by Lulu Taylor
She smiled back, wondering if that meant he was telling her he would come to accept her plans. It had been hard enough to talk him round to her taking a diploma in literature at the college. Two years of pleading before he finally agreed had meant she was older than most of the others on the course. She’d been allowed in the end, partly, she suspected, because her mother had done slow but steady work behind the scenes. Perhaps some bargain had been struck, although her father would not usually tolerate bargaining. But in the end he had grudgingly given his permission.
Her father continued: ‘He’s only just getting started, of course, this boy, but Few tells me that he shows some talent.’
‘What sort of things does he paint?’
‘Portraits. And not the kind with the noses off kilter and two eyes on the same side either. Quite respectable-looking things, apparently. Few says it’s possible that he might become well regarded in time. And there’s much less to deplore in a decent man painting portraits of his own class. Take Birley, for example.’
Cressie burst out laughing. ‘Honestly, Papa, the way you sound! It’s very old-fashioned. Lucky for you that Henry and Gus never wanted to go into art or design or trade.’
Her father looked at her from under his brows. Her brothers were nicely settled in banks in the City and he was more than content with that. ‘Indeed. They both know better. But it occurred to me that one should do what one can to help the boy get on. So I told Few that I’d commission him to have your portrait done.’
Cressie blinked in surprise. ‘My portrait?’
‘Yes. I had the idea as I was talking to Few. I’ve been thinking of finding someone to paint your picture and it struck me this was an opportunity. His nephew has a studio over in Blackheath so you’ll have to go there a few times to sit for him.’
At once irritation sparked through her but she spoke calmly. ‘Blackheath? I can’t do that, Papa. I’m about to start at the school.’
‘You’re not going every day, are you?’
‘Not at once . . .’
‘Well then, we’ll arrange it so that the portrait is started right away. It will only take a few hours.’
She opened her mouth to protest but suddenly did not know what to say. There was no real reason why she couldn’t have her portrait painted, but she resented her father’s bullying, the way he imposed things on her, promising her commitment without asking her first. But it was always the same: he never asked and rarely changed his mind. His dictum was that under his roof, his will held sway. The problem was, there was no way of not being under his roof.
‘I do not want to hear objections, Cressida,’ her father said, seeing her expression. ‘Most young women would like to have themselves painted. An hour or two and it will all be done. You’ll be glad of it in the future. You’re at the right age to have yourself preserved on canvas.’
‘Can’t I have my photograph taken?’ Cressie asked, inspired. ‘It’s more accurate and a great deal quicker.’
Her father ignored her. ‘That’s settled then. I’ll tell Few that you’ll be at his nephew’s disposal and that we’d like to start immediately.’
‘What’s his name?’ Cressie asked, trying to bite back her exasperation.
‘Oh . . . er . . . Few did tell me but I’ve forgotten. Richard? Robert? Something like that.’ Her father lifted his hand to summon the wine waiter for a refill. ‘I shall write to him this afternoon and you young people can make the arrangements between you. Now . . . where’s our soup?’
Cressie let herself in through the large black front door of their house on a quiet Kensington street. Inside, everything was still. Only the huge grandfather clock by the stairs made a sound, its heavy tock beating time. The place had never changed in her lifetime and she suspected it had always looked the same, with the heavy dark furniture, the potted palms, the fringed velvet curtains that seemed to echo fashions of sixty years before. The rooms were kept dim because of some order given long ago to keep sunlight off the furnishings, and even though Cressie was accustomed to the fusty twilight of the downstairs, she still felt oppressed by it. In her own room, she’d done what she could to bring light and air inside, persuading her mother to let her do away with the heavily floral wallpaper and brocade curtains. She had had the walls painted a fresh green and had put up curtains of plain linen in off-white, and escaped there as often as she could to read or write letters or paint the little watercolour pictures that relaxed her like nothing else.
She took off her coat. The summer was showing signs of finally making way for autumn, but it was still chilly. Ellen, the maid, came into the hall, peering curiously to see who was there, on edge in case it was Mr Fellbridge.
‘Hello, Ellen, I’m home.’ She smiled as the maid visibly relaxed at the sight of her. ‘How’s Mama?’
‘She’s fine, miss. Ruth came down half an hour ago and said she was comfortable and sleeping.’
‘That’s good.’ She had expected nothing else. Her mother had drifted on in her invalid state for so many years that Cressie could no longer imagine her doing anything other than lying propped among pillows so snowy white they made the pallor of her skin more ghastly than ever. Somewhere she had memories of a different mother who was not ill and who laughed and ran up and down stairs. Every year she had taken the young family to their house in Cumbria for the summer, leaving the children’s father behind to work in the City. Cressie remembered long train journeys north, their cases and boxes stuffed into the luggage car, the three children bouncing on the seats of their compartment while Mama tried to read despite the huge picnic basket on her lap. At some glorious, long-anticipated point in the journey, she would open it and they would feast on cold meat sandwiches and cake as the train bore them to that place of strange wild beauty so far from dirty, smoky London. The summer would be spent mostly out of doors, unless the weather was too bad, and Mama was always there, sitting on a rug and reading, organising boating on the lake, or playing cricket with them. She didn’t ride the hardy little ponies they loved so much, but Cressie remembered her holding the bridle of one, laughing as the wind whipped her dark hair around, vibrant with healthy strength. Papa came for a week in August but usually spent most of it shooting. The air would be full of the pops and cracks of the distant guns, and occasionally she saw a drive of birds rise up in the distance, and small black shapes flutter and fall to earth. They all went back when it was time to prepare for the return to school, and the train ride home had a mournful air, the picnic basket holding the last sandwiches of summer, and the sky had always turned grey by the time they pulled in at Euston.
