by Caro Fraser
‘Yes,’ replied Rachel, ‘that’s fine.’
‘Come on, mate, let’s hit the road,’ said Leo to Oliver. He walked to the door, then turned. ‘Where is Charles, by the way?’
‘He’s in Romania, filming.’
Leo nodded, then walked out to the car. Rachel stood in the doorway and watched them drive away. It was only when they were out of sight that it occurred to her that never for one moment had there been the slightest suggestion of tension or animosity between them. Whatever apprehension she might have had about betraying her perplexed feelings for him had been entirely unfounded. There had been simply nothing to which to respond. In fact, he had arrived and departed in what she could only think of as a kind of emotional vacuum. She thought about it for a while, about his altered appearance and manner, and wondered if she should have let Oliver go with him. Telling herself this was absurd, she went back into the house and set about filling the emptiness with domestic activity.
She had got a mere half an hour’s work done when the phone rang. The voice at the other end was a woman’s, one Rachel did not recognise.
‘Is that Rachel Davies?’ asked the voice uncertainly.
‘Yes.’
For a few seconds there was nothing but concerned, elderly breathing, then the woman went on, ‘My name’s Mrs Munby. I’m a neighbour of your mother’s.’
‘Oh … Mrs Munby.’ Rachel’s gathering recollection of a taciturn, large-bosomed woman from the house next door to her mother’s was almost instantly replaced with a sense of foreboding. ‘What’s wrong?’ she asked. ‘Is my mother all right?’
‘Well, that’s why I’m calling. They took her into the hospital this morning, about half an hour ago. St Mary’s. I went outside when I saw the ambulance, and the ambulance people said did I know who her nearest relative was, and I said, well, she has a daughter, and I had a look in your mother’s address book and found your number. They said would I call you, and I said I would.’
‘What’s wrong with her?’ Rachel felt oppressed by a sense of guilt and dread.
‘I don’t know, to be honest, dear, but I think it must be her heart. I thought I’d better find out how she was before I called you, but when I spoke to the hospital all they would say was that you should get there as soon as you could. I’m sorry to be the bearer of bad tidings.’ She waited, breathing stertorously, for Rachel to speak.
Rachel managed to keep her voice calm. ‘Thank you for calling me, Mrs Munby. I’ll go to the hospital straight away.’
‘Is there anything you want me to do? I’ve locked the house up for her, taken the keys and so forth.’
‘No, no, thanks. You’ve been very kind. I might call round later, depending on how my mother is. Goodbye.’
Rachel hung up and glanced at her watch; her immediate thoughts were for Oliver. Damn, Leo wouldn’t be at Stanton yet. She could try his mobile … But when she tried, the maddeningly sweet voice of a female automaton informed her that the mobile phone she was ringing was switched off. When she called the house at Stanton and tried to leave a message, the phone at the other end merely rang and rang. Had Leo suddenly taken against modern technology? Rachel wondered, as she replaced the receiver. Anyway, she would just have to go to her mother and try Leo later. She grabbed her coat and her keys, locked up the house and hurried to the car.
‘So, baby boy, where shall it be?’ murmured Leo as he drove, glancing at Oliver in the car seat next to him. ‘South America? France? Where can we bury ourselves out of sight? Just think of all the people Daddy knows, all the lawyers and the business men and the wheelers and dealers … do you think they’d help us?’ Oliver glanced up at his father, following the sound of the words with brief wonder, then became absorbed once more in the little plastic plane he was playing with. ‘But what would I do with you? What kind of a time would we have, and what would become of us both?’ Leo sighed, turning off the motorway on to the road to Stanton. ‘And what would your poor mother do if I were to spirit you off somewhere? Go demented, no doubt, and turn into a hysterical wreck for the rest of her life. I couldn’t do that to old Charles, now could I? No, nor to Mummy, I suppose. So we’ll all go on as we are …’
He carried on talking all the way to the house, unaware that he was doing so, his mind flitting from thought to thought, unable to fix on anything. He did not care to think much at the moment. At least he would have Oliver for company today, something to focus on, a reason for living. Each day seemed painfully empty of such reasons.
