It had begun with a headache, a terrible one, in the middle of the school day. This was before they moved to York and Nancy was still teaching at the secondary modern in Leeds. A wretched Monday in winter, a raw east wind and precious little daylight. “A bit under the weather,” Nancy said when Teddy remarked over breakfast that she looked “peaky.”
At lunchtime she went to the sickroom and the school nurse gave her a couple of aspirin, but they had no effect and she had to abandon teaching the first period of the afternoon and instead took up residence in the sickroom. “Sounds like a migraine,” the school nurse said authoritatively. “Just lie down in the dark and rest.” So she did, on the sickroom’s uncomfortable little camp bed with its scratchy red blanket, the usual occupants of which were teenage girls with period pains. After half an hour or so she struggled to a sitting position and vomited all over the red blanket. “Oh, God, I am so sorry,” she said to the nurse.
“Definitely a migraine,” the nurse said. She was the maternal sort and after cleaning up she patted Nancy’s hand and said, “You’ll soon be as right as ninepence.”
She did feel a bit better after being sick and was well enough to drive home to Ayswick—rather cautiously—before the end of the school afternoon, although it felt as if a swarm of bees was busy inside her head.
When Nancy arrived home, Viola was already there with Ellen Crowther. Mrs. Crowther was the local woman they had employed to pick up Viola from the village primary school and wait with her until one or the other of them returned from work. Mrs. Crowther’s own “brood” was grown and gone but she had a husband, who was a farmhand, and an ancient father-in-law (“the old man”), both of whom sounded more demanding than any child, even Viola. She was a witchy-looking woman, thinning black hair scraped into a knot and a twisted expression due to some childhood palsy. Despite these attributes she seemed rather characterless, worn away by service and obedience. “Do you like Mrs. Crowther?” Nancy once asked Viola and Viola gave her a puzzled look and said, “Mrs. who?”
Usually by the time Nancy got home Mrs. Crowther was ready to leave, wrapped up in headscarf and brown belted gabardine mac, and out of the door like a greyhound from a trap before Nancy had time to say “hello.” Her husband (and perhaps the old man too) seemed to be a stickler for punctuality, particularly when it came to tea being on the table. “I’ll get a row if I’m late” were Mrs. Crowther’s usual words as she dashed off.
Arriving home earlier than usual, the bees still diligently at work in her head, Nancy must have entered the house more quietly than she realized as neither Viola nor Mrs. Crowther noticed her. Even Bobby the dog failed to greet her. Viola was sitting at the big farmhouse table reading Bunty, holding a ham sandwich in one hand while twirling a lock of hair around a finger on the other—a surprisingly irritating habit that they had been unable to break her of. Mrs. Crowther was writing what looked like a shopping list in a stubby joiner’s pencil on the back of an envelope, a cup of tea to hand. Nancy felt oddly affected by this domestic tableau. The peaceful ordinariness of it, perhaps—the knitted cosy on the teapot, the way Mrs. Crowther was stirring the sugar in her cup without taking her eyes off her shopping list. The frown of concentration on Viola’s face as she assiduously ate her way through her sandwich while lost in this week’s adventure of “The Four Marys.”
For a moment, as she stood unseen in the doorway, Nancy experienced a sudden, odd sense of detachment. She was invisible, an observer, looking in on a life that she was somehow barred from. She began to feel dangerously untethered, as if she might simply float away at any moment and not be able to get back to where she belonged. She started to feel panic, but at that moment Viola looked up from her comic and spotted her. “Mummy!” she exclaimed, her face lighting up. The spell was broken and Nancy crossed the threshold and entered the safety of the kitchen, the old Aga throwing out comfort and warmth to welcome her.
Mrs. Crowther said, “Goodness, you gave me a fright standing there. For a minute I thought you were a ghost. You’re as white as any ghost would be,” she added (as if she was familiar with spirits). “Are you feeling all right? Here—sit down. Let me pour you a cup of tea.”
“I had a migraine at school,” Nancy said, sinking into a chair at the table. The bees moved restlessly in her head, behind her eyes. Mrs. Crowther poured the tea and before Nancy could protest she stirred three spoonfuls of sugar into the cup.
“Hot sweet tea,” Mrs. Crowther said. “Just what you need.” It was strange being ministered to by someone who was normally a blur of gabardine in the hallway. (Mrs. Crowther proved to have unsuspected reservoirs of small talk.) “Thank you,” Nancy said, enormously grateful for the tea, even with its heavy charge of sugar.