Rory was jealous of Theo.
It seemed perfectly clear now. He was jealous of his own son, of how much his son was loved by Hugh, jealous of how hard Hugh was prepared to fight for the boy, not even his own. He wondered if Archie would have gone to Hell and back for his son. Rory wondered whether, if he’d asked him, Hugh would have gone to Hell and back for him.
‘You don’t love me any more, do you, Hugh?’ Rory hadn’t meant to ask the question and covered his tracks immediately with sarcasm. ‘Just out of interest, when did love turn to hate? When I betrayed you with a kiss?’
Hugh looked surprised, even shocked. ‘I don’t hate you. For reasons I don’t quite understand, Rory, I think I still love you. In spite of everything. Certainly I pity you.’
‘Pity? For Christ’s sake, why?’
‘I pity you because you’ve never really known Theo or been loved by him. I have, and neither you nor Flora can take that away from me. It’s something I’ve learned since he was born, something fatherhood has taught me. Sexual love makes one vulnerable, weak - foolish sometimes. But paternal love - that makes one unassailable.’
Much to Hugh’s surprise, Rory offered him a lift as far as Aldeburgh where he’d arranged to meet Ettie. Hugh declined, saying he felt he needed time for reflection and that he’d found a railway carriage was as good a place as any for that purpose.
Hugh was even more surprised when, as the two men parted, Rory offered him his hand. Hugh hesitated for a moment. As they shook, he remembered the last time he’d allowed himself to touch Rory, nine years ago, on the night Grace lost the baby, when he’d placed an arm round his shoulders to comfort him.
Dora was weeding in the garden behind the house when the car drew up. She heard the noisy rattle of the gate latch, the pained squeak of its hinges, all with what appeared at the time, but perhaps it was only with hindsight, to be a preternatural clarity. She heard footsteps on the gravel path, more than one pair. She struggled to her feet, wondering whether Ettie and Rory had returned early for some reason. The flutter of concern was there even before Dora rounded the corner of the house and saw the police constable remove his helmet before raising his hand to the doorbell. He was accompanied by a young WPC.
Dora knew at once.
She never forgave herself for the thought that entered her head then, a thought too sudden to suppress, too heartfelt to deny. Her mind was seared in that moment and she bore a guilty scar ever after.
‘Take Ettie… Take Flora… Don’t take Rory! Dear God in Heaven, please, please, don’t take Rory.’
For once, Dora’s prayers were answered.
Flora knew when it happened. She didn’t know what had happened, but she knew precisely when. At ten to five, as she served up baked beans on toast for Theo’s tea, she was suddenly overwhelmed with anxiety. She felt a shooting pain on her right side, her hand lost all sensation and she dropped the small saucepan and its contents on to the table.
Theo screamed as the hot beans splashed his hand and arm and he ran from the kitchen, shouting, ‘Daddy! Daddy!’ Flora bent over, clutching the table for support. She closed her eyes against the pain and nausea and everything was red.
Grace had no inkling until she received a phone call from Archie. She was on her way out with the children to a birthday barbecue party. She would much rather have got a babysitter and gone to Rory’s concert at Snape, but the birthday boy was Colin’s best friend and he (or the boy’s mother) had been kind enough to invite Charlotte as well. Grace was looking forward to a quiet dinner on her own with perhaps a glass of wine when Archie rang.
He told her straight away that Rory wasn’t dead but that she should prepare herself for bad news. Grace remembered afterwards feeling both terrified and irritated with Archie - how exactly did one prepare oneself for bad news?
She sat down because she knew that’s what people did in films.
At ten minutes to five Rory was driving from Aldeburgh to Snape with Ettie sitting beside him in the passenger seat. It was a fine evening and they were enjoying the drive along dusty country lanes. Stationary at a T-junction, waiting for a stream of traffic to pass so that he could turn right, Rory had wound his window down and was resting his elbow on the car door. His shirtsleeve was rolled up and he could feel the late afternoon sun burning his forearm as his fingers drummed Bach impatiently on the hot metal roof of the car.
To her left, Ettie registered a lorry travelling at speed along the main carriageway. It veered suddenly into the middle of the road. Ettie said, ‘Oh, my Lord’, then the lorry came hurtling towards them. By the time Rory realised what was going to happen, the car had already been hit on Ettie’s side and was turning over. He knew before the car hit the ground that his hand and arm would be crushed. He felt no pain but thought he sensed, even heard, bones snapping. The car landed on its side in a ditch with Rory’s hand between the car and the ground. Ettie hung above him, trapped by her seat belt. Still conscious, Rory saw that his white shirt and trousers were gradually turning red. He still felt no pain and turned his head gingerly towards Ettie who was unconscious. Blood was spurting from her throat, slashed by flying glass and he realised the blood soaking into his clothes was mostly Ettie’s. He thought she was probably dead or dying. Reaching with his good hand to take hold of hers, he prayed that he too would die soon.
Apparently there are twenty-seven bones in the hand. Rory broke or fractured fifteen.
