Five minutes passed; then ten. This is my fault, he thought. Jane will hold me responsible. It was my idea to have James and Kerry in the house. Jane never wanted them there. He took his pulse: 130. They’ll find me in here dead, he thought, standing up abruptly and crossing the room in two paces. He poked his head around the door, intending to waylay the first passer-by. A cleaner in a plastic overall, pushing a floor-polisher, was vanishing round a corner. From the same direction a trolley, hung with drips and tubes and accompanied by a cavalcade of medics, swung into view. The patient was a middle-aged man. Guy shrank back into the waiting room as it sped past him and disappeared into the High Dependency Unit. Even in his mood of desperation he couldn’t bring himself to flag down another casualty. In the silence of the pale green hospitality suite Guy sank to his knees and prayed.
Please God, forgive me for doubting you. Please don’t take Harriet from me. Please let her be all right. I will never ask for anything again. I will never have another petty thought as long as I live. Oh, and please let James be all right too. And his girlfriend. Whatshemame. Amen.
Guy was still on his knees when the doctor – a tiny Asian woman – walked in. When he scrambled to his feet he towered over her. She spoke so quietly he had to bend down to catch every word. ‘You are Harriet’s father?’ she whispered.
‘Yes.’ Guy clenched and unclenched his hands at his sides to stop them from shaking.
‘You can see her now, but it will be quite distressing for you. Her face is very bruised and swollen, and she has had some stitches in her scalp.’ She patted the left side of her head. ‘So a patch of hair has been shaved off. She has a small fracture to the skull. That’s not necessarily as bad as it sounds. Her brain scan is clear, there’s no sign of any damage, so that’s good. But it looks alarming when you first see her.’
‘But is she going to be all right?’ Guy asked, for what seemed to him the hundredth time. He would go on and on asking different experts all the time Harriet lay in hospital until someone came out with an unqualified Yes.
‘Well, as I say, there’s no obvious sign of damage to the brain,’ said the doctor. ‘So there’s no reason why she shouldn’t make a full recovery. But we always take head injuries seriously, especially with children, so we’re monitoring her very closely.’
‘Can she talk? I mean is she awake.’
The doctor looked perplexed at his naivety. ‘No. She’s not talking at the moment. The painkillers have left her very woozy. But you can sit with her. Ready?’
Guy nodded, bracing himself for shock, and followed the doctor through the locked double doors.
In another wing of the hospital Nina paced the corridor outside Theatre Two. There was nowhere to sit – loiterers were not encouraged – but she wanted to see James the moment the operation was over. Just a glance would be enough for her to tell – with a mother’s instinct – whether it had gone well.
The Senior House Officer who had assessed James’s condition on his arrival in Casualty had explained to Nina that they needed to operate. Internal injuries were suspected. He had taken her aside into a curtained-off cubicle to give the illusion of privacy. Beneath the curtain hem on both sides Nina could see feet and ankles, not a metre away. ‘It may be a ruptured spleen,’ he had said. ‘In which case they’ll perform a splenectomy.’
‘Is that a dangerous operation?’ Nina asked. ‘Do most people, you know, survive?’
‘Any operation carried out under general anaesthetic involves an element of risk,’ the doctor replied, with what Nina soon came to recognize as standard-issue professional caution. ‘But, no, it’s not especially dangerous.’
‘He’s got a donor card,’ Nina said, in a dull voice. She didn’t want to be asked about it later, when she might say No. The doctor escorted her back to the waiting room, his hand hovering near but not quite touching her back. ‘There’s no reason why it should come to that,’ he said. ‘But thank you.’
Nina stared at the closed doors of Theatre Two, willing them to open. She would have prayed, but she didn’t believe in God: the more she knew of the world the less likely it seemed that there was anyone in control. Instead she prayed to James himself: to be strong, to fight, not to leave her. She made extravagant bargains with destiny. If James comes through this I will never be jealous or clinging or protective or bossy as long as I live. I will devote my life to helping Others.
