‘He still won’t want to see you. He doesn’t want to see anyone.’
‘I assure you, if he gives me the slightest indication that my presence is unwelcome, I’ll leave immediately.’
Flora looked up and saw Theo running towards them, waving an empty bowl. ‘If Rory gives you the slightest indication of anything, Hugh, you will have achieved more than all the rest of us put together.’
Hugh sat in silence, his hands folded in his lap, his head bowed. Occasionally he would look up and turn his head towards the bed where Rory lay quite still, facing the wall. Each time he did so, the sight of Rory’s right arm in plaster, the hand completely obscured by bandages, caused Hugh’s stomach to churn. Each time the sight came as a shock, as if he’d expected something to have changed, as if the shattered body might somehow have healed itself while he’d looked away. Each time, Hugh could not prevent himself from looking away again, his body and mind racked with the desire to take this man in his arms, hold him and comfort him, even though he knew no comfort was possible, no comfort from him was even acceptable. Hugh steeled himself to look back again.
He couldn’t see much of Rory’s face. His hair was untidy and unwashed, his face encrusted with several days’ stubble and scabs of dried blood where his face had been cut by flying glass. One sleeve had been cut from his pyjama jacket to accommodate the plaster cast. Hugh noted that the plain white pyjamas looked expensive. Linen probably. Grace, ever thoughtful, would have brought him linen pyjamas to keep him cool in the overheated hospital. Rory’s good left hand lay inert on the bedspread, as beautiful as a Michelangelo sculpture. And as lifeless, Hugh thought.
He wondered if Rory would prefer him to leave. He thought so, but Rory had made no move to indicate this. But then he barely reacted to anyone or anything. Grace had said he was refusing food and drink now. The poor girl was half out of her mind with worry. Hugh wondered how much more she would be able to take. He remembered the lie he used to tell sick and bereaved parishioners: that God never sends us more than we can bear. He’d believed it then.
Hugh started to speak before he’d even decided what he would say. ‘Rory, if you want me to leave, I will. Raise your hand, give me some indication. I don’t expect you to speak. Not to me. But if you don’t tell me to go, I will speak to you. There’s something I’d like to say.’
There was a noise of rattling trolleys in the corridor. Hugh waited but Rory said nothing and remained motionless.
‘I imagine what you want most in the world at this moment is… to be dead.’ Hugh sensed rather than saw a tensing of the body. The slack jaw muscles at the side of Rory’s expressionless face twitched briefly before relaxing again into their customary passivity. ‘I imagine you’re thinking, if only I’d died instead of Ettie.’ Rory closed his eyes for a few seconds, then opened them again, still averting his gaze from Hugh who continued, his voice low. ‘When I realised I was going to have to live without God… without love… from God, from any man - I thought I wanted to die. I thought there’d never been such a useless, sterile, ridiculous life as mine.’ He smiled ruefully. ‘Oh, I can see why you used to make fun of me. What a pathetic figure I must have seemed to you! Probably still do. Not just pathetic - hypocritical. Finding out that Theo wasn’t even mine was the final blow. It seemed as if everything had been taken from me: my God, my wife, my son, my sense of myself as… a man. I think you must be able to understand some of this, Rory. I know you won’t be able to respect my seemingly infinite capacity for self-delusion, but perhaps now you might pity me for it. Or maybe not. I took Flora away from you. I don’t expect you ever to forgive me for that.’
Hugh paused and wiped his upper lip where sweat was collecting. Rory had given no indication he was listening. His chest rose and fell steadily and Hugh wondered if he was asleep. He looked away from the bed and clasped his hands together, staring down at his feet.
