The hospice was on the hill above the town – a Victorian house converted into a care facility, with wide corridors and high ceilings and the smell of cleaning products and flowers and, beneath both, the older smell that all hospices share, which is the smell of time running in a single direction. The nurses knew me. I visited Isobel every week. I brought books and flowers and the news from the casino and the town, and Isobel listened with the same sharp attention she had brought to every ballet class she ever taught, and when I left she would say: “Tell Morven to keep her turnout” – the instruction of a woman who was dying and had decided that the dying would not prevent her from being a teacher.
Her room was at the end of the corridor. Sunlight through clean windows. The lavender perfume she had worn for forty years was still present – she applied it every morning, the nurses told me, with the same discipline she had applied to everythingin her life. The bed was propped up. The pillows were white. Her eyes were open and they were sharp and they found me the moment I walked through the door.
“Sit down,” she said.
I sat. The chair beside her bed was the green vinyl kind that all hospitals have, and the vinyl was cold and the room was warm and the lavender was mixed with the antiseptic and the combination was Isobel – the beauty and the rigour and the fact that both existed simultaneously.
“You’re seven years late,” she said.
I looked at her. She looked at me. The sharpness in her eyes was the sharpness of a woman who had known the question I was going to ask before I knew I was going to ask it.
“Is she safe?” I said.
Isobel looked at me for a long time. The looking was not unkind. It was the looking of a woman who had been keeping a secret for reasons that were not her own and was now assessing whether the person in front of her had earned the right to receive it.
“She’s safer than she was,” Isobel said.
“Where is she?”
“I’m not going to tell you that.” Her voice was quiet and firm and unapologetic. “She asked me not to. I gave her my word. My word is the last thing I have that works properly, and I intend to keep it.”
I sat with this. The room held its breath. The afternoon light was moving across the wall and the flowers on the bedside table – yellow chrysanthemums I had brought last Tuesday – were starting to droop. I looked at the flowers and I looked at Isobel and I sat with the weight of a woman who loved me enough to refuse me.
She had been carrying this for years. The secret was not a burden she resented – I could see that. It was a trust givenby a girl she had taught and loved and watched disappear, and holding that trust was Isobel’s last act of teaching. She was teaching Cat, from a hospice bed, that promises held. That a word given to a frightened woman in a chip shop or a ballet studio or wherever the promise had been made was a word that would be kept until it couldn’t be.
I loved her for it. I hated her for it. Both things were true.
“But I will give you one thing,” she said. She turned her head on the pillow. The movement was slow – the body failing, the mind refusing to acknowledge it. “I wrote a phone number on a piece of paper six months ago. I gave it to the hospice nurse. In case anything happened to me before you worked it out.”
“She gave you her number.”
“She gave me a way to reach her. Whether it’s a number she still uses – that I can’t guarantee.” Isobel paused. “She’s been moving. She moves because she has to. But she left this number six months ago, and six months ago she was closer than she’s been in years.”
I sat very still. The vinyl chair creaked. The lavender settled around us. Outside the window, the Clyde was visible – grey, flat, constant – and the dock cranes stood in their rows and the town spread along the waterfront and somewhere in that town, or beyond it, my sister had left a number with a dying woman because she trusted Isobel more than she trusted the world.
“Thank you,” I said.
“Don’t thank me. Find her. And when you find her, tell her that her turnout was always better than Morven’s.” Isobel’s mouth moved. A smile – faint, brief, the smile of a teacher who was making a joke about technique from a hospice bed because the alternative was not making the joke, and Isobel had never accepted an alternative when the first option was still available.
The car. The hospice car park. The engine was off. The windows were fogged from my breathing and the cold was settling into the car’s interior and I sat in the driver’s seat with the piece of paper the nurse had given me and I looked at the number.
Ten digits. Cat’s handwriting – I knew it, even after six years. The letters were small, precise, the handwriting of a woman who had been trained in ballet notation and applied the same discipline to everything she wrote. The paper was folded once. It smelled faintly of the hospice – the antiseptic and the lavender, the combination that was Isobel.
I called the number.
It rang three times. Each ring lasted approximately two seconds. Six seconds of ringing in a cold car in a hospice car park on a Tuesday afternoon with the Clyde visible through the windscreen and the cranes standing in the dark and my breathing fogging the glass.
It went to voicemail.
The voicemail message was wordless. No greeting. No name. No instruction to leave a message. Just four bars of music. A melody. Played on what sounded like a phone recording of a piano – thin, slightly out of tune, the sound of someone playing in a room with poor acoustics.
I knew the melody. I had known it for twenty-three years.
Cat used to hum it. In the kitchen. In the car. In the studio at St.Jude’s, warming up at the barre, her feet in first position and her voice carrying the melody through the empty room while Isobel set up the day’s exercises. The melody had no name. Catsaid she’d heard it once, in a film she couldn’t remember, and it had stayed.
It had stayed with me too.
I sat in the car. The voicemail ended. The phone asked if I wanted to leave a message. I did not leave a message. I ended the call. I put the phone on the dashboard. I put my head on the steering wheel. I stayed like that for a long time.