They wanted to amputate, insisting that the hand was irreparable and that Rory would have a better quality of life and be able to do more for himself if he had a prosthetic hand. He refused. Or rather he said nothing, thereby withholding his consent to the amputation. They brought him a form to sign - he was left-handed so he could still write - but he just turned his face away.
The surgeon had to patch up the hand and told us that he thought he’d managed to do ‘a pretty good job given the extent of the injuries’. We were suitably grateful. He told us that the hand would be effectively useless and would become riddled with arthritis, causing a lot of pain. He also told us that the blood circulation would be poor and Rory would feel the cold a lot. He didn’t mention the piano and we didn’t really need to ask, but I suppose Dora had to hear the words. She couldn’t let go until she heard them and so she asked. The surgeon lowered his voice appropriately and told us Rory would never play with his right hand again. In the silence that ensued he informed us that he had two of Rory’s recordings and that it was ‘a terrible tragedy’.
Rory died in that crash. The man they cut out of the crushed and twisted metal wasn’t my brother. My brother was a pianist and he lived for music. It was the only thing he really cared about. It meant more to him than his children, more even than me. The broken man they loaded on to a stretcher would never play the piano again and so he wasn’t Rory.
I didn’t know where that man had gone. Sometimes when I sat by Rory’s bed and looked into his hopeless eyes and saw nothing but emptiness, heard nothing but his silence, I thought I knew where the real Rory, my Rory was.
In Hell.
Hell for Rory was silence.
Chapter 15
We couldn’t take in what had happened. Even after the initial shock had passed we couldn’t assimilate the information, get to grips with the facts of Ettie being dead and Rory being maimed. Because the two events happened simultaneously we were unable to prioritise them. It was impossible to say with any real conviction, ‘Thank God Rory survived’ (although Hugh did, of course, scraping the barrel for something his precious God had got right). We knew that Rory would much rather have died; that continuing to live without being able to play was a kind of living death, was perhaps for Rory worse than death. But we all said Rory had been lucky. We all knew that he hadn’t.
Ettie’s death should have put Rory’s loss in some kind of perspective but somehow it didn’t. It was a horrible way to die, but Ettie would have said she’d had a good life. She was spared long, lingering illness, the infirmity and indignities of
old age. It sounds callous, but what happened to Rory seemed to me worse, much worse. He was thirty-two, the breadwinner, and his children were eight and five years old. He had no skills other than playing the piano and he was not insured against injury - a mixture of arrogance and economy.
I was angry, but I didn’t really understand why. I was angry that the accident had happened, that it wasn’t even Rory’s fault, but I was also angry that I didn’t know how to grieve. I felt Rory had somehow been cheated - of his life and career, but also of the family’s grief. His loss was eclipsed by Ettie’s gruesome death, by her funeral, by the empty chair at Orchard Farm.
But at the same time I felt poor Ettie had been cheated too - and not just by her premature death. Life had cheated Ettie. Even in death she had to share her tragedy with Rory.
Rory stopped talking and I stopped drinking. I did a deal with God.
I don’t think it struck anyone immediately that Rory had stopped talking. Only Grace was allowed to visit to begin with and when the rest of us got to see him he was either unconscious or groggy after an operation on his hand. We all assumed he must be speaking to somebody else. Information about Rory’s condition and his state of mind filtered back to us but it came via doctors, nurses and surgeons, not Rory.
He wouldn’t speak, write notes or give any indication of comprehension, assent, anything that would have helped us to look after him or share the burden of his loss. He appeared to take painkillers but we discovered later when he overdosed that he’d merely pretended to swallow them, then hoarded them. (The willpower required to do that in a state of post-operative pain gives some indication of what we were up against.) He was prescribed anti-depressants but wouldn’t take them. They were also prescribed for Grace, who did.
As soon as he was physically fit enough to be on his feet he was allowed some independence. Too much. He limped off in his dressing gown one morning and was found hanging from a high window in the Gents’ toilet. He was discovered by a hospital porter, alive but unconscious. The man bore his weight and yelled until somebody came to cut Rory down.
Grace said it was just a cry for help, that Rory must have known he might be found before he was dead. She needed to believe that - we all did - and so no one contradicted her. No one mentioned Rory’s frightening determination, his obsessive single-mindedness. No one told Grace (and we supposed she didn’t know) that at the age of seven Rory had run away from school and lived rough, travelling across two counties before his pocket money ran out, he collapsed and was found. No one told her that Rory had played the silence card before, nor that he’d only spoken again when he’d got what he wanted.
I knew Rory had meant to die. It had probably taken him longer than expected to tie the knot in his dressing gown cord with only one working hand. He probably didn’t know that when you’re hanged it’s usually the drop and the broken neck that kills you. He probably underestimated how long it would take him to asphyxiate. Who knows whether Rory was thinking straight? (Since he was trying to kill himself, I think we can assume he wasn’t.) But how on earth can you gauge the state of mind of someone who never speaks or reacts, who doesn’t even seem to hear?