Rachel drove the fifteen miles to Bath, forcing herself to think about her mother, something which she usually avoided doing. The weight of guilt was heavy. She thought about the woman her mother had been when Rachel was a little girl - slim, pretty, fairly quiet but cheerful and affectionate in an absent-minded kind of way. She remembered murmurings among her aunts about her mother having had ‘a difficult time’ when Rachel was born, so Rachel had always supposed this to be the reason why her mother had had no more children. Rachel, even then, had felt herself in some vague way responsible for making her mother suffer - though how, she did not know. But the mother of her childhood had been transformed by the events of Rachel’s adolescence. Even as she drove, Rachel found herself physically flinching at the recollection of her mother’s tearful anger, the shouting, the blame, when Rachel had finally summoned up the courage to tell a teacher at school about what her father had been doing to her. Then the awful blackness of that time, being disbelieved, then believed, her father going to prison and out of her life for ever. She had never wanted that.
Rachel found her face wet with tears as she took herself back to the pain and difficulty of those days, about which she so rarely thought and never spoke. She had told no one except Leo. Oh, God, Leo … How much he had helped, how much he had done to restore her faith and her belief in people - and then how utterly he had undone all that with his lies and deceit. She wiped the tears quickly away, but still they came, blurring her vision. She could look back now, she realised, and understand why her mother had been so angry, why she had blamed Rachel for everything that had happened, rather than her husband. She could trace now, in her memory of all the things her mother had called her, the tracks of her mother’s own shame and guilt. Had she known what was happening and ignored it? Rachel had always wondered about that. It had not been a question she could ask. After her father had gone to jail, the lines of communication went dead between Rachel and her mother. Oh, they had an outward relationship, they spoke of mundane matters, life went drearily on, her mother still made her packed lunch every day, ironed her school blouses, saw to it that Rachel was fed and clothed. But from that time, Rachel had been alone.
Why, she wondered now as she drove, had she clung to the pathetic remnants of their relationship? When she had left home to go to university, she could have cut her ties, left her mother behind her. After all, she didn’t feel her mother wanted her any more, or regarded her as anything more than a reminder of shameful events, but somehow Rachel had never managed to do it. She still sent birthday and Christmas cards, she still made the occasional - very occasional - visit with Oliver. Not that her mother seemed to welcome these visits, or ever acknowledged the cards. So why did she do it? Why did she send out these forlorn little signals? Was she waiting for forgiveness? Possibly. Like every child who is the victim, but still feels itself to be the perpetrator, the culprit, she was constantly apologising. That was why she was driving to the hospital now.
When she arrived, Rachel was shown to the coronary care unit, where her mother lay in bed, oddly small and insignificant among the paraphernalia of monitors and drips and bedside equipment. She was unconscious, but Rachel could see the slight rise and fall of her thin chest as she breathed, and a little blip ran with bright regularity across the monitor screen.
‘The doctor knows you’re here. He’ll be along in a minute,’ said a nurse.
Rachel sat down at the bedside and stared at her mother, not sure what to feel or do. Her mother’s han
d, with a patch of white tape holding the drip in place, lay on the bedspread, and Rachel felt she should touch it, hold it. But she had no wish to. She couldn’t remember how long it was since she had touched her mother. So she sat gazing at her mother’s face, trying to think about nothing.
The doctor came after twenty minutes.
‘Your mother has had a massive heart attack,’ he told her. ‘She’s very unstable, I’m afraid.’
‘So - so what is likely to happen?’
‘Well, we’re doing everything we can, but the chances of stabilising her aren’t very good, I have to tell you. There is a risk that she may have another heart attack within the next twenty-four to forty-eight hours.’
Rachel nodded. ‘I see. Can I stay with her?’
‘Of course. There’s a relatives’ rest room just down the corridor, where you can make tea and coffee.’