She opened her eyes and glanced down at her watch. An hour, the doctor had said. Almost no time had passed since she last checked. Presently the anguish of hoping overcame her and she began to weep, silent streams, which collected in the lines on her face and dripped off her chin. This lasted a minute or two and then the tears ran out – as if a tank had been drained. Nina dried her burning face on a fresh tissue, feeling marginally better. Crying seemed to have released a build-up of pressure inside her skull. She thought of Irene, who had lost her only son and lived another eighteen years in the shadow of grief, and was profoundly grateful that she had been spared this day. And in that brief moment of deep concentration it came to her with absolute clarity that in giving Irene a share of James she had done the Right Thing. She had never been perfectly convinced until now, even when trying to explain it to herself, but this new sense of justification would stay with her for ever.
Jane drove as fast as the speed limit would allow, occasionally faster if the traffic permitted, her eyes fixed on the road ahead. Apart from initial expressions of dismay and sympathy Erica made no attempt at conversation, intuiting correctly that Jane had no desire to talk. From the back seat Yorrick babbled and laughed, oblivious to the change of atmosphere.
This is all my fault, Jane was thinking, chewing mechanically at the skin on the inside of her cheek. Harriet will die because I left her behind. Guy will never forgive me. This is my punishment for wishing her out of the way. The feeling of nausea deep in her guts was a combination of fear of losing Harriet and fear of facing Guy. How would she drag herself through the rest of her life under the weight of so much sorrow and grief? She gripped the steering wheel and locked her arms to stop herself from slumping forwards, already feeling the pressure on her shoulders like a sack of stones.
In the seat beside her Erica flinched. They were too close to the car in front. Jane braked sharply. Concentrate, she told herself. Just get there. She gave Erica an apologetic glance and noticed the gold question mark on her collar flashing as it caught the sun.
‘Oh, I never got Harriet a present!’ she cried, remembering too late her parting bribe. Another rock of betrayal for the sack.
‘She won’t hold it against you,’ said Erica. ‘Anyway, there’ll be a shop at the hospital selling teddy bears and things like that.’
‘I said it would be something from the seaside.’
‘She won’t mind where it’s from. Don’t upset yourself.’
But Jane refused to be consoled, preferring instead to torture herself all the way home with the thought that her last words to Harriet had been a broken promise.
Guy sat beside Harriet’s bed holding her limp hand. The nurse had positioned the chair on her good side where the bruising to her face was less shocking. All the same Guy was shocked. He had expected at least to recognize Harriet, but with her black eye and swollen cheek and jaw, so raw and purple, and her curly hair combed straight back off her forehead, around a gauze dressing, the resemblance to his beautiful girl was not even passing. She looked so small, too, in the wide white bed; she hardly made a bump under the sheet. He concentrated on watching her breathing: the gentle rise and fall of the hospital gown was infinitely comforting. The only other occupant of the unit – the middle-aged man who had been wheeled past him earlier – was on a ventilator. Guy could hear its mechanical sighs. He tried talking to Harriet while she dozed, and reciting those bits of The Jumblies and The Owl and the Pussycat that he could remember, just to let her know he was there, but his voice sounded strained and artificial, and more likely to communicate anxiety than reassurance
, so he had stopped. Occasionally Harriet’s good eyelid flickered, and she made a faint mewing noise in the back of her throat and, once, she opened one eye and closed it again, but she seemed reluctant to wake up fully.
Just five more minutes, thought Guy, and then I’ll go and phone Mary, and tell Sophie that everything’s fine. And then I must find Nina and James. He was torn between his duty to James, who was, from Nina’s account, more seriously injured, and his desperate desire to be with Harriet when she woke, and, if possible, to intercept Jane on her arrival. He was surprised and a little ashamed to find how clearly and naturally his priorities had declared themselves; his sense of responsibility and goodwill towards James was nothing beside the anguished love he felt for his girls.
‘I’ve just got to go and find out how my son is,’ Guy explained to a nurse who was adjusting dials on the bank of monitors at the head of the middle-aged man’s bed. He felt bound to make a point of his departure so that they would know that Harriet was now unattended.
