In a Good Light

by Clare Chambers

  To cheer myself up I decided to re-read Donovan’s note, the only thing of his I had left. I knew it by heart anyway, but somehow seeing his handwriting intensified the effect. When I took it from its place of safe-keeping, tucked into the frame of my dressing-table mirror, another horrible jolt awaited me.

  Esther

  I have taken back my first letter because I retract what I wrote. I said you were special to me. You are not.

  Donovan

  It wasn’t so much the contents of the note that floored me as the method of delivery, which relied on the accurate, mortifying assumption that I intended to re-read the original, and also allowed no opportunity for retaliation. Short of dancing round the room, shaking my fist and slamming a foot through the floorboards like Rumpelstiltskin, I had no outlet for my rage. Nothing chases sleep away like this sort of unspent indignation, so I pulled up a chair to the window and watched the tatters of cloud racing across the moon, and the trees jerking and diving in the copse. I could hear the low growl of an aeroplane somewhere far above, the church bell tolling, and in the far distance, the mournful wail of an ambulance.

  I suppose I must eventually have fallen asleep where I was sitting, because the next thing I knew Mum was standing over me, a ghost of herself, with her white nightdress and floating hair, shaking my shoulder and saying, ‘Esther, Esther, wake up. Something terrible’s happened.’ And with those words the picturebook of my childhood fluttered before me, page by page, in all its strange and wonderful detail, and slammed shut for ever.

  35

  THE TWELVE MONTHS that followed the accident were the worst of our lives. I use the word ‘accident’ grudgingly: only a pedant or a lawyer would deny that Christian was the victim of a crime.

  Although he was the one paralysed, it’s no exaggeration to say that what happened to him shattered us all. Only Grandpa Percy, adrift and unreachable in his dementia, remained untouched.

  Dad underwent a spiritual crisis that took him years to resolve, and ultimately cost him his job: in the crucible of suffering, he found his faith melted away, leaving him prone to fits of crushing guilt and nihilistic despair. He saw the fault as his alone. If only he hadn’t sent that letter to the papers supporting Janine Fellowes’ release, and giving our home address in black and white. He was prepared for hostile criticism, and even some personal danger, but he had never dreamed that anyone would hunt down his son. I couldn’t help remembering that they’d nearly got Christian the first time, with that brick through the window. I’m sure Dad remembered it too.

  ‘You feel abandoned,’ said his spiritual adviser, Canon Fogle. ‘You think: how can a loving God have visited this tragedy upon my innocent son? Why, in my hour of need, is He so remote?’

  ‘No,’ said Dad. ‘I think: there is no God. I’ve been wrong all along. My whole life has been based on a mistake.’

  He lost interest in his work at the prison: he had no sympathy any more for criminals, those casual, remorseless wreckers of lives, and no message of divine salvation to redeem them. He tried to resign but they wouldn’t let him. They gave him compassionate leave, and then sick leave, and then extended sick leave, until in the end he obliged and became sick. I remember coming home from school each day to find him sitting in the same chair in the dining room, absorbed, to the point of autism, in sorting the pieces of some vast jigsaw onto trays, by shape and colour, while the picture made a slow, ragged advance across the table. When it was finished he took a photograph of it, which struck me as highly peculiar. This was hardly an episode he’d want any reminder of, I thought. Not that there was much chance of a print ever surfacing: in our house films sat around in drawers undeveloped for years.

  Mum’s sympathies and energies were focused on Christian: there wasn’t much left over for Dad. ‘I’ve got two genuine invalids to care for here,’ I once heard her snap. ‘Don’t waste my time with your bogus afflictions.’ She coped better than him, publicly at least, but how much of it was a performance for Christian’s benefit I never knew. Hers had always been a more wrathful God, and her opinion of mankind more pessimistic: it could be said that the disaster confirmed rather than undermined her view of the world as a vale of injustice and tears. Perhaps women are just stronger. I know she aged about ten years in as many months, and her hair fell out in handfuls. I used to find slimy skeins of it choking up the plughole in the bath. Where once it had been so lush, twisted and coiled and pinned, it now sat like cobwebs, revealing the pink of her scalp underneath. She didn’t make any attempt to disguise it (if, indeed, she’d even noticed: she’d never had any personal vanity), until Christian asked if she was having chemotherapy without telling us. After that she combed the whole lot forward and chopped it into a fringe, and wore a headscarf to cover the back.

