When I awoke in the morning I remembered the events of the night before, but they seemed distant and wavering, so unusual and indistinct that I dismissed them as a dream even before I had truly opened my eyes. The ache in my head was almost gone and I felt refreshed from my sleep.
I sat up carefully, wondering if my head would protest at motion, but it seemed to take it in its stride. I pulled myself into a sitting position and stretched my hands up over my head. There is something about stretching which seems to pull us from the lands of sleep into those of our wakeful minds; even as muscles pull and bend, so too does the mind stretch from a world of lost thoughts and forgotten memories into the present once more.
I looked about. Martha wasn’t in the room, but a distant clanking noise of teacups and spoons told me she was in the kitchen, preparing breakfast. I felt a stab of guilt. I was supposed to be looking after her. I had let my fanciful mind lead me into a silly accident, and now my sick aunt was having to care for me.
I got up, pulled a blanket about my shoulders, and wandered into the kitchen. Martha was standing to the side of one of the surfaces, two cups before her, staring at the kettle as it boiled, apparently lost in thought.
“Morning,” I said, yawning and plonking myself down at the table on one of the great heavy wooden chairs.
Martha jumped and turned. I had evidently broken the spell of her thoughts, and although she smiled in welcome, I saw how very pale and drawn her face was. She seemed to be holding herself up against the counter and looked much weaker this morning than she had when bursting through the door to the bathroom last night like Superwoman, or when I had dreamed of her in the garden talking to the skies.
“Martha…” I said, rising from the chair in alarm, “are you alright?”
She took the kettle from its nest, pouring boiling water into the teacups. “Just a little weary,” she replied as she set a cup before me and nodded to the milk. She took four crisp slices of toast from the toaster and set them on a plate, rasping against each other, as she slid the plate across the table to me. Suddenly I was ravenous, as if I hadn’t eaten in days. With Martha sitting at the other end of the table, sipping at her hot tea, I took up the toast and slathered butter on it. Not pausing for jam or peanut butter as I would do normally, I ate the slice of toast rapidly, and reached for another.
“Good to see your appetite is back,” she said, sipping her tea.
“I feel much better this morning,” I agreed, as I took another slice and this time paused to add Bert’s homemade raspberry jam to it. So much more flavoursome than shop-bought preserves, Bert’s jam had huge lumps of fruit in it which oozed into the rough surface of the toast, and, wonder of wonders, actually tasted of raspberries rather than sugar. “I had some strange dreams, though,” I said, pausing to drink tea, “did you wake me in the night?”
Martha nodded, apparently recovering strength by sitting at the table. “I did,” she said. “But I don’t know that you’d remember the times I woke you. Every time, you woke easily and fell back to sleep quickly.”
“I had this weird dream that you were outside in the garden,” I said, watching her face. In truth I didn’t know if I’d dreamed her being outside on the lawn or not. Perhaps it was just a hiccup in my dreaming memory of the first time I had seen her on the lawn, perhaps it had really happened, I didn’t know, and Martha’s face gave me no reason to think it had been real.
“What was I doing?” she asked.
“Just… standing,” I said. “You were telling me that everything would be alright, and that you were here to protect me.”
She smiled, a little sadly. “If only that was always the truth,” she said. “That we who are older could always protect you who are younger.” She sipped her tea. “There comes a time in all our lives when we realize we cannot always shelter the ones we love from every storm, but I think we all wish we could.”
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to Gemma’s Substack to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.