Chapter Text
She comes to the house on the Friday. Tim’s alone. His parents are gone, trailing his siblings, stuffed in the back of the car. They’re on summer holiday - he’s not. He stayed behind.
And then there she is, standing by the front door, blown by the wind. He blinks. He thinks he must be imagining her. The sun is over her shoulder, low and bright, hot even for July.
He was alone - this was his freedom, his escape - the summer before his eighteenth to figure out the world.
‘Timothy?’ she says. His name sounds unfamiliar when she says it, as she’s not quite sure it’s the right name. He notices the pink suitcase at her feet, is captivated by it. He looks her up and down, as if she’s on a revolving platform, a ballerina in a music box.
‘Nurse Franklin?’ he says, one hand on the door. She can’t, he thinks, she can’t be here to stay.
‘It’s Trixie, please,’ she says, and she steps forward into the doorway. ‘I’m going to be looking after you.’
So a nurse it is. One nurse, a pink suitcase and a silence that she carries and he doesn’t know where to put.
She’s here to stay - the whole three weeks his family are away. Trixie shuffles into the house and it occurs to him, suddenly, vividly, that she’s never been here before. Tim tides away cups, scoops up magazines. She follows in his wake.
Trixie Franklin, of all people. Effortlessly elegant, always occupied by makeup and mirrors. If Nonatus sent a babysitter, Tim would’ve expected Nurse Crane; she was the kind of fierce that would keep a kid in order.
He wasn’t expecting anyone - it’s only been a couple of hours since his mum and dad packed up and said their goodbyes. Would one afternoon have been too much?
It’s three o’clock now, he spies the time over the mantlepiece. He’s seventeen, for God’s sake. He’s not a child anymore. He doesn’t need someone to watch him.
Trixie’s sitting by the door, waiting. He sits with her. There’s a question sitting on the settee between them. He wants to know why, if they’re so keen to keep an eye on him, the nurses can’t just pop in every so often, check he’s not burnt the house down or lost himself to his record player.
But there’s something in Trixie’s eyes when he looks at her: a far off look. It says to him, too much. It says, danger, don’t ask.
He has only seen that look once before, when his mother was sick and his father fraught, when they would sit in the dark quiet of the old house and put the radio on.
He usually sees Trixie laughing, at a distance. Now she’s beside him, Tim’s worried she’s always had that look.
The Turner family minus Tim are probably barreling down the M4 right now, escaping London with more teddy bears than people. They’re going to a hotel in Bristol, Dad said they’d have a blast. Tim had wanted a quiet summer. A summer to think, not be pulled and tugged by his siblings, however good intentioned they were.
‘I think a break’s a good thing for a boy,’ Trixie says, balancing a tea cup on her knee.
‘What about for a girl?’ he asks. He’s looking right at her. She’s the girl, of course.
He shows her the spare bedroom, the one that’s got dust on the bedclothes and was only ever used by Magda before she hightailed it out of London.
Trixie tests out the mattress and Tim leans on the doorframe with his arms folded. The suitcase lies abandoned in the hall downstairs. She brushes the palms of her hands against the pillows, the folded blankets.
He seems out of place watching her, even though this is his house, like he has to tiptoe. He’s scared of distracting her when it’s him who should be thinking things over, who should be worried about his mind wandering off. His exams are over, but there are still things to sort, to fix, to decide. That’s what he’d wanted - time. And now he’s got time and he’s got a mystery: she’s sitting on the bed before him.
‘How is school?’ Trixie asks. They’re sitting in the kitchen, an undrunk pot of tea in front of them. They keep doing that, making tea and leaving the cups. It’s a way to keep busy, a distraction tactic they keep forgetting.
‘Far away,’ he says, shrugging. She smiles for a moment and pours tea that neither will drink.
‘Was it terrible?’
‘Not terrible,’ he says, quickly. ‘Just different.’ Tim shakes head. He enjoyed it - he did. It was exciting and fun and wonderful, at the start. And then, he was somewhere new and he didn’t know anybody and they didn’t know him. They’d all been there since they were eleven, and there he was, a lanky sixteen year old who could play the piano and quote the Lancet. He couldn’t even play cricket right.
‘Lonely?’ Trixie says, handing him a cup. He takes it and leans back.
‘No - not at all.’ His teacup clatters against the table cloth.
‘Why did they send you?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘But-’
Tim pushes his chair away from the table and it makes such a horrible sound. He stands, suspended for a moment as if he, too, is surprised by his actions. Trixie is staring. He can feel his face heating up and he looks away, at the floor.
Trixie taps her feet against the hardwood. She doesn’t say anything.
‘I’m sorry,’ he says. He wants to say, I don’t know what came over me, but he’s too embarrassed. He scuffs his feet against the chair leg.
‘We’ll get used to each other,’ Trixie says, full of exuberance, full light and laughter. She’s even smiling. He doesn’t know how she does it. He really doesn’t.
He makes a cake, or tries to. Trixie protests, she shakes her head, says, ‘No, you don’t need to do anything,’ but he doesn’t listen to her. In the end, she relents, huffs her shoulders dramatically and spins on her heels.
She hands him the ingredients: the flour from the cupboard near the sink that he spills everywhere the moment it’s in his arms, then the eggs from the refrigerator, the sugar hidden under the sink because Teddy had a habit of grabbing handfuls when no one was looking.
They settle into an easy kind of truce. There are still questions - things he doesn’t understand but knows he’s not supposed to. Things like: why his mum and dad didn’t tell him Trixie was coming, like why there was no one else from Nonnatus on the doorstep. Things like the suitcase, pink and bright, that betrays something he can’t quite quantify.
