Intensive Care

by Rosemary Friedman

Genres: General Fiction

Synopsis

Professor Sidney Sands, wife of a mathematician and devoted mother of a young son, is researching a cure for a fatal lung disease when ironically she is diagnosed with the very condition she is investigating. Does this entitle her to jump the queue for scarce donor organs?

Doubts are raised about the hidden agenda beneath the life and death decisions doctors have to make. Will time run out before young Liverpool supporter, Colin Rafferty, realises his ambition of watching the World Cup? Will popular TV soap star Gavin Wyatt have to be written out before the end of the series? Can US attorney Martin Bond's money save his seventeen-year-old daughter, Anna?

Intensive Care reveals the highly charged human drama that lies behind 'spare-part' surgery. The anguished lives of those who wait for one man's verdict are portrayed with great insight, sensitivity and compassion. It grips from start to finish.

Release date: June 30, 2013

Publisher: Quercus Publishing

Print pages: 363

Sample

According to the Audemars Piguet Fletcher had given her for her birthday, the minuscule face of which she found increasingly hard to read, it was getting on for six o’clock and Harrods had promised to deliver the ice-cream bombe by half-past five at the latest.

At the age of seventy-two, Clarice Goddard entertained at her Knightsbridge home increasingly rarely. She and Fletcher had made a conscious decision to ignore Jung’s admonition to spend the afternoon of their lives differently from the morning, and had decided to march to the rhythm of their psychic rather than their corporeal ages. While at weekends they were comfortably tucked up in bed by ten with their reading specs, the newspapers and the TV, there were few nights in the week, which they spent in town, that they did not put in appearance at one function or another: charity concerts, Save the Children or Friends of the Tate, appropriately kitted out for the part. Socialising was a full-time job; at her time of life, just keeping the ancient monument that was her well-preserved body in working order was a full-time job. A glance at the Harpers & Queen diary with its gold tooled initials – for which she surreptitiously removed the coupon from the magazine in one waiting-room or other each November – revealed a series of appointments which lined the pockets of various dental and medical practitioners in the environs of Harley Street. She was waited upon in addition by a hairdresser, who not only ensured that she never went grey, but who cut her thinning hair with the kind of attention bestowed on the topiary, privet swans and eagles which graced the lawns of Meadowlands, their Norfolk home, plus a chiropodist (podiatrists they called themselves now), a beauty therapist (depilation and eyelash tint), a diet counsellor (Fletcher had already had one coronary bypass operation and she was determined he should not have another), a masseuse, and sundry reflexologists, acupuncturists, thallaso-, aroma-, and whichever other therapists happened to be in vogue. Add to that the dressmaker she shared with Her Majesty the Queen, the milliner who ensured she was suitably (though not ostentatiously) hatted for Ascot and the Royal Garden Party (where she was always amazed to discover that Her Majesty neglected to provide paper napkins because of the consequent litter), the corsetière where they kept her vital statistics on file, the old Greek where she had her shoes hand-made for a sum which made her wince, and the smiling manicurist who came from Hong Kong and attended her at the flat.


Clarice was proud of her hands with their long fingers, the knuckles only negligibly thickened by arthritic changes, their tapering almond-shaped nails with a smooth coating of creamy varnish, the flattering circles of platinum and diamonds and the handsome square-cut emerald which matched exactly the poule de soie of the figure-hugging top she wore over her black taffeta skirt, and which reflected, in the purest of translucent greens, the dancing light from the newly-cleaned crystal chandelier. She had a thing about hands. In a man it was the first thing she looked at. It was one of the reasons she had married Fletcher, possibly the only reason. They had little in common. She had thrown in her lot with the fledgling banker on her return from her Swiss finishing school largely to avoid having to make a decision about what to do with her life from the unexciting choices on offer, and to escape from the paternalistic constraints of a home where a good marriage, for the three girls at any rate, was, in accordance with the precepts of Jane Austen and the post-war years, the quintessence of achievement.

She had met Fletcher at a ball – where else? – and the solid warmth of his unambiguous response to her body as he steered her clumsily round the dance floor excited her far less than his immaculate hands, proficient and strong, on the steering wheel of the family Bentley as he drove her home to Groom Place.


