“I always think it’s nice to have something to put under your pillow to mask the hospital smell,” she said, pressing it into Jean’s hand. “I know your mother likes lavender.”

Does she? thought Jean, ashamed to realize that she knew nothing of these preferences. But she was touched by the gesture—one of those small, untrumpeted acts of kindness, passed from person to person, that bind a community together.

“Soap? Funny thing to bring,” said her mother, laying it aside unopened.

“How are you today? Nothing broken, they say.”

“If you believe that you’ll believe anything. Look at me!” She threw the bedsheet back with surprising strength and lifted her cotton gown to reveal a livid purple bruise from hip to knee—and much else besides.

“Yes, well, cover yourself up,” said Jean, flustered, replacing the sheets.

It was something she had noticed before about people in hospitals; in the face of illness and shared quarters they rapidly abandoned all modesty.

“It’s agony, I might tell you,” her mother remarked.

“It looks it. Do they give you anything for the pain?”

“Probably. I don’t know. It’s a madhouse.” She leaned, wincing, closer to Jean and spoke from the corner of her mouth. “There was a man in here last night—going from bed to bed. He put his hand right under the covers. I soon sent him packing.”

For a moment or two Jean was quite dumbfounded, speechless with outrage.

“A man? On the ward? Why didn’t you call out or say something?”

Her mother gave a scornful laugh. “No one would believe me . . . Anyway, then there was a sort of fire drill, and we all had to get up and go outside in the rain in our nothingness. What a performance.” She chuckled to herself at the memory.

Jean looked around at the other occupants of the ward—comatose, heavily bandaged, intubated or otherwise immobilized—and caught up at last.

“Goodness. Quite a night, then.”

“I’ll say.”

All the same, she felt obliged to mention her mother’s remarks to the head nurse before she left.

“She seems a little confused.”

“They all get like that. It’s the diamorphine.”

Jean smiled, not altogether reassured.

“She thought she’d been interfered with. By a man.”

Matron shook her head. “She also thinks Queen Mary is in the bed opposite.”

“It must be so distressing—perhaps she’d be better off without the diamorphine.”

The head nurse looked at her over her glasses. “You only say that because you are not in pain.”

Jean accepted the rebuke. “How long will she be in here, do you think?”

“I can’t say. At the moment she can’t even use the bathroom.”

The look in her gray eyes was neither stern nor kind but some combination of the two—a calm, unassailable confidence that she was in charge and knew what was best. It was oddly soothing and reminded Jean of someone; she had been in the presence of this phenomenon before, but she couldn’t now recall where.

She went home feeling somewhat disconcerted by the conversation with her mother. Something about it kept tweaking at the edge of her mind, refusing to reveal itself, as she prepared her dinner of cheese on toast. It was there as she washed up her single plate and knife and fork, and as she sat at the kitchen table to write a brief letter to Dorrie explaining about the accident and that there was no cause for alarm, but she couldn’t coax it into view.