Another Woman (9781468300178)

by Vincenzi, Penny

  A young nurse, the one who had led the policeman off, came over to him, put her hand gently on his shoulder. ‘Mr Buchan is it?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Theo, ‘yes, that’s right.’

  Every word was an enormous struggle to get out; it was as if some huge pressure was constricting his throat.

  ‘Would you like a cup of tea?’

  They always did that, offered relatives tea. It was supposed to help, God knows why. He shook his head at her dumbly.

  ‘Well, if you wait just a little while, someone will see you. Are you sure you’re all right?’

  He nodded again. The doctor, he supposed: to tell him. All the usual clichés, that they had done all they could, that she hadn’t suffered, hadn’t known anything about it; maybe he would even have to identify her, someone had to, he knew that. He found the thought of looking at Harriet, a suddenly dead Harriet, quite horrific. It was not death itself, Deirdre had died, she had died in his arms, he had held her for hours, and for hours after she died had sat looking at her, wondering where she had actually gone, why he could not have gone with her; but they’d said all the right things, he and she, all the things that needed to be said, had reassured, tried to comfort one another, and he’d had Mungo at least, had that much of Deirdre left to him. He’d said nothing to Harriet that was right, and he had nothing left of her, only her face, raw with misery when she told him to get out of her life and leave her alone. And now she had got out of his.

  ‘Mr Buchan?’ It was a young doctor; he looked, Theo thought, like an extra in Casualty, with his white coat and his stethoscope and his carefully arranged face.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Mr Buchan, if you come with me you can see Miss Forrest now.’

  So he was going to have to identify her. How bad would she look, how badly mutilated would she be? Was he going to be able to stand it? He stood up, and felt suddenly very dizzy.

  ‘Are you all right, Mr Buchan? Did anyone give you tea?’

  ‘No. Yes. Well –’

  ‘This is a terrible ordeal, I know,’ said the doctor. ‘Nothing can really prepare you for it. I’m so sorry. Now, I think you should be ready for a bit of a shock, but –’

  Theo wasn’t listening. He was standing outside the cubicle and nothing he had ever done in his life had required this kind of courage. He raised his hand to pull back the curtain, and it fell again; he simply couldn’t do it. ‘I’m sorry,’ he mumbled to the doctor. ‘I don’t seem to be able to –’

  ‘That’s all right,’ said the doctor. ‘Let me.’

  Theo looked away, hearing the curtain pulled back, knowing he must turn, look at her, what was left of her, still unable to do it.

  ‘Just a moment,’ he mumbled to the doctor. ‘Just a moment. Sorry.’ Go on, Theo, do it, do it, man, for Christ’s sake, look at her, get it over, do it, do it–

  ‘Theo.’ It was Harriet’s voice, weak, slightly slurred, but still her voice, unmistakably hers, unmistakably real. ‘Theo, what on earth are you doing here?’

  Epilogue

  He drove her home next morning to Wedbourne, his car retrieved from the fast lane of the M40 and brought to the hospital by a reproachful policeman who told him he was lucky, it could well have caused another accident.

  James followed in his car; he had arrived at the hospital in response to Theo’s phone call, and they had sat together through the night while Harriet slept, checked on hourly for concussion and a suspected fractured skull. They all said it was a miracle she had come out alive; two people had died, three had sustained major injuries, and she had suffered only a fractured ankle (although broken in two places, possibly requiring surgery), a broken arm, two cracked ribs, a great many cuts and bruises on her face and what they were assured was a comparatively mild concussion.

  The police came in the morning to question her, but there was no question of any of the blame being hers; several witnesses had seen the lorry (going in any case far too fast) swerve from the middle lane straight across the road, and go into a skid and then a spin, hitting the first car head-on, and then Harriet’s. She had crashed onto the hard shoulder and into the barrier, and the car behind her had hit her tail sideways. She had been saved by her seat belt and the fact that she had been skidding so fast her brakes had been useless.

  ‘If they’d worked, the car, and therefore you, might have been hit much nearer the centre,’ said James, stroking her head tenderly.

  ‘Oh God,’ said Harriet, ‘and you know what I thought? The last thing I thought? That I really should have had the car serviced, then I could have stopped.’

