Last Kiss Goodnight

by Teresa Driscoll

On a good day the drive up to the old hospital takes less than ten minutes, but every set of traffic lights seems against them. None of the three want to believe they will find Matthew there. Geoffrey has seen him poring over his cuttings, bad-mouthing the place, the company, the project, after Maria was taken ill. But none of them can know the darker fear – the mistake about his origin – which has taken deeper and deeper root in Matthew’s head since his meeting with the journalist.

  And so even as they turn the corner and see Geoffrey’s car and the pall of smoke just emerging from the upper windows of the derelict building, they cannot make this fit.

  Not with Matthew.

  Kate pulls alongside the same telephone box Matthew used to phone his mother on his first visit to Millrose Mount. She leaves Geoffrey there to phone for help – driving Martha right up to the main steps.

  Before she can stop her, Martha runs so fast up the first flight – trying to take the steps two by two but miscalculating – that she misses her stride, twisting her full weight over onto her right ankle. She tries immediately to continue but the ankle is twisted. Way too painful – no longer able to take her weight.

  ‘Oh dear God…’

  Just then, as Kate bends down to help, there is a loud crack from inside the building and to the far right a pane of glass shatters, spraying glass over the grass frontage, a few fragments landing just feet from the two women.

  Martha tries again to stand but the pain is too strong. Kate looks up at the windows to the right, a red glow now from inside – as Geoffrey catches up with them, out of breath.

  ‘Dear God.’ Staring in disbelief still at the building. The smoke. ‘They’re on their way. The fire brigade. But we need to get you both back a bit. Wait for the truck. It’s too dangerous this side. I’ll see if there’s another way in round the back.’

  ‘No. It’s all boarded up round there. It’ll be too late.’ Martha is clutching her ankle, Kate turning then to watch them all reflected in the glass above Millrose Mount’s entrance.

  She looks down the hill, calculating it will be five, ten minutes maybe before help arrives. Maybe longer. There is no conscious decision. Just instinct. So that as Geoffrey tries to stop her, grabbing her arm – don’t be insane, Kate – she pushes him away just hard enough to get a head start up the steps.

  47

  Later, when people ask for the details – the police; the firemen; Martha and Geoffrey – she will lie. She will tell no one quite how badly she miscalculated. What it is really like.

  Inside.

  Geoffrey had been right – insane – for it is night-time on the other side of the double doors, the smoke so dense she can hardly make out the shape of the hall. Where it ends. Where the corridors begin. What is most confusing is that very soon, in this smoke, she has no idea which way to turn. Which way even she has come.

  One minute there is a narrow stretch, she remembers that, and then she turns right, holding the bottom of her jumper over her mouth, and it is wider suddenly – two circular windows – and there is a huge portrait on the wall between them of a strange, severe man with a dark cape and hat, standing proud in a large gold frame which reflects what little light there is. Weird eyes – this picture – which seem to follow her everywhere.

  She turns right at the portrait – a longer corridor now – and then door after door. All locked. She wonders for just a moment, coughing, if she should turn back. Insane. But then she hears it.

  The tapping.

  The sound, metal on metal, is too faint to be sure of the direction, and infuriatingly, just as she thinks she can source it, it stops. She is in a larger room now, much hotter, the smoke denser and for the first time the colour red. She does not register this for what it is, just acknowledges the colour, the glow through the door at the far end of this room. It is some kind of hall – a dining hall, yes, for there are stacks of chairs, old tables too, and in the middle a little staircase to an upper gallery. A mezzanine level. Part of the structure has collapsed; pieces of wood splintered everywhere like a bonfire. She has the sense of someone watching her and remembers for a moment the portrait.

  But then the tapping again. And now, crouching down low to follow the source of the sound, she sees him – deep within the pile of shattered wood that was the stairs – tapping the back of his watch against the pipe of a radiator alongside him.

  ‘Matthew. Oh – thank God. It’s Kate. It’s all right. I’m going to get you out.’

