She looked at him and felt the tears lifting in her eyes, but it didn’t really matter. For the first time since she had come to America she felt someone cared about how she felt, and understood her. Jay loved her, of course he did, but their closeness was a different sort of thing entirely. Jay was about passion and need and possessing, but what she was now getting from Timothy was a sense of concern, a protectiveness that she hadn’t realised she missed so sorely. All the feelings and fears she had had about her father for so many months came flooding back into her, but they didn’t make her feel sick and ill as they had done. She felt instead a great rush of warmth and she hurled herself at the old man and flung her arms round him and cried thickly, ‘Oh, Pa, thank you! You’re so kind to me!’
‘Ah, the hell with it,’ Timothy said, patting her shoulder awkwardly but clearly enjoying the encounter, for he held her close with his other arm. ‘You’re just a kid yourself, not much more’n a baby, and you with a baby of your own! You’ve been looking peaky – go home and see your Pa and then come back and it’ll all be better. Hey, Jay?’
‘It’s not a good time, Pa,’ Jay said and Maddie felt the warmth that had filled her begin to drain away for he sounded wooden. Not angry or sulky exactly, but not happy. ‘I’m just beginning to get old Cray to see things our way. I need to see this through. Declan’ll make a complete balls of the whole thing, you know that –’
‘But I won’t,’ Timothy said and his voice was sharper now. ‘And I’ve made up my mind. I was thinking about it anyway. Your mother’s been giving me a bad time,’ and again he patted Maddie’s shoulder and she stiffened a little at the mention of Blossom. ‘It’d be a good idea if you’re both away for a spell. She’s got Rosalie and her baby to fuss over, and Timothy coming home for Thanksgiving, and the girls – she’ll be all right. You take Maddie. Come back after Christmas, okay? Let her see how things are with her family, and she’ll be all right. And Blossom, well, you heard me. You get a sailing as soon as you can. Out of Boston if possible, but New York if you must. I got some business I want you to do in London, anyway, Jay. I’ll give you all the details, but not now. Right now, I’m heading home. You two go to your Copley Plaza. I’m having Mary Margaret’s corned beef and cabbage and I’ll be better off for it. Now get out of my way, the pair of you. I’ve made up my mind, and that’s an end of it.’
24
July 1987
‘It’s like when I was a kid,’ Joe said. ‘If I said I had a headache or a toothache, so that I could bunk off school, you could count on it I’d get the real thing the next day. I claimed she was physically ill so that I could get her in here and –’ He shook his head. ‘It’s been a nasty few weeks for her.’
‘It hasn’t been a great deal of fun for me either,’ Annie said tartly. ‘I caught it too, you know. From her. Even though I’d had that stinker already.’
‘So did I,’ he said mildly. ‘Half London had it. But at least she’s a good deal better now, and seems settled enough. Not that dear old Gresham got off so lightly.’ He laughed then. ‘It is not an agreeable trait to take pleasure in another’s downfall – what’s it called? Schadenfreude? But I have to admit to being deeply grateful for Gresham’s sick leave. It’s kept all the fuss about getting the hospital cleared out of our hair for a while.’
He looked down the ward, at the serried rows of beds on both sides, each humped with an occupant lying tidily under the red covering blanket, and shook his head. ‘This ward never used to be so full when the whole hospital was occupied. To see so many of these poor old souls wheezing and coughing like this is depressing.’
‘Flu’s depressing,’ Annie said shortly. ‘Maddie was hell for a while there, quite apart from her sniffing and snorting.’
He looked at her shrewdly. ‘Yes, and it’s knocked you back a bit again, hasn’t it? And don’t give me a display of aggression just to prove it. A simple yes will do.’
She had opened her mouth to protest but now she managed a thin grimace of a smile. ‘Yes,’ she said.
‘If it’s any comfort to you, I’ve been feeling like a little heap of something very nasty,’ he said and got to his feet. ‘But it’s an interesting experience. Every psychiatrist ought to get depression sometimes. Therapeutically valuable.’
