The Four of Us

by Margaret Pemberton

  She sucked in her breath. Serena must have guessed, or been told by now, that Rupert was talking to his wife and her walking across to join them was shockingly bad manners.

  She rearranged her smile, preparing to launch into a freezingly cool ‘I’m Rupert’s wife and I’m very pleased to meet you’speech that would, hopefully, take the wind completely out of Serena’s sails.

  She wasn’t given the opportunity, because Serena didn’t so much as give her a glance. ‘What a great match that was, Ru,’ she said, walking directly up to Rupert and slipping her arm through his. ‘I’m soaking with sweat, absolutely dripping.’

  She ran a finger down Rupert’s perspiration-sheened neck and then, turning to face her, she very slowly and very provocatively licked the perspiration from her finger.

  Artemis made a strangled sound deep in her throat.

  Serena smiled lazily at her. ‘And you are Artemis?’ She tilted her head quizzically, obviously finding it amusing that Rupert was married to someone overweight, inappropriately dressed and old enough to be her mother.

  The nervous tension in the pit of Artemis’s stomach was replaced by anger so all consuming she thought she was going to explode.

  ‘I’m Mrs Gower to you! And don’t ever touch my husband like that again in front of me!’ Absolutely convinced that Rupert would be as appalled at Serena Campbell-Thynne’s brazenly crude behaviour as she was, her eyes flew to his, expecting support.

  To her stunned disbelief, there was none forthcoming.

  Without troubling to remove Serena’s hand from his arm or to crush her with a look, as he could crush most people, he merely said, ‘You can see the situation, Artemis. This isn’t the place I would have chosen to come out into the open about things, but you’d have had to know some time, and so it might as well be now. I’m in love with Serry, and I’m going to marry her. The best thing you can do is to go home. I’ll tell the boys, there’s no need for you to do that.’

  Artemis stared at him goggle eyed, not trusting her ears. He couldn’t have said what she thought he’d said. He couldn’t possibly be ending their life together – ending thirty-two years of marriage – on a polo field, in full view of hundreds of people!

  He was.

  The way he and Serena were facing her, standing together as a couple, told her he was.

  She felt her head swim and knew she was on the verge of fainting. Aware that if she did she was too heavy to be picked up and carried and would, instead, be left lying in an undignified heap until she should recover consciousness, she sucked in deep gasps of air.

  ‘You bastard! she hissed, when the world steadied enough for her to speak. ‘You complete and utter bastard!’

  He breathed in hard. ‘For God’s sake, Artemis,’ he said, impatiently. ‘There’s no need for such over-the-top drama. We came to the end of the road years ago. Stop behaving like a fish-wife. This isn’t your father’s birthplace. You’re not in Rotherhithe now.’

  The contempt in his voice completely undid her. She was making a spectacle of herself in public, and all for no good reason. The only way to deal with the nightmare scene she’d found herself in was to exit from it fast. That way, something might still be salvaged.

  As her eyes met his, she knew she was fooling herself. Rupert had meant everything he had said about their marriage being finally over. She’d lost him and, as she turned blindly away, stumbling in her distress, she wondered wildly if she’d ever had him in the first place, or if her entire marriage had been nothing but a long, pathetic sham.

  People were making way for her, but she couldn’t see clearly and then, seemingly out of nowhere, Olwyn Kent was at her side.

  ‘Tell me where you live and I’ll drive you home,’ she said, taking hold of her arm as she stumbled yet again, this time on a divot kicked up by a pony.

  ‘Thank you.’ She was crying, not desperately or tragically, but silently and without hope. ‘How could he do it?’ As Olwyn steered her steadfastly towards the field of parked cars, tears spilled down her cheeks and on to her dress. ‘How could he do it here? In front of everyone? In front of her?’

  ‘Because when you said he was a bastard you were right. And because he wants to pretend that he’s years younger than he really is and having a wife in her twenties will enable him to achieve his fantasy.’

  For the first time Artemis attempted to wipe the tears from her face with her fingers. ‘You too?’

