Blue Hour at Vaucluse

The Derwent was doing what it always did in the blue hour before dawn — holding the light before anyone else could claim it. Jane Lahey had been watching it from her bed for the better part of an hour, that particular grey-silver the river turned in the minutes before morning committed to itself. Across the room her granddaughter was asleep in Patrick's old recliner, curled the way she had been curling into things since she was nine years old, one arm bent beneath her cheek and her dark hair fallen across her face in a way the waking version of her would have found intolerable.

Jane had worked palliative wards for the better part of two decades. She knew the full range of a sleeping person's communications. The small sounds surfacing from the chair and the flush beginning at Sarah's throat arrived in her trained attention as a diagnosis so complete that for a long moment the only appropriate response was to settle more firmly against her pillows and decide, without hurry, what to do with it.

The sounds took her somewhere she had not visited in some time. Not Hamburg — Hamburg was a place she rarely visited before breakfast. Further back than that. A winter evening in Sandy Bay, the children finally asleep, Patrick coming in from the garage with oil on his hands and a particular unhurried quality she had once found irritating and had later understood to be one of his more fluent expressions of love.

She brought herself back to the room. She let Sarah finish, because people deserved the dignity of their own recovery.

Then — gently, at the right moment — she asked whether her granddaughter was alright over there. The freeze was immediate. The theatrical stretch that followed was a committed performance that received full marks for effort and none whatsoever for effectiveness. Jane had known Sarah Lahey for twenty-nine years and had watched her talk her way out of broken curfews and misplaced homework and at least one incident involving the garden shed and a quantity of stolen cooking sherry. She had not improved.

The teasing was gentle and the reassurance underneath it was genuine. Your time will come, Jane told her — and meant it absolutely — looking at this young woman who had arrived on her doorstep at nine years old angry and hollow and had grown, in the decades since, into one of the finer human beings Jane had encountered in a very long life. She kept the moment in the careful way she kept everything worth keeping now, which was with the quiet discipline of a woman who had recently begun, without melodrama, counting these things.

Sarah got herself out of the recliner in protesting stages, found her boots on the floor, and crossed the room to the bedside. The kiss to Jane's cheek was soft and reverent. The hand squeeze that followed was the same squeeze Sarah had been giving her grandmother since she was small enough to fit entirely in her lap. Jane held on for the moment that it lasted, and registered without flinching how little there seemed to be of her own hand inside her granddaughter's now.

Then the bag was over Sarah's shoulder and the detective was fully reassembled, and the door closed behind her with the careful quietness of someone who did not wish to disturb the person they were leaving.

Jane turned back to the window. The Derwent had committed to the morning — the silver gone, the pale gold establishing itself along the far shore with the unhurried confidence of something that had been doing this for a very long time. Her hands lay quiet on the blanket. Patrick's wedding band caught the new light in its small reliable way, the familiar glint she had stopped noticing for decades and had recently, with no particular fuss, begun to notice again.

Out in the corridor, Sarah walked past the smell of disinfectant that never quite covered the underlying smells of ageing and medication and the slow quiet business of dying. The brittle smile she had put on at the door of the room began to crack by the time she reached the reception desk. A single tear made it to the corner of her eye. She wiped it away before it could become something the reception staff would have to pretend not to have noticed.

Neither of them had yet said out loud what the doctors had said the week before. Neither of them would say it this morning. Some mornings were for letting a thing be as ordinary as both of you could still manage.