Not long after we graduated, Aisling dragged me upstairs to the oldest part of the hospital. She wouldn’t tell me why, only that it was a surprise. We came to the door of one of the smaller rooms in what used to be an attic; it was shared by two senior ward sisters.
‘Go on in, have a look.’
‘What about the sisters?’
‘Just open it, you coward,’ she said.
I pushed the door open and crept inside. It was empty. The beds had been stripped and pushed against the walls. There was nothing on the nightstand. The walls were bare brick, there was one small porthole window and a wardrobe built into the eaves. I could hear the pigeons on the roof. The place was tiny. The roof in that part of the building was very narrow and there was just a little strip in the middle where we could both stand up full height. It was a room for miniature people, barely big enough for one Aisling, let alone a gangly Susannah as well.
‘Sister Chase is transferring to a hospital in Leicester to be nearer her mother, and Sister Eccleston has been promoted and has a room in the new block, nearer Matron. It’s ours, Susannah! Just us! I arranged it with both of them weeks ago – got in there before anyone else.’
‘Did you have to fight some elves for it?’
‘I’m going to ignore that comment because I know you only said it for the craic. Yes, it’s small – but it’s all ours. What do you think?’
I was exhilarated by the prospect of having so much freedom. There would be no intrusive eyes on us, watching us too closely; there would be privacy and space. At the same time, I was petrified because now, in an altogether different way, I had nowhere to hide.
‘What is it? What’s wrong? Don’t you want to be with me?’ she asked.
‘Yes, I do want to be with you, but…’
‘Let’s simply concentrate on getting on.’
‘Agreed.’
Aisling was so untidy, it always looked as if there’d just been an explosion, as if one of those elves had managed to get into the wardrobe and throw everything about. We began to fantasise about running away – always to somewhere with pirates and jungles and, oddly, a British regiment. Aisling’s brother had been a soldier in India and had returned with the wildest tales, which she would recount to me. We didn’t want to stay within our four walls and wait for a man to come home and describe the world to us – we wanted to touch it and feel it ourselves. We would finish our contractual obligation at the hospital, then take jobs in India. I liked the sound of that.
‘We can go anywhere,’ said Aisling, leaping onto the bed with her legs crossed, wild eyed like a child. ‘Anywhere but rainy old England, which is no better than Ireland, only it has more buildings and more people, and less peat and less Church. We can go somewhere where no one knows who we are or where we’re from, where they’ve never heard of Ireland or Reading and don’t care what class we are. We’ll be the exotic ones, instead of just the plain old boring poor. And the freaks.’
She lay down next to me and rolled over like she had that day in the field. I held my breath again.
‘Wait a minute,’ she said. ‘I know…’ She pulled her blanket over our heads so it was dark underneath, then whispered, ‘Now shut your eyes. What you can’t see coming, you can’t be guilty of.’
During those few months we had together in our little attic room, we fell into a rhythm, and I forgot to be shy. We used to have to remind ourselves that we were not a usual couple; it was easy to forget and not be as vigilant as we should about the little nuances that might give us away, but we were not the only pair, there were more than a few among us at the hospital. We made efforts to be discreet, and everyone else made efforts not to see. In the evening we would push the beds together, and in the morning we’d knock them apart as naturally as making them. My only regret is that the time we had was made so brief, and I wasted a huge sum of it, being full of self-doubt, so frightened of being wrong.
I managed to keep a few things that belonged to Aisling in an old sewing box. Personal items that wouldn’t be missed. I had her textbook, Matron’s Lectures on Nursing, with her exotic winged loops in the margins. She’d written her name inside the cover. I used to tease her for her flamboyant writing with all its extravagant flourishes. It was my decision, she told me, if I chose to leave a dull mark on the world. My own handwriting was a rigid apology.
When I moved into the Chelsea house, I wrapped the sewing box in a shawl and put it at the bottom of the wardrobe in my bedroom. I hadn’t sought it out for a while, but one morning I woke with a jolt from another dream about Aisling and had a desperate urge to go through the box and hold its treasured contents. The dream had upset me. I had felt her skin against my dry lips. I could smell her and, if I’d wanted to, I could have rolled over and kissed her shoulder, but when I woke I found I had forgotten her scent; the memory was missing. I was gripped by a terror that I had lost another part of her.
I dashed out of bed and scoured my wardrobe for the box, but it wasn’t there. I found the shawl, which had been folded and was exactly where I expected it to be, but the box was gone. There was no possibility I could have mislaid it. I never lost or misplaced anything, and especially not that. I had intentionally, purposefully, put that box there, wrapped in the shawl. It contained my most precious mementoes, little pieces of Aisling.
After what happened, most of Aisling’s things were scooped up and taken away, but I did manage to salvage her silver crucifix and her dark green kid gloves, both presents from me for the birthday and Christmas we had together. The thing I cared about most, though, was Aisling’s hairbrush, the one that still had her hair on it, the one I’d wound the strands of her hair around. I had not lost that sewing box. I did not lose things. It had been taken.
I tore apart my room, but I couldn’t find it anywhere. It had to be Mrs Wiggs. She was always nosing through my things, tampering, looking for any conceivable way to judge me. A second punch to the gut came when I remembered there was also the photograph of our graduation: Aisling in the row in front of me, Matron at the centre. Even Mabel was in there. I was devastated to think I’d lost these things for ever. I pored over every inch of that room, ripped out every item in every drawer, until I could no longer deny what was obvious: Mrs Wiggs had taken it.
I flew downstairs. Trembling, barefoot, and still in my nightdress – the same one I’d been wearing for the last week – I shot into every room, opening and slamming every door, shaking the house like thunder. Eventually I found her on the narrow staircase that led to the pantry with the china cupboard. Sarah and Cook were at the large table in the kitchen behind her.
