecting an answer. Granny had not spoken since her fall, months before. She bent and kissed her grandmother on the forehead. ‘Rest, eh?’
Granny breathed. A little sigh, every time. One more hill to climb, then down the other side. Rolling home. There was a hymn-book on her bedside table. The words stamped on the black leather cover had lost their gilt. Sarah opened the book, releasing the scent of childhood Sunday mornings. ‘Amazing Grace, how sweet the sound, that saved a wretch like me,’ Sarah sang softly in that hospital room, surprising herself. Almost not singing, then singing a little louder, then singing to her grandmother. ‘I once was lost but now am found. Was blind, but now I see . . .’ She sang with gathering strength, songs she had not sung for years. Sarah slipped her fingers between the cool, bony fingers of her grandmother and imagined that she began to sing too. She imagined a groan becoming a wheezy, wordless harmony, and she found to her astonishment that this was not just imagination. She felt those fingers squeeze her own and heard a sound.
‘O Lord my God, when I in awesome wonder . . .’
Softly, Granny was singing with her. When Sarah faltered, Granny caught the melody. Sarah sang now with purpose and vigour, as if she could drag her grandmother up and out of the bed with the power of the song. But her throat tightened and she stopped. There was quiet. Birdsong. The radiator gurgling. A buzz of applause from a television in a distant room.
Then Granny, so quietly, began a song on her own. ‘O Love, that wilt not let me go . . .’ First line. Page three hundred and fifty-two. Sarah joined her, tentatively. ‘I trace the rainbow through the rain.’
They sang together for ten minutes, an hour, she didn’t know. Granny sat up a little, she smiled a lot, and when they ran out of tunes she fell back on the pillows again and hummed notes that tripped and slurred and sounded like hymns even though they were only the faintest of breezes passing through the Aeolian harp of her chest. She got fainter and fainter, until she seemed to have sung herself to sleep.
‘Thank you, love.’
She had spoken, for the first time in months. Sarah couldn’t believe it, but Granny smiled as though it was perfectly natural. There were even more remarkable things to come.
‘I could drink a little soup.’
Granny got stronger in the following hours and days and weeks. She swung her legs out of bed and was wheeled into the garden and walked a few steps herself, out in the sun. The nurses said she laughed a lot but was difficult. ‘Do come forward,’ she told them, as though back in the Scottish Presbyterian revival meetings of her youth, throwing her arms wide. ‘There’s plenty of room at the front here!’ She didn’t know where she was sometimes; but she was happy.
In lucid moments, she gave orders about her forthcoming ninetieth birthday to Sarah’s father. This was important, there were things she had wanted to say but not been able. ‘I want you to sing, dear. In the park. Sing with the birds. Have a drink, too. To your health, not mine. That would be a little pointless, wouldn’t it? Ha! I’ll probably be stuck in here; don’t look at me like that, I’m not an old fool.’ She reached out and held her son then. It was that way round, for the first time in years. ‘You must have champagne. There is so much to celebrate, it has been such a lovely life.’