They spoke for a few more minutes, then he left. Rachel looked at her watch. It was half past eleven. She gazed helplessly at her mother, wishing she felt more, guilty that she did not. She must stay, that much she knew. However little life her mother had left, it was all eternity to her. She might wake up and, if she did, she would be frightened. Rachel couldn’t leave her alone.
She sat there for several long hours. Occasionally her mother stirred, and once she seemed to mutter something, but it was indistinct. The little pulse of light blipped over and over on the screen. Twice Rachel went to make tea in the rest area, and in the middle of the afternoon she purchased a sandwich from a vending machine. At five o’clock she realised that she would have to ring Leo. She took her mobile phone from her handbag, then hesitated. Wasn’t there something about not using mobile phones in hospitals, in case they interfered with the equipment? She went in search of a pay phone and rang the house at Stanton, and was relieved when Leo replied. She explained what had happened and where she was.
‘The thing is, I can’t leave her. The doctor seems to think she might not last the night out. Oliver will have to stay with you. He’s got no pyjamas, but I did put a change of clothes in with his things - Oh, has he? Well, he’ll just have to make do with those tomorrow. How many nappies have you got? I suppose he can do without cleaning his teeth for one night … Can I speak to him for a minute?’ Leo put Oliver on the phone and Rachel talked to him, finding comfort in his incoherent bubbles of noise. Then she spoke to Leo again. ‘I feel so guilty, Leo. Something in me just wants all this to hurry up. How can I feel like that? It’s her life, after all. But I just can’t help this awful feeling of impatience. And pity, I suppose. Anyway, look after Oliver for me. I’ll call you again when - well, if anything changes.’
Rachel hung up and wandered back to her mother’s room. On the way she passed the hospital shop and paused, wondering if it would be some awful betrayal to buy something to read, just to relieve the tedium of the hours. She bought a paperback, went back to the coronary care unit, and sat and read, and waited.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
‘You shouldn’t go out. It’s getting too dark,’ said Felicity, glancing out of the window at the gathering dusk. ‘Well, cabbies have to drive in the bleeding dark, don’t they?’ Vince pulled on his jacket and took the bike keys from a shelf. ‘How am I ever going to get this knowledge done unless I put in the hours?’
‘You could have gone out earlier, when it was daylight, ‘stead of sitting around watching television.’
‘Yeah, well, that was an important match, that was.’
‘And you’ve been drinking.’
‘Couple of cans doesn’t count as drinkin’, Fliss. Anyway, I’ll be back later. Then we can have a takeaway.’
‘All right,’ sighed Felicity. ‘Take care.’
Vince went out of the flat and down the two flights of stairs to the street. He fetched his bike from the lock-up where he kept it two streets away and sped off, his list of routes clipped to the board in front of him.
It was only when he reached Shaftesbury Avenue that it occurred to Vince that perhaps half past five on a Saturday evening wasn’t the best time to be navigating and memorising a route from the National Gallery to Wembley Stadium. The traffic was infuriatingly slow as he wove his way round buses and between lines of cars. He slewed left into a side street, almost running into a little knot of pedestrians blocking his way. Vince revved and swore at them, and they fell back. He was about to head off up the street when suddenly he felt someone kick the back of his bike, not once, but twice, and shout a few obscenities at him. Vince stopped and looked round at two youths who were eyeing him aggressively. Stepping off the bike, he walked back to them.
‘You kick my bike? You—’ He jabbed one of the youths in the chest with the fingers of one hand. ‘You fucking kicked my bike, didn’t you?’
‘What if I did? You’re asking for it, you are. You own the road, or what? Me and my mate was walking there.’
The youth’s mate was looking uncertainly at Vince, sizing him up, hoping there wasn’t going to be trouble. Vince and the youth began pushing and shoving, swearing at one another. A few pedestrians slowed down to witness the altercation. After that, everything moved very suddenly. Vince hit the youth, who tried to punch him back but only managed to connect with Vince’s helmet, and the next thing the boy was on the ground. Still enraged, Vince swung a foot at his head and kicked the youth viciously so that he fell back, his head hitting the side of the pavement with a sickening crunch. The blood that flowed astonished even Vince. The boy’s mate launched himself at Vince, but some people had already grabbed Vince, pinning his arms behind him to restrain him and a man was kneeling beside the youth on the pavement, shouting for someone to get an ambulance. The next ten minutes, for Vince, were a blur of people and voices and flashing police lights. He watched the boy he had kicked being stretchered into an ambulance and was aware of two policemen talking to excited witnesses from the crowd.
