A Woman's Life

by Rachel Billington

Genres: General Fiction; Literary Fiction

Synopsis

Three women, born at the outbreak of World War II, who've grown up in widely differing circumstances, form an improbable friendship that sustains them through forty years. Connie is the youngest member of a large Irish family and Ireland's too small to contain her. She is beautiful and impulsive. Men love her, while she roars through life, never looking before she leaps - sometimes onto rocks. Nina is English and middle-class, the shy, thoughtful, daughter of an army officer. She marries her boyhood love and has two children before realising how unfulfilled she is, and that painting is her true passion. Fay is American and Jewish, the granddaughter of a holocaust survivor. She's the ambitious one, who fulfils her dream of becoming a doctor before admitting a darker, more complex side to her nature. Through love, marriage, children, work, divorce and tragedy, this is a beautifully written and compelling novel of friendship.

Release date: July 22, 2010

Publisher: Orion

Print pages: 388

Sample

The urn, crumbling at the base, was planted with sweet-peas. Without supporting canes, they trailed wistfully down the sides. How inappropriate, thought Fay, for a mental hospital. So unstructured, so childishly pretty when surely we aim to teach our patients to walk tall, to brace themselves for the world, to find courage and strength. But, then, the whole hospital was peculiar, even by English standards, she assumed, although as a newly arrived American, she could not be certain. Twenty or more wards, long, brick, two-storey buildings, had been grafted together around the remains of a grand house. A hundred years ago it would have stood outside London but now the city, residential streets and tall apartment buildings, had grown to enclose it. Nevertheless the grounds, with stately oaks and Wellingtonias, still discernible walks and stone parapets, had survived. Hence the crumbling urn. But who had planted the sweet-peas? Gardeners did little more than mow. Perhaps it had been a patient.

Fay looked down at the large folder she carried, filled with patients’ notes, sad stories she had found herself relucant to read. That was what she had been doing in the garden, sitting on a parapet in the not very warm sun. Walking with more resolution, she crossed a courtyard and entered a small black door opening almost directly on to a functional flight of stairs, which she climbed at a run, arriving at a long corridor. To her left was the group-therapy room where she was due later. To her right at the end of the corridor, bathed in the sage green of its walls, a queue had formed in front of the kiosk from which pills were dispensed. Despite the occasional date with group therapy, Fay had already noted that pills were the principal treatment in the hospital and that most of the inmates wore the habitual droop of the heavily drugged. Or, in her view, over-drugged. But how could she know, a mere doctor in training, what stories of horror and anguish were made, by the use of chemicals, dully acceptable?

‘I beg your pardon!’ She had apologised automatically as one of the pill-takers, a young woman, as if to contradict her thoughts, broke away from the herd, dashed down the corridor and knocked her against the wall. Fay, irritated, decided to block her way, ‘Please don’t bother with an apology.’

The girl shook her head, loosing a mass of red-black hair. ‘I’m sick. I don’t have to dispense apologies. I’m way past apologies. Apologies are over, out.’

‘Who said?’ They stared at each other. Fay noted that she was very beautiful, Irish colouring to match her Irish accent: thick dark hair, white skin, vivid blue eyes and a perfect oval face that made her seem like a child, appealing.

‘I don’t even bother to apologise to my maker any more.’

‘What maker is that?’

‘I’m not joking, you know.’

Fay tried to remember any notes on a hyper-manic Irish woman before deciding the repartee had gone on long enough. She held out her hand, announcing formally, ‘I’m Dr Fay Blass. I don’t think we’ve met.’

‘You refer to one of those unmerciful group sessions, I may assume.’ The tone was petulant but she put out her hand politely. ‘My name’s Connie O’Malley.’

‘Please to meet you, Connie.’

‘It’s my pleasure too, Dr Fay.’ Again she was mocking.

Fay said nothing. She represented authority here: there was no need to say anything. She wondered, however, whether this was the sweet-pea-planting patient.

Fay watched as Connie signed the Name of the Father across her breast and walked away without saying goodbye.

Fay next saw her later that day. Group therapy was held at three o’clock in the afternoon. Fay hadn’t yet worked out how compulsory it was for the patients but there was always a large group sitting in a circle, heads down, hands limp on knees or one hand grasping a cigarette with weary vigilance. Everything was dangerous to these people on the edge. Words were infrequent, occasional explosions blasting apart the dust trapped in the shafts of early-afternoon sunshine.

