She stared into her now empty coffee cup. 'I went to see him. Giorgio. Before I came home.' She drew in a quavering breath. 'Giorgio had gone. The damage where the ski hit his head was too much. He was a husk, just the machine keeping him breathing. His eyes were lifeless, I knew he'd gone. His family had been told that he wouldn't recover.
'I couldn't bear to stay on the island.'
'I'm sorry.' His hand was warm on her arm. The good hand.
She jumped up to pace the room. 'Before he met me, Giorgio didn't dive. If not for me, he would never have had the accident. Would still be alive. Alive and breathing, laughing and smiling - ' And then she was crying, dry, painful sobs that scourged her throat and pleated her chest.
Warm arms threaded around her and her head fell forward onto Adam's shoulder, as she groaned the questions that those left behind have always asked. 'Why? Why him? Why did he have to surface right there, right that instant? A few seconds more, a few seconds less. That's all he needed! And if I'd been there I would have realised what was happening, known from the engine sound under the water how close it was and how quickly it was approaching! I should have been there!'
The room grew dark around her.
Adam left her mainly alone to cry out her anguish in the depths of the sofa, returning only occasionally with a glass of water to ease her aching throat and a fat kitchen roll to absorb her tears.
He squatted down beside her. 'Shall I fetch someone to be with you? Your mother?'
She blew her nose. 'Too old and frail.'
'Your sister?'
'Molly's wonderful, but I'm not sure I can bear her particular brand of sympathy, at the moment.'
He hesitated. 'Then I'll stay. I'd feel like hell, going home and leaving you like this.'
'I've stopped crying. I'll be all right.' But even as the words left her lips, her face crumpled anew.
He made a deep noise of concern. 'I'll sleep down here, just so you're not alone in the house, tonight. It would be wrong to abandon you.'
She blew her nose for the millionth time. A heap of damp tissues was building on the carpet at her feet. Went attractively with a red nose and swollen eyes, no doubt. 'I'll be OK. I'm going to get drunk. Obliterate the pain.'
'Good idea.' He shrugged off his jacket, pulled the curtains and switched on a light. 'What have you got?'
She'd expected him to try to dissuade her rather than join in with gusto, but led him through to the kitchen where they found a bottle of whisky in the fridge and two bottles of red wine in the under-stairs cupboard. He also discovered a tin of biscuits that Molly had given as a welcome-back-into-your-home gift, and cajoled her into nibbling her way through two shortcakes. Then they began on the whisky, sloshing the twinkling amber brew into cut glass tumblers that were heavy at the base, fragile at the rim. Side-by-side on the sofa, they propped their feet on the coffee table.
Judith tossed back her first glassful and squeaked a gasp at the scorching in her throat.
'You unman me. I shall have to do the same.' Adam copied her, then had to wipe his eyes on the back of his hand.
She poured refills, and sniffed. 'Life is sometimes very crappy.'
'Absolutely.'
Judith blew her nose. 'He didn't deserve to die. He had a lot of life left.'
Adam had kicked his shoes off, his feet were alongside hers on the table, encased in black ribbed socks without holes or pulls. It occurred to her that he was a comfortable person to be in proximity to; nothing about him was worn or stale.
'If only I'd never introduced him to diving. I should have been with him that day, I could've - '
His eyes were intent. 'Did you make him happy? Were you good together?'
She had a vision of Giorgio's face, the smile that felt only for her, the way his dark eyes became darker as he pulled her into his arms. She nodded, biting her lip.
'Then don't "if only". Pointless. If you loved each other, be glad. You can't change anything now.'
It wasn't bad advice. But so difficult to follow! Sombrely, she sipped her whisky.
She wasn't sleepy. She was hollowed out and exhausted, aching with sorrow, but felt as if she'd never sleep again. Adam yawned occasionally, but Judith just drank steadily, watching the room turn to blurs, feeling her brain sloshing gently within her skull, hearing her voice stretching and contracting as her tongue struggled to cope with S and other difficult letters, and she told him about the last time she'd seen Giorgio in his hospital room and the confrontation outside it with Maria Zammit.
