People behind him were still screaming and weeping. Someone groaned in pain and someone else was shouting down a mobile for help. It began to rain and he took off his jacket to wrap around her, leaning over her frail form to protect her while cupping her face in his hands, begging her not to die.
‘Em,’ he whispered. ‘It’s going to be all right. You’ll see, someone will come. You’re going to be okay. Open your eyes, please Em, open your eyes.’
Then there was a bellow, loud, elemental, obscene. It must have been him.
Chapter 48
Sandy didn’t know then, as he crouched beside Emily, that above them in the meditation centre, someone had answered their mobile and heard about the accident. Someone else called for an ambulance. He didn’t realise that Matthew knew the bus had crashed and had jumped on someone’s motorbike and driven at breakneck speed down the winding treacherous road until he arrived at the bend where the bus had overturned, a small trail of smoke still curling up into the mist and rain.
Sandy had no idea that Matthew would know what to do, that he’d thought to bring a blanket with him, so he could wrap it around his sister while he gave her mouth-to-mouth resuscitation; that he had the foresight not to let anyone move her until a truck arrived with stretchers and a doctor.
Other people must have been injured. Sandy remembered three stretchers being lifted onto the bed of the truck, and Matthew telling him to get into the cabin with the driver and the doctor, then looking into the side mirror to see Matthew behind them, slaloming on the motorbike.
He never knew how long it took to get to the hospital. He only remembered that Matthew took his hand and held it while they watched Emily being lifted off the truck, moaning softly as the stretcher jolted on the ground and they wheeled her into a ward full of people injured in the accident.
It took two hours before a nurse appeared with an intravenous drip, another four hours before someone came with an X-ray machine, and then a doctor, sweating with fatigue, appeared to tell them that Emily’s spleen had been ruptured, some of her ribs had been broken as well as an ankle, and that she needed an operation, but not here because they didn’t have the equipment.
For all that time Matthew did not leave Sandy or Emily. There was an assurance about each of Matthew’s movements that Sandy had never seen. Matthew found a clean towel to wipe Emily’s face and mouth. Painstakingly, he fed her tiny sips of water as he soothed her forehead while talking to her in a low calm voice.
Sandy could do nothing except shake as he held Emily’s hand and brushed her hair away from her face. Some time before dawn, Annie arrived with a thermos of tea and Matthew slipped away to telephone Penny. Annie sat on the floor by the bed and asked Sandy to pray with her.
‘For Emily,’ she said. ‘So she knows we are here.’
He nodded and closed his eyes. He tried to ignore the discomfort and the constant sting from the gash on his forehead. Nothing came to him, except for Samten’s sermon on protective custody and the sound of the bansuri music shimmering in the air above the temple. He felt as he had when he’d first met Samten, and when the doctor had come to his flat; a sense that if he gave himself up, just leaned against the bed and held Emily’s hand, that everything would be all right. This time, he did not fight it. He felt his breath ebb and flow, the pulse in Emily’s wrist beat weakly, but steadily. Everything else dimmed before this rhythm. Sandy had no idea how long he sat there in this state. It might have been minutes or longer, even an hour, until, through a haze, he felt Annie’s hand on his shoulder and heard Matthew slipping in beside him.
‘I rang Mum and told her what to do. She wanted to come right away,’ he whispered. ‘But I said she should wait. Until we know more about the operation and everything. She probably couldn’t get a visa immediately anyway, even an emergency one.’
The day passed like a dull dream. Emily opened her eyes, murmured and closed them again. She drank more water. Sandy wept for the miracle of her survival. At some stage, Matthew must have called Jeremy, or Penny must have called him, because the next day an ambulance appeared to drive them back to Delhi where Emily was admitted into the most modern and luxurious hospital any of them had ever seen. Matthew and Sandy were checked into the excessively comfortable hotel next door. When Sandy asked about tariffs and payment, the concierge said it was taken care of, sir. Your son has organised everything, sir, with the man in England.
