AN Outrageous Affair

by Penny Vincenzi

  Now, as they lurched through endless streets for what seemed like hours, she felt as if she was on some nightmare pilgrim’s progress, a trial of endurance and fear, that was destined never to end, and that for all eternity she would be sitting, lurching from side to side in this cab, feeling ill, fearful, vulnerable. She wished more passionately than she had ever wished anything that she had accepted Joe’s offer to accompany her, but it had seemed cowardly at the time; she had felt Fleur would regard it with contempt, and besides she needed to be as alone with Fleur as the workings of a great hospital and the needs of a dying woman would allow. But now, she longed for him, for a friendly hand, a supporting voice, a kindly spirit. And she was late too: it was already nearly a quarter to seven; she had never expected it to take so long; suppose Fleur thought she wasn’t coming, didn’t wait for her. She would never find her again.

  Suddenly the taxi flung to a halt. Caroline was practically thrown on to her knees; she put out a hand to save herself and bruised her wrist badly. It didn’t seem to matter.

  ‘Here we are, lady. St Margaret’s Hospital. That’ll be twenty-two dollars.’

  Twenty-two dollars! Almost eight pounds. He must be ripping her off. Well, it didn’t matter. Caroline pulled out a wad of notes with her bruised aching hand. ‘Could you – take what I owe you?’

  ‘Lady, I ain’t a nursemaid. Just find me a twenty and a five. That’ll do.’

  ‘Oh, a twenty and a five. Yes. Yes, here you are.’

  ‘OK.’

  No thank you, no goodnight. He just pulled away into the darkness, her only human contact in this utterly solitary journey; slowly, carefully, as if she were treading a minefield, Caroline walked into the foyer.

  She realized suddenly that Fleur would not know her, would have no idea what she looked like. She at least had some idea what she was to find. It gave her an advantage, a sudden sense of confidence as she stood looking round. The place was packed, filled with people, with families, with small children, crying babies, some of them waiting apparently for nothing, some of them talking, a few obviously greatly distressed, most of them standing in a long line at the reception desk. She stood there, her heart beating so hard it made her breathless, her eyes desperately roving over the crowd, searching for a tall slender girl with dark hair and blue eyes. A girl she had borne and then been parted from seventeen long years ago, and who now, at last, she was to be with again. But she was not there. After five minutes of looking, of walking round, of peering into corners, of looking outside again on the steps, even in the lavatories, Caroline knew Fleur was not there. And she didn’t know how to bear it. She sat down suddenly on a newly vacated seat, weak, sickened with sadness, nursing her aching wrist, wondering how Fleur could be so cruel and how she could ever have believed that she would find her. Dimly through her own misery, the crying babies and the thick, strange, different accents, not just the American, but the Italian, the Spanish, the Indian, she could hear the Tannoy, endlessly giving out messages, incomprehensible, irrelevant, intrusive. At the end of each one there would be a bleep, then a moment’s merciful silence, then a second bleep and another one. And then suddenly Caroline recognized a word: a name. Her name. Sounding strange, the stress coming singsong-like on the first and last syllable Hun-ter-ton, but unmistakable. She stood up and pushed her way to the front of the queue at the desk, careless of hostility. ‘Excuse me,’ she kept saying, ‘excuse me, there’s a call for me, excuse me, excuse me.’ And – as much, she realized afterwards, because of her expensive fur coat, her tall Englishness, the aura of money and authority she carried about with her, as her own desperation, the crowd parted and let her through. These people had learnt to make way for authority. Certainly in a situation like this one.

  ‘Yes, ma’am?’ She was at the desk now. A black, impatient face confronted her. ‘Can I help you?’

  ‘My name is Hunterton. There’s a message for me. On the Tannoy.’

  ‘Ah, yes. Yes, you’re to go right on up to Ward 7B. Miss FitzPatrick will be up there with her grandmother.’

  ‘Ward 7B. Yes, yes of course. Er – where – how do I find it?’

  ‘Over to the elevator. Seventh floor. Turn right.’ The voice was more impatient now. ‘Next?’

  ‘Er – is everything all right?’

