About Last Night

by Adele Parks

  How would she ever sleep again after Tuesday?

  Julian hated hospitals. This thought had haunted Stephanie since she’d arrived here. How would he get better when he was in the one place on earth that he despised? They hadn’t always bothered him. He’d attended all three of the boys’ births and regarded hospitals as very useful places where his wife went to safely give birth to their bouncing baby boys. Julian was not the type to entertain the idea of a home birth. He rejected that suggestion when he heard that a new mattress would no doubt be required despite the plastic sheets that the midwife could readily supply. The fear and loathing began two years after Freddie was born.

  She had asked her mother to bring in the teal cashmere throw that they kept on their bed, Steph wanted to cover up the utilitarian hospital blanket, and she’d also asked for some cushions to scatter on the visitors’ chairs. At the very least they needed the children’s pictures Blutacked to the wall covering those glum signs reminding people to wash their hands. Steph sighed as she hopelessly and helplessly glanced around the room. Would such tiny touches help? Probably not. The reason Julian had a hatred of hospitals was too big to be covered up with a cashmere throw.

  They hadn’t been actively trying to have another baby but they weren’t always as careful as they could be. When Stephanie had skipped her period, her heart had skipped a beat too, she was so thrilled. Three healthy, lovely children were a joy, a blessing and a godsend. A fourth would be a marvel. Steph didn’t mind that she became so huge so quickly. After three pregnancies it was reasonable to assume her stomach muscles had simply given up, she looked five months gone at the point when she calculated that she was just ten weeks down the line. As with the other pregnancies, she was forever nipping to the loo and her boobs were sore and lumpy, she even had a bit of extra hair growth (sadly not on her head!) but there was no sickness and she was generally much more lethargic than she had been during all her other pregnancies. The slight variations in the symptoms were enough to convince Stephanie that they were having a girl this time. She hadn’t rushed to take a test, she hadn’t believed it was necessary after three babies, she knew her body well enough. Instead, she’d dragged out the sacks of baby clothes that were bagged up and stored in the loft and begun to re-sort and rewash anything in white or neutral greens and yellows, although even as she meticulously salvaged Babygros she knew she was kidding herself, there was no way she’d be able to resist a pink fest. She’d had none of the superstitious caution that she’d had before, the fourth time round she was all about practicality. The way she saw it was, the more she could get done in this first trimester, before she was too tired or bulky, the better. She’d begun to browse around baby shops, drawing up lists of equipment she might need to replace and equipment that might make do, just one more time. She had liked nothing more than lying in bed at night, next to Julian, reading through naming books.

  ‘Rose?’ she suggested.

  ‘Beautiful.’

  ‘Daisy?’

  ‘Very pretty.’

  ‘Lily?’

  ‘Also gorgeous but I draw the line at Hyacinth,’ Julian had said. This had made her giggle.

  But then she’d started to get terrible pains in her stomach, agonising piercing cramps; her biggest fear was that she was miscarrying. She went to the doctor and he immediately redirected her to hospital. By the time Julian arrived at the hospital, just a few hours later, she’d already found out that she wasn’t miscarrying because she wasn’t growing a beautiful baby girl as she’d hoped, just some nasty, enormous ovarian cysts.

  The vast majority of these cysts go away without treatment. Some are inconveniently persistent and positioned, and therefore have to be removed; most of these can be operated on without hurting the ovaries. In a very small percentage of cases the cysts are eradicated along with the chances of ever having any more babies. After a series of tests and scans, it was established that Steph had the latter type.

  Oh, of course Steph knew she was very lucky, very lucky indeed. She already had three children, what possible need could there be for another one? A fourth would be an unnecessary luxury, at least that’s what the few well-meaning friends and family who knew of her condition implied. Even Pip pointed out that things could have been a lot, lot worse. And yes, they could. She was so incredibly lucky that the cysts turned out to be benign and no further treatment was required. No chemo, no radiography. Pip’s marriage was in tatters at this point, she was drowning in her own particular brand of agony, so it was hard for her to imagine Steph’s pain. How could she possibly be grieving? There never was a baby. How could she grieve for their never-was baby?