‘I saw myself as a priest. And a family man. I never actually saw me. You were the only one who saw me for what I was. I was concerned only with the man I wanted to be, not the man I was. I thought I would be loved - by God, by my congregation, by both my wives - if I was a good priest and a good man. And I was. They did all love me. Except it wasn’t me they loved, was it? It was a fake. A hollow man.’ Hugh straightened up in his chair - like most chairs, slightly too small for him to be comfortable. Without looking at Rory, he continued. ‘What I’m going to have to find out now is if anyone, anyone at all, will love me for myself. I think Theo does. But of course he’s too young to understand who and what he loves. I wonder, will he love me when he discovers I’m not his father? I think he must be told one day. Even if he isn’t told who his father is, he surely has a right to know I am not… And if he still manages to love me as his adoptive father - and I think he might - will he be able to love me knowing I am homosexual?’ Hugh looked up towards the bed. There was no movement, no sound. ‘Doesn’t seem very likely, does it? So is that a reason to keep the truth from him? For his sake, if not mine? I don’t think so. It’s not as if I’m a criminal. Not any more… That’s something you must be able to understand, Rory. Knowing that your love is unnatural. That it makes you a pariah. It’s a strange and horrible feeling, isn’t it? And so unfair. As if one could help one’s feelings! Are our feelings sent to try us, do you think? Are they another test? Are we afflicted with these terrible loves just so we can spend our lives denying them? I don’t know. I don’t know anything any more.’ Hugh put his head in his hands. ‘I used to have an answer for everything, didn’t I? I must have been insufferable.’
A nurse entered with a jug of fresh water. She removed an untouched jug from the bedside table and frowned. She poured a glass of water, then leaned over the bed and said, ‘Please try to take some liquid, Mr Dunbar. You’ll become very ill if you don’t. And that won’t help anything.’ She didn’t wait for a reply but nodded and smiled at Hugh, reassured by his dog collar. As the door closed behind her, Hugh resumed.
‘I’m sure it’s of no interest to you, Rory, but I’d like you to know how things are for me now. I think perhaps it might be relevant. To you.’ He paused and waited for a reaction of some sort, of impatience perhaps, but none came. ‘I stand to lose everything, absolutely everything I hold dear. The truer I am to myself, the more likely I am to lose. But,’ Hugh smiled faintly. ‘I don’t know, there’s a sort of recklessness got into me… I’m curious to know - damn curious - who I’m going to turn out to be! Who will want to befriend me, who might even love me? I’ve lost - or am about to lose - almost everything: my identity, my job, my home, my wife…’ He swallowed. ‘And my adored son. But… I’m now myself. And that feels good!’ Hugh’s spine straightened and as his chin lifted he said, ‘The people that walked in darkness have seen a great light; they that dwell in the land of the shadow of death, upon them hath the light shined. You’ll know that bit of Isaiah from Handel, I suppose… I still read my Bible, you know. So much beauty and wisdom! One can’t give it all up, like… like tobacco. The words are still a comfort to me. But they’re just words now. Poetry. Music. Beautiful sounds. But I find it no less a comfort, no less a wonder for all that. Does that make me a hypocrite too? I’m not sure. Maybe it does. But if anyone were to love me now it would be me they loved, not some deluded fool.’ Hugh laughed silently, his broad shoulders shaking gently. ‘You made an honest man of me, Rory! I’m no longer hiding behind the Word of God. Behind anyone else’s words. I shall speak for myself in future. That’s what I’m doing now. It’s me who’s speaking. Hugh Wentworth. Not God. Or a priest. Just a very ordinary man.’
From the corner of his eye Hugh saw Rory’s fingers move slightly. An involuntary twitch perhaps. They moved again, then curled inwards slowly, forming a relaxed fist, then they spread again, splayed and extended to their full, remarkable length, then lay still on the bedspread. Hugh stared at the perfect hand, completely unmarked by the accident.
‘You probably think you were just a pianist…’ Hugh was silent for a mo
ment, unable to continue. He gathered himself, then went on. ‘That wasn’t what we saw. Flora. Grace. Ettie. Your parents. Your children. We saw a husband, father, brother, son. We saw a brilliant mind. An incisive wit. A talent for explaining. A gift for interpreting. There were so many different Rorys. And we loved them all. Now one of them is no more - the one you valued most. But perhaps - who knows? - that Rory, the pianist, was holding back other Rorys. How much of a human being can one be, do you think, practising alone for five or six hours a day?’ Hugh paused, then took a deep breath. ‘The question you’re going to have to ask yourself - unless you decide to die, of course - and I accept that probably seems like the obvious solution, the only way to deal with all this unbearable pain - the question is, do you have a connection with music in any way other than through your hands? Are you a musician, Rory, or were you simply a pianist?’