Fay was only an observer, noting the slack atmosphere, noting Connie sitting by the door – propped open for those with a claustrophobic fear of no escape. She was obviously paying no attention to the group but staring dreamily towards the corridor outside.

Suddenly she rose to her feet so violently that her chair fell over, shrieked, ‘Hubert! You disgusting man!’ and dashed out.

Subdued panic followed. The smokers stubbed out their cigarettes as if in agitated preparation for their own departure. Those who were temporarily without one in hand lit up at once and puffed passionately. Calm was gradually restored and, in the course of this, a woman was uncovered to Fay’s view whom she hadn’t previously noticed, which was odd because she was large, tall and solid. Perhaps it was because she had been sitting back silently but now leant forward, even half rose as if she planned to follow Connie. Fay, attention drawn, thought she looked too much a regular person to be one of the patients. Perhaps she, like herself, was an observer.

‘I know that girl,’ this woman said out loud.

‘Excuse me?’ enquired the facilitator, in a kindly voice. But the woman said nothing more and hunched further back into her chair as if that made her invisible.

Connie reached her room with a big bearded man hard on her heels. Flinging herself on her bed, she buried her head in her arms. Humiliation and rage churned about her brain, slowing now and again for simple misery with images of Rick: Rick at the seaside, Rick in her bed, Rick in Paris. Her heart and stomach became squeezed with pain. Rick wouldn’t come to see her. Rick had abandoned her. Instead she had this huge person, this gargoyle, this Hubert, his father. Now anger beat out all other emotions.

Crouching tigerishly, she yelled, ‘I don’t know why they let you in! This is a closed ward! I am a closed person!’

‘I’m sorry. I know my way around these places, I’m sorry to say.’

‘Sorry and sorrow and sorry again. I’m sorrowfully sorry to see you here. Visits by invitation only. My own family debarred.’ Connie sat on her bed, back defiantly against the wall.

Hubert, apparently downcast, certainly old, perhaps penitent, sat on a chair. ‘I’ve brought you some bananas.’

‘Bananas. Ugh.’ She pushed away the brown paper bag. She thought, Of all things, bananas! It should be laughable. ‘Ugh,’ she repeated.

‘Bananas were rarely to be had in my youth.’ He was trying to smile reassuringly but it came out as a leer.

‘Your beard needs trimming, cutting, shaving right off. You’re disgusting!’ But it was she who was disgusting. That beard brushing over her naked skin. He hadn’t raped her. Oh, God, if only he had raped her!

‘I’m glad you’ve lost none of your fire,’ he said sadly. There was a pause while she tried to hold on to her fierceness, staring above his head, waiting for him to go.

‘I’m sure Rick would come from Paris if he knew.’

That was it. Leaning over to where the bananas had spilled on the floor, Connie grabbed and split the bunch, peeled each in turn as Hubert sat amazed, then threw them at his face. One found its target. Hubert looked as if he was going to cry but, backing away from the onslaught towards the door, began to recover.

‘I have been working on a sonnet,’ he cried, ‘with all the principal words in brackets. It was to begin with your name in double brackets, a tribute, but now I shall substitute Rick’s mother, my lady wife, who, I may say, has been very gracious to me lately. And let me add,’ he ducked further out of the door, ‘that you’re a great fuck and that your religion expressly forbids any self-harm.’ Happily for Connie, his foot then caught one of the banana skins, with which she had followed the bananas, and he slid out of her view, crashing resoundingly on the well-polished corridor floor.

The moment he was gone, Connie fell forward flat on the bed, head dangling to the floor. She thought she might vomit, which would have been a relief, but she didn’t. Instead she shut her eyes. Maybe life upside down would be better.

A few minutes later there was a tap on the open door.

‘May I?’

Connie opened one eye and looked through her hair at the dark legs of what, even without raising her gaze further, she could identify as a priest.

‘Welcome, Father O’Donald.’ She could see at once he was used to hospital, even mental hospitals. It was the way he took off his coat and hat and laid them neatly one on top of the other on the window-sill of her little room, the way he did not bring his chair too close to the bed where she spent so much of her day.

‘I only just received your message,’ he said.

He knows I am a murderer, she thought, and he thinks if he had got my message earlier he might have stopped me. She imagined the conversation, about the sanctity of life. ‘What God has given, let no man take away.’ Except that it was Hubert who had given it to her. Or Rick. No. Rick had been in Paris. She would never cry in front of a priest. She thought of the orphanage she’d visited with her sister, Eileen, a grey granite building on the outskirts of Dublin, where rows of babies, born out of wedlock, were tended by their mothers before being shipped out for adoption. She had thought it a terrible scene but Eileen had been impressed, wondering cheerfully whether a couple of her children wouldn’t be better off there.