  When Julian had come to pick her up after her hospital stay, he’d ignored her instructions to bring along the children. Instead he had left Freddie with Mrs Evans and the eldest two had gone to school as normal. He’d correctly anticipated that Steph would be weak and pale and sore.

  ‘A boisterous two year old inadvertently using you as a trampoline would not be the best idea,’ he’d gently explained as she’d desperately searched behind him for any sign of her brood. ‘Will my cuddles do?’ he’d asked as he’d pulled her into a careful hug. She’d poured herself into his embrace, surprised to find that his big, firm arms offered absolute comfort. She’d been in hospital for two nights and he knew she’d missed her boys but he hadn’t brought them in to visit as Steph had been too drugged up the first night and too delicate the second, they’d have been rowdy on both occasions. ‘Come on, let’s get out of here,’ he’d said. They’d signed papers and then fled from the hospital as though they were jailbirds.

  Julian had not brought her flowers or (God forbid) helium balloons the way other husbands might have. Steph remembered her mother had been quite irritated with him because she thought he was showing a lack of consideration. Steph knew the opposite was the case. Julian would not ruin her favourite flowers by bringing them to her at such a time, ever after forcing her to associate peonies with her loss. He had not tried to disguise or decorate the room; he had not shied away from what it was. Horrible. And for that she’d been extremely grateful.

  He hadn’t taken her directly home. It was a bright, warm day and Julian had driven straight through the town centre and towards the country. They parked below St Mary’s-on-the-Hill, the church where they’d married, and there he revealed that he’d packed a picnic. He’d fussed around Steph, insisting that she remained sitting in the car until he’d set everything up. He’d told her it was all to be a surprise and she wasn’t to watch him as he staggered up and down the hill a few times, lugging deckchairs (normally they sat on the rug but he’d brought along deckchairs to make her more comfortable), the picnic rug and hamper. He’d then momentarily lost confidence in his plan; would she be able to manage the walk to the spot just beyond the church that offered the most glorious view?

  ‘Actually, I fancy a walk,’ she’d insisted.

  ‘That’s what I first thought. Fresh air in your lungs,’ he’d replied. She’d noticed that he was sweating. She wasn’t sure if it was the exertion of setting up the picnic or worry, as he tentatively took her arm and led the way.

  It was the most beautiful picnic spread Stephanie had ever seen. No wonder Julian was out of puff. There were slices of prosciutto and cantaloupe melon, crayfish tails served with delicious lime and coriander, a dressed crab, an enormous selection of cheeses, including Steph’s favourite Cornish brie, a pot of olives, bread rolls and a mixed summer salad with basil and cherry tomatoes.

  ‘Find a good website?’ she’d asked with a knowing beam.

  ‘Yup,’ he’d admitted with a grin. ‘But I picked the champagne.’ It was Krug.

  Steph had gasped. ‘That’s madness, Julian. We won’t be able to manage more than a glass each. I’m on medication and you’re driving. We’ll have to throw most of it away. How much did it cost?’

  ‘Don’t worry about it. Not today. I brought your crystal glasses.’ She’d gasped again, this time at the thought of her
crystal being hauled around in a picnic hamper. ‘It tastes better and they make a great sound when clinked together,’ he’d pointed out as he eased the cork out of the bottle.

  ‘What’s the toast?’ she’d asked, giving in to his determination.

  ‘Us,’ he’d replied firmly.

  And there were flowers. Somehow (and Steph had subsequently given a great deal of thought as to how exactly there were flowers but never quite fathomed it) Julian had managed to cart a bunch and a plastic vase of water up the hill while she was looking the other way. Plonked in the middle of the rug was a vase of pale pink roses, just opening lilies and big, fat, wild daisies. Roses, lilies and daisies. Steph had stared at the flowers and furiously blinked away tears.

