Chapter 11 Aldercrest

Aldercrest was a long low building with a garden and a fish tank and a sign that had been repainted a slightly wrong green, and it had been nine years since Edie had stood in its lobby, and the lobby had not changed except that the fish tank was new and the woman at the desk was young. She had not planned anything. She had come off a shift at seven and driven over the mill and out the other road, and she stood in the lobby in her coat with the badge still on it, because she had forgotten to take it off, and the young woman looked at the badge and asked if she was here from the trust. "No," Edie said. "I'm here about a resident who died here nine years ago. Her name was Stroud. Margaret Stroud." The young woman's face did the small polite closing that faces do when a request arrives from outside the script. She said the records went back only five years in the front office, and that family could request older files, and that Edie would need to be next of kin, and Edie said she was, and the woman said that in that case it would take a few days. "Was there a night nurse here then," Edie said. "Grell." The young woman brightened, because this was at last a question with an answer. "Nurse Grell retired years ago. She lives in the flats by the river. Everybody still asks for her." And she said it the way people in care homes say things about the beloved retired, with a little pride, as if the kindness were still banked somewhere. Edie drove to the flats by the river and knocked on a door she had found by asking at the ground floor, and a woman of about eighty opened it, small and upright, with her hair in a braid pinned down the back of her head, and she said, before Edie had finished the sentence, "Margaret's daughter. I know your face. Come in, I've just made tea." Grell had kept her mind. That was the first thing, and it made everything after it worse and better at once. She remembered Edie, she remembered the year, she remembered the room and the window and the fact that Margaret had wanted the door left open. She did not pretend. "You want to ask me about the visitor," Grell said. The word went through Edie like a change of temperature. "You knew." "Knew what." Grell poured the tea with a steady hand. "I knew your mother saw somebody in the last week. I've known that about a hundred people over forty years, and I've written it in a hundred charts, and every time I wrote it I wrote the same thing, which I don't suppose you'll remember, because you were a young nurse and you had your own way of managing it. I wrote, *patient reports seeing a figure at night, reassured, no distress.*" She looked up. "I wrote it about your mother. I've never stopped thinking about it, if that's any comfort, and it isn't, I know." "Did she describe it." "She described it the way they always describe it," Grell said. "By the time they're that close they don't have the energy to dress it up. A tall person in a coat. Never a face. A smell. A question." She set her own cup down. "And I'll tell you the other thing, because you came all this way and you're the daughter of a woman I liked. I did not disbelieve a single one of them. Not one. I had a rule, all those years. I put it in the chart for the doctors and I kept the truth in my head, and the truth was that I didn't know, and that a nurse who says *it's the morphine* to a woman who is at the very edge of her life is a nurse who has decided her own comfort is worth more than the patient's last honest conversation. And I'm not saying I never said it. I'm saying I knew what I was doing when I did." Edie sat with her hands around the cup and let that land. She had come for absolution or for ammunition and the old woman had given her neither, only the flat clean weight of another night nurse who had stood in the same place and made the same compromise and carried it out the door. "There's a question I want to ask you," Edie said. "When your residents died. The ones who saw it. What time." Grell looked at her for a long moment. Then she got up and went to a cupboard and took down a shoebox of old papers, and she did not ask why, and she did not laugh, and she opened the box on the table and took out a bundle of photocopied death records that she must have kept for her own reasons, and leafed through them, and laid them in a row. "Quarter past three," she said. "Three-oh-five. Three-eleven. Two-fifty-eight." She looked down the row of times. "I noticed it in about the tenth year and I stopped noticing it out loud in about the fifteenth. I told one doctor, once. He wrote *nurse reports clustering, query stress.*" She put the papers down. "How bad is it at your place." Edie did not answer. She was looking at the times, and at the small tidy handwriting of the death records, and at the braid pinned down the old woman's back, gray now, the way Edie's own mother had worn hers in her last year, the way Edie wore hers still. "There's always one of us," Grell said, gently. "That's what I worked out. One night nurse per house, and the one who notices, and the one who notices carries it and never says it in the day, and then she leaves and there's a gap, and then somebody else notices. I left after your mother. I gave my notice the next spring. I never once said why." Edie drove home with the bundle of photocopied times on the passenger seat and did not turn on the radio, because the old woman's voice was still in the car and she did not want to drown it out. She thought about Grell's hands around her teacup and the death records in the shoebox and the way a person can know a thing for forty years and never once say it aloud, and she understood that this, not the coat, was the real shape of the horror: not a monster in a corridor, but a long line of careful women, each one awake alone at three in the morning, each one carrying the whole of it in the front of a bag or the back of a register or the bottom of a drawer, and each one making the same quiet calculation and putting the day's comfort ahead of the night's truth, not out of cowardice but out of a nurse's ordinary habit of protecting the people she is responsible for from what cannot be helped. The line was forty years long, and Edie Stroud had just learned that she was the latest woman on it. ---