The Crow Trap (21 page)

“Very well, thank you.” This was true. She’d been predicted an A Grade in every subject except French for her exams.

“No problems with Maureen and Frank?”

“None.”

The hospital was approached by a curving drive up a hill. The car stopped sharply, jerking Grace forward to the extent of her seat belt, when two elderly men shuffled out in front of them. Miss. Thorne muttered, pulled on the hand brake and attempted a hill start. The engine stalled and she became flustered, especially when she saw a car approaching in her mirror. At the second attempt it leapt forward and she drove on.

Grace’s father was being kept in Sycamore, which was one of the villas.

The garden was tidy but the woodwork needed painting. The door was locked and

Miss. Thorne rang the bell. Standing on the doorstep, Grace thought it didn’t look like a hospital but a large suburban house. The impression was confirmed by the woman who opened the door. She looked just the sort of woman who would live in such a house. She was slim and smart, wearing a navy pleated skirt and a white blouse with a bow at the neck.

It was 1985 and she reminded Grace of a young version of Margaret Thatcher.

“Yes?” The woman was friendly enough but very brisk. She made it clear she had important things to get on with.

Miss. Thorne was still flustered by her problems negotiating the hill.

She opened her bag, dropped a glove, stooped to pick it up.

“We’re here to visit Edmund Fulwell.”

“I’m sorry.” The woman smiled graciously. “Afternoons are the times for relatives’ visits. Perhaps you could come back after lunch.”

Miss. Thorne was horrified by the notion that she might be thought one of the patients’ relatives. She groped again in her bag and came out with a laminated identity card.

“Actually,” she said, “I’m a social worker. I did phone.”

Grace looked past the woman in the navy skirt. A thin girl, not much older than her, dressed in a nightdress and slippers walked down the corridor as if in slow motion. There was a smell of institutional food and cigarette smoke.

“We agreed eleven o’clock.” By now Miss. Thorne was indignant.

The woman was apologetic. She introduced herself as the sister in charge of the shift. “Edmund’s doing very well,” she said, as if that would redeem her in Miss. Thorne’s eyes. “The consultant’s very pleased with him. We could be talking discharge in a few weeks. We don’t keep them in long, these days.” She seemed to notice Grace for the first time. “And who’s this?” “The daughter,” Miss. Thorne said abruptly.

The nurse, who according to her name tag was called Elizabeth, let them in, locking the door behind them.

“Ah yes!” She sent Miss. Thorne a look of great significance. “Of course.”

In the building it was stiflingly hot. The corridor ran the length of the villa. Large painted radiators stood at regular intervals and each time they passed one they were hit by a wave of heat. Elizabeth seemed not to notice, but Antonia took off her cardigan and Grace held her anorak by its hook over her shoulder.

“You can use the interview room. It’ll be quiet in there. Stan, have you seen Edmund?”

Stan, a middle-aged man in a grey overall, was washing the floor. Grace wondered idly if he were an inmate or a member of staff. He shook his head and continued to move his mop over the lino tiles.

Elizabeth pushed open the door of a large room. Chairs were lined in front of the television screen. On the television a jolly young man dressed as a clown was making a kite from brown paper and orange string. Behind him teddy bears and dolls sat on a plastic bus. The programme seemed to fascinate the audience. Grace didn’t believe that her father, even when he was ill, could ever enjoy children’s TV, but it was impossible to tell if he was there because a cloud of cigarette smoke hung over everything and the people were sitting with their backs to her.

“Has anyone seen Edmund?” Elizabeth asked. She used the same tone as the TV presenter. Grace thought that any minute she’d break into song with Large Ted and Jemima.

“Non-smoking lounge.”

This information was volunteered anonymously. No one turned away from the screen.

The non-smoking lounge was as large as the TV room but only two people sat there, in chairs close to a window. A pane, too small for anyone to climb out of, had been opened and let in a blast of cold air. They seemed deep in conversation. With Grace’s dad was a large-boned, dark woman in cord trousers and a checked cotton shirt. As they approached Grace heard her say, “I’m not used to all this sitting about. In the last place I was attached to the market garden. It broke your back that work, but there wasn’t time to be bored.”

She wasn’t at all the sort of woman Edmund would fall for, but Grace sensed an easy rapport between them which she’d never seen before in his relationships with women. With Sue especially he’d been flirtatious and devoted but never friendly.

Edmund’s reply was drowned out by the repeated shout of an exotic finch, perched in a cage standing against one wall. The cage door was fastened by a huge padlock. Grace wondered if the noise of the bird irritated the patients so much that they tried to kill it. She wouldn’t be surprised. Against the other wall there was a tank of tropical fish. The water was murky and green.

“You’ve got a visitor, Edmund,” Elizabeth said brightly.

“I’ll be off then,” said the dark woman. “Leave you in peace.”

“Thanks, Bella.”

Bella walked away quickly. When she caught Grace’s eye she smiled a clear, unclouded smile. Grace was convinced she must be a nurse until Elizabeth said, “Bella will be leaving us soon too.”

Edmund deliberately turned his back on Elizabeth. He looked up at Grace. “Sorry about all this.”

She shook her head. He looked dreadful, worse than when he was sitting in the town centre.

“If you want to use the interview room, I’ll fetch you some tea.”

Elizabeth looked at her watch.

Edmund groaned. “We’re all right here if it’s all the same to you. I can’t stand that place. It’s like a cell.” When she turned and walked away he added, just loud enough for her to hear, “And I can’t stand her either, stupid cow.”

He ignored Miss. Thorne. She might as well not have been there. He talked to Grace as if they were alone in the room.

“I really fucked up this time, didn’t I? I just couldn’t stand the thought of being without her. And I thought you’d be better off without me to worry about.”