  Just as I can’t remember when I first learned that we all have to die, I don’t think there was a specific moment when I was told that Christian would never walk again. The bad news seemed to come piece by piece, anticipated, delivered, withdrawn, rephrased and hedged about with uncertainties. Christian knew he’d broken his back from the moment he hit the ground, but some stubborn streak of optimism convinced him that the combination of modern medicine and his own invincible willpower would prevail. It was a long time before he was prepared to make any accommodation with his condition that was anything other than short term. ‘Just until I’m back on my feet,’ he’d say, as though he’d sprained his ankle.

  Perhaps we were to blame for colluding in his self-deception. But we could see how close to despair he was, and none of us had the courage to extinguish that faint glimmer of false hope with a cold draught of truth. Sometimes honest comfort isn’t well received. There was one occasion early on, while Christian was still in hospital, before he was moved to the specialist unit at Hither Green. I was sitting with him, watching him eat his lunch – some sort of fish and potato gloop with peas: real invalid’s food. His legs, on top of the covers, were still tanned from the summer; his catheter tube emerged from the hem of his pyjama shorts and vanished over the far side of the bed. He was propped up on a bank of pillows against the adjustable backrest, but not quite upright enough, so he couldn’t always manage to convey the fork to his mouth without dropping lumps of food. I didn’t know whether to pretend I hadn’t noticed, or offer to try and shift him, but after the third or fourth spill he started swearing, so not noticing was no longer an option.

  ‘You need to be sitting up more,’ I said. And I had to push him forwards off the backrest, so I could crank it up a notch, and then haul him back against it. Even with Christian using his arms for support, his lower body was such a dead weight it was a real struggle. It struck me that if it hadn’t been so awful, it was just the sort of situation that would have had us falling about with laughter. But we weren’t laughing; we were just sweating and cursing. When I’d finally sorted him out, he let out a sigh and said, ‘I can’t stand this much longer. How am I ever going to get my life back to normal if I need help all the time?’

  ‘Oh, Christian!’ I said, slipping into that tone of mournful sympathy he hated. ‘Don’t worry. Whatever happens I’ll always be there to look after you.’

  It was the wrong thing to say. He looked at me with something like hatred and then turned his face to the wall. Before I could think how to salvage the situation, he snatched up the fork he had just been using and jammed it into his thigh. He laughed in surprise as four, deep, painless puncture marks in his inert limb welled up with blood.

  The nurse who came to clean it up and give him a tetanus jab was not impressed. ‘Please don’t do that again,’ she said, mildly. They all loved Christian. ‘You might have severed an artery. And as for using a dirty fork . . .’

  ‘I might have had to have the whole leg off, and then where would I be?’ Christian retorted, and I could smile at last. Black humour was always preferable to black despair.

  One of the many specialists who saw Christian in those early days made an unguarded (and, as it turned out, complet
ely fanciful) remark along the lines that in his view they were only ten years away from a cure. I could see Christian latching onto this as though it was a cast-iron guarantee, accurate to the day. ‘I’m going to be walking by the time I’m thirty,’ he’d say, in the way that equally deluded souls proclaim they’re going to be millionaires.

  ‘I don’t know what to do,’ Mum said to the clinical psychologist. ‘He sits there listening and nodding while the consultant explains that the damage to the spinal cord is irreversible, and then half an hour later he’s off again, talking about having physio to strengthen his leg muscles.’

  ‘Well,’ said the psychologist, clasping her hands in her lap. ‘It’s probably not a good idea to endorse anything that’s plainly not true. But optimism should be encouraged: it just needs to be channelled towards achievable goals, if you see what I mean.’

  ‘So when Christian says: “I am going to walk again, and I don’t care how long it takes or what I have to do”, what should I reply?’ Mum asked.

