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Authors: Clare Curzon

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BOOK: The Glass Wall
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Sheena pushed her empty glass across the counter. Still with her listening face, Roseanne swivelled to apply it to the vodka optic, added the Martini and pushed it back into Sheena's hand.
‘Speak to you later,' Sheena said, counting out the money, slid from the stool and took her drink to sit at a table by the window. She doubted the crowd would thin out, but she knew Roseanne. In duty bound, she'd come over on the excuse of collecting glasses. Liked to keep people happy, daft cow.
 
Oliver Markham sipped at his lager, making it last, telling himself he wasn't a real drinker; just for the moment needed an anonymous crowd to get lost in. Things were going wrong at work again. You knew when they started watching you that way. Then they'd produced that new woman and told him to show her the ropes. Part of the new policy of making magistrates' courts all mumsy-comfy. This time he could really be on the way out. Not that he wasn't shit-tired of the rotten job anyway.
Smothered in legal lists all day, keeping at bay the pompous and legally qualified while enduring the feckless and unruly, he relished this pub as halfway-house back to an empty flat. Relinquishing Roseanne (and it seemed she'd quite enjoyed the one about the mermaid and the bishop) he turned his back on the bright range of mirrored bottles to take in tonight's wallpaper
faces.
Many were known to him; some of their names were too. They shared quite a number of personal histories he could quote if he cared to be indiscreet. These professional secrets in the safety deposit of his mind were little jokes to mull over in his private moments. ‘Lord, what fools these mortals be!'
That was Oberon's line. Markham gave his tight little lean-cheeked smile. He'd rather fancy that part, seven feet tall, antler-crowned and draped in filmy woodland colours: one of the bard's most magical characters. Not quite Prospero, but then by the time he got to write
The Tempest
Old Will was almost out of this world.
What would he have made of this crowd here? The men – suburban hempen-homespuns, few of them commuters to London; at most two generations away from artisans, but considering themselves sophisticates. The town had grown faster than their wits. Their big adventure these days was a fiddled tax return; a weekend wife-swap; the family's holiday money blown on a three-legged dead cert at Newmarket. Smallest of small beer, the sort that ended up before him in magistrates' court.
And the women? He looked around – office escapees still tangling with Fred from Accounts or Ted from the next computer; the odd librarian delaying return to a grouchy husband or sullen kids. (No young talent, not at The Crown: there were brighter lights drawing them only streets away.) A couple of slags, and over by the window the Big Lump settling at a table with a fresh drink in her hand, hoping to mingle, pick up some interest. Bored and boring.
Well, he could bore her some more. As an old couple rose from her table he swung his legs from the stool and carried his lager across. ‘Mind if I join you?'
Little welcome on the pudgy face, but she made room for him alongside on the padded bench. It amused him not to notice the move, sliding instead on to a chair that faced her. She flicked a glance back at the bar counter, making sure the Filipino noticed someone else was interested.
‘I've seen you in here before.'
‘Yuh. Just this last week or so.' She reached in her bag for cigarettes in a crushed packet, offered him one which he refused. Then let him light hers from a disposable lighter. She wondered why he needed it if he wasn't a smoker.
‘I carry this for clients,' he emphasized as if she had questioned it aloud; meaning to get across to her that he was a professional man. Sheena, knowing exactly what he was, didn't rise to the bait.
‘Not new to the town, though?' he probed.
‘Me? No. Born here.' She spoke as if it was an infliction. She waved a vague hand towards the door. ‘Other side of town, but I took on a – a patient close by. This bar's on my way home.'
If he was making out he was a full-blown lawyer, no reason she couldn't be a qualified nurse. Ramón had swallowed it easily enough.
‘Agency nursing?' Markham sounded impressed.
‘Private. One-to-one treatment. Very demanding.'
‘Drink up and I'll get you a refill. You must deserve it.'
Actually, I do.' She batted her short, blond lashes. ‘It's been a long day.'
‘So what happens overnight? With your patient, I mean.'
‘I have someone else for the graveyard shift.' She wasn't sure she'd got the term right, but it sounded fancy.
‘Nothing much to do then, with the patient asleep,' she amplified. ‘And I'm on call at home, see, if there's a need to consult.'
‘So it's a critical case?'
‘A doddery old lady. Ninety-four next May, if she makes it to then. Bedridden, special diet, but I have to get her sitting out. Do everything. Puree her food. Still, you don't want to know.'
Actually he did. Anyone that old who could afford twenty-four hour attendance would surely have made a will, maybe appointed a proxy. He wondered which firm of solicitors had drafted it. His court work made him curious about all legal matters.