  ‘I thought we needed to have some kind of formal way of saying, I don’t know, maybe goodbye,’ said Julian quietly.

  ‘There never was a baby,’ Steph sensibly pointed out, as doctors and nurses and family and friends had sensibly pointed out to her. Not to be cruel but in a misguided attempt to comfort her.

  ‘I know. I think we need to say goodbye to our never-was baby.’

  Steph nodded, unable to speak because of all the love that was choking her. He understood. He’d understood that she hated her body, she felt it had let her down, she felt unfeminine and useless. He’d understood that she was grieving and angry and extremely sad. He’d understood that these emotions did not mean that she was ungrateful or unaware of all she already had. He’d understood her.

  How had that man put his dick into another woman?

  Steph’s head spun. She didn’t know what to feel or think. This situation was beyond difficult. Now as she stared at her husband’s face, tracing the lines that ran like rivers from his eyes, she felt bemused and displaced. Who was this man? She’d thought she’d known and trusted him. She thought she’d known herself.

  She’d known nothing. Now she had nothing. She’d been better off before.

  Stephanie glanced across at her father-in-law. He was holding a copy of The Times, folded at the crossword page, but Steph knew that he was just pretending to be interested in the quiz. Usually he could rattle off all the answers to clues, up and down, within twenty minutes. He’d been holding the paper for three hours now and Steph hadn’t seen him write a single letter. He looked pallid and drawn. She could only imagine the fear and despair that was surrounding the widower as he watched his eldest son lie still. He’d contacted Julian’s brother who lived in Canada; he’d had to make one of those dreaded calls where you have nothing but bad news. James had asked whether he ought to get on a plane right away. Her father-in-law had been forced to admit it might be best.

  She’d been here for over twenty-four hours now, here by his bedside staring at the same things. She simply sat. Still. Like Julian. She was not finding sitting at the hospital as difficult as everyone imagined. She was naturally a patient woman, used to waiting, biding or filling in time. The truth was that there were a lot of dead hours in Stephanie’s day. Hours when she sat in the car between one child’s school finishing time and the next, hours when she sat in dusty, draughty, smelly school halls while the boys fenced or played music in a recital. She stood on the side of games pitches and cheered modest and robust attempts to chase some ball or other. She did not mind, she’d never counted up the hours and worked out the days – perhaps weeks – of her life that were washed away in this manner. Because standing on sidelines, sitting in the audience, waiting in line, was her life. And it was valid, she thought indignantly. She was continuing, preserving, nurturing the next generation. What could be finer? What could be more important? But she did wonder if it was the fact that Freddie was now in full-time school, her last baby bird flown the nest, which had led to her thing with Subhash. Had there suddenly been simply too many hours to fill? Could all this destruction and mess and confusion simply be a product of boredom?

  Steph could list every encounter she’d ever had with Subhash, because there were so few. Had their rarity inflated their worth? It hadn’t felt like that on Tuesday but on Tuesday she was desperate and hurt. So hurt. She’d shared endless days with Julian. Birthdays blurred in her memory, was it last year she’d bought him tickets for Twickenham to see England or the year before? Christmases were all fun but they became interchangeable, the only thing that distinguished one from the other was the pyjamas the boys wore when opening their gifts. They had twenty years’ worth of days, weekends that bled into bank holidays that melted into weekdays. They had sunny days, wet days. Happy days, sad days. Months, seasons. A lifetime. Was it going to end?

  Stephanie carefully tried to process exactly what Mr Khan had said when he last popped in to check on Julian. The doctor had explained that a comatose person is defined as such when the person in question cannot be awakened, fails to respond normally to pain or light, does not have sleep-wake cycles, and does not take voluntary actions. They are still.

  Julian was still.

  He was still Julian.