  And then the relief is gone instantly, for she sees that his face, behind a lattice of wood, is not the Matthew she knows at all but a child – a little boy who is crying and Kate realises only now how very young he is.

  ‘I’m sorry, Kate. I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean— ’

  ‘It’s OK. Matthew. I’m going to get you out.’

  Quickly, furiously, she begins to hurl bits of wood aside, using both hands now, which means her jumper falls from her mouth and she is coughing more. Some of the pieces of wood are quite heavy, interlinked, and there is creaking and crashing as the bonfire readjusts.

  ‘I was trying to get up the stairs to the window to get out. But they collapsed.’ Matthew is trying to help but seems unable to move and only now, as she gets nearer, does she see his leg – a large piece of wood stuck deep into the thigh, blood soaking his trousers. And only now is she truly afraid.

  ‘I can’t move. I’ve tried. You’d better go.’ He says this in the tone of one who is old enough to know it is the right thing to say but young enough to hope she will not listen.

  And so she continues working slowly, more methodically – piece by piece – both of them coughing as the colour red glows brighter across the room.

  She will never tell Martha what she does next. That for a few minutes, with some of the wood refusing to budge, so tired, so sleepy and so much smoke in her lungs, she thinks for a moment that she will rest a bit.

  For just a moment she puts her arm around his shoulder. To rest. Two bears in a cave, stroking his hair as he cries. Says over and over how sorry he is.

  It is the smoke – choking her lungs and confusing her brain. For how long, she will not remember. All she knows is that for a brief time she is waiting for them both to sleep. Warm at first. Floating. Drifting. Floating. And she is telling him that they must sleep, all the while stroking his hair.

  But then something changes and it is no longer warm.

  The smoke turns to water and she is very, very cold suddenly. She opens her eyes to look up, not through smoke now, but up through the water to the woman on the hill. For a time, she does not realise that it is her. This woman on the hill with long, wet hair down her back, struggling to free herself from a man in uniform who is holding her so tightly that she cannot escape. And the woman is shouting that she needs to get back in the water, cursing the people who have pulled her out. Shouting for the man to let her go.

  Lower down, by the ferry, there are two more men in the river, surfacing and shaking their heads. A van. More divers. A crowd is watching – silent. One woman in a red coat turning her daughter’s head into her stomach so that the child cannot see what is happening.

  And now the woman on the bank is screaming for them to try again.

  Daniel. Daniel. Daniel. On her knees, begging them. Please. Telling them that his seatbelt is stuck and they must try one more time. I am begging you. Please…

  And Kate looks more closely, to see that it is her. The woman on the hill. And that is when – very suddenly – she stirs. Wakes.

  And realises…

  ‘Come on, Matthew, I have to get you out.’

  … why she is here.

  ‘Come on.’

  For a woman knitting on a bench. And the woman on the hill.

  ‘I can’t move.’

  ‘You have to, Matthew. Come on. We have to get you out.’

  It takes her a while to clear enough space, and then she just pulls – dragging him from under the shoulders, both hands knotted around his chest from behind – ig
noring his pleas that it hurts too much.

  And she is telling him that he must help. Shuffle on his bottom. And push with his good leg. Come on, Matthew. Come on. You have to.

  Their progress is incredibly slow – Matthew in such pain, Kate dragging him along and all the time bullying him to bend and stretch his good leg to give them some momentum.

  Come on, Matthew. You have to try.

  The colour red has reached the far curtains now, framing the window just as they make it out of the hall back onto the long corridor. Kate shuts the double doors to try to hold the heat and the smoke, but is then confused. Which way? Shuffling and pulling. Which way?

  Please.

  She can’t remember. Can’t see.

  She closes her eyes – smarting in the smoke – and in her head, in the confusion, is counting twenty eight, twenty nine, thirty… coming, ready or not… and then, when she opens her eyes, she sees him. The mysterious figure that is Samuel Cribbs in his big black cloak framed in gold, glinting through the grey in the distance, watching them as they shuffle, pull, shuffle, pull. So she heads for the painting. Remembering now…

  And then, exhausted, as they finally turn the corner by the painting – two men suddenly, in masks. Uniforms and masks.