Rory’s head turned slowly, rolling like a great stone across the pillow, until he faced Hugh. A lock of heavy hair fell back on to the pillow. Hugh forced himself not to look away, not to blink, but he’d found it easier to look into the eyes of the dead and the dying than to hold this man’s tortured gaze.
Hugh’s voice when he finally managed to speak again was no more than a whisper. ‘You have a choice, Rory. You could choose to walk out of the darkness… and into the light. And you wouldn’t be making that journey alone. We would be with you every step of the way.’
Eventually, without looking away from Hugh, Rory closed his eyes. He lay quite still, his long brown lashes resting in the dark hollows of his eye sockets. Hugh continued to watch as Rory’s eyes shuttled rapidly back and forth, frantic, under pale, veined lids.
Chapter 16
The shock of discovering that my husband was gay had barely sunk in when the accident happened. One shock was superseded by another, then another. What with Ettie’s death, Rory’s injury, his suicide attempts, then Archie’s decline, the unorthodox and unhappy state of my marriage seemed like the least of anyone’s problems.
When I did have time to take stock I realised that, in a way, I was relieved about Hugh. Knowledge brought me relief. I knew the failure of the marriage wasn’t my fault. How could I ever have made it work? I’d had no idea how comforting it would be to have someone else to blame for my misery. That in itself made it easier to bear.
Once I’d got over my initial feelings of shock and revulsion, Hugh’s homosexuality conferred a strange kind of freedom on me, a freedom to love with a whole heart. My feelings towards Rory were unnatural and adulterous, but they didn’t appear to hurt my husband so I felt I was no longer betraying him. I would never love my brother without guilt, but now I could love him with less.
I suppose Hugh must have been relieved to find he hadn’t driven me to drink. It was one less thing for him to atone for. I believe he told me about his feelings for Rory partly so that I shouldn’t feel so guilty or, rather, so alone in my guilt. He knew, had known for all the years we’d been married, what it was like to feel ashamed, to feel outcast. (It was only after he’d told me about his true nature that I realised Hugh did in fact love me, he just didn’t love me sexually.)
We achieved a kind of uneasy equilibrium. We knew each other’s secrets and had to keep them, but we could speak freely to each other, almost like the old days when we were just friends and I was too young and he too old to be regarded as a potential partner. Hugh now understood my ambivalence towards Theo and could forgive it; I understood Hugh’s lack of interest in sex and forgave that. It was a relief to have things out in the open and life became much simpler in a way, especially after I’d stopped drinking.
Simpler that is, if you set aside the fact that the man we both loved was suicidally depressed and seemed unlikely to survive.
Everyone applied themselves to helping Grace cope, taking Colin and Lottie off her hands as much as possible so she could deal with Rory and make decisions about their future. There was nothing any of us could do for Rory so we focused on Grace and the children. The survivors.
Buoyed up by drugs, Grace was full of plans. She got Rory’s agent to cancel two years’ worth of musical engagements and his lucrative recording contract, then she made arrangements for a future that none but she could envisage, a time when Rory would be physically and mentally well - and talking - but simply not playing the piano.
It was impossible not to admire Grace. She refused to give up. With their income wiped out overnight, no insurance, no savings to speak of and a husband incapable of speech, let alone earning a living, she had little time to grieve and none at all for self-pity.
Once it was clear that Rory was beyond caring about the family’s future she made all the decisions alone, asking Hugh’s advice or occasionally mine. My mother was useless, preoccupied as she was with Rory’s condition and Archie’s decline.
I rarely saw Grace cry in the months following the accident but on one occasion when we were out shopping together she burst into tears and sobbed, ‘How am I going to afford Christmas presents for the kids? They both want bikes, for God’s sake!’ So she sold the baby grand without consulting Rory. That secured their rented London flat for a few more months, paid for a second-hand car and gave Colin and Charlotte the best Christmas they’d ever had, despite the fact that their father, when he was allowed home for the festivities, seemed disorientated and more depressed than ever.
Grace also sold her family heirloom cello and bought an inferior specimen, arguing that since she was going to have to teach cello for a living now, her old one would be casting pearls before swine. What it must have cost her to part with it, I can only imagine.
