‘Okay.’ Jonty’s eyes followed Drew as he walked to the table to pick up his car keys and roll up the newspaper he’d been reading. ‘You’re too good for me, you know that?’
‘Maybe,’ Drew said. He reached and touched Jonty on the shoulder, when really he could see that what Jonty needed was a hug. But heck! This wasn’t America and sit-coms, this was life. Drew turned at the door and waved, as he slipped from Jonty’s life back into his own.
There was a letter on the table in the hall when Drew crept in. He’d taken off his shoes outside the door, turned his key in the lock as noiselessly as was possible. His mother had left it sticking out over the edge of the table so that Drew couldn’t possibly miss it. And she’d gone to bed, thank goodness – he just couldn’t have trusted himself to answer her questions without being rude and offhand in his tiredness.
He turned the letter over in his hand now. A buff envelope. Narrow. A hospital’s franking machine. A date for Amy’s cochlear implant operation assessment? At last? Hurriedly Drew slit the envelope with the edge of a thumbnail.
Funding has been approved by your local health authority. You are invited to bring Amy for a pre-op assessment on Monday, 14th June at 2 p.m. Allow three hours for this assessment. If all is well on that date then Amy’s operation can go ahead. A provisional appointment has been made for that operation. We hope this will meet with your approval.
Too bloody true it would. Not long to wait now. Drew kissed the envelope and punched the air, pressing his lips together to stop himself shouting out. He kissed the envelope again, then he walked up the stairs, his feet on the outsides of the treads because the middles creaked; something he’d done many times when he’d come back late after making love to Mel in a car park somewhere, or down a green lane on the edge of Dartmoor. Well, hadn’t that all been a total waste of effort? The minute the going had got tough Mel had bottled out. Mel. How rarely he thought of her these days. In all probability he wouldn’t even bother to try and find her, tell her about Amy’s operation. At last he reached the door of Amy’s room, left open so that he or his mother could check on her from time to time through the night.
He bent over her tiny, sleeping form, leant down and kissed the top of her head.
‘Soon baby,’ he whispered, ‘soon.’
If all the info he’d read about the success rates for cochlear implants was true, then all their lives were going to change – his, his mother’s and most of all Amy’s.
And possibly Jonty’s if Drew wasn’t there to run the pottery, make sure invoices were sent out, bills paid. But that was the last of Drew’s worries.
What a day – what a bloody surreal day.
Chapter Twenty-Two
‘Of course, Lydie,’ Lydie’s bridesmaid, Megan, said, ‘“til death us do part” doesn’t mean the long wooden box, you know?’
‘What does it mean, then?’ Lydie giggled, a little tipsy on too much champagne, woozy with the heat of the day.
‘The death of the marriage, silly. It’s an out. A legal loophole. I bet they didn’t think of that when they wrote the marriage service!’
This is surreal, Lydie thought, as for the second time in only a few hours she presented herself at the desk in A&E. The same girl was on the desk – Dawn something. Lydie, her eyes dry with tiredness, squinted to try and read the name on the girl’s identity badge. Ah yes. Dawn Brumfield – Lydie remembered now. The girl looked up, her eyes asking the question ‘You again?’ in a puzzled way before she spoke.
Lydie saw her eyes scan the computer screen before saying, ‘Mrs Marshall? Your daughter is fine, she’s been moved to Bascombe Ward.’
‘I know this is a bit like a bad joke, but it’s my husband this time. Ralph Marshall. Someone rang. Not you obviously.’
‘No, not me. I was on my break, I suspect.’ She spoke without looking up from the computer screen, tapped some keys, clicked the mouse a few times. ‘Ah, got it.’
Lydie saw the surprise flicker with a rapid succession of blinks in the girl’s eyes, and then her almost instant recovery lest she give something away when, perhaps, it wasn’t her job to do so.
‘Is he …’ But just as Lydie hadn’t been able to say the word ‘dead’ in relation to Grace, she couldn’t when it applied to Ralph either. There was so much she wanted to say to him. So much she wanted to say sorry for. It was something she’d planned to do, even before she’d had the shock of seeing Jonty again. Only now? Oh God, please, please don’t let it be too late. Ralph was too young to die, wasn’t he? And it was so unfair if he did die now. He’d worked and worked to give his family a comfortable existence and now he was so happy doing something for himself with The Gallery, already making a success of that. Lydie knew she was only guessing but Ralph could have had a heart attack. Or a stroke. People recovered from small strokes, didn’t they? Wasn’t there something she’d read in a newspaper only last week where it said if the big toes are massaged – the acupressure points or something – at the onset of a stroke then recovery can be rapid and complete? She ought to tell the doctors that – they might not know.
‘Is he …’ Lydie tried again, and again she couldn’t complete the sentence.
The look in Dawn Brumfield’s eyes now told her everything; beautiful blue eyes, the pale sky-blue of a bright winter’s day. And long, curly auburn hair – like those paintings of girls in velvet frocks and amber beads in pre-Raphaelite art. Full, lush lips, with just a slick of clear lip balm making them shine.
Lydie wondered what part of a person’s mind made them take in such detail at times like this.
‘Someone will be with you in a moment, to talk to you. If you could just sit over there?’
