He got up from the chair and flexed his shoulders. “I need to give this dog a walk,” he said. “Do you want to come?”
I shook my head. “No, thanks; not today.” I frowned. “You don’t seem so careful of the gossipmongers now – why not?”
“Because we’re not in the hospital. You’re discharged and no longer my patient.”
“I see.”
“I’ll be twenty minutes, no more. Look in the fridge and see if anything takes your fancy.”
“I doubt that.”
He stared down at me sternly. “I insist you eat.”
“Ha. But I am not your patient. I can tell you to…”
“Stop right there.”
When he had gone I sat and sipped my coffee, thinking. Why was this man being so kind? How had we, rather suddenly it seemed, become friends? I strongly suspected that Jasper may have had something to do with it. Or perhaps I was seen as a bit of a sad case, a friendless victim who needed support and cosseting. I bristled at this thought. Could Eve Rawlins have known just how much she was to take from me? Potentially, my whole career, worked for through long years; but also my self-respect, my independence, my peace. Or had these always been mere chimeras? Was this rock-bottom existence reality after all?
It seemed that Eve Rawlins was also on Michael’s mind. He was gone for much longer than twenty minutes, and when he came back he was on his own. “Sorry, my wretched dog rolled in something disgusting down by the riverbank. I had to take her home and give her a bath. I left her looking damp and very sorry for herself.” He looked at the kitchen table. “What’s this? I thought I was cooking.”
I shrugged. “You were ages. I made myself get up and do something. It’s only a bit of salad, but it’s all I want.”
“Fine. Could you drink a glass of wine with it?”
“I might just manage. There’s some white in the fridge, courtesy of the generous Axtons.”
Michael pulled the bottle out. “Looks like one I brought them back from France. I’ll find a corkscrew.”
He poured the wine into two large glasses and we sat down at the table. “What have you been doing in my absence? Apart from washing lettuce?”
“Nothing,” I said between mouthfuls. “Washing lettuce was unnervingly wearisome.”
He chuckled. “I’m imagining you leaning on the sink exhausted, a limp lettuce leaf in an even limper hand.”
“I’m glad you find my pathetic state amusing. I wish I could say the same.”
He speared a tomato. “Seriously, though. I have been thinking about your attacker.”
“So have I,” I said. “It’s not pleasant.”
He looked at me with a curious considering gaze, as if I had turned green or developed a hideous rash. “How angry are you with her?”
“You have no idea. If my anger were blazing instead of smouldering this place would be hot ash in minutes.”
He frowned. “It’s not good for you, harbouring such feelings. It’s not the house that’ll burn, it’s you – from the inside out.”
I threw down my fork with a rude clatter, and he paused, eyebrows raised. “For heaven’s sake, not you as well!”
“What? What do you mean?”
“I had a visitor while I was in the hospital. The first of two I received the Saturday after the attack. A priest.”
“Father Vincent Cornish?”
My jaw dropped. Slowly I picked up my napkin and wiped my mouth. “How do you know about him?” I whispered. “I don’t think I mentioned him. Or did I talk to Jasper? I don’t remember.” Miserably I dropped the napkin onto the table. “What’s wrong with me? My brain has turned to mush.” I gripped the wine glass with a trembling hand.
“Let me tell you what happened,” Michael said gently. “That Saturday I was coming to see you, but I was overtaken in the corridor by a young man in a hurry – brown hair, wearing jeans and a pink T-shirt.”
“Yeah. Rob. Well, you did know about him, I imagine.”
“I saw him knock on your door and decided to leave you to it. I turned round and headed back to my office – there were a few things I needed to check. But on the way I noticed an elderly man in a blue suit, leaning on a stick, wearing a clerical collar. He looked worn out.”
“He’d come all the way from Porton on the train. For a frosty five-minute interview.”
Michael nodded. “I know. I asked him if he was all right. He said he was, but then he seemed to sag. I persuaded him to come with me to the cafeteria and I bought him a cup of tea and a slice of cake.”
“You’re full of good works,” I said sourly.
