“My mother was pleased.”
“Then so am I. If you can cope with me, I can do my best to cope with them.”
Oddly, though, Michael rarely looked surprised. Perhaps he felt it, but it didn’t reach his face. He was habitually calm and measured; perhaps that was what Alison had interpreted as no fun, but it was fine by me. He was cautious in the expression of his feelings, but I sensed they ran deep.
One gloomy morning in November we were both due at the hospital to operate, and we were running late. I grabbed a coat and joined him in his car, throwing my briefcase on the back seat. He turned the car round and headed for the city.
“I’ve been meaning to ask you,” he said. “What do you want, or want to do, for your birthday?”
He couldn’t have foreseen my answer, but he still managed not to look surprised.
“I’d like a baby,” I said.
It wasn’t the first time the subject had arisen; it had been aired in a vague, general, maybe-later-or-not-at-all kind of way. But the previous summer it had been mentioned quite publicly. We were in France, just Michael and me and Dulcie; Jasper was somewhere at a music festival, camping with friends.
As soon as we walked into St Luke’s before the service that summer morning I was gleefully accosted by Letty Wetherly. Janet had parked her at the end of a pew while she fetched something from her car.
“Rachel, it’s you!” Letty crowed.
“Hi, Letty. How are you?”
“Got a sunburned nose.”
“So you have. Did you forget your hat?”
“No. Mum forgot my sunblock.” She looked me up and down with a critical eye. “That’s a pretty colour,” she said of my blue and cream striped top.
“Thanks.”
Letty’s voice was rarely quiet, and that day it was louder than ever. “You know what I think, Rachel,” she said. “I think you should have a baby.”
People heard, and heads turned. There was some laughter, but not from Michael, who was behind me, nor from Janet, who was just coming to join us. “Colette!” she said. “How many times have I told you not to be so personal! That’s Rachel’s business, not yours.”
“And Michael’s,” Letty said with a sly giggle.
“Well, yes, of course, but –” Janet’s face flushed pink.
“Because, you see,” Letty went on, her voice rising higher and higher, “I know how you make one. A baby, I mean. Danny told me.”
Now poor Janet was utterly mortified. The service was about to begin, and Letty was in no mood to be hushed. I put my finger to my lips and bent down, so that my head was on a level with hers. I beckoned her closer, with what I hoped was a conspiratorial expression on my face, and whispered in her ear. She grinned, and put a finger to her lips, copying me. For the next hour she said nothing more. She joined in all the hymns, singing random words as usual, and occasionally exchanging grins with me.
That service was memorable for another reason. A visiting clergyman was preaching on 2 Corinthians 1, verses 19 and 20. “For Jesus Christ, the Son of God, who was preached among you by Silas, Timothy, and myself, is not one who is ‘Yes’ and ‘No.’ On the contrary, he is God’s ‘Yes’; for it is he who is the ‘Yes’ to all God’s promises.” I had heard this, or something like it, many years before; I couldn’t recall when or where. As the preacher unpacked the references to Jesus in the Old Testament, applying various prophetic sayings, I tried to remember, but it eluded me.
Afterwards, as we were drinking coffee in the hall, Janet Wetherly came up to me. “I’m so grateful you managed to shut Letty up,” she said. “She can be a pain, and I’m sure she knows it will embarrass me and does it all the more. However did you do it?”
“Ah,” I said, “I’m afraid I can’t tell you – it’s a secret. Letty has been sworn to secrecy too.”
Much later, as we sipped a cool aperitif in the garden, Michael asked me the same question.
“Seeing as Letty isn’t here, glowering at me, I can tell you. I said if she kept it a deep, dark, sacred secret, we’d make the effort.”
“To do what?”
“Procreate.”
Now, in November, all he said was, “Are you sure? Thought long and hard?”
“Yes, as far as I can. I don’t see how you can prepare for parenthood, actually. No two babies are the same, are they? We could have a grumpy one, or a cheerful one, for example. I could manage well, or not. But, my love, you have to buy into it too, for your own sake, not just to please me.”
