In a Good Light (42 page)

‘So when Christian says: “I am going to walk again, and I don't care how long it takes or what I have to do”, what should I reply?' Mum asked.

‘Oh, something like: “Your self-belief and strength of
character are two qualities that will help you to live a fulfilled life.”' Mum looked thoroughly sceptical.

The Day he came home in his wheelchair was the saddest day of my life. The dining room had been converted into a bedroom for him, with all his belongings brought down and arranged in their former layout. Only the dartboard remained upstairs. Dad couldn't bring himself to nail it up at half-mast.

Christian wheeled himself over to the French windows and sat looking out over the garden. It was late autumn now and the trees in the spinney were in their usual fiery death throes, a blaze of copper and gold against a hard white sky. The apples had gone ungathered this year and lay rotting where they fell. Unpruned bushes sagged over the leaf-spattered lawn, steaming from recent rain. Beside the greenhouse something glittered in the grass. A fragment of broken pane: debris from another lifetime.

Mum had collected together all the cards that had arrived from well-wishers during his absence and put them in a pile for him to read. There were dozens and dozens. I would never have believed we knew so many people: the congregation at Holy Trinity, Old Turtonians, people from the golf club, and the Fox and Pheasant, friends from Exeter, Mrs Tapley, Martina. Many cards bore the shamelessly inappropriate message ‘Get Well Soon'. At the other end of the spectrum, a few offered ‘Deepest Sympathy'. Christian's predicament clearly represented a gap in the market that was not being addressed.

He ran his eyes over them listlessly, in the manner of someone exposed to other people's holiday photos, and laid them aside with relief.

Two squirrels were playing chase on the grass, scrambling up and down the fence, tumbling and clowning. At last Christian broke the silence.

‘Mary Lennox,' he said.

‘What?'

‘Mary Lennox. I've been racking my brain trying to remember the name of the girl in that book we read when we were little. She goes to live with some old uncle and there's this cripple hidden in the attic or somewhere.'

‘
The Secret Garden
,' I said, the memory clawing its way into the light.

‘That's right. What was his name?'

‘Colin.'

‘
Colin
,' he repeated, with something like delight.

‘Yes, he learns to walk again,' I said, without any forethought.

‘Does he?' said Christian, suddenly alert. ‘I'd forgotten that. Yes, you're right!' And the way he seized on this detail from what was, after all, just a story, wrenched at my heart, and the endless horror of it all swept over me again. My face must have betrayed me, because Christian's expression darkened. ‘Don't look at me like that,' he snapped, and he turned away and stared out of the window until I slunk away.

No one minds a little sympathy, but what Christian couldn't bear was to be an object of pity
for ever
. That was why he didn't want, and refused to see, any visitors in hospital. He'd asked for Penny on the first or second day, and when I told him she'd gone to France he didn't even need me to elaborate. ‘They didn't waste much time,' he said. ‘He always was a shitty, conniving little bastard.'

By the time she came back home and heard the news his resolve was as hard as steel. I wasn't there the day she turned up at the hospital: it was left to Mum to turn her away. She had brought a bunch of white roses, still in bud, which Mum promised to pass on, but Christian dropped them unopened into the rubbish bag on the door of his bedside cabinet. A nurse, not knowing their history, retrieved them and put them in a plastic vase, where they hung their heads and withered without ever coming into bloom.

‘Do you think you'll ever see her again?' I asked him, when I heard about the failed visit. He shook his head with slow deliberation. ‘No. He can have her,' he said.

I wondered if she'd try again, or make some effort to use me as an intermediary, but she never did: I suppose she had her pride, too.

There was no likelihood of his ever bumping into her. He seldom left the house, and had no intention of returning to Exeter to finish his degree. He'd already missed one whole term of his final year. Mum offered to move down there with him and act as nurse, chauffeur, cook, amanuensis, whatever it took so he could study, but he decided he didn't want to be a student on those terms. He said he'd be better off doing a correspondence course, an idea he brought up from time to time to head off motivational pep-talks from Mum, but never pursued with any vigour. I think he was reluctant to face those friends who'd known him as he was. It was that everlasting sympathy he dreaded. ‘I don't want anyone coming over to gawp at me, or getting all emotional, so
I
end up having to comfort
them
.' On the other hand he was no keener to mix with other disabled people, and flatly refused to attend the Spinal Injuries
Support Group. ‘Waste an afternoon sitting around in a circle with a bunch of other cripples? No way!'