Michael ignored this and went on. “He told me why he had come, and the reception he’d got. But I was interested: he obviously knew your attacker – Eve, isn’t it? – quite well. I asked him a few questions, and he told me a bit about her background.”
I pushed my chair back with a loud scrape and stood up. I found I was shaking, and I clenched my fists at my sides. “I don’t want to hear it. What’s this, anyway? Some kind of do-gooder ploy to make me feel sorry for her? For her – a madwoman bent on smashing my life to pieces? I suppose you want me to forgive her, just like that priest. I wouldn’t know where to begin, and I don’t intend to make any effort to find out.”
I saw him bite his lip. “Forgiveness isn’t forgetting,” he said. “No one can ask you to forget. And it isn’t something you do and then it’s all over. It’s a process, sometimes a long one.”
I felt my fury bubble up, and I swallowed hard. “Why should I even try?” My voice grated.
“Because it would be better for you if you did,” he said simply. “You could even include your parents while you’re at it.”
“What?” I said wildly. “My mother, yes, for being a lousy parent, for making me feel like a piece of rubbish, but why do I need to forgive my father?”
“For deserting you.” He held up his hands as I opened my mouth to protest. “I know it wasn’t his fault. Even so.”
For a moment I stood and stared at him, my mouth open, my eyes narrowed. “You know what? I’m sick of people foisting their homespun psychology on me.” I felt my breathing become laboured, my throat choking. “Look, I’m grateful for all your kindness. I’m sure you mean well. But I’d like to be on my own now, if you don’t mind. I’m very tired.”
He got to his feet. “I’m sorry, Rachel. I had no intention of upsetting you or making things worse. Please believe that. I’ll go.” He took his plate to the sink and put it on the draining board. He turned to me, a frown wrinkling his brow. “There’s so much more I wanted to talk to you about. But perhaps you’d rather not. I just –” I waited. “I can’t help worrying about you. I’m sorry, but there it is. I won’t bother you, of course. But please don’t think you are all alone. There are people who care.”
“I don’t see why they should.”
“No, I know you don’t. Well, I’ll say goodnight.”
“Yes. Goodnight.”
I watched him walk to the front door, open it, and walk out. I caught a glimpse of the evening sky, studded with early stars, and smelled the fragrance of cut grass and roses. As the door closed behind him I broke into a torrent of crying. I leaned on the wall, shaking and sobbing, until my legs buckled under me and I sank to the floor. I had weathered so much over the last almost twenty years, but it was the scent of roses that threatened my undoing.
The next morning, to my surprise, I awoke clear-headed, and I remembered recorking the bottle and putting it resolutely back in the fridge. There may have been times when I was tempted to kill pain with alcohol, but I knew enough to recognize it as an extra problem, not any kind of solution to current ones. But a clear head and a crisp memory have their disadvantages. I felt bad that I had sent a kind friend away with the proverbial flea in his ear. At best I had been ungrateful.
I looked at the clock: it was after nine. I found my phone under a pile of cushions in the sitting room and keyed in Michael’s number, but after several r
ings it went to voicemail. I had no message to leave. I padded into the kitchen barefoot and made coffee. Sipping, I looked around the flat. My occupation had tarnished Angela’s efforts: here was someone else whose kindness I had abused. It was time, as my mother frequently told me in acidic tones when I was a child, to “pull my socks up”.
I finished my coffee. Galvanized by caffeine, I tidied stuff away, put my bedsheets – grisly from intense use – in the washing machine, and vacuumed the carpets. It wasn’t much, but I was soon exhausted. With a last burst of determination I opened the windows at the front, letting in the scent of flowers which had done for me the night before, and with it the sound of church bells, several competing at once, a joyous jangle which sent me back a quarter of a century to another life: not forgotten – never that – but deeply buried, until Michael came along innocently with his spade and started digging.
