‘No, I’m sure he doesn’t. It was a one-off: he and Flora had been at a Round Table party in someone’s house. Alex was away at a conference so I babysat for Ellen. There was a lot of drink at those Table dos, and that Flora, for the only time in her life, had a right few too many. She was pregnant with you, but I don’t think she knew it then. Mac brought her home, and carted her straight upstairs. Then he came back down. He’d had quite a few himself, and I’d sipped my way through the best part of a bottle of wine in the course of the evening. He said something about how nice I looked, I said something similar in return, we got close, there was kissing, and then there was more than kissing. We never mentioned it afterwards. . I don’t know about him, but I was embarrassed, for it was completely untypical behaviour on my part. . and I think both of us made sure that the same circumstances could never arise again. But I fell pregnant shortly afterwards.’
‘So you must have known from the start.’
‘No!’ Her protest was so spontaneous that I believed her. ‘I didn’t know about Alex’s condition then, neither did he. I didn’t know anything about peak fertility times either. We weren’t long married and we were trying for a family, trying quite hard if you must know. I admit that when I became pregnant the thought did cross my mind, but I discounted the possibility. Then when Jan was born, she didn’t look a bit like Ellen or you. . You and Jan were babies at the same time, remember.’
‘Yes, but Ellie and I both looked like our mum when we were infants; it never occurred to me till I saw Tom, but he’s very like my granny Blackstone. So was Jan in the picture I just showed you. When I looked at some older photos, I discovered that they were quite alike as young women too.’
‘Mac’s never noticed that, I promise you; he certainly never mentioned it to me, and I don’t think he’d have been able to keep it to himself if he had noticed it.’
‘When did you find out the truth?’
‘Years later; when Jan was thirteen, I think. Alex and I had been trying in vain for another baby, and finally we went to see a specialist in Edinburgh. He checked us both out, then said he was very sorry but Alex’s sperm count was virtually zero. Alex asked what had brought this on, and the consultant told him he’d always been like that.’
‘Jesus, that was tactful of him.’
‘Indeed. When I challenged him privately, he tried to claim that the case notes didn’t say we already had a child, but he’d examined me pretty carefully so he must have known.’
‘Is that why Alex left you?’
‘Ultimately, yes. He never asked me who Jan’s father was, I never told him, and I’m sure he never guessed. In truth, we barely discussed the matter. We just stumbled on for another four or five years, until he went off with his new love. . who, ironically, has three children from her first marriage.’
‘You never told us, Mary,’ I repeated quietly, my calmness restored.
‘How could I? Flora was still alive then, and she and your father were blissfully happy. What was I to do? Spill the beans and put that at risk? Make myself the most hated woman in town in the process? I’m sorry, Oz, call me weak, call me a fool, but I kept my mouth shut.’
‘But what about Jan and me, when you saw us together as kids?’
‘When I found out, you were both in your early teens. You behaved like brother and sister, even if you didn’t know you were.’
‘Mary,’ I told her, ‘from the age of. . fourteen, as I recall. . Jan and I did not behave exactly as brother and sister should. I’m not saying that she wasn’t a good girl, or that I was a bad boy, because we were pretty responsible by contemporary standards, but like any other kids of that age, there was kissing, like you just put it, there was cuddling, there was touching, there was feeling around. The older we got, the more intimate we got.’
‘I didn’t know that, though. When Jan reached puberty, we had the chat that you’re supposed to have. It embarrassed both of us, for she was very much a tomboy at that stage. I never thought of the two of you like that, honestly. When I found out. . I was shocked, terrified, even, but by then it was too late.’
‘When did you find out?’
‘I began to worry when I heard a story about you beating up two boys at school, because of something lewd that one of them had said about Jan. Then I found a condom, in its packet, in her room. I didn’t need to ask any questions after that.’
‘Did you talk to Jan about it?’
‘I asked her if she was having sex. I didn’t ask her with whom, but there was only one possibility. It’s the only time we ever had anything close to an argument. She told me very firmly that we should strike a deal: I wouldn’t ask her that question again and she wouldn’t ask me either.’
‘Even then, couldn’t you have told us?’
