Chapter One
Insufficient Words
“We could have spent all that time together.”
“Say what happened, mum,” Toby said like a youngster asking for a favourite tale.
“We said we’d see each other at the Shakespeare. They were putting on two weeks of plays, and that night it was Macbeth.”
“Only they were showing films as well as putting plays on.”
“Let me tell it, Dominic.” When Lesley squeezed my hand I couldn’t tell whether she meant to be gentle or was using all her strength. “So it was Macbeth,” she said and closed her eyes as if she might be dreaming of the memory. “And I thought your father would have wanted me to see the film, so that’s where I waited for him.”
“And meanwhile dad was waiting at the theatre because he thought that was where you’d be.”
I saw Lesley do her best to grip our son’s hand, possibly to hush him. “Mobile phones weren’t around then,” she said, “and anyway we couldn’t have afforded them. So we never met that evening. Sometimes I dream we did.”
This made me realise “I’ve had a dream like that myself.”
“I’m glad,” Lesley said and clasped my hand a shade more firmly. “I hope it means we’re there together.”
Returning the pressure left me all the more aware how frail her hand was. Her high forehead bore a life’s worth of lines, and her rounded face had grown thinner, while her generous lips appeared to feel their weight whenever she produced a smile. I couldn’t avoid seeing how her eyes were faded, both their colour and the light in them. Somehow the childhood dent in her small slightly upturned nose reminded me most vividly of how she used to be, and my answer came out fierce to hide my feelings. “We’re together now.”
“I know, Dominic. All three of us.”
I met our son’s eyes across the hospital bed and saw acceptance. This was hardly the place to revive our differences, and I sent him a silent nod. I had to fend off the notion that by holding Lesley’s hands we were keeping her from leaving us. However much the heart attack might have taken out of her, we’d been assured that she was stable after the operation. All at once she looked more concerned than I was trying not to look. “Macy hasn’t seen me like this, has she?”
“Just Claudine has, mum. We didn’t think they’d want young children in the ward.”
“Tell Macy I’m getting better, won’t you? And when I am, don’t you think it would be lovely if we all went away together?”
“I’m sure it would. Aren’t you, dad?”
Lesley gave my hand a determined squeeze. “When we’re certain you’re up to it, Lesley,” I said.
Her eyes turned away to find Toby. “Do you remember the first time we took you abroad?”
“Disney World? Of course I do. The best ghost train ever and a whole lot more. I told them about it at school for weeks.”
I wished I weren’t reminded of other tales he’d told there. Lesley gave my hand a tug so faint it was close to imperceptible. “We’ll forget what happened afterwards,” she said.
I felt as though I’d spent decades in forgetting it and ignoring much more. Perhaps Lesley sensed my resistance, because she turned her gaze on me. “Just in case I’m not doing as well as we think, will you both make me a promise?”
“Don’t say that kind of thing, Lesley. Don’t think it either. It won’t help you get better.”
“You’re saying you won’t promise.”
“No, I’m saying we know you’ll be fine, because the surgeon told us.”
Though her gaze didn’t falter, her lips did, and I could only capitulate. “You haven’t said what you want.”
“Just be there for each other.”
For a disoriented moment I imagined she was echoing the vow I’d shared with Jim and Bobby, but she couldn’t know we had. “Of course we will,” I said.
“You as well, mum.”
“After I’ve gone, I mean.”
“Like dad says, don’t say that. It’s like wishing yourself away, and you aren’t going anywhere.”
I wanted to believe he meant this as unambiguously as he should. I was striving to hide my thoughts when Lesley said “And please forget that old obsession of yours, Dominic.”
“I think he’s come to terms with it by now,” Toby said.
I searched for a response I could safely make. “You could put it that way.”
I was afraid Lesley might realise how devious this was – I could see Toby did – but she said “Just be the family we should have been.”
“Then that has to include you as well,” I said.
“It will if you promise.”
“Then of course I will.”
“And I do,” Toby said.