‘Turn your mind to it, Father. Spending nine months producing a baby and then giving it away.’

‘I beg your pardon?’ said Father O’Donald. He looked so unknowing that Connie realised all of a sudden that he didn’t know of her terrible sin and was merely visiting a poor Catholic girl who’d taken an overdose. Well, why should he be let off the hook? She stood in front of him, hands on hips, bare feet planted defiantly.

‘I was going to have a baby when we met on that boat to France – twice we met, wasn’t that odd? Going and coming back – but now it’s gone. The baby, I mean. I killed it. Well, I paid thirty pieces of silver. Anyway, it’s all over now.’

The priest looked serious.

‘This isn’t a confession,’ continued Connie. ‘I haven’t repented. I’d do the same again. And if I don’t repent, you can’t forgive me.’

‘That’s true enough.’ The priest sighed. ‘Although that’s going by the book.’

‘The Holy Book,’ confirmed Connie.

‘I didn’t know. If you’d told me on the boat …’

‘No, you couldn’t. I told you already. You would never have persuaded me.’

‘It wouldn’t be me.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘I would have listened. And then I would have asked you to listen. But it’s too late now.’

Connie began to cry. ‘There you are. I knew you’d make me cry. But it doesn’t make any difference. I still think it was the right thing to do. I could never have given away my baby. Never!’

He sighed again. ‘No. I see that. You were so unhappy before and now you seem even more unhappy.’

Connie stopped crying. ‘That’s just for now. I keep hearing my aunt, that’s all. Sister Mary Oliver. She was a nun. She took me to Knock on my twelfth birthday and we recited the rosary by the gable wall where the Virgin appeared in the rain, although there wasn’t even a puddle where she stood in her blue cloak. We filled our jam jars with holy water. My aunt was very, very holy. She died, you know, soon after, and I expect she’s shaking her finger at me from God’s right hand.’ She flashed a defiant look at the priest. ‘But I’ll soon get over her. And then I’ll be better. And I won’t have a baby no one wants. I’m going out of here quite soon, for sure. There’s nothing wrong with me. I meant to kill it, sure enough, but I didn’t really mean to kill myself. It was just showing off, to God I wouldn’t be surprised, in a low moment. I don’t know why they brought me to this sad place. I’m not mad or anything.’

‘Just unhappy,’ said the priest gently.

‘Much less unhappy than if I were still pregnant.’ They looked at each other. ‘You see what I mean? A baby is real. It’s about feeding and dirty nappies and sleepless nights. I’ve seen that. My big sister had five under eight last time I saw her.’

‘I’m sorry.’ The priest stood. He glanced at his watch. ‘Perhaps we could say a prayer.’ He looked a little more hopeful.

Magnanimous in her victory, Connie said she would really like to say a prayer but she was still surprised when he dropped forward on to his knees. She felt obliged to join him, conscious of her bare knees on the lino floor.

‘Make us, O Lord, understand the purpose that we are sent her for, and give us the joy that comes out of true understanding. Amen.’

‘Amen,’ echoed Connie.

‘Not very elegant, I’m afraid,’ Father O’Donald got to his feet in a tired, lop-sided way.

Connie saw him down the corridor and stood to watch his black hat and overcoat disappear. He was all right, except that he reminded her of her weekend in Paris. Of those roofs. Of that sex. Of Rick who had given her a letter to read on the boat. ‘Dear Connie, you are so special but …’

Nina turned the taps so that they ran quietly. She was in a sterile cream-painted hospital lavatory, which was reassuring. It also had a basin. She was trying to keep her breathing regular, not to panic, not to scream. Just wash quietly and leave the room after a few seconds like any normal person. But she knew she needed longer than that. There was general washing first, up to her elbow, thorough, thoroughly thorough. Next were droplets, clean droplets splashed at her neck and face, flicked at her legs. She was panting. She must control her panting. Thank God there was no mirror to reflect the flush of panic on her face. Now for the serious part, each finger washed ten times under running water, and three ten times again and, just in case she had miscounted and to be quite certain everything really was absolutely all right, even those uncertain and unknowable things that were beyond her powers of prediction, three times more. No towel, of course, with the horrors of filth that it might be harbouring. Breathe evenly, she told herself again and, at last, ritual completed, was free to do so. Slowly and carefully, she unbolted the door and sidled out.

