Fruitful Bodies

by Morag Joss

  ‘I don’t need your name onemomentplease.’

  ‘That’s the patient’s name! James Ballantyne!’

  ‘Onemomentplease trying to connect you.’

  More rings, then ‘Ralph Allen Ward Nursing Assistant Harris speaking.’

  The last members of the orchestra were now disappearing through the doorway leading to the stage and the last of Sara’s coins was disappearing into the box.

  Her voice and hands were now shaking. Trying not to scream, she asked to speak to James Ballantyne. There was a pause, during which Sara heard the distant applause as the leader took his chair. Tuning started. Simon would be waiting to follow her on, his benign face thunderous.

  ‘Are you family?’

  ‘No, I’m a friend. I’m ringing from abroad, so if you could—’ Christ, she must be mad, she couldn’t stand here a moment longer. She had to go and play the Dvořák concerto. Oh God she couldn’t …

  ‘And the name of the patient again?’

  ‘James Ballantyne. I’m a close friend.’

  ‘Pardon me? Oh er, yes. Oh yes, right. Just a minute, I’ll just get Sister to speak to you.’

  While Sister was being got, Sara realised that she needed to pee again, and wouldn’t be able to.

  ‘Hello, Sister Banda speaking.’

  ‘Hello, look, could I please speak to someone about James Ballantyne—’

  ‘Oh yes, I’m sorry, you’re a friend, is that right? You haven’t heard, obviously.’

  ‘Heard what?’

  ‘I’m very sorry to have to tell you by phone, but I have to give you some bad news. I’m afraid your friend passed away yesterday. There were complications following surgery. And as there don’t appear to be any—’

  ‘Oh no. No, no no no—’

  ‘I am sorry, but the end was—’

  Sara had dropped the phone so the sister’s careful words, that death when it came had been peaceful, pinked tinnily out of the swinging receiver, unheard.

  CHAPTER 40

  IT HAD BEEN a choice between throwing up on the stage or managing to wait until she got off the platform and back into her dressing room, so Sara retched luxuriantly into her dressing-room loo with a sort of numb self-congratulation that she had held on until the end of her fourth return to the stage. The outrageous bouquet that she had just accepted lay slumped against the wall where she had flung it, fearing she might be sick into it. The audience was still applauding, as if determined that she should go back for a fifth time, but gave up at around the same time as she finished groaning and was lifting her head to the mirror.

  She did not know how she had managed to play the Dvořák at all but it appeared, as if it mattered, that she had played it rather brilliantly. She had been thinking only of James, though thinking was not quite what it had been, nor had it been totally its supposed opposite, feeling. It had been thinking and feeling fused into suffering of such intensity that it amounted to a kind of knowing. She splashed cold water on her face and tried to stop shaking. So, she thought, looking at her wrecked face, she had played the Dvořák brilliantly because she had played it in pain, knowing both love and loss, or rather getting to know them again. The good years since Matteo’s death seemed less like the achievement of happiness than the mere wandering of her attention. How could she have forgotten what it was like? How was it possible that she loved James enough to feel like this, but not enough to have saved him? Love was powerless except to create pain. She pushed Andrew out of her mind. Would James have considered that tonight she had loved the Dvořák enough? Yes, probably, but she never would again.

  She showered and changed into jeans and retched once more, and called through the dressing-room door to yet another enquiry from Charlie.

  ‘Truly, Charlie, I’m all right. You go on with the others, I won’t join you for dinner. No, I’m going straight back to the hotel, I’ve got a car.’ Somehow, to join the others and send the news of the death of James Ballantyne round the orchestra would make it real. For as long as only she knew about it, she felt she could contain it, that she could make it somehow not quite the case. She stood no chance of bearing it at all unless she could fool herself that James was becoming dead a little bit at a time, in tiny pieces, until she was able to cope with the fact in its entirety.