  ‘Oh, something like: “Your self-belief and strength of character are two qualities that will help you to live a fulfilled life.”’ Mum looked thoroughly sceptical.

  The Day he came home in his wheelchair was the saddest day of my life. The dining room had been converted into a bedroom for him, with all his belongings brought down and arranged in their former layout. Only the dartboard remained upstairs. Dad couldn’t bring himself to nail it up at half-mast.

  Christian wheeled himself over to the French windows and sat looking out over the garden. It was late autumn now and the trees in the spinney were in their usual fiery death throes, a blaze of copper and gold against a hard white sky. The apples had gone ungathered this year and lay rotting where they fell. Unpruned bushes sagged over the leaf-spattered lawn, steaming from recent rain. Beside the greenhouse something glittered in the grass. A fragment of broken pane: debris from another lifetime.

  Mum had collected together all the cards that had arrived from well-wishers during his absence and put them in a pile for him to read. There were dozens and dozens. I would never have believed we knew so many people: the congregation at Holy Trinity, Old Turtonians, people from the golf club, and the Fox and Pheasant, friends from Exeter, Mrs Tapley, Martina. Many cards bore the shamelessly inappropriate message ‘Get Well Soon’. At the other end of the spectrum, a few offered ‘Deepest Sympathy’. Christian’s predicament clearly represented a gap in the market that was not being addressed.

  He ran his eyes over them listlessly, in the manner of someone exposed to other people’s holiday photos, and laid them aside with relief.

  Two squirrels were playing chase on the grass, scrambling up and down the fence, tumbling and clowning. At last Christian broke the silence.

  ‘Mary Lennox,’ he said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Mary Lennox. I’ve been racking my brain trying to remember the name of the girl in that book we read when we were little. She goes to live with some old uncle and there’s this cripple hidden in the attic or somewhere.’

  ‘The Secret Garden,’ I said, the memory clawing its way into the light.

  ‘That’s right. What was his name?’

  ‘Colin.’

  ‘Colin,’ he repeated, with something like delight.

  ‘Yes, he learns to walk again,’ I said, without any forethought.

  ‘Does he?’ said Christian, suddenly alert. ‘I’d forgotten that. Yes, you’re right!’ And the way he seized on this detail from what was, after all, just a story, wrenched at my heart, and the endless horror of it all swept over me again. My face must have betrayed me, because Christian’s expression darkened. ‘Don’t look at me like that,’ he snapped, and he turned away and stared out of the window until I slunk away.

  No one minds a little sympathy, but what Christian couldn’t bear was to be an object of pity for ever. That was why he didn’t want, and refused to see, any visitors in hospital. He’d asked for Penny on the first or second day, and when I told him she’d gone to France he didn’t even need me to elaborate. ‘They didn’t waste much time,’ he said. ‘He always was a shitty, conniving little bastard.’

  By the time she came back home and heard the news his resolve was as hard as steel. I wasn’t there the day she turned up at the hospital: it was left to Mum to turn her away. She had brought a bunch of white roses, still in bud, which Mum promised to pass on, but Christian dropped them unopened into the rubbish bag on the door of his bedside cabinet. A nurse, not knowing their history, retrieved them and put them in a plastic vase, where they hung their heads and withered without ever coming into bloom.

  ‘Do you think you’ll ever see her again?’ I asked him, when I heard about the failed visit. He shook his head with slow deliberation. ‘No. He can have her,’ he said.

  I wondered if she’d try again, or make some effort to use me as an intermediary, but she never did: I suppose she had her pride, too.

  There was no likelihood of his ever bumping into her. He seldom left the house, and had no intention of returning to Exeter to finish his degree. He’d already missed one whole term of his final year. Mum offered to move down there with him and act as nurse, chauffeur, cook, amanuensis, whatever it took so he could study, but he decided he didn’t want to be a student on those terms. He said he’d be better off doing a correspondence course, an idea he brought up from time to time to head off motivational pep-talks from Mum, but never pursued with any vigour. I think he was reluctant to face those friends who’d known him as he was. It was that everlasting sympathy he dreaded. ‘I don’t want anyone coming over to gawp at me, or getting all emotional, so I end up having to comfort them.’ On the other hand he was no keener to mix with other disabled people, and flatly refused to attend the Spinal Injuries Support Group. ‘Waste an afternoon sitting around in a circle with a bunch of other cripples? No way!’