It was Hugh who pointed out that there really wasn’t a lot of point in maintaining, at huge expense, the flat in London. He suggested Grace move to somewhere cheaper, possibly somewhere closer to the family who could help share the burden of virtual single parenthood. It was then that Dora (prompted by Hugh, I suspect) roused herself from her stupor of grief and announced, ‘You could come and live here. Why not? There’s plenty of room and the children love it here. They’d have a big garden to play in, a bedroom each and they could go to school with Theo.’
Since Grace had complained, pre-accident, about the kids having to share a bedroom and bemoaned the lack of even a balcony for them to play on, the only resistance she could offer was on financial grounds. She thanked Dora, then pointed out that her only source of income was giving cello lessons in London.
Dora was undeterred. ‘Give cello lessons here. Use the music room. You could advertise in the local paper. Ring the music department at the high school. It might take a little while to build up again, but word would soon get round. Especially when people knew… the circumstances.’
Grace insisted that she would have to pay Dora the going rate for rent but Dora simply waved an autocratic hand. I suspected she was beginning to enjoy herself. ‘Oh, pooh! Don’t bother about that. Payment in kind, my dear. We’ll work you to death in the kitchen and garden, not to mention looking after Archie. How on earth do you suppose I am going to manage here without Ettie? I’m sixty-seven. If you don’t move in to Orchard Farm we shall be obliged to sell up anyway because I simply cannot manage it on my own - even with help from Hugh and Flora. Give up the flat, get yourself settled in with the children and we’ll talk about the future when - well, when Rory comes home.’
So Grace moved in. Colin had Rory’s old bedroom and Lottie had Ettie’s. She was thrilled to have a bedroom of her own, especially one with a washbasin (which she used mainly for washing dolls’ clothes). Grace took my old room, the nursery, which Dora had long ago furnished as a double guest bedroom. Grace and I cleared out a box-room, Hugh gave it a coat of paint and it became a sort of den for all three children to play in on wet days. They formed a secret society with badges and membership cards. Its purpose was unclear but it seemed to entail looking (with the aid of torches) for secret passages, underground tunnels and spies, none of which they ever found, but this didn’t seem to mar their enjoyment.
The two Dunbar children settled in easily at the village school. Colin was put into Theo’s class and Theo took it upon himself to broker friendships for both his cousins. Colin and Lottie found the Suffolk pupils friendlier and less sophisticated than their London counterparts and they received invitations to tea and birthday parties, invitations issued by mothers who were doubtless keen to hear the latest developments in the Dunbar family saga.
By the beginning of November, the London Dunbars were settled in at Orchard Farm. Rory was stable, but clinically depressed and still hospitalised. Grace was working part-time as a peripatetic cello teacher for the Suffolk LEA. The children were flourishing at school and - as far as one could tell - were happy, although Colin seemed prone to sudden bouts of tearfulness. Archie was deteriorating but Dora was bearing up. Hugh had been a wonderful support to just about everybody and - much to my surprise - Grace and I had become friends of sorts.
Hugh and the children built a huge bonfire in the vegetable garden. Grace spent a small fortune on fireworks and we had a party with baked potatoes and sausages to celebrate the fact that we appeared to have come through the worst; that maybe better times lay ahead.
It was a fiction we were able to maintain until it was time to visit Rory.
We all found our own ways of coping, all of them a mixture of faith, blind hope and denial. Rory’s visitors sat by his bedside, or eventually in a day room, delivering monologues about the weather, the news, the NHS. Dora talked about the garden; Grace talked about the children, all three of them, and how well they got on, now they saw a lot more of each other. She didn’t mention the cancellation of Rory’s engagements, but told him of the benefit concert to be organised by his friends in the music business and how they hoped to raise £3000 which, she said, ‘would help’. Apart from that, nobody talked about money, nobody talked about the future and nobody ever talked about music - to Rory or among ourselves. The accident plunged us all into a world in which only the present moment existed, a nightmare world where the only bulwark against horror and uncertainty was a kind of heartfelt, superstitious gratitude. We were grateful that Rory was - despite his best efforts - still alive. We prayed our gratitude would keep him that way.
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