“You tried to kill yourself?”

“And I couldn’t even manage that. Instead I’m in here with Busy Lizzie ticking me off every ten minutes to check I’m still alive.” “I’m glad,” she said. “That you’re still alive.”

After that first time she was allowed to visit her father without the social worker. On Christmas Day she went there for lunch. Most of the patients had been allowed home for the holiday so Sycamore Ward was almost empty. She had considered asking Maureen and Frank if he could come to them but decided that they had enough to worry about. This group of boys were particularly troublesome and Maureen always looked tired. She’d lost weight and there were shadows under her eyes.

So Grace walked the three miles up the hill to the hospital and sat with her father at the formica bench in the dining room. Also there were Wayne, a teenage schizophrenic whose parents were embarrassed by him, and a woman whose name Grace had never been told. From an overheard conversation between other patients Grace had learnt that this woman had had a child, who had died soon after birth.

“She won’t accept it, see,” the patient had said. “They caught her in the maternity hospital, trying to walk out with a little boy.”

The two nurses on duty tried to do their best and it was quite a pleasant meal. They ate turkey which had already been plated up in the hot trolley, pulled crackers and wore paper hats. Her father had been much calmer lately and didn’t even make too much fuss about the dreadful food.

After Christmas there was a period of quiet, very cold weather. She and her father, wrapped up in coats and scarves and gloves, because after the heat of the ward it felt glacial, even in the sun, went for walks in the hospital grounds. He was allowed to be away from the nurses for half an hour at a time now. She pointed out a red squirrel in the tall trees which separated the hospital from farmland beyond.

“I saw my first one when I went for a walk with Nan,” she said.

“Did you?” He was pleased, amused. “Fancy you remembering that.”

“Does she know you’ve been ill?”

She knew that her father had kept sporadically in touch with Nan who’d moved at last into sheltered accommodation.

“God, I hope not.”

He was being prepared for release. He had to attend a group. That was what it was called the group. It was run by a pretty young psychologist. There was a lot of drama and role play, lots of talking.

At first Edmund was sceptical, even antagonistic.

“Load of crap,” he said. “I wouldn’t go if I didn’t think they’d let me out quicker.” After a while Grace thought he must be finding the group useful, because he wouldn’t miss it, even when he was given the opportunity for a legitimate excuse. She was curious about what went on at these sessions but he wouldn’t answer her questions in any detail. It seemed unlike him to be so cooperative and she hoped he hadn’t fallen for the pretty young psychologist.

Usually the group met in the lounge with the finches and the fish tank.

They shut all the curtains so no one could see in. But one day when Grace arrived to visit her father, the time and the place of the group had changed. They were meeting in the TV room and it was still in session. It was cold and almost dark, so although the corridor was curtained they hadn’t bothered with the windows facing the garden. The therapist must have assumed that no one would venture outside.

Grace realized this by chance. She hadn’t meant to pry. When Elizabeth told her Edmund wouldn’t be available for at least half an hour she decided to walk to the WRVS canteen to buy him some chocolate.

On her way back she saw the light from the windows falling on the unpruned rose beds. Although she knew she shouldn’t look she was attracted closer, like a moth.

They had pulled the chairs into a circle, almost a huddle. Her father was sitting next to Bella, who had been released from the hospital but returned as a day patient to attend the group. Grace recognized most of them. The woman with the dead baby, who had shared Christmas lunch with them, was there too.

Bella was talking. The others were listening intently. Grace had the impression that it was a new development, Bella taking centre stage.

The psychologist who was sitting on the floor because there weren’t enough chairs to go round, nodded, encouraging Bella to continue.

Suddenly Bella got up from her chair and moved to the middle of the circle. She stood with one hand above her head, still talking. She seemed agitated but Grace couldn’t hear what she was saying. She dropped her hand to her side and began to cry. The others crowded round her. Grace saw Edmund put his arm round her and hug her.

She felt awkward about being there, pulled up the hood of her anorak because now she was very cold, and walked on round the building. She rang the doorbell and stood shivering on the doorstep for Elizabeth to let her in. When the door to the TV lounge opened and they came out, they were chatting and laughing like old friends. No one would have been able to tell that Bella had been crying. Edmund seemed preoccupied. Grace said she wouldn’t stay long, soon they’d have to go into the dining room for supper. But he walked with her to the bus stop.

“Good group tonight?” she asked.

He didn’t answer. “They’re letting me out next week.” He seemed almost sad.

“Will you go back to Rod’s?” “He says I can.”

“Well then.”

“It won’t be easy,” he said, and though he didn’t say so, she knew he was thinking about the support he’d received from the group.

“No reason why you shouldn’t stay in touch.”

“No,” he said relieved, ‘.”

When she arrived back in Laurel Close there was an ambulance outside the door. Frank had had a heart attack. The ambulance crew wheeled him out on a trolley. Grace rushed through the crowd and touched his hand. Before Maureen climbed into the back of the ambulance Grace put her arm around her, and they cried together.

Frank died before he reached hospital. Grace was offered another foster family but she opted instead for the children’s home. There she slept in a room with three empty beds. There were blankets folded at the foot of them and pillows in striped cases.

Chapter Twenty-Six.

The memory of the room in the children’s home, so similar to her room at Baikie’s, jolted her back to the present. An hour had passed. She had come to one of the stone blinds built by the estate for grouse shoots, and she imagined her father’s relatives crouched here, guns raised, waiting for the whirring grouse to speed overhead. They would have waxed jackets, braying voices. Her family’s decision to sell this land for the quarry had only reinforced her prejudices about them. In the days leading up to Bella’s funeral, once she had finished her survey in the morning, she would walk the hills, getting her bearings.