  He had been warned he might put on weight, and, in this respect at least, he was happy to conform. He’d always had a prodigious appetite, even given the disincentive of Mum’s cooking, but now his only exercise was bouncing a tennis ball against the floor and catching it off the wall. Ker-thunk, ker-thunk, it went, hour after hour in exactly the same spot, so that it left a grey, shiny patch on the wallpaper.

  ‘There’s loads of sports you can do in a wheelchair,’ I said to him one day. I’d been looking through all the leaflets about keeping fit that the physio at the spinal unit had given him, and which he’d left unread in their folder. ‘You could do basketball, hockey, even tennis. You’d be brilliant at it.’

  He looked at me as though I’d suggested joining the Brownies. ‘That’s not proper sport,’ was his bitter riposte. ‘It’s like . . . women’s rugby,’ he said, managing to denigrate two sectors of the population for the price of one.

  The best times were when he asked for help, and there was something I could do for him. Occasionally, last thing at night, as I was about to go up to bed, he’d say, ‘Hey, Esther, take us out for a push, will you?’ He could manage the wheelchair perfectly well by himself on the flat, but the gravel in the driveway was deep and slushy in places, and there was nothing that maddened him more than getting beached. Also, I don’t think he liked being out on his own any more, though he would never admit to a weakness like fear. I’d wheel him round the lanes – always, and without discussion avoiding the churchyard – up to the green, past the Fox and Pheasant, Mrs Tapley’s old house (now flats), the Victorian cottages where the Conways lived, and back along the stretch of road where Aunty Barbara had skidded into the ditch. On one of these walks he said to me, unprompted by anything we’d been discussing, ‘You know something, Esther? You’re the only person I know who doesn’t totally wind me up.’

  Here was the recognition I’d been striving for all my life, but it brought me no pleasure, because for him to appreciate me at last had taken the wreck of all his hopes.

  When I say that my own feelings were never acknowledged, it is a matter of record, not of complaint. My
own trivial heartaches about the loss of Donovan, and then Penny, had been engulfed, quite understandably, by the larger sorrow, and my grieving had to be done in private. There wasn’t enough sympathy left over: it was all drawn into the black hole of Christian’s pain. I thought about Donovan often, with a sense of regret and helplessness. Occasionally, when I was out, I would catch a glimpse of someone who, after pursuit and proper scrutiny, turned out to bear no more than a feeble resemblance. I looked forward to going to bed each night, because it gave me the chance to relive that stupid, bungled kiss before I dropped off to sleep, in the hope that I would dream a fitting sequel, but I never did. At first it took some willpower not to bring his name up in conversation, or when it did arise naturally, not to pounce.

  When a six-page letter of condolence arrived from Aunty Barbara, written, as a mark of respect, on actual notepaper, I skimmed directly to the reference to Donovan. . . . Donovan has decamped to the caravan and shows no sign of returning. He seems to be intent on turning into one of these travellers. (This struck me as bizarre, since the very last thing anyone could do in that bog-bound caravan was travel.) I’m not sure what he’s living on. He says he does odd jobs – no doubt a euphemism for pilfering. I await a call from the Dyfed constabulary.

  The main body of the letter was peppered with emphatic capitals and underlinings. I could practically hear her roars of sympathy coming off the page.

  I was absolutely DEVASTATED to hear your APPALLING news. I can only imagine the HORROR you must be going through . . . Poor Christian! . . . Poor all of you! What a LOATHSOME world we live in. I hope your faith and your goodness and your great love for each other will sustain you, as it must.

  She signed off ‘Barbara Fry-Kapper’ – a detail whose significance was missed by everyone but me, who recalled perfectly Donovan’s parting advice to her, as I recalled all his words.