‘It won’t make most of them any the less arrogant when they get better,’ she said. ‘They’ll still stuff their patients full of pills instead of listening to them.’
‘You sound like a lecturer at an alternative medicine symposium,’ he said after a moment. ‘Very boring and even more arrogant than the people you’re castigating.’
She stared at him and then, surprisingly, laughed. ‘That’s better!’
‘What is?’ He was scowling and it looked faintly comic on his agreeable face, surmounted as it was by his untidy frizz of curls.
‘You, biting back. It’s been driving me potty, your placidity. No matter what I said, no matter how bloody I was, you did your damned psychiatrist thing and came on like Pollyanna, all sweetness and light and joy through strength. Boring at best, and unbelievably irritating.’
The scowl had faded. ‘I’ll remember in future to be a pig then. Clearly, you like men who behave badly. No nasty modern equality for you.’
‘Pah!’ She made a soft little noise of disgust. ‘What’s equality got to do with it? It’s passivity I can’t stand and that can drive me mad, whatever the gender of the person who shows it.’ She looked past him to Maddie’s chair, by the window. ‘She’s another. She was so much better – starting to snap back when I had a go at her instead of sitting and sopping up all the abuse and saying nothing at all. But this flu seems to have sent her right back.’
‘Not all the way back.’
‘No.’ She allowed that. ‘Not all the way. She is still talking, at least.’
‘Can you give me an update? Or do I have to wait for the notes to come down? Not that they’re bad notes, mind you. In fact, they’re damned good. It’s like reading a particularly absorbing novel. Great stuff.’
She went pink with pleasure. ‘I’m glad you like them,’ she said gruffly. ‘Yes, I can give you – how far had you got in your reading?’
‘Marriage. Life in Boston. The wheeling and dealing over the business of getting her brother-in-law out of her way.’ He shook his head admiringly. ‘She was a sharp operator, wasn’t she? “Whatever Maddie wants, Maddie gets,” ‘ he sang softly, seeming to have quite forgotten his moment of pique, and he grinned at her again with his usual amiability. ‘Is there more? I thought she’d been feeling too lousy to talk?’
‘I’ve got a bit more. She came back to London when she found out her brother had been involved in a police chase. It sounds like a film, the way she tells it, but you have to believe it. It’s all so –’ She shrugged. ‘It’s just true. I can tell. He was sent to prison for his black-market dealings, it seems, and because he was a first offender it wasn’t a difficult prison. An open one, I gather. Anyway, her father got him out, using some villains or other, Maddie said, and they were speeding to get away when the police caught up with them. The police chased them off the road, the driver was killed, the other two men escaped and ran for it and her brother Ambrose broke his neck. Died six weeks later – he was twenty-six at the time.’
‘And this was because of black-market dealing? Oh, Christ, what a world this is. To kill people because of crimes against possessions. Did it matter that much?’
‘It did to them, I suppose. I wasn’t around at the time so I don’t know how much people cared about crimes like black-market dealings. Maybe they thought people who profited out of shortages were wicked enough to die young? Anyway, no one much seemed to care, it seems. Her father, Maddie said, tried to get action against the police, claiming they’d done it deliberately, that they weren’t trying to stop them so much as knock them off the road, but he got nowhere. And then he had a stroke.’
‘Not all that surprising,’ he said. ‘There’s a direct link between emotional stress
and CVAs.’
‘Mmm?’
‘Sorry. Cerebro-vascular accidents. Strokes.’
‘Then call ‘em strokes. You all love your jargon, don’t you? Maybe that’s why you like my notes. They’re written in ordinary straight English and not medical gobbledegook.’
‘I like them because they’re written by you,’ he said. ‘And you’re good. So, he had a stroke. What happened after that?’
‘Maddie had a bad time,’ she said and looked over at the slumped grey figure in the chair again. ‘I have to say she’s coming out of all this as a frightful twister – she used people like shoes, you know? Fancied them, got them, broke them in and then went looking for new ones. But it wasn’t all her fault.’
