Fruitful Bodies

by Morag Joss

  * * *

  IT WAS a pleasure, although not a soothing one, to drive when she had had too much to drink, in defiance of Andrew and his attitude to such things. It was a pleasure to know how much he would disapprove of what she was doing, so she resolved, as she drove with the concentrated diligence of a Sunday driver, that she would tell him, in detail, should she ever speak to him again. She parked in the car park of The George at Bathampton Lock. Other things she would tell Andrew, she thought, as she set off at an unwisely fast pace: how dark it was on the towpath, how deserted, how unprotected she was. How guilty he would feel if anything happened to her, because it was his and his ex-wife’s fault that she was so angry and so also his responsibility that she was running off her rage in the dark, alone.

  After five minutes Sara began to feel weary, as if she were tramping through water. She ran faster. After ten she was wearier, so she ran faster still. The sensation of running through water had gone; she was now struggling through deep tar which seemed to cling to her legs and would drag her down if she stopped.

  The towpath was now darker for she had passed the last of the moored barges and houses of Bathampton long ago and on either side of the canal lay only fields, open to the moonless sky, harbouring silence. Sara felt almost afraid of her own laboured breathing, for although she was still too angry to feel frightened, it was impossible not to realise that somebody very frightened indeed would make a sound exactly like this. And somebody very frightened indeed would also be too short of breath to scream. She ran on.

  At the end of half an hour Sara found herself more than three miles beyond Bathampton Lock and at the end of her strength. The champagne-charged rage which had surged through her, curiously like elation in its power to animate, had vanished, and she realised that she was actually quietly scared out of her wits. Then, just as she was thinking appeasingly that it was not Andrew’s fault that she had failed to pick up his message and that she ought to turn round and go home, she saw the trembling, tiny, burning dot just feet away from her in the dark. It dawned on her. A fatalistic calm was sweeping fear out of her mind, although her body had begun to shake. She had already slowed her pace to a walk and now she stopped, watching the dot as it moved jerkily upwards, glowed brighter, and moved down. It would be no more than she deserved: alone on an empty towpath near midnight, wearing shorts and a T-shirt, undefended unless she could stick her car keys in his eyes. The kind of thing that when you read the Body Found On Towpath story in the paper you think, what did she expect? Yet it seemed a little cruel, she considered oddly without panic, that before she met her fate at the hands of some mad rapist who was just sitting here on a bench in case someone as stupid as she was should happen along, she should have to watch him enjoying a fag while he waited. She fingered the car keys in her pocket and wondered if, should she turn now and run, she would make it more than a hundred yards.

  A frightened whimper broke from the direction of the glowing cigarette. A helpless voice in the dark called out, ‘Oh oh, oooh—Ivan? Ivan? I hurt myself.’ Despite the adult, male voice, it was the sound of a child in distress.

  ‘Ooh, Ivan?’ Fear or perhaps cold had reduced his speech to a squeaky whisper.

  Sara called quietly, ‘Hello? I’m … it’s not Ivan. Are you … are you badly hurt?’

  After a silence the voice answered, ‘I hurt myself.’

  Sara advanced. The man on the bench had thrown down the cigarette and it glowed on the path in front of him. He was shaking violently, yet was looking at Sara with neutral curiosity. For no especially rational reason, Sara’s fear disappeared. It was just the shabby man. It was only the bearded, lost-looking bloke who was often on the towpath or in the field beyond, smoking roll-ups, watching the trains. True, this did not amount to a certainty that he was not also a mad rapist, but Sara’s mind grasped at the recognition and took it as reassurance that he was harmless.

  ‘Are you cold?’

  He was wearing jeans and a jersey which looked warm enough, but perhaps he was feverish. His thin face certainly had a weakened look, as if softened rather than hardened by circumstances, and going by the state of his clothes he was probably sleeping rough. The weather this summer could have broken anyone’s health. In reply the man simply held out one trembling hand to her and beckoned her with his eyes to take hold of it. Knowing she was mad, she did so. The fingers were freezing.

