‘Of course. Don’t worry about that. Come here.’
She stepped forward and wrapped her arms around him. He rested his chin on top of her head and sighed. They both knew what this latest development meant.
The situation with Jim’s parents had been complicated enough already. He was an only child, and was only here in Hinton because his mother, Alice, had traded on a never-before-exploited family connection to write to the store’s owner, Cedric Marlow. She’d hoped that he’d help Jim through Agricultural College, but she hadn’t dared to ask outright and instead Cedric Marlow had offered a Jim a position at the store. With neither of them feeling that he could turn it down, Jim had moved away to the town, and Marlow’s – and Lily. His mother, frustrated at losing him, had spent the entire time since hoping that he’d return. In fact, she’d done more than hope – she’d as good as schemed to get him back.
Just a few weeks earlier, seeing that looking after his dad, the house and the garden was getting too much for her, Jim had started going back to Bidbury every other weekend, leaving after work on Saturdays and taking Mondays off unpaid to make the lengthy journey worthwhile.
The new regime had coincided with Lily and Jim confessing what they felt for each other, and if it was a brake on their relationship, at least it was better than the screeching full stop that Lily had feared. She’d had moments when she’d genuinely thought Jim was going to leave Hinton for good, and the fact that he was still there at all felt like deliverance.
But now this.
Jim pulled away and looked sadly down at her.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said again. ‘We’ll make things work, Lily, I promise.’
Lily stood on tiptoe and kissed him.
‘I know.’
Jim held her tight and kissed her back. ‘I’d better go.’
‘You had.’
Lily saw him to the front door. He kissed her again, for longer this time.
‘I don’t know when I’ll be back.’
‘I’ll see you when I see you,’ she said, as brightly as she could. ‘Give your mother my best, won’t you?’
Jim smiled thinly. He knew that Lily’s good wishes were the last thing that his mother would want and in her heart of hearts, Lily knew it too. The two of them were gambling for Jim’s affections, and, though a stroke was hardly something you could fake, or plan, and she felt wicked for thinking it, it still seemed to Lily as though Alice had played an ace.
‘Poor Jim!’ Gladys, the next day, was sorry to hear the news. ‘His poor mum, of course. And poor you, Lily!’
Lily shrugged the sympathy away.
‘Don’t feel sorry for me. I’m not the one in hospital.’
‘And the telegram didn’t say how bad it is?’
‘No.’
Gladys pushed a bit of potato round her plate, trying to robe it in the thin gravy. The friends had managed to get off to dinner together, and the clatter of the Staff Canteen was all around them. The meat dish of the day was roast heart, which Lily couldn’t fancy – a bit too much like her own. She was doing her best with a lump of grey fish in a heavy sea of white sauce.
‘Who sent it anyway?’ Gladys managed to transfer the dripping chunk of potato to her mouth. ‘His dad never leaves the house, does he?’
Lily paused, knife and fork arched.
‘I never thought. I never asked. A neighbour, perhaps?’
Gladys nodded. She was such a sweet soul; she was really feeling for Jim, Lily could see.
‘I suppose so. Oh dear. And we’d had such a lovely afternoon.’
It was early afternoon by the time Jim got to the hospital. He hadn’t got back to Bidbury till dawn, trains cancelled or diverted, stuck in a siding in Birmingham to let troop trains pass, then the sirens going, hearing planes overhead, straining to hear if they were German Dorniers, then realising they were Lancasters, probably on their way back to base from a raid of their own.
Exhausted, he’d had to walk the last few miles, letting himself into the darkened cottage to find his father asleep in the chair with the dog loyally at his feet. Jim had a couple of hours’ sleep, washed and shaved his father and himself, and at nine had walked back into the village to get some food in. From the shop-cum-post office he’d telephoned the hospital to hear that his mother’s condition was unchanged, and that visiting was from two o’clock till four.
Now he was standing nonplussed in the ward with its shiny lino and tidy beds, trying to see which pale figure, pinioned by the bedclothes, was his mother. A nurse came by with a cloth-covered tray, so he asked.
‘Far bed on the left,’ she said, swishing off on rubber heels to the sluice room.
Head down, uncomfortable and feeling out of place, Jim made his way past the other patients, who, apart from one jolly woman surrounded by a tribe of relatives, seemed to be largely elderly and unloved, or at least unvisited. But as he neared the end bed, he realised that wasn’t the case with his mother – there was someone there already. A young woman was sitting at the bedside with her back to him.
‘Margaret?’
The girl spun round and stood up rapidly, rattling the chair back. She looked almost as out of place as Jim in her cord breeches and shirt, with tanned arms and her brown hair cropped close into her neck.
‘Jim! You made it!’
Jim caught the chair as it rocked.
‘Yes, finally. How is she?’
He could see straight away there was no point in addressing the question to his mother. She was asleep, or seemed to be, her face white and her lips a thin mauve line.
Margaret motioned him to one side. She kept her voice low.
‘The doctor was leaving as I got here. They’ve given her something to calm her down – she was getting what he called “agitated”. She hasn’t said much, so they can’t really tell about that, but it’s taken her movement, Jim, down her right side.’
‘Oh, God.’
On the long journey Jim had speculated about how the stroke might have affected her. A mother, especially his mother, who could get about but not communicate was as bad as one who was physically impeded but still had the power of speech. Now it seemed his mother might have lost both. He reached for the only possible straw.
‘People do get better, though, from a stroke? With exercises …?’
Margaret lifted her shoulders minutely.
‘It’s too early to say. But the doctor did say the stroke was a relatively mild one.’
‘That’s something.’
It still left him with a heck of a problem, he knew.
‘Look, Margaret,’ he offered. ‘I’ll sit with her now. I can stay till she wakes up. It’s good of you to have come. And thank you so much for sending the telegram.’ His father, who seemed bemused by the whole thing, had told him that much. ‘I’ll give you the money.’
‘Don’t be silly. That’s all right.’
‘How did you … how did you even know it had happened?’
‘Oh,’ said Margaret. ‘But I was there. I was with her.’
His mother showed no sign of stirring, so they went outside to talk. There was a small garden with a sundial and some benches where recuperating patients and their visitors could sit. Jim was too tense to sit down, so they walked round and round the narrow crazy-paved paths.
‘I’ve been dropping in when