Going Gently by David Nobbs

Author:David Nobbs [David Nobbs]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House
Published: 2009-02-05T05:00:00+00:00

11 Lily

KATE WOKE TO the clanking of the breakfast trolley. Maurice’s words, ‘pretty disastrous concept, really, school’, flashed through her mind, and she thought, Pretty disastrous concept, really, hospital. What do you need least when you’re fighting for your life? Rotten food, bleak walls, and the retching, spitting, gobbing, belching, farting, bleeding, screaming and moaning of the seriously ill.

This morning, though, it seemed very quiet in the ward, and she realised why. Hilda had gone home. It seemed impossible that Hilda could ever have made sufficient impression on anything for her absence to cause even a ripple, but Kate did feel a sharp sense of loss for this woman whom she had never seen and only heard. And she suspected that Glenda and Mrs Critchley felt it as well. Glenda was grumbling, of course. ‘Why didn’t he send me home instead of her? He hasn’t a clue. You contribute all your life to the NHS, and what do you get? Sheer incompetence. When I get out of here I’m going to complain all the way to the House of Lords. This nation is going to be sorry for its treatment of Glenda Carrington.’ And then Mrs Critchley joined in. ‘The York ham at breakfast was so succulent in the old days. The smoked haddock was oak-smoked. Now it’s all dyed. Water oozes out of the bacon. Oozes. I’ll come with you to the House of Lords.’ ‘Quite right,’ said Glenda. ‘The women of this land are on the march.’ She began to sing ‘Onward Christian Soldiers’ in a wavery screech. ‘Hush!’ said Mrs Critchley softly. ‘You’ll wake the little one.’

A nurse came to give Kate her morning ablutions. This one seemed gentle and caring but she was a stranger. It was much worse having these dreadful humiliations performed upon her by strangers. Kate summoned up all her will-power and retreated from Ward 3C into pleasant recollections of the marvellous sex she’d enjoyed with Walter. If the nurse could have seen into the mind of the wrinkled old woman, seen her being taken by Walter from the front and from the back and from the side in rooms to the front and back and side of Copson Towers! If the nurse could have known that she was remembering the joy that Kate of the Two Settees had experienced in making love on both settees! Joy, delight, the pleasure of giving, the thrill of the partner’s pleasure. Togetherness. Oneness. What could be unnatural or shameful in any of that, between committed lovers, even for a chapel girl?

And that, all that, was what she had thrown away, through the naivety, the vanity, the sheer stupidity of her behaviour with Red Ron Rafferty. If she hadn’t been so stupid, Walter and she would never have been divorced, she wouldn’t have married Graham, Graham wouldn’t have been murdered, she wouldn’t be fast approaching the longed-for, dreaded moment when she had to try to discover which of her three dear sons was a murderer. Oh, Kate!

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