They had been married at Meadowlands and the honeymoon, paid for by Fletcher’s father who was chairman of the bank, had been spent at the Hotel Scribe in Paris and the Negresco in Nice. As far as sex was concerned, Clarice, who had been a virgin at the time both in body and mind, could take it or leave it, and while Fletcher took it, at opportunities both available and unavailable, she left the mechanics of it to him and was happy to let him get on with it while, neither liking nor disliking what seemed to her a grossly overrated pastime, her mind was elsewhere. He was a good husband. Of that there was no doubt. While he had kept his marriage vows to love and to cherish her, about which there was not the slightest degree of dissimulation, once the children began to arrive reservations started to infiltrate her preoccupied mind about his promise to remain faithful to her, but as things turned out she was hardly the one to talk. After fifteen years of a relatively harmonious marriage in which both she and Fletcher settled down into their respective places, Clarice, in a belated sexual awakening which concealed itself in a bout of unaccustomed depression, became uncomfortably aware that there was something lacking in her life and that what she desperately needed was the touch of a stranger: the exploration of another body and another mind. She found herself, for a moment too long, holding the gaze of unknown men, blushing, like a young girl, at the attentions of the least likely of them.

In an attempt to accommodate Fletcher, who spent his weekends, when it was not the season for shooting, on the golf course, she had agreed, whilst he was in Japan on business, to take lessons from the pro at his club so that they might enjoy golfing holidays together. The pro, whose name was Mike Beasley, had found it necessary to stand behind her and put his muscular arms around her body in order to demonstrate the correct back swing, and it neither surprised nor disgusted his pupil when she swivelled in his grasp one day to find a passionate tongue in her mouth. Mike had accepted a position as golf pro on a new Robert Trent golf course near Marbella. Their short-lived affair had astonished Clarice only in so far as her own responses were concerned. In an anonymous hotel room above a Surrey pub, she had flung off her accustomed modesty together with her underwear and kneeled to take his powerful penis in her mouth, giving it the attention and regard she had refused, point-blank, no matter what inducements he offered, to bestow upon Fletcher’s no less accomplished organ. Oblivious to the fact that her cries of pleasure could be heard through the afternoon window which was pulled hastily shut by her erect Adonis, she had screamed and begged in a crescendo of delight, which afterwards she was amazed to find had come from her own vocal chords.


If she shut her eyes now, even after all these years, she could have drawn a map of her lover’s lean body – with its carpet of curled hair that met the long line extending from his penis to his deep navel in the front and petered out at the base of his spine at the sharp divide of his trim buttocks – which she had been unable to resist smothering with uninhibited kisses. All that had been long ago. Back safely in Fletcher’s bed, while her body had been willing to abandon itself to an experience she had found quite mind-blowing, to coin a phrase, her authoritarian mindset was not, and both had shrivelled back into apathetic acceptance, neither welcoming nor complaining of his advances. It was some years now since they had settled comfortably into the more undemanding routines of companionship. She neither knew nor cared what Fletcher did with his undiminished sex drive. Since that time the mutual dependency which couples in their advancing years mistook for love had developed between them. Each cared when the other was ill, mentally out of sorts, or unable to cope with what had become an increasingly alien and often hostile world apparently run by children. The unspoken fear that, sooner or later one of them was bound to lose the other as a result of age, illness, or a combination of both, strengthened the bond between them. Next year – it was hard to believe – they would celebrate half a century of marriage to each other, an aberration in this day and age, and they were already discussing how to celebrate the momentous occasion that coincided neatly (she liked everything to be neat) with the millennium. Clarice, in a rush of unrealistic benevolence, had suggested that they took their entire tribe, children and grandchildren, on a family holiday to some exotic location. Fletcher, who had been shaving at the time, almost cut his chin with the old-fashioned razor by which he still swore. He raised his bushy eyebrows in the bathroom mirror and said how could you live for a day, let alone a week, in the midst of a brood which included the four warring siblings that were their own children and a diverse assortment of infants and teenagers, some of whom had embraced one or other of the prevalent weird cults, pierced and adorned their bodies in the most bizarre and primitive fashion, were slaves to impossible feeding regimes, were in many instances attached to undesirable partners, and in any event were more than likely to be in the midst of examinations or in an alternative hemisphere. Fletcher was right of course. It had been a romantic dream on Clarice’s part as she imagined them all on a deserted island skipping scantily clad round some tropical beach, as in a Boucher painting, in an excess of love and goodwill. In the event they had settled for a cocktail party at Claridge’s and were preparing the guest list, already reduced by natural wastage.


