This One Is for You

Chapter One: The Quiet Work

October came into Kingsbarrow the way it always did, with rain that fell so softly it seemed to be thinking about something else.

Marion King parked in her usual place at Foxmead Hospice, under the copper beech that dropped its leaves on her windscreen every autumn, and sat for a moment with the engine off. This was a ritual she had never told anyone about. Ninety seconds in the car. Long enough for the radio voices to stop, for her hands to settle in her lap, for her face to arrange itself into the face she wore inside.

She had a good face for the work. People told her so. Open, unhurried, a little tired around the eyes in a way that made the dying trust her, because she looked like someone who had also been kept awake by something.

Inside, the building smelled of coffee and lilies and, underneath, the faint chemical sweetness of the cleaning fluid they used on the floors. Foxmead had been a farmhouse once. It still had the shape of one: thick walls, deep windowsills, doorways that made tall visitors duck. The hospice had grown out from it in two low modern wings, sixteen beds, a garden room with glass doors that opened onto lawns and a view of the Quantocks when the cloud lifted. It was, everyone agreed, a lovely place to die.

Marion's office had been a linen store. It was long and narrow, with one window looking onto the car park and the copper beech. She had a desk, two soft chairs, a box of tissues she replaced twice a week, a lamp with a green glass shade, and a filing cabinet that stood a few inches out from the wall because the skirting board was warped. She had asked maintenance about it once. Then she had stopped asking, and the gap had become part of the room.

At half past eight she went to handover.

The night staff were grey-faced and cheerful, the way they always were at the end of a shift. Lucy Rowe was among them, twenty-eight years old, sharp-eyed, with a plait she pinned up in a coil and a habit of writing on the back of her own hand when she ran out of paper.

"Mr Nettlefold went at four," Lucy said. "Very peaceful. Daughter got here in time."

"The other daughter?"

"Didn't come." Lucy shrugged, but not unkindly. "That's for you, I imagine."

"That's for me," Marion agreed, and wrote the name down.

This was the work: the afterwards. She sat with the ones who came too late and the ones who came too often and the ones who had not spoken to their father since 1994 and now had to decide what that had meant. She sat with wives who wanted to know if it had hurt. She sat with a man last spring who had wanted only to tell her, for two hours, about his wife's talent for growing sweet peas, and who had shaken her hand at the end and said, *thank you, that's the first time I've enjoyed myself since she was diagnosed.*

She was good at it. She had a London qualification and a London reputation, once, and she had walked away from both.

At Foxmead nobody was under nineteen. That mattered more than she liked to admit. In London she had worked with bereaved parents, and she had been the best in her practice at it, until the afternoon four years ago when the sonographer's face had gone very still and quiet, and a doctor had said the words *I'm so sorry, there's no heartbeat*, and Marion had delivered her daughter Beatrice at thirty-eight weeks into a silent room.

Beatrice had weighed six pounds eleven ounces. She had a full head of dark hair. Marion had held her for four hours and eleven minutes. She knew the number because she had looked at the clock when they took her, and she had been looking at the clock when they brought her in, and some part of her mind had done the arithmetic without being asked, and had never once let her forget the answer.

After that she could not sit in a room with a mother who had lost a child. She could not sit in the room at all. So she and Andrew had sold the flat and bought a cottage two miles outside Kingsbarrow with a damp problem and a wood burner, and Andrew commuted to Bristol four days a week, and Marion had found the hospice, where the grief was late-arriving, orderly, expected, and belonged to grown-ups.

Three years now. She told herself it was recovery. Andrew called it a very expensive way of holding your breath.

At eleven, Elizabeth Gorham came to find her.

Elizabeth ran Foxmead the way a good captain runs a small ship: with total attention to hull integrity and no patience at all for weather. She was fifty-six, silver-blonde, always in navy, and she had built the hospice's reputation out of church fetes and legacy donations and sheer relentless charm applied to the right people at the right dinners. She did not knock. She put her head round the door with her reading glasses pushed up into her hair.

