Free The Beloved by Alison Rattle

and chair, and the bars at the window to be simply the folds in the curtains.
    My hand shakes as I reach out to my bedside table and feel for the cup of beef tea. It is cold, and a film of grease coats my teeth as I swallow it hurriedly. The liquid swirls nastily in my stomach, but it is nourishment, at least. After a while, when my nerves have calmed and my stomach has settled, I climb from the bed and pull the chamber pot from underneath. A pungent smell catches at my nostrils and tells me that no one has been to empty it since I relieved myself earlier. I squat over the pot, knowing that I will have to bear the indignity of its contents for the rest of the night. Someone will surely come to attend to me in the morning. When I have finished, I walk over to the window. There is no means of lighting a candle, but the moon is high and silver and I can see the empty street below my window almost as clearly as if it were daylight. There is a yellow gaslight spluttering at the end of the street, but other than that, there is no other movement.
    I am gripped by a sudden and horrible sense of loneliness. Is there no one in this world that I can turn to? Is there no one in this world who understands me? Only Papa, I think, but he is not here. Eli has abandoned me and as for Mama, she has never wanted me from the moment I was born. I am not the daughter she wanted. But how can I be someone else? How can I be anyone other than me? I lean my forehead against the glass. Would it help if I opened the window and screamed for help? Would anyone answer me? And if they did, would they too think I was mad?
    I have already slept for so long that when I eventually return to my bed, all I can do is lie there and count the hourly strikes of the clock, and watch how the grey light darkens to thickness in the dead of the night, and how it gradually pales again as dawn approaches and another day begins.

Ten
    It is early morning. The clock has only just struck six. I am restless, hungry and longing for someone – even if it just Sarah – to come and open my door. My mouth is watering at the thought of toast and a pot of hot tea. Will I be permitted to breakfast downstairs? I could see Eli then, and tell him what I overheard between Mama and Dr Danby. But even as I pretend to myself and imagine that things could go on as before, there is a much bigger part of me that knows with a hard and cold certainty that nothing will ever be the same again.
    I climb out of bed and stretch. I look down and realise I have slept in my gown. I have never done that before. This small thing somehow helps. It is as though there are no rules any more; and that from now on, anything is possible.
    Time passes slowly. Hunger grinds at my insides and boredom weighs heavy on my shoulders. If I shouted and banged and kicked at the door, surely someone would come.
You could wish for someone to come. You could wish for someone to come
, a voice in my head tries to persuade me. I shake it away. I dare not wish for anything, not after what happened to Lillie.
    I walk to the window. It is going to be another beautiful day. A day when, if I wasn’t me but somebody else altogether, I could sit in the garden at the back of the house with a parasol to shade me from the sun when it grew too hot. There would be a jug of lemonade by my side, with chips of ice inside it, bobbing and sliding between stray lemon pips. Ice – all the way from the mountain lakes of Norway – that Papa paid the ice-man to deliver in a block, every day. There would be cucumber sandwiches too, cool slivers of cucumber, salty butter and wafer-thin bread. Eli would come and sit next to me and we would read to one another or play backgammon. I would beat him, of course, and he would feign disappointment before smiling chivalrously and chasing me across the lawns.
    But I am not somebody else. I am only me.
    I start from my daydream. There is a cab rumbling down the street. It is a black, plain