Gaining courage, she made her way down the corridor towards the kitchen and only recoiled a little when she saw the American doctor holding the coffee jar. There was something calming about her slim quietness, the dark hair pulled back tidily, red lips, glasses, clipboard held protectively under her arm.

‘May I?’ Carefully Fay tipped a spoon of coffee into two cups and waited for this large anxious-looking woman – the same who had cried out in the group therapy – to pour in the hot water.

‘You’re a doctor, aren’t you?’ she asked, kettle in hand. The hand shook a little, Fay noticed, then wondered about her drug dose.

‘I guess. Fay Blass. I’m over here on a residency as a post grad. Over from New York, that is.’

The woman poured some hot water on to the coffee powder. Her manner was tentative and suspicious, as if she trusted neither herself nor the hot water. She did not pick up on New York nor did she supply her own name. Even her voice was doubtful. ‘I come in three afternoons a week. Under Dr Halpern. It’s a break from my children.’

‘Children? More than one, then?’

‘Two. Two babies, born in Malaya.’ She paused, as if picturing her children or Malaya, while Fay waited patiently. Eventually she started again in a rush. ‘My husband’s in the army. I mean, that’s not the reason I have two children. Anyway, we’re in Germany now.’ Her face became bright with colour and embarrassment. ‘Actually, I’m here to try to break the cycle of my obsessional washing. Dr Halpern believes in behavioural therapy. But I expect you know all about me.’

Fay took a calm professional breath. So that was the problem. ‘Not really. Ritual purification isn’t my field.’

The woman took a step backwards. ‘Oh, I don’t think it’s got much to do with purification.’ She sounded shocked.

‘I’m sorry.’ Fay frowned. She felt much more out of sync with England and the English than she had ever expected. There was a lack of openness, she thought, that bordered on the devious, and she replayed to herself the map of central London with all its crazy crescents and mews and gardens. ‘I’m over here for two rotations of six weeks,’ she explained. ‘I’m on a bit of a learning curve here,’ she added, in order to be non-threatening.

The woman asked, with sudden intensity, ‘What do you make of the girl who left our group? I know I’ve seen her before.’

‘You mean Connie. The Irish girl. She had a guest. Unwelcome, it seemed. What’s your name, if you don’t mind me asking?’

‘Mrs Purcell.’ She rethought. ‘Nina.’ She held out her hand. ‘Americans are more informal, aren’t they?’

‘If you’ll let us be.’

Companionable now, they left the kitchen. ‘When I was asked how I wanted to spend the afternoons,’ said Nina, ‘I answered, “Paint.” Heaven knows why.’

‘That sounds great,’ encouraged Fay. ‘I’d love to see your pictures some time.’

‘Oh, no, they’re not pictures.’ Nina, returned to nervous mode, backed away. ‘Just daubs. Colours. You know. A child would do better.’

‘Not me,’ persisted Fay, holding out her hand palm upwards like a wild-animal tamer. ‘I’ve no sense of colour. In fact, I suspect I’m colour blind. Except then I’d almost certainly be a man.’ Suddenly Fay smiled. ‘My mother, on the other hand, has a thing about fuchsia.’ And when, except in England, did she ever think about her mother, let alone bring her up in conversation? The fuchsia climax had been in Orbachs after a solid afternoon’s shopping – the only reason she came to New York from Chicago as far as Fay could see. She’d gone on and on about how she was one of the lucky few who was enhanced by a vibrant colour like fuchsia. In the end Fay’d given in and got the wretched garment knowing she’d never wear it. And then her mother had begun boasting about her daughter, the doctor.

‘Fuchsia would mean a flower not a colour to my mother.’ Nina stared over Fay’s shoulders. ‘She has a big garden with big flower-beds. When I try to talk to her, she throws withy-winde and ground-elder and nettles at me. We’re very close.’ She began to walk way but quite slowly, talking over her shoulder. ‘In fact, I’m living there now.’ Fay watched her go, disappointed.

‘Did you plant some sweet-peas in an urn?’ she asked, hoping to recall her but Nina didn’t hear or didn’t answer.

Nina sat by a window in the painting room, watching the clouds go by. ‘You’ve got the whole afternoon,’ Dr Halpern had said when she first arrived, and she had vaguely remembered that time had once been a source of pleasure. ‘The whole afternoon.’ Clearly, he expected her to respond in some way, with thanks, suggestions or even merely comments. He had been sweating rather heavily, his skin red and freckled, his shirt collar rising above a pull-down tie. He was a fitting part of the ugly world she had created for herself. Even his white coat had a button hanging down, like an eyeball gouged from its proper position. Actually, there had always been too much time in her life.