  ‘Ma’am, nothin’ is all right in this hospital. Certainly not in Ward 7B. Why don’t you go on up there, and you can find out for yourself. Next!’

  Caroline went over to the elevators; they were slow, grindingly noisy, packed. They stopped at every floor; by the time she reached the seventh she was alone apart from a little old black woman and her granddaughter. ‘Now you listen to me,’ she was hissing in the little girl’s ear, ‘you just be good tonight, and no cryin’. Your mother don’t want to be visited by a child who cries. It don’t help her any to get better. You just smile at her and be good.’

  The child was silent; she appeared to be in the grip of an overwhelming terror.

  ‘Are you going to 7B?’ asked Caroline.

  ‘Yes, we are. Follow me, honey, we’ll show you the way. Come along, Aurelia, now remember what I said.’

  Ward 7B was down the corridor, quite a long way; the old woman walked slowly, but Caroline didn’t like to run, it seemed rude. At the ward, huge, neat, awesome, she halted; Aurelia and her grandmother made for the bed nearest the door, where a young woman clearly in the most appalling pain lay twisting and turning on her pillow. Caroline winced and looked down the beds, and then started very slowly walking towards the other end of the room.

  And then she saw her, straight away, sitting facing her, but looking at the person in the bed, holding her hand, and stroking it, smiling very sweetly, and then, as Caroline watched her, she leant forward and whispered something into the pillow. Caroline had not known quite what to expect, but it had not been this: this tangible, visible tenderness. She felt a stab of tears behind her eyes, a harsh roughness in her throat. She could still not see who was in the bed, shielded as she was by the curtains and the pillows propped round her; so she moved forward again, and Fleur looked up across the bed at her, with her great dark blue eyes smudged with weariness and grief, and just for a moment, before the defences went up, Caroline saw in those eyes not just curiosity, desperation, fear, but a flash of greeting, and of relief that she was actually there.

  ‘Fleur?’ she said, stepping forward, right up to the bed, and the girl nodded, and put her finger to her lips and gesticulated at the pillow. Caroline had not seen anyone near to death before, but she recognized it now; Kathleen lay back, her grey hair spread about her, her face pinched and waxy, her lips slack, moving occasionally, her hands clawing gently but constantly at the sheets. She was emaciated, except for the huge extended abdomen; her arms were like small sticks with skin hung on them, her neck so thin it seemed scarcely possible it could support her head. Caroline looked at her for a long time, Brendan’s mother, and felt a genuine aching grief of her own, having never known her, never spoken to her, but known her son so well; and then she turned to Fleur, Brendan’s daughter, looking up at her with an oddly trusting expression, and found that in the great white heat of emotion she was experiencing, the predominant one was entirely maternal and tender, a sense that this child had had enough, and needed respite.

  ‘Come along,’ she said gently, ‘she will sleep for a while. We can stay nearby and ask the nurse to call us. Come along, Fleur, come with me.’

  And, childlike, obedient, utterly unlike the harsh, hostile young woman Caroline had been expecting to find, Fleur stood up and followed her out of the ward.

  At the end, by the nursing office, they paused. ‘We are relatives of Mrs FitzPatrick,’ said Caroline firmly. ‘She is asleep at the moment. We shall be just along the corridor. Please call us if she wakes.’

  And the young nurse, as awed by the authority of the fur coat, the English accent, the air of conf
idence as the people downstairs had been, nodded and said she certainly would, and directed them towards the drinks machine.

  They walked towards it in silence; when they got there, Caroline got out her purse and said, ‘What would you like, Fleur, tea or – or coffee? It seems quite wrong that I don’t know even what you like to drink.’

  But this was too big a step forward to Fleur, she was not prepared to make such concessions to friendliness; she shrugged and said, ‘I don’t care,’ and then sat huddled on the bench seat, watching Caroline struggle with the unfamiliar coins, the temperamental machine.

  ‘Here,’ said Caroline. ‘Tea. With sugar. Great English remedy for shock. Drink it.’

