The Best of Times (21 page)

He ordered another Americano, went over and got a paper from the rack by the door. The front-page news was a bit boring: Afghanistan. He turned to the inside page and saw a bird’s-eye view picture of a pileup on the motorway. He was about to give that a miss too when
he read, “almost all the casualties were taken to St. Marks, the new state-of-the-art hospital in Swindon, where medical staff worked tirelessly all afternoon and through the night.”

“Blimey,” said Luke, and folded the paper, starting to read it intently.

“Hi, Luke.”

It was Emma, smiling, but pale and tired-looking. She was wearing jeans and a T-shirt and had no makeup on; she usually made more effort. Still …

“Hi, babe.” He kissed her. “Come and sit down.”

“Thanks. I’ll have one of those, please.” She indicated the coffee.

“I’ve just been reading about the crash. So that’s why you didn’t ring me last night. It was obviously a big one. Says here it was the worst this summer. God, Emma …”

He sat looking at her in silence; she smiled.

“You look rather … impressed.”

“I feel it. Definitely. Yeah. My little Emma, involved in a thing like that. Were you actually … you know … doing things? Operating and so on?”

“Of course I was! What did you think I was doing, reading a magazine?”

“No,” he said, “no, of course not. It just sounds … so bad.”

“It was so bad. It was awful. Lots of casualties, loads of injuries, people’s lives wrecked forever. Anyway—sorry not to have rung you.”

“That’s all right, babe; I can see why now. You look tired.”

“Thanks,” she said. “That’s exactly what I need to hear.”

“Well, you do. You can’t help it. I’m sorry for you.”

“Well, good.”

She looked at him, and the great blue eyes filled with tears; she dashed them away, smiled determinedly at him.

“Sorry. Got to me a bit. You know, I might like a drink.”

“Course. What d’you fancy?”

“Oh … glass of white wine. I’ll just … just go to the toilet. See you in a bit.”

Luke looked after her thoughtfully; she seemed in a very odd state.

“Tell you what,” he said when she came back, “why don’t you go back to the flat, have a kip before tonight? I’ve got us a table at Alain Ducasse at the Dorchester; you want to be able to enjoy that, and I’ve got something to do this afternoon—thought we could do it together, but I can manage …”

Emma stared at him. Such thoughtfulness was not quite his style. Then she leaned forward and kissed him.

“Oh, Luke,” she said, “you’re so sweet. And you’re right: I am very tired. That’d be lovely. I’d really appreciate it. Thank you.”

• • •

Talking to Abi had become a priority—before the police started taking statements. They had to get their story straight: why they’d been together, and on the M
4
, what they’d seen, how they thought it might have happened. And Laura was going to have to know; important the story was watertight for her too. He’d been working on it: Abi was just a colleague, from the conference; he’d never met her before, just giving her a lift to … where? Maybe not London, maybe just Reading, somewhere like that.

He’d tried to raise her the night before, had walked down the road away from the house, praying Laura wouldn’t see him. There had been no reply, her phone clearly switched off. He didn’t leave a message: too risky. And again this morning, while he’d been out on his bike; still no reply. It was now six p.m. and he was beginning to feel frantic. Maybe he should e-mail her; she had a laptop in that little flat of hers, supplied by the office, as there was so much weekend work; but her housemate, Sylvie, might see it. He’d met her once, hadn’t liked her at all. He wouldn’t trust her an inch. Just the same, he had to talk to Abi soon …

• • •

Patrick always said afterwards that the worst thing, in a way, was not knowing what he could and couldn’t remember. Going through the barrier, certainly; calling on God to keep the trailer from jackknifing—He’d failed him there, all right—and then a long, long confusion, a swirling mass of pain and fear, and a complete inability to move. He seemed to be in some kind of a vice, and every time he struggled to get out of it, the pain got worse. It was unimaginably dreadful, that pain, like a great beast tearing at him; after a while it seemed better to stay in the vice without struggling And then after a long time, there seemed to be people with him, one trying to get at his hand, saying, “This’ll help you, mate; just hold on,” and he wondered how his hand could be of any use when his whole body had been rendered useless. And then he had swum off somewhere, where the pain was removed from him, although he could still feel it in some strange way; and then there was a long blank when nothing seemed to happen at all. He remembered some angel smiling down at him, holding his hand, an angel with long blond hair and huge blue eyes. She’d said he was just going into the theatre, and he’d wondered why on earth anyone should think he was up to watching a play in the state he was in; after that he couldn’t remember anything much at all, and he certainly couldn’t have told you how much time had passed, but he seemed to be surfacing somehow into something very uncomfortable—and then as he opened his eyes to see what it looked like, there was Maeve, smiling at him.

