Chapter Text
Delia watched from across the table as Patsy’s fingers twitched against the edge of the letter. The crease across the middle was a thick line, Delia could see the many veins spreading from the centre created from so many times being folded and unfolded. Patsy’s face was impassive as her blue eyes scanned from left to right over the familiar words but Delia noticed an almost imperceptible rise of the right eyebrow. She reached out her feet, pointing them until she could rest the edge of her foot against the smooth of the other woman’s ankle bone. The contact made Patsy raise her eyes in question.
‘Are you okay, Pats?’ Delia’s voice was warm, rich with the singsong of her Welsh roots despite so many years away from the Pembrokeshire coast on which she had spent her childhood.
‘Fine, quite fine, thank you.’ The reply was curt, more brusque than Patsy intended and her left eye squinted into a wince of apology. ‘Sorry old thing, I just can’t seem to settle.’
Delia responded with a half smile as Patsy folded the letter along its well worn line, handed it across the space between them, her hands disappeared from view and tugged at the hem of her skirt before letting her long fingers rest on the nylon covering her knees. Tucking the letter inside her handbag on the train seat beside her Delia chewed for a moment on her bottom lip before responding, the clasp of her bag providing a welcome reason to avoid eye contact.
‘I’m still not sure why we had to come all this way. Poplar’s a lot closer than Glasgow to Southampton. I feel I ought to have bought shares in British Railways. We could have just gone home. We could have even gone to my parents.’
Patsy’s eyes widened like an owl’s, her eyebrows knitting.
‘Deels we have been through this. I am not even sure that Poplar, Nonnatus, London, any of it, really is home anymore. We could hardly pitch up at the doors of a convent after two years away on a round the world trip and declare ourselves in need of charity. And I promise we will go to Wales. Next time there is a really warm day.’ Patsy paused and her lip curled. ‘In January.’
The woman opposite rolled her eyes and cocked her head to one side. The ghost of an exasperated smile passed across her features. She pushed the bag to one side, the leather creaked slightly as she leant against it to lean forward.
‘You are infuriating Patsy Mount.’
Patsy glanced around the rest of the almost empty carriage before she leant forward. Her voice was more silent than a whisper.
‘You love me though.’
The remainder of the journey was quiet. Delia read and Patsy leaned her head so that her gaze was directed at the slate grey of the passing sky. Occasionally, she lit a cigarette but the movements were automatic and mechanical, the trim nail of her ring finger flicking anxiously against the tip of her thumb as the paper of the cigarette burnt between her fore and middle fingers. Delia watched these movements with quiet concern. Her own fingers itched to reach out and still the anxiety, to salve the worry with a simple act of love but she knew that any physical display of affection made Patsy jolt like a marionette yanked from its box.
When the carriage juddered to a halt Patsy had fallen asleep and she awoke with a tiny surprised exhalation of breath that sounded like panic, her eyes flying open. Delia smiled across the table, a large teal coat taut across her chest. She stood and shuffled around the table, stooping slightly, picking up Patsy’s long woollen coat from its resting place on the seat beside the taller woman and shaking it out as the carriage began to come alive.
‘Come on sleepyhead. We’re here.’
Patsy gave a grateful half smile as she shrugged into the proffered coat.
‘What would I do without you Busby?’
‘Luckily for you you’ll never have to find out,’ responded Delia as she used the flat of her hand to smooth against the panels of Patsy’s coat. The material was thick and the action entirely unnecessary, but Delia wanted to let Patsy know that she was there, an emotional and physical presence.
As Delia stood beneath the imposing four faced clock hanging from the vast ironwork ceiling struts, a throng of moving people around her, she let the plastic handle of her suitcase drop and heard the clatter of the metal trim hit the platform concrete below.
‘Deels, are you well?’
‘Yes, sorry. I got distracted. I just didn’t imagine Glasgow to be beautiful.’
Patsy gave a harrumph in response before drawing in her breath and pushing back her shoulders. She attempted to keep her voice cheerful but her jaw was set and her words tumbled over one another, her tongue catching thickly on the roof of her mouth.