He had been warned he might put on weight, and, in this respect at least, he was happy to conform. He'd always had a prodigious appetite, even given the disincentive of Mum's cooking, but now his only exercise was bouncing a tennis ball against the floor and catching it off the wall.
Ker-thunk, ker-thunk
, it went, hour after hour in exactly the same spot, so that it left a grey, shiny patch on the wallpaper.

‘There's loads of sports you can do in a wheelchair,' I said to him one day. I'd been looking through all the leaflets about keeping fit that the physio at the spinal unit had given him, and which he'd left unread in their folder. ‘You could do basketball, hockey, even tennis. You'd be brilliant at it.'

He looked at me as though I'd suggested joining the Brownies. ‘That's not proper sport,' was his bitter riposte. ‘It's like . . .
women's rugby
,' he said, managing to denigrate two sectors of the population for the price of one.

The best times were when he asked for help, and there was something I could do for him. Occasionally, last thing at night, as I was about to go up to bed, he'd say, ‘Hey, Esther, take us out for a push, will you?' He could manage the wheelchair perfectly well by himself on the flat, but the gravel in the driveway was deep and slushy in places, and there was nothing that maddened him more than getting beached. Also, I don't think he liked being out on his own any more, though he would never admit to a weakness like fear. I'd wheel him round the lanes – always, and without discussion avoiding the churchyard – up to the green, past the Fox and Pheasant, Mrs Tapley's old house (now flats),
the Victorian cottages where the Conways lived, and back along the stretch of road where Aunty Barbara had skidded into the ditch. On one of these walks he said to me, unprompted by anything we'd been discussing, ‘You know something, Esther? You're the only person I know who doesn't totally wind me up.'

Here was the recognition I'd been striving for all my life, but it brought me no pleasure, because for him to appreciate me at last had taken the wreck of all his hopes.

When I say that my own feelings were never acknowledged, it is a matter of record, not of complaint. My own trivial heartaches about the loss of Donovan, and then Penny, had been engulfed, quite understandably, by the larger sorrow, and my grieving had to be done in private. There wasn't enough sympathy left over: it was all drawn into the black hole of Christian's pain. I thought about Donovan often, with a sense of regret and helplessness. Occasionally, when I was out, I would catch a glimpse of someone who, after pursuit and proper scrutiny, turned out to bear no more than a feeble resemblance. I looked forward to going to bed each night, because it gave me the chance to relive that stupid, bungled kiss before I dropped off to sleep, in the hope that I would dream a fitting sequel, but I never did. At first it took some willpower not to bring his name up in conversation, or when it did arise naturally, not to pounce.

When a six-page letter of condolence arrived from Aunty Barbara, written, as a mark of respect, on actual notepaper, I skimmed directly to the reference to Donovan. . . .
Donovan has decamped to the caravan and shows no sign of returning. He seems to be intent on turning into one of these
travellers.
(This struck me as bizarre, since the very last thing anyone could do in that bog-bound caravan was travel.)
I'm not sure what he's living on. He says he does odd jobs – no doubt a euphemism for pilfering. I await a call from the Dyfed constabulary.

The main body of the letter was peppered with emphatic capitals and underlinings. I could practically hear her roars of sympathy coming off the page.

I was absolutely DEVASTATED to hear your APPALLING news. I can only
imagine
the HORROR you must be going through . . . Poor Christian! . . . Poor
all of you!
What a LOATHSOME world we live in. I hope your
faith
and your
goodness
and your great
love
for each other will sustain you, as it must.

She signed off ‘Barbara Fry-Kapper' – a detail whose significance was missed by everyone but me, who recalled perfectly Donovan's parting advice to her, as I recalled all his words.

