Tree of Hands Read Online Free PDF Page B

Marriage Knot
. . .
    James had opened his eyes. He was moving his head from side to side, rubbing his eyes with his fists. The floppy-legged tiger cub lay sprawled on the pillow beside him. Benet ran the drumstick down the painted octave of the xylophone,
do-re-mi-fa-so-la-ti-do
. Usually that alerted him. He would reach for the stick and want to play the notes himself. She unzipped the tent. He put out his arms and said, ‘Mummy,’ but he didn’t raise his head from the pillow.
    Benet lifted him on to her lap. His forehead was hot and he was breathing the way he had done the evening she hadbrought him in. He very obviously wasn’t over it yet; he was less well than he had been the day before.
    â€˜You’re my poor lamb, aren’t you? It’s giving you a really hard time.’
    The nurse came in with a thermometer. Benet left James with her and went down the corridor to the pay phone. The time was just on eight. In the house in the Vale of Peace there was a phone on each floor, you didn’t have to run downstairs or up when the phone rang. Benet dialled her own number, wondering what kind of storm would break when she had told Mopsa that James was going to have to stay in hospital for more days and more nights and she was going to have to stay with him.
    The phone started ringing. It rang and rang. Benet put the receiver back and tried again in case she had misdialled. Still there was no answer. It was early yet, it was possible Mopsa was still asleep.
    Breakfast had arrived. Cornflakes, a boiled egg and bread and marmalade for herself, milk, baby cereal and an orange for James. James wouldn’t eat. He clung to her, clutching her round the neck while she tried to eat cornflakes. The day sister came in, said she would like him to be in the croupette, would Benet please try and keep him in the croupette, and Dr Raeburn would be along to see him in about an hour.
    James pushed the milk away with his arm, spilling it over Benet’s jeans. She got him to lie down inside the tent by inserting the upper half of her own body in with him. The vaporizer puffed away steadily.
    â€˜He’s got a little temperature,’ the nurse said, filling in his chart. ‘It would be good for him to have a little sleep.’
    Finally he did sleep and she went back to the phone. She dialled her own number and it started to ring. She was aware of a tight feeling of anxiety beginning to knot inside her. The phone rang ten times, fifteen times. She put the receiver back and she didn’t dial again because there was a woman in a dressing gown with a bandaged leg waiting to use it. Benet recalled how, when she herself had beenabout thirteen, Mopsa had disappeared without warning and been found two days later wandering in Northampton (in a sleeveless dress) having apparently lost her memory. No one ever found out how she got there or where the dress, which was not one of her own, had come from.
    Mopsa might never have gone back to the Vale of Peace last night. As soon as she was out of sight, she might easily have altered the directions to the taxi driver. Benet wondered if she should phone the police, then dismissed the idea as extreme. Later in the day, especially if James got up and played with the other children as he had been doing, she would take the opportunity to rush home for an hour.
    Mopsa had seemed so sane, so ordinary, so normal. But perhaps she had always been at her sanest, or appeared to be so, before a bout of madness. If she hadn’t gone to the Vale of Peace, where would she go? She knew no one in London now except those old neighbours, the Fentons, and very likely they too had moved away by now.
    The woman with the bandaged leg finished her call and Benet dialled again. There was no reply. Benet found it impossible to imagine her mother going for a walk or getting a taxi to come here, but how well did she know her mother? What did she know of her except that she was totally