Free Sun at Midnight by Rosie Thomas Page B

didn’t any longer try to suggest that there was nothing to worry about. Their conspiracy now was about getting Margaret to hospital with all speed.
    ‘I’ll see you there,’ Alice said. She left her office and drove to the hospital, and found a seat in the A&E waiting area. People flurried past her or sat and gazed into space. An ambulance with its blue light lazily flashing arrived under the canopy. The steps at the rear were unfolded but it was a young woman carrying a baby who was helped down and hurried through the doors. Another half-hour dragged by before a long white car with blacked-out windows drew up.A stretcher was rolled out of the back and lifted on to a trolley. Alice glimpsed her mother’s white hair on a blue pillow. She left her seat and ran in pursuit.
    Margaret’s eyes seemed twice their normal size. Her face was a parchment triangle that looked too small to contain them and there were purple marks like fresh bruises showing through the skin. She was breathing in fast, shallow gasps. Her hand moved just perceptibly under the red blanket that covered her, and Alice slid her own underneath and took hold of her cold fingers.
    ‘It’s all right,’ she said gently and the memory came back to her of Trevor using exactly the same intonation when she woke up from some childish nightmare. ‘It’s all right now.’
    Margaret’s eyes remained fixed imploringly on hers.
    Medical staff crowded into the cubicle. Alice and Trevor retreated together to a short row of chairs. They could see feet and ankles and rubber wheels and metal protruberances beneath the curtain hems of the cubicles facing them. Trevor’s cardigan was buttoned up wrongly, with one button spare at the chest vee and another unmatched over the small swell of his stomach. His white hair stood out round his head and Alice wanted to smooth the wrinkles of freckled skin where it suddenly seemed too loose for his skull.
    ‘The flight,’ he murmured. ‘I thought…’ His eyes travelled to where Margaret was lying. He had thought that she was going to die. Having seen her mother, the fear didn’t seem irrational to Alice.
    ‘The doctor will tell us everything.’ It was important to get information and to act on it. She took his hand and found that it was trembling.
    She sat still, holding her father’s dry hand and waiting. The hospital setting was completely unfamiliar to her. She had hardly ever been inside one before today. None of them was ever ill. A sheltered life, she thought, aware of it slidinginto the past tense. She pressed the soles of her shoes to the mottled grey floor, wondering how it remained motionless when everything was shifting.
    At last a doctor came to find them.
    ‘Mrs Peel almost certainly has a form of pneumonia,’ she said. ‘We are X-raying her now and we’ll do some blood tests.’
    Under her married name Margaret sounded like a stranger, Alice thought. She was always Margaret Mather, yes, the Margaret Mather…
    ‘Can I go to her?’ Trevor asked. There was suddenly a pleading note in his voice. Anxiety scraped away his reserve. It occurred to Alice that she had never been properly aware before of how deeply he loved Margaret. She felt like an eavesdropper outside the walls of her parents’ marriage.
    ‘We’ll stabilise her first. It’s a matter of making her comfortable.’
    They went back to the row of seats and waited. Alice let her father sit quietly. A teenaged girl with her leg propped in front of her was pushed past in a wheelchair. She was wearing school uniform, the navy-blue and cerise of Alice’s old school.
    Once, Alice remembered, when she was eleven or twelve, Margaret had come to talk to the school to show one of her celebrated films. She stood up on the stage in the hall beside the rectangle of white screen unrolled in readiness by Mr Gregory, the biology teacher. Her neat navy-blue suit was unremarkable, but she wore it with a pair of stiletto-heeled shoes. The sunlight flooding in