Separate Beds (39 page)

‘As well to be careful,’ said Tom, catching her eye.

They talked over the various options, and routines to be put in place for Hermione’s return, but Annie knew, as she suspected Tom knew, their children’s hearts were not engaged in the process. Whether they wished it or not, they were being
drawn to wider horizons and towards a future that did not contain the needy elderly – and that, concluded Annie, with a wry grimace, would in time include her and Tom.

‘I’m sorry.’ Emily glanced at her watch. ‘I’ll do what I can. Of course I will. But, right now, I’ve got to go.’

‘Sorry,’ said Jake, indicating his sleepy baby. ‘I don’t think Maisie can stay awake a moment longer.’

He carried Maisie up to bed and Emily rushed around, gathering up the salmon recipe ingredients. ‘Dad, would it be possible for you to give me a lift to the bus stop?’

The phone rang and Annie answered it. It was the hospital. She listened intently and put down the phone. ‘Tom,’ she said. ‘That was the ward sister. They’re worried about Hermione. They’re doing some tests.’

Chapter Twenty-three

The woman in a shiny PVC mac and matching boots cut in front of Emily at the entrance to St Brigid’s and almost tripped her.

It took Emily a good ten seconds to dismiss her annoyance and then to register who it was. She raced after the woman and tapped her on the arm. ‘Kate? Kate Sinclair, isn’t it?’

‘Oh, my God, it’s little Emily. How are you?’ Kate Sinclair had been a stalwart of the Mia set at school, and something of a bully. The PVC crackled as she dropped a kiss on Emily’s cheek. ‘Not ill, I hope?’

‘My grandmother is. And you?’

A shadow crossed Kate Sinclair’s now pleasant, settled expression, which made her look older than Emily knew she was. ‘My mother. Chemo.’ She glanced at her watch. ‘Actually, the train from Northampton was late. Whenever is it not? I don’t like to keep her waiting.’

Emily stepped aside for a woman who was pushing, with some difficulty, a trolley stacked with a library books. She heard herself say, ‘You haven’t heard from Mia at all, have you?’

‘Mia! The wonderful Mia. Not for ages.’ The penny dropped. ‘Of course, you had a family falling out. She told me all about it. Like the rest of the world, I was training at the time to be a counsellor and I think she was desperate for
a sympathetic ear … How many counsellors must there be in this country?’ She laughed. ‘That didn’t work out. I got married instead. But, no, I haven’t heard from her – not since she was teaching at the … Oh, where was it? That place near Hammersmith … The William Davies. That must have been four or so years ago. We seem to have lost touch. Pity. But what can you do?’ Again, she glanced at her watch. ‘Must go. But we should catch up. Yes? Facebook me.’

‘Sure.’

Serendipity. How extraordinary it could be. The casualness with which a momentous and burning piece of information had been dropped into her lap whistled the breath out of Emily’s lungs. She watched Kate Sinclair’s shinily clad figure shoot into the lift with all the astonishment that she might have experienced while looking at Niagara Falls or the Grand Canyon. And what would she do with this knowledge?

Her grandmother was not good. Even the medically ignorant, and Emily was profoundly so, could have told that at one glance. Propped up on her pillows, she was shrunken, motionless and, if Emily could describe her this way, removed.

It was a scene that – once – she might have tried to write. The ritual of the handwash at the ward entrance, the reverent procession along the corridor lined with machinery and stretchers, the silence, the urgency and the waiting.

The ward was stuffy and smelt of age and other unmentionable things that they had endeavoured to mask with disinfectant. There was no getting away from it and she tried not to mind. No one else seemed to, which made Emily ashamed of her squeamishness. As surreptitiously
as possible, she lifted her wrist to her nose and sniffed the scent she had sprayed over it before leaving the office.

Her parents were already there, talking to the staff, and Emily elected to sit awhile by the bed. A woman shouted from across the corridor. No one paid any attention. Someone else coughed horribly and wetly. A nurse came into sight carrying a covered bedpan.

Sitting by a bed was a tiny thing to do and yet it wasn’t. Emily couldn’t help feeling that she had been put to a test that it was important to pass. Neither must she flinch.
The writer should be able to stare death and the bedpan in the face
. This was followed by:
So should a sentient human being who cares about others
. A calm, matter-of-fact acceptance would be, she imagined, a state of mind that one grew into. Watching her parents confer with the staff nurse, she hoped that this
was
true. In fact, it was vital that it was. If most people felt as she did, and were overcome with a craven desire to run, then the world would, indeed, be a charnel house.

