Chapter Two

London, July 1972

A nurse bustled in to change the plastic bag attached to Eve’s catheter, which was full of amber-colored urine. Two more nurses came to give her a bed bath, rolling her onto one side, then the other, like a slab of beef they were browning for Sunday lunch. They massaged her legs and feet, slapping them to encourage circulation, and Eve felt grateful that she could feel the slaps. The only bit of her body she couldn’t feel, or move, was her right hand, which was numb and useless as a dead fish.

Midmorning, a therapist came to teach her to swallow. She’d been swallowing perfectly well for seventy-one years but now it seemed her throat had forgotten how. The woman gave her a spoonful of something with the texture and taste of thin wallpaper paste, then told her to let it slide to the back of her tongue and to massage the sides of her neck, just under the jawbone, till it went down. Eve coughed and choked and the woman bent her forward and thumped her back, then they started all over again. Afterward her throat was raw, but Eve vowed to keep practicing. Until she mastered this, she wouldn’t be allowed proper food.

She’d been hoping to start speech therapy straightaway but instead the therapist—the same one as last time, a sparky, friendly girl, name of Katie—brought an alphabet chart, the kind children used to learn to read. She could communicate by pointing to the letters but it was painfully slow.

“What daughter name,” she spelled out. It had completely slipped her mind and she didn’t want to hurt her feelings when she visited.

“Your daughter is called Patricia, and you have two grandsons, Simon and Edward.”

Eve knew that. She could picture them. Handsome, strapping lads with sunny personalities. They got Brograve’s height, thank goodness—he was six foot four while she was teensy, only five foot one. That’s why Brograve called her “Pipsqueak.” She was excited she could remember so much.

“Try to say your name,” Katie said. “Eee-ve.” She enunciated, exaggerating the movements of her lips.

“Eeee,” she managed, but the v sound wouldn’t come. Her mood plummeted. It seemed she would have to lift herself up from quite a low starting point this time.

After the nurses had left, but before Brograve came, Eve fumbled in the bedside cabinet for her reading glasses and perched them on her nose, then reached for a laminated page of medical instructions one of the staff had left behind. She mouthed the words, following them with a finger: “Oropharyngeal airways should be used in unconscious patients as they stimulate a gag reflex.” She read the whole page, then tried to say the words out loud. It was frustratingly slow, but she persevered.

When she was a child, everyone teased Eve for being a chatterbox—as an adult too, come to think of it. She was one of life’s talkers. She could live without the use of her right hand if need be, she could even manage if she had to use a wheelchair for the rest of her life, but she couldn’t possibly manage without speech.

* * *

Brograve brought a photo album to the hospital that afternoon. He’d compiled it after the stroke before last, interleaving shots of family and friends from over the years to try and nudge Eve’s memory. He was aware he shouldn’t rush her—the doctor had emphasized that—but he needed to know for himself that the brain damage wasn’t too great. She might have a few gaps in her memory, but if she remembered most things, and if she was her bright, funny self, then he could wait for the rest.

Eve smiled crookedly when he arrived, the left side of her mouth not lifting. “Lo,” she said, and he kissed her on the lips before pulling up a chair.

“The nurse gave me this alphabet board in case we need it,” he said. “I’m hoping you won’t make me do all the talking. What on earth would I say?”

“O-kay?” Eve asked out loud, then spelled “sorry” on the board.

“Goodness, you have nothing to apologize for. I’m sorry I wasn’t there. I got back from my walk and found you unconscious. You could have been lying there as long as an hour.”

He shivered, remembering the horror of the moment. Eve was slumped facedown on the kitchen table and breathing noisily, with a rattling sound a doctor had told him was called stertorous breathing. He’d gone into overdrive: turning her head to the side so she could breathe more easily, telephoning an ambulance, then calling Patricia, all the while his heart thudding as if it would burst from his chest. His hands were clammy and there was a rushing sound in his ears. He opened the front door so the ambulancemen would be able to get access if he collapsed before they arrived. And yet, when they got there, he was lucid enough to explain Eve’s medical history, to tell them that she had been prone to strokes since a serious accident in 1935, and that she had been treated in the past at St. George’s, Tooting.

With previous strokes, Eve had come around reasonably quickly—within a few hours, a day at most. The doctor had warned him that the fact it took longer this time meant the damage could be greater. She might not recover all her faculties. He wasn’t to get his hopes up.

You don’t know my wife, he thought. If it is remotely possible to recover fully, then Eve will do it.