Nina returned to the clouds. It was a cool, late-autumn day but the sky was blue with a tumultuous selection of grey and white moving slowly across it. Unfortunately, from Nina’s viewpoint, across the hospital garden to the world outside, the clouds had to pass behind a tall apartment block. Twenty-nine floors, she’d counted. At first she found this jutting intrusion frustrating each time it interrupted the flow of her observation. Moreover, she noticed that a cloud entering the space barred to her eye in one shape emerged on the other side subtly altered. Because the sun was fairly low and behind the clouds, she could see their outline sharply etched, frilled like a shell, often black-edged with a thin, shimmering halo. Sometimes, when a cloud was big enough, it showed on either side of the block. What horrors were created by man, thought Nina, and, holding up her finger, was delighted to see that as swiftly as that, with one finger raised, she could obliterate the whole concrete hideousness. And then, as she watched, concentrating hard, one finger in front of her nose, she saw a cloud with billowing perimeters like a ballet dancer’s skirts enter the space behind her finger. But how would it emerge? Smiling to herself, she tried to imagine, waited patiently to see if she might be right.

‘Could I be disturbing you in the ancient ritual of raising the left forefinger?’

Nina turned quickly. She wanted to talk to this beautiful Irish girl, who was shifting about, pushing back her thicket of hair. ‘I’ve seen you before.’

‘Is this a way of avoiding my question? Anyway, you’ve seen me all over the place, throwing my weight around—’

‘No, really,’ Nina interrupted, frowning. ‘I did see you once. In a hotel in Hastings. But we haven’t met.’ She, who was usually so private, was tempted to tell this stranger more, tell her that she had been on her honeymoon, lunch each day in the formal restaurant, William so handsome, both of them so formal, despite the nights in that big white bed.

But Connie, grimacing and looking as if she might burst into tears, had dashed over to the table and plunged the biggest brush into a pot of red poster paint. ‘Blood!’ she exclaimed, scrawling and dipping over a sheet of paper.

Nina watched the ugly redness spread from the paper to the table and wondered if she wanted to talk to such a crude self-dramatist. It was all so obvious. Abortion. Suicide equals blood. She went over to the table. ‘I did see you, about four years ago. You came in with a man, both of you looking so wild and happy. William, that’s my husband, and I watched you. You joined an elderly couple who were half-way through their lunch and we knew it was your friend’s birthday because the man, who was huge with a beard, shouted it out to him. He was your friend’s father, I think. Oh, you looked so happy,’ repeated Nina, sadly. ‘I’ve always remembered.’

Connie daubed even more angrily for a few seconds and then laid down the brush, her expression changing. ‘Oh, we were happy! We’d been to the sea so Rick could wear his birthday suit, he said. So I wore mine too. How we made love among the dunes – with the sand in every cranny of us but we didn’t mind. It didn’t feel wrong either, not like hell and damnation, more like Adam and Eve before creation.’ She paused. ‘Or was it after? Anyway, you know what I mean. Rick buried the condom, you know, with a little ceremony for the precious seed. Oh, God. Oh, God.’ She began to cry, tears dripping freely. ‘The sun glittered on the sea and I never found my knickers at all.’

‘I’m so sorry to have upset you so much,’ began Nina, horrified at Connie’s anguish, although she seemed determined to continue speaking through her sobs.

‘That was my first meeting with the disgusting Hubert, you see. He who came visiting me a few days back. At least I caught him with the bananas. You were in that summer Sunday dining room so you saw he licked the salt off my arms. But you couldn’t see that he had his fingers running up my legs. Between my legs. Still wet from sex with his son. I should have known then. Like father like son, whatever that foolish phrase may mean. They were both my ruination one way and another.’

‘Oh dear,’ began Nina again, but saw, to her surprise, that Connie had stopped crying and even produced a bewitching smile.

‘They’re in the past, that’s what I say to myself. Now, you tell me what you were doing in that gloomy dining place spying on a poor Irish girl.’

‘I … I …’ Nina realised how unused she was to confidences. What should she tell her? About the wedding night when she, a virgin, had been whiter than the white sheets and William had told her it would be better next time. No, that would be disloyal. ‘I was on my honeymoon,’ she said briefly, adding, to avoid further questions, ‘You know you asked me why I had my finger raised. Shall I tell you now? I mean, it is quite interesting.’