‘Hallo, Gran,’ she said.

There was no reply. Her mother had warned her that her grandmother would probably be doped up.

‘You could brush her hair,’ her mother had suggested. ‘It usually helps.’ Helps whom? wondered Emily. She opened the locker and extracted Hermione’s hairbrush. A few grey hairs and some fluff were trapped in the bristles. She swallowed, her stomach twitched queasily, and she almost shoved it back. She made herself think about the sick and the suffering in Africa. She made herself think of cities in the poorest parts of the world with sewage flowing down their streets. She made herself think of those whose illnesses had condemned them to a living hell or death.
Consider those
, she admonished herself. Of course she could bring herself to brush her grandmother’s hair.

Gingerly, she made a pass over Hermione’s now tangled locks, which needed a wash. Hermione did not move but, as she continued to brush, Emily was sure that she relaxed a little. ‘There now, Gran,’ she said. ‘Hope that feels better.’ Hermione sighed and murmured and Emily was sure she’d said, ‘Nice.’

That made it more palatable. It really did.

After a while, she replaced the hairbrush in the locker. Hermione lay quiet and motionless so she joined her parents in the corridor.

‘It can’t be …’ Annie was clearly distressed. ‘We’ve done everything,
everything
we can …’

Emily looked from one parent to the other for elucidation. ‘They’re doing tests for MRSA,’ her father murmured in her ear. ‘I’m going to get some coffee.’

The staff nurse did not trouble to hide a suggestion of
Schadenfreude
. So much for Administration’s statistics and targets, was the message her body language conveyed. Now you’ll understand that it’s quite different when it happens to you. ‘I’m sure we’ve all done what we can, Mrs Nicholson, but until there is more space between the beds, and more time is allocated for cleaning …’

It was educative to observe her mother in her work capacity. Emily watched as Annie pulled herself together. ‘No, of course not. What I mean is that we’re all in the fight together.’

The staff nurse softened. ‘Let’s not jump to conclusions. There are other things. It could be just an infection.’

Annie looked exhausted, and Emily’s conscience and pity pricked in equal measure. The grudges she had nurtured
against her mother, the so-called lack of mutual comprehension, plus her impatience with Annie’s tendency to meddle, did not exactly vanish but were relegated to a minor, insignificant slot. All she could think of was that Annie had suffered, and continued to suffer. She slipped a hand through her mother’s elbow. ‘Don’t worry.’

It was as anodyne a gesture as you get, but the effect was almost miraculous. Annie turned to Emily and said, her voice quivering with gratitude, ‘Thanks, Em.’

Such a fervent reaction could not fail to touch the newly activated deeps in Emily.
Oh, Mum
, she thought. Directing a smile at Annie that was far more adult and confident than she felt, she said, ‘
Don’t
worry.’

The test results came. As it turned out, Hermione was not suffering from any of the feared hospital infections. Shock, the anaesthetic and a reaction to her medication had probably triggered the fever and left her very weak. She would be in hospital for at least a fortnight.

Tom visited most afternoons. He took in grapes and soft drinks and fed them to her. In the morning, he searched the paper for articles he thought might amuse her and read them to her. He even took Rollo in the car and held him up among the dustbins so that Hermione could see him out of the window. Once Hermione’s memory had been jogged, she begged Tom to bring Rollo in more often. Tom couldn’t make up his mind whether Rollo or Hermione was affected more.

Occasionally Annie swept in for a quick visit and they conducted a halting, three-way conversation because Hermione’s concentration was not at its peak and the subject had a habit of slipping between the floorboards.

The hospital visit became routine and, however hard Tom tried, other things fell by the wayside. The level of job applications dropped and the vegetable plot never did get under way. Nor was he as free to babysit Maisie as he had expected – which meant Jake did not get as much done at the workshop as he had planned.

Returning home one day in the late afternoon, he discovered Jake and Maisie holed up in the kitchen, with Rollo on ever hopeful patrol under Maisie’s chair. When she saw her grandfather, Maisie laughed and held out her hands. Tom swept her up and settled her into his lap, as always poleaxed by feelings of love and protectiveness triggered by a pair of blue eyes and a fairy body.