  ‘Wouldn’t have made any difference,’ said Theo.

  ‘What I don’t understand,’ said James, ‘is why you were here at all, Theo. I thought you were having dinner with Mungo.’

  ‘Oh God,’ said Theo, ‘he’s probably still sitting at the Ritz.’

  They set her up in the drawing room, made a bed for her there, since she couldn’t handle the stairs. She slept a lot for the first few days, her head gave her a lot of pain, but then she became more cheerful and a great deal more demanding, wanted to be out in the garden (summer had returned), wanted a phone, wanted endless jugs of fresh iced lemonade, wanted very specific kinds of food, mainly rather spicy things, curries and chillies. They raided Maggie’s freezer, then moved on to takeaways and the food department at Marks and Spencers.

  James provided her with crutches, but her broken arm prevented her from using them, so he got her a wheelchair, which she rather liked but still needed help with; she couldn’t propel it efficiently herself (again because of her arm) and sat crossly dependent while they wheeled her about the house and garden, and even on occasions down the lane.

  Theo refused to leave her; he nursed her and cared for her with surprising sweetness, performing the most intimate tasks with a detached competence, anticipating her needs with extraordinary perception. It was only after a week of this that Harriet properly realized that the sickroom was familiar territory to him, that he had nursed Deirdre, Mungo’s mother, almost single-handed during her illness. She found the thought infinitely moving, found, too, that her emotions towards him shifted, softened, found herself in those first shocked, pain-filled days dangerously near to admitting love. Then as she recovered, began to gain strength, physical and emotional, as thought took over from reaction, she struggled to put herself back into a more objective mode. Theo observing all this, recognizing the conflicts, was at once amused and touched by it.

  She woke one night, hot, aching, thirsty, reached out for the glass of water by her bed, and knocked it over. ‘Shit,’ she said aloud, but quite quietly, her sense of helplessness adding to the blanket of misery, wondering if she felt bad enough, desperate enough to ring the little bell Theo had supplied her with to summon them. But before she’d had time to decide he was there, sleepily alert, struggling into his dressing gown, and ‘What is it, Harriet?’ he said. ‘Is the pain bad, do you want me to get you something?’ And she stared at him, so awed by his response to her need, his sensitivity to her pain that she was unable to speak, unable to do anything but smile and reach out for his hand.

  ‘I seem to be making progress,’ was all he said, smiling back at her, and was gone, to return with more iced water, her painkillers, and a quiet swift neatening of the bed; and then he sat beside her, waiting for her misery to ease.

  ‘You’re wonderful,’ was the last thing she said, drifting back to sleep. ‘Dear Theo. Thank you.’

  In the morning her mood had changed; she was irritable, tired, and anxious too that he should not think she and her resolve were weakening. Always one jump ahead of her, he teased her, said it was all right. He wasn’t going to cash in on any goodwill he might have engendered, he was going to London for the day, so she could relax.

  ‘I’m perfectly relaxed,’ said Harriet petulantly, aware of a distinct lack of such a quality in almost every area of herself.

  ‘You don’t look it,’ he said mildly and bent to kiss her cheek
. Harriet turned away.

  Mostly he stayed at the Court House, conducted his business from there, moving Myra Harman and Mark Protheroe into the Royal Hotel for several days a week, using both the phone lines, one for his fax, as well as his own mobile and car phone.

  ‘You must be singly responsible for most of Telecom’s profits,’ said James plaintively after three days of this. ‘I really can’t go on, Theo, having to go out to the village post office to make a call.’

  ‘Sorry, James. It’s not for long.’

  He had told James on the long night at the hospital about Harriet, told him he loved her, that he wanted to marry her. James had taken the news with interesting calm.

  ‘I can’t imagine what she sees in you, and it had better be the last marriage you ever make, or I swear to God I’ll kill you, but if that’s what she wants –’

  ‘She does, but she doesn’t know it yet,’ said Theo.