“I always wanted more children, as it happens,” Michael said.
“So why didn’t you?”
He sighed. “When Jasper was born Alison was quite ill. She couldn’t look after him for the first eight weeks of his life.”
“Ill physically or mentally?”
“Both, poor thing.”
“So who did look after baby Jasper?”
“I did. Took time off. I couldn’t let anyone else have him when he was so tiny.”
“Does he know?”
Michael shrugged. “I haven’t told him, and I don’t suppose Alison has – she wouldn’t want to remember such a horrible time. My mother may have mentioned it, but he’s never said anything.”
“How do you think he’ll feel about the prospect of a sibling?”
Michael swung the car into the hospital approach road. “He’ll love it. Besides, he’s at university, rarely home. He’ll only have the fun part of being a brother.”
“So you’re quite happy to go along with my crazy plan?”
He looked over at me, the merest hint of a smile twitching his lips. “If you’re certain,” he said quietly. “Would you like to put your plan into action straight away?”
“Ha! Wouldn’t that be a bit ill-advised? Seeing as we’re fully clothed, in a moving car, and on our way to do a day’s work? Soon, though.”
I conceived straight away, had a trouble-free pregnancy, and was walking Dulcie when my waters broke. Labour was long enough and quite tedious and wearing, but on 24 August – not quite Bernstein’s birthday: sorry, Dad – Jonathan Frederick Wells saw the light of day, a neat, compact baby with a shock of dark hair and a prodigious gummy yawn. He was perfect.
Jonathan is seventeen months old now, and runs around the house on his sturdy little legs, chuckling and burbling all sorts of random almost-words, usually followed by a watchful collie. He is a cheerful child, free with smiles, and apart from having my blue eyes, he’s eerily like his father, who adores him (quietly, of course). It seems to me that my life has done several somersaults in the last four years; becoming a mother has stood it on its head yet again. Clearly Michael’s life has also been taken apart and put together again in a different order. “How can it be,” he mused one evening as he poured water over Jonathan’s head in the bath, “I have one son at university and another one in nappies? What was I doing in between?”
Taking my husband at his word, I gave thought to the idea of another child. Michael told me we should get a move on, with me forty-one and him fifty in May. But I knew there was something I had to do first, something I’d been brooding on for some time. The New Year with all its hysteria was over, leaving a trail of party-poppers and broken glass; the lights and baubles and tinsel had all been stowed in the attic. It was time to put my plan into action.
JANUARY 2016
I phoned my old mentor and friend Malcolm Harries, but he wasn’t there. So I had a long chat with Bridget, who asked me a few questions, mainly on the progress of my son, but also bemoaned the fact that I was no longer on the Porton West team. “You’re greatly missed,” she said. “At least that Oliver Jacobs fellow has moved on. Malcolm is relieved about that, I know. He said he was competent enough, a safe pair of hands, but nobody seemed able to get on with him. He ruffled a few feathers, quite unwittingly, I believe: it was just his manner, the way he spoke to people.” (I didn’t say so, but I was surprised that I could come out best in a civility contest with Oliver Jacobs. Either Malcolm’s
memory was faulty, or Jacobs must have been singularly charmless. I guess I have mellowed – but not that much.)
“What is it you wanted to talk to Malcolm about, my dear?” Bridget asked finally. “Is it urgent? Should I ask him to call you back?”
I had changed my mind, and prevaricated. “No, that’s OK, Bridget. It’ll keep. Just give him my best. I’ll be in touch.”
I’d decided there was, after all, no need to involve Malcolm. I hunted around on the internet and found contact details for St Joseph’s church. I left a message on the answerphone, with my own details, and the same evening Father Vincent rang me.
“Good evening, Ms Keyte – or should I call you Mrs Wells?”
“Either will do, and Rachel is fine too. I see you’ve been keeping up with me.”
“I talk to Professor Harries from time to time. He likes to discuss theology.”