‘We’ll keep an eye on her,’ the nurse promised, catching on.
‘I’ll be back soon,’ said Guy, tapping his watch face.
‘Just ring. I’ll let you in.’
He made his way down the cul-de-sac into the long straight corridor which formed the hospital’s main artery. Two doctors passed him at a brisk pace, their white coat tails flapping. Porters with trolleys criss-crossed the passage and disappeared into lifts. A pregnant woman in a dressing gown was feeding coins into a pay phone. A woman well past retirement age pushed a jangling tea-cart from ward to ward. And then for a second the corridor cleared, and Guy saw the figure of his wife, silhouetted against the glass doors in the far distance, staring up at a bewilderingly comprehensive directory.
‘Jane!’ he bellowed, in violation of all accepted protocols, and causing several heads to turn in annoyance. She looked up, startled, and her face seemed to melt with relief, and she ran to meet him, dodging and apologizing as she went.
‘She’s all right,’ he said, as soon as she was comfortably within earshot, and this was so exactly the right thing to say, and at that moment the only words Jane wanted to hear, that she threw herself at him and hugged him gratefully. He could feel her arms around him, pressing against the damp fabric of his shirt.
‘I’m sorry,’ they both began, and then stopped, surprised to be on the receiving end of an apology.
‘Never mind,’ said Guy, keeping one arm around Jane as he led her back to the High Dependency Unit, telling her everything he knew about Harriet’s condition on the way. Just outside the double doors he stopped. ‘Her face is very distorted. You can hardly recognize her,’ he warned. ‘But they say she won’t be disfigured. It’s just bruising.’ He heard Jane’s sharp intake of breath as she approached the bed.
‘My little baby,’ she whispered. He couldn’t know it, but at that moment Jane was experiencing the outrush of yearning love that she had never felt at Harriet’s birth or since, until now. She leant over and kissed the unblemished, downy skin of her ear.
Guy noticed that Harriet seemed to have moved since he had left: the sheets were disarranged. As Jane sat back and pressed the heels of her hands into her eyes to stop the tears forming, Harriet twitched and opened her good eye: the other was hidden beneath a seam of puffy flesh. For a second it seemed as though she hadn’t seen her parents, but then the eye widened and she turned her head to bring them both into view.
‘Darling,’ they both said in cracked voices. Jane squeezed the tiny hand on top of the bedclothes, willing her to give some sign of recognition. It had occurred to both of them separately that she might have amnesia and be unaware who or where she was. Harriet licked her dry lips. Jane and Guy swayed forward expectantly to catch whatever words might escape.
‘Mummy,’ said Harriet hoarsely, and Jane’s heart leapt. My little girl, she thought. My precious.
‘Mummy. Did you get my present?’
40
It was left to Kerry to provide an explanation of the circumstances of the crash. She was the only one of the three who remained conscious at the moment of impact. Apart from bruising to the chest from the steering wheel she was uninjured. It had been the passenger side which had taken most of the punishment. James could remember nothing of the accident or the events leading up to it and Harriet was a highly unreliable witness. Over the forthcoming weeks she would occasionally claim that she had been driving.
What had in fact happened was this: Kerry had strapped Harriet tightly in the back on the passenger side, unwittingly using the faulty seatbelt which Nina had neglected to mention in her original sales pitch. There were a couple of graphite tennis rackets on the front seat. Before she found out they were babysitting, Kerry had envisaged a game in the park. James sat in the front with the rackets between his knees, handles uppermost. They had been driving down Kingston Hill, quite fast, when the driver of a van, badly parked on the brow of the hill, had flung his door open. Kerry swerved to avoid it, nearly colliding with a minicab which was belting up the middle of the road, then veered back to the left, mounting the kerb and burying the car bonnet in the trunk of a sturdy horse-chestnut. Her final piece of bad luck had been to hit the accelerator instead of the brake as she came out of the second swerve.