  ‘Thank you,’ said Fleur. She would not look at Caroline; she sat looking at her feet, her long, slender feet, on which she wore rather expensive-looking brown leather low-heeled pumps, Caroline noticed rather irrelevantly. She was dressed all in shades of brown, a brown coat pulled round her against the world and the cold, a brown skirt, a beige sweater. Her legs were long and very slim, her hands long-fingered and graceful. Caroline had expected, possibly, beauty; she had not expected grace. She sat looking at her, drinking her in, much as she had seventeen years before, when she had been committing her to memory; now, finding her again, having her restored to her, there was as much to see, to explore.

  Finally Fleur spoke. ‘She probably won’t go through the night,’ she said. ‘She suddenly, just this afternoon, got much worse. She – she hemorrhaged. The pain was so bad, I was afraid. I – well, they’ve given her so much stuff now, she doesn’t know anything any more.’ She turned to Caroline, and the blue eyes were full of tears; she pushed her heavy dark hair back with a gesture of immense weariness. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said, more formal, less friendly all of a sudden, ‘I’m sorry I wasn’t downstairs. You were very late, and I didn’t want to leave her. What happened?’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ said Caroline, ‘I didn’t think it would be so far, take so long. And it was the rush hour, I suppose.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Did she – does she know I’m coming?’

  ‘Oh yes. I told her. I told her we’d already met. She wanted to know all about you. I told her some lies. I don’t think she took much of it in. It made her really happy. I can’t imagine why.’ She looked at Caroline coldly; more the girl of the letters, the phone call.

  ‘Well,’ said Caroline, ‘it doesn’t really matter, does it? Why, I mean.’

  ‘No. No, I suppose not. I was going to ask you if we could move her, but it’s not worth it now.’

  ‘No, I’m afraid not. Where are your aunts?’

  ‘Well, one of them has been here all afternoon and gone home to her kids. One died, oh, about five, six years ago. One will be here quite soon. And the last one, Edna, is flying over from California tonight. I don’t know if she’ll make it.’

  ‘Miss FitzPatrick! Can you come quickly, please. Your grandmother is asking for you.’

  Fleur stood up, dropped the cardboard cup and ran along the corridor. Caroline followed her. They reached the bed together; Kathleen was awake, looking confused, frightened. She reached out for Fleur’s hands, clung on to them. ‘You naughty child. Where did you go? I need you here with me.’

  ‘Is the pain bad, Grandma?’

  ‘The pain is nothing compared with worrying about you.’ She was half lucid, half drifting in and out of hallucination. ‘Now did you bring Caroline with you this time?’

  ‘Yes I did, Grandma, and she is here. Look, here, take her hand.’

  She placed Caroline’s hand in the frail, dry one; Caroline held it gently, smiled into the fierce blue eyes. Those eyes. So that was where they came from. Irish eyes.

  ‘You’re very pretty. I knew you would be. Brendan only liked pretty girls.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘Now I want you to promise, promise me to look after Fleur. She has no money, I have no money. She is a clever child, she has to finish her education. She must not be wasted. Brendan would not have – not have . . .’ The voice, initially urgent and hurried, weakened, trailed away.

  ‘I will. I will look after her. I promise. I will take her home with me and care for her. She will be safe and she will be loved.’

  ‘Safe and loved. Yes. The girls, they can’t do anything for her. None of them. You must. Fleur, you will be safe and you will be loved. With your mother.’ The voice was exhausted, so faint it was scarcely there. Then a new sound came from the thin throat: a wail of pain, of agony.

  Fleur looked frightened, she pressed the bell on the bed frantically. ‘Nurse, nurse, come quickly, please, give her more morphine quickly, for God’s sake.’

