“I’ll see you soon,” Trish said. She dressed and made tea and ate a handful of nuts and raisins. She wrote a quick note for Bethany: “Helen in labor. Tamsin will be asleep in her room. Please give her breakfast and take her to school! When Cathy comes if I am not back send her to the Infirmary to see Mark. Thanks, T.”
Don arrived with a sleepy Tamsin. “Hi Gran. I might as well have gone to bed here earlier!”
Trish hugged her. “Isn’t this exciting! You go up to bed. Bethany’s downstairs, and I’ve left her a note to wake you in the morning. This reminds me of that night nine years ago when you were born.”
She pulled her coat on and hurried out into the night with Don. As they walked down the hill she thought what a strange world it was—Mark possibly dying while Helen’s new baby was being born. She couldn’t say that to Don, she didn’t know him well enough.
“Have you thought about names?” she asked instead.
Helen’s labor went easily, as it had with Tamsin. Don stayed in the room the whole time, which was the first time Trish had ever heard of a man being present at a birth. The baby was another girl. “Donna Rose,” Helen said, looking down at the red-faced bundle.
“She’s perfect,” Don said, sounding awed.
Trish went to look in on Mark. He was asleep, snoring. He looked helpless and diminished in size under the hospital covers.
By the time Cathy arrived Trish was exhausted to the point where she could barely keep her eyes open. “We think your father’s going to pull through,” the doctor said to Cathy.
Trish went home and slept. She was woken by the telephone again—this time George, calling from the moon to find out how Mark was. “They think he’s going to survive. But he’s paralyzed and he can’t speak,” she said.
“What are you going to do?” George asked, his voice strange and full of echoes.
“When he’s well enough to come out of hospital I think I’ll put him in his study.”
“It shouldn’t all fall on you, Mum,” George said.
“Who else is there?” Trish asked. She didn’t want Mark, but she felt she couldn’t just abandon him.
Mark was released from hospital in October, by which time Trish had his study ready for an invalid. He still couldn’t speak, but he could make noises and call out. Doug, home for Christmas as usual, took one look at Mark and turned his back. “He’s like an animal.”
“You’d feel sorry for him if he was an animal,” Trish said. As she had done with her mother, she found a woman to come in and take care of Mark while she was at work. This one was called Carol. She had been a nurse and stopped when she had children, and now did private nursing.
Trish’s life settled into a routine again. She continued to teach at the school, and to teach her evening classes. Mark—paralyzed, incontinent, bellowing—was a burden she had to deal with. She tried not to let it grind her down. She didn’t know if he was alert and angry inside his head, or how much the stroke had wiped away. Was he trapped in inarticulacy, did he long to be sarcastic and unkind as he had always been? Or was he really the animal he seemed? She sat and read to him sometimes on evenings when she was at home, trying to convince herself he was quieter when she did that. She fed him and cleaned him up, like a huge baby.
“I don’t understand why you’re doing this,” Bethany said.
“I couldn’t expect the children to do it. And those nursing homes are terrible places. I go sometimes to visit my old headmistress. The smell—disinfectant over stale urine. I couldn’t send him there. And a private home would be so expensive.”
“He has his pension from the university. Or Doug could pay it without noticing. And George and Cathy are doing well.” Bethany shook her head. “You’re too nice.”
“Maybe I want to have him in my power,” Trish joked, and then she wondered if it was true. But she didn’t feel as if the thing in the bed was really Mark; more that it was a shell Mark had left behind, a shell that needed tending. “He’s just another baby, but one who won’t grow up.”