The force of the crash caused Harriet’s seatbelt to burst open, flinging her against the car door and knocking her out. If she had been any taller her head would have gone through the window. As it was she was hit by a piece of flying glass from James’s shattered window which left a three-inch cut across the top of her head and contributed to the gruesome spectacle she had presented to her parents in hospital.
James, in the worst seat of all, was showered with fragments of glass and struck the side of his head on the seatbelt casing, causing him to black out. His worst injury, however, was inflicted by those tennis rackets. (This confirmed what Nina had always maintained: that all sports were dangerous.) The compression of the front nearside had, in addition to breaking his big toe, driven the graphite shafts up into James’s abdomen, breaking his bottom rib and rupturing his spleen. His rescuers had been obliged to use the very latest cutting equipment to free him: the rackets were now in pieces. Which was a shame, Kerry said later, since they were new, but then neither she nor James would be playing much tennis for the rest of the season.
Nina had no reason to disbelieve Kerry’s account. The girl had made no attempt to exonerate herself: on the contrary she blamed herself bitterly. Her test certificate was still somewhere in the wreckage of what had once been the glove compartment: she had no intention of trying to salvage it.
‘I’ll never drive again,’ she promised Nina, not histrionically, or like someone wanting to be dissuaded, but in a matter-of-fact tone.
They were sitting on either side of James’s bed the morning after the accident, talking across him while he lay wreathed in a fog of post-operative pain and nausea, trailing tubes like the suckers of some rampant weed. He wasn’t asleep but his eyes were half-closed as if he could only admit so much reality. Every so often he would emit a low groan. Nina had commandeered the extra chair from the neighbouring bedside. The patient, an elderly man, said: ‘Keep it. I won’t be needing it. I don’t get any visitors.’
‘That’s a shame,’ Nina had replied, inadequately. There wasn’t so much as a card, a book or a newspaper on the top of his formica unit. His hands lay slackly on the sheet, unoccupied, and once this exchange with Nina was over he continued to gaze into the space where she had formerly stood. Poor man, she thought, as she drew the dividing curtain between them to give Kerry some privacy while she relived the events of the previous day.
It was the detail about the defective seatbelt which made Nina’s heart miss a beat. The very next time she saw Guy she would feel compelled to abase herself and confess. She would go on to confess to Kerry, Bob, Jane, the doctor who was treating Harriet, and anyone else who would listen. This was the worst of agnosticism: your sins were always with you.
&n
bsp; ‘Don’t try and take all the blame for this, Kerry,’ she said. ‘No one’s angry with you.’
‘I’d feel better if I was more injured myself, if you know what I mean,’ Kerry said. ‘When they were doing my chest X-ray I was secretly hoping they might find a broken rib or two. Because the bruises hurt like hell anyway, but it sounds better. Stupid, isn’t it?’
Nina agreed that this showed a lack of logic, not to mention self-esteem, which was quite understandable in the circumstances. In view of her own act of barbarous negligence, Nina was willing to forgive Kerry anything – even the fact that her name had been the first word uttered by James on his emergence from anaesthesia. (He had in fact been having a nightmare that Kerry was trying to hit him with an iron bar, and had called out her name through fear rather than desire, but Nina would never know that.)
‘As far as I can gather, everyone seems to be feeling guilty. It’s infectious.’ Her attempt at penitence hadn’t gone quite as planned: Guy, Jane and Kerry were all as dismissive of her part in the disaster as they were anxious to protest their own complicity. Kerry chewed this over for a minute. ‘Well, in my view if you feel guilty, you are guilty,’ she said at last in her ponderous way. ‘I mean if you can’t trust your own conscience, who can you trust?’
Nina looked at her with new respect. In all their encounters Kerry had never before expressed anything resembling an ‘idea’. I wonder how long she’s planning on staying, Nina wondered, and then it dawned on her that Kerry – and very probably James, too – was waiting for her to leave. She stood up suddenly. ‘I’m going to get myself a cup of coffee,’ she announced, brushing the creases out of the clothes which she had slept in. ‘You sit there.’
A Dry Spell Page 35