She reached up and touched my face. ‘And if I had, my dear,’ she murmured, ‘how cruel would that have been? No, I kept it to myself and prayed you’d never find out. And you never would have either, but for Tom.’
‘You realised when you saw him, didn’t you?’
‘How could I not? It was like seeing my own child again. But it didn’t occur to Mac at all, I promise you. He said, “He’s a real wee Blackstone, isn’t he?” but that was all.’
I looked at her. ‘Then, Mary,’ I said, ‘for the love of God, if he comes through tonight, make sure that he never finds out the truth.’
‘I’ll try.’
I couldn’t help it: I felt my eyes harden. ‘Trying isn’t an option. Make bloody certain that he doesn’t.’
9
Maybe I should have blamed my dad. After all, the consequences of his quick, drink-fuelled, adulterous lapse on the living-room shag pile would live with me for the rest of my life. But I couldn’t: I’d found out a couple of years before that he isn’t perfect, just as I know I’m not.
When I thought about it some more, I found I didn’t blame Mary either. The same event had doomed her marriage, which some might see as just, but it had also condemned her to live what must have been a nightmare. Those who see that as right and proper retribution are free, as far as I’m concerned, to go and abuse themselves in some far corner of the planet, for they can have none of the Christian in their soul. (Unlike Mary, who’s always been a Church member, and who’s a true believer. All the more credit to her, I suppose, that she’s come through it as best she could. Eventually. . not that night, but on one of only two other occasions we’ve ever spoken about the matter. . she confessed to me that she saw Jan’s death as a divine punishment. I told her that any God who would do a thing like that wasn’t worth an inverted candle, but I don’t think she could bring herself to believe me.)
The surgeon came to see us just before six. It was well daylight outside, and Ellie was awake. Happily, he was smiling when he opened the door. Relief came from my sister and my step-mother in waves, and even from Conrad. I have to confess, for all that I’d convinced myself that Dad would pull through, a tear came to my eye when I saw the confirmation in that big, chunky man’s face. I saw something else there too: pure exhaustion. The procedure had taken six hours from start to finish.
He looked at Mary, then Ellie, and finally at me. ‘Positive news,’ he announced, ‘I’m happy to say. We’ve replaced your father’s failed aortic valve with a metal one, and it seems to be functioning well. He’s in a recovery room just now; I’m going to keep him heavily sedated for a while, and still on the ventilator, but that’s just routine. I’m entirely happy with the way things have gone.’
‘Can we see him?’ Mary asked.
‘From a distance. He’s still under, and in theatre conditions. Once you’ve done that, I recommend that you all go home and get some rest; maybe come back in around twelve hours, if you’d like. Any questions?’
‘How close a call was it, Mr. .?’ I asked.
‘Blacker,’ he replied, ‘Cedric Blacker. As close as there can be. If there hadn’t been a doctor present when he collapsed, he wouldn’t have made it. He can thank his golfing
chum for keeping him alive till the ambulance arrived.’
‘He’ll thank him, don’t you worry. So will we all. I know said doctor. He’s a gin-swilling old sod normally. Thank God he was on the ball yesterday.’
The four of us were gowned up. . Conrad held back at first, but I insisted that he join us. . and shown into the recovery room. As soon as I clapped eyes on him, lying on that bed, zonked out on whatever sedative they’d pumped into him, with a pipe in his mouth and umpteen tubes leading into and out of various parts of his body, all my euphoria disappeared. I’d never imagined seeing him so weak, so old, so vulnerable; the sight filled me with all kinds of dread. He wasn’t out of the wood yet. Indeed, looking at him, he seemed to be in the heart of the forest.
The sight of him took me back to my mother’s last illness. It took me back to identifying Jan’s body in a tiny, impersonal room in a Glasgow hospital: Jan, my lover, my wife, my soul-mate. . my sister.
It took me forward too: I imagined other people on that bed. Susie, Ellen and Prim. I saw all of them lying under that sheet. And I saw myself too; oh, yes, I saw myself, with a row of gowned people staring misty-eyed at me. Not the kids, though: I couldn’t imagine my children in such a situation. What parent can?