‘I'm surprised she lives in the centre of town. Must find the traffic noisy, what with emergency vehicles from the fire station and hospital.'
‘Oh, you can't hear a thing up there. Enormous triple-glazed
windows. It's so quiet it's spooky. Gets on your nerves. Still I've got my tranny and the TV'
Yes. He could picture her polluting the silence with a ranting television soap or a tinny version of a DJ's histrionic enthusiasms.
‘Up there' could only mean the block of luxury apartments above the BMW showrooms. It was the nearest to a residential tower that local planners had permitted. He knew the solicitor who'd dealt with the purchase of the fourth floor flat. The price had made him whistle. This very old lady who owned the penthouse had to be mega-rich.
He reached for the woman's empty glass, stood and took it back with his own to the bar, forgetting to ask what poison she'd been taking. But the barman remembered.
‘Vodka Martini. After this she has enough, yes?'
‘Just as you say. Mine's a lager, touch of lime.' He counted out the exact money, not begrudging the expense. You never knew when information gathered might be useful. The woman was trash but the connection needn't be.
She had swallowed her drink down before he was halfway through his own, but he wasn't to be hurried. ‘So what do you young people do of an evening for entertainment round here?' he asked, presuming on his forty-odd years making her thirty-odd seem juvenile.
‘A bit of this and that. There's the theatre, the flicks. Clubbing,' she added hopefully
Slouching in front of the TV, he guessed. This one would go for the line of least resistance: supper out of a foil container courtesy of an Indian takeaway – unless she had the proverbial old mum chained to the kitchen sink, serving up bangers and mash on a cold, cracked plate.
‘Have fun while you can,' he advised. ‘For me it's a Hawaiian pizza, a large whisky, and more of the same I've been doing all day.'
‘You take work home?' She didn't believe him. Maybe she'd noticed he had no briefcase.
‘It's all on the home computer,' he said confidently. He tapped
his head. ‘What's not in the old noddle.'
Sheena wasn't impressed. He was a court usher. Sort of dogsbody, to her mind. And old with it. Forty-five if he was a day.
Because he'd planted himself down here Roseanne hadn't bothered to come across, so she was cheated of a good natter. And she hadn't had that chance to drop Ramón's name into the conversation.
‘Look, I gotta go,' she said on impulse, gathering woollen gloves, scarf, shoulder bag, and lurching out under the table's rocking edge towards the standing crowd. ‘Thanks for the drink. Be seeing yuh, eh?'
Gracious she wasn't, Markham regretted. He watched her push through towards the bar counter waving her fingers at Roseanne, go close, bob her head and exchange a few words behind one hand, giggle and be off.
He didn't like that. She shouldn't have giggled. She'd tossed her head in a knowing sort of way and Roseanne had grinned back, darting a look in his direction. A joke at his expense? He felt heat rise up his neck, knew his face was flooded with colour. Bloody woman making a mock of him. He clenched his right fist in his lap. The nails would have marked the flesh if they hadn't been nibbled away.
‘Slag,' he said under his breath. The green-striped cotton dress below her fake fur jacket hadn't convinced him she was a nurse. Looked more like a lavatory cleaner.
Alyson had Emily in the bath, gently pouring water over her shoulders when the buzzer sounded. Dr Stanford was late tonight: she'd more or less given up on him. She reached for the inflated rubber ring kept for emergencies and slipped it under the wasted arms. ‘Just for a moment,' she promised.
The CCTV screen in the kitchen showed the familiar face upturned to the exterior camera for identification. She pressed the button for the street door's release, stood the apartment door open and went back to Emily's bathroom. She was lying back in the water, cooing like a dove.
When Dr Stanford stepped out of the lift she had Emily on her feet wrapped in a warm towel, transferred her to the wheelchair and rolled it alongside her freshly made bed. He followed them in and threw off his coat.
‘Good evening, ladies. Alyson, you should ask for a mobile lift for getting Emily out of the bath. It's too much for one person.' His robust approach was belied by the dark smudges under his eyes. It had been a long day with some hard decisions.
‘Emily's no weight, really. We manage, darling, don't we?' She completed the old lady's transfer to the paper undersheet of the air-bed and pedalled it up to working level.
Stanford adopted a hangdog expression. ‘I suppose I'm too late for coffee?'
‘Not if you can wait while I do a little something.'
He took a seat across from the bed and watched as Alyson cupped a hand for oil and began gently to massage the birdlike body. ‘How does she seem?'
‘Why not ask her?'
