Ingarsby Lane is a common walk for dogs and their owners, a post lunch stroll for conscientious professionals walking off the calories and for young lovers wanting to get out of parental homes. It’s a place for sharing secrets, quarrels, making-up, breaking-up, coming to terms with loss, thinking about new arrivals, new places and empty nests. Ingarsby Lane is whatever you want it to be and will never let you down. It changes with the seasons yet remains constant; each bend increasingly familiar to those who pace it regularly.
It was early. The dawn chorus, unlike Catherine, had not wakened. She was getting out of bed. Almost automatically she put on her jeans, a tee shirt and jumper and stepped into the Minnie Mouse slippers her son had bought her last Christmas. She looked over at Mark as he lay there still and cold and wondered what to do. She would go for a walk down Ingarsby Lane. Catherine went downstairs and put on her coat. She left the house pulling the door closed and reassuring herself that the key was in her right hand pocket. It seemed even quieter outside than it had been in that silence indoors. She felt confident there would be nobody around. She walked slowly down the shingle lane and turned left towards the main road. She breathed a sigh as she reached Ingarsby Lane.
At the beginning of the lane there are pavements and half a dozen houses each side before fields edged the lane. Catherine anticipated the muddier, narrower lane and walked down the middle of the road. She remembered how she had done that with a pram when her daughter was a baby, then with a push chair with her son while her daughter walked at her side.
She remembered the children running on ahead to reach the small bridge, their own Pooh bridge. She remembered Sunday afternoon walks with Mark before the children were born..
When she got to the muddy lane, she was thinking about the time she told him, in the lane, twenty two years ago that she was pregnant with their first child. He had run around on the spot with excitement and shouted ‘When’ and ‘How’ and ‘What is it ’ Then they’d stopped to look at the sheep over the gate in the field on the right.
Catherine kicked a stone in front of her and noticed that she was still wearing her Minnie Mouse slippers. She smiled at how it must have looked – a woman of forty eight, with a coat and Minnie Mouse slippers walking down Ingarsby Lane at five in the morning. Well, she thought, nobody’s likely to see me.
What would Mark think? ‘Twit,’ he’d say, ’you’ll ruin your slippers’.
It was three years ago when he first went to the doctor complaining of the pain. He was told it was migraine and got an explanation of how best to cope with it. But the pain became more frequent and prolonged. The GP tried to reassure him that there was nothing to worry about. Then one day it was all too much and they called an ambulance to take Mark to the accident and emergency department. After a battery of tests and a scan, he was told that the ‘migraine’ was, in fact, a cerebral tumour which was too extensive for an operation. From now on he would be given medication to control the pain. The tumour would continue to grow. How long? They thought the consultant said at least a year, but maybe he said no more than a year. Neither of them had dared to ask.
Then Mark was going to the hospice during the day and coming home to Catherine at night. Until very recently he had been able to manage a short walk but now he couldn’t make Ingarsby Lane. Catherine had reached the old manor house, marked with a plaque about the lost village in the field opposite that was wiped out during the plague. This was probably far enough. So she turned to walk back.
Now Catherine seemed to stop thinking and just looked down at the packed mud of the lane and the hedges and trees. She crossed the bridge and walked uphill, returned to the pavement and reached the main road with the garage opposite. She could see that someone was beginning to open the shutters. She crossed the road and quickened her pace to her front door. She found the key still in her pocket and opened the door. When she’d closed it, she put her coat on the banister.
The telephone was on the wall. It would soon be time. Time to telephone the doctor and tell him.
‘This story, a prizewinner in the NHS Retirement Fellowship Short Story Competition, was submitted by Dianna Oxley from Bristol’