He was looking at her with bright eyes, watchful and eager but she wasn’t aware of that. She was still looking at Maddie. ‘Well?’ he said softly after a long pause. ‘Whose fault was it then?’
She shrugged. ‘Oh, I don’t know. Her father, maybe. He spoiled her as surely as if he’d set out to do it. Told her she could have the world if she wanted it, and gave her some of it – and then sent her out to get the rest for herself. He made her believe that if she didn’t go after what she wanted, and get it, she was useless and wet – and she was proud too, I think. She wanted to do things the way they ought to be done. She had such a thing about her house in Boston, you see. It had to be right – it was the way it looked as much as the way it was. So she was like that about what she did with people. It all had to be her idea of what was right. Except with Jay. She loved him, poor pathetic object that he was. She loved him –’
‘You don’t like him?’
Again she shrugged. ‘How can I say? I never met the man. But he sounds – the way she tells it, he sounds like the most selfish and stupid of men, and she’s telling me he was wonderful and how she loved him and needed him. But the man was a bastard. It comes out in all the things they did together. A total right royal bastard.’
‘Strong words,’ Joe said and sat down again. He ought to be somewhere else, but this was too important to miss, he told himself. And, anyway, I want to be here. ‘What sort of bastard?’
‘Every sort. He simply thought of no one but himself. When her father was ill and she felt so bad about him and blamed the whole thing on herself – and she had shopped him, of course, hadn’t she? And her brother? Sending that cable to the police from the ship – she felt bad. And she was pregnant again. But what did he do?’
‘I don’t know. Tell me.’
‘Nothing.’ She invested the word with so much scorn it seemed to crackle in the air between them. ‘Nothing at all. He sulked, I think, because he had to leave Boston, though God knows why. From all she says he didn’t have all that wonderful a time at his father’s hands there. Nothing like as much money as Maddie said he got in London, and it’s obvious to me that money was the only thing that man ever got excited about. Really excited. But look after his wife when she was going through such a rotten time? Not he, not that bastard –’
‘Annie,’ he said softly, ‘why are you getting so angry with him?’
She turned her head at last to look at him and her eyes were very dark because the pupils were so enlarged. ‘What?’
‘You’re red and your forehead is sweating and you’re furiously angry. Over a man you never knew, and are never likely to. Why, Annie? Try and tell me.’
She stared at him and slowly the flush died down and she shook her head, but he leaned closer and said, ‘Talk to me, Annie. You must talk to me. Tell me about Colin.’
‘Colin.’ There was no question in her voice. She just repeated the name dully.
‘Colin Matthews, Annie. Your father – another right royal bastard, wasn’t he? No, don’t pull away, for pity’s sake. Tell me! Tell me now –’
She was still trying to pull her hands away, because he had taken hold of them and was gripping tightly and for a moment he thought she would manage to escape and the chance would be lost, but slowly she stopped tugging and relaxed. And then, even more slowly began to speak.
‘Yes. He was a bastard. He made me one, but he was much worse than I am.’
‘You were an accident of marriage and birth, Annie. But he was selfish and unkind from choice, wasn’t he? We’re not talking about his birth certificate when you say he was a bastard, are we? We’re talking about his behaviour. Tell me what he did.’
‘The stupid woman adored him!’ Annie said, and she shook her head. ‘Just like that stupid one there – adored a man who was too selfish and too stupid to understand what was going on. He used her, sucked out of her all he could get, made her do whatever he wanted, when he wanted, and what did he give her? Nothing. Nothing at all. Just a stupid grand passion to talk to herself about, to dream about, to make stupid schemes about. Scheming to be with him, to make him care for her, to –’
‘Annie,’ Joe said very quietly, ‘who are we talking about? Maddie’s Jay, or your mother’s Colin?’
She shook her head piteously, and her eyes filled with tears, but she said nothing.
‘Go on,’ he said and put up one hand to touch her cheek. It was a friendly gesture but she turned her head away and he let his hand fall. ‘Go on, Annie,’ he said again, as though she had not moved. ‘Talk about it. You need to.’