  ‘Oh yes,’ Olwyn Kent said, as they mercifully left the polo field behind them. ‘Mine left me for a lapdancer. All too trite and pathetic for words. She’s only interested in him as a slap-up meal ticket and he, stupid fool, thinks he’s found a love only Shakespeare could do justice to.’

  She opened the passenger seat door of a Citroën Xantia and helped Artemis into it.

  ‘What you need now,’ she said, walking round the car and opening the driver’s door, ‘are friends. Real friends. Have you got many?’

  Artemis thought of all her Women’s Institute and Conservative Party friends and nodded. ‘Yes, but only friends who have known me as Mrs Rupert Gower and who are Rupert’s friends as well.’

  Olwyn turned the key in the ignition and revved the engine into gear. ‘Friends whose loyalties are divided aren’t the best sort at moments like this. What about old school friends? Have you any of those?’

  Artemis fumbled in her handbag for a handkerchief and blew her nose noisily, tears still dripping down on to her dress.

  ‘Yes,’ she said at last. ‘I have three. But I’ve lost contact with them.’

  Olwyn careened off the grass of the parking area and bucketed on to a tarmacked lane. ‘Then find them,’ she said forcefully. ‘Check out Friends Reunited. And try to stop crying, Artemis. You’re ruining your lovely dress and he isn’t worth it. No man is.’

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  September 2003

  It was early morning and the air was damp with dew. Geraldine wrapped her cream silk dressing-gown a little closer round her racehorse-lean figure and then folded her arms, leaning against the jamb of the open French doors, looking out over her immaculate garden.

  The roses were already in flower. Snowy-white Boule de Neige and blush-tinged Comtesse de Murinais edged the gravel pathways and luminous Purissima tulips infilled her box-edged parterre. It was a very Parisian garden, restrained in colour and formal in structure. She, too, after thirty years of living in the city, had become very Parisienne – which was probably why she was being so phlegmatic about the appointment written in her diary for ten o’clock.

  Aware that the morning was getting into its stride she reluctantly turned her back on the view of the garden. She needed to check her emails before leaving the house for Neuilly, and she didn’t want to run out of time. Today, of all days, she needed to remain calm and unhurried and perfectly in control.

  At nine thirty, not troubling to tell her housekeeper when she would be back, she left the house by its classical-pillared front entrance and, minutes later, hailed a taxicab in the busy Boulevard de la Madeleine.

  ‘The American Hospital, 63 Boulevard Victor Hugo,’ she said to the taxi driver in French, her accent flawless.

  He turned left into Rue Caumartin and, amid a familiar reek of Gauloises, she sank back against cracked leather, suddenly tired with nervous strain. What was her consultant, Mr Zimmerman, going to say to her? Were the results of her last lot of blood and bone marrow tests going to be negative or positive? And if they were positive, just how was she going to come to terms with such a verdict? What plans was she going to have to make?

  Not able to come to an answer she stared out of the window as the taxicab swerved to avoid a pedestrian. Rue Caumartin was, as always, a hive of activity. Cafés throbbed with life, smart boutiques were thronged with shoppers, tourists crowded the pavement.

  She’d always loved the fact that such activity took place so near to her home. It made the green oasis of her garden seem very special. On her rare trips back to London, she’d
never been able to understand why Londoners, instead of aspiring to live in the heart of their city, as Parisians did, preferred living on the outskirts, in places like Bickley and Bromley.

  As the taxicab crossed the Boulevard Haussmann, she thought back to her school days at Bickley and the long, sun-filled afternoons she’d spent with Artemis and Primmie in Kiki’s parents’garden.

  She didn’t think of Kiki, because she never did. Not ever.

  She often thought of Primmie and Artemis, though. She knew that twenty-five years ago Artemis and Rupert had lost a child in tragic circumstances, because she’d seen notification of the death in The Times. And she knew that Primmie had married. For three decades, that had been all she had known about Primmie, and then she had accessed Primmie’s message box on the Friends Reunited website.