“Sweet Jesus,” she said, and, “No, no, darling,” he said, “not Jesus, no, it’s me, Patrick.”

And then he felt completely exhausted and went back to sleep for quite a long time.

• • •

Russell sat in the departure lounge at Heathrow waiting for his flight to be called. He could hardly believe this was happening, instead of
his being in London with Mary, as they had planned, revisiting old, half-remembered places, lunching with Mary, then driving out to Bray for dinner at the Waterside Inn with Mary—God, he must cancel the table. He felt wounded as well as angry, and he wanted the reassurance of home. The more he thought about Mary and what might or might not have happened to her, the more he felt convinced that she had just not tried hard enough to contact him—and that hurt.

He stayed at the Dorchester until lunchtime, still hoping she would contact him, had called her home several times, but there had been no reply. He left a couple of messages, giving his mobile number, but his phone remained stubbornly silent.

They had brought him the
Times
with his breakfast, but after he had read the front and the city pages, he phoned down and demanded the
Wall Street Journal
. It was the only paper he ever read. The young man who brought it asked him if he would like him to switch the television on, but Russell told him sharply that if he wanted to watch it, he was quite capable of switching it on himself.

Russell was an enthusiastic user of technology: of his laptop and his iPhone. However, he was not a television watcher; he hated its banality, its obsession with trivia. He preferred the radio, and most of all he loved the BBC World Service. He and Mary had discovered that they both listened to it when they couldn’t sleep, and although their nights only partly overlapped, he still liked to think of her lying there, listening to the same voices, the same news reports. It brought her closer …

Well, he had obviously been keener on that closeness than she had …

The car journey, once they were on the M
4
extension, had been swift. “Bit different from yesterday, sir,” the driver said. “Traffic held up for hours, it was. I gave up, just went home—there was no way you could get through.”

“Really?” said Russell, getting his iPhone out of his attaché case
and rather ostentatiously fitting the earbuds into his ears. He would listen to music. He had no intention of getting involved in a conversation about traffic, for God’s sake …

• • •

He checked in, went to duty-free and bought himself a couple more books, and then moved up to the first-class lounge. He walked through the seating area, passing the TV screens on his way. He glanced at them: an earnest girl was saying something about Prince William and Harry and some concert they had just put on and how marvellous it had been. He moved off. As he did so, he half heard something about an accident the day before and that someone or other was still in intensive care. Not guaranteed to take his mind off his troubles; he moved into the computer area and called up his e-mails. There were three: two from his secretary, one from a colleague. He’d tried very hard to persuade Mary to have e-mail, but she’d resisted. “I like getting letters,” she said, “and if it’s urgent you can telephone me.”

It might have helped … he wasn’t sure how, but it might … Dear God, this was painful.

An hour passed while he wrote e-mails and looked at the online edition of the
Journal;
then he decided to get a whisky. That might ease the pain.

He walked out to the bar; they had only one whisky, and that was a blend.

“I’m not drinking that rubbish,” he said. “I want a single-malt. What is this, economy or something? Just give me a club soda.”

He went and sat down near the screens, so that he could see the latest on his flight. No delays; they should be in the air in thirty minutes. And he could shake the soil of bloody England off his feet. He should never have come back, never.

The flight was called; he walked to the departure bay slowly; there seemed to be a delay.

“For God’s sake, what is the matter with this airline?”

“Sorry, Mr. Mackenzie. If you just wait over there, shouldn’t be more than a few minutes.”

