Chapter 27: Mrs. Blackwood
Constance Blackwood arrived on Friday the eighteenth at twenty past two, in a hired car.
Her own car was in for service and she thought hiring one sensible rather than tragic.
She was seventy-one and she came up the steps without touching the rail.
I was on the landing with an armful of laundry that was not my job.
I had discovered that a woman carrying laundry is allowed to be anywhere.
She saw me before she saw anyone else.
“You’re Lily,” she said. “I am so sorry. What a terrible fortnight you have had.”
Everything I write about this woman will be read backwards by anyone who knows how it ends. That is not how I met her.
I met her as the first person in that house in four days who used the word terrible.
She was small and straight-backed. Her gray cardigan had a stain on the cuff she had not noticed, and she said sorry as though sorry were a normal word.
She took my hand in both of hers. Her hands were cold and very dry.
“How is your side?” she said. “Roz tells me you were hurt too.”
Nobody had asked me that. Not the police. Not the agency. Not Victor.
I said I was fine.
She looked at me exactly long enough to show she did not believe it and would not press it, and let go.
Then she went up to the nursery, and thirty seconds later I heard Ethan laughing.
She stayed eleven days. I set down what she did plainly, because it matters later.
She reorganized nothing. She criticised nobody. She never once asked me for my version of Monday.
She got Mr. Foyle to put me back on the day sheet for two hours instead of forty.
She did it by asking what he thought best, then agreeing with a version that was not what he had said.
She sat with Roz in the kitchen for an hour on Saturday, which had not happened in six years.
She talked to Serena about table plans at dinner and was perfectly pleasant.
On Sunday she found me in the linen room and said the thing that kept me in that house another eight months.
“I have known Victor for forty-one years,” she said. “He is a good man who will do nothing at all for as long as you let him. Don’t let him.”
I said I had no standing to let him or not. I was suspended staff.
“You have the child,” she said. “That is not standing. That is better.”
In eleven days I never heard her voice rise above the level of an ordinary room.
I have gone over that conversation perhaps four hundred times. I still cannot find the seam.
Constance Blackwood was the most reassuring person I met in the whole of it.
I went upstairs afterwards and cried for the first time since the foyer, out of relief.
That night I did something practical, which I now believe was the result of being reassured.
I went down at ten past eleven, when the kitchen is empty, and took the marbled book down.
I did not take it out of the room. I stood at the counter under the one light that stays on.
I turned back to the eleventh of March.
Mr. V — out. Miss M — in. Nursery — 1. Six for breakfast.
Then I put the book back square with the shelf edge, because Roz would know.
I did not draw a conclusion. I want that on the record.
One date is not a finding. One date is a coincidence with better manners.
But I lay awake thinking how the house sounds different when he is away, and how I had always blamed the alarm.
On the Monday Ethan had his first check on the cast.
Constance drove, badly and confidently, and talked to him in the mirror at every red light.
He watched her with his whole face.
At the clinic she gave her name as his grandmother and mine as Miss Carter, who looks after him.
That was not true any more, and nobody queried it.
They took a film, said the position was good, and that it could come off in four weeks.
The twelfth of October, give or take.
Ethan cried at the machine and stopped the second it was over, then pulled my finger towards the door and said ba.
On the way out we passed the pediatric respiratory clinic.
I looked at the door and said nothing. Dr. Moreno’s rooms are on Wabash. But it was the same word on a sign.
Constance saw me look.
“He is still having them,” she said. “The breathing.”
I said yes. Nineteen since March.
She stopped walking, holding the car keys and the parking ticket, and looked at me with perfect kindness.
“Nineteen,” she said. “Does Victor know that it is nineteen?”
I said nobody knew it was nineteen except me and Dr. Moreno.
“Then tell him the number,” she said. “Men like my son cannot hear a description. They can hear a number.”