The One Hundred Years of Lenni and Margot, Marianne Cronin [top fiction books of all time txt] 📗

And he looked like he couldn’t have been happier than he was at that moment.

I saluted. ‘Your honour.’

‘This is Lenni … Peters?’ The new nurse turned to me for clarification.

‘Pettersson.’

She let go of my arm and added gently, ‘She’s from the May Ward.’

It was the kindest way for her to say it. I suppose she felt she ought to warn him, because he looked as excited as a child on Christmas morning receiving a train set wrapped in a big bow, when in reality, the gift she was presenting him with was broken. He could get attached if he wanted, but the wheels were already coming off and the whole thing wasn’t likely to see another Christmas.

I took my drip tube, which was attached to my drip wheelie thing, and walked towards him.

‘I’ll be back in an hour,’ the new nurse told me, and then she said something else, but I wasn’t listening. Instead, I was staring up, where the light shone in and the glow of every shade of pink and purple imaginable was striking my irises.

‘Do you like the window?’ he asked.

A cross of brown glass behind the altar was illuminating the whole chapel. Radiating from around the cross were jagged pieces of glass in violet, plum, fuchsia and rose.

The whole window seemed like it was on fire. The light scattered over the carpet and the pews and across our bodies.

He waited patiently beside me, until I was ready to turn to him.

‘It’s nice to meet you, Lenni,’ he said. ‘I’m Arthur.’ He shook my hand, and to his credit he didn’t wince when his fingers touched the part where the drip burrows into my skin.

‘Would you like to sit?’ he asked, gesturing to the rows of empty pews. ‘It’s very nice to meet you.’

‘You said.’

‘Did I? Sorry.’

I wheeled my drip behind me and as I reached the pew, I tied my dressing gown more tightly around my waist. ‘Can you tell God I’m sorry about my pyjamas?’ I asked as I sat.

‘You just told him. He’s always listening,’ Father Arthur said as he sat beside me. I looked up at the cross.

‘So tell me, Lenni, what brings you to the chapel today?’

‘I’m thinking about buying a second-hand BMW.’

He didn’t know what to do with that, so he picked up the Bible from the pew beside him, thumbed through it without looking at the pages, and put it down again.

‘I see you … er, you like the window.’

I nodded.

There was a pause.

‘Do you get a lunch break?’

‘Sorry?’

‘It’s just, I was wondering whether you have to lock up the chapel and go to the canteen with everyone else, or if you can have your break in here?’

‘I, um—’

‘Only, it seems a bit cheeky to clock out for lunch if your whole day is basically clocked out.’

‘Clocked out?’

‘Well, sitting in an empty church is hardly a nose-to-the-grindstone job, is it?’

‘It’s not always this quiet, Lenni.’

I looked at him to check I hadn’t hurt his feelings, but I couldn’t tell.

‘We have Mass on Saturdays and Sundays, we have Bible readings for the children on Wednesday afternoons, and I get more visitors than you might imagine. Hospitals are scary places; it’s nice to be in a space where there are no doctors or nurses.’

I went back to studying the stained glass window.

‘So, Lenni, is there a reason for your visit today?’

‘Hospitals are scary places,’ I said. ‘It’s nice to be in a space where there aren’t any doctors or nurses.’

I think I heard him laugh.

‘Would you like to be left alone?’ he asked, but he didn’t sound hurt.

‘Not particularly.’

‘Would you like to talk about anything specific?’

‘Not particularly.’

Father Arthur sighed. ‘Would you like to know about my lunch break?’

‘Yes, please.’

‘I take it at one until twenty past. I have egg and cress on white bread cut into small triangles, made for me by my housekeeper. I have a study through that door’ – he pointed – ‘and I take fifteen minutes to eat my sandwich and five to drink my tea. Then I come back out. But the chapel is always open, even when I’m in my study.’

‘Do they pay you for that?’

‘Nobody pays me.’

‘Then how do you afford all the egg and cress sandwiches?’

Father Arthur laughed.

We sat in silence for a while and then he started talking again. For a priest, he wasn’t that comfortable with silence. I’d have thought the quiet would give God an opportunity to make himself known. But Father Arthur didn’t seem to like it, so he and I talked about his housekeeper, Mrs Hill, and how she always sends him a postcard whenever she goes on holiday and then, when she returns, how she fishes them out of his ‘in-tray’ and sticks them on the fridge. We talked about how the bulbs are changed for the light behind the stained glass window (there’s a secret passageway around the back). We talked about pyjamas. And despite how tired he looked, when the new nurse came to collect me, he told me that he hoped I would come back.

I think, however, he was surprised when I arrived the next afternoon in a fresh pair of pyjamas and now free of my IV. The head nurse, Jacky, wasn’t thrilled about the idea of me going back a second day in a row, but I held her gaze and said in a small voice, ‘It would mean a lot to me.’ And who can say no to a dying child?

When Jacky called for a nurse to walk me down the corridors, it was the new nurse who turned up. The one with the cherry red hair, which clashed with her blue uniform like there was no tomorrow. She’d only been on the May Ward a matter of days and she was nervous, especially around the airport children, and desperate for someone to assure her she was doing a good job. As we made our way along the corridor towards the chapel, I commented on how excellent her chaperoning skills were. I