Chapter 17: Half a Room
We came back through the gates at 6:22 on the morning of the fifteenth.
It had stopped raining.
The light was doing the gray thing it does before it commits to being a day.
Marco was in the gatehouse and had not been home. He opened the gate by hand and did not look into the car.
The gate log for that night has thirty-one entries on it. I have seen it. I know it better than I know most poems.
Ethan slept the whole way. It was the first time he had gone under since seven o’clock the previous evening.
He slept with his right hand shut round the red ring and his left arm in a cast lying across his front like something he had been given to hold.
Victor did not come into the house with us.
The car went round to the garage block and he went in through the west corridor, the way he had come in eleven hours before.
I have never known whether that was avoidance or whether he simply always used that door.
I carried him up the twenty-two stairs and put him in the cot, and he did not wake, which frightened me.
I stood over the cot for four minutes with my hand flat on his back, counting.
Twenty-six a minute, even, no pauses. I wrote it on the back of my hand in pen.
Roz was on the second-floor landing with two cups of tea on a tray.
She gave me one. She said nothing about the night before, and I did not ask.
She said, “Drink that before you go up.”
I said, “Go up where?”
And she said, “Ah,” and looked at the floor. Then: “Go on up, love.”
My room was on the third floor, second door on the left, in the staff corridor over the kitchens.
Eleven square metres. A bed, a chest of four drawers, a rail behind a curtain, a chair, a window over the yard.
Thirteen months of my life were in that room and they fitted into it with space left over.
The door was open, which it never was.
There were two suitcases on the bed. Mine, both of them, from under the bed.
They were open, and they were packed.
Somebody had taken everything off the rail behind the curtain and folded it and laid it in.
That is the part to sit with. Folded. Not thrown. Sleeves in, the way you fold to travel.
Three uniforms. My winter coat. Four jumpers. The dress I own for funerals and interviews.
My shoes were in a supermarket bag with the soles turned in so they would not mark anything.
Whoever did it had been careful with my things, and I have never decided whether that made it better or worse.
I stood in the doorway with the tea in my hand and did not go in.
Then I noticed the other half.
The two bottom drawers of the chest had not been touched.
My textbooks were still on the windowsill. Foundations of Nursing Practice, with a spine broken twice.
The photograph of my father on the chest, in a frame from a charity shop, still standing up.
My father’s watch in the dish beside it. It does not work.
I keep it wound anyway.
My mug, still on the sill, with tea in the bottom of it from Monday afternoon.
So somebody had packed the rail and the top two drawers, and then stopped.
Not finished and left. Stopped.
There is a difference, and you can see it in a room, the way you see where a person put a book down mid-sentence.
I found out the times eleven days later, from Marco, in the gatehouse.
At 9:40 that night, while I stood in a hospital corridor, the housekeeper was told to clear the third floor, second on the left.
At 11:05 the house telephone rang.
It was Victor Blackwood, from Lakebridge, and the packing stopped where it was.
Eighty-five minutes. That is the whole width of the window I lived in that autumn, and it never got much wider.
I did not unpack the cases. I want to be honest about why.
It was not defiance and it was not despair. It was that I did not believe the eighty-five minutes was over.
I took out one uniform and a pair of shoes and left the rest folded exactly as somebody else had folded them.
Those two cases stayed open on that bed, packed, for four months.
I slept next to them. I got dressed out of them. I stepped round them in the dark.
Roz saw them once in October and stood in the doorway and said, “Oh, Lily.”
That is the only time in the whole of this that anybody said something to me that made me have to leave a room.
I drank the tea standing up, at the window, looking down into the kitchen yard.
There were two bins and a stack of florist’s boxes under a tarpaulin that had blown half off in the night.
At twenty to eight the telephone on the corridor wall rang. It was Aaronson’s office.
Mr. Blackwood would see me in the morning room at eleven.