“Does he? How surprising people are.” I thought about this for a moment, and then set it aside. “How are you, Father?”
“In a lot of pain from arthritis,” he said. “It’s time I retired properly.”
“I’m sorry to hear that.”
“What can I do for you?” he asked gently. “I don’t imagine you contacted me just to enquire about my health.”
“Ah, yes. Thank you for ringing back so promptly. I… actually, I need your input. I want to visit Eve Rawlins.”
There was a long silence at the other end. Then he said, “May I ask what has inspired this? You understand I have an interest in defending her.”
“I understand, and applaud. I’ve been thinking about it for some time, and it’s been getting stronger, the notion of unfinished business. Also the anniversary is coming up, really soon – the day Craig died. If nothing else, and even if she refuses to see me, she’ll know that someone else remembers and thinks of it as significant.”
“What is it you’d like me to do?”
“I’m assuming you visit her from time to time – is that right?”
He cleared his throat. “Yes, I go to the prison regularly and we pray together.”
“I wondered if you’d ask her on my behalf – whether she’d be willing to talk to me. I don’t want to just turn up unannounced. I guess someone in her position has few choices, but at least she can have the option of telling me no.”
“I’m due to visit her, as it happens, on the 12th. The anniversary. I can telephone, see if she would be willing for you to come as well. If so, I’ll come with you, but I’ll remain in the outer room. If she agrees, this can be your visit.”
“Thank you. But if not then, if that is just too sensitive, perhaps another day.”
“All right, Ms Keyte. I’ll see what I can do, and I’ll get back to you.”
I hesitated to tell Michael of my plan, simply because I thought he would be anxious. I said nothing for a few days.
But somehow he knew. He looked up, over the top of his glasses – a new pair, as it happened – and said, “Something bothering you?”
“Uh, yes. I have to tell you something and I’m not sure how to do it.”
He raised his eyebrows. “Since when did you turn into a shrinking violet? Anyway, I think I know.”
“You do? Since when did you turn into a mind-reader?”
He laughed. “I’ve been honing my mind-reading skills over the last couple of years, actually.” We were sitting on either side of the breakfast table with Jonathan in his high chair between us. Michael stretched over and took my hand in his, sticky spoon and all. “It’s that time of year,” he said softly, “when you go into a sort of gloom. I can almost see the dark cloud hanging over you. Happens every January.”
“I didn’t know I was so transparent.” I heaved a sigh. “I’m thinking of going to see Eve Rawlins in the prison.”
“Of course you are.”
“It doesn’t bother you?”
He shook his head. “I can’t see that there is much likelihood of you being in any physical danger. If I had a concern it would be the possible psychological effect, but I trust your judgment. When are you thinking of going?”
“The 12th – the anniversary. I’ll drive down to Porton and pick up Father Vincent. I thought I’d combine it with visiting Mother, and call in to see Bridget and Malcolm. Maybe if I stay over I can fit in Beth and Jimmy too. But that depends on who’s going to take care of His Lordship.” I waved a hand in the direction of our son, who was eating fingers of buttery toast and singing at the same time.
“I can look after him,” Michael said, “and if there’s some emergency at the hospital and it has to be me that deals with it, I’m sure Angela would step in for half a day. Go, love. You need to do this, I think.”
“Thank you – for understanding.”