  Steph played with the words until they stopped making sense. She should really go home and have a shower, check on the kids as the doctors and nurses, her parents and father-in-law had begged her to, maybe try and get some sleep herself. She couldn’t imagine sleeping. It was funny but since Julian lost consciousness she had only managed to snatch the briefest of catnaps. Was it possible that on some sort of spiritual level they were still behaving as a ying to the yang? Maybe she should try to get a proper night’s sleep; if she did, then maybe he’d wake. This theory seemed quite reasonable, just as convincing as any scientific theory the doctors might come up with. They hadn’t – as it happened – come up with any definitive theory which would mean he’d wake up. All they could tell her was that apparently it was unlikely that there would be a sudden eureka moment when Julian woke up, and said, ‘Stephanie, my—’

  My what? What would Julian say if he could? My darling? My deserted? My detested?

  But Mr Khan had taken great pains to explain to her that those moments were unlikely anyway, they were the sole preserve of Hollywood. Julian’s recovery (pray God there was one) would be flagged by a twitching toe, a moment or two of consciousness.

  Slowly, gently, with as much courtesy as possible, it had been explained that the outcomes of a coma ranged considerably. Steph had pushed for details.

  ‘What range are we talking about here, Mr Khan?’

  ‘Well, there may be a full recovery, Mrs Blake,’ he’d assured her.

  ‘Or?’

  ‘Or not,’ he’d admitted.

  ‘Worst-case scenario?’

  ‘It never does any good to dwell on the worst-case scenario,’ the consultant had replied. He was too used to this type of conversation to be uncomfortable with it. He wasn’t embarrassed, he was just aware it was an unhelpful avenue to pursue, more of a cul-de-sac, in fact. As a doctor, as a human being, he preferred to dwell on the positive until it was scientifically ridiculous to do so.

  ‘Comas generally last a few days to a few weeks,’ he’d explained. ‘They rarely last more than about five weeks.’

  ‘But they can?’ asked Steph.

  ‘Some have lasted as long as several years,’ he admitted. Mr Khan saw a realist in this patient’s wife and wanted to treat her questions with a dignity and honesty that her no-nonsense demeanour deserved but as he’d replied, he’d noticed she swayed as though she was about to collapse, and he’d put a steadying arm on her elbow. ‘There is no point in speculating,’ he said firmly. ‘The outcome for coma depends on the cause, location, severity and extent of neurological damage. A deeper coma alone does not necessarily mean a slimmer chance of recovery, because some people in a deep coma recover well while others in a so-called milder coma sometimes fail to improve.’

  Stephanie hated this information because it informed her of precisely nothing at all, it told her less than she thought she already knew. There were no guarantees, no certainties.

  37

  Mr and Mrs Amstell took all four children to s
chool while Pip slept. They didn’t know about the late-night phone call from Steph but they wanted to be occupied and being in charge of four children ensured that. When Pip woke up and found she was alone in the house, she saw her opportunity. She hardly dared acknowledge the thought in her head. Did she really think Steph might have done something so terrible and desperate? It was too, too awful to imagine and yet she had imagined it. Pip didn’t want to entertain the possibility of something so heartbreaking and dire but it was becoming harder and harder to draw any other conclusion. Steph had lied to the police and asked her for an alibi and Robbie said that it was usually the spouse who was responsible for this sort of thing. A crime of passion, was it? And then there was the fact that last night Steph had said it was all her fault. What else could she have possibly meant? Nothing else. The thought made Pip tremble.

  Pip felt extremely underhand as she flicked through Stephanie’s telephone book and found Mrs Evans’ number. She tried to tell herself that she wasn’t really checking up on Stephanie, not as such. No. Rather, she was just confirming her friend’s story, so that when the moment came for Pip to talk to the police, she could be certain that she said exactly what Stephanie wanted her to say and that she had understood everything correctly. Of course Steph had gone straight home, just as she’d said. She’d probably spent the night sadly pawing over her wedding photos. How could she consider for even a moment that Steph might have mowed down her husband? And yet Pip knew she would not rest until she made the call.