He spent a few minutes trying to coax a response from the old lady, but she had screwed her mouth into a tight circle and given herself up entirely to the sensation of being smoothed and stroked. At the end she expelled her breath in a long whoosh of contentment.
‘Best …' she said. Then, after a few seconds' pause, ‘ …part …of the day.'
‘Brilliant,' said Stanford. He had seldom heard her say so
much.
‘It is as Emily says: this is her best part of the day. And she is brilliant. You're right.' Alyson went back into the bathroom to wash her hands, calling back over her shoulder, ‘Can you stay and talk to Emily while I make our drinks?'
‘Right.' He leaned forward confidentially. ‘Well, Emily, it's devilish cold outside. Quite a bit of snow underfoot, so you're lucky to be snug in here. And very lucky to have Alyson taking care of you.'
‘Martin!' the old lady called out sharply, gazing blindly over his head. ‘Martin, get me out of here!'
He reached for her hand. ‘Sorry, Emily. I'm Keith, and you're really better off where you are.'
For the first time she looked at him, her eyes focused, but the moment passed even as her lips started to form words. The pupils wandered off. Her eyelids drooped. Another five seconds and she was sound asleep.
‘It tires her out,' Alyson said, coming back with their drinks.
‘Maybe she should have her bath during the day, but I can't leave it to anyone else.'
‘How long will she sleep now?'
‘An hour and a half, perhaps two hours. Then I'll feed her and she should get another four hours solid.'
‘And you?'
‘I'm geared to much the same. I'm a light sleeper. If she's disturbed I hear her in my room through the baby alarm.' She stood there, tray in her hands. ‘Let's go through, shall we?'
He wasn't happy about the duties. ‘That isn't good enough. Not on top of a day shift in ITU. You're overdoing it.'
She said nothing, knowing he didn't doubt her ability to perform at the hospital, but was concerned for her welfare.
He followed her into the large penthouse lounge, its lights dimmed to preserve the panoramic view, and they sat together looking down at the orange-lit snow, the diminished night traffic.
The town centre lay in a deep bowl which extended uphill on three sides. It made a natural auditorium and she was sometimes reminded of the ancient amphitheatre at Epidauros, imagining an
orator below whose every syllable came up clearly to her. Which made the apartment's soundproofing doubly strange. The reality was something between looking down into a goldfish bowl and watching TV with the volume turned off.
Stanford was differently inspired by the scene. ‘Toy town,' he said of the diminished streets. ‘And you're Rapunzel in her tower.'
‘I'm no prisoner. I come and go.' All the same, she admitted to herself, not a lot outside work.
In ITU there wasn't the companionship of an open ward. The nurses, individualists with families and outside interests, didn't party together. Few of her patients were ever capable of speech.
‘How's Audrey?' she remembered to ask, not that there was any connection. Or not directly.
‘Much the same. Scared, of course.'
At least he appreciated that. Some doctors became desensitized, even about cancer.
‘She pretends it doesn't matter about losing her hair, but …'
‘It must be very hard when you've been so beautiful. She still is, of course. But I can understand the horror.'
‘There are other aspects she hasn't fully confronted yet. At least, I think not. Trouble is we don't talk. Never did really. Not about basic issues.' He slid both hands round the mug and lifted it to sniff at its contents. ‘What's this? Ovaltine?'
‘I'm not giving you caffeine at this time of night. You work hard too; you need to switch off.'
Wish I could do it here, he thought wryly: just curl up with my head on your gentle shoulder. I'd be good, really I would. For a while, anyway. But don't tempt me.
He sighed. ‘Guess I'd better make tracks.' He swallowed the drink down, hot and milky. ‘I'm off on a course in a couple of days. So after tomorrow I won't be in for a week. Dougie will cover for me, if that's all right. Anything you need, any change you observe, just ring him.'
‘Right. Make a complete break of it, if you can.' She wondered what arrangements he'd made for keeping an eye on Audrey. She'd surely have protested at his need to be away from home.
She saw him to the door. Stanford left and she went back to the window, waiting until, a dark shape against the snow, he eventually crossed by the traffic island, stopped and looked back, face tilted upwards.
With the room dim behind her she doubted he could see her, but still he raised a hand, and she did the same back.
Mind how you go, Keith.
The little ormolu clock in the hall struck midnight. Tomorrow already. She went through to look in on Emily asleep. Her face was calm. She looked immeasurably wise.
In her almost ninety-four years she had known three generations, outlived their changes. What tales she might tell if only she were able.
 
Keith Stanford pulled the collar of his black overcoat up to his ears and trudged round the outer wall of the college to the hospital car park. His red Volvo was plumply quilted with snow on roof and bonnet. Abandoned there half the day, its locks had frozen over and his de-icer was in the glove compartment.
