The Safe House (6 page)

I didn’t say anything. He began talking as if he couldn’t tolerate the silence.

‘Incidentally, I wanted the chance to tell you that I read your article in the
BMJ
, ‘The Invention of a Syndrome’, or whatever it was called, the one that caused all the fuss. It was splendid.’

‘Thanks. I didn’t think doctors like you would read it.’

His colour rose slightly and his eyes narrowed.

‘You mean a GP out in the provinces.’

‘No, I didn’t mean that. I meant a doctor outside the speciality.’

It was an awkward moment, but then Daley smiled again.

‘I can remember a bit of it by heart: “dogma, based on unexamined premises and unsupported by demonstration”. The stress counsellors must have needed some counselling of their own after reading that.’

‘Why do you think I’m out here in the sticks setting up my own unit? Who else would employ me? By the way, I mean “the sticks” in the nicest possible way.’

‘That’s all right,’ said Dr Daley. He rolled up his shirtsleeves and picked up the mugs. ‘You wash, I’ll dry.’

‘No,
you
wash and then put them in the rack and they can dry on their own. How is Finn?’

‘Well, the superficial lacerations…’

‘I don’t mean that. You’re her doctor, what do you make of her?’

‘Dr Laschen…’

‘Call me Sam.’

‘And call me Michael. If you mean her mood, her degree of shock, then I’m talking beyond my field of competence.’

‘That doesn’t stop other people. What do you think?’

‘I think she is severely traumatized by what happened. Understandably traumatized, I would say.’

‘How is her speech?’

‘You mean from her injuries? It has been affected. There is some degree of laryngeal paralysis. There may have been minor lesions in the vocal cords.’

‘Any stridor or dysphonia?’

Daley paused in his scouring of a mug.

‘Is this your field?’

‘More like a hobby. It’s one up from stamp-collecting. Or one down.’

‘Perhaps you should have a word with Dr Daun at Stamford General,’ said Daley, returning to his scrubbing. ‘Anyway, she’s all yours now.’

‘No, she isn’t,’ I replied. ‘She’s your patient. I insist on that. This is irregular enough as it is. I’m helping out in an informal, I hope, supportive way. But I understand you’ve been her GP for years, and it’s absolutely essential that you should remain in place in her eyes as the doctor. Is that acceptable to you?’

‘Sure. I’ll do anything at all to help.’

‘I hope you’ll come to see her regularly then; you’re her only link to the world she comes from.’

‘There we are, finished,’ he said, having washed up not just the mugs but my breakfast things and yesterday’s dinner things as well. ‘I should say that I felt dubious about this. I mean about this as a plan. But the way it’s worked out, I don’t think Finn could be in better hands.’

‘I hope everybody is going to carry on being this supportive of me when it has all gone wrong.’

‘Why should it go wrong?’ Daley asked, but he laughed as he said it, his eyebrows slanting into a dark upturned ‘V’. ‘The only thing I want to say is that I’m worried about Finn being so cut off from her normal surroundings, from people she knows.’

‘I feel the same, I promise.’

‘You know about these things, but if I could just make a single suggestion, it would be that we should arrange for her to see people. Assuming that’s what she wants and the police agree, of course.’

‘We’ll take it slowly for a bit, shall we?’

‘
You’re
the doctor,’ Daley said. ‘Well, I’m a doctor as well, but what I mean is you’re
the
doctor.’

‘I don’t know
what
you mean,’ I protested. ‘I’m
a
doctor. You’re
a
doctor. And we’ll just try to make the best of this stupid and tragic situation that we possibly can. Meanwhile, I shall want the details of medication, history and so on, and your number. I don’t want to have to go to Baird every time I need some information.’

‘It’s all in my bag in the car.’

‘One more thing. This situation is ridiculously vague, so I want to be firm about one thing. I’m going to tell you and I’m going to tell Baird that I want a strict time-limit for all of this.’

Daley looked taken aback.

‘What do you mean?’

‘If things work out, there’s the danger that we’ll become a replacement family for Finn in her new life. That’s no good. What’s the date now, January the twenty-fifth, isn’t it?’

‘The twenty-sixth.’

‘I’m going to be clear with Finn that whatever happens, however things go, this arrangement is until the middle of March – let’s call it March the fifteenth – and no more. All right?’

‘Fine,’ said Daley. ‘I’m sure it will be less than that anyway.’

‘Good. So, shall we join the ladies?’

‘You think it’s a joke, Sam. You wait until you get invited for dinner by the neighbours.’

‘I’m looking forward to it. I’ve already got my face-powder ready.’

Nine

I turned to face the girl. I hadn’t looked at her properly until now. Her pale oval face, behind the swing of dark-brown hair, was perfectly expressionless. Under her neat thick eyebrows, her brown eyes were unfocused. She was attractive, she could be lovely in different circumstances, but hers was a face from which all character seemed to have been wiped.

‘Let me show you round the house,’ I said. ‘Though that won’t take long.’