‘Do that. It might take my mind away from the weakness of the flesh.’

‘I was looking at the clouds,’ explained Nina, in a clipped voice, ‘and I held up my finger to obliterate out that depressing apartment block.’

Connie picked up the brush again, still dripping blood, and held it towards the window. ‘That’s outlandish!’ she cried. ‘The brush is greater than a million tons of concrete!’

So they sat side by side, monitoring the progress of clouds behind finger and brush and, after an hour, the sun had delighted them by moving through yellow to orange to mauve. Time was very slow in the hospital, particularly in the afternoons.

Rubbing their eyes, which were squint sore, they moved over to the table where paper and paints were still scattered around.

‘I saw you with a priest.’ Nina took up the brush.

Connie stared, began as if to mock and then began again: ‘A friend. All the Irish have pet priests. He’s mine, although I only met him once before. On board ship. But, in case you should ask me, I won’t tell you about that trip because we’ve had enough tears for one afternoon.’

‘I’m sorry,’ said Nina.

‘Father O’Donald was sorry too.’ Connie sat down and put her feet up on the table. ‘I told him enough to shock him, poor man. Although I didn’t tell him about the crème de menthe I vomited over the Algerian boy with long eyelashes and a stiff you-know-what. I didn’t want to absolutely revolt him. It was bad enough revolting myself.’

Nina, head bent over a painting, found nothing to say.

‘Have you been long in the married state?’

‘Five years. We’ve been abroad most of that time. My husband’s in the army.’ Was this the most defining truth about her? It seemed so. She tried to think of any other personal information but instead remembered watching William’s stalwart legs when she had been ten and eating cucumber sandwiches under the shade of a table. He had been playing tennis on their grass court with her father and his father and someone else. At fifteen, he had seemed very grown-up. His legs had been pink with exertion and covered with blond hair. His feet, in particular, had seemed enormous and she kind of thought he had been wearing sandals. Or maybe she was remembering his toes from later assocation.

‘The British army.’ Connie dropped her voice to a whisper before resuming at her usual high pitch. ‘If I told my da I was associating with the wife of a British army officer – he is an officer, I assume – he’d cast me off without a penny, although as he hasn’t got a penny and I’ve already cast myself off, it would not count as relevant. I had an uncle, joined the British army during the Emergency and his name was never spoken in our house, although he was Da’s best beloved younger brother. I never even knew he existed till he was dead, killed by a German bullet, a traitor to his own country as even his own father admitted, though his mother had more sense, I was given to understand by my sister. We women tend to be more balanced. Are you inclined to nationalism yourself ?’

‘Why do you call the war the Emergency?’

‘It was your war, not ours. I was only a little girl. It meant nothing to me, whatever it was called.’

Nina looked up from her painting and spoke slowly. ‘I think the war, war in general, has been the most important thing in my life.’ This was better. This was saying something true and new about herself. Should she add, ‘You see, my father was held in a prisoner-of-war camp from the time I was born till after my fifth birthday?’

But she could see Connie was not listening. She crowded over Nina’s shoulder to look at the painting. ‘Heavens above! You’ve drawn God’s finger wagging at creation.’

Nina looked. ‘I didn’t mean to. I was just trying to put down what I saw.’

‘Let me tell you, what you saw was the great policeman in the sky. I would say Gardai but I’ve always pictured him British.’

Nina washed her brush deliberately in a pot of water. ‘You’re going out soon, aren’t you?’ She was surprised to feel a sense of desolation.

‘Everyone knows everyone else’s business here.’

‘Sorry. I just wondered.’ She looked down shyly. Why shouldn’t she do something for herself ? Something out of character. ‘Perhaps you’d like to visit me in the country.’

Connie walked restlessly round the table. She held Nina’s picture, which she flapped as if to cool herself. ‘That’s very kind. Most kind. But I’m not too drawn to the country. I was brought up there. My formative years in rain and cow shit.’

‘It’s not very like that in Sussex,’ said Nina earnestly. ‘At least, I suppose it does rain and there are cows. I just thought you being out of your own country … It’s my mother’s home, really, although my husband bought it from her. It’s called Lymhurst.’ She hesitated. ‘My father’s dead, you see.’

Connie stared at her. ‘Well, I’m sorry.’ She turned away and looked relieved when Fay, white coat plus clipboard under the arm as usual, entered the room. ‘I was going to clear up.’ Fay stared at th