They stayed in Delhi for a fortnight before flying back to London. Emily was still swathed in bandages. Matthew sat beside her, holding her hand throughout the flight. Every half hour or so, Matthew would turn to Sandy in the seat behind and tell him not to worry, that everything would be all right after all.
Penny was at Heathrow to meet them. As he pushed through the doors and saw her kind weathered face and her grey hair pulled back, Sandy wished that the four of them could be together, the way they never were, the kind comfortable way Penny used to crave and he used to despise. He wanted it with a ferocious hunger. He wanted them never to stop talking to each other. He wanted them to tell him everything. He wanted to tell them everything.
He wanted to tell Penny about Matthew, the person who his son had become in India. Matthew was no longer depressed and purposeless, but someone new who taught children to play basketball, who cured a young boy’s boil with an everyday spice, who leaped onto a motorcycle at the top of the mountain, competent and assured.
When Sandy was incapable of doing little more than slumping by the hospital bed, it was Matthew who supervised Emily’s care, ensuring that she wasn’t thirsty, that she was comfortable, that her pillow was at the right angle; that Matthew had done all this with a quiet confidence, as if he had glimpsed an idea of who he was, of who he might become.
As Sandy fussed and worried to little effect, it was this new Matthew who consulted the doctors, who updated Penny and Jeremy each day, and booked the flights back to England. Matthew did all of this so easily that it was hard to imagine he’d never done anything like it before.
A sari-clad woman pushing a trolley of plastic-wrapped luggage taller than herself pushed past them and for some seconds he lost sight of Penny’s grey head. Panicking, he scanned the crowd until he found her again, looking at the cluster of drivers holding up their placards.
Beside him, Matthew patted Emily’s shoulder as he pushed her. His hands slipped on the wheelchair handles and he wiped them, one at a time, on his trousers, leaving a cluster of fogged fingerprints on the chrome handles. Sandy reached out to touch him, but Matthew had moved ahead, swept forward by the wave of weary passengers leaning into their trolleys for the last stretch, buoyed by the anticipation of the embrace of home.
Chapter 49
Penny stood near the information desk. She had been waiting there for nearly an hour, not wanting to move in case she missed them coming through the doors. Emily came first, pushed by Matthew. Her eyes were dark with fatigue and pain and she flinched as a child rushing past banged her bandaged ankle.
Matthew’s hair was cropped so short that Penny could see his scalp, even at that distance. Behind them was Sandy, pushing the trolley of luggage. He was brown and thinner than the last time she had seen him. She was reminded of Robert, also thin and brown; a disloyal thought, although she was not sure where the disloyalty lay. She manoeuvred her way to the point where the barriers ended.
Penny crouched down to Emily and hugged her. She held her close, felt the bones in her shoulders and the roughness of the plaster cast as they both wept.
‘We’d better get to one side,’ said Sandy. ‘Otherwise we’ll get mown over.’
She nodded and they moved to the main concourse. She turned to Matthew and clutched him to her. Over his shoulder, she saw a bored-looking chauffeur holding up a scrawled placard smile in their direction. She saw the four of them through his eyes, through the eyes of the people milling in the arrivals hall.
Just look, they would think. A regular English family. The middle-aged, sensible mother waiting for
her middle-aged sensible husband and children, one of whom has had an accident, but looks as if she will recover soon. Look at them embrace, watch them weep with happiness that they are together again. There should be more such families.
Penny wished that they were returning home to a reunion dinner, something like roast chicken, with a cake and candles to indicate this was more than an everyday meal. Then she was in Sandy’s arms, tentative about physical contact with him after so long and also because she had recently rediscovered the responses of her own body. But the hug came naturally enough and she felt Sandy’s cheek against her own, wet with tears.
A man in a turban behind them asked them to move because he was trying to film his son and new daughter-in-law and they were in the way. As she moved apart, she saw the chauffeur still smiling.
Penny suggested coffee and muffins, and the other three agreed, although no one seemed hungry or thirsty. Sandy found a table at the back of the café, where they sat shielded from the world by a semi-circle of luggage.