  ‘Hurts,’ he said.

  ‘Have you got anywhere to go? Somewhere to sleep?’ Sara looked up and down the towpath in despair. What was she supposed to do—walk with him, supposing he could walk three miles, back to her car and get him to a hospital?

  ‘Have you got somewhere to sleep?’ she repeated.

  He was nodding.

  ‘Is it far? To where you sleep?’

  ‘Ivan … bad trip. Bad dream.’ He glanced behind him and smiled through his shivers. ‘I woke up,’ he told her almost happily. He turned round again and then back to her. Sara had the impression that he was now surer of his bearings. ‘Bad dream. Over the track.’ He waved an arm in the direction of the quiet darkness behind him, beyond the towpath where the railway line cut through between acres of farmland, wood and scrub.

  ‘Perhaps you were sleepwalking,’ she suggested. ‘You woke up and got lost. Do you know where you are now?’

  The man looked at her calmly, saying nothing.

  ‘You’re cold,’ she went on, gently. ‘I think you must have woken up and wandered off and lost your bearings, and you’ve been sitting here and got cold. Perhaps you should get back home now.’

  The man listened and rose to his feet obediently. He held out his hand again.

  In a flat voice he said, ‘Kind.’

  Sara took his quivering hand. ‘Goodnight,’ she said.

  The man’s fingers trembled in her closed palm.

  ‘Hurt,’ he said, before turning and disappearing into the darkness of the scrub beyond the towpath.

  CHAPTER 23

  STEPHEN GOLIGHTLY UNLOCKED the cabinet in his consulting room, removed the three folders marked Mrs Barbara Fernandez (Bunny), James Ballantyne and Miss Joyce Cruikshank and took them over to the armchair where he intended to spend a quiet few moments reading and planning in peace, with a cup of ginseng and milk thistle tea. He slumped carelessly in the chair before correcting his posture, reminding himself that by sitting badly he was risking breathing problems from a collapsed chest, increased tension of the neck and lower back and depressed blood circulation leading to impeded venous return from the lower limbs. Asthma, slipped disc and varicose veins in other words, whose numberless, miserable victims he had picked up, dusted off and restored by naturopathic means for over ten years now. Again sitting up straight, he confirmed in his mind (for it was a thought of which he was fond) how avoidable and unnecessary most ailments were.

  He wondered if he could track down in Bunny’s notes something to show her daughter that would satisfactorily explain her present condition which, since its onset yesterday, was not improving. Then he would give careful consideration to Mr Ballantyne and how the news of his ulcer could best be conveyed so as to create sufficient anxiety for the patient to cooperate with long-term naturopathic treatment, but not so much that he would panic, jump ship and get himself opened up by some investigative butcher on the NHS. It would be a blow to the patient, of course, to learn that his problem was not simple IBS, but Stephen was confident that James would be amazed and grateful that naturopathy could still address this more serious condition. And the degenerative kidney condition outlined in Miss Cruikshank’s notes since her medical examination and X-ray result this morning needed to be, as it were, fleshed out. It would take some explaining, and must be done gently so as not to alarm the patient. She too, if she cooperated, could expect a full recovery in time. Both of them would need the right handling and to his delight, his best hope of handling them right was to enlist the support of Sara Selkirk.

  Stephen sank back luxuriously in his chair, again forgetting p
osture. Already he felt Sara was someone he could expect something from, perhaps even trust, largely because she had seemed after only one meeting to trust him. He recalled the look of entreaty that he had seen in those extraordinary eyes as she had petitioned him, five days ago, on the Cruikshank woman’s behalf. Entreaty had been replaced by delight when he had agreed to give Joyce a trial as music therapist. He knew himself well enough to realise that it was really in pleasing Sara that his own gratification lay, and that while he was certainly not so crude a person as to be sexually aroused by mere gratitude from a woman, his pleasure in giving her what she asked for had not been entirely—what would the correct phrase be?—gender neutral. There had been quite simply something unthinkable in turning Sara down, and simultaneously something arousing in the notion that, as he was allowing himself to succumb to her persuasiveness, she might prove receptive to the power of his. And now that he had actually met Joyce Cruikshank it was surely undeniable that Sara owed him something.