I left early in the morning, and as I headed west the heavy cloud that had persisted ever since New Year lifted, and a weak wintry sun blinked through. I was apprehensive; Eve Rawlins remained a mystery to me, someone I found hard to fathom. I thought of her in the hospital before Craig’s surgery, taciturn, tense, controlling some vast and difficult emotion. I thought of her like a demon, or a harpy, when I went to see her the day he died, and the out-of-control maniac at his funeral. Worse, I saw the deranged knife-wielding attacker, full of hatred. The only other time I’d seen her was briefly at her trial, the day I was called to give my witness statement. Then she had been completely different: pale, almost bloodless except for the birthmark, unnaturally calm, her hands folded in her lap, and answering questions so quietly that she had to be asked to speak up. A statement was read on her behalf by her defence – a plain, unemotional statement of deep regret. As I lay in the hospital after the attack, I was in no frame of mind to think about what had happened from anyone’s viewpoint save my own. Father Vincent’s visit was much too soon, though I knew he had come at her request. But later I came to see that she had, as he claimed, seen what she had done; that in the moment of my terror and anguish her own fury had leached away. Now she was paying the price exacted by the law for her months of cold calculation fuelled by rage and despair, culminating in an act of violence that was entirely foreign to her beliefs. Because I was beginning to take on these beliefs for myself, I was willing to accept that she felt then – and perhaps still felt – a profound sense of failure and shame. And yet… what had she really done? Would I have responded differently in her place? These were questions that could not be answered; one question that I hoped she could answer was why she focused on me. Why not Malcolm? Or the anaesthetist? Or the hospital? She was no fool. She knew that any operation was the work of a team of specialists, any one of whom (or none) could have introduced into Craig’s body the toxic agent that killed him. Why me?
I parked outside Father Vincent’s vicarage a little before half past ten. He was waiting for me, and had a pot of coffee brewing. After a longish drive I was grateful. I noticed how he seemed to have aged in the time since I’d last seen him, and how he walked carefully, stooped and leaning heavily on his stick. His face was more lined, and his pallor spoke of constant pain.
We were due at the prison at midday. On the way, as I drove, I asked him what Eve’s life in prison was like, and how it had changed her.
He reflected for a while, then he said, “She has tried to make the best of it. As I tried to tell you, she is a remarkable woman in many ways: accepting the burden of a sick child with selfless devotion, working in hard and unpleasant jobs, when in fact she is qualified to do better. I suppose I am not really surprised. Prison has brought out a calmer, yet more determined woman. She has found a role in the prison library, and in a quiet way she is supporting some of the other women, often younger and disadvantaged. She is trying to turn something bad around and wring some good out of it.”
“I was going to ask her… but perhaps it would be better if I asked you. I don’t want to cause more distress. I’ve wondered – why did she pick on me? I’ve always felt there was something personal in her revenge.”
“I agree,” Father
Vincent said, shifting his bulk in the seat, trying to find a less painful position. “And I’m glad you asked me, rather than her, because she would be very embarrassed. I think, right from the beginning, when you went to introduce yourself as the surgeon, she took against you – for no real reason, except that she envied you.”
“Why?”
“She saw you as successful, free of constraints, able to choose your own path, respected, perhaps a little arrogant; the sort of woman she would like to have been, if life had not dealt her a couple of bad hands. As you might imagine, even though she never mentions it, that birthmark has always kept her in the shadows. And then there were the circumstances of how Craig was conceived… But she knows – maybe she knew even then – that her vendetta wasn’t rational. Perhaps it provided a desperate sort of distraction from the overwhelming devastation she felt when Craig died.” He looked out of the car window. “We’re almost there. Take the next left.” As I swung in and started the long approach, he said, “I believe that’s what grates on her even now – that she let such an unworthy feeling drive her. That’s why all her rage evaporated when she saw you bleeding: you were no longer someone far above her, but a vulnerable and hurting human being.” I brought the car to a halt. “Tell me, Ms Keyte – Rachel. Why have you come today?”
I turned to look at him. “I need to tell her something, and it needs to come from me, not second-hand. And I need to ask her something too, if I can find the courage.”
My meeting with Eve Rawlins, which I had imagined, on and off, for a long time, was curiously understated. Perhaps this was unsurprising. She sat opposite me, very still and calm, and answered my questions in a low, unemotional voice. She told me about her work in the library, how her old skills had come back to her, how she loved to be among the books, and how she was trying to encourage reading in some of her fellow-prisoners; as well, she was running a literacy course for those who had never learned to read with confidence.
The Healing Knife Page 33