‘You’re not too tired for this, darling girl?’ Penny asked Emily. ‘Just say, and we’ll leave right this second.’ She almost said that they would go home, but there wasn’t one. Penny had arranged for her and Emily to stay with Frieda until Emily had fully recovered and could travel to France. Matthew and Sandy were going to his flat.
‘I’m fine,’ said Emily and burst into tears. ‘It’s not true,’ she wept, clutching a paper napkin. ‘I feel sick, my stomach hurts. I don’t know what to do, if I’ll ever fit in here again. Where am I going to live? What am I going to do?’
Beside her, Matthew’s chin wobbled. He rubbed her shoulder.
Sandy took Emily’s hand.
‘Do you remember, Dad?’ she said, still crying. ‘Do you remember what I said about the Michael Palin documentary? But this time it feels like England, my home, is unreal and India is the place where I feel comfortable. I don’t know what to do.’
‘You don’t have to do anything, darling girl,’ said Penny. ‘Just get better. Don’t think about anything else.’
Emily nodded dutifully like a child, then told the story of the bus ride and the accident again. After Sandy and Matthew recounted their versions, they fell silent. They had run out of things to say to each other after the emotional charge of their reunion. Emily looked as if she was too tired to cry.
At the taxi rank, they hugged. ‘Can we meet before Mum and I leave for France?’ Emily asked. Her question carefully addressed the spaces between them all. ‘Maybe for lunch or dinner?’
Penny felt a tinge of euphoria, an almost forgotten pleasure from a previous time.
‘What about Sammy’s?’ she said. ‘The place on Fulham Road, opposite the flower stand. It’s a good halfway point between us all.’
She steered the wheelchair so that it faced the approaching taxis. ‘We used to have dinner there years ago,’ she said. ‘The four of us.’
‘I remember,’ said Sandy as he opened the taxi door and helped Emily into the back seat. Together he and Matthew folded the wheelchair and stowed it in the boot. Now they had left the terminal and there was no chauffeur smiling at them anymore, reflecting what Penny wanted to see, something had shifted. They were no longer a family greeting each other after a long separation, but a group of four people about to leave each other.
Chapter 50
Sandy and Matthew took the tube back to Vauxhall, then the bus to Battersea. Sandy shrugged off his backpack and felt inside his pocket for the keys. He stepped over clumps of autumn leaves, noting a new spray-painted slogan on the wall of the bus shelter. ‘What part of illegal don’t you understand?’ It was the same scarlet colour that he’d used to deface Jeremy’s boat less than six months ago. Now, it seemed an aeon away.
In Delhi, he’d thought about making some kind of peace with Jeremy, if only to thank him for everything he’d done for Emily. It was easy for rich people to be kind because it cost them nothing, but Jeremy had done all that voluntarily. It had to mean something.
‘Hey Sandy?’ Matthew’s voice bisected his thoughts.
‘What?’ he asked, suddenly fretting that Matthew might want to leave and stay somewhere else.
‘You’ve finally got it.’
Sandy was perplexed. ‘Got what?’
‘The art of carrying a backpack.’ Matthew smiled. ‘Congratulations. You haven’t knocked anyone over all the way from the airport.’
Sandy laughed. ‘So I learned something in India after all.’
He fiddled with the lock and together they made their way up to his flat, pushing the door open against the pile of mail his neighbour had collected for him. The flat smelled damp and airless. A stray teabag left on the kitchen table was covered in a bloom of mould. Matthew opened the windows, and they stood together in the sitting room, too tired to do anything but feel the gritty breeze circle the room.
Sandy told Matthew that the sofa was too uncomfortable, that he’d blow up the old airbed instead. The truth was that he couldn’t bear to be apart from his son. He needed to hear him breathe through the night and see him wake in the morning.
They took turns to clean their teeth. Sandy gave Matthew an old T-shirt and made up the airbed. He collected the armful of mail and heaped it on the kitchen table.