Once we had all seen enough. . most of the time I looked at the monitors, convincing myself that all the peaks were regular and steady. . and once I had given an update to the small group of diehard journalists who were still standing guard, we took Mr Blacker’s advice and headed home. More specifically, we headed for Dad and Mary’s, in Anstruther, with me at the wheel, Conrad beside me and the girls sleeping in the back. . my sister could sleep for Britain. I bought a bag of morning rolls, and the four of us had an old-fashioned Scottish breakfast. . much the same as a full English breakfast, but heavier on the black pudding and with potato scones thrown in. Then Ellen headed back to St Andrews, to Harvey and my nephews, Jonny and Colin, and I headed for the phone to call Susie.
She was as relieved as the rest of us, and she’d had a sleepless night too. Prim was with her: she had called her an hour before, asking anxiously for any news. I was touched that she’d been as scared as the rest of us, but I was struck too by something else, the ease with which she seemed to have fitted back into our circle, in spite of her efforts to wreck me a year earlier. It spoke volumes about something, but at that moment I was too damn tired to figure out what it was.
I slept for the rest of the morning and into the early afternoon; in fact, it took Conrad’s knock at the door to waken me. ‘Time to get ready, Oz,’ he called, ‘if you still want to see your nephews, that is.’ I had agreed with Ellie that we would take Mary’s car and pick her up from St Andrews. Harvey was in court in Edinburgh that day and she would go home with him. I reckoned that Mary would want to be closer to Dad for the next few days, as, indeed, I did, so I had asked Conrad to book three suites in the Caley Hotel.
It’s amazing how much better you look when you’re a super-resilient old bastard and you don’t have a pipe down your throat and a tube up your knob. I’m not saying that Mac the Dentist looked as if he’d be on the golf course any time soon when we saw him at six that evening, but he was several hundred per cent improved on the version we’d seen in the morning.
We didn’t crowd his small room. . he wasn’t given private treatment because of me but because he had health insurance to pick up the tab. Instead I let Mary and Ellie go in first, then followed when they’d had ten minutes.
‘You’re here, are you?’ he croaked. ‘I must have been fucking near the wooden waistcoat, then.’ There was that old twinkle in his eye, one which, I feared for a while I’d never see again.
‘Wouldn’t have missed it for the world,’ I told him. ‘You ever give me another night like that and you’ll wish you had pegged it.’ I wanted to hug him, but since that was out of the question, I contented myself with sitting by his bedside, taking his hand and holding it against my face. ‘How are you feeling?’ I asked.
‘Damn silly question, son, if you don’t mind me saying so. At the moment it’s as if somebody’s shaved my chest with a chain-saw, but I’m sure it’ll get worse in the days to come. I think I preferred it when I was dead.’
‘What did you score anyway?’
‘Net sixty-nine: I birdied the last two holes. It was probably holing that last putt that did it.’
‘That’s not what the consultant told me. He said it could have happened at any point of any round you’ve ever played.’
‘You might never have been born in that case.’ He looked up at me, suddenly solemn. ‘How’s Mary handling it?’
‘She’s fine now.’
‘Good, good. Losing her daughter and her husband within the space of a few years wouldn’t have been much fun. Tell you something,’ he whispered, ‘that I hope you’ll appreciate. When I was in Never-never Land, I saw Jan. I remember it quite clearly. She was on the other side of a bridge: she waved to me and she called out, “Hello, Uncle Mac,” like she used to when she was a kid. I never could work out how Alex More could up and leave a daughter like her and a wife like Mary. Stupid bastard. . not that I’m complaining, mind.’
‘You’ve done okay out of it. Now shut the fuck up and don’t tire yourself out.’
I didn’t really need to tell him that: he was so heavily sedated that it wasn’t long before he drifted off, back into the curious, wacky, private world of the heroin medicated.
He was better next day, more alert, and as he had predicted, obviously less comfortable as the pain-killing dope was lessened.
The day after that, he was out of bed in a chair.