Tim attacks the eggs with a whisk.
‘Are you leaving nursing?’ he asks, suddenly, violently, like a crack of thunder. His voice surprises him. Trixie, stops in her tracks, a butter dish held in her outstretched hands. He looks deep into the eggs, like maybe he asked them and not her.
‘No,’ she says, quickly and quietly. There’s a certainty in her voice that comforts him.
‘Poplar?’
‘Not if I have my way.’
He bites his tongue, hesitates. Trixie rests the butter down on the side
‘Tim?’ she says, insistently, ‘Tim, the eggs!’
She leaps across the kitchen at him, and he falls backwards, the bowl sinking to his chest. Trixie’s right to be worried about the fate of the eggs. He wasn’t paying attention and now they’re splattered all over the side, over mum’s prized table cloth. She was right. Tim really shouldn’t have stretched himself like this.
They crouch by the oven when they’re done. The cake’s not rising, but the egg’s cleared off the side and the kitchen no longer looks like a bomb site. That’s a victory in his eyes.
‘I’ve never made a cake before,’ Trixie says, beside him. He looks over at her. She’s staring at the oven with a kind of reverence that reminds him of the nuns when they pray.
‘Me either,’ he says. Finally, he's smiling. Trixie bumps against him lightly.
‘I would’ve never guessed that.’
She’s laughing. Tim likes it when she laughs. She looks more like he remembers then.
They eat the cake, even though it’s as flat as a pancake. Trixie throws cream at it in an attempt to make it seem more attractive, but it doesn’t make much of a difference.
‘It’ll be just divine,’ she says, but she’s laughing. And he’s laughing too. It doesn’t seem to matter how the cake actually is anymore.
Tim puts the record player on, plays something that Trixie pulled from the shelf - Ray Charles, something with swing and sway, jazz. They pour more tea to have with the cake and this time they drink it - they need to, given that, as it cooled, the cake’s become as hard as a rock. But they try it anyway, forcing it down and laughing at how terrible the attempt has gone.
‘Divine,’ he says, raising an eyebrow.
‘Yes,’ Trixie says, nodding resolutely,
‘Exactly that.’
After, Trixie goes upstairs. She takes the suitcase. She’s going to unpack. Tim stays in the kitchen with Ray Charles for company. He can hear her creaking the floorboards, back and forth from the bed to the chest of drawers by the window.
She walks more softly than his dad, than mum when she’s chasing an errant sibling.
Trixie walks soft like a cat, like she’s scared something’s going to jump out and scare her.
Tim listens to her and to the record, overlapping. He’s working through what he wants to know, what he should ask. A feeling is dawning upon him: that this isn’t about keeping him in check, but about Trixie and her silence.
People don’t just come to stay, out of the blue, if everything’s going well. Even if there’s a seventeen year old in the house who can’t make a cake. People just don’t.
The record ends. He puts on another. He eats a sandwich. Trixie is still upstairs and it’s almost possible to forget she’s there at all. Tim lays out his books on the coffee table in the living room - the school textbooks, the reports, the letters about his results.
He was going to burn them, but it seems impossible now there’s someone else in the house.
Trixie billows down the stairs, later, socks and shoes off, caught by something. She stands on the last step, seems surprised to find he’s still here. She crosses her arms, uncrosses them.
‘Do you have a spare toothbrush?’ she says, revealing the source of her discomfort. ‘I seem to have misplaced mine.’ She pulls at her shirtsleeves.
Tim jumps up. The record has run to an end, now.
‘It’s fine,’ he says. ‘We’re on the telephone line, Trixie. You can just call Nonnantus, get someone to bring it over.’
He paces towards the telephone, as if to showcase it - to say, look how marvelous! A telephone in a house.
But Trixie’s off the step, feet delicate and forceful against the floor. She reaches him at the telephone and puts a hand out to stop him. He’s of one mind just to reach over, but her face is like a gathering dark cloud.
‘No telephone,’ she says, cooly. ‘Do not go phoning Nonnatus.’
‘Why?’ he asks, stupidly.
‘Because I said. That should be enough, young man.’
He’s made her angry, all this talk about the telephone. It’s as if the thought of it scares her. Tim wonders what awaits her on the other end at the line. Surely she’s not terrified by the words, ‘Nonnatus House, midwife speaking,’? Not after all this time.
He says, ‘There are spare toothbrushes under the sink in the bathroom,’ as they climb up the stairs together. The phone fiasco has made them both tired. It’s late. The cake making took most of the afternoon and the unpacking the rest.
She pulls the curtains before they go, careful and kind. He walks behind her and they wait for a moment in the corridor, as if they’re unsure of going their separate ways.
‘Well, goodnight Timothy,’ she says, nodding her head. She steps backwards, opens the bathroom door, and disappears. For a moment, Tim could’ve sworn she was a ghost, so sudden is her exit. No, not a ghost. A fairy. Trixie has that kind of feel about her.
When he turns around, he notices a letter placed on the top of the hall dresser. It’s caught in the moonlight, swept up by the beams. Tim steps towards it. It’s already stamped, written, sealed: Trixie’s whimsical scrawl on the front. She must’ve put it there and forgotten it when she couldn’t find her toothbrush.
He presses his finger over the name.
Tom Herewood.
Tim leaves the letter alone. Maybe that’s it, he thinks. One name, one letter. Maybe that’s what all this fuss is about.