‘You’re doing it again,’ she said dully and now she did manage to pull her hands away. ‘Treating me like a patient. I’m not a patient.’
‘No,’ he said. ‘Just a friend.’
But the moment had gone. She had her anger under control now, and the tears had not spilled over and she stood up and moved away towards Maddie.
‘Anyway, there it is, up to date,’ she said as lightly as she could. ‘You’ll see the notes as soon as I can get them typed. But you may have to wait a while. I’ve got a lot to do at the flat and anyway Maddie isn’t talking so much these days.’ She looked down at the bent grey head. ‘Are you, Maddie? So the next chapter of the tale is one you can’t have for a while. But we’ll get round to it, I dare say.’
He was on his feet too now. ‘Thank you,’ he said. ‘And I hope you feel better about –’
‘Please, don’t start talking about me,’ she said. ‘It isn’t only your Pollyanna-ing that drives me potty. It’s your meddling too. I don’t want to talk, all right?’
‘No. It isn’t. It’s time you learned to be a little less selfish yourself, you know.’ He seemed to flare up quite suddenly, and she blinked in surprise as his voice rose, and even some of the elderly women in the red-covered beds turned their heads to look. ‘When people offer friendship, it’s not just yourself you’re depriving when you reject it. I don’t create my concern for you out of the air, and if you stopped to think for just a moment about other people apart from yourself, you’d realise that. You’d realise that I talk to you as I do because I care about you, damn it. I told you once before that I like you. Can’t you see what it all is, or are you too wrapped up in your own misery and loving it, to give a damn about anyone else? I’m a determined man, Annie, and when I build a set of feelings, I don’t jettison them that easily. But go on as you are and you’ll make even me despair. And that could be the worst thing that could happen to you. So give just a little thought, will you, to what you are and what you’re doing with your life and other people’s? You might surprise yourself if you manage to be honest enough.’
And he went, walking down the ward with the long loping strides she knew so well and out of the door at the end, without looking back, as she stood and watched him go, feeling curiously deflated. She wasn’t angry – the emotion with which she was most familiar – and she wasn’t surprised or miserable or anything else identifiable. She just felt that half of her inner structure had gone, leaving her like a sagging wrinkled weakened nonentity. And it was a very uncomfortable way to feel.
‘Annie.’
She was still standing staring down the ward to the far end where the double doors were just stopping the swinging action he had left behin
d as he went sweeping out, and did not answer. Until it came again.
‘Annie. Come and sit here.’
Slowly Annie turned her head. Maddie was sitting in the same position but her chin was up and she was looking at her, and as Annie’s eyes met hers, she put out one hand.
‘Come and talk to me, Annie. I want to talk to you,’ the cracked old voice said and Annie said irritably, ‘Cough, for heaven’s sake! You don’t have to sound as croaky as that.’
Surprisingly Maddie laughed, opened her little black cavern of a mouth widely, and then she coughed, deliberately, and swallowed and coughed again, and then said, ‘Will that do?’ Her voice sounded clearer and stronger and after a moment Annie came and sat down beside her on the window seat.
‘What do you want?’
‘Did you mean all that?’
‘All what?’
‘The things you said about Jay.’
Annie looked at her and considered for a moment, and then said, ‘Yes. Yes I did. I think he treated you badly when your brother died. Don’t you?’
‘No,’ Maddie said. ‘Nothing he did was ever as bad as what I did.’
‘What did you do?’ Annie felt alertness creep into her. The deflated feeling thinned out and disappeared as interest came to fill the space Joe had managed to create in her. ‘He was dreadfully selfish and unkind. You must know that. How could you have been as bad to him as he was to you? When you loved him as much as you say you did?’
Maddie was staring at her with her eyes wide and very dark. ‘I can’t tell you. Not ever. I’ll tell you some of what happened. But I won’t tell you all of it.’
‘Why not? Isn’t it better to be as you are now, better than it was last year, when you never talked to anyone?’
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