So he got in the car and drove along Elysium, then through Parnassus and along Helium then left and, his heart pounding, over the bridge and, pounding, left again, following the pounding familiar route, until he pounding, pounding, approached Grace pounding Han-pound-worth-pounding’s house where an ambulance was parked outside, its blue lights blinking sleepily, casting and withdrawing their sad tint from the cars and pavement and hedges and the walls of the houses, including Grace Hanworth’s house.
Philip pulled in to the left.
George Emory’s Bristol had gone and in its place was a police car.
From where he was, Philip could see most of the front door of Grace Hanworth’s house beyond the low wall and the lavender bushes. And he could see the front gate, and the whole of the ambulance, and a bit of the side of the police car which was behind it.
He watched.
As he was watching, Sue was saying: ‘In the long corridor room, the second room, we get at the fact that there are simply millions of sitting rooms across the country, across the world. So, people have walked in and been in that first room, and then, next, whoosh! – it suddenly multiplies, and shrinks, and flattens, so we have a million photographs of sitting rooms along the left-hand wall.’
‘I’m not . . .’
‘Well maybe not a million. But . . . how long is it?’
‘Say 12 metres?’
‘OK, say it’s 12 metres by a height of 3 metres. And each photo is 10 cm × 5 cm, that’s 120 x 60 = . . .’
‘7,200.’
‘But anyway, loads: it needs to feel like lots and lots and . . . lots. Maybe the photos could be a bit smaller but we can try out different sizes, see what works. Something bigger than a postage stamp but smaller than a postcard.’
‘So like a whole wallpaper pattern of sitting rooms.’
‘Yeh that’s right, it would be lovely if it could be seamless, a seamless array of flattened, displaced rooms, an army of them.’
‘Yup.’
‘Sometimes it’s the first room of the gallery multiplied.’
‘Right.’
‘And some of them are of sitting rooms where the furniture didn’t get chosen for the first room – do you see? That can be the prize, the carrot: that you get your place up on the wall, in among all the others.’
‘Yeh, good.’
‘Then also there are rooms from around the world, of obviously different ethnicities, all muddled together. I mean I think there should be a’ – Sue waited for the right word – ‘preponderance of western rooms because that’s the mindset we’re in, that’s people’s assumption. But eating away at that assumption, eating away at the’ – she guffawed – ‘hegemony of the western sitting room are other ways of doing it.’
‘Which we can get from the web.’
‘Or like also launch a global appeal. Twitter it. See what comes in.’
As Philip watched, Grace Hanworth’s front door yawned open and a man in black stepped out. He had his back to Philip as he was turning to pull the door shut behind him. His shoulders were bulky and his black jacket was belted. The policeman took two strides along the path, swinging his chequer-banded cap up on to his head as he did so. He yanked the gate open, stepped through and closed it carefully behind him. He disappeared behind the ambulance. Must be going to his car. Would sit there, would be sitting there, making notes. Would be radioing someone. Why?
Because he, Philip, had committed some catastrophic.
No he had not. He ran the scene through in his mind again, again, back and forth, as he had run it through before, only slower now, in greyer colours, bored almost, because there really was only the slight possible wrong emphasis to be concerned about socially, and probably not even that, but when it came to the actual doctoring, the medicine, then no. Because actually the point was he had simply and clearly refused to do the thing that was against the law.
So maybe George.
Because George’s car had been there and so maybe George.
