Free Tread Softly by Wendy Perriam

than she had all week – exhausted whether upright or flat out. And her lunch had gone cold, of course. It was an unwritten rule in the Princess Royal that, whenever a meal arrived, someone or something would turn up almost immediately and disrupt it. Thus Phil had appeared thirty seconds after the duck in port-wine sauce and chocolate soufflé. The soufflé had collapsed and the port-wine sauce was edged with an orange frill of solidifying fat. Not that it mattered – she wasn’t hungry anyway.
    Too lethargic to read, she lay slumped against the pillows, gazing at the implausibly blue sky above the sun-kissed poppy-fields. The real sky outside was leaden, and this morning’s forecast had warned of floods in Wales. Clare was in Wales, which meant she couldn’t visit. They might have had a good laugh together. Or more likely a good cry.
    Lorna counted on her fingers – fourteen days till Clare was back, eight till Christmas Day. Much of her time was spent counting days: two until she left hospital, twenty-one until the stitches were out, forty until she could dispense with the crutches, a hundred and eighty until she could walk really well, three hundred and sixty before the second operation, which she didn’t dare to contemplate. She thought of the charts she had made at school, ticking off the days to the end of term – although memories of school were best avoided. She had been a pariah then: an orphan, to be shunned, as if the condition were catching. Often she had lain awake in the dormitory terrorized by images of car crashes: her parents bleeding in a tangle of wreckage. Had they suffered dreadfully? Would she see them again when she died?
    Ralph seldom mentioned his schooldays, yet from what she could gather he had been equally miserable. And it had forged between them a bond no less powerful for being unspoken. He was the only person she had met who understood the pain of a lost childhood, and who’d also been forced to come to terms with grief before he knew the meaning of the word.
    â€˜It’s a pity you can’t be more stoical, like he is. Now get up and practise your walking, as Phil told you.’
    â€˜But it hurts , Aunt Agnes.’
    â€˜I don’t wonder, child, with all this lying around. God gave us our bodies to use.’
    With a groan, Lorna reached for her special shoe again. (One thing she had learned was to keep everything close at hand, otherwise it meant hopping – strictly forbidden by both physios.) Doing up the ordinary shoe on her good foot, she stared dejectedly at the mismatch: the left foot a wodge of white bandage in an ugly, clumping blue thing; the right pink-socked in a black lace-up. As she leaned forward for the crutches they fell to the floor with a crash.
    â€˜ Damn! ’ she muttered. When you were immobile, picking up things you had dropped was a struggle. Several of her possessions had already vanished under the bed: a book, a pen, a handkerchief, one of the pink socks. The cleaner – a manic-depressive Spaniard, Dolores – didn’t appear to have noticed: too busy complaining about her husband. (‘He bad news. He go with other women.’)
    Having retrieved the crutches, Lorna crawled on her hands and knees to recover the other items, then rested with her head on the floor. This was a baby’s-eye-view of the world, nose to the carpet, aware of its smell and feel, and dwarfed by beetling crags of furniture. Babies had it easy – sleeping all day, with no little Hitlers bossing you about. Cooed at by strangers. Cuddled by your mama.
    She had no real sense of her mother, despite the photographs – which, somewhat disconcertingly, portrayed a younger version of Agnes. Occasionally she invented a different mother, with no resemblance to Agnes in either looks or temperament. But on the whole she preferred to stick with her father – an only child, as she was. She liked to imagine him free of all