ANTE-ROOM

Emmeline Adeane lay very still and looked up at what was above her. She saw a distant vaulted ceiling, as though she might have been in a concert hall or a church, but she had been reminded that she was in a hospital and that she had only one task to perform and this was to rest.

She wasn’t a person who set great store by rest. It had always seemed to her that life was a gift, briefly given, and that those who sat and stared out of windows or who lay on day-beds, asking nothing of their bodies or their brains but a passive surrender to inertia and vacancy were despicable nonentities. She knew that her own life had been hard and that there had been moments when she’d fallen into despair, but she also believed she’d kept a bargain with existence: she had embraced the world; she had kept striving for truth in her art.

Now, her heart had faltered.

In her dreams, she imagined this heart, once so faithful to all her endeavours, coming apart in small but fatal rents, letting blood ooze out to clot around it, so that it was destined to struggle harder and harder to keep beating and would soon give up the fight and stop. Sometimes, in these dreams, Jocelyn Hulton appeared and stood above her, looking down at the damage her heart was suffering, with his hand covering his mouth, as if he feared he might vomit. Then, he walked away. In every dream, this was what happened: Jocelyn never spoke a word, but only turned and walked out, closing the heavy door behind him. And Emmeline usually woke up at this point and found herself once more in the hospital, looking up at the high ceiling. She wondered if, in its dark magnificence, it was calling to her spirit.

She knew that this call had to be resisted. She wasn’t ready for death, yet it seemed to her that the nurses who visited her bedside, who gave her no help and no instruction but to take doses of laudanum and to lie still, were resigned to letting her go. And it was this terrible resignation that had led Emmeline to call out for Jane. Jane, she knew, would fight on her behalf. She would find the right words to rally her.

But if she was indeed dying, then she could think of no companion she would rather have at her side than Jane. She saw the scene, as if from afar: she lies and gazes, not up into the void, but into Jane’s eyes, which are steady and kind. Jane holds her hand. This hand is already getting cold, but Jane massages it gently and Emmeline can feel what a thousand other sufferers have felt, the healing touch of the Angel of the Baths.

When Jane arrived in the hospital ward, Emmeline was sleeping. She saw that the bed sheet had been pulled right up to her aunt’s chin, as if in preparation for its further unfolding, to cover the dead face, and she did not like this at all. Gently, she pulled the sheet back a little, and put her palm against Emmeline’s cheek. She noticed that Emmeline’s hair was tangled on the pillow and that it had not been washed and she did not like this, either. She wanted to take her aunt in her arms and carry her back to Tite Street – to the smell of turpentine and to the sunshine coming through the skylight – and let everything be returned to life and brightness and the perfume of a creative life.