As the rain started to lash down on the windows and the winds howled outside, Jack looked across at his wife as she lay in bed. She was out for the count. He could smell the gin on her now and knew she kept some tablets in her bedroom drawer to help her sleep. He also knew he could get up out of bed without any questions or cajoling to come back and join her.
Still, just to be on the safe side, he manoeuvred himself gently and quietly out of bed, making sure he put the bedclothes back around Miriam so that she would not feel the cold and wake.
Grabbing his thick night robe Jack pulled it on, then slipped out of the room. Quiet as a mouse, he padded down the carpeted stairs and into the main living room where the drinks cabinet could be found.
Jack put one of the side lights on – just enough to see what he was doing. Then he went over to the walnut cabinet, fully stocked with just about every kind of alcoholic beverage, more than they should have had, considering wartime shortages.
He took the bottle of Glenfiddich and poured himself a good measure, immediately taking a mouthful and swallowing hard. He needed this. As the burn travelled from his mouth, then throat and down into his stomach, he started to feel a little calmer.
Now that he was on his own, in the semi-darkness, with no one distracting him, asking him questions, or telling him things, he could try and think clearly. Go over what he had learnt today.
He’d had to sit through another mind-numbingly boring dinner party at some high society house a few streets down, and all he wanted to do was simply be on his own, with his own thoughts, mulling over what Arthur had told him today.
Jack sat on the leather chesterfield and said a silent prayer of thanks that his daughter had gone up to Scotland for a few weeks to see relatives and to have a break. The poor girl had been working her socks off at the yard while he had been away in America, by all accounts, and when he’d been in hospital she had barely left his side. He loved his daughter dearly, but he was glad that this evening he knew he would be undisturbed.
‘Arthur.’ Jack said the name quietly to himself, as if saying it would bring back the memory of this old man he had apparently known so well for most of his life.
Chatting to him today he had felt a few green sprouts start to peek their way through the barren wasteland of his memory. For the first time since he had come out of his coma he had a sense of his past. It was still pretty murky, but he had felt that there might be the slightest possibility that his memory, or at least a part of it, could come back. For once he had felt some kind of connection with the past.
When Miriam chatted to him, it was like listening to the story of another person’s life, but with Arthur he had a feeling of reality.
But what had really made him think – and was the reason he was now sitting here, late at night, on his own, in the semi-darkness, unable to sleep and in need of a large whisky – was Arthur’s mention of Gloria.
He understood now why she had visited him in the hospital, but what he didn’t know was why she hadn’t said as much when he had seen her in the yard that day. Wouldn’t it have been normal to mention it? Or did she not say anything because of Miriam? And, come to think of it, Miriam had acted like she didn’t even know Gloria.
Nothing made sense.
Jack finished off his whisky and as he made his way back up to bed, he hoped he’d be able to get some sleep. He needed to get into work early tomorrow to arrange cover while he went to meet Arthur. He didn’t want their meeting to be rushed.
He wanted – no, needed – time to hear more about this woman called Gloria. He had a lot of questions he wanted to ask his old friend, Arthur.