‘Never mind, chickens,’ Mama would say, ‘summer will be here again before you know it. It can’t always be the holidays. And we’ll always have December House. We’ll be back there next year, never you fear.’
But those days were long gone. Sickness came, an unspecified condition that was spoken of in such vague terms, it was hard to know exactly what was wrong, only that Mama grew weak and thin, and despite many attempts at a cure – the endless doctors’ visits, the huge brown bottles lined up on the chimney piece in her room, the journeys not to the north but to the seaside and the spa towns on the continent – nothing had come of it. They stopped going to December House and Mama had shrunk and diminished to the thin, pale creature in the bed upstairs, coming down only occasionally after great preparations had been made. The presence of a nurse in the house was now quite accepted, and the hush that pervaded it was not only that of a place where the children had grown up and gone, but of one where quiet was enforced for the comfort of the sick. The air had the bitter tang of medicine and disinfectant, the faint sourness of a hospital.
‘Would you like tea, miss?’
‘Thank you, Ellen. I’ll have some in the drawing room while I get on with my reading.’
The maid went off and Cressie walked over to the hall mirror to inspect her reflection in case she’d picked up smudges on her journey home. She smoothed her hair. In the lamplight
it glowed burnished brown like the table in the dining room. As she inspected her face, her attention was caught suddenly by another face just behind hers and she jumped slightly before she realised it was something she had seen many times before in this very place: the portrait of her mother that hung on the wall opposite. She turned to look at it. It had been there for as long as she could remember but she had not properly looked at it, or even noticed it, for a long time. Mama had been painted at the age of twenty-five, just four years older than Cressie was now, in the languid style of the early thirties, with an emphasis on her long neck, slender hands and fine-boned face. But, Cressie realised, the face was like hers, the dark eyes set back in the skull with brows arching above, the fuller lower lip, and the mahogany-coloured hair full of glints and lights.
I never realised I look so like her. She put a hand to her own cheek and brushed it over, feeling the contours for herself as though to give reality to what she was seeing, and remembered that her father had commissioned a portrait of her. Here was her mother, still young, still beautiful, wearing a silk blouse that had long vanished and a string of pearls that now sat unworn in her jewellery box, caught forever at a moment in her life that had gone irretrievably. Cressie was struck by a sudden sense that her seemingly immutable youth would vanish and fade just as her mother’s had done.
But that’s so far away. There are years and years to live first.
She went to wash her hands before tea.
Chapter Three
The ventilator moved up and down with quiet determination, hissing lightly as it went about its job of keeping Will alive. The whole place seemed to be nothing but machinery and tubes – the thick white plastic tube taped into his mouth delivering oxygen, the nasal tubes, the lines in his arms and chest and stomach, delivering saline, painkillers, food, removing waste and doing everything his body needed to live while it lay shattered on the bed.
Emily knew it was Will lying there even though his red-brown stubble was not visible under the bandages around his skull and his face was obscured by tape and tubes. It was his eyelids – their pale greeny translucence was something that she remembered from when he was ill at home with the flu. His skin had a papery fineness when he was unwell, quickly taking on the greenish-blue tinge of old copper. Below bandaged wrists where lines into his veins were secured, his hands lay in loose fists on the covers, the skin lightly freckled, the knuckles reddened; their width and strong fingers, one with the red-gold wedding band she knew so well, were unmistakable. The hands and the eyelids were what made the prone man on the bed into Will.
But who is Will anyway? Did I ever know him?
The room was less like a place of sickness and more like a kind of scientific laboratory, with its dozens of power outlets, the hooks and stands, the complex computer screens banked beside the bed where coloured lines waved and undulated across the black background, and where numbers came and went, lights flashed, and mechanical chirrups and beeps sounded at intervals. Even the bed wasn’t a bed, but a kind of plastic trolley with sides that could be clipped up or down or taken away entirely. The mattress was filled with air to reduce pressure points on Will’s body.
Intensive care was, it seemed, a matter of electrics as much as anything else. Once the electrics were taken away, you were either getting better, or dead.
The question was how long the electrical currents would continue to breathe for Will, feeding him and nurturing him while he slept on, his brain apparently frozen and his spirit locked away somewhere in his depths. Unless, of course, it had already gone somewhere else.
Emily had the sudden thought of a kind of disembodied Will flying about the room, like the Ancient Egyptian concept of the soul after death, with the person’s head on the body of a bird that flew off to the afterlife. She pictured a fat-chested pigeon with Will’s head, flapping up to the ceiling and roosting on the metal arm of the thing that lifted his tubes away from his face. Perhaps he was there now, head cocked, regarding her with a bright eye, watching as she stood by the door on her crutches and wondering what she was doing there.
