The Last Letter from Your Lover

little—’
    ‘Please . . .’ Her voice was a murmur, barely audible.
    ‘Mr Hargreaves! I do believe she’s trying to speak.’
    ‘. . .  want to see . . .’
    A face swam down to her. ‘Yes?’
    ‘. . .  want to see . . .’ The grapes, she was begging. I just want to see those grapes again.
    ‘She wants to see her husband!’ The nurse sprang upwards as she announced this triumphantly. ‘I think she wants to see her husband.’
    There was a pause, then someone stooped towards her. ‘I’m here, dear. Everything is . . . everything’s fine.’
    The body retreated, and she heard the pat of a hand on a back. ‘There, you see? She’s getting back to herself already. All in good time, eh?’ A man’s voice again. ‘Nurse? Go and ask Sister to organise some food for tonight. Nothing too substantial. Something light and easy to swallow . . . Perhaps you could fetch us a cup of tea while you’re there.’ She heard footsteps, low voices as they continued to talk beside her. Her last thought as the light closed in again was, Husband?
    Later, when they told her how long she had been in the hospital, she could barely believe it. Time had become fragmented, unmanageable, arriving and departing in chaotic clumps of hours. It was Tuesday breakfast. Now it was Wednesday lunchtime. She had apparently slept for eighteen hours – this was said with some disapproval, as if there were an implied rudeness in being absent for so long. And then it was Friday. Again.
    Sometimes when she woke it was dark, and she would push her head up a little against the starched white pillow and watch the soothing movements of the ward at night; the soft-shoe shuffle of the nurses moving up and down the corridors, the occasional murmur of conversation between nurse and patient. She could watch television in the evenings if she liked, the nurses told her. Her husband was paying for private care – she could have almost anything she liked. She always said no, thank you: she was confused enough by the unsettling torrent of information without the endless chatter of the box in the corner.
    As the periods of wakefulness stretched and grew in number, she became familiar with the faces of the other women on the little ward. The older woman in the room to her right, whose jet-black hair was pinned immaculately in a rigid, sprayed sculpture upon her head: her features fixed in an expression of mild, surprised disappointment. She had apparently been in a moving picture when she was young, and would deign to tell any new nurse about it. She had a commanding voice, and few visitors. There was the plump young woman in the room opposite, who cried quietly in the early hours of the morning. A brisk, older woman – a nanny perhaps? – brought young children in to see her for an hour every evening. The two boys would climb onto the bed, clutching at her, until the nanny told them to get down for fear they would ‘do your mother an injury’.
    The nurses told her the other women’s names, and occasionally their own, but she couldn’t remember them. They were disappointed in her, she suspected.
    Your Husband, as everyone referred to him, came most evenings. He wore a well-cut suit, dark blue or grey serge, gave her a perfunctory kiss on the cheek and usually sat at the foot of her bed. He would make small-talk solicitously, asking how she was finding the food, whether she would like him to have anything else sent along. Occasionally he would simply read a newspaper.
    He was a handsome man, perhaps ten years older than she was, with a high, aquiline forehead, and serious, hooded eyes. She knew, at some deep level, that he must be who he said he was, that she was married to him, but it was perplexing to feel nothing when everyone so obviously expected a different reaction. Sometimes she would stare at him when he wasn’t looking, waiting for some jolt of familiarity to kick in. Sometimes, when she woke, she would find him sitting there, newspaper lowered, gazing at her as if he felt something similar.
    Mr Hargreaves, the consultant, came daily, checking her charts, asking if she could tell him the day, the time, her name. She always got those right now. She even managed to tell him the prime minister was Mr Macmillan and her age, twenty-seven. But she struggled with newspaper headlines, with events that had taken place before she arrived here. ‘It will come,’ he would say, patting her hand. ‘Don’t try to force it,