Lesley gave our hands a final squeeze before resting hers together on the sheet, and I tried not to be reminded of the occasion of another promise – the last time I’d spoken to my father. Lesley closed her eyes, and I thought she’d fallen into a doze until she murmured “You never wrote a book, Dominic.”
“Neither of us did. You should, and put in everything you used to tell your students.”
Did she hear this? Her smile was so faint and fleeting that it could have been the product of a dream. I sat back from crouching towards the bed, and pain flared the length of my spine, impaling my hipbones as well. It had for years whenever I couldn’t avoid sitting forward, and I could only walk it off. “I’m going to have to move,” I said through my teeth before I managed to relax my jaw. “Won’t be long.”
Lesley gave no sign of having heard. “We’ll be here,” Toby said.
I supposed he had his wife in mind. I hobbled painfully into the corridor to find her reading Roberta Parkin’s book The Jargon of Concern. In it Bobby argued that the fashion for defining vulnerability often worsened the conditions and created too many of them. I couldn’t help recalling that Claudine had met my friend at Safe To Sleep when I’d sent Bobby to investigate, and her having Bobby’s book seemed indefinably ominous. “How is that, Claudine?” I said.
“She knows people.” As Claudine raised her small face her habitual look of deceptively languid alertness gave way to sympathy. “How’s Lesley?” she said.
“I think she may be sleeping. Go in by all means. I’ll be a few minutes.”
A passing male nurse gave her slim long-legged figure an appreciative glance and then another. She made me feel like a decrepit soft toy stuffed too full, not to mention leached of colour and supplied with spots to compensate. My lopsided hobbling took me to Men, where the water from the tap proved to be as hot as a notice warned, after which a ferocious hand dryer crumpled my skin. Moments later my hands grew as sweaty as the rest of me. The hospital felt oppressively concerned to fend off a winter chill, and I limped to the entrance in search of relief.
I had to go a good deal further for fresh air. An ambulance was reciting its movements as it backed towards the hospital, emitting a sharp smell of diesel. Patients with cigarettes clustered near a drain so that they could drop butts through the grid, while other smokers flourished metal substitutes. A prodigious pink-faced man in a frayed white bathrobe barely large enough for him stood eating curried chips with a plywood fork out of a plastic carton, a meal his partner – a dumpy morose woman in a pink track suit – had presumably brought him. As I moved away from the invasive smell the ambulance fell silent, isolating the voice of a woman with her back to me at one corner of the hospital.
Nobody was near her except a girl well short of teenage. Given the woman’s angular gestures and many of her words, I took her to be suffering from Tourette’s. I was about to retreat when the girl stared at me, and the woman swung around, revealing that she was on a phone. Her broad flattish face was highlighted with makeup, which emphasised her scowl. “What the fuck you looking at?” she demanded.
“I’ve no idea. Why don’t you tell me?” Rather than this I said “I couldn’t say.”
I should have left it there, but my saddened gaze lingered. “Fucking what?” she cried.
“You might like to restrain your language when a child can hear.”
“Don’t you fucking tell me how to talk in front of my own fucking kid. What are you creeping round here for?”
“My wife’s in hospital.”
“Hope they treat her better than my dad.” I mistook this for sympathy until her rage became plain. “The cunts are doing fucking shit for him.”
As I grasped she’d been saying as much on her phone, my heart jerked, or something near it did. I was afraid I might be having an attack, if nowhere near as serious as Lesley’s, until I realised what I’d felt. I snatched out my own mobile to see I’d inadvertently muted the sound. A message from Toby said Come back.
I stumbled as I ran or at any rate limped as fast as I could to the entrance. I had to dodge around several paramedics and their patients waiting on trolleys on my way to the ward. More than one of the hospital staff outdistanced me in the corridor, and in a sudden acute hope of seeing them pass Lesley’s ward I managed to put on more ungainly speed. I was in time to watch them disappear into the ward. More ominously still, my son and his wife were outside. “What’s—” I croaked and had to clear my throat to revive my withered voice. “What’s happened?” I said too loud.
