Five years ago today . . .
I can hear my mother’s voice, so close in note and tone to my own that they are one.
‘Ten years ago today . . .’ I am calling up the stairs, ‘Dad and I went down to the theatre.’ I think I hear her yawn. I’m glad. ‘I had my epidural and I noticed your dad had disappeared.’
Grant laughs, he knows what’s coming.
‘Then I looked round and everyone else had disappeared as well, nurses, doctors!’
I’ve got her now, I can hear her listening.
‘Don’t exaggerate.’ Grant is still laughing. He is sitting in his overalls at our big farmhouse table in the kitchen, reading his Farmer’s Weekly, surrounded by Soil Association bumpf and farm orders. He is drinking a cup of tea and eating toast.
‘A nurse came back in and I said, where is everyone? And she said, oh, your husband went a bit green, we had to take him out.’
I hear her go ‘Ahhh . . .’ Her sympathy is genuine.
‘One minute, he’s sitting there with a J-cloth on his head, looking concerned; the next he’s out cold, surrounded by nurses.’
Grant stops laughing.
‘I never could stand hospitals.’ He feeds his crusts to the dogs and goes back to his Farmer’s Weekly.
‘No, it was a typical act of upstaging on your part.’ Now I’m making myself laugh. ‘You were so beautiful,’ I tell her, ‘so perfect.’
And she laughs and she is.