And here she was, sitting up in bed and smiling at him with one side of her face. He told her that he was staying at Patricia’s because it was closer to the hospital. He told her that Patricia was coming to say hello when she picked him up later but they didn’t want to tire her out. The boys sent their love.

She smiled at that. “Edwa . . . Si-mon.”

“Edward and Simon. Jolly well done!” He grinned.

She pointed at the glass of water by the bedside and he held it to help her take a sip, watching the way she massaged her neck to make it slide down.

“Are you in the mood for some photos?” he asked, holding up the album bound in Black Watch tartan, a birthday present to her from someone or other a few years ago. Eve bought birthday gifts for dozens of friends, never forgetting the dates and choosing the gifts with great care, so when her own birthday came around each August an avalanche of parcels arrived, even now that she was in her seventies and their friends had started dying off.

He opened at the first page. The Earl of Carnarvon stood outside the main entrance of Highclere Castle, holding a rifle, with his three-legged terrier Susie beside him.

“Pups,” Eve said, quite distinctly—her name for her father. She ran her finger along the stonework above the doorway, then used the board to spell “Ung je Serviray.” It was the family motto that was engraved there, meaning “One will I serve.”

Brograve shivered. What a thing to remember! “Very impressive,” he said out loud. “You’re definitely all there, aren’t you, Pipsqueak?”

“Ope ssso,” she managed.

He turned the page to a glamorous photo of Eve’s mother, the Countess of Carnarvon, in full evening gown with a tiara perched on her dark hair. It looked as if she was in the drawing room at Number 1 Seamore Place, the magnificent Mayfair townhouse she had inherited from her godfather, Alfred de Rothschild.

“Ma-ma,” Eve said, quite clearly.

Usually they called her Almina, Brograve thought. She hadn’t been much of a mother. As parents, he and Eve had believed in spending time with their daughter, to teach and nurture her, but Almina had left Eve and her brother, Porchy, to be raised by a nanny, and had shown an interest only when it was time for them to marry. In later life, Almina had leaned on Eve—both emotionally and financially—until her death just three years ago. She hadn’t been Brograve’s favorite relative, suffice it to say.

On the next page was a picture of Porchy at his wedding to Catherine Wendell, his first wife. Eve stared at it for a long time, then turned the page without a word. She flicked past a picture of her three closest friends, Maude, Emily, and Lois, and Brograve couldn’t tell if she remembered them or not. He didn’t want to make her feel as if this were a test. She’d remembered the family motto, after all.

“You’ll know these lively fellows,” he said, when she turned to a page with pictures of their racehorses, Miraculous and Hot Flash. Eve loved horses. She’d grown up in the saddle at Highclere, galloping around the estate’s five thousand acres from when she was a nipper. “Do you remember when Hot Flash took the St. Leger at odds of eight to one? You yelled yourself hoarse. Your voice was husky for days afterward.”

He looked into her eyes and saw confusion. She didn’t know what he was talking about and it was upsetting her. He turned the page quickly.

Next there was a grainy black-and-white photo of Egypt. He recognized the Nile from a felucca in the foreground and some palm trees on the opposite shore but couldn’t work out where the image had been taken.

“Luxor,” Eve spelled on the board. “View from Winter Palace.”

“Ah, I only stayed there a couple of nights,” Brograve said. “But you spent three winters there, didn’t you? You must have known it like the back of your hand.”

Eve slid her finger under the photograph and slipped it free of the photo corners. She gazed into the picture, then looked up and smiled.

“Goo . . .” she said, then a word he couldn’t make out. “I kee . . .” She tried to form another word, frowning with the effort.

“You want to keep it?” Brograve guessed, and she nodded. “Of course you can! It’s your photo. Probably taken by your father.”

He put the album away after that and sat, stroking her good hand, describing the episode of Dixon of Dock Green he had watched with Patricia and Michael the previous evening. A nurse came to feed her some god-awful gruel and Eve turned to him and made a comic face. She was her old self, she definitely was.

But lying in bed later that night, Brograve was worried. Her mother, father, and Egypt were the only images she had responded to. Did that mean the rest didn’t ring any bells? Or was she just too tired to comment?

What’s more, he’d been watching her face when Patricia came into the room, and there had been no sign of recognition. By the time she reached the bedside, waving a bunch of pink roses, Eve had arranged her face into a lopsided smile of welcome, but Brograve was pretty sure she hadn’t recognized her own daughter. And that was sad beyond words.