Golden Hour by William Nicholson Read Free Book Online Page B

have.”
    â€œYou know you want to go to bed.”
    â€œJust go away. Leave me alone.”
    â€œI can’t leave you here. You’ll catch your death.”
    â€œGood.”
    A silence falls. Mrs. Dickinson waits, hearing Bridget’s heavy breathing, wondering what she’ll do next. A secret exultation fills her. She’s never staged such a show of total defiance before.
    â€œWell,” says Bridget. “I can’t force you.”
    Mrs. Dickinson says nothing. Victory is in her grasp.
    â€œI should have been home an hour ago. You know my hours. If you won’t go to bed, I can’t make you.”
    â€œNo, you can’t.”
    â€œSo what are you going to do? Put yourself to bed?”
    â€œYes.”
    â€œWell, then. You’d better do that.”
    Mrs. Dickinson keeps her head down and waits. Then the beam of the torch is swinging away. Bridget’s footsteps return to the back door.
    The old lady listens, not moving. She hears Bridget pass through the house. She hears the front door open and close. She hears a car engine start up, and drive away. She hears the sound of the car fade into silence.
    Bridget has walked off the job! She can’t come back after that.
    Mrs. Dickinson sits in the dark garden and savors her victory. A flock of rooks passes overhead, squawking, to land in the distant elms. If she stays quiet she can hear the soft scratch of the guinea pigs in their hutch as they make their nest in the straw. She wonders if Bridget filled her hot-water bottle before she left.
    Why didn’t Elizabeth come? She didn’t even give a reason. Because she hasn’t got a reason. She just couldn’t be bothered. My only child, and she can’t be bothered to come when I call. For all she knows I’m dying. Except of course Bridget would have told her it’s nothing. The old bat making a nuisance of herself over nothing.
    I shall kill that woman. If she comes back.
    Now she does feel cold. Suddenly it’s more than she can bear. She knows she must get herself into her warm bed.
    She grasps the arms of the garden chair, shuffles her bottom to the edge of the seat, and pushes. Up she goes. There. Who says I need help? She turns herself slowly to face the house. The light in the kitchen window throws an illuminated rectangle across the stone-paved path. Moving slowly, probing with her stick, she sets off on the journey to the back door.
    Walking is hard work. Not just the effort required to pull one leg ahead of the other: there’s the constant worry over maintaining your balance. You take it for granted all your life, but it turns out that staying upright is a feat of skill that requires constant responses from muscles all over your body. This common act of crossing the garden is now fraught with danger. Get the movement of an arm or the lean of the back just a little wrong and you fall. So everything has to happen very, very slowly.
    She reaches the back door at last. The door is standing as Bridget left it, half open. She puts out her left hand to support her weary weight on the door handle. The door swings back under the pressure. And down she goes.
    Falling has its own familiar pattern. The first terrible moment of helplessness. Then the slithering crumpling descent, in which many parts of your body are bumped, but you feel no pain. Then seeing the floor and the walls at odd angles, and not quite knowing where you are. Then twisting your head about you and seeing an arm, a leg, all in strange places. Then the throbbing sensations in various unidentified regions of your body, and the rush of sudden weakness that makes you lay your head down again. Then the pain.
    Maybe you’ve broken a hip. Maybe you’ll have to go tohospital. Maybe you’ll have a general anesthetic and die. Or not die, but lie in bed for weeks and weeks, and die later.
    Falling is the prelude to dying.
    She lies still for a few minutes longer. Then she starts to