The L-Shaped Room by Lynne Reid Banks

Author:Lynne Reid Banks
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9781446426272
Publisher: Random House

Chapter 13

THEY kept me in hospital for a week, even though after the first day they were able to tell me that my violent indigestion following my curry debauch had not dislodged – or even seriously inconvenienced – my small passenger. But they decided to keep me under observation until I was safely out of the third month.

I was in a large ward full of ailing women, many of them, so far as I could judge, suffering from senile decay. I’d never been in hospital before, and after the first day I felt well enough to notice things like the faint smell, which I thought was of death, but which was disinfectant, and to be mildly infuriated by hospital routine. But it was pleasant to feel safe and looked-after, and another nice thing was that nobody remarked on, or even appeared to notice my absence of rings – except the Matron, who was inclined to toss her head a bit as she passed me, but perhaps she just had a tic.

I didn’t know whether it was fair to expect Toby to come and visit me. When he didn’t come, I told myself I’d been foolish even to hope. Stupidly, I kept on hoping, day after day. But he didn’t come. In fact, nobody did, which was only to be expected since nobody except Toby (and possibly John) knew where I was. Nevertheless, visiting hours were an ordeal far more to be dreaded than the occasional unattractive things the doctors or nurses came and did to me. I longed for company and felt unreasonably deserted. When the appointed hour approached and we could see the visitors massing outside the glass doors at the end of the ward, waiting for opening-time, I would bury myself in a book to hide my pink eyes; but they would none the less be drawn irresistibly to watch the passage of each visitor along the aisle while I thought babyishly, ‘Somebody might think to come.’ I wished I could have screens put round my bed like the really sick people had, so that instead of giving me sidelong glances of pity because I had no visitors, people would drop their voices and whisper sepulchrally to interested outsiders, ‘Poor little thing – she’s dying, you know.’

All in all it was with a feeling of indescribable joy that on the sixth day I saw a familiar figure coming towards me among the prompt arrivals. It was Dottie, looking very smart in a new scarlet coat and a little matching hat, fairly exuding personality and with a huge bunch of daffodils in one hand and a bulging hold-all in the other. She was a being apart from the visitors belonging to everybody else, and there were admiring stares and not a few tut-tuts of disapproval from some of the senile-decays for her vivid make-up and briskly clacking high heels, all of which sent my morale skyrocketing.

‘Well, rat-girl,’ she greeted me, pulling off her hat and throwing down the flowers on the bed.

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