Free Paradise Lodge by Nina Stibbe Page A

with the newspaper. He’d help out with assorted day-to-day duties, such as cooking and pie-making, and did his best to keep on top of the paperwork. He was especially helpful in handling the owner when he was sad or drunkenly ranting at the poor patients—a thing he’d started to do since his wife left. Mr Simmons seemed more like a friend than a patient, diverting the owner from his various troubles and preventing him slipping further into depression via trips to the Piglet Inn, games of backgammon, and talks about how difficult marriage could be, and business. Mr Simmons would say, ‘The show must go on!’ and things like that to gee him up.
    One morning, Daybreak, the owner’s gelding, came trotting into the courtyard without the owner on board. He didn’t try to tell us anything with his hoof, he just went to his hay net, tripping a bit on his trailing reins, and munched away, regardless of his poor owner.
    It was Mr Simmons who searched for and found the owner and helped carry him home on a plank of wood, because, in spite of a hurt back, he wouldn’t agree to an ambulance. Mr Simmons had known where to look for him because he’d listened to all his mumbling nonsense about the places he liked to go for quiet contemplation. And that had saved his life. Later that day the owner called us all into his quarters and gave a gloomy talk from the chaise longue, warning us that we were ‘on the skids’. I put it down to his general discomfort.
    Almost every day the staff talked about the owner’s state of mind. We also talked about the Owner’s Wife and wondered what had become of her—whether she’d ever come back and whether that would be a good thing. Or not. Had she started up the art school? And if so, where? Some said St Ives in Cornwall because of its associations with the arts. Others felt it more likely she’d gone to Italy to run watercolouring holidays—where you might paint an olive grove in the morning, have a bottle of wine and a knees-up by the pool in the afternoon, followed by lasagne, then bed.
    We were careful not to tell the patients that the Owner’s Wife had gone—and to fool them, the owner would dress up occasionally in his wife’s old Dannimac and headscarf and dash past the day-room window with a trug of something.
    And then one day we had news of her. And if it hadn’t come from Miss Tyler—our most able-bodied and mentally reliable lady—we shouldn’t have believed it.
    It was teatime and Miss Tyler began on an anecdote about her favourite hat, a solid turban in duck-egg and ruby shot silk.
    We all knew the hat—she almost always wore it and, if truth were told, it was getting a bit raggedy. Everyone had something to say about this hat, for it was extremely handsome and had a touch of something exotic. That day Nurse Eileen picked it up and put it on. She looked amazing, like Elizabeth Taylor. I couldn’t try it because my nurse’s hat was pinned on too fiercely, but everyone else did and all looked equally fetching in it—it suited everyone, patients and staff alike. The turban was declared a ‘wonder-hat’ and we all vowed to steal it away etc.
    â€˜Well, I almost lost it this week,’ said Miss Tyler.
    â€˜Oh, no,’ we all said, not being able to imagine her without the duck-egg turban.
    â€˜Yes, I was visiting a friend at the new nursing home—Newfields, in Longston—and I forgot to pick it up when I left, and I was just getting into my taxi when I saw the Owner’s Wife—our dear Owner’s Wife—running out into the car park with it in her hands. It was most definitely she. She asked me how we were all getting along.’
    â€˜What?’ we all said.
    â€˜She has taken over the nursing home. She’s bought it with a business loan and refurbished it with council grants. She’s the owner,’ said Miss Tyler. ‘And Nurse