He hunkered alongside, breathing hard on the driver's door lock, then tried with the key. A few tactical wrigglings and the ice reluctantly yielded. He reached in for the plastic blade to scrape the frost off windscreen and mirrors. It took a few minutes with the engine running for the interior to warm, but he was in no hurry to get home. There had been three text messages from Audrey on his cellphone in the last four hours but it was pointless to reply. By now she should know how it went, emergency building on emergency; even more so in tricky weather like this.
Over the twelve years of their marriage she had never learnt how to cope on her own. Once, as a young bride, her dependence had delighted and flattered him, but his career didn't allow for the great chunks of time she demanded in his company. Nor had he managed to divert her interest elsewhere. None of the clubs or hobbies he'd suggested had kept her interest for more than a few weeks. It was much the same with acquaintances. The faces of women who appeared occasionally in his home were constantly changing. Those with positive lives soon ran short of patience with her, and she had wit enough to avoid any of her own kind
requiring efforts made on their behalf. He was quietly ashamed that when her cancer had been diagnosed he'd seen it as yet one more tentacle she reached out with to bind him close. It was as well after all that they'd never had children.
As he drove it seemed that the stars were going out one by one. If it clouded over completely the frost would be less severe, and the forecasters had been warning of more snow. Audrey hated the winter, kept on about taking a break in Madeira, Florida, anywhere but Britain. He couldn't spare time to get away himself, and she refused to go on her own or with friends. By late May, when their holiday was booked, she could be weaker. Perhaps he could persuade the practice manager to grant him something earlier, on compassionate grounds. Not that that excuse would carry much weight with Bullock, his senior partner. And God only knew what extra time he'd have to take off when things reached the final phase.
The car was climbing towards open country. After the close-packed Victorian terraces had come more substantial houses set apart, then occasional dark woodland, bare orchards, ploughed fields. His own home had once been a farmhouse, seventeenth century, retaining many of the romantic features that delight house agents and prove less beguiling for modern living.
It was what Audrey had once set her heart on, but over the years so many alien elements had been introduced to the original structure that it now made him think of a wrinkled crone under layers of make-up and tottering on stiletto heels.
It appeared ahead through winter-bare trees; not just the porch light guiding him in, but every window defiantly ablaze as a rebuke to him that she was unable to sleep in face of his persistent neglect.
It would not be a smiling welcome. But then, he'd had that already, served up with sympathy and a nursery drink.
He was smiling to himself as he turned into the dip of the driveway. Then he saw the flashing blue lights and the cars drawn up by the entrance. Dougie was on the doorstep, pulling on his driving gloves, about to leave.
‘Audrey?' Keith demanded, bursting from the car as it finished
slewing on ice.
‘Not as bad as it might have been,' his partner said shortly. ‘I'm sending her into hospital for the night. I want Ashton to assess her.'
‘What's she done?'
‘Changed her mind at the last minute, fortunately,' Dougie said. ‘Sat in the bath to slash her wrists, with her mobile phone alongside. I've fixed her injuries up, but she was in a right old pickle otherwise. Sedated now, but asking for you. You'd better go along with her, old chap.'
‘Of course.' He turned towards the ambulance, then remembered the house and the lighted windows. ‘Who's inside?'
‘Mike Yeadings. He's just checking things out and he's got your spare keys, so you can leave it to him. His wife's with Audrey in the ambulance, but she'll need to get home for her children. A neighbour's minding them.'
‘Right. Thanks, Dougie, for coming out. What a god-awful mess.' Ashen-faced he approached the emergency vehicle. The paramedic at the wheel hung out of the window. ‘Sorry, doc. Your car.
‘Blocking the way. Yes, sorry.' He stumbled back to it, put it in gear and reversed into a clearing by some laurels. He switched off, put his face in his hands and waited for his shaking to steady. Then he walked over and climbed up into the familiar antiseptic smell which Audrey so detested.
‘Nan,' he said to the woman seated beside the stretcher, ‘this is so good of you. How is she?'
‘Everything's under control,' was the answer. ‘She'll be fine now you're here.'
‘I had my mobile switched off,' he mumbled.
‘Understandably. She tried your partner next, and then us.'
‘Audrey rang you?'
‘Nearest neighbours she knew would understand,' Nan said comfortably. ‘She probably remembered I'd been a nurse once.'
Or that Mike is a senior policeman, Keith thought grimly. That would have been no coincidence. And no more than I deserved. God, why didn't I see all this building up?
BOOK: The Glass Wall
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