From the bedroom, he heard the plastic mattress squeak and then settle under Matthew’s slight weight. He heard Matthew sigh, then turn over. He would join him in a minute or two, after listening to his telephone messages. There could be one from the nursing home, about his mother. He sat down with a glass of water and pressed the play button. Of eleven messages, eight callers had breathed once, then hung up, one was from Carolyn asking him to get in touch when he returned, one was from Peter and the last, left two days before, was from Tim. He played it three times, as if to make sure it was real. For some time, he sat absolutely still before finding himself reaching for the pile of letters.
Most were pamphlets or bills. Various people wanted to steam clean his carpets or wash his windows. Others wanted money for one cause or another. The last in the pile was a leaflet advertising discounted bathroom fittings and he was halfway to throwing it into the bin when another letter fell out from its pages and onto the floor.
Sandy recognised it instantly. He didn’t have to pick it up to know the weight of the paper, feel the linen-like weave and the embossed letterhead. He stared at it for a while, then picked it up and placed it in the centre of the table, very slowly as if he was performing some sad private ceremony. He made himself a cup of Rooibos and went into the bedroom. The sitting room lights shone on Matthew’s fuzz of hair as he lay curled under an old duvet.
He flicked the switch and went back into the kitchen. He drank his tea. He put the mug in the sink. He gathered up the junk mail and put it in the bin. He moved the bills to one side of the table, then the other. When he could think of nothing else to do, Sandy opened the letter from Jeremy. It was only one page, brief and written in a strange shaky hand.
‘You were right about Forster,’ it said. ‘My mistake and one I have regretted for too long. For everything, my friend, I thank you. For everything else, I apologise.’
He put the letter back in the envelope and wept silently, his head in his hands. He wept for Jeremy and for Polly. He wept for himself and Penny and his own mistakes and when he was too exhausted to weep any more, he turned out the light and went to his bed.
He sensed that Matthew was still awake, but didn’t dare to say anything. The night was so quiet. They turned in tandem. The bed springs creaked, the airbed squeaked. Sandy and Matthew lay in silence and listened to each other not sleeping.
Matthew cleared his throat. ‘Dad? It’s good you came. To India, I mean.’
A cab pulled up across the road. Its diesel engine rattled. The headlights swung on the ceiling as it turned around and drove away.
In the darkness, Sandy allowed himself a small smile. He was Dad again.
Outside, the lid of a garbage bin clattered. A fox
screamed, high-pitched, like a scared woman. He waited until everything was silent again. ‘I’m pleased I came too, although I was scared of how you and Em might react. After all, I did invite myself and I wouldn’t have blamed you if you didn’t want to see me.’
Sandy turned in the bed, so his body faced his son.
‘Dad, it wasn’t that bad.’ Matthew’s voice wobbled.
Sandy reached down and rubbed his shoulder.
‘You know all those songs you wrote?’ asked Matthew. ‘The ones about love lasting, and everything? Did you mean them, or were they just something you did to make money?’
Sandy remembered the piano in the kitchen and Penny’s encouraging smile. ‘I meant them, all of them. Most of them I wrote for your mum. It’s just that I didn’t know how things would turn out. I was too careless about everything. I thought I could do anything I wanted, and I couldn’t.’
Matthew’s breath came like a sigh of relief. Sandy heard the duvet rustle and Matthew’s head turn on the pillow, then steady breathing. He lay on his back, timed his own breath to match Matthew’s and thought about what he would tell his family the next day.
Acknowledgements
I am indebted to my agent, brilliant Kerry Glencorse, for her commitment to this book.
Thanks also to Susanna Lea and all at Susanna Lea and Associates
Alex Craig at Picador Australia and Sarah Branham at Atria/Simon and Schuster in New York have made me feel very welcome in a new world. Thanks to Deonie Fiford, Jo Lyons and Libby Turner for their insightful editing.
Kylie Fitzpatrick encouraged me through early drafts and made invaluable suggestions, as did Elisabeth Gifford, Brett Hardman, Angela Lett and Jennifer McVeigh.
Thanks also to Lyndall Crisp, Jacqueline Diedrich, Susan Haynes and Corinna King.
After Everything Page 30