Her ears were hearing slowly, making Adam's voice thin and distant. 'Why wouldn't Giorgio's family let you into the hospital?'
She sighed. 'I didn't exist, to them. Giorgio's been separated from his wife for fourteen years, but there's no divorce in Malta.'
'Ah. Uncomfortable.'
'It was their coping mechanism to acknowledge only Giorgio's wife, it was all about surface respectability. Maria, Giorgio's mother, was particularly good at it. When Giorgio invited his parents to dinner and then produced me, Maria simply walked out. Agnello shook his head and asked Giorgio why he had to hurt his mother like that - he had a wife, till death, not till the marriage becomes difficult. Giorgio didn't want to cause any more pain to his family than necessary, so we carried on our relationship discreetly.'
Adam shook his head as if trying to clear it. 'He let you be treated like a dirty secret?'
She ran her tongue reflectively along the hard, thin rim of her glass. A dirty secret. 'You could look at it like that, I suppose, although Giorgio said a secret affair was simply impossible in Malta. I was angry, in the beginning. But if we'd tried to force the issue, what would we have achieved? We would have been together, but Giorgio would've been estranged from his family. Possibly including his children - I couldn't be responsible for that. We had to go along with the charade.'
'Really?' Adam pulled a face as if the idea were sour.
'Don't be too judgmental, his family were acting on what they believed in. In their eyes I was a despicable interloper. They're not alone in their attitudes, my own mother wasn't thrilled when I left Tom. She considers that marriage is for life and she was very tight-lipped about me ending things.'
He opened his eyes wide. 'You're confusing me. I'd forgotten you were married.'
'I like to forget it, too.' She explained about her marriage, Tom and Exotic Liza, and Kieran.
'Tom must be stupid,' he commented, swirling whisky unsteadily in the depths of his crystal glass. 'But at least you have someone else to blame for the break up of your marriage.'
She wriggled to get more comfortable, slanting herself into the corner to face him. He was in jeans today and his chestnut hair, faded to grey in the wings above his ears, fell over his eye, making him look very laid back. She remembered that he knew one or two things about separation. 'How about you? What was your downfall?' She'd drunk far too much to worry about impertinence.
He glugged some whisky, and reopened the biscuit tin. He'd been feeding her biscuits to put something inside her stomach other than booze. After the shortcake, she'd eaten two bourbon, two custard creams and a digestive. Because he shook the tin at her she chose a ginger nut and a chocolate chip cookie, but once she had one in either hand couldn't imagine herself eating them.
'Shelley and I were married for a long time. Since I was twenty-four. But...' He shrugged. 'We were very good friends - are still. It turned out not to be enough.' He gesticulated towards her with his chocolate digestive. 'It wasn't the love you've talked about, you and Giorgio. There was a lot of affection, and when she brought the subject of marriage up I believed it was logical. And I'd be able to sleep with her every night, which, frankly, was appealing. I suppose I mistook affection for love.'
He creased his brow. 'Or it probably was love, but not the right sort, the deep sort.'
She sniffed, and blew her nose again. Her throat felt as if it were lined with hay and her eyes with sand. 'But she must've thought she loved you, or she wouldn't have
wanted marriage.'
His eyes slid sideways, fastening themselves on her through a narrowing slit between his lids. 'Not necessarily. I think girls in those days operated on a fixed programme. If they went out with someone for a certain length of time, they got engaged. They got the sparkly ring and the party, they were the centre of attention.'
It was true, that had been the norm. What was it about herself that had made her fall outside this fixed programme?
'And she's always joked that it was because Shelley Leblond sounded glamorous, big improvement on Shelly Dobben, which sounded like a cart horse.'
'Funny thing to joke about.'
He shrugged. 'She's artistic. An interior designer. Things like that are important to her.'
Tired of their sticky presence in her hand, Judith ate the biscuits slowly. Crumbs worked their way in between the buttons of her grey-green blouse and she tried to flick them out with her fingers. Stopped when she realised he was watching. The crumbs tickled. 'So did one of you find someone else?'
