Her tears came then. As she cried she made retching sounds, her whole body jerking. All I could do was hold her, feeling the grief cutting her inside. My own tears fell on her chopped hair.

I was barely aware of the footsteps in the corridor. The nurse fled across the room in a second. The heavy wooden door swept open and I heard a deep, angry woman’s voice. ‘Get her out of there . . .’ It fizzled out to a furious whisper. There was a fierce exchange by the door, then the young woman came back to us, watched from the door by the other nurse, with oily looking skin and thick black eyebrows, who I had never seen before.

‘She’ll have to go back now,’ our nurse said. Her cheeks were burning red, but she had an air of defiance.

‘Nurse Tucker deliberately flouted my instructions,’ the other woman’s voice boomed from the door.

I was so shocked I didn’t even have the wits to kiss Olivia goodbye before Nurse Tucker pulled her to her feet by her good arm and led her away. Olivia went without protest. But as they left, the young nurse turned to me a last time, her eyes expressing both sorrow and a kind of appeal.

‘Thank you,’ I mouthed at her before they disappeared.

I sat down again, listening to them, the older nurse haranguing the other in the corridor, the noises of keys, lock, door. A slam, then all but the faintest of sounds was gone. I would have liked to sit there. Just sit and try to pull my thoughts together, but I felt compelled to go out to the taxi.

Outside the clouds had not thinned and a fine rain was falling. As I stepped out of the front entrance of Arden I saw the handcarts. They were moving closer, very slowly, from across the field to my right. Three heavy wooden carts joined together by ropes. As they came closer I could see the carts were piled high with weeds and grass. At the front, two long thick ropes extended forward pulled by lines of men. There were about fifty of them, I calculated, all dressed in dark overcoats, some far too long, others obviously too tight, sleeves ending somewhere between elbow and wrist, and most of them had their collars turned up against the wet. They shambled along over the hummocky grass, stumbling in their boots and pulling on the ropes, the lines ragged and uncoordinated. They were of a wide variety of height and build but somehow all the same, the cropped hair taking a segment of identity. Some moved with an unnatural slow stiffness, others quicker, more jerky. They trudged along in silence except for someone near the back giving out panting sounds, almost sobs, as they moved across in front of me. Their breath left unearthly-looking sworls of mist behind them.

* * *

OLIVIA

The nurses who have been giving insulin therapy can be seen afterwards on the ward with a white silt of glucose down the front of their blue uniforms. Their charges are pushed down into the flabby-walled darkness of coma and then, at the given time, hauled back up through its narrow neck.