Pat Barker - Double Vision

Physio every bloody day.

When they’d done everything they could to get her mobile, they let her go, though she had to return to the hospital twice a week for more physiotherapy.

In the car, being driven home by her friend Angela Mowbray, Kate felt optimistic. She’d been managing better the last few days, and she knew the physiotherapist was pleased with her. Another fortnight and she’d be all right, perhaps even well enough to do without the bloody assistant. Alec still hadn’t got back to her on that.

Angela looked sideways at Kate, thinking the surgical collar looked a bit like a ruff, reflecting light on to her face, emphasizing the lines of tiredness, the blue shadows underneath her eyes. Kate said she hadn’t been sleeping well in hospital, but then nobody could. Footsteps squeaking up and down the ward, blinds on the corridor side left up because you had to be observed all the time, and then there were admissions, sometimes in the middle of the night. The memories of her hysterectomy were fresh in Angela’s mind. Poor Kate, she thought, and such a bad patient.

They were approaching the scene of the crash. Angela slowed down — had to, it was a dangerous bend — though, imagining what Kate must be feeling, she would have preferred to pick up speed and get past as soon as possible.

‘Do you mind if we stop here?’ Kate said.

Surprised, Angela pulled over on to the grass verge. Kate got out. It was a struggle and Angela came round the car to help, but by the time she got there Kate was shakily standing up.

‘Why do you want to stop?’

‘I just want to see where it happened.’

Kate walked along the verge, thinking she might not recognize the spot, but there was no danger of that. Skidding off the road, the car had left scars, flattened bracken, made tyre tracks in the mud, smashed stripling trees — and then her nemesis: the tree whose branches, broken by the impact, had reached through the shattered windscreen to get at her. She had a flash of it happening again and closed her eyes. The trunk had proved solid, though the roots had been disturbed. She looked down and saw how they’d been prised loose from the earth. At that moment a light wind started to blow between the trees, a current of air moving at ground level, quickening the forest floor. Dead leaves rose up and formed twisters, little coils and spurts of turbulence, and the shadows of branches danced and shook on the snow-stippled ground.

Then it was over and the wood was as quiet and still as it had been before.

Kate was aware of her breathing, the sound, the movement of her ribs, and the sight of it too, furls of mist escaping from her lips to whiten the air.

Angela shifted behind her. Coughed. She thinks I’m being eccentric, Kate thought. Well, she can talk.

There was something else, something she needed to get clear, a memory that bulged above the surface, showed its back and then, in a burst of foam, turned and sank again. It was the sound of her breathing that had summoned it. She groped after memories that dissolved even as she tried to grasp them. She had a sense of missing time. The minutes — how many minutes? — she’d drifted in and out of consciousness, while somebody had stood by the car, breathing, watching, not calling for help.

But all her memories were confused, and for large stretches of time she had no memory at all. Nothing about the ambulance journey or the arrival in hospital, nothing about the emergency treatment, the fitting of the back brace and the surgical collar, nothing about that. Nothing, in fact, until she woke the following morning to find her mother and Alice by the bed. So probably her memory of the man who’d stood and watched her was a distortion. A symptom of concussion.

Two days after the crash a young woman doctor had sat by her bed for half an hour, asking her questions about what time it was, who she was, where she was, why she was there, and, although she hadn’t felt confused or uncertain of the answers, she’d got most of them wrong.

It was a relief to turn and see Angela’s worried face.

She made herself smile. ‘Lucky escape.’ She was thinking of another road, in Afghanistan, the road Ben had died on. For a moment she felt a deep affinity with him, a closeness, and then it vanished, and the loneliness rushed back, worse than before. She raised her hand to her neck and touched Ben’s amulet, feeling the disc cold under her fingertips, rasping it along the chain. ‘That’s that, then,’ she said. ‘Come on, let’s go.’

Back home, Angela bustled around quite as if the place belonged to her. Kate would have liked to make herself something to eat, but Angela had brought stacks of home-made food from her freezer. Feeling useless and too tired to protest, Kate sat in her armchair and let Angela get on with it.

The fire was already laid and only needed a match put to it. Angela propped a newspaper up against the hearth, and a photograph of burning cars was sucked into the draught. The paper darkened, grew crisp and thin. An orange glow began at the centre of the page, which blackened round the edges until, at the last second, Angela whisked it away, filling the room with a spurt of acrid smoke.

This is like old age, Kate thought, looking round the room. Shadows leapt across the walls, tentative flakes of snow fumbled at the window pane and were whirled upwards out of sight. Watching them, she tried to trace the progress of a single flake, but her eyelids were heavy, and when she opened them again Angela was putting a tray with pâté and warm bread rolls on to the table beside her chair. She watched Angela’s faded English-rose face turn pink again from the warmth of the fire. A strange girl — though she shouldn’t say girl, Angela was forty-five if she was a day, but girlish still in many ways, gushing, giggly, inclined to develop crushes on people. Also stoical, unassuming, brave.

And a trial at times, Kate thought guiltily, wanting to be alone. All those times when Kate had tried to talk about her grief for Ben, and Angela had gently, but firmly, reminded her that she had lost Thomas and William and Rufus and Harry. Yes, Kate had wanted to say, but Ben was my husband, and they were like, well,… SHEEP?

She’d always managed not to say it, remembering the time she’d switched the television on to watch the six o’clock news and seen Angela rolling around on the muddy ground, displaying her knickers to the whole nation, as she defied the men from the Ministry of Agriculture who’d come to kill her ‘boys’. It had taken three policemen to hold her down. And anyway who was she to quantify somebody else’s love or decide how much grief was reasonable? She remembered watching Angela feed them, how they’d all stopped cropping the grass and answered her with their plaintive cries when she called their names.

Kate ate and drank and drifted off to sleep again. When she woke, Angela was putting on her coat. ‘You sure you’ll be all right now?’

‘Quite sure. Thanks. I’ll just sit over the fire a bit longer.’

‘I’ll be in again tomorrow first thing. Ring if you need anything.’

After she’d gone, Kate stood for a long time by the window, listening to the minute creaks the house made — wood and stone still settling after five hundred years — and watched the snow, falling more thickly now, cover the ground. Darkness seemed to rise in a blue vapour from the snow. She went back to the fire, wondering how she should spend the next few hours. Having slept, she supposed, for an hour or an hour and a half, she now felt too awake to go to bed.

In the hospital, with its unchanging routines, she’d been protected from the urgency of time passing, but now she counted the days lost since her accident — nineteen. She was tempted to go across to the studio, but knew she mustn’t. The desolate expanse of floor, the tall windows open to the night sky, no, she wasn’t ready to face that yet, and anyway there was nothing she could do. By now there should have been a roughly carved figure standing there. Instead there was nothing, not even an armature, and it would take five to eight days of hard work to produce that.