Elizabeth Day - Scissors, Paper, Stone

She visited Charles every day, so that the receptionists started to recognise her and wave her through without asking for the customary ID. It was a nice, private hospital with a river view over the Thames and room service menus offering glasses of Chardonnay (unoaked). The overall impression was one of an efficient business hotel, on the edge of a motorway between cities.

There was a television suspended on the wall in Charles’s room that had all sorts of satellite channels that Anne did not have at home. Since he had been ill, she had become a connoisseur of trash. There was an American programme she particularly liked that was a reality search for a new fashion model. It seemed to be endlessly repeated and Anne always liked to watch the ‘makeover’ episode where seemingly plain-faced girls with dull eyes were transformed, by dint of hair dye and teeth whitening, into glamorous visions of fabricated beauty.

She got an illicit thrill from the certain knowledge that Charles would have hated the programme, would have sat scowling in the room, making his disapprobation painfully obvious with every heavily exhaled breath. The only television he watched was the News at Ten or Panorama, although he’d gone off the latter when the BBC cut it down to half an hour. Anything else would prompt him to launch into a critical analysis of why Anne felt she had to rot her brain by watching ‘rubbish’. She had become used to recording her favourite programmes and looking at them late at night, after he had gone to bed, with the volume turned so low she had to strain to hear what the characters were saying.

Anne liked the hospital for its sense of quiet order and the wordless comfort offered by the nurses’ sympathetic glances. Part of her felt she did not deserve their arm pats and smiles. Over the years, she had successfully convinced herself that Charles had become a fact rather than a person, something to be borne, to be lived with and endured rather than loved and looked after. It wasn’t that she was callous. It was rather that she had had all her tenderness battered out of her. She found a sense of peace by Charles’s bedside that she had not known for years. And, of course, it brought her physically closer to Charlotte.

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