‘Come on, we’ll need to get a cab. Anna-Marie, Mrs Hardwick, lives just outside the city I believe, or up on the hill near the university, or something. I have the address on the letter. Well, you have the letter. So, I suppose, really, you have the address and not I.’
Delia didn’t move. She reached out, grasped Patsy by the wrist where a sliver of pale flesh crept out between cuff and the end of the elegant leather gloves the older woman had pulled on. Patsy gave a rueful smile and stared at her feet. She reached her free hand across without shifting her eyes and Delia felt the peculiar softness of gloved fingers graze the back of her hand.
‘I’m here,’ said Delia, softly. ‘Remember, wherever you go next, I’m coming with you. Always.’ The words were an echo of a time past, a time that felt lost to Patsy now. She had said them, or an approximation of them, to Delia at one of the lowest moments of her life. Everything she knew had turned on its head, she had left her job as a district midwife in the East End of London, left Delia to cope in a world where she could tell nobody how alone she was, left a world where she felt safe and accepted because her poise, professionalism and uniform gave a her a protected status where nobody asked too many questions. All of that had been forsaken to travel to the other side of the globe to nurse a dying father who held her hand and talked softly of a mother and a sister lost in the horrors of war and who were buried in a cleft of Patsy’s brain she rarely prised open. When the inevitable happened and death claimed the last member of her family Patsy had shattered. The fragile, porcelain peace she had made with herself about her life smashed into fragments of grief, rage, loneliness, memory and disappointment. She was suddenly in possession of what felt like vast wealth, a house and staff in Hong Kong and a flat near a vast, noisy stretch of the Clyde and as that new ownership became a reality she had lost any sense of her own identity. Only one thing remained constant and she was waiting, alone and insensible to the emotional cataclysm occurring six thousand miles away. Patsy had fled, to disapproving mutterings from the ex-pat community, her suitcase heavier by the weight of a manila folder full of pressing financial affairs and she had boarded the first boat that would take her back to Delia, even if she knew it could not take her back to her old life. So, six months after she had left, with the first, wet flakes of winter catching her eye lashes and making her uncertain if it was the weather or unbidden emotion wetting her cheeks she had stood before a furious, hurt Delia whose every gesture wreaked of abandonment and told her that where ever she decided to go she was taking Delia with her. In the subsequent year of world travel, ‘you’re coming with me’ had become a byword, a form of code; a light-hearted shared moment on the way to buying a bus ticket and a laden, charged reassurance when times were more challenging. Now, stood beneath the suspended clock at Glasgow Central Station Patsy wondered, for the first time, if she had made a terrible decision, if selfishness not love had driven her to drag Delia across the globe whilst she attempted to make sense of nearly three decades of hurt.
Patsy forced herself to look at Delia, suddenly awkward like a shy child. Her face tilted upwards to allow for the several inches in height difference Delia’s stance and countenance was a fierce mixture of loyalty, defiance, concern and openhearted love. Patsy smiled. She remembered once chastising Delia for the way she looked at her; for suggesting that the world would guess their secret, that nobody looked at another living soul the way Delia looked at her without raising suspicions. Now she was grateful for the patient, genuine spirit that was the fuel for her very being. She desperately wanted to take Delia in her arms and whisper how she felt into the waiting shell of the woman beside her but she contented herself with a firm squeeze of the fingers that still rested on her forearm.
‘I’m quite alright. Honestly Deels. It just all seems rather, well, real. I know we have had a splendid time this last year and it had to come to an end sometime but I do so wish we could have simply carried on. You and I against the world.’
Delia pressed her fingers into the wrist, pushing against the resistance of wool and leather. She spoke slowly, her voice low and earnest.
‘It isn’t a fight Patsy. You don’t need to fight anymore. Come on, let’s go and find your Mrs Hardwick.’ Delia smiled and dropped her hand. ‘Hopefully she already has the kettle on the stove.’