  Over here. They’re here.

  Flashing lights, arms guiding her and taking Matthew, and then at last outside on the grass – the air so shockingly sweet it makes her cough worse than the smoke. And as someone puts a blanket around her, and others are lifting Matthew onto a stretcher, she whispers it, head down, so they will not hear. That she got him out…

  To the blades of grass. To the ants marching in line. And then, her head tilted up to the blue of the sky, streaked now with smoke. To the painting of Samuel Cribbs. To the woman knitting on the bench.

  And to the woman on the hill, wet hair down her back.

  That this time…she got him out.

  48

  December 1977

  ‘Do you think it will snow for Christmas?’

  Kate looks at Martha, fidgeting with a strand of cotton from a button, trying so hard to behave as if this is nothing out of the ordinary. Visiting your son in prison.

  ‘I don’t know, Martha.’

  They have arrived early today, Kate knowing all the shortcuts now. Matthew has been transferred to an open prison in recognition of his work with the choirs. Such a relief. And no surprise that he is using the music more and more – not just accompanying the prison choirs but running workshops also. His way to cope.

  ‘I love snow. Thought about getting a chalet job once. When I was travelling. Switzerland. You know – cooking for the skiers. But like so many things… ’ Martha turns to Kate and tries to find a smile. ‘I just never got around to it.’

  Kate reaches across to squeeze Martha’s hand. She tried so hard to prepare everyone – fearing from the very first that Matthew could face a custodial sentence, but Martha and Geoffrey refused to accept it. They convinced themselves that compassion would win the day. That his clean record and the mitigating circumstance would spare him.

  Dear God, but he is practically a child still. In the end Geoffrey sold a very good upright piano to fund the best lawyer he could find.

  But arson – whatever the context – is arson. Matthew was no child in the eyes of the law and there had been a security guard in Millrose Mount that day. He was at the other end of the building and escaped without injury but that, apparently, was not the point. It was what might have been that troubled the court.

  Prison rules took a lot of getting used to. A choice at first. One thirty-minute visit each week or one two-hour visit every twenty-eight days? They opted for the shorter, regular visits, so Martha and Glenda can take turns. And now that he has been transferred here, the rules are more relaxed. With parole, this should be his one and only Christmas…

  No visiting is permitted on Christmas Day itself, they learn, and so there is an extended slot today. Martha and Glenda have special permission to split this in two. Glenda first, for half an hour. Then Martha.

  Kate keeps the motor running, to try to hold in some heat, and passes a newspaper to Martha, who keeps looking at her watch before glancing at the other visitors gathering over by the entrance – six women waiting in a little group. Talking. Smoking. Swearing.

  And then – there she is. Like Martha and Kate, looking lost. Entirely out of place – standing apart from the line, awkward in her smart coat, belted at the waist, black patent handbag, immaculately polished shoes and, most incongruous of all, leather gloves.

  Kate catches Martha’s eye as Glenda turns – both recognising her instantly from Matthew’s photographs. This will be the first time they have met.

  ‘Do you think we go in together or do I wait inside for her to come out? What do you think?’

  ‘I don’t know, Martha. I really don’t know.’

  ‘I suppose I should go over and speak to her. Work out how we do this. I should have phoned her. Or do you think I should wait? Wait for her? What do you think?’

  Martha lets the newspaper fall into the well in front of her feet and clenches her fist so tightly, the knuckles turn completely white.

  ‘It was always going to be difficult, Martha. It’s natural to be nervous.’

  ‘Yes.’ And then she narrows her eyes. ‘She looks lovely, don’t you think? Not quite what I was expecting, though. God. This feels strange.’

  They have taken it slowly – Matthew and Martha – but with everything now talked through so many times, over and over, they are getting on well. All the gaps filled in much more quickly in these extreme circumstances. All their conversations condensed against the clock – everything now settling into a calmer understanding, spoiled only by this terrible place.

