—

When Esther Blood opened her eyes after one of the particularly heavy and dreamless slumbers she experienced from time to time since her ‘trouble’, she was again puzzled about time and place. When this happened, she kept her eyes shut and sifted through what evidence she had to discover her present whereabouts. For a brief moment she had thought that she was in the little back room in the cottage at Southsea and that it was morning and she was being aroused by Nancy.

Then the whole span of the intervening years fell upon her and she uttered a small groan.

‘You all right, ma’am?’

It had been Nancy Dickenson who had placed the cup of tea at her bedside. And then it came back to her that her father had persuaded her to promise that she would take on Nancy to help out whilst Esther was still suffering the effects of her trouble.

‘Nancy?’

‘Yes, Mrs Blood, ma’am. Nancy Dickenson turned up like a bad sixpence.’

Esther, who had taken a potion and fallen asleep fully-dressed, sat up and held out her hand. ‘Welcome, Nancy.’

‘Thank you, ma’am, I’m glad to be here, though I’m sorry you’ve had such trouble. Here, drink this tea, it’s strong and sweet and it’ll buck you up. I thought you might like to have a bit of a walk out… The master says you haven’t done much walking of late.’

‘No. My illness made my legs weak.’ She took the tea and drank some of it.

‘All the more reason to take a bit of exercise.’

‘When did you come? I get a bit confused at times. I fell asleep and woke up to hear you in the room – I thought we were back at Southsea.’

‘I’ve only been here half an hour or so, but there’s no sense in hanging about doing nothing, so I thought I’d see what was what with you.’

‘Well, that’s nice of you, Nancy. Do you know where Kitt and Baby are?’

‘The nanny has taken Stephanie out in her perambulator to meet Master Kitt from kindergarten. I haven’t seen the little boy, but your baby is the very sweetest thing you ever saw. You are very fortunate to have her.’

Esther made no reply but concentrated upon drinking her tea. Nancy – starting as she meant to go on – sat on an upright chair beside the window that overlooked a very pleasant garden. She had made up her mind to bring the sad and broken Mrs Blood back from the brink where the apparent blessedness of oblivion had enticed her. Nancy, remembering the very nice sort of girl that she had been that summer at Garden Cottage, wanted nothing better than to make her want to live again.

‘You’ve had a rough time, ma’am. What happened to you shouldn’t happen to a dog.’

‘You know about my husband?’

‘Yes, and losing your baby… and the poor man. Life must have been so terrible for him to have gone like that, and terrible for you to have lost his child. I sometimes has to wonder what sort of a God it is that does such things to us.’

‘Oh, Nancy, what a relief to hear someone acknowledge that. It is terrible to have your husband go mad, and it was a baby that I lost. I never imagined anything so terrible. And I do want to talk about them.’

The stones that had rested upon her chest for so long moved a little, allowing her to inhale freely for the first time in a long time.

‘Now, ma’am, if you’ll tell me where you keep your stout walking shoes, we’ll be off.’

And they were. Like a steam-roller, Nancy rolled over any of Esther’s objections to venturing out. In a very short space of time they were walking in the park.

‘If you want to hold my arm, that’s all right, but it would be nice if we could keep going for half an hour. We’ll have a rest then. Is there a little tea-house in this park?’

‘A kind of kiosk that serves trays, somewhere through the rose-garden.’

‘Right, that shall be our prize at the end, tea in the rose-garden.’

They walked steadily, and after the first five minutes Esther tucked her fingers into Nancy’s elbow. Nancy, pulling the young, frail hand closer, held it firmly.

‘Just now you said, “the poor man” – about my husband, about Bindon. People behave as though he was a criminal. The war did cruel things to him. They would not give him a Christian grave, you know.’