Toby looked as if he thought I might blame him and Claudine, and I was dismayed to wonder what they could have said to Lesley in my absence. Their silence alarmed me even once I realised they were waiting for me to come close enough to let them keep their voices low. “It wasn’t long after you went out,” Toby said. “She had a pain.”
“What kind of pain?” When neither of them answered I said so urgently that it left my throat raw “What did she say?”
I saw Claudine willing Toby to respond. With visible reluctance he said “She couldn’t speak.”
I lurched past him, but he closed a hand around my arm. “Dad, they said we’re to stay outside till someone comes.”
More like a child than I wanted to sound I protested “Did they say me?”
“They meant any visitors, Dominic. Our whole family, that is.”
No doubt Claudine wanted her second comment to placate me, but I couldn’t welcome it just now. I stared at the doors of the ward in the hope they would open to show I’d no need to experience the panic that was turning my hands clammy and speeding up my heart until it ached while my cranium seemed to grow as fragile as a shell. Too much time crawled by before I turned away in case willing the wait to be over was prolonging it somehow – my perception of it, at any rate. I felt isolated and afraid, and meeting my son’s eyes offered no reassurance. I saw he was keeping some thought to himself, and I suspected Claudine shared it, especially when she said “Dominic, I’m sure it won’t be—”
“We don’t know if it’s the end or not,” I said so as to cut her off. “I just hope we all mean the same thing.”
I felt ashamed at once, not so much of my outburst as of having flinched from being too precise, but this wasn’t the occasion to attack their faith, however much it disturbed me. I didn’t realise anyone had come out of the ward until a man said “Mr Sheldrake.”
“Yes.”
It was Toby who answered before I swung around. “I believe he means me,” I said.
“She’s mine as well.”
I wanted to believe that Toby just meant Lesley was his mother – that he had no more than that in mind, let alone worse. I could only appeal to the plump ruddy doctor who might have been advertising health if not the sort of shape that undermined it. “Who are you looking for?”
“Mr Sheldrake?” Since we hadn’t previously met, he seemed anxious for the confirmation. When I nodded he said more quietly still “I’m sorry, Mr Sheldrake.”
“For what?”
“I don’t know if you should have left when you did. I’m afraid your wife suffered a relapse.”
The staff who’d passed me in the corridor were emerging very quietly from the ward. I hadn’t time to decide whether the doctor was expressing regret at my absence or convicting me of thoughtlessness. “How bad?” I pleaded.
“Mr Sheldrake, your wife is no longer in distress.”
“You’re telling me she’ll recover.” Now I couldn’t mistake his regret, and despite the relentless heat I began to shiver. “No,” I found it necessary to say out loud, “you’re saying she never will.”
“Please be aware the end was peaceful.”
I fought to keep my voice steady, because if I lost control of it the rest of me felt poised to follow. “Did she say anything?”
“She was beyond that, Mr Sheldrake.”
Before my words could grow unsafe to pronounce I said “Can I go to her?”
The doctor stood aside and motioned me into the ward without speaking. When Toby made to follow, Claudine took his arm to detain him. A screen concealed Lesley’s bed, and nobody was talking in the ward; I couldn’t even hear any breaths apart from my own uneven attempts. As I paced between the beds, feeling as if I were venturing into a funeral home, a nurse beckoned to me and wheeled back a corner of the screen. He closed me in as soon as I reached the bed.
Lesley was lying on her back. Her eyes were shut, her hands were clasped together on her breast, and I felt as if the last time I’d seen her in that position had been an omen I’d failed to read. I laid a hand on hers, only to find they were already colder than the hospital. Lines had been subtracted from her forehead, and her face looked as calm as a dreamless sleep. When I kissed her brow it felt as empty as I did. “Be somewhere beautiful,” I whispered for only her to hear, if anybody heard at all.
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