“I’ll fetch a cloth.”
“I suppose that I’m used to the Aga in the old house and I just—I don’t know—misjudged something. Oh, the poor lamb,” she added sadly, as if the joint was an old friend. “Do you think we can salvage it—scrape it up off the floor and pretend nothing happened?” The leg of lamb seemed to have crusted itself in every last bit of grit and dirt on what Nancy had previously thought was a clean kitchen floor. She silently berated herself for her sluttish housewifery. “Could we wash it under the hot tap? We wouldn’t have let it go to waste during the war. We still have carrots,” she added hopefully. “And mint sauce.”
Teddy laughed and said, “I think I’d better heat up a tin of beans and scramble some eggs. I can’t see Viola eating carrots for Sunday lunch.”
There had been other little things, numbness and tingle in that rogue left arm, more headaches and another awful migraine that started on a Friday evening and didn’t clear until Monday morning. It prompted her into visiting their new GP, hoping for a prescription for strong painkillers. After some rather odd tests—walking in a straight line, moving her head in different directions, as if testing her for drunkenness—the GP said he wanted to refer her to the hospital. He was the youthful partner of an older doctor in the practice and was eager not to make mistakes. “But no need for alarm,” he said. “You’re probably right about it being migraine.” No hurry either, apparently, and by the time the appointment card for the specialist came through the letter-box Nancy thought the hospital must have forgotten about her. She had told Teddy none of this. There seemed no point in worrying him. (He was a worrier, Nancy wasn’t.) She supposed the results would be vague and she would end up like her mother, having “heads.” She doubted she could suffer as patiently.
It was perfect spring weather on the day of Nancy’s hospital appointment and when she left school at break time (“Back by lunchtime”), she decided to walk to the hospital. If she planned her route she could walk part of the way on the Bar Walls and enjoy the daffodils, recently come into flower and now in their “golden pomp”—a phrase she recalled from an old column of Agrestis. Teddy had been “enraptured” by the wild daffodils he had encountered unexpectedly on a woodland walk a couple of years ago.
Teddy had, so far, kept on his Nature Notes. It was a short piece once a month, he argued (to himself), and he could easily drive out to the countryside—they could all go, take a picnic, a pair of binoculars. “It’s not quite the same, I know, as being in the middle of it—‘the middle of nowhere,’ ” he added rather pointedly, “but needs must. Until the Recorder can find someone to replace me.” They did find someone, a year later—a woman, in fact, although the new Agrestis never admitted to this change in his sex. But by then it was of no consequence to Teddy, very little was, and he left Agrestis behind without a backward glance.
The daffodils growing on the grass slopes beneath the Bar Walls were truly lovely. There were none in the garden in the new house for some reason (surely everyone had daffodils?) and Nancy determined that she must talk to Teddy about planting some. Lots of them (a host, in fact) in a great Wordsworthian drift. He would like that. To her surprise, he had taken to gardening, perusing seed catalogues and drawing up plans and sketches. Nancy gave him free rein, although he continued to consult her—“How do you feel about gladioli?” “What about a small pond?” “Peas or beans or both?”
It was when she had come down from the walls at Monkgate Bar and was waiting to cross the road at the traffic lights that a black curtain suddenly descended and covered her left eye. More of a blind than a curtain—she had never thought before about where the word came from. Her own personal blackout. She sensed disaster. “Struck blind”—it felt biblical, although Monkgate was hardly the road to Damascus.