  It had meant registering, of course, but she hadn’t registered under her own name. In her line of business, real names were a handicap and using a false name was second nature to her. Besides, there was always the chance that Kiki would access the website – and she didn’t want to hear from Kiki. She just wanted to know how Primmie was, if life had treated her well and if she was happy.

  A ghost of a smile touched the corners of her mouth as the taxi driver turned right, heading straight as an arrow for Montmartre. Primmie had a great capacity for happiness and if she was living on a smallholding in beautiful countryside then she would be in her element. She wondered what kind of lives Primmie’s adult children led. She wondered if Primmie had remained in contact with Artemis.

  And because she was thinking about the past she thought, as always, of Francis.

  Throughout the years he had been with Kiki, in America, he had intermittently made contact with his father by phone, and whenever he did so her Uncle Piers would telephone her and let her know that Francis was still in the land of the living.

  All such telephone calls had ceased after Kiki had ditched him, replacing him with a hotshot American manager and, if the music magazines were anything to go by, a black lover several years her junior.

  As time had passed without any kind of contact from him, her uncle had backtracked on his decision to disown him and had flown to Los Angeles to try to track him down. It had been an abortive exercise.

  ‘Kiki Lane has no idea where he’s gone, and isn’t interested,’ he’d said to Geraldine grimly. ‘And everyone I’ve spoken to who knows him says his drug problem is way out of hand. They reckon that’s the reason he’s dropped out of sight – that he’s given up the effort of living anything approaching a regular way of life. All we can do, Geraldine, is wait until he surfaces.’

  The taxicab was in the much broader Avenue de Clichy now, the vast Cimetière de Montmartre on their right-hand side. Cemeteries had never held an attraction for her and most definitely didn’t do so today.

  She focused her thoughts once again on Francis. Her uncle had long ago resigned himself to the fact that Francis was dead. ‘And if he is, and if he hasn’t fathered any children that can be traced, you are my next of kin, Geraldine. You can either keep Cedar Court, battle with the death duty and pray that the various money-making activities I’ve been reduced to implementing – the business conventions, wedding receptions, clay-pigeon shooting weekends, craft fairs, et cetera – continue to provide for it, or you can hand it over to the National Trust. I don’t care,’ he had said wearily. ‘To tell the truth, my dear, I’ve tired of the battle. I’ve lost interest.’

  So, too, had she. Her obsession with her family home had been fuelled by the prospect of living there with Francis and of raising a family there. Thanks to Kiki, she hadn’t done so. She was now fifty-two and, without a child to inherit from her, ownership of Cedar Court seemed pointless.

  The taxi dived beneath the Boulevard Périphérique, emerging at the Porte de Clichy. Her fingers tightened on the silver handle of her Gucci handbag. After her meeting with Mr Zimmerman she might well have to arrange a meeting with her uncle in order to tell him that he, not she, was going to be the one bequeathing Cedar Court to the National Trust.

  If they would accept it.

  If Francis were really dead.

  The taxicab swerved to a halt outside the main entrance of the hospital.

  With her black hair swept softly into a knot at the nape of her neck and wearing a dove-grey suit with a white silk shirt tied in a loose cravat at the neck, she looked stunningly elegant as she stepped from the cab and paid the driver. Fifteen minutes later she was seated facing Mr Zimmerman.

  Like most Americans, he had an unpretentious, direct manner.

  ‘The prognosis isn’t good, Miss Grant,’ he said after going through the formalities of greeting her. ‘But then, I think you already know that, don’t you?’

  Geraldine ran the tip of her tongue over her bottom lip. ‘Yes,’ she said, as outwardly in control as if they were talking about nothing more important than the weather, only the whiteness of her knuckles betraying her inner turmoil. ‘How many treatment options am I now left with?’

  ‘With your type of aplastic anaemia, severe aplastic anaemia, there is, as we discussed on your last visit, a complete failure of production of all types of blood cells, resulting in fat cells in the bone marrow instead of the blood-producing cells which would normally be present.’

  He paused, leaning forward and resting his elbows on his desk, steepling his fingers together. ‘The only real, definitive cure is a bone marrow transplant.’