"Marion. Have you got ten minutes for something irritating?"

"I've got ten minutes for anything."

Elizabeth came in and shut the door, which was unusual. She sat down in the visitor's chair and crossed her ankles.

"We're taking a transfer from The Larches, out at Stoke Ridge. Tomorrow, probably Thursday. Pancreatic, hepatic mets, palliative only. She's seventy-two. Prognosis is weeks — the referral says four to eight, but you know how that goes."

"That's not irritating. That's a Tuesday."

"She's a difficult admission." Elizabeth turned her wedding ring around her finger, once. "Ten days ago she attacked a member of staff."

Marion put her pen down. "Attacked how?"

"With a pair of dressmaking shears. She's a seamstress by trade. Forty years with a shop in the village, apparently — before my time. The orderly went to take some of her fabric away to be laundered and she opened his forearm from wrist to elbow." Elizabeth said it flatly. "Twenty-two stitches. He's off work. The Larches say they can't safely manage her and, frankly, they don't want to. Her GP has begged us. She is dying, she has nobody, and there is no other bed in the county."

"Is she confused?"

"That's the thing. She isn't. Her bloods are a mess and her liver's failing and she's had no delirium at all. Cognitively she's sharper than I am." A dry pause. "She was entirely deliberate."

Marion thought about the orderly's forearm. Wrist to elbow. That was not a swipe. That was a stroke, like cutting cloth on a marked line.

"Name?" she said.

"Edna Rackham."

Something shifted, faintly, at the back of Marion's mind. Not recognition. Just the small draught you feel when a door opens somewhere else in a house.

"There's a condition attached," Elizabeth went on. "She has two possessions she will not be parted from. A sewing machine — an old treadle Singer, cast iron, God knows how heavy — and a roll of her own work. Fabric panels. The Larches tried to put both in storage. That's what the shears were about."

"And she wants to bring them here."

"She wants to bring them here or she wants to die in her own front room without pain relief. Those were her words to the GP. Verbatim." Elizabeth uncrossed her ankles. "I am inclined to allow it. A sewing machine in a bedroom is a nightmare — fire regs, moving and handling, infection control will have a fit about the fabric. But she's had everything taken off her already. Her house, her shop, her freedom, her body. I don't want to be the last person who takes something."

"That's decent of you."

"It's practical of me. Patients who feel robbed are patients who don't settle, and patients who don't settle keep the whole corridor awake." Elizabeth met her eyes. "But I want the machine and the fabric to be somebody's responsibility. Emotionally, I mean. Not the nurses'. They've got enough. I want you to hold this one, Marion. Sessions from day one, not when she asks. If there's a psychiatric picture developing, I want to know before it walks up the corridor with a blade in its hand."

Marion looked at the rain on the window and the leaves stuck to the glass like wet paper.

She should have said: *this needs a psychiatrist, not a counsellor.* She should have said: *put her on the mixed corridor, not near Mrs Vellacott who screams.* She should have said any number of sensible, boundaried things.

What she said was, "Yes. I'll take her."

Because the truth — the shabby, private truth — was that Marion King had been bored for three years. Not by the dying. By the safety. She had built herself a life with the sharp edges filed off, and some starved part of her had been waiting a long time for a door to open somewhere else in the house.

"Good," said Elizabeth, standing. "Thursday, then. And Marion — she asked for you."

Marion looked up. "Sorry?"

"By name. In the referral. It says: *patient requests counselling from Mrs King.*" Elizabeth pulled her glasses down out of her hair and frowned at the doorframe as if it had said something impertinent. "I assumed you'd met. A church thing, or the summer fete."

"I've never heard of her in my life," Marion said.

Elizabeth made a small dismissive noise. "Village," she said, as if that explained everything, and went out, and left the door open behind her.

Marion sat for a while after that, listening to the trolley going along the corridor and the rain, and the hospice being calm, and being useful, and being safe.

Then she wrote the name in her diary, under Thursday.

*E. Rackham.*

She underlined it twice, and did not know why.