Wondering why I’m still alive, maybe. Wondering why it didn’t all go according to plan. Her hands tightened around the handles of the crutches. A bitter bolt of fury raged through her. She had a sudden urge to yank out all the tubes and wires and electrical cables and scream, Die then, you bastard, if you wanted it so bloody much! and her heart began to pound. She felt dizziness overpower her. Oh God, am I going to faint?
The door behind her opened and someone strode in with a cheerful, ‘Hello there!’
Emily took a deep breath and turned to see one of the nurses, a smiling black woman in the hospital uniform of loose blue tunic and trousers. On her hands were latex gloves and a badge clipped to her pocket showed her name to be Rita. ‘H . . . hello.’
‘How are we doing?’ Rita went to the machines and began to inspect the screens. The lights and lines and numbers seemed to make sense to her. She checked the plastic pouches of fluid that hung from the hooks – one the colour of dark red wine, one with a sickly straw-coloured middle, and the other clear – and all the other inlets and outlets connected to Will.
‘I’m fine,’ Emily said. Her heart had stopped racing and her deep breaths had restored some calm to her.
Rita glanced over her shoulder at her. ‘How’s that leg?’
Emily looked down at the thick plaster encasing her left leg from the ankle to just below the knee. She was getting used to the weight and awkwardness, and to moving with crutches. ‘They say it will heal all right. But I’m going to be like this for a while. Then there’ll be physio to get it back to health. Months of it, I expect.’
Rita’s gaze travelled over Emily’s face to the bulky bandage that covered the left side of her head. ‘And that?’
‘They . . . they won’t know for a while. It’s been stitched, of course.’
The nurse stared for a moment, frowning, her mouth in a slight grimace that made Emily feel sick, and then seemed to remember her job was to be unfailingly optimistic. Her smile returned. ‘It’ll be fine. Mr Watkins is the best, you know, the best in the country!’
Emily managed a smile. ‘That’s good.’ Everyone here seemed to be the best in the country or pre-eminent in their field. Maybe it was true and it was simply luck that they had all ended up at this particular hospital. Or perhaps it was just part of something she suspected was the tissue of lies that padded the relationship between patients and doctors. It was like being wrapped in cotton wadding so that the unpleasantness of reality would not cause too much pain. The wadding was only taken away when the sorry truth could no longer be hidden. It was not so much an exercise in deceit, she felt, as one in misplaced kindness and optimism. So many doctors had looked at her injuries and hissed or frowned, and then said brightly how wonderful it all was. Something told her that further down the line they might pronounce quite a different judgement. ‘He’s going to see me in a few days when the initial healing is complete.’
Rita returned to her work and Emily watched her for a while before venturing. ‘How is he?’
‘Yeees, he’s doing well.’ The reply was half distracted, as Rita noted Will’s blood pressure on a chart. ‘He’s doing really very well.’
Emily gazed down at her husband and wondered how he could possibly be described as doing well. He was barely alive. Compared to being actually dead, he was doing well, but in all other comparisons, surely, he was doing very badly. ‘Do they think he’ll get better? Will he wake up?’
Rita was silent for a moment and then said, ‘We’ll have to see. He’s still in the artificial coma. It all depends on how he responds when they withdraw the drugs keeping him under. We’ll just have to wait, I’m afraid. But he’s coping well, considering. No infections yet. We’re keeping a close eye on the lungs and bladder. I’m just going to massage him now.’
She watched as Rita began work on Will’s limbs, lifting and kneading them to keep the blood flowing and prevent atrophy. Alr
eady he looked thinner, his once strong arms more wasted than before. It was so odd to see him weak and floppy, when he’d always been so vital. Those arms had been wrapped tightly around her so often. Now they were useless.
Will he ever come back?
No one had yet given her a straight answer about this, despite the fact that she and Will had been in hospital for over a week. It seemed like an eternity. She was beginning to wonder if there’d ever been a time when she hadn’t lived here on a noisy ward, the children brought in by Will’s mother to see her, her life shrunk down to a hospital bed cut off from the others on the ward by curtains.
How had her life changed so much? How had she ended up in this place? She remembered being brought in because suddenly, after much darkness, she was dazzled by white lights, orb after orb beaming down on her as she sailed beneath them, people all around her. She was in pain but in such a fundamental way that it became almost more of a mental challenge than a physical one. They took her to strange rooms with more light, where she was pummelled and probed, her dress cut off her (My dress, she thought, whenever she remembered. Where can it be? Discarded in a bin somewhere, cut into shreds. It seemed as though the dress represented her previous life – expensive frippery, gone forever) and a needle pressed into her skin, the pain negligible compared to the elemental agony she was in elsewhere in her body. She’d sunk into blessed oblivion after that.
When she woke, hours later, the pain was different: sharper, more intense, more localised instead of possessing her whole body. But that was good, wasn’t it? It meant she was still alive.
What the hell happened? she thought, dazed. Then it came flashing into her mind. Will wanted to kill us. He wanted to kill us both.