  With the complication of the weakness in the Cruikshank liver and kidneys which could, he was confident, keep Joyce under his medical supervision for some time, Sara might feel she owed him even more. He was already looking forward to her gratitude when, having first saved Joyce from the trauma of invasive conventional treatment, he would lead the old lady gently towards a slow but full recovery. Stephen, lying back in his chair, gazed at the ceiling without seeing it. He was indulging in a lewd and pictorial prediction of how Sara Selkirk might, should she be so encouraged, repay her debt of gratitude, and although correct posture was still far from his mind he, or part of him at least, was beginning to sit up very straight indeed.

  The thought of Bunny Fernandez produced the necessary detumescence for Stephen to get on with his work. He leaned forward and picked up her folder. Barbara Grant, born 1918, in Hastings. What a long time ago that seemed, a time which one could imagine only in black and white, or perhaps in pastel colours. Stephen sipped some of his tea. It was inconceivable, somehow, that children born in such a time could break their parents’ hearts as they do now except, perhaps, by dying. Scarlet fever, diphtheria, whooping cough: killers all. Perhaps it was the absence of routinely life-threatening conditions that accounted for people’s slide into laziness where their health was concerned. Until, that was to say, some nasty consequence of their neglect began to bite (asthma, slipped disc, varicose veins) when suddenly they would be willing to subject themselves to any extremity of treatment in order to get well enough to go home, crack open a bottle of wine, swallow a large steak and start the whole process of decline into ill health once more. Stephen was realistic enough to acknowledge that it did him and the clinic no harm that it was so.

  He sighed and drained his cup. He knew the irony of thinking it a pity that Sylvia could not be here to enjoy the clinic’s success. It was her money that had set it up after she died, and in her lifetime she had enjoyed so little. She had been deeply pessimistic not just about naturopathy but about anything that doctors claimed to do. Perhaps she had been right, because it had not been until that extraordinary business with Lady Wallace, a terrific stroke of luck whichever way one looked at it, that word had got around and the clinic had really come into its own after five years on the brink of closing. Nothing like the miraculous cure of a voluble and well-connected patient to increase bookings, he had found. Sylvia would not have been amused at how that had come about, but then there had been few things that had made her laugh.

  He remembered Ivan’s arrival in 1964. Nobody had talked about post-natal depression in those days. Even he in his newly qualified ignorance had been keen to call it ‘a touch of the baby blues’, a phrase which miniaturised and prettified the big, ugly fact that for nearly two years following the birth of their son, Sylvia had been almost catatonic. He did not blame himself, but he had often wondered if Ivan’s later mental history had its basis in those first two years of competent but unaffectionate handling by a succession of expensive nurses, paid for by Sylvia’s parents. Or if his instability were innate, inherited from his depressive mother, in which case that would not be his fault either. But at least after Sylvia picked up again everything had been normal. He remembered a certain amount of parading in the park while Ivan, dressed in ruthless stripes, sat up in his Silver Cross pram and sucked on Scandinavian toys, the first to hit Britain. It seemed, and indeed in Sylvia’s sad case truly was, a lifetime ago, and it did not help with the matters in hand. He sighed and turned back to his reading.