  Three more months, the lawyers reckon. Then parole.

  Kate keeps quiet but is not especially surprised when, after watching Glenda for a time, Martha suddenly takes a deep breath and gets out of the car.

  ‘You must be Glenda?’

  The head turns first, followed by the mac then the strap of the handbag which falls from her shoulder.

  ‘I’m Martha.’

  Both of them have seen pictures, but not especially good ones. Matthew playing go-between. Ferrying news. To and fro.

  Later they will be honest about this moment. That Glenda is warmer and more homely than Martha expected. And she in turn – younger and very much more beautiful than Glenda imagined.

  ‘It’s so good that they allow this extra visiting. For Christmas.’ Glenda hitches the strap of her bag back into place, her hand trembling.

  ‘Yes. It is.’

  Suddenly there is a bellow from the midst of the group of women, followed by a screech of laughter from a tall woman, her hair tied in a ponytail on the very top of her head. Glenda smiles, her hand still holding the strap of her bag.

  ‘She looks like one of those Tressy dolls.’

  Martha laughs. Both smiling now.

  ‘It was good of you to write, Martha. I’m sorry I didn’t reply. To be honest, I wondered if I should have phoned. But I didn’t really know what to say.’ She is looking away now, towards the prison side door where a guard has emerged with the familiar sign detailing all the rules for visiting.

  Martha puts her hand into her pocket, feeling around for a tissue and, unable to find one, turns away slightly to hold the back of her hand up to her nose in the cold. Embarrassed. Trying to prevent a drip. Glenda, immediately reading her distress, then rummages into her own bag for help.

  ‘Thank you.’ Martha takes the tissue gratefully. ‘I didn’t expect you to reply. I just felt so responsible. The fire and everything. Matthew misunderstanding about Millrose Mount – getting himself into such a… Well. It all felt like my fault and I wanted to say that I can only imagine how angry you must feel. At me.’

  ‘Yes. Well. Very difficult for all of us.’

  Martha blows her nose and they stand for a time – awkward again.

  ‘S
o much colder today.’

  ‘Yes. Kate, my friend who drives me, is worrying about ice on the way home, but I think we should be all right, providing… ’

  ‘I should have told him when he was a child.’ Glenda is tugging at the wrists of the smart gloves.’

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘I should have told him. About the adoption.’

  Martha looks at Glenda very intently. Warm, kind eyes.

  ‘That’s what I would have said, Martha. Should have said – if I’d replied to your letter, I mean.’

  For a time then they just watch the group of smokers, some now stamping their feet against the cold – one of them wearing ridiculous gold, strappy sandals without tights. Her feet blue.

  ‘Did you drive here?’

  ‘No. Train and then a taxi. I don’t drive. Matthew’s father used to do all the driving, but we’re not together any more.’

  ‘Yes. I heard. I’m sorry.’

  ‘Don’t be.’ Again Glenda is hitching her handbag strap higher. ‘It’s better. Another thing I should have done a long time ago. Much better for Matthew – when he gets out of here, I mean.’

  And then Glenda looks very carefully at Martha’s face and her expression softens. ‘It’s good that you’ve worked things out. With Matthew. I’m pleased for you, Martha.’ She has pushed her chin up and lifts her arm to signal the bag she is carrying. ‘I made him a chocolate cake. His favourite. Do you think they will let me give it to him?’

  Later Martha will wish that she had said today what is in her head at this moment. That if she had to lose him to anyone, she is glad that it was to Glenda. But is not quite ready to say this. Not today. And so instead she simply says she hopes there is some way they can allow the cake. Even a slice. And she insists that Glenda should go in first as planned. No – I absolutely insist. It’s what Matthew wants. And quite right too…

  Much later, after Martha’s turn, there is a scribbled message from Glenda via a guard to thank them for the offer of a lift to the station but she has shared a taxi. Seemed silly to wait but thank you all the same. I’m very glad we met. A good visit today.