High-handed George Emory who blusters and knows best. Jovial Dr Emory who is so generous with the pills and the syringe. Who would go padding up the stairs all rotund and pampered and gently, gently open the door and squeeze his way through it and sit attentively with his concerned, sinister smile on the edge of Grace Hanworth’s bed and think that it was actually down to him, actually in his power to decide to agree to what she asked. The calmative, too calmative syringe. The excess morphine permeating the body, further stimulating µ-opioid receptors so as to produce extreme relaxation and calm. There is not even a memory of pain. The breathing slowing, the breathing less and less, quieter and quieter, the chest not stirring, the lungs settling into stillness, no little breeze across the lips. No doubt relying on the fact that morphine concentrations in the blood post-mortem are notoriously difficult to interpret given patients’ variable reactions to the drug, which was why careful titration was so crucial in treatment. So that he, Philip, would have to testify as to the really pretty low dose, considering, that Grace Hanworth was still on. But anyway that would be in the records. Unless even now Dr Emory was altering the records. But the police were there! The police were there! So that what must have happened was that Mr Hanworth must have got wind of it and walked in on him or just been suspicious afterwards. And dialled 999. So that it was all up now for Dr Emory, it was all over. Scandal for the practice. No good for his, Philip’s, job prospects next year although presumably in fact he might be able to just carry on here, if Dr Emory was struck off and if the practice were able to continue. Dr Emory turned into a chess piece in his mind and was taken by a knight’s move and lifted from the board.
‘On the other side,’ Sue was saying, ‘it’s names. The whole wall covered with printed names. Like the phone book only without the numbers. Or like the names on a war memorial only these will be the names of living people, so far as we know. And again some of them will be people from the local community – that can be another lure to get involved. Others will be random names from across the world. The space is the same as for the photos on the opposite wall and if we do, what 10 names per photo. Or 5 maybe. That’s 70,000 names. Or 35,000 names. Or something in between.’
She was sitting back now, happy, expounding, on the home straight, the thing was making sense.
‘So the punters walk into the first room.’
‘The stage set,’ said Charlotte.
‘The room pretty much like theirs, the every-room, their sort of space. And then they walk into the second gallery and – boom. So many rooms and so many people. Made miniature and flattened into photos and names.’
‘The unimaginable multiplicity of people.’
‘And monotony.’
‘Where does sameness stop? – and difference start?’
‘Then on from that into the last room.’
‘The command centre.’
‘Well, the place where you can stand and take stock. Reach out with your mind and vision, and notice . . .’
As Philip watched, the front door opened once again. Nothing emerged. But then something began to nose out. At about chest height. Black. Next, the person carrying it. Who was wearing a green uniform. Who was stepping sideways with his or her back to Philip. And then swung round so that you could see the expanse of what was carried, infer the undulant form of the body within the bag, the nape of the neck supported by the right upper arm of the squat man in green who was the bearer, the crook of the knees over his left upper arm, and his hands clasped under the edge of what must be the hip, the same hip that Philip had touched before through cotton.
With his burden, the man stopped at the wooden gate. Until another man in green came out behind him, and edged past, and reached a leg over the lavender, squashing it a bit, and tipped himself then over the lavender and the low wall onto the pavement, so that he could open the wooden gate and let the other man with his burden through. And then opened the back of the ambulance and pulled out the light, wheeled aluminium stretcher. Upon which the body i
n its bag was laid. After which the two men lifted the stretcher and body in its bag into the ambulance. And hopped out again, one of them shutting the doors while the other went around to the front. Then the one who had shut the doors went round to the front as well, and got in. At which the engine of the ambulance started, the brake lights shone, the reversing light shone, the ambulance nudged back, the reversing light went off; and then the ambulance had pulled out into the flow of traffic and was gone, carrying within it, within a bag, the body of Grace Hanworth who had –
– and strangely Philip then smelled the smell of her room as he had been in it earlier that day, dusty, acrid, cosy, sweet; and saw himself again kneeling at her bedside reaching under her to lift; and heard her say one of the first things he had ever heard her say: that she felt as though she were trying to hold herself; that she was slipping through the fingers of her own hands.
‘Are you alright,’ Sue was saying anxiously, ‘to do the email?’ She suddenly saw, black in front of her, the enormity of what they were about to enter into.
‘Yeh, totally,’ said Charlotte. ‘Do you want to . . . ?’
‘It’s just I really should go back to Philip.’
‘Oh,’ said Charlotte. ‘So you’re not . . .’