  She ought to tell Simon. He had been more puzzled than angry at her behaviour before the performance, though clearly quite delighted by the performance, but she had fled the minute she had got off stage and for that alone Sara knew that she owed him a proper explanation. But she could not trust herself to give it now. The kindness in his eyes would finish her, and she had to keep a hold on herself in order to negotiate a way of getting home tonight rather than waiting for her flight in the morning. She would write to him, she decided, she would write him a letter after she got home, which was the thing she had to concentrate on doing now.

  At the Osterreichischer Hof she set the desk staff into a flurry by demanding information about flights that night, went up to pack and came down again fifteen minutes later. No flights that night from Salzburg.

  ‘From somewhere else, then!’ she almost shouted. ‘What about Munich?’

  There was no scheduled flight that night from Munich to Heathrow, but there was a charter to Stansted, leaving at 1.30 am. She could make it, just, as there was a train to Munich at 10.45. Would Madam like to book the flight? There was availability.

  ‘Two,’ Sara said, patiently. ‘Two seats. I must have a seat for the instrument.’ The concierge nodded without raising his eyebrows. Cellists, he’d seen them come and go: Cohen, Wallfisch, Isserlis. Very nice, some of them. Very fussy, all of them, about their instruments. This one was positively easygoing, next to some.

  People who are travelling to attend to a death are the most efficient travellers, being if not quite intolerant, then indifferent to everyone else; to be in public with a privately breaking heart induces a particular stand-offish dignity. They must be constantly moving, as if by concentrating all energy on the process of getting there they can shrink the distances between destinations. Sara sat upright in the train, comforted by the speed of it. She drank water and ate peanuts, until she was sick again. As she brushed her teeth in the lurching train cubicle she deliberately did not look at her face, anticipating that it would show her her own wretchedness. In the plane she managed to doze for a short time, so that when the flight landed at Stansted she felt able to drive and hired a car.

  As she drove out of the airport and into the dark countryside she found herself relaxing and smiling until she realised that she had been travelling under an odd, vague delusion that her unhappiness, too, would end when she arrived. She had been unconsciously taking comfort from the knowledge that she was drawing closer to the place where James would be as if she believed, in some ludicrous way, that he would be waiting for her, interested to hear all about her appalling journey. For the first time she wanted to cry. Instead, she turned her mind to practical considerations. James would (she recoiled from the thought of James’s body) still be somewhere at the hospital, she supposed. She had not found out exactly when he had died, but now that she thought about it she realised that Tom must already know and could even be in Bath.

  She reached the edge of the city at four o’clock in the morning. Now it was suddenly intolerable that she had arrived, for she was too early to do anything. As well as exhausted and on the edge of hysterical tears, she now also felt stupid. What difference could it have made to James if she had spent one more night in a comfortable hotel in Salzburg and arrived home on her booked flight—she added the hours up—only ten hours from now? Now there would be at least a five-hour wait in her empty house before she should even try to get in touch with Tom. The streets were deserted. She had rushed home as if James would be waiting and now there was nobody here, nobody who knew what she had done and nobody who cared. There was no Andrew and never would be, not after what they had said to each other. He did not even know about James. Nobody did. There shou
ld be some sign that would show people what had happened, and how somebody felt about it.

  Behind Bathwick Hill the pink and silver promise of light was stealing into objects and buildings. The day had almost begun, the first whole day and the first of thousands that Sara would see in the knowledge that another person dear to her was dead and would not see it too. She seized at a reason for her frantic journey home. She would watch the sunrise from James’s look-out at the top of the Sulis garden, the place where she had last heard him laugh. She would think about him for a while and leave her flowers there. She would place them just where he had lain, the beautiful, wilting flowers she had been given for the performance that only James, because she loved him, had made it possible for her to give. How unbearable it was proving to be, loving. No private ceremony with flowers altered that, yet she would leave them in the way that people marked the place of a fatal event, a gesture she had never until this moment understood the point of.

  CHAPTER 41

  TO SARA’S SURPRISE the gates to the Sulis were open, so she drove straight up and parked. The house was in complete darkness, not even an outside light shone. In the half-dark she set off, making for the terraces that led up to James’s gazebo. She supposed, not really having thought about it until now, that if she were challenged by anyone she would simply tell them to fuck off and leave her alone, feeling somehow quite able to insist that wandering round someone’s garden at four o’clock in the morning carrying a bunch of flowers was a perfectly reasonable thing to do.

