The Lives of Women Read Online Free

forward to these visits, but no sooner had they started when she wished they were over. Her father in the corner of the little room, plucking cake flesh out of the buns and reading the Sunday newspapers. Elaine and her mother by the bed, half-heartedly rattling dice in a plastic cup and pushing coloured buttons up ladders and down snakes.
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    The doctor brought the good news in person. Her tests had come back. She was to be discharged this very afternoon.
    She’d been reading one of Mrs Hanley’s novels at the time and her heart had been thumping on some faraway beach in the South of France.
    His sudden appearance gave her a fright. For some reason, she felt ashamed of the book, turning it over and covering it with her hand. She’d had trouble understanding him or even why he should be addressing her in the first place. She kept looking around, expecting her mother to be standing there behind her in the doorway.
    The doctor sat side-saddle on the end of the bed and called her ‘young lady’. He tapped his thigh as he spoke. There would becertain conditions, of course: a weekly check-up in the outpatient department. Bed rest and quarantine for a further two weeks. After that, afternoon naps and early to bed to allow her immune system to build itself up. ‘In short, young lady, you will be a hot-house plant, but at least you’ll be a hot-house plant in the loving comfort of your own home where your own people can take good care of you.’
    Then he wished her good luck and sauntered off down the corridor, leaving her bereft.
    She had thought about getting up and shouting down the corridor after him. She thought of all the things she might say: ‘But I don’t feel better, Doctor. I don’t feel ready.’
    Or, ‘Please, can’t I just stay for another week, a few days even? Oh,
please
?’
    Or, ‘I’m not going! Do you hear me? I’m just NOT!’
    But she stayed as she was, clutching her book in her old lady’s hands and staring down at a photo of F. Scott Fitzgerald, who stared blandly back with his girlish eyes and thin sardonic smile.
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    It had been strange to find herself standing in clothes again. It had been strange to be standing at all. Her yellow jumper poured off her like thick custard, her jeans barely stayed up on her hips. Even her shoes seemed too big. Next door, a nurse had lifted the baby, making his little hand wave at her through the glass. And she felt this warm, sharp gush come into her chest as if she might be going to cry, although she couldn’t see why – because how could she love him when she’d never even touched him and probablywouldn’t recognise him again, should their paths ever cross in the outside world?
    Her mother piled books into a cardboard box and praised Mrs Hanley’s good taste. She said she hoped there’d been no spillages – jam or tea stains or such like – because the books, of course, would have to be returned.
    â€˜But Mrs Hanley said…’
    â€˜Oh now, I’m sure she didn’t mean—’
    â€˜No, no, she said, she said…’
    â€˜Now really, we can’t expect. At least not forever.’
    â€˜They’re mine! I’m telling you, she said they were mine.’
    â€˜All right, all right. Calm down. Surely you’re not going to start crying over a few old books! Tell you what, I’ll pop over, offer them back and see what she says.’
    As her mother began rolling clothes into the hold-all, Elaine felt a chill in her stomach. She remembered, then, the way her mother would sometimes come back from the shops pinkened by the news of some medical woe: this man’s cancer, that woman’s pleurisy, the butcher who had a daughter who had a friend who had a neighbour who had a baby who’d just died.
    Now, bustling around the hospital bed, the little grin on her face said it all – there would be weeks of playing nursies