  ‘And?’ Geraldine could feel her heart slamming against her breastbone. What was he saying to her? That she could be cured if she underwent a transplant? And if that was the case why had he said that the prognosis wasn’t good?

  ‘And transplants are usually only carried out on patients under the age of forty who have a brother or sister as a suitable match.’

  She opened her mouth to speak. No sound came. She had no siblings. And she was certainly no longer under the age of forty. Once again, she licked her bottom lip. ‘And when those conditions aren’t applicable?’

  ‘In some cases where a sibling donor isn’t available a matched donor transplant can be carried out using a donor from a volunteer donor registry. However, the risks are higher with a matched unrelated donor transplant than with a sibling one and suitable donors, especially for someone of your age, are not plentiful.’

  His face was sombre.

  ‘And supportive treatment?’

  Geraldine had never been a panicker, and she didn’t panic now. She did, though, have a giddying sense of unreality. How could she be continuing with the conversation so coolly and calmly? Was there something unnatural about her? She thought of the way she’d long avoided close personal relationships and thought that perhaps there was.

  ‘We can continue treating the symptoms as we have been treating them, with transfusions and antibiotics. Another course of action is an immunosuppressive therapy called ALG. This treatment suppresses the immune system allowing the bone marrow to recover. The dangers are that with your immune system “damped down” in this way you are open to a high risk of infection – and left with no way of fighting it off. And it only allows improvement to a level which minimizes the need for transfusions. It isn’t a cure.’

  Vaguely she was aware that she was grateful he wasn’t pussyfooting around and giving her hope where hope didn’t exist. He hadn’t, though, yet told her the real nitty-gritty. He hadn’t told her how long she had left to live if no donor transplant was forthcoming.

  Reading her mind, he said gently, ‘Without a successful transplant you have a year, Miss Grant. Maybe a little more, maybe a little less.’

  A year. Her head spun. She heard herself thanking him. As if from a distance, she saw herself rise to her feet.

  Saw herself leave the room. Leave the hospital.

  Outside, on the Boulevard Victor Hugo, the traffic was as heavy as ever. She stood, staring at it, reviewing her options, such as they were.

  A transplant was possible – just. And she could have ALG th
erapy, which carried the risk of her dying from an infectious disease that her damped-down immune system could not fight off. Or she could continue with her monthly blood transfusions and antibiotics and put her affairs in order.

  As pragmatic as any Frenchwoman, the last option was the one she knew she was going to embark on whether she decided to have ALG or not. As for a transplant – that was in the lap of the gods. Mr Zimmerman would do his best for her, but it was no use assuming that a suitable donor would be found.

  Not attempting to flag down a taxi, she began walking without aim or purpose, wondering how she felt about the obscene prospect of dying in her early fifties.

  Not good, of course. And not frightened. This realization interested her and she knew that, later, she would try to analyse why. She couldn’t do any such analysis now, though, because she was too angry. Too ragingly, scorchingly, searingly angry.

  How dare her body betray her in such a subversive, sly, deceitful way? It was unforgivable. Insupportable. Vile beyond belief.

  Still oblivious to her surroundings she crossed to the far side of the Boulevard Victor Hugo and into the smaller, though still busy, Avenue du Général Leclerc.

  The indications that there was something wrong with her had, at first, been deceptively mundane. She’d begun feeling tired during the day. She’d lost colour. She’d become aware of bruises appearing for no good reason.

  ‘You are anaemic, chérie,’ Dominique had said to her over lunch at Beauvilliers, their favourite restaurant. ‘You need a pick-me-up – a tonic.’

  ‘If I’m anaemic, I need lots of red wine,’ she had said, thinking that Dominique’s diagnosis was perhaps right and not worrying about it. ‘How about we share a bottle of Burgundy?’

  Her doctor had taken blood from her to be tested and, until the results were received, had prescribed an iron supplement.

  Then had come the blood test results.

  They had shown an alarmingly low blood count.

  It was then that her doctor had referred her to Mr Zimmerman at the American Hospital.