  At Harriet’s request, her accident was played down to Maggie. ‘I know she’ll want to come home and look after me, but that will be difficult for everyone and probably most of all me. I shall have to be fussed over which I hate and listen to her telling me how wonderful Cressida is being and I just shan’t be able to stand it.’ So Theo phoned and simply told Maggie that Harriet had had a bit of a bump in her car and hurt her arm and was taking a few days off to recuperate. Maggie was happy, he reported, with her friend and was house-hunting. Cressida, it seemed, was also happy, feeling better, coping with her situation. Maggie was probably going over for a few days in September. ‘She says,’ he added, his dark eyes gleaming with malice, ‘that Cressida has written to Oliver, trying to explain. Your mother says she is sure Oliver will understand and see that it’s for the best.’

  ‘I’m sure it is,’ said Harriet, hitting her pillow viciously, ‘but not for the reasons Mummy thinks. I wonder what this person is like. A sucker I should think.’

  A week after the wedding day a letter arrived from Cressida for James, begging his forgiveness, hoping he would understand. ‘We plan to be married in the Bureau de l’Etat (that’s the registry office) as soon as he is out of hospital. I wish you could meet Gérard, but I expect you would prefer not to. He is very ill, I’m afraid, he’s having treatment, transfusions, they’re seeking a bone-marrow donor for him. But he’s not expected to live for very long. The best we can hope is that he will survive to see his child born.’

  James was clearly distressed by the letter; he went for a long walk and came back his face drawn and grey.

  ‘Do you want to talk about it?’ said Harriet.

  ‘No,’ he said, ‘no, not now.’

  He spent the rest of the day in his study, only emerging for supper which he ate in almost complete silence.

  ‘It sounds a terrible thing to say but this is a perfect scenario for Cressida,’ said Harriet to Theo later. ‘It’s got everything, romance, tragedy, mystery. She must be very happy.’

  ‘You sound very cynical,’ said Theo.

  ‘Cressida makes me feel cynical,’ said Harriet. ‘I can’t help it.’

  Slowly, painfully, she was coming to terms with her father’s long relationship with Susie.

  He broached the subject one evening when Theo was in London, and oddly, after an initial resistance, she found it helped her, eased her hostility to him, to air it, to hear his halting apologies.

  ‘I can’t excuse it, can’t explain it,’ he said simply. ‘I was in love with her. I behaved very badly for a long long time. Now I’m getting my just desserts.’

  ‘You are.’

  ‘Yes, I’ve lost them both. I’m going to be very lonely. It’s a fitting punishment for me.’

  Harriet was silent.

  Tilly and Rufus came down to visit. Tilly was wearing a large engagement ring, a futuristic sculptured gold design, set with tiny spangled diamonds. She said she had given up swearing, and planned on giving up smoking for Rufus, but it was too much to ask her to do both things at once.

  ‘And what are you giving up, Rufus?’ asked Theo.

  ‘I couldn’t think of anything,’ he said. ‘I seem to be perfect already. But I’ve promised Tilly we won’t send our sons to public school.’

  ‘Sons? Tilly, this is a huge change of heart,’ said Harriet laughing.

  ‘Yeah, I know, I know. I think maybe, one day, with a Caesarian under a double general anaesthetic I might be able to manage something. I really am quite interested to see what we might produce between the two of us.’

  ‘Me too,’ said Rufus. He pushed back his fair hair, smiled his lovely, gentle smile at her, his dark eyes soft with love.

  ‘Rufus, you look more and more like your mother every day,’ said Harriet.

  Susie was recovered, but had agreed to have the surgery Mr Hobson recommended. Another lump had appeared – still benign but none the less worrying.

  ‘I can have a reconstruction done,’ she said to Alistair, ‘I hate the thought of it so much, but I think I should. And I shouldn’t be so vain, it’s terribly wrong of me. Anyway, no one but you will see it, and if you can cope with it then so can I.’

  ‘Is that a promise, my darling?’ said Alistair lightly. Susie looked at him; he was smiling carefully, but his eyes were unreadable.

  ‘Yes, Alistair, it’s a promise.’

  Mungo came to visit too, bearing a jeroboam of champagne, a bunch of three dozen roses and a sheaf of details of studios and offices where Harriet might start up her next business. ‘Special rates to you, madam, and we’d waive our usual insistence on a year’s rent in advance.’