When I was nine years old my father, in a fit of enthusiasm, decided we should learn to be bell-ringers. “They don’t just call the faithful to prayer,” he said. “They remind all those who don’t believe there’s something else out there.” I had only the vaguest idea what he meant but as always I did whatever he wanted, not in a spirit of subservience but simply because I loved him and he had the best ideas. Martin, now fourteen and sceptical, could not be persuaded, so my father and I went along by ourselves. I never amounted to much – really I was too young and skinny and weak, and as often as not sat out in the pew, watching and listening – but he threw himself into it, and for a few months we were in our local church tower every Tuesday for practice and many Sundays. I don’t know why we stopped going in the end, but that time stayed with me: the glorious cacophony of the bells, the smell of polish on the pews, the teetering piles of hymn books, the dull brassy glow of the lectern, and the height of the barrel-vaulted roof, drawing my child’s eyes upwards to another plane.
I was brought back to the reality of the present by the sound of a powerful car engine outside, and I opened the front door. Michael’s dark blue estate car was passing where the towpath met the lane, and I saw him glance towards my door. Seeing me standing there he waved and smiled. I returned the wave, realizing that he was going to church this fine summer morning. My momentary sense of well-being evaporated, swallowed by a cold sense of my own isolation. Family, friends, even God – these were things other people had, things from which I had cut myself off so resolutely, depending only on my work for fulfilment – work which I could no longer do. I closed the door, and the clangour of the bells diminished.
How odd it was that for the second time I heard my mother’s voice, remembering the sharp tones I had so resented as a teenager. Do stop wallowing, Rachel. Self-pity is nauseating. Nobody wants to listen to your gripes. The worst of it was, she was right. I drifted over to the Axtons’ bookshelves, stocked by Angela with a number of titles I had barely registered – novels I would never read, biographies of people in whom I had no interest. I’d added my own well-thumbed reference works to the lowest shelf. But on the top was a Bible. I hadn’t really noticed it till now. I took it down, planted myself on the sofa, and looked up “anger” and “forgiveness”.
There was so much I had forgotten (or perhaps I had simply sent it down to the dusty archives of my memory where only rats scuttled and beetles ate the mouldering pages). My father, though he was only an irregular church attender, had great reverence for Scripture. He made sure I knew all the usual dramatic stories, but he also read me bits of it, even though a lot was incomprehensible to a child. Now I found passages which resonated from that far-off time: plenty about the anger of God but also about his mercy and restraint. Then I came across two short verses in Ephesians which made my skin prickle. “Get rid of all bitterness, passion, and anger. No more shouting or insults, no more hateful feelings of any sort. Instead, be kind and tender-hearted to one another, and forgive one another, as God has forgiven you through Christ.” But wasn’t there something else, about the forgiveness of God being conditional? I hunted it down; there it was, in Matthew 6: “If you forgive others the wrong they have done to you, your Father in heaven will also forgive you. But if you do not forgive others, then your Father will not forgive the wrongs you have done.” And, I realized, these were not the words of any old prophet, however wise – they were the words of Christ himself. It came to me that Michael, Jasper, Bridget Harries, even Father Vincent, had tried to be “kind and tender-hearted” to me, and I had rudely repudiated their efforts. I took a deep breath, and blew it out again. I had a long way to go, but I had to begin.
I made another cup of coffee and munched on some chocolate biscuits I found in the cupboard. Tentatively I picked up my phone again, and dialled. It went to voicemail. “Michael, I owe you an apology. You’ve been very kind, and I was ungrateful. I’m sorry.” I put the phone on the table, and waited.
I thought he’d ring back before long, and maybe we could make some kind of peace. But he didn’t ring, and the day wore on, with nothing to do except, listlessly, my physiotherapy exercises, which were very dull and soon palled. Bit by bit my fragile little spurt of confidence, my tiny gleam of hope, evaporated in a welter of cynicism and self-blame. Why would anyone want to befriend me, of all people, when I was so rude and ungrateful, when I barely knew how to be a friend, let alone have any? I supposed that all those who’d tried to be kind to me lately were doing it out of some kind of charity, and in my scarred pride I found the thought humiliating: they didn’t want me as their friend because I was witty or good company, or for any reason to do with my worthiness; it was simply because I was in need. This notion stuck in my throat like a fishbone. All my adult life, apart from a few transient and half-baked relationships – even the engagement to Howard fell in this category, I realized, with a small shock – I had relied on one person alone: myself. If I fell apart, who was there? Through that long, lonely day I gathered up the loose threads of my vulnerability, and resolutely ignored the metaphorical clang of closing doors: doors which had so recently let in the scent of roses.