  The notes began only at 1971 when Bunny, by then Barbara Cliborne, had presented to a private physician in London with (Stephen sighed again, this time with boredom) the usual: depression, weight gain, sleeplessness and thinning hair. The notes told him that she had one daughter of fourteen, smoked about twenty a day which he knew meant thirty, and that she drank ‘wine, in moderation’ which might well mean gin consumption in immoderation and in the afternoons, almost standard in a woman of her age, habits and social standing. Obviously the ‘whole patient’ philosophy had been doing the rounds in Harley Street by the seventies because the doctor had noted also that she had recently been divorced by her third husband and that this might be an underlying cause of his patient’s indifferent health. Four subsequent appointments over the following year were kept, and the notes revealed nothing surprising about the progress of Bunny’s mid-life symptoms under the ministrations of the standard, barbiturate-heavy treatment of the time. The last consultation revealed a thinner, happier patient, however, and the information that she would soon be leaving London to live in ‘the Argentine’ with her new husband. To help with onward referral, the doctor recorded that his patient’s new married name would be Mrs Raymond Huntley-Crosse. No help whatsoever, in the event. He knew the rest: several years later Bunny, by that time Mrs Fernandez, resident in Bath with no Senor Fernandez in sight, had booked herself into the Sulis Clinic for three weeks that summer and every subsequent one, the only difference being that with each passing year she tended to be a little more fanatical and stay a little longer.

  All that followed in the folder were the annual assessments of her reliably excellent health that he himself had made on each of her stays, because Bunny had consulted no other doctor. He closed the folder. In fact he was probably being over-cautious. Bunny Fernandez was one of those kippery, marinaded old women on whom nicotine and alcohol seemed to have acted as preservatives, while her indestructible constitution had gone its own sweet way no matter what she threw down her gullet. If at eighty-one, a good age by any reckoning, she was starting to show signs of wear and tear, could anyone be surprised? Dementia would be just what one could expect to strike Bunny Fernandez, so he should not allow himself to be unnerved by the woman’s intermittent raving and loss of muscular control. Stephen reminded himself that the two people least surprised or concerned, except insofar as their own holiday plans were being scuppered, were the daughter and son-in-law. They were clearly taking the sensible view, and he had just satisfied himself that his patient’s notes, as far as they concerned him, were in perfect order. There would be no comeback if Bunny Fernandez finally slipped away on his premises. Her symptoms were interspersed with periods of lucidity and calm; her decline would be gradual enough for them all to grow used to the idea that the old bird’s synapses were ceasing to fire properly. Yvonne had better be warned that the nursing would become heavy. And although he would phrase it appropriately to the daughter when the time came for comforting words, his honest opinion was that it would be thanks to naturopathy that she would die so healthy.

  Unlike his Sylvia. Petronella Cropper should be grateful that her mother would die after eighty-one years of undeserved good health and a brief spell of indignity. What was that compared with being so diminished and emptied of hope that you end your own life at forty-two? A knock at the door startled Stephen out of his speculation. Hastily he stacked the three folders together on the table and placed a paper weight on top. He rose and opened the door.

  ‘Ivan! Come in,
come in. Oh, come in!’

  ‘You all right, Dad?’ he asked as he sat down. ‘I’ve only come to talk about nutrition plans for the new admissions. I’ve brought their menus for an update. I can come back if you like.’

  Stephen waved this suggestion away and smiled broadly at his son without speaking for some moments. What Hilary had said was true. Since the news of her pregnancy Ivan had changed. No longer was he wearing, like some invisible T-shirt slogan, an air of having been so out of his head in the seventies and fucked up by the eighties that it was doing his head in to be functioning at all in the nineties. It seemed inconceivable that this was the same person who as a schoolboy had been fiddling with LSD, who had failed to get in to do medicine and who had, in between attention-seeking, psychotic breakdowns and a few not very bold suicide attempts, managed a poor pharmacology degree at the age of twenty-nine. He was the purposeful and outgoing Ivan who, Stephen had always known, lay underneath the pose of shambling reticence and who had not been sighted since about 1979. Now the younger, ganglier version of his tall, straight-backed, blue-eyed father smiled back shyly.