They were greeted at the reception desk by a smiling young nurse with soft red hair, who took their names and gave them visitors’ badges to clip to their clothes. Inside, the building was bright and overheated, and Leah pulled at the funnel neck of her jumper, which was suddenly too tight and stifling against her skin.
‘You picked a good time. We’re definitely having a good day, today,’ the nurse chirped, passing them a register to sign. Leah wondered if she was referring to the day in general, or Mark’s father in particular.
‘Good. That’s good,’ Mark said. When he didn’t move, the nurse gestured along the corridor to the left of the desk.
‘Room eleven, you remember?’ she said. ‘You can make a hot drink in the common room, if you like.’
‘Thanks,’ Leah said, and turned towards the corridor. A heartbeat later, Mark followed her, never quite catching her up, so that Leah walked two steps ahead, counting up the room numbers with mounting unease. The smell of the place was strong and pervasive. The slightly greasy, fusty smell of people and worn clothes, some harsh artificial air freshener, and underneath it all the nauseating tang of ammonia and bleach. Leah took shallow, cautious breaths, just like when Ryan had shown her the body of the dead soldier.
Geoffrey Canning was sitting in an armchair by the window in a small room that overlooked the front gardens and the driveway along which Leah and Mark had recently driven. The carpet was green, synthetic, and very hard. The furniture looked brand new – pale beech veneers, flimsy looking, the chairs padded with more hard fabric. The window was shaded by vertical blinds, turned to their most open position. Geoffrey himself was a strong-looking man. Even sitting down, Leah could tell from the length of his back and legs that he was tall. There was none of the stoop of old age about him. He looked fit, and strong; as though he might get up to greet them with a hearty handshake, hearing Mark’s diffident knock at the door. He did not. He kept his face turned to the window, his hair smooth to the side of his head, thick and silvery.
‘Dad?’ Mark said, hovering uneasily just inside the door. Leah crowded behind him, trying to smile. Geoff looked over at them briefly, his face registering nothing. Mark gritted his teeth and Leah saw stress knotting every joint in his body. She gave him a soft bump with her arm, which made him glance at her, and then cross the room to his father.
‘Dad? How are you? It’s me, Mark.’ He bent forwards in front of Geoff’s chair and patted one of the broad, wrinkled hands that gripped the arms. Geoff made a slight harrumphing sound.
‘There you are! Where did you get to? You were gone for over an hour,’ Mark’s father said, quite calmly.
‘Uh – sorry, Dad. I had to… pop out for a bit.’
‘Well, well. Not to worry. I told them you wouldn’t be long,’ Geoff said, with a slight smile. ‘Pull up a chair, son, don’t stand about. Your mother’ll be along in a minute with the tea.’ Leah saw this remark visibly strike Mark. She gripped his arm briefly in support, then fetched two hard plastic chairs, like school chairs, from the other side of the bed. The soles of her shoes were scuffing static from the carpet, and when she touched the chairs tiny sparks flew, stinging her fingers.
‘Thanks,’ Mark murmured to her. Geoff had gone back to staring out of the window, nodding his head slightly as if agreeing with some general point that had been made. Again Mark had to touch his father’s hand to get his attention. ‘Dad? This is Leah Hickson, a friend of mine,’ he introduced her. Leah smiled, murmured ‘hello’, but Geoff did not look at her. It seemed so odd, and uncomfortable, to be rebuffed in this way, even though she knew he was not to blame. He had the same grey eyes that had passed to his son, and they drifted from one side of the gardens to the other, without blinking, as if searching for something. The same raw cheekbones as Mark, the same lean look and straight nose. Mark had a smaller frame than his father, was shorter and not as broad, but the resemblance was still strong.
‘You look just like him!’ she said quietly to Mark, who nodded sadly.
‘No, indeed! I take after my mother’s side. Everybody has always said so. These are Giddons hands!’ Geoff told her, speaking so suddenly that they both jumped. He put his hands up, fingers spread, in front of Leah’s face and held them there long enough for the muscles in his arms to protest, and a slight tremor to stumble along them from shoulder to fingertip.
‘That’s right, Dad,’ Mark said, gently guiding the old man’s hands back into his lap. Geoff looked crestfallen and bewildered, as if he couldn’t remember why he’d raised them in the first place.
‘I don’t know why you keep calling me that,’ he muttered, plaintively. Mark cast a bleak look at Leah.
‘Shall I make us some tea?’ she asked brightly, getting up when nobody answered her and slipping from the room. In the common room at the end of the corridor, she filled three mugs with hot water from a steaming urn, dropped three tea bags into them and put them on a plastic tray with a small steel jug of milk.
‘Are you from the club?’ an old lady asked her, appearing behind her so quietly that Leah jumped. She was tiny, bird-like, and so papery thin that it hardly seemed plausible that she should be standing unaided. Wisps of white hair stood out around her wrinkled scalp, as fine as a dandelion clock. A blonde, at one point, Leah guessed.
‘No, I’m not.’ Leah smiled, awkwardly. The woman’s face fell, as if this was a terrible disappointment.
‘Well, when are they coming? I was told Tuesday, that’s what I was told. It’ll be too late, if they don’t come soon…’ she quavered, anxiously.
‘I’m sorry… um… I don’t know when they’re coming,’ Leah told her. ‘I’m sure it’ll be soon.’ The old woman said nothing more, but still stood, looking up at her with such great expectation that Leah gathered up the tea tray clumsily and walked away, feeling a terrible, ill-defined guilt. The place was like a doorway, a crossing-over point into a myriad other worlds, she thought. A place where time and meaning shifted from person to person, and the worlds in which they lived, real, past or imagined, converged.
Back in room eleven, Leah dunked the tea bags, squeezed each one and lifted them out. As she busied herself with the task, Mark asked his father a few more questions, about his health, and how he was being treated. He got few replies, and most of them non-sequiturs.
‘I’ve been to see your lovely house, Mr Canning. The Old Rectory,’ Leah said, as she put two mugs of tea in front of the men. ‘I love old buildings. It must be wonderful to live somewhere with so much history.’
‘My grandparents bought it from the church, you know. After the war. He was a man of the cloth, you see,’ Geoff told her, as clearly and lucidly as if they had been chatting about it all morning.
‘That’s right. The Reverend Albert Canning,’ Leah encouraged him, but Geoff harrumphed again, fumbled with the handle of his mug as if his finger wouldn’t fit through, though this was not the case.
‘Make sure the children aren’t playing near the well, won’t you?’ he said, raising a warning finger towards her.
‘Yes, I will,’ Leah said, carefully. Geoff nodded, satisfied. ‘Do you remember your grandparents, Mr Canning? I was hoping to ask you a bit about them, actually. About your grandmother in particular – Hester Canning? I’ve found some letters that she wrote…’
‘I’m not deaf, you know.’ Geoffrey sounded mildly offended. Leah checked herself. She had been speaking loudly, hoping to get through.
‘Sorry,’ she apologised, glancing at Mark. He shrugged; smiled a quick, wintry smile. Leah waited for a while, but Geoffrey had gone back to his sweeping survey of the garden.
‘Never play near the well. The ghost of a boy lived in it, you know. A little dead boy,’ the old man muttered, his voice growing thin and brittle.