‘If that’s alright? – If you’re alright to . . .’
‘Yes,’ said Charlotte, ‘I am OK to do the email. Don’t you worry about that.’
So, as Sue gathered up her bag and checked the time and hauled on her jacket, Philip sat in his silver VW Golf looking at where the ambulance had been; and, as Sue stood for a moment in front of Charlotte, and was hugged by her, and said earnestly – ‘Charlotte: thanks,’ Philip still sat in his silver VW Golf looking at where the ambulance had been; and as Sue bounced down Charlotte’s stairs and lit out towards the station Philip saw the curtains being pulled across Grace Hanworth’s window and, a minute or two later, also across the front window downstairs; and as Sue hurried through the booming space of the station Philip was looking at nothing in particular; but when Sue, as the train pulled out, texted him to say that she was on her way, he was beginning to emerge from the mesmeric effect of all that he had seen; so that when the text buzzed into his phone he was able to reach and grasp and lift and read and even feel the ghost of a smile within the muscles of his lips. Sue travelled through black-brown fields which were dotted with little sprays of violent green, and Philip at last felt able to move, to start the car and slowly, slowly drive along the road and all the way around the irritating mini-roundabout and back the way he had come. So that, as Philip came to a halt in the designated parking space outside 12 Eden Grove, Sue was reaching through an opened window to turn the stiff outside handle of her carriage door; and, as Philip still sat in the car outside 12 Eden Grove, waiting, Sue, striding home, was getting to the end of the lane of old houses by the station and was about to begin the asphalt pathway between chicken-wire fences; and, as Philip waited still, she neared, and neared some more, until, turning into the courtyard of Eden Grove, she saw the silver Golf parked outside the house that was theirs (rented) for the arc of the year, and saw a moment later that there was someone sitting inside it, that there was Philip sitting inside it; so that he watched her seeing him and breaking into a trot as she came towards him; so that when she had tapped on the window, worried, smiling, and he had pressed the button to wind it down, her face was pink and flurried, whereas his was grey and numb; and then she opened the door; and he rose out of it, and in a half-hug the two of them walked on towards their temporary home.
Twenty-Nine Hours in July
The sun made starbursts here and there on the black glass front of the building in which, on the fourth floor, the coroner’s court was housed. The sun brightened the wet pedestrian concourse where people in summer clothes passed among the sapling beeches and through stark lines of shadow. On the shallow steps leading up to the two revolving doors that gave entrance to the building lingered three men in suits, Dr George Emory, Dr Philip Newell and Mr Hanworth, and two women in dark dresses, Mr Hanworth’s sisters.
‘It shows,’ friendly, authoritative Dr Emory was saying in his resounding voice, ‘what a very distinctive woman your mother was, an amazing woman.’
‘It was a privilege,’ added Dr Newell, who was very much in a supporting role, ‘to . . . to look after her in her final months.’
‘Well,’ gasped Mr Hanworth, ‘it’s over now. It really is.’ He looked to his slim younger sisters for confirmation. One of them, with a wide countenance, and cropped hair, a relaxed-looking person standing slouchingly in flat shoes, smiled brightly back. The other, in a prim, belted, dark blue dress, gave a brisk nod: her chin-length straight grey hair flapped across her face.
‘Closure,’ said Dr Emory persuasively, looking at each one of them in turn. And then: ‘Well’ – he glanced at Philip, ‘we’d better be going.’
After the handshakes and farewells the two doctors were walking past shopfronts, French Connection, Swarovski Crystal, M&S, their reflections mingling with bikini-clad dummies and panoramas of ideal beaches. George Emory shuffled along doggedly, head down, his jacket still on and buttoned despite the warmth. Philip had loosened his collar and flung his jacket over his shoulder: he walked with a lolloping stride. They did not speak. Until:
‘Let’s go in here,’ said George Emory. It was a café-bar with aluminium chairs and tables. It seemed a decent distance from the court.
‘No point going back to the practice,’ George Emory urged. It was 4.45.
