The Handbag

She sat in an upright chair in the bare window bay and looked at the folded hands in her lap.
Her name was Grace, and she never looked through any of the 48 individual panes of glass in the nearest sash window at the fields and faraway housing estate which surrounded the Chester hospital.
She either wore a blue or a green dress with a matching cardigan.
The dresses were cheap and too short for her.
She wore her long grey hair in a bun at the nape of her neck.
The semi circular scar very evident on her forehead
A member of staff told me that she had been kicked by a horse
I believed his cruel words.
The ward manager put me right  after I had walked her silently to her chair one afternoon
"Transorbital labotomy!" 
" Surgery to quieten not to cure" he added.
Grace was not only quiet.
She was serene
But totally empty.
She walked, and slept  and allowed herself to be fed and peed noisily every three hours at toileting time. She sat still when her hair was brushed and merely turned her palms upwards so briefly in her lap as though accepting absolution from a priest  when someone interrupted her vigil in the bay window.
Grace had a handbag which was made of cream leather
I never once saw her open it, but it was always  by her side and she would carry it once it was presented to her, the handle loops in the crook of her left arm like the Queen Mother
One day I looked inside it
A grey handkerchief, a comb, a small purse full of coins and a photograph
The photograph was of two women , taken in the forties
Arms around each others waists on a beach. They were smiling
On it's reverse was the words New Brighton 1942 written in ink pen

I showed the photograph to Grace one day and she just looked at her folded hands with milky eyes
And the day I left the ward, I brought in a blank postcard of a painting of a vase of bright flowers , that sat on my bookcase at home
And for some strange reason I placed it inside her handbag
A handbag that was never ever opened .