  Death, Caroline told Joe much much later, when she arrived back exhausted at the hotel, was not swift, was not easy, was not peaceful; it was, as she had seen it that night and the following day, hard, as hard a struggle as birth, the pain as intense, the drama every bit as great. They stayed, she and Fleur and Brendan’s sisters, they sat and endured as Kathleen endured, they forced themselves to listen as she cried out in pain, they felt her relief as the morphine lifted the pain away, they waited afraid of its return. And each time, as she drifted away from them into the half peace, they looked at each other, Caroline made entirely one of them by the drama, by her willingness, her courage, to share it with them, and said, although not in words, this time she is gone, she has left us; and each time, Kathleen clung on, desperately, bravely, fearfully to life. The priest came, administered the last rites; Fleur and Caroline, who had never witnessed the ritual, watched him in something close to terror as he anointed Kathleen, blessed her, and as she went through the awesome act of accepting the gift, the extreme unction, pronounced her sins forgiven. The night passed, morning came, around them the life and death of the ward went on, the nurses aroused Kathleen, washed her, changed her bed, administered her drugs; at one point Fleur slept, sitting next to Caroline, her head falling heavily on to her shoulder, and Caroline thought that despite the horror, the grief, the ugliness she was witnessing, she had not in all the long years since Fleur’s birth felt so at peace, so happy.

  When Kathleen finally died, with no fuss, no drama, just a slowly decreasing series of breaths, her eyes wide open, but calm, almost humorous, Fleur and Caroline were alone with her: Edna, worn out with her journey, was asleep in a chair in the day room, Kate had gone to telephone, and Maureen was at home briefly, necessarily, with her husband and children. Fleur looked at Kathleen, then at Caroline, her eyes big and afraid, and Caroline nodded gently and went for the nurse; when she came back Fleur was holding Kathleen’s hand again, quite calm, but with great tears rolling down her white face. They closed Kathleen’s eyes, the nurses, straightened her sheets, and then asked Caroline and Fleur to leave; they could come back later, they said, when they had done what had to be done. Fleur walked quite quickly down the ward, out into the corridor and then leant against the wall, shaking, her eyes closed; Caroline, without conscious thought, without self-consciousness, put her arms round her and said, ‘It’s all right, Fleur, she’s all right now,’ over and over again. And Fleur, briefly allowing herself to accept the comfort, leant against her, put her head on Caroline’s shoulder and wept: peacefully, easily, almost happily.

  ‘She was always there,’ she kept saying, ‘always there. She was my mother, my father, my family, all I had,’ and Caroline did not find this hurtful or hard to accept, she just kept saying, ‘I know, I know,’ and thinking that Kathleen’s death, however painful, however fearful, had accomplished a wonderful thing for her and her child.

  Later, much later, when they had all seen Kathleen again, quite peaceful now, and Fleur, oddly grown up and in command, had thanked the nurses, and they had the death certificate, they discussed, briefly, the funeral arrangements, and Maureen said she must get back again to her family, and Kate announced she must go to work, and Edna pho
ned her family and asked her husband to come up with their children for the funeral.

  Then finally Caroline said, and they could all see how true it was, that she was tired, that she would like to go back to her hotel. Kate said she would help her find a cab, and thanked her for staying and walked out into the suddenly bright sunshine with her.

  ‘It was good of you to come,’ she said again, on the hospital steps, ‘very good. My mother became obsessed with meeting you, with knowing Fleur would be in good hands. Of course, she saw her as a child. Fleur is quite able to care for herself. But she could never see that. To her, Fleur was a baby. Brendan’s baby, and she had to take care of her.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Caroline, ‘yes, I can see that.’

  ‘And now did she just write to you? Out of the blue?’

  ‘She did,’ said Caroline carefully, anxious not to reveal Fleur’s earlier letter, lest they had not known any of it.

  ‘It must have been a great surprise,’ said Kate, awkwardly, not sure how to handle the situation, not sure how much Caroline would have wished her to know, ‘not having seen Fleur for so many years.’

  Caroline said yes, it had indeed been a surprise, but that Fleur was a beautiful girl, and clearly a brave and loving one, and a daughter such as she could be proud of.

  ‘Indeed,’ said Kate, ‘and she is clever too, very clever. You will enjoy getting to know her. Now here is a cab. Please come and see us again, tomorrow perhaps, and we will be looking for you at the funeral. It will be good to have you there.’

  None of them seemed remotely hostile, or even aware that she had had no part in Kathleen’s life until the time of leaving it; her sharing of the trauma had made her part of them, part of the family, the one night worth months, years of closeness.