‘Where is it?’ I shouted.
Mrs Wiggs looked startled. Then, as if she knew what was coming, she folded her arms across herself. Sarah, and Cook, whom I had very little to do with, both stared up at me open-mouthed, then when I glared straight at them, dropped their eyes to the table and carried on preparing dinner.
‘Mrs Lancaster, you are not making sense,’ said Mrs Wiggs.
She peered at me as if I were filthy: a rat she had been ordered to keep alive. She cast a knowing glance at Sarah and Cook, as if seeking validation regarding a previous conversation. No doubt they all gossiped about me. I thought about hitting her. I wondered if she’d ever been slapped across the face. Instead, I demanded she come with me to my bedroom. Again, she looked at Cook and Sarah, wanting them to share in her ridiculing of this inconvenience. I marched up the stairs. She followed behind at a glacial pace, I’m sure to antagonise me, just as Dykes had when she’d dragged her screaming bucket through the hospital on the day Emma Smith bled out.
When we entered my bedroom, she stood and gasped in shock at the horrific mess.
‘Good Lord, Mrs Lancaster, what have you done?’
‘There is a box missing from my wardrobe. It’s a small wooden sewing box – where is it?’
She didn’t answer, only stood with her hands pressed to her cheeks, looking about and shaking her head, as if it were a battlefield strewn with dead bodies and bloodied limbs.
‘Mrs Wiggs!’ I shouted. ‘Answer me! It was here, in my wardrobe! Why would you steal it?’
My hands shook, my whole body trembled with rage and I wanted to tear the hair from her head, wrench each strand out of that tightly wound bun and make her squeal. She just stood there, staring at me as if I were mad, while I shrieked at her, tossing aside clothes I’d already thrown onto the bed, hurling them now onto the floor and trampling on them, screeching that she’d done it all on purpose, that she was trying to trick me into thinking myself mad. She denied ever taking anything, denied it over and over. Her reaction made me doubt myself. She begged me to see what I had done to the room. I did look. I saw the mess and heard myself screaming. Then I became overcome with a paralysing fear: what if we did find the box and what if she saw that inside was a collection of worthless things, strands of hair collected in memory of a dead woman? I would seem deranged, and she would tell Thomas.
‘I’m going to send for a doctor,’ she said, and moved to leave.
I chased her as she made for the door. Her face turned back towards me as I pulled on her shoulder. Then she fractured into a million little mosaic pieces that broke apart and fell away, and everything went black.
*
When I woke up, I was still in my bedroom, in bed. The room had been tidied and everything was cleared away. I couldn’t remember if the episode had really happened or if it had been another one of my bizarre dreams. I looked under the bed to see if Mabel was there, or the pigs, or Aisling, but there was only the floor.
‘It’s not under the bed, Mrs Lancaster. I’ve looked,’ said Mrs Wiggs.
Her voice gave me a start. I hadn’t even realised she was in the room.
‘I’m afraid I do not know where this box is. It is obviously very precious to you, so I shall have the house turned upside down to find it, rest assured. I’ve asked Sarah to draw you a bath.’
As she came into focus, I began to understand what she was talking about.
‘Perhaps after that we should call a doctor,’ she said.
I shook my head. ‘No, I’m fine.’
‘Mrs Lancaster, you fainted, do you remember? In the middle of attacking me.’
‘I did not attack you, Mrs Wiggs. I was trying to stop you from leaving, that is all, and there’s no need for a doctor, I am not ill. I merely fainted.’
The windows had been opened. It was freezing. I pulled the bedclothes around me. Mrs Wiggs came and sat on the edge of the bed, trapping my legs under the covers. I’d never been in such close proximity to her before. I could smell her: a sickly combination of vinegar and cloves. If a nurse had been caught sitting on a patient’s bed like that, they’d have been fired. I could see delicate little thread veins on the white skin of her face; the lines around her eyes were like marks made on clay. She had the smallest ears: round with no earlobes at all. Everything about the woman was definite and sharpened to a point, as if she’d been whittled away by so much. But she must have been quite attractive once.
‘Mrs Lancaster, I hope you understand. I know I am not… I don’t set out to offend you, Mrs Lancaster, I really don’t… May I ask a question? And of course, please do not feel obliged to answer it.’
‘Go on.’
‘When you fainted, I thought… Could it be what I think it could be?’
‘Please don’t tell Thomas, Mrs Wiggs – you know how disappointed he was last time.’
I hadn’t planned to lie, but I was interested to see if she would act differently towards me. I didn’t think I was pregnant. I doubted anything could survive in my body the way I’d been treating it.
‘I thought so,’ she said.
Though she smiled, it was hard to glean anything from her expression. She didn’t appear happy or excited, but then why would she? She was just a servant. A baby would only mean more work for Mrs Wiggs. She remained quiet, gazed past the walls of the room. A dark thought appeared to cast a shadow over her face before she swiftly whipped back on her servant’s mask.
‘Of course, I won’t say a word to Dr Lancaster. It is not my place, after all, and he will return shortly.’
‘You know where he is?’
‘I only know he was called away on business.’
‘He’s been called away?’
‘Yes. He has these other interests he pursues. I’m sure he’ll be home shortly.’
‘Mrs Wiggs, I must ask you something, and I want you to tell me the truth. I will not be angry.’
‘Of course.’
‘Did you take the wooden sewing box from my wardrobe?’
I fixed her dead in the eyes. If I could discern the tiniest flicker across her owl-like glare, I would know she was lying.
‘Mrs Lancaster, I promise you, I would never remove anything without your permission.’
I didn’t discern a thing.