One of the policemen turned to where Vince was still being held by onlookers. ‘Come on, son,’ he said, taking Vince by the elbow and leading him towards the police car.
‘Hold on - what about my bike? That’s my bike there. I can’t just leave it!’
‘We’ll take care of it, don’t you worry,’ replied the policeman, glancing at Vince’s bike and noticing the board marked out with the city routes. ‘Doing the knowledge, are you? I’m afraid you’ve damaged your chances there a bit.’ He shook his head in mock sympathy.
‘What you on about?’ Vince tried to shake off the policeman’s grip as he got into the back of the car.
‘You go down on a charge of GBH, son, and I’m afraid the Public Carriage Office have to be informed. Then that’s that. They don’t like their cabbies to have records for violent crime, do they? And you can see their point.’
Vince said nothing, feeling his insides shrivelling into a small, nerveless ball. He threw one last glance at his bike lying by the side of the road as the police car drove off.
Rachel sat with her mother throughout the night. She tried to read, but found herself constantly glancing at the monitors, then at every slight rise and fall of her mother’s chest. Towards morning she dozed in the chair, and woke up with a stiff back and a headache. She went to the rest area to make herself some coffee and stood at the window watching the grey light filtering across the rooftops, listening to the sounds of the hospital preparing for the day. She wondered whether Oliver was awake and whether Leo had taken him into bed with him, the way he used to when he was a tiny baby, when it had been the three of them.
She went back slowly to the coronary care unit, then stopped in the doorway. A group of people were standing round her mother’s bed. She could tell from their voices and movements that an urgent moment had just passed. She glanced at the dead monitor screen, then walked in.
The doctor who had spoken to her earlier turned to her. ‘I’m sorry, Mrs Davies. Your mother had another attack. It was very sudden. We couldn’t resuscitate her.’
Rachel nodded at the doctor, her face expressionless
. She felt totally blank. Then she sat down next to the bed where her mother lay and suddenly, in the tiredness which overwhelmed her, she found she could do what was expected of her, and wept.
Half an hour later she drove to the street where her mother lived, a row of modest terraced houses with tiny front gardens, and rang the bell of Mrs Munby’s house. Mrs Munby came to the door in dressing gown and hairnet. Rachel apologised for disturbing her so early and told her the news of her mother’s death. After much tut-tutting and sympathy, Mrs Munby handed over Mrs Dean’s keys, and Rachel went next door and let herself into the house. In the little living room a copy of the Radio Times still lay open on the arm of a chair and a cigarette, presumably her mother’s last, had burnt itself out in a brass ashtray in a long and. perfect cylinder of grey ash. The dishes from her mother’s evening meal still sat in the sink in the kitchen. Rachel washed them, dried them and put them away. She could bear to do no more for the moment, she decided. Were there things to do, like cancelling milk and papers, and so on? Perhaps, but her tired mind couldn’t face the thought of them right now. She went into the hallway, sat down on the stairs, and took out her phone to call Leo and tell him she would be with him and Oliver in a couple of hours.
By the time she reached Stanton, the early November sun had burnt away the mist, leaving a perfect autumn day, soundless, bright and beautiful. Rachel parked her car on the gravel driveway and sat for a moment, looking at the house, remembering the first time she had come here, the haven it had been. She had been so much in love with Leo that anything of his possessed a special enchantment, but even without him she would have loved this place. She got out of the car and went to the front door, hesitated for a moment, then turned and walked round to the back door. She came into the kitchen and found a scene of domestic tranquillity: Oliver sitting in his high chair eating toast and butter, Leo cooking breakfast.