  He looked vaguely different, Harriet thought; more sober, more grown-up. The wild black hair was shorter, neater-looking, he was wearing a suit (linen to be sure, but still a suit) and a tie, and he produced the studio details from a formal-looking briefcase, rather than the canvas bag he had always used before. But he looked happy, more self-confident than she could remember, and the hug he gave his father was unmistakably affectionate.

  ‘Mungo, you’re sweet,’ said Harriet laughing, flicking through the papers, lingering longingly over a studio in Bloomsbury, ‘but I’m an undischarged bankrupt. I can’t possibly start taking on expensive new premises. If I do start again, it will have to be from the kitchen table here, I should think. I’ve even got to sell my flat.’

  ‘That’s ridiculous, there must be dozens of people who’d make you a loan. Dad for a start, why don’t –’

  ‘Mungo, no,’ said Harriet hastily. ‘Your dad is the last person I’d take money from.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Well, because – just because.’

  ‘You’re mad,’ said Mungo. ‘He’d like to do it and he’s very fond of you, you know.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Harriet, ‘yes, I know he is.’

  Janine and Merlin also came to visit several times. They’d set their wedding date for the end of August. They were having a small civil ceremony in Paris, followed by a luncheon at the Meurice and a large party in London, before leaving for their journey through China. Merlin was remorseful, still convinced he had been instrumental in causing Harriet’s accident. ‘Darling Merlin, you weren’t. Don’t flatter yourself. And don’t flatter Theo either. As if I’d care if he was going back to Sasha or not anyway.’

  ‘Not what he’s hoping to hear, I understand,’ said Merlin, and received a sharp kick on the ankle from Janine. ‘Sorry, my dear. Can’t do a thing right these days,’ he said to Harriet plaintively; but he winked at her and then at Janine, and took her small white hand and kissed it tenderly.

  ‘Have you been saying things to Merlin?’ said Harriet crossly to Theo that evening, as she lay in the garden on a chaise longue, drinking her way through yet another jugful of lemonade.

  ‘I say a lot of things to Merlin.’

  ‘You know perfectly well what I mean. About me. Us.’

  ‘No, but Janine might have. Why don’t you have some champagne in that?’

  ‘You know I’m not allowed alcohol. Theo, you are appallin
g. How dare you discuss our lives with other people?’

  ‘Well, I’m not allowed to discuss them with you.’

  ‘There’s nothing to discuss,’ said Harriet.

  They talked for hours, night after night, the three of them, about Cressida: whose story to believe, which explanation might be the right one, tracking backwards and forwards over the same ground, the same details, the story each of them wanted to believe, the story that to each of them seemed the most likely.

  ‘A combination of them all, perhaps?’ said Theo. ‘There is no doubt she is in love with this man, that he is ill –’

  ‘He doesn’t look ill,’ said Harriet sharply, ‘in that photograph.’

  ‘Harriet, you’re being very hard,’ said James. ‘You can’t tell from a photograph, and besides leukaemia patients often look comparatively normal until very near – well, for a long time. He’s in hospital –’

  ‘How do you know that?’ said Harriet. ‘We have Cressida’s word for it. Oliver had her word that she was pregnant last year and she wasn’t, we had her word she loved Oliver, was going to marry him. For God’s sake, you’re all obsessed with her, duped by her –’ Angry tears had filled her eyes; she struggled to stand up on her crutches, to leave the room, almost fell over.

  ‘Harriet,’ said Theo gently, easing her back into her chair, ‘Harriet, don’t be so hostile. It doesn’t help.’

  ‘I can’t help it,’ she said, ‘I am hostile. I can’t forgive her, I can’t even think about forgiving her. How you can, Daddy, I really don’t know. At best, at very best, even if we believe her wonderful, romantic story, she still hurt you so much that day. And Mummy too, who adored her so. She could have talked to you, discussed it, told you what she felt she had to do. I just don’t understand you.’

  ‘Well,’ said James, ‘the human psyche is very complex. And she was in crisis. Try to put yourself in her position, Harriet, desperate, pregnant, trapped. What would you have done?’