The World Was All Before Them
Page 28
‘OK,’ said Sue: ‘You win.’
‘Do think,’ said Omar, ‘of taking some time off. Do think of visiting a doctor.’
Sue said: ‘That’s good advice Omar. Thank you.’
As Philip was trundled over the smooth floor and under the bright lights of A&E, Sue was standing at her desk. Trash it? Clear out never to return? Go into the press view and shout the truth. Stand outside on a soapbox and declaim. Torch the place, use semtex, send the whole institution fireworking up and shattering into a million whistling iridescent shards.
But ohmigod, but how was Philip?
She checked her phone. She speed-walked through the office and she gambolled down the stairs and she hurried through rooms one and two.
The edge of the wall. Stained – she looked closer: blood? Some strands of grass and a poppy bent across. So there was . . . So there had been . . .
So at least something had now happened. So at least the ambulance had probably . . .
She pressed Philip: ring ring: voicemail.
Strangely thrilled now, as well as worried, she stepped back. She surveyed the stack of old TVs. There was Tahrir Square. There, in the strange grisaille of infrared, was the damaged face of the Buddha. There was the beautiful, mercurial surface of a river; and there was the bloodstained wall.
She saw or thought she saw a railway line. She saw or thought she saw Philip wrapped in a blanket and strapped to a stretcher. The scribble of a twig floated away from her across a reflection of the sky.
She walked out. Out between the photos and the names; out past the blocky white sofa, and the hatstand lamp.
‘Bye Osh,’ she called.
The inner gallery doors swung shut behind her; the outer doors swung out into the world.
Where Betty and Ken Newell were sitting, one on each side of their picture window in their cream and fuchsia sitting room, looking out at clumps of white, white cloud and intersecting contrails which dappled and scratched the exhilarating summer sky.
Where Dr George Emory, in the practice, in his consulting room which was actually quite comfortable and spacious, having despatched his 19th patient of the day, was turning to his screen to remind himself of the name of the next.
Where Janet Stone, in a playground, near the shadow of an old brick wall, among other parents – mums, mainly – waited for Albert to come running towards her out of school over uneven tarmac ridged by the roots of a huge willow whose mourning boughs leaned over a little climbing frame and slide.
Where, lying back on a double-width chaise longue, in the light of a full-height, half-moon window which made the floor of polished concrete gleam, Elton Barfitt felt their Crème de la Mer re-animating face-mask do its lovely permeating thing, readying them to rise, and dress, and manifest themselves at Spike, where they would preside over the press view of The Whole World, courteously.
Where sweaty Dr Adam Hibbert, bored of months of heat, proud of what he felt he had achieved but missing England and the fact that, well, you can just sit down and have a pint there, scrolled through his calendar: not so many hard days left now till his return.
Where Dr Sara Kaiser was sitting with Sushma and David in the back office, among the revolving filing-towers of old paper notes, talking through the planned structure of collaboration with the other practices in the Clinical Commissioning Group that was soon to be given the green light.
Where, standing in his mother’s shadowy, cleared house, or rather the house that had been his mother’s, with a candyfloss of roses outside the open window, and eddies of lavender breezing through it, Friedrich Hanworth watched dust float wanderingly in rays of light.
And where Sue now walked through streets of the city, among people she did not know, past windows and walls and doors and lamp-posts and a letter box, past bent tin cans, and squashed and swollen cardboard boxes, and imperishable, recently aseptic tetrapaks made in Wrexham, and polystyrene coffee cups from Xi’an and their imperishable plastic lids; past Sarny Heaven she walked, over five-decade-old concrete pavement between whose non-slip slabs the cracked, old-fashioned mortar gave roothold to clumps of moss and tufts of poa annua while, in the shelter of a litter bin, procumbent pearlwort spread and dandelions and Canadian horseweed soared; she walked through air, among phone signals and wireless networks, and lacings of nitrogen dioxide and traces of ozone, and drifting specks of this and that, and scraps of music and rillets of conversation and the traffic’s companionable roar; beneath the swooping flights of swifts she walked, towards the triangle of parkland through which she would stride, making pigeons blunderingly scatter, to the junction which she would cross to reach the station whence she would travel through fields that were pale with wheat or yellow with oil-seed rape that had been treated with pyrethroids and nourished with Foliar N, past woods where bats in daily torpor dangle, where foxes doze among mealy shards of bark and shreds of leaves, where pheasants are bred in cages for the slaughter, and where azotobacter and acromobacter flourish and woodlice scurry and earwigs writhe; through all this, and more, her way would take her, to the place where Philip lay: a windowless, bright area in a building on a hill by a large fast road which led towards The Willows, where their house was (rented) for the circle of the year, in Eden Grove, near a line of ash trees and a scattering of elders with, beyond them, Kidney Meadow, where the grass, and buttercups, and flax, and all the rest of it were drying in the sun; and where the endless, un-translucent river flowed.