But two things happened that day which were to turn me upside down once again. I’d listlessly eaten up some of the leftover salad from the previous day, and fallen asleep on the sofa over a heavy tome on congenital heart defects, something which would never have happened before the attack. I was jerked awake by the shrilling of my phone, and the book fell with a thud to the floor, painfully catching my bare foot on the way. I hobbled to where I had left the phone on the table, trying to douse a shaming spark of hope that it might be Michael, and he wasn’t offended. But it wasn’t Michael; for the second time in six months – something else that was almost unheard-of – I heard my brother’s warm and lazy tones: “Hey, Lizzie.”
“Martin! What’s this? It’s not my birthday, is it?”
I heard him chuckle. “I know, I’m a rubbish brother, but there’s no need for sarcasm.” He cleared his throat. “Just checking in to see if you’re OK. Heard you’ve been in the wars.”
“What?”
“Someone carved you up.”
I blinked, astonished. “How on earth did you find that out?”
“I read a little item in an old newspaper. We do get them, you know – newspapers – even here in the Antipodes. It was just a few column inches, but the headline caught my eye: ‘Female surgeon in deadly assault’ – or something like that. And your name appeared. So I did a bit of digging on the internet and got a bit more of the story.”
“Good grief!”
“Hm,” Martin said. “Didn’t think to let your relatives know, then?”
“Well, in your case it seemed a bit pointless. You’re many thousands of miles away. What are you going to do except worry? And they did ask me if I wanted to inform our mother, but again, what’s the point if it’s going to cause her concern, which I doubt.”
“Hey, come on, Liz, be fair. Of course she’s going to be a bit concerned at least. And if I heard about it in New Zealand, she’s going to hear about it when you’re just a coupl
e of counties away.”
“But hang on, bro,” I protested. “I didn’t even know there was anything in the press, not till now – apart from very local papers that have a circulation of ten.”
“What, no reporters snooping around the hospital?”
“Not that I knew of. I was interviewed by the police, that’s all. Didn’t think it was worthy of note.”
“You’re kidding! Look at it from their point of view. Nice scandalous story: eminent lady surgeon, crazy parent, family tragedy, deadly knife attack. Bread and butter to the press. So if you know nothing about it, I guess the hospital sent the reporters packing. Someone was defending you, for sure.”
I thought for a moment, chewing my lip. “Are you telling me Mother knows?”
“Yep, someone saw the item in your local rag, a fair bit after the event. She rang me, which has never happened before. So what do I tell her?”
“No, you’re right,” I conceded. “I’ll ring her myself. Sometime soon. Anyway, all that aside, how’re you doing?”
“I’m OK, but more to the point, what about you? Were you badly hurt?”
“I was lucky, bro. Slashed across the face, but eyes and major structures escaped. Just a thin red line now, and I was never going to be Miss World, was I? Worse was the damage to both hands, but they’ve been expertly repaired, and I’m doing lots of tedious exercises.”
I spoke lightly, but Martin was not fooled. “No, Liz! Not your hands! Will you be able to work again?”
“Not sure. Jury’s out. Maybe.”
I heard him swear softly, and loved him for it. But before either of us could speak again, there was a tapping on my front door. “Mart? I’d better go; someone’s knocking. Look, thanks for ringing, OK? Don’t leave it so long next time! And I’ll ring Mother.”
“Yeah. Might be coming home soonish. But I’ll let you know when I know more myself. Bye, Liz. Take care, you crazy fool.”
I rang off. The tapping had stopped, but I went to the door and opened it, and saw a skinny figure loping away across the grass towards the river, a black and white dog at his heels. I surprised myself by the little dart of delight that leapt up in me. “Jasper!”
The Healing Knife Page 15