When the front doorbell rang, breaking into her reverie, Clarice guessed it must be the ice-cream bombe she had ordered to accompany the tropical fruit salad prepared by Milly, the Filipina maid who had been in her employ for more than twenty years and was more of a friend than a servant. The dessert would satisfy the taste of those of her six dinner guests – the table would only accommodate eight – who had a sweet tooth. With the small heels of her black satin pumps sinking into the deep velvet pile of the carpet, she made her way along the hall, hurrying in case the delivery boy, although it was usually quite an elderly man these days possessed of old-fashioned courtesy, assumed there was no one at home and took the dessert away again.

Opening the front door with the spyhole and several locks with which they safeguarded themselves against intruders at night, Clarice was ready to register her complaint about the tardiness of the delivery (which she would insist be passed on to the manager of the Food Hall). But it was not the bombe.


Two youths, balaclavas over their heads, pushed their way roughly past her, pausing only to turn the Banham in the lock and remove it from the keyhole. In the space of a few seconds a dialogue took place in Clarice’s mind: there had been a number of ‘incidents’ in the vicinity recently. She should not have opened the door. Murphy the doorman, a constant vigilante, should not have let the two into the building. She never opened the door without looking first through the spyhole – Fletcher had warned her often enough. Fletcher would be back any minute to put on his black tie and organise the drinks. So would Milly, who had gone home to change before she waited at table. The police, she must telephone the police… The two were there before her, ripping the instrument (which sat on the satinwood console table and matched the dove-grey Brussels weave carpet) from its socket. One of them wore blue jeans, a brown leather jacket and heavy walking boots, the other a track-suit, with a white stripe down the leg, and trainers.

‘Safe keys.’ The taller of the two held out a brown hand, as if she kept the key of the safe about her person. Hesitating for only a moment, she realised that the other young man, the one who had ripped the telephone from the wall and wound the severed flex neatly round his pale fingers, had whipped agilely behind her and was holding what felt suspiciously like the blade of a knife to her throat. She grasped, for the first time, although even now it did not really sink in, that she was in serious trouble.

‘Hand over the fucking keys, Grandma.’ The voice was menacing but paradoxically it was the appellation which offended her. Although she was indeed a grandmother several times over, she hated to be categorised as such, preferring to regard herself as a still youngish woman who just happened to have grandchildren, rather than as a stereotypical grandmother, which according to her children for whom she refused to babysit, she was not. The knife was pressing uncomfortably hard against her Adam’s apple.

‘I don’t have the key…’ She admired the fact that she had kept her cool and not allowed herself to be intimidated, but did not recognise the quavering sound of her own voice.


‘Bullshit!’

‘My husband has the key…’

‘Don’t give me that crap.’

‘He’ll be here any minute.’ She looked involuntarily at the Audemars Piguet before it was snatched roughly from her wrist, burning the skin and bringing tears to her eyes. She sobbed with self-pity as the emerald solitaire and the diamond eternity rings were torn from her fingers, bruising and scraping the knuckles and making them bleed. This was getting decidedly unfunny. She wished fervently that she had allowed Fletcher to connect them to Red Alert as he had suggested, the advertisements for which depicted an elderly, grey-haired woman with whom she had no wish to identify, sprawled unconscious on the floor.

‘Move!’ The coarse voice, which clearly belonged to someone of the lower denominations, was tense. Mention of Fletcher’s imminent return had made him uncertain. Deciding that it was preferable to lose her jewellery and whatever valuables Fletcher had in the safe rather than her life, Clarice led her careful way to the bedroom, terrified that the knife blade, which was still at her throat, would slip. Opening a cupboard she removed the safe key from beneath a pile of Fletcher’s impeccably ironed and neatly folded shirts. As she turned to hand it to her captors she realised with shock that the smaller man of the two was unzipping his jeans. Oh God, surely not that. This was turning into a real nightmare. Surely that was not what they wanted from a woman of her age? She tried to remember whether one was supposed to struggle or submit when threatened with sexual assault and prayed that it would not be what they referred to in the newspapers as an ‘indecent’ one, as if any of it were decent. She tried not to stare as the man, who had a missing tip to his finger, extracted his purple penis and proceeded in full view of her to urinate on the ivory carpet, a deed to which she reacted with almost as much disgust as if she had in fact been raped. Pulling herself together (a carpet was, after all, only a carpet when all was said and done) Clarice decided to try reason.