Acknowledgments
Thank you Kate; and thank you Mark, my brother.
Thank you Helen and Erica and Peter.
Thank you Audrey, Don, Katja, Margaret, Martin and Tania.
I have drawn information and inspiration from the following sources. Chantal Simon, Hazel Everitt and Tony Kendrick (eds), The Oxford Handbook of General Practice, 2nd edition with corrections, 2007; Gillian Pocock and Christopher D. Richards, The Human Body: An Introduction for the Biomedical and Health Sciences, 2009; Horace Bolingbrook Woodward, Stanford’s Geological Atlas of Great Britain, 1904; T. B. Johnston and J. Whillis (eds), Gray’s Anatomy: Descriptive and Applied, 30th edition, 1949; Sarah Simblet, Anatomy for the Artist, 2001 and Botany for the Artist, 2010; James Lovelock, The Revenge of Gaia, 2006; Richard Mabey, Flora Britannica, 1997; Mark Cocker and Richard Mabey, Birds Britannica, 2005; Owen Johnson and David Moore, Tree Guide, 2004; Lars Svensson, Peter J. Grant, Killian Mullarney and Dan Zetterström, Bird Guide, 1999; Richard Fitter, Alastair Fitter and Marjorie Blamey, Wild Flowers of Britain & Northern Europe, 5th edition, 1996; pulsetoday.co.uk; M. Fagot, B. de Cauwer, A. Beeldens, E. Boonen, R. Bulcke and D. Reheul, ‘Weed Flora in Paved Areas in Relation to Environment, Pavement Characteristics and Weed Control’, Weed Research: An International Journal of Weed Biology, Ecology and Vegetation Management, 51 (2011), 650–60; Christopher Green and Kit Chee, Understanding ADHD, 2nd edition, 1997; Wikipedia; Richard Hamblyn, The Cloud Book, 2008; airquality.co.uk/bulletin.php; cancerhelp.cancerresearchuk.org; macmillan.org.uk; Paulus P. Shelby, Cotton Production in Tennessee (utcrops.com: PDF); healthyalternatives.com/attentiondeficitdisorder.html; Delirium: Diagnosis, Prevention and Management, NICE Quick Reference Guide, July 2010 (PDF); Noreen Branson, History of the Communist Party in Britain, 1941–51, 1997; John Callaghan, Cold War, Crisis and Conflict: The History of the Communist Party of Great Britain,1951–68, 2003; H. Brandenberger and Robert A. A. Maes (eds), Analytical Toxicology: For Clinical, Forensic, and Pharmaceutical Chemists, 1997; S. Kerrigan, D. Honey and G. Baker, ‘Postmortem Morphine Concentrations Following Use of a Continuous Infusion Pump’, Journal of Analytical Toxicology, 28. 6 (September 2004), 529–32; J. S. Rodwell, British Plant Communities, Vol. 3: Grasslands and Montane Communities, 1992; Joseph Engelberg, ‘On the Dynamics of Dying’, Integrative Psychological and Behavioral Science, 32. 2 (April–June 1997), 143–48.
A Note on the Author
MATTHEW REYNOLDS is the author of Designs for a Happy
Home: A Novel in Ten Interiors. He also w
orks as a critic
and scholar, in which vein he has written The Poetry of
Translation, The Realms of Verse, and many essays in the LRB and elsewhere. He spent time in London, Cambridge, Pisa and Paris before settling in Oxford where he teaches at the university and is a fellow of St Anne’s College.
Also available by Matthew Reynolds
Designs for a Happy Home
‘A genuinely original piece of writing’ Paul Torday, author of Salmon Fishing in the Yemen
Can Interior Design make you a better person? Alizia Tamé™ believes it can. In this book she will take you on a journey through the most private Interior of all: her thoughts and feelings.
Everyone has heard of her creations – the Bridge Hallway, the Funnel Office, the Dawson House with its sofas that run on rails: now you can experience the life that lies behind them. Meet her husband Jem – the postmodern potter – who is in many ways her inspiration. Share the thrills and anxieties of juggling family and career. Discover the truth about her partnership with Fisher Paul and Simon Sanders at IntArchitec, the world's most innovative Design practice. Remember that when your world flips upside-down it is sometimes the most surprising people who turn out to be your friends ...
For while Alizia has a Design for everything from relationships to work to motherhood, the people who matter most to her refuse to fit. As the gloss she has put on her life begins to crack she realises there may not, after all, be a Magic Motto for everything.
And where can she find happiness then?
‘A novel of floor plans and flawed plans’ Times Literary Supplement
‘A smart, sparkling read, peeling back the layers of Alizia Tamé's seemingly perfect existence to reveal the human truth beneath the surface’ Elle
‘A sad and gentle story of a family's breakdown so gripping is the immediacy of the format ... An engrossing, clever and funny novel’ Literary Review
First published in Great Britain 2013
This electronic edition published in 2013 by Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
Copyright © 2013 by Matthew Reynolds
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