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A nurse came over to her bed, smiling brightly, whispered, ‘Back with us again? That’s great. How do you feel?’
‘I’ll live,’ she said, and laughed, although it wasn’t really funny.
‘Well, you sound cheerful! That’s good. My name’s Sally, Nurse Embry. Can you tell me your name? Then we can get in touch with your relatives or friends, or whoever you want us to ring.’
‘I’m Miranda Grey. You’d better tell my mother, but don’t ring her until morning, I don’t want her woken up in the middle of the night and scared to death.’
The nurse scribbled on the chart hanging from the end of her bed. Miranda watched her, noticing her pallor and deep-set eyes. She looked tired, and no wonder, working all night. Miranda would have hated the job, could never have coped with the long hours or low pay, not to mention the sheer horror of what nurses had to cope with, broken bodies, blood, death.
‘We’ll need your mother’s telephone number and address.’
Miranda whispered them and the nurse wrote them down with long, elegant fingers.
‘Dorset? That’s a long way off. Is that where you grew up?’
‘No, she moved there when she retired.’
Mum had decided, in Miranda’s last year at school, to sell their London home and move out to the country. She looked for somewhere special for months without success. At last she fell in love with, and bought, a beautiful, thatched cottage in a village set way off the beaten track within miles of the sea at Lyme Regis. There were only two small, rather poky bedrooms, a huge bathroom, a big, country kitchen, a cosy sitting room. It was ideally a house for one or two people at most.
But the garden was what made Fern Cottage a wonderful home. Her mother spent hours in it, every day – pruning, weeding, mowing the lawn, deadheading roses in the busy cottage garden. Warm, pink, climbing roses sprawled across the front of the cottage every summer, twining around golden honeysuckle whose scent on summer evenings was paradisal.
When she had time, her mother loved to sit out there as long as the light lasted, reading or doing embroidery, under the tiny porch which framed the front door.
But she was always very busy. In fact, her social life was positively hectic. Far more crowded than Miranda’s and certainly more crowded than her life in London had been. Country people seemed to take more trouble over their social lives. There were fetes in summer, at the church hall, jumble sales every month or so, flower shows, film shows, gymkhanas and pet shows. Every Saturday, throughout the year, there was a dance at the village hall – country dancing, old time dancing, square dancing, line dancing. Something different every week. The band was the same and not wonderful; they all lived locally and had other jobs but lived for Saturday nights. They had a following locally, people thought a lot of them. When you didn’t have much entertainment, except TV or radio, you enjoyed anything that came along.
Her blonde hair might have turned silvery but Dorothy still had sex appeal although she didn’t work at it. It was simply something she had been born with; men reacted to it on sight, picked up the vibes she gave out, the dazzling come-hither of her smile, the glint in her eye, the sheer liveliness of the way she talked and moved and laughed. Watching men’s faces as they talked to her mother, Miranda could see that to them she seemed almost to glitter like the star on top of a Christmas tree. Men queued up to take her out and she enjoyed their company, but although she kept getting marriage proposals she always turned them down.
‘I don’t fancy being married, again, and tied down to one man. I’m having too much fun,’ she once said. ‘I like them all, but there isn’t one of them I could be serious about. I just want a partner to go dancing with, have dinner with – and I like to ring the changes. Once you really know them, there’s nothing new to learn and it gets tedious.’
‘You’re a wicked woman,’ Miranda had said, laughing. ‘As you get older, you’ll need companionship, somebody else around night and day. Surely?’
‘Maybe, but
I haven’t got to that stage yet. You won’t have realised it, yet, Miranda, but life is one stage after another. When you’re young you want to have fun, then you start yearning to get married, to have babies, all that. The biological clock starts ticking. I remember feeling that way. Been there, got the t-shirt. Now I’m on another level. I’ve been through that stage and come out the other side. I’ve discovered freedom and being responsible for yourself. I love running my own life. I don’t want a man around full time. They’re bossy. They can’t help it. It’s the testosterone. They always want to run things, tell people what to do. They feel that that’s their role in life. Well, I won’t put up with it. At the moment I’m free to make my own decisions, and I want to go on doing so. I don’t want some man around all the time, trying to run my life, giving me orders, telling me what I can and cannot do.’
Miranda had stared at her, absorbing what she said, and her mother had grinned teasingly. She still had all her own teeth, small, neat, whitish, just as she had the same trim, healthy figure she had had all Miranda’s life. Dorothy took care of herself; ate a lot of fruit and vegetables, drank the odd glass of wine, walked a lot, swam, was always busy working either in her small house, or out in the garden.
‘Am I right, or am I wrong?’ Mum had demanded.
‘It’s your life,’ Miranda had shrugged. ‘How do I know if you’re right or wrong?’
‘Oh, I’m right. To paraphrase Jean Jacques Rousseau, women are born free and everywhere they are in chains. Even worse, they seem to like it that way. Well, not me. I’ve been married. I don’t want to put the chains back on again.’
‘But you loved Dad, didn’t you? I don’t remember him as some sort of tyrant.’
‘No, of course not, but I was still a prisoner, of you as much as your dad. Duty is the worst prison of them all, don’t forget that. When you have a husband and children, you’re never free. But now I can get up when I like, go to bed when I like, do what I like.’
‘What are you smiling at?’ Nurse Embry asked as she tidied the coverlet on the bed.
‘Something my mother once said to me.’
‘She lives alone? Your dad . . .’
‘Died. You haven’t told me yet exactly what my injuries are.’
‘Your right ankle is broken, that’s why it’s in plaster. That will take a while to heal, I’m afraid. You’ve strained your right wrist, that must have been when you fell, you would have put your hand out to stop yourself. You’ve got superficial cuts and bruises to your head, hence the bandages – but you haven’t got concussion or any serious injury.’
Frowning, Miranda said, ‘Well, that doesn’t sound too bad – I thought it might be worse.’