  The stillness of the garden was broken by a disturbance, or more the sense of a disturbance, from the direction of the swimming-pool temple. Until now it had not occurred to Sara to be frightened, but she did now dimly think, though curiously without much concern, that the person who had murdered Warwick Jones less than a week ago was still at large and might have killed for no reason. Turning towards the temple she saw a faint gleam of light, and as she watched there came a faint sound like a hush! Then the light broke into dancing specks and darts which lit up the pillars and sparkled out across the dim stone steps almost to the grass in front of the entrance. Somebody had just dived into the pool. Or was drowning.

  Still clutching her flowers, Sara made her way swiftly across the grass and pulled open the sliding door. She was at once stilled by the atmosphere inside that was created by hundreds of candles, single tealights, set out on the floor and on little tables around the water’s edge. Feeling that her entrance violated some almost divine, ceremonial atmosphere, she pulled the door closed behind her lest any breeze should blow them out. Hundreds of flames flickered and twisted in obedience to the gust that she had brought with her, righted themselves and burned true. It was so beautiful, so warm and quiet that Sara, as her eyes gazed at the golden light which gleamed off the water, wondered if she had been mistaken about the noise. No one was here. Just then, the dark water shivered. She followed with her eyes the darker line below its surface which, as it moved, sent a gentle wake which lapped up to the pool side. Someone was under water, swimming the entire length of the pool. The water broke when the shape reached the far end. The naked figure which emerged with its back to Sara, not quite far enough away to escape the candlelight which cast its glow along the body’s edge, flattering or perhaps just showing it as it was: male and strong. Stephen Golightly stepped over to a chair and picked up his towel. Turning and peering, he laughed with surprise and called, in a voice that boomed sonorously across the water, ‘Oh, you shouldn’t have.’

  ‘Whu-uh? Sorry? Uh?’

  ‘For me?’ He gestured at the bunch of flowers which hung half wrecked and forgotten in Sara’s hand. As she stared, Stephen Golightly continued to stand smiling at her as if entirely unaware that he was naked. Then he took his towel and began to dry his face. While his head was covered, Sara took a long, involuntarily fascinated look at his groin, whose main attraction was wobbling rather endearingly as his arms energetically pummelled his hair dry. Stephen pulled the towel away from his head and began to walk a little unsteadily towards her end of the pool. As he walked he knotted the towel, as an afterthought, round his middle.

  He had stopped smiling by the time he reached one of the tables from which he picked up a bottle. Sara had not noticed it, or the glass, behind the candles. Stephen was now looking at her seriously.

  ‘Come on, I don’t bite,’ he said, gently. His speech was not slurred, exactly, but his tongue sounded thicker than it should be. ‘You’ve heard, obviously. I’m so sorry. I’m sorry about everything.’

  Sara stood rooted, tears now beginning to pour down her face, still clutching the damn flowers. Stephen took them from her and laid them down, then led her by the hand to a pile of lounger mattresses and towels spread out on the floor. She took the glass he offered and drained it. When she had finished the vodka she covered her face in her hands, feeling rather pointless, so she asked for another. She had not eaten for hours and had only dozed on the plane, so the fabulous stuff was hitting her just where it needed to. Stephen gave her more and when she had drunk it, he refilled the glass and drank that himself.

  After a silence he said, rather unnecessarily, ‘I’ve had quite a lot of this already.’

  Sara nodded. She could see now that his smiles had been rather forced. With his face now in repose he looked almost as bad as she did.

  ‘It’s all over,’ he said, waving an arm loosely. ‘All these lights, they’re for the aromatherapy burners. We buy in bulk. This is the whole damn lot. Go out in a blaze, I thought.’

  ‘It’s very pretty.’

  ‘There’s no one left now. I’ve cancelled new admissions. The clinic’s gone. I’m leaving—’

  ‘Have they found out any more about Warwick?’

