“You’re home early,” Viola said. She was suspicious of any change in routine, disliking spontaneity. Was it because she was an only child? Or simply a child?
“Yes, darling, I am.” When the tea was drunk, and, on Mrs. Crowther’s recommendation, she had eaten a Rich Tea biscuit to settle her stomach (“Works a treat, doesn’t it?”), she said to Mrs. Crowther, “I know it’s an imposition, but would you mind hanging on until my husband gets home? I think I might go and lie down.”
She must have fallen fast asleep. When she woke it was dark, but the bedroom door was open and the light was on in the hall. The bees were silenced, gone to find a new queen. The clock by the bed said nine o’clock. She felt thick-headed but much better.
“Hello, you,” Teddy said when she came downstairs. “Mrs. Crowther told me you had a migraine, so I let you sleep.” (Nancy wondered if Mrs. Crowther had been given “a row” from her husband and the old man.) “I gave her a bit extra for hanging on. I said this morning that you looked peaky—that must have been why. Shall I fry you a chop for your supper?”
She didn’t have another migraine, just a few more headaches than normal, nothing as startling as that day in the sickroom. “I expect your job is rather taxing,” the optician said when she visited him to discover why she was occasionally seeing a wave of light in her left eye, a little shimmering line of gold that was actually rather pretty. “Optical migraine,” he said, peering into her eye, so close to her that she could smell the peppermint he had taken to mask (not very successfully) the oniony smell of his lunch. “You don’t necessarily experience pain with them, dear.” He was quite elderly, the avuncular sort, and had practised for years in their small local town. There was nothing, he said reassuringly, that he didn’t know about eyes.
“And sometimes when I’ve been writing a lot on the blackboard,” Nancy said, “my eyesight goes a bit blotchy, like Vaseline rubbed on glass, and I can’t read or write properly.”
“Definitely an optical migraine,” he said.
“I had a proper migraine recently,” she said, “and a few more headaches than usual.”
“There you go then,” he said.
“My mother used to have headaches,” she said, recalling her mother dragging herself up the stairs to her darkened bedroom, her sad, uncomplaining smile when she said to them, “One of my heads, I’m afraid.” That used to make them laugh (not when she was in pain, they were not cruel daughters). “The Hydra,” they called her affectionately. “But a nice one,” Millie said. “A lovely, darling Mummy Hydra.”
Later, Nancy wondered if she had sensed something, a kind of premonition, that had motivated her to choose that particular evening to suggest uprooting the three of them and moving into town, where life would be easier and more convenient. As she left the optician’s, however, armed with a prescription for reading glasses (“Just the age you’ve reached, dear, nothing to worry about”), the thought uppermost in her mind was the pot of tea and the toasted teacake that she was going to treat herself to in the café around the corner before setting off on the rather arduous cycle home. It was a hot day and Teddy had the car. He was going to an agricultural show, a reluctant Viola in tow. She was awfully tired, Nancy thought, but the tea would buck her up.
It did, and as she was sorting out her change for a tip for the waitress she was struck with the thought that the only thing that was happening to her—to her and Teddy (and even Viola, although less urgently)—was that they were simply growing older. Otherwise their lives stayed the same. They were treading water, plodding along in a rut. Why shouldn’t they do something different, shake themselves up a little?
Plodding?” Teddy said, a fleeting spasm of distress taking hold of his features. They were in bed—cocoa and library books, and so on—a good definition of “plodding” in anyone’s lexicon, Nancy supposed. She remembered Sylvie saying, “Marriage blunts one so.”
“It’s not an insult,” she said, but Teddy didn’t look convinced.
One weekend, not long after they had made the move to York, Nancy was taking the Sunday roast from the oven when, with no warning at all, her left arm gave way and the pan and its contents clattered to the floor. Teddy must have heard the noise because he came rushing through to the kitchen and said, “Are you all right?”
“Yes, yes, fine,” she said, surveying with dismay the carnage of lamb and potatoes, not to mention the hot fat that had splattered everywhere. “Not burnt?” Teddy said anxiously. No, she reassured him, not burnt. “I’m a clumsy dolt, I really am.”