He sat down, sighed heavily. This was what he hated most about flying: sitting helplessly, life at least temporarily out of his control …

The man sitting next to him was reading a newspaper; he had it fully open, knocked Russell’s arm as he tried to fold it over.

“Sorry, mate.”

The man turned to his companion, a pasty, overweight creature in a tracksuit.

“Shocking thing, that crash yesterday,” he said. “Thank God we wasn’t trying to get a flight last night. Says here seven miles, both directions. Hundreds of people missed their planes. Three people killed …”

Russell stood up. All anyone seemed to be interested in today were car crashes …

“Would rows A to G please commence boarding immediately. First- and club-class passengers may also board at their convenience.”

Better check his phone for the last time; not that there was anyone he wanted to hear from …

There was one message on it. Left that day, half an hour earlier. A number he didn’t recognise …

“Hello, is that Mr. Mackenzie?” It was an English voice. “Mr. Mackenzie, you left a message on my mother’s answering machine. Mrs. Mary Bristow. I’m afraid she’s in the hospital—she was involved in a traffic accident yesterday. We only heard ourselves quite late last night. Anyway, if you want to ring me back, my number is—”

A series of clicks went off in Russell’s brain.
Holdups for miles … serious traffic accident … in intensive care … hundreds missed their flights
.

So there had been a reason: a perfectly good reason. And he had been too blind, too arrogant, too self-centred to try to find it. And Mary, his little Mary, was lying in a hospital, possibly dangerously ill …

• • •

Abi’s flat was in a rather unlovely outpost of Bristol; she’d bought it eighteen months earlier, on the strength of her new job. She loved it; it was in a small purpose-built block, fairly recently built. It had two bedrooms, one of which was let to her best friend, Sylvie, to help pay the mortgage; a very cool galley kitchen, with white cupboards and black work surfaces; a studio living room with floor-to-ceiling windows; and a bathroom that, as Sylvie said, was too small to swing a kitten in, much less hold a bath, but which served its purpose perfectly adequately.

She had furnished it slowly, through the year, refusing to put any old rubbish in it that she didn’t like; the Bristol branch of IKEA had served her well. The room she was most proud of was the living room, with its white blinds, white carpet—no one was allowed in with their shoes on—and two black corner sofas. She’d talked a photographer mate into giving her a very nice set of black-and-white prints of pictures he’d taken in New York, and had them framed by one of the suppliers at work; it all looked seriously classy. Her latest acquisition was a plasma TV, not too huge, but big enough to feel you weren’t missing anything watching a film on DVD rather than in the cinema.

She was actually watching
Notting Hill
for the umpteenth time, having got back from the gym exhausted but feeling slightly better, and wondering if she could face any lunch, when she decided to ring her phone once more.

“Hello?” said a voice.

“Oh … oh, my God … it’s William, isn’t it?”

“Yes, it is. And that’s Abi? I was hoping you’d ring.”

“So—you’ve got my phone?”

“Yes, you gave it to me to hold yesterday. I’d put it down and forgotten all about it, only just found it again.”

“Fantastic. I thought I must have dropped it on the road or something. It was such a terrible day, and—”

“Certainly was. How are you feeling?”

“Oh … you know. Bit … out of it. Look, could I come and get
it, do you think? I’m really missing it. Tell me where you are, and I’ll drive over.”

• • •

“Hello, Linda.”

“Hello, Georgia. How are you?”

“OK. Why shouldn’t I be?”

“Well … I could be forgiven for wondering. Don’t you think? First I have to change the time of your audition; then I wait for hours for you to arrive, and you don’t return any of my calls. Then I hear that you’re back at home and you’ve told your mother you didn’t get the part. What’s going on?”

“Nothing’s going on.”

“Well … why didn’t you come to the audition?”

A silence: then: “I lost my nerve. I was scared, OK? Really scared. I’m sorry, Linda. Very sorry. I got stage fright.”

“They’re very disappointed. They really thought you’d be ideal.”

“Yeah? Well, they’ll have to get over it.”

“That is an extraordinarily stupid attitude, Georgia. Not the way to get on.”

“Maybe I don’t want to get on.”