  Stephen shook his head. ‘They’re looking for Leech. They seem quite sure it was him. They’re interviewing people, people he knew, people from here.’ After a silence he said, ‘But they’ve let that other man go, the husband of that Japanese woman. It was in the Chronicle. He didn’t do it, he’s gone back to Japan.’

  ‘Oh no. Really? But he did do it. They just can’t prove it. Andrew was—Oh, God, it doesn’t matter.’

  ‘To be honest, I’ve had my mind on other things.’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Sara, I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry about James. I promise we did all we could.’

  ‘Don’t tell me about it, I can’t bear to hear it. Not yet. It’s too late. What are you doing swimming at four o’clock in the morning, anyway?’

  ‘I love this place. It’s my last night. One last night, and I thought I’d spend it here. Clinic’s finished. One last night before I leave.’ Stephen smiled unhappily.

  ‘You sound very final about it.’

  ‘Well, I’m realistic.’ He poured himself another drink and sipped it. ‘The clinic’s finished. Everything happened rather quickly down at the RUH. The police came and took medical files for the coroner, before I could, well, tidy them up. Yes, they’ll look into everything very thoroughly, I have no doubt.’

  He looked earnestly at Sara. ‘I’m human, too. I make mistakes. Doctors do make mistakes. But I want you to know I’ve genuinely tried to help my patients. I didn’t want anyone to die. I hope people will at least give me credit for that, afterwards.’

  ‘After what? The inquest, you mean?’

  ‘No. I mean after I’m struck off. I’m leaving, of course. I have to leave. I’ll be struck off, but I have always genuinely tried to help my patients.’

  Sara half sat up, indignant. ‘But why? Are you saying you were negligent? Do you mean it didn’t need to happen? They said complications following surgery, that’s all.

  What—’

  ‘No, no. No, there’s been no negligence.’ Stephen sighed heavily, sat up and filled the glass from the near-empty vodka bottle.

  ‘That’s not why I’ll be struck off,’ he said, sipping and handing the glass over. She drank, waiting for him to explain while he stared across the pool.

 
‘Why will they, then?’ she challenged him, not understanding.

  He looked at her, thinking about her usefulness. ‘I’d like to tell you. Of all the people who could have walked in here tonight, I’m glad it’s you, do you know that? It might be good to tell you. I’d like to think you understood, even if you didn’t forgive. I haven’t hurt anybody.’

  ‘ Why will you be struck off?’

  After a silence in which they both drank some more vodka, Stephen said, in a voice now definitely slurred, ‘I set up the Sulis a few years after my wife died. I used all of the money she left. It was a lot, but barely enough. We struggled. The first two years I don’t know how we stayed open. I had a patient called—I shouldn’t tell you her name, but she was local, she had a title.’ He turned to her earnestly. ‘What happened was an honest mistake. This lady—she’d been to see me in town down at the surgery and I’d sent her for some tests. When the results came back they were with lots of others and it was a busy morning. I saw her to discuss her results which were not at all good. A bowel problem. Intestines.’

  ‘Intestine? Oh God, not Lady Wallace?’

  Stephen nodded. ‘She raised the idea of spending time at the Sulis. It was her own idea. I have never, ever tried to sell my clinic to my NHS patients. It would be completely unethical. I manage to keep the two things separate because I don’t make any money from the Sulis, it’s non profit-making. I only intended to take a salary from the Sulis after I’d retired from the NHS.’

  ‘Don’t talk to me,’ Sara said, pouring herself another drink, ‘as if I were a bloody medical ethics tribunal.’

  ‘Sorry. Anyway, I didn’t bring up the idea of the Sulis to Lady Wallace because I honestly didn’t think it would help, but she was desperate, and I agreed the relaxation and diet might help her palliatively, so to speak, so in she came, the next day.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘Well, she began to get better immediately. Quite spectacularly better. I was astonished. So I went back to her notes, and I found that I’d made a mistake. I’d discussed someone else’s results with her. They’d somehow got into her notes, clipped to her own results, which were fine. You see? She wasn’t really all that ill to begin with.’