How could he have permitted himself to miss this with his own children? All those times when he hadn’t read a story, played the game, comforted a childish sorrow, or shouted himself hoarse at the finishing tape in the egg-and-spoon race. Had failed to hug Jake. These were memories that weren’t there – because they hadn’t happened – and he regretted them.

Extremely pleased by her perch on his lap, Maisie tried out one of her new noises on him: ‘Ga.’

‘Am I Ga?’

‘Sounds like it.’

He kissed the top of her head. ‘Ga I am, then.’

Jake asked, ‘Cup of tea, Dad?’

It was a simple offer, but Tom felt inordinately pleased that Jake was making it. ‘Love one,’ he said, which was a white lie as he had already drunk two cups of brown liquid at St Brigid’s, sufficient to put one off tea for life.

He watched Jake boil the kettle and dunk two teabags
into mugs, and decided closer proximity to him was good. Tom was acquainting himself with the physical reality of his son. How he walked. How he gestured. The sound of his voice. These were all pieces of information to store in the memory bank that Tom would have known when Jake had been the small, trudging twin but had lost sight of in the adult.

But he knew enough now to see that the spring had gone out of Jake’s step and, for a young man, he was weary. ‘Jake?’

Kettle in hand, he looked around. ‘Yes?’

‘Do you want to brief me on what’s happening about Maisie and Jocasta?’

Jake grabbed the milk bottle. ‘I’ve declared war.’ He described what had taken place in Pat Anderton’s office. ‘And don’t think that my decision is just a desire for revenge, because it isn’t.’

‘Jake, listen. No, really listen to me. This is vitally important. It would be extraordinary if you didn’t feel badly towards Jocasta, but you must never let it get the better of you. What you have to do is to prove Maisie will flourish better here.’

Jake stirred his coffee. ‘Point taken.’

‘Have you got a stack of paperwork from the lawyers?’ Jake nodded. ‘Can I ask if you’ve done it?’

Jake screwed up his face. ‘Not quite.’

‘Would you like me to go through it with you?’

Jake was startled by this unusual offer. ‘Do you mean that?’

Tom could have taken umbrage at Jake’s scepticism.
The sins of the negligent father
. ‘What have I just said?’

Jake fetched the relevant papers and Tom his calculator.
With Maisie relegated to the baby-walker, they sat down and worked their way through the financial calculations.

Jake consulted his order books and totted up his out goings. ‘Forty per cent down on the previous year,’ he said, and Tom added the figure to the list.

A little later, Tom asked, ‘Our wedding present to you, does that have to be included?’ He was referring to the money given to Jocasta and Jake when they married. ‘And, Jake, you will have to think seriously about the house.’

Jake gestured at the papers. ‘I don’t mind what she gets, as long as Maisie stays.’

Tom chose his words carefully. ‘You will need every penny to bring up Maisie.’

Jake’s eyes narrowed. ‘Dad,
nothing
is more important than Maisie. The rest can follow.’

Tom revised tactics. ‘OK, Jake, it can be done.’ As he spoke, his former resolution sneaked back. ‘I’m going to ring up one or two contacts who know about this sort of thing and see what they think.’

Jake dropped his head into his hands and muttered, ‘Old-boy network.’

‘Yup,’ said Tom. ‘That.’

Which was the reason he found himself waiting three days later (evening paper turned down at the Cassandra-warning of economic forecasters) for Roger Gard in L’Estimet on the South Bank.

Not having seen Roger since they had sat on a broadcasting committee several years back, he was lucky to have made contact so easily. Such were the riches that Roger had accrued in his successful legal practice that he devoted most of August and September to the historic and beautiful
French
manoir
on which he had lavished them. ‘Tom,’ he said silkily, down the phone, ‘it’s good to hear you and I happen to be flying over for a visit.’

Never mind any qualms Tom might have had at exposing himself as the-man-who-had-lost-his-job or appearing the washed-up loser: this had to be endured for Jake, and for Maisie.

Roger swept in: tanned, in control, expensively dressed.
Once upon a time, Tom had been up there with him in the confidence and expense-account stakes
. The two men enacted the hearty greeting rituals, ordered a good bottle of wine – ‘On me, Tom, for old times’ sake. Really, it’s nothing’ – and discussed the cricket scores until the bottle was three-quarters empty. This was a familiar game, and Tom fell back into the moves without too much trouble.