Chronic Misery has a numbing effect, thankfully. It blunts the sharp edges of experience, until you reach a curious state of immunity to extremes of joy or sorrow. Months after Christian's accident I found that graphic news reports of famine or child abuse left me quite unharrowed, and I remember contemplating the possibility of my parents' death with complete detachment – something previously unthinkable.

It was the year of my O levels. My teachers knew what was happening at home and made no attempt to pressurise me, and the prevailing culture of underachievement meant that my apathy and lack of concentration were well-camouflaged. Art was the only subject at which I exerted
myself. For my exam piece I did a series of pen and ink studies and a large portrait of Christian. When I asked him if he'd mind modelling for me, he gave me a dour smile and said, ‘I might as well. Sitting still is the one thing I really excel at.'

Mr Hatch asked me if he'd consider coming in to sit for the whole class, but I thought twenty-four pairs of eyes might be interpreted as gawping, so I declined on his behalf.

When my results came – a mixture of flukey passes and unclassifieds, crowned by that one A grade in art, no one knew whether to congratulate me or commiserate. Mum and Dad had rather lost track of my potential, and perhaps felt guilty at their lack of involvement. I think they were waiting for some cue from me, and were lost when it failed to materialise.

‘Are you pleased with your results, Esther?' Mum asked me in a carefully non-committal tone. She'd cornered me in my bedroom, where I was putting navy blue polish on my toenails.

‘Not really,' I replied.

‘So you're a bit disappointed, then?'

‘Not really.'

‘Oh. So you're just, sort of . . . satisfied.'

‘Not really, no. I'm not anything.' I was thinking how furry her face had become. In the bright sunlight the downy hairs made her cheeks look like a tiny field of silver grass.

‘You must feel something,' said Mum, who was beginning to find my serenity unnerving.

‘But O levels just lead to A levels, which lead to university, which leads to a career. So what's the point? I mean, my career is going to be looking after Christian, and I don't need exams for that.'

Mum's face crumpled. ‘Oh, Esther, don't be silly,' she cried, clutching my shoulders with her strong, knobbly hands. ‘You don't have to give up the rest of your life for Christian. You've got work of your own to do.'

She must have gone up to the school soon after that to have a word, because when I went back in September to do re-sits Mr Hatch took me aside and gave me a long, rambling lecture – a sort of secular parable of the talents – which was only curtailed by my agreeing to do A levels, with a view to art college.

‘It'd have to be somewhere near, though,' I said. ‘I'm not going away.'

‘You wouldn't have to. There are excellent places in London – Slade, Saint Martin's: they're the best in the country.'

‘Which is the nearest?' I asked, and he made strangling gestures in my direction.

I don't think I appreciated the effort he put into me at the time: all the chivvying and chasing to help me build up my portfolio, and the phone calls and favours called in to secure me interviews. I thought it was just nagging, and refused to be flattered. He'd given up trying to loosen my draughtsmanlike style, and decided to make a virtue of my fanatical precision. It was so contrary to the predominant fashion among art school students for boldness and expressionism that he thought one of the professors might take me on out of sheer curiosity – and so it proved.

When my first illustrated book was published I sent him a copy, inscribed with appropriate expressions of gratitude. Almost by return of post I received a long letter saying that he was delighted to hear of my success, and that I was the best pupil he'd ever had, and the most rewarding to teach,
etc. Really, it was so full of compliments and praise that I couldn't help wondering if he was remembering somebody else.

A Few points of brightness from that dark year. When Christian's colleagues from the building site heard about the accident they turned up at the house one weekend with a concrete mixer and built a ramp up to the front door, and another leading from the old dining room into the garden, and wouldn't accept any payment.

Another time, very early on, while Christian was still in hospital, Pam came over with her newborn twins and a sausage casserole from Mrs Clubb. It was the first proper meal we'd had in weeks: we'd almost given up eating as an irrelevance. Mum and I sat on the couch and held the tiny palm-sized miracles, trussed up in identical marshmallow-pink strip: bibs, bootees, mittens and bonnets, while Pam, who looked scarcely less pregnant than before, prattled on about her caesarean and centile charts and what a devoted dad Andy was, as long as he got his eight hours sleep, minimum.