So in they went and George ordered a Campari soda and Philip a double whisky because, God knows, he could do with one. They sat indoors where it was cooler. Light pooled and blurred in the uneven plate-glass window. People passing stretched and wobbled.
‘I didn’t realise,’ George said, ‘how stressed you were until I saw you in there, saw you walk in. You should have seen yourself!’ He chortled but then stopped the chortle and made his face look sympathetic.
‘I hadn’t slept.’
‘But it went OK, it went fine.’
‘Oh I knew it was just a formality. I mean, deep down I knew that. But I couldn’t stop worrying that, I dunno, one of them would stand up and denounce me.’
‘The one in blue seemed more cross with her mother.’
‘Yeh, didn’t she.’
‘It was like,’ George said, ‘the whole thing had been done to inconvenience her, one of a long line of embarrassments that her mother had caused her throughout her life.’
‘When she said “It’s exactly”’ – Philip imitated her impatient intonation – ‘“the sort of thing she would do.”’
‘It’s quite remarkable, though, isn’t it,’ said George, ‘that none of them had the faintest idea.’
‘You mean of what was in the . . .’
‘Yes, so you could hardly be suspected of it.’
‘Christ, it felt like I was suspected of it when the fucking policeman came round the next day,’ Philip said. He gulped some more of the whisky and felt the prickly warmth of it slip down his throat. ‘So first he said the cyanide was in the statuette of Lenin and then he said could I supply any information on how the statuette had been moved to her bedside table. “Because in this sort of situation it is very important to establish whether there has been an accessory to the act,” he said – and, you know, gave me a look. And then he informed me that, according to Mr Hanworth, the statuette had been “situated on the table in the window” and “could I throw any light on the matter?” So I said I moved it. When I said that’ – Philip jerked his head up and to the side and glimpsed a triangle of blue sky between the roofs of the high buildings opposite – ‘I felt that I had done it, I felt that I had killed her, because if I hadn’t moved the thing she wouldn’t have, she might not have . . .’
‘If you hadn’t moved it,’ George Emory said firmly, ‘she would have got up and got it for herself.’
‘I know but still it was me who did it.’ Philip felt that he was shriek
ing but his voice came out very quiet. ‘These fingers picked it up and moved it. And then ten minutes later she was in fucking convulsions, presumably.’
‘She was the one who did it,’ said George Emory heavily. ‘She had it planned. She had kept that poison by her for sixty years. Think of that! It was part of her, that it was there and she could use it. I don’t know what she was involved with in the forties, or fifties. Who knows? Whether she was ever in real danger. But that feeling, that feeling of power, of being able to step out of it all when things became too – objectionable: that stayed with her. It was as if’ – George’s voice was wondering – ‘she was a sort of secret agent in the heart of life. So that when’ – the voice was brisker again – ‘she faced the ultimate betrayal, the one we all face, terminal illness, she had her escape route just there, nice and simple. Unlike the poor devils who have to go to Switzerland. She’s an example to us all.’
‘What I still don’t understand,’ Philip said, calmer now, ‘is why, if she knew that, she knew she had the poison there, why she did the whole thing about trying to get me to give her a morphine overdose. I know the coroner took it as evidence of her settled inclination towards suicide but it’s weirder than that. It’s like she wanted to get me into trouble.’
‘That’s part of it,’ said George, sure of the answer. ‘It’s part of her being’ – he put on a laborious French accent – ‘un agent provocateur. I’ve known her for twenty years, had known her for twenty years. She needled me pretty much non-stop. Some of it was utter hogwash – doctors are tyrants who turn their patients into slaves – you probably heard some of it yourself.’
‘Yeh but some of it made sense.’
‘Ha!’ – George grinned, leaning back. With his fingers he patted the edge of the table. ‘I thought you’d think that,’ he said, gleefully. ‘When I suggested she go to see you I thought that’s how it’d be, that you’d hit it off.’
The World Was All Before Them Page 21