She stooped to pick up the small suitcase which was beside her, although she looked too weak and listless to carry anything at all.

‘Here, let me take that for you. We’ll start with your bedroom, though you’ve seen that already.’ She flinched as my hand touched hers on the handle of her case. ‘Your hands are cold; I’ll put the heating on in a minute. Come this way.’

I led the way up the stairs, Finn following obediently behind. So far, she had not said a word.

‘Here. I’m sorry about all the boxes; we can move them into the attic later.’ I put her suitcase by the bed, where it stood, forlornly small in the high-ceilinged room. ‘It’s all a bit bare, I’m afraid.’ Finn stood in the middle of the room, not looking. Her arms hung by her sides, pale fingers loose as if they didn’t belong to her at all. I gestured vaguely at the wardrobe and small chest of drawers that Danny had found for me in a nearby village. ‘You can put your stuff in there.’

I led the way back into the corridor. I saw something small and white and angular on the floor. I crouched and picked it up delicately between two fingers.

‘And this, Finn, is a paper bird created by my semi-detached partner, Danny.’ Was he still my semi-detached partner, or had he become quite detached? I pushed the thought away for later. ‘Look, I can make it flap, sort of. Lovely, don’t you think? After living in this house for a few days you will start to find these little creatures among your clothes, in your hair, sticking to you, in your food. They get everywhere. Men, eh?’

I was talking to myself largely.

‘That’s my room. And this’ – she walked two feet behind me and stopped when I stopped – ‘is the room of my little girl, Elsie.’ The door jammed on a jumble of blonde-maned Barbie dolls, pencil cases and plastic ponies. ‘Elsie is short for Elsie.’ I looked at Finn and she didn’t laugh – well, what I had said wasn’t particularly funny – but she gave me a little nod, more like a single convulsive jerk. I saw the plaster around her throat.

Downstairs I showed Finn my study (‘out of bounds to everyone’), the living room, the kitchen. I pulled open the fridge door.

‘Feel free to take whatever you want. I don’t cook but I
do
shop.’

I pointed out tea and coffee and the hole where the washing machine would be and I told her about Linda and Sally and the routines. ‘And that’s about it, except of course that’s the garden’ – I pointed out of the window at the soggy undergrowth, the mulched heaps of leaves that hadn’t been cleared, the frayed edges of the balding lawn – ‘ungardened.’

Finn turned her head, but still I couldn’t tell if she saw anything at all. I peered into the fridge again and pulled out a carton of country vegetable soup.

‘I’m going to heat us up some soup. Why don’t you go and get freshened up in the bathroom, then we can have lunch together.’ She stood, stranded in the kitchen. ‘Upstairs,’ I said encouragingly, pointing, and watched as she turned slowly round and made her way up the broad shallow steps, one at a time and stopping on each step, so slowly, like a very old woman.

Sometimes I see trauma victims who don’t speak for weeks on end; sometimes words pour from them like a great muddy flood with no barriers. Quite recently a middle-aged man came to me after being in a train crash that he had been lucky to survive. All his life, he’d been reticent, buttoned up. In the crash he’d emptied his bowels (his phrase, through puckered-up lips) in shock, something that seemed to affect him as deeply as all the deaths he had witnessed. Afterwards, when he was released from hospital, he became incontinent with speech. He told me how he would stand at the bus stop, walk into a shop, stand at his front door, and tell anyone who came near him what had happened to him. He played the scene over and over, yet got no relief from its telling. It was just like scratching an unbearable itch. Finn would speak in her own time; when she spoke I would be there to hear, if it was to me she chose to speak. In the meantime she needed to be given a structure to feel safe in.

I looked at her as she lifted very small puddles of soup in her spoon and carried them carefully to her mouth. What would she say if she could talk?

‘Elsie gets back here at six,’ I said. ‘Some days it might be earlier; often I collect her from school myself. She’s excited that you’re coming. I will tell her only what we’ll tell other people: that you’re a student who is staying with us. Fiona Jones.’

Finn got up, the chair scraping noisily against the tiles of the floor in the kitchen that was too quiet, and took her bowl, still half-full of soup, over to the sink. She washed it and balanced it on the draining-board among all the other dishes, and she sat down at the table once more, facing me and not looking at me. She put her hands around the cup of tea I’d made for her and shivered. Then she raised her velvet eyes to mine and stared at me. It was the first time she had done so and I was unaccountably startled. I felt as if I could see into her skull.

‘You’re safe here, Finn,’ I said. ‘You don’t have to tell me anything unless you want to; you don’t have to do anything. But you’re safe.’

The second-hand on the kitchen clock, the glowing green digits clicking over on my radio clock, the deep metronome of the grandfather clock’s pendulum in the hall, all agreed with me that it was a long, slow afternoon. Time, which had always hurtled through my days, slowed to a painful dawdle.