He drew his eyes back up to her face. 'No. But when I had my accident, Shelley found the whole thing very difficult.'
Judith shook her spinning head. 'How?'
His eyes narrowed. 'She has a problem with ugliness.'
Chapter Fourteen
In those few, carefully chosen words, Judith got a glimpse of his pain and felt a dart of anger towards the unknown Shelley Dobben Leblond.
'She couldn't bear the sight of my hand. And as for touching her - forget it!' He laughed, mirthlessly. 'The occupational therapist warned me that I might need to "rethink my position in the marital bed", and "get used to doing things with the left hand that had always been done with the right". Fat chance of that, as it turned out. Shelley didn't want me anywhere near her.'
Judith put down her whisky, suddenly getting that threatening feeling in the back of her throat that told her to slow down. She enunciated carefully. 'That's not nice. Not supportive.' She struggled for what she was trying to say. 'Not wife-like.'
'At least she was honest. Better that she told me candidly that she didn't want to sleep with me any more. Can you imagine how humiliating it would have been to realise she was suffering in silence? Pitying me? Gritting her teeth but shrinking inside?'
She frowned, and admitted, 'That doesn't sound very nice, either. But it's still big of you to be so... understanding.'
'Realistic.'
He went to make coffee, leaving her in a hazy brooding on the vagaries of fortune until he returned with two mugs for each of them, fragrant and steaming.
'Two mugs at a time seems a good idea. Saves getting up again. Wonder why I never thought of it.' She began her first mug. 'So how did you hurt your hand? Lawn mower? Power saw?'
He shook his head.
'You're a photographer, I bet you were in a war and had to try and toss a grenade out of a vehicle, careening across the desert, caught in cross fire?'
He raised his eyebrows. 'You know I'm not that brave or glam kind of photographer. It was a stupid, freak accident.' Picking up his coffee, he half-closed his eyes. 'I was helping Shelley. She'd taken on this huge first floor room, where they'd knocked the walls out to create 'a space'. All wooden floors and Swedish furniture that didn't match. She asked me to take pix. I often did, so that she had a portfolio to show to clients.
'Nice house, well-heeled customers. And they were keen to get their place into one of the glossy home magazines, so they engaged me to shoot some stuff for them, too, then they were going to approach someone to write it up.' He paused to sip his drink.
'The space had French doors opening to a first floor sundeck. They wanted photos of the family toasting one another with champagne, on the deck. I was absorbed in what I was doing, trying to get the bloody woman to shut up so I could get a photo of her not mouthing like a fish, and then someone let these dogs out.' He shook his head at the memory. 'Rottweilers, they were, half dog half monster. They came flying in, baying for blood, straight at me.'
He surprised her with a sudden smile. 'Major heart attack time! I shot backwards. The wooden rails weren't up to twelve stone of Adam in a panic, and gave way.'
He drained his cup. 'There was a conservatory underneath. I fell through it.'
'Oh my God.'
'It just exploded, shattering into my palm and fingers - sliced into me like razors. And my back, my neck.' He pulled down his collar to show her a white curve from just below his ear. 'But those were relatively superficial, and healed OK. It was the hand that really suffered.'
She reached for his hand to examine the cross-hatching of thin, white scars and the tiny dots of stitches on the palm.
He took it back, and pushed it into his pocket. 'I didn't realise how badly hurt I was, at first. I was all gashed to buggery and I could see the fingers weren't exactly intact. So off we went to Northampton General, Shelley driving and me with my hand held up in the air and towels soaking up the blood.'
He finished the first coffee and poured whisky into the second. It seemed to Judith that some object was being defeated, but she'd always enjoyed coffee with a tot in, so followed suit.