‘Listen you two, why don’t we try to sort this out between us…?’

‘Shut your fuckin’ gob.’ The urinating man had now jumped up on to the bed and was in the process of defecating on her quilt. This was going too far. She thought that she would faint. That she was going to be sick. Aware of the knife, pressed harder now to her throat, she decided that the entire episode, which seemed to have lasted for ever but which had taken no more than a few moments, was not happening to her and that she was dreaming it. She led the way into the dining-room where, on the drawn-thread tablecloth, translucent slices of smoked salmon were tastefully arranged on blue glass plates, each with its lemon half, to await her guests. As she moved towards the portrait of herself, for which she had worn a guipure lace dress to emphasise her tiny waist and which had been painted at the time of her marriage, an outstretched hand removed the cling-film and helped itself to a grubby fistful of smoked salmon which disappeared rapidly beneath the balaclava. Reverting to dinner party mode, she thought irrationally – what strange tricks the mind played! – that as the hostess she would have to make do with half an avocado and pretend that she did not care for salmon.

As she struggled to remove the portrait concealing the wall safe, she realised that she had been half expecting some flattering comment on the likeness, which had been captured in pastel colours by quite a well-known artist.

‘Get the fuck on with it.’ The words were accompanied by an unexpectedly sharp blow to her ear, making her dizzy. The key was snatched preremptorily from her hand and inserted into the lock. This left the tumbler with its arrow and its dedicated code, which she had used only a short while ago to get her emerald ring from the safe. Both the six digits, and the number of turns of the marked wheel which must be executed in specified directions with each entry, refused to come. She knew that the first two numbers had to do with their eldest daughter’s birthday, which was on the 22nd of March, unless it was the youngest’s on August the 15th. Either 22 or 15 followed by 99 – which was what the doctor used to make you say when he wanted to look down your throat and which they had decided was easy to remember – then the year in which Fletcher had been born or was it the date of his birthday? She tried 22, turning the tumbler four times to the left and trying to get her shaking hand to stop the dial precisely on the line, then three turns to the right and 99, two more to the left and 23, the 23rd of May. She pulled the handle. Nothing happened. It must have been 24, 1924, the year Fletcher had been born…


There was another blow, this time to the other ear. It was no good, her mind had seized up. A fist in her back brought her to her knees as a frantic hand wrenched at the unyielding handle to the safe.

‘I’m sorry,’ she heard herself apologising. ‘I can’t remember the combination.’

‘She’s ’aving us on.’

‘’Aving us on are you, Grandma?’ A kick from the heavy boot flattened her on to her back on the narrow stretch of parquet between the chairs and the wall, which smelled of the liquid wax Milly had applied that morning.

‘Leave it. The silly bitch ’as lost ’er marbles.’

There was a crash from above as the crisp tablecloth was pulled from beneath the place settings, sending shards of blue glass, slivers of smoked salmon and halves of muslin-wrapped lemon scudding over the floor. Clarice thought how concerned her grandfather would have been at the decimation of the set of plates which he had brought back from Murano as a present for her grandmother and which had been in the family for so long. The tablecloth was used as a container to hold what she assumed (she was unable to see) were her silver candlesticks and cutlery, the wine coasters and anything else that was of value from the table, while her captor hastened to bind her hands and feet with the telephone flex, which he slashed into two and tied in cruelly tight knots. Slipping the knife into his waistband, he aimed a series of vicious kicks at her body.

‘Cut it out, Wayne!’

‘Wayne! Wayne? Fucking fuckhead!’ Taking his anger at his companion’s indiscretion out on Clarice, her assailant kicked her sharply, several times, in the region of her kidneys. Although the pain was worse than that of childbirth and made her want to vomit, the chandelier on the ceiling was revolving and she was soon past feeling it. She no longer thought, no longer cared. ‘Fucking Paki!’ Using his full force, the youth brought his foot down, again and again until he heard the satisfactory crack of bone.


*   *  *  *  *

Fletcher’s first intimation that all was not well was that Murphy, a proud Janus, was not at his usual post in the pillared foyer, sitting at his desk near the lift from which he vetted all comers to the building. Assuming that the porter had been summoned by one of the tenants to replace an out-of-reach light bulb, or that he was delivering a parcel, Fletcher took the lift to the second floor as usual, where h. . .