I ran Finn a hot bath, which I filled with my favourite bath oil. She went into the bathroom, locked the door, and I heard the sound of undressing and of her getting in, but she was out again and dressed in the same clothes as before in under five minutes. I asked her to help me choose curtains for her room, and we knelt by the piles of fabric that I pulled out from under my bed where I’d stored them, and she watched as I held up pleated lengths and said nothing. So I chose her something cheerful in dull red and yellow and navy, though it was much too long for the small square window, and hung it up. I left her in her bedroom so she could unpack, thinking she might like to be alone there for a bit. Before I left the room I saw her looking into her open case at clothes which were all still in their packets. A few minutes later she came downstairs again and stood in the doorway of my study where I was tidying away folders. I took her out into the garden, hoping that the bulbs the previous owner was sure to have planted had poked through the neglected soil, but all we found were a few snowdrops in a cracked flowerpot.

We went back inside and I lit a fire (mostly consisting of firelighters and tightly crumpled balls of newspapers), and she sat a while in my only easy chair, staring into the erratic flames. I sat near her, on the rug, reading through chess problems I’d saved up from the week’s papers. Anatoly clattered through the cat flap and into the living room, and he pushed his moist jaw against my hunched knees a few times and then lay between us. Two women and a cat by the fire: it was almost cosy.

Then Finn spoke. Her voice was low, husky.

‘I’m bleeding.’

I looked in horror at her neck, but of course she didn’t mean that. Her eyebrows were puckered in a kind of vacant puzzlement.

‘That’s OK.’ I stood up. ‘I’ve got plenty of Tampax and towels and stuff in the bathroom. I should have thought to tell you. Come on.’

‘I’m bleeding,’ she said again, this time almost whispering. I took hold of her thin, chilly hand and pulled her to her feet. She was several inches shorter than me and she looked terribly young. Too young to bleed.

‘This,’ said Elsie, ‘is a shoulder.’ She plunged her thin rectangle of toast into the runny yolk and sucked it noisily; it slipped down her chin like yellow glue. ‘Do you have shoulders?’ She didn’t wait for a reply; it was as if Finn’s silence had loosened her own guarded tongue. ‘We had chicken nuggets today and Alexander Cassell’ – she pronounced it
Ale-xxonder
– ‘put his in his pocket and they
squished
together.’ She gave a squeal of appreciation and sucked her toast again. ‘Finished. Do you want to come and see my drawing?’ She slithered from her chair. ‘This way. My mummy says I draw better than her. Do you think that’s true? My favourite colour’s pink and Mummy’s is black but I hate black except I like Anatoly and he’s all black like a panther. What’s yours?’

Elsie didn’t seem to notice that Finn wasn’t replying. She displayed her picture of her house with a front door up to the roof and two crooked windows, she showed her how she could do somersaults, crashing into the legs of the chair, and then she demanded a video and together they sat through the whole of
101 Dalmatians
, Finn in the chair, Elsie on the rug, both staring at the screen full of puppies, Finn vacantly and Elsie avidly, and when I took Elsie up for her bath (‘why do I
always
have to have baths?’) Finn stayed staring at the blank screen.

Evenings would be the worst, I thought: stretches of time with just the two of us and no structure and Finn just sitting and waiting, but waiting for nothing. I thought of the way she’d looked at me. I rummaged through the freezer: Marks & Spencer steak and kidney pudding, Sainsbury’s chicken kiev, a packet of lasagne (serves two), spinach and cheese pie (serves one). I pulled out the lasagne and put it in the microwave to defrost. Perhaps there were some frozen peas. I wondered where Danny was; I wondered who he was with, and if he had sought comfort and pleasure elsewhere, taking his rage to a different bed. Was he with someone else now, as I nursed a mute invalid? Was he laying his roughened hands on someone else’s compliant body? For a few moments, at the thought, I could hardly breathe. I suppose he would say that I’d been unfaithful to him, in my fashion. Finn, sitting passively in the next-door room, represented a kind of treachery. I wished he was here now and I was heating up lasagne and peas for him instead; then we could have watched a movie on the telly and gone up to bed together and pressed up against each other in the dark. I wished that I could banish Finn, and my foolish and hasty decision to take her in, and return to the past of two days ago.

‘Here we are.’ I carried the tray into the living room, but Finn wasn’t there. I called upstairs, at first not loudly, then with greater impatience. No answer. Eventually I knocked at her bedroom door, then opened it. She lay, fully clothed, on her bed. Her thumb was in her mouth. I pulled the duvet over her, and as I did so her eyes opened. She glared at me and then turned her head to the wall.

And so ended Finn’s first day. Except later that night when I’d gone to bed myself and outside it was quite dark in the way that only the countryside can be dark, I heard a thump from Finn’s room. Then another, louder. I pulled on my dressing gown and padded along the chilly corridor. She lay quite asleep, both hands covering her face like someone hiding from an intrusive camera. I went back to my warm bed and heard nothing more except the hoot of an owl, the sigh of the wind, horrible unfiltered country sounds, until morning.