'What I noticed immediately was that I'd lost a lot of movement, and what I did have sent sort of electric shocks searing up my arm. It was nerve damage causing the awful pain, but it turned out I had everything-damage - tendon, muscle, tissue, artery. I had microsurgery, nerve repair, tendon grafts. But the whole thing was just slashed from my fingers down to the heel of my hand. Chopped up. Then I got deep infection that resisted antibiotics. The fingers never worked and pretty soon began to wither - that's from the nerve damage. Looked really strange, as if they belonged to a corpse, sort of pale blue.' He smiled thinly.
'Quite quickly I realised that it was about as good as it was going to get. I'd have greater use of the hand without the useless, immobile fingers getting in my way.'
'That's horrific.'
Looking down at his coffee, he shrugged. 'Much worse things happen to people. Being in and out of hospital brings that firmly home to you. For everyone who loses a finger there are others who lose an arm. There's even amputee humour: the patient says, "Doctor, doctor, I can't feel my legs!" And the doctor, "That's because I've cut off your arms!" ' He snorted.
Judith wiped her face with the back of her hand, not knowing if she were shedding tears for Adam or tears for Giorgio. They just seemed to well up endlessly of their own accord. 'So Shelley couldn't cope with the amputation?'
He shook his head. 'She'd turn white at the very word. Couldn't cope with any of it, gave up completely once she realised the fingers were never going to be better. The disfigurement made her skin crawl. That was pretty painful, too.'
Judith tried to imagine if it had been Giorgio who'd suffered like Adam. Put herself in the place of a woman who loved beauty and couldn't bear mutilation near her. Failed. Surely love should have transcended the loss of a few fingers? 'When you compare it to what happened to Giorgio - '
'Yes!' His eyes were bleak. 'In comparison with death it's pretty minor. And that kind of illuminates the quality of her feelings.' He jettisoned his mug roughly onto the table, and it rattled around in a circle, almost spilling the remaining contents. 'Finishing the marriage was a similar process to deciding on the amputation. A clean end. Cut away the rotting stuff. No point hanging onto something that's never going to work again. Shelley cares for me a lot, but there's a gulf between a lot and enough, and you can't bridge it artificially.'
'So that's why you always hide your hand away,' she thought aloud.
His head whipped around as he fastened a scorching glare on her. 'I don't do any such thing! My occupational therapist says people who don't hide their damage feel better about themselves.' Then he immediately contradicted himself. 'It's emotionally quite difficult to have it on display. Some people like to have a good stare and some people avert their eyes. I don't know which is worse.'
'What about prosthesis?'
'I didn't like the idea. There are quite a
few of us who'd rather put up with the loss of limb than wear artificial replacements. I do exercises to assist with strength and symmetry, I have one or two gadgets and aids, and I apply the problem-solving strategies I've been taught by the occupational therapist. I make the best of things.'
Judith remembered observing him. 'Like using your left hand for everything?'
'Not everything. I can write with my right hand - untidily. I can drive - although it's better if the car's modified - and I can play the violin, with a bit of adapting to my bowing. I tend not to wear too many buttons, but use my left hand for those I do. I use my left hand for the computer mouse, to hold a spoon, and clean my teeth. And one or two other things you won't want to discuss.'
She managed a watery smile. 'Yet you've done all the decorating here since you lost your fingers?'
'I have this gizmo to help hold things like paintbrushes.' His response was short, as if he'd had enough of the subject. He was probably only allowing it to give her something to focus on other than Giorgio. It would be fairer to let him go to sleep. But something inside her quailed at the thought of being completely alone with her grief. It might swallow her up.
He yawned again, and turned the subject. 'Kieran's a step, isn't he? Have you got kids of your own?'
'The time was never right. Your Caleb seems such a lovely lad. I know I was furious at him about the party, but it was bad judgement rather than malice. He's very pleasant and personable. A live wire.'
'Live wire,' he repeated dryly. 'Polite-speak for Caleb ricocheting from one disaster to another. As you say, there's no malice in him, but from the moment he could crawl he's been getting into strife. A big shock for us after his brother, Matthias, who was a golden child, bright but with common sense.'
Judith smiled. 'I didn't realise you had another. Tell me about Matthias - fabulous names your kids have, by the way.'
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