‘Some people are bigoted and wouldn’t know an injured creature from a sack of beans if it fell at their feet. What do they think, that a person takes their own life on a whim? People have got too much to live for on this world to want to give it up easy. It must be hard to do that, and needs some guts if you’ll pardon the expression. There’s too many laws made by people who don’t know any better and they make criminals out of good people.’

Esther stopped walking and looked at her paid companion/keeper. ‘Nancy, do you really think that? You’re not just saying it to raise my spirits.’

‘If you knew Nancy Dickenson a bit better, then you’d know that I don’t just say. I might come out with some half-cocked things at times, but I don’t never say anything I don’t mean.’

‘Oh Nancy! If only you knew how they all keep shutting me up when I want to say something… to explain. You do have to be brave, and a bit crazy, and it is so terrifying when you are doing it that it is only the craziness that keeps you going.’

‘Well, ma’am, I can’t say I ever felt that low. I’ve been very pulled down at times, but never quite that much.’

‘Do you mind talking like this?’

‘No, ma’am. Better out than in, if you ask me. I suppose nobody will let you talk about it.’

‘Father, and the doctor and nurses, they say that it is morbid and that I should turn my thoughts to the nice things that there are in the world, and I can see that. I can see that Kitt is a nice, funny little boy and that Baby is pretty and delightful…’ Her fingers were so tight that they were almost pinching as she held on to Nancy. ‘But it is as though I cannot get through into the world where Kitt and Baby are living. Can you understand that?’

‘Yes. I understand that very well, and it’s my belief that the way to break through into their world is to get rid of what is tying you to the world where you try to eat a whole boxful of aspirin.’

Nancy felt her charge flinch and guessed that no one had said the thing outright.

‘May we sit down please, Nancy?’

‘Well, all right, but not for too long.’

‘Nobody at all has mentioned the aspirin. They talked about somebody finding some “medication”, but they speak now as though I ate a box of contaminated chocolates and it was that which made me ill. Yet they know and I know about the aspirin. Father, of course, cannot say anything because of his position, and my physician cannot admit to having colluded in covering up the facts. I don’t know whether my father has paid him money or whether there is some other reason he has not reported my “illness”.’ She closed her eyes and turned her face in the direction of the sun like a worshipper. ‘Nancy, Nancy, you don’t know the relief to be saying these things.’

Nancy smiled and thought of the way that she and Wally’s mum had torn the world to shreds about the way they and Wally had been treated. Nancy had cried and May had comforted. May had railed against the world and Nancy had supported her. Nancy knew that she had a good few tears yet to shed over Wally, but she knew that at May Archer’s she had a place in which she could shed them and in which she could get and give comfort.

‘Come on, Miss Esther, let’s see if we can get those legs of yours back in some sort of fit state to walk proper again.’ She smiled. She wanted to hug the poor little love-hungry woman.

So why not hug? What were they but two women, each of whom had lost the man they had loved above all else and who had been loved in return. So Nancy Dickenson, in a brief but sincere clasp, gave Esther what she needed most at that moment, warm and spontaneous human contact. ‘To the rose-garden, ma’am? I believe it won’t be long before you are back on your feet again.’

‘You are right, Nancy. I believe your walking cure is going to work.’

‘Not “walking” cure, ma’am – “talking” cure. Let’s you and me have a pact to be open with each other. You needn’t worry that I shall step over the mark, I know better than that.’

‘My husband’s name was Bindon, do you think you could say it to me sometimes? If nobody ever says the name Bindon Blood, then it will be as though he never existed. Do you understand?’

‘I understand. Have you still got some of his things? Maybe we could, I don’t know, go over them sometimes. It’s no bad thing to keep a jacket or pair of boots about in the place where they’ve always been.’

‘What is left of Bindon’s things are in Lyme. My father gave away everything he had brought here; he said that it was morbid to want to keep things… but do you know, I notice so much the empty spaces his things have left.’

‘If that’s where his things are, then maybe we should go to Lyme once you are on your feet again.’

Esther smiled, something she had not done in a long time.