The third day after his op he was shuffling around in his slippers and we were able to have a longer talk, during which I persuaded him to agree to something I’d been pressing on him for a while. He could have retired years before, and become a full-time golfer. He hadn’t, not because he needed extra years on his pension but because, as a dentist in a rural practice, he felt a loyalty to his patients. I’d tried the loyalty-to-Mary gambit often enough before, but he’d pointed out in his inimitable way that she was a patient too, and that my argument had just disappeared up its own arse.
This time, though, I had a stronger hand in the poker game between us. ‘You’re going to have to get a locum in,’ I said casually.
‘I know,’ he admitted. ‘Don’t bloody know how I’m going to go about it from here, though.’
‘It’s done,’ I told him. ‘A woman called Carol Salt starts tomorrow, that’s Monday, if you’ve lost track of time. She lives in Crail, she’s thirty-four, and she’s looking to get back into practice now that her second child’s going to nursery.’
‘How the hell did you. .?’
‘I asked Conrad, a couple of days ago, to speak to the health board. They came up with her name straight away and I gave her a call. I saw her yesterday and we agreed terms. She’s coming in on a locum basis initially, with a view to buying the practice.’
He drew me one of the longest looks I’ve ever had from him. ‘I just love it when you get authoritative,’ he drawled drily. ‘Is that Dallas Salt’s daughter?’
‘That’s her; he practised in Dunfermline, didn’t he?’
‘Aye, but he’d gone private before he retired. I heard that he offered to hand over to her but she turned him down.’
‘That’s right. She told me that she believes in the NHS and wants to work in it.’
‘Good for her, then. But tell her to forget about buying the practice: if she wants it, once she’s seen what fills my waiting room, she can have it. My patients aren’t a commodity to be sold. She can pay me a fair rent for the surgery, but that’ll be that.’
I grinned at him. He thought it was triumph, but it was pride: I’d known he’d say that, but I hadn’t volunteered it to Carol.
‘Right,’ he said, sipping from a glass of water,‘now you’ve sorted out my life, it’s time you got back to your own.’
‘I know. Your surgeon’s told me you’r
e now officially on the convalescent list, so I’ve booked a plane back to Cannes on Tuesday.’
‘A plane.’ He shook his head, then winced. ‘My son, hiring bloody planes. Why don’t you just buy one?’
‘Not one, a fleet, actually; Susie and I have been thinking about buying an air-charter company. There’s money to be made there.’
‘Get away with you. You don’t know what to get up to next, you two.’ He frowned. ‘Have you heard from Tom’s mum lately?’ The question took me by surprise but he’s always been good at that. My dad’s always had a fondness for Primavera; he didn’t know the whole story of what happened last year, only that she was a bit silly and got banged up for deception, but even if he had, he wouldn’t have shut her out. Like son, like father, I suppose.
‘Last Wednesday, as it happens. She came out to Monaco to visit him. She was as cut up as the rest of us when she heard what happened; she sends her love.’
‘You give her mine too, when Susie’s not listening.’ He winked. ‘You got the rest of the summer off?’
‘Yes, just like you. Once you’re out of here, by the way, I want you and Mary, and Jonny and Colin, through at Loch Lomond. There’s a pool to swim in and plenty of ground to walk around. It’ll be good for your recovery.’
‘We’ll see.’
‘You will, for sure. I’ve told Mary and Jonny to make sure it happens.’
‘Ah,’ he said, ‘if my oldest grandchild’s on-side, I’d better go along with it. He’s grown into a formidable young man.’
‘That he has. He has a formidable girl-friend too; his mum’s a bit worried about that, if you know what I mean.’
‘Tell her not to, will you? I remember when you and Jan turned sixteen, I decided that my prime responsibility as a father was to make damn sure you knew about the importance of contributing to the profits of London Rubber, then put my trust in your good sense. Christ, what else was I to do? Throw buckets of water over the pair of you?’
I smiled, although he didn’t fully understand why. ‘That wouldn’t have done a hell of a lot of good,’ I confessed. ‘Don’t worry, I’ve already had that discussion with Jonny. Told him to buy in bulk, to cut down the chances of being spotted in Boots by some loose-tongued friend of Ellie’s or of his girl’s mum. I reckoned that Harvey was a bit new on the scene to be expected to handle that one.’
For The Death Of Me ob-9 Page 6