After the botched hanging Archie was a broken man. A combination of grief, shock and old age banished my father to an incoherent twilight world of half-truths and memories. We told him Rory was on the mend; we even fabricated conversations with him. Archie meanwhile was adrift somewhere between the present and the past. He became confused and often called Theo, ‘Rory’, asking him to play the piano - a senile substitution that was understandable, but one which brought me out in a cold sweat every time. When Rory finally came home - still not speaking - his father didn’t appear to recognise him. He asked Theo to tell him ‘who the thin young man was’.
Archie wasn’t the only one who wondered who the thin young man was.
Grace had a label for it: ‘elective mutism’. She seemed to derive some comfort from talking about the condition. Perhaps she thought a diagnosis would speed recovery. Grace explained it could be a reaction to trauma and that recovery was therefore likely. It was simply a matter of time.
I think Grace probably understood what was really going on - she wasn’t stupid - but she couldn’t afford to confront too much reality. She was the one who had to tuck the kids up at night and tell them Daddy would get better one day. I think she probably knew that what we were fighting wasn’t the destructive power of trauma but simply Rory’s will.
He had lost the ability to play. For ever.
There was nothing more to say.
Rory had a limited number of ways in which he could try to despatch himself. After the hanging attempt he was sectioned and put on suicide watch. He was allowed nothing he could use to harm himself: no glass, knives or scissors, no razor blades. He was encouraged to walk in the grounds of the mental hospital with a carer, but once he realised he was too weak to run away he lost any interest in these excursions.
Eventually he refused all food and most liquid. He appeared to think he could gradually starve himself to death. Or maybe he just wanted to be in a coma and achieve oblivion. Who knows? He didn’t say.
His psychiatrist, Dr Reilly, a warm, gentle woman to whom Rory never spoke, told him that he wouldn’t succeed in killing himself this way. As soon as his condition became critical they would put him on a glucose drip that would save his life. When he was no longer in danger they would dismantle the drip and let him go back to starving himself. This was perhaps the first time Rory realised he was up against a will as formidable as his own. Dr Reilly pointed out that all he would achieve by playing this cat-and-mouse game was huge amounts of distress for his wife and children who had the job of visiting and seeing him in a state of semi-starvation.
Dr Reilly was a courageous and determined woman and also a music lover. She was of the ‘tough love’ school and she spared Rory nothing. Playing her trump card, she told him she’d overheard Colin say he didn’t think Daddy would ever speak to them again, so what was the point of them visiting?
Rory said nothing.
She tried on one occasion to speak to Rory of music. His only reaction apparently was to shut his eyes. If Dr Reilly ever got any other reaction from him - a guilty look, an angry grunt, a mute appeal for mercy - she never mentioned it to us.
Nothing and nobody got through.
1974
Flora, Hugh and Theo were picking blackberries at Orchard Farm. There was a bumper crop and Dora had insisted they make jam ‘as usual’, as it was Archie’s favourite. Jam-making had always been Ettie’s job. Flora wondered if Dora thought they would all miss her less if jars of blackberry jam appeared on the table in September, as they had done for as long as anyone could remember.
Hugh handed a full china bowl to Theo and told him to carry it carefully indoors and place it on the kitchen table. The boy grasped the bowl with sticky, purple fingers and set off up the garden.
‘I think he’s eaten as many as he’s picked,’ Hugh said with a smile.
‘Oh, no - he’s eaten a lot more.’
Hugh smiled again and watched Theo plodding up the garden path. Flora watched Hugh watching and thought, if it weren’t for the children, how rarely any of the adults would smile these days.
Hugh bent to his task again and after a moment said, ‘I’d like to go and visit Rory in hospital.’
‘Oh, don’t be such a masochist! You’re the last person in the world he’d want to see. He doesn’t even acknowledge his children.’
‘No, I know. But I’d like to go and see him just the same. He is my brother-in-law.’
‘That’s not why you want to see him.’
‘No, I suppose not. But I need to see him. I don’t think I’ll be able to come to terms with… with what has happened to him until I do. In any case, it’ll look a bit odd if I don’t go and visit him soon. It’s been nearly two weeks. And Dora thinks I’ll be able to offer some spiritual comfort, talking man to man.’
‘Talking? Rory doesn�
��t speak! He’ll just ignore you. Or worse - he’ll think you’ve come to preach at him.’
‘No, he won’t think that. He knows I wouldn’t have the nerve. I’ve been quite frank with him about my future.’
‘You’ve told him you want to give up the ministry?’
‘Yes. And I told him I know about Theo.’
‘Good God! When?’
‘The day of the accident. I met Rory in town. I’d asked to see him because there were things we needed to discuss.’
‘What things?’
‘Oh, it doesn’t matter now. Events have rather overtaken us. We attempted to indulge in a little mutual blackmail but I think we actually parted on pretty good terms. We seemed to understand each other.’
‘Wonders will never cease.’
‘I’m not sure. It wasn’t exactly a truce, more of a ceasefire.’
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