Lydie looked in the direction Dawn was pointing; she saw about fifty chairs. Only about a quarter of them were occupied – men, women, a couple of small children – all looking rather glum, a little frightened, waiting to be seen. Lydie chose a chair nearest to the reception desk and sat down. The chair was hard, unyielding and rather grubby from a constant change of people fidgeting on them as they waited anxiously to be called for treatment. Orange. Lydie hated orange. She wasn’t likely to change her opinion now. But Lydie found she couldn’t sit still. She got up and went over to a pile of magazines, some with no covers, or ripped, or tea-stained, in a haphazard pile on a coffee table. Discarded plastic cups, with dregs of coffee or tea spilling from them lay scattered at one edge. A wet spoon with dried, hardened sugar granules. Don’t they know this is how germs spread? Lydie asked herself. Well, don’t they? Instinctively she thrust her hands into the pockets of her jacket so as not to dirty them. She should be careful not to take germs to Ralph just in case he was still alive, and not dead as she was certain he was.
Ralph. What was she going to do without him? Hadn’t he been a solid, dependable bulk next to her all these years in bed? So that if she woke with the night-time terrors, or was ill, he was always there to reach out sleepily, pull her to him. And she would crawl into the comforting warmth of him, smell his familiar smell, synchronise her breathing with his until she slept again.
‘Mrs Marshall?’ a voice said beside Lydie now.
Blinking back tears, Lydie looked up.
‘Yes.’
‘I’m Dr Tucker. Can we have a chat in my office? It’s this way.’
A chat? He was making it sound as though it were some sort of longed-for social event – a discussion on the re-decoration of the waiting area perhaps, or whether blue curtains would be better around the beds in A&E instead of the green that were there at present.
Lydie stood up and followed the fast-disappearing form of Dr Tucker through a set of double doors into his office. By the time Lydie reached Dr Tucker’s desk he had already pulled out a chair for her, had slid a box of tissues across, and was drawing a glass of water from the water-cooler in the corner. He handed the drink to Lydie and sat down.
‘He’s dead, isn’t he?’
‘I’m sorry, Mrs Marshall. Yes. Your husband was alive when t
he ambulance crew picked him up, but shortly after he arrived here he had a massive stroke. He died a short while ago. It would have been very quick.’
‘For whom?’
Dr Tucker smiled, lips pressed together, yet the smile didn’t reach his eyes. I expect, Lydie thought, he does this at least half a dozen times every night of his working life. There is probably some sort of role-play session at Medical College where they have to practise ‘breaking bad news to relatives’. Dr Tucker pulled a tissue from the box and handed it to Lydie. She took it, although what she really wanted at that moment was for Dr Tucker to come around from his side of the desk, take Lydie in his arms, let her cry all over his white coat with the pens and stethoscope standing erect in the breast pocket. And then tell her it wasn’t true – Ralph wasn’t dead at all. But that it would be a long, hard road to recovery for both of them. At that moment Lydie felt there was nothing she would rather do than nurse Ralph back to health, however long it took – appease herself of her sins of deception.
‘For your husband. It would have been very quick for him.’ The doctor glanced at his computer screen. ‘Ralph,’ he said in a way that was almost a question but not quite.
‘Yes. You’ve got it right. Ralph.’ Lydie knew she sounded snappy and cross and none of this was Dr Tucker’s fault, was it? On a scale of one to ten for empathy and kindness Dr Tucker was scoring a very respectable nine and a half. Lydie doubted her father had ever been as good as Dr Tucker was being at delivering bad news.
‘Can I see him?’ Lydie asked, her voice small and seemingly far away to her own ears.
‘Not just yet. This was a sudden death, so the police will be involved, at least initially, I’m afraid. And the coroner.’
‘Oh. Oh.’
The tears came then. Hot and salty tears that almost burned Lydie’s cheeks as they coursed down and slithered into the sides of her neck. She knew them to be tears of guilt and regret. She didn’t want Ralph being prodded about by people who didn’t know him, whom he didn’t know. They might even have to cut him open, delve about inside him to find the reasons for the stroke. And how did families cope with the police and the coroner involved as if it were a criminal offence and not a death? How was she going to cope?
‘I just wanted to talk to him,’ Lydie gulped through her tears which were now running down the back of her throat as well, making her cough a little. ‘Talk to him, you know.’
‘Most people do,’ Dr Tucker said. ‘All the things they wish they’d said in life. Cathartic cleansing. It will be very good for you, and you will be able to do that shortly.’
‘How soon?’ Suddenly Lydie was panicked that she might have to go back out into the A&E waiting room and sit on a hard, orange, plastic chair again. Alone. And possibly wait and wait because wouldn’t the coroner be in his bed at the moment, and all the people who worked in his office? Although, Lydie supposed there was always a policeman on duty somewhere.
‘Can we run through a few questions first?’
Lydie nodded. She sniffed and swallowed back her tears. She balled her hands together in her lap, the tissue Dr Tucker had given her a small, soggy lump in her palms.
‘Of course.’
‘Fine. Good. Were you in the home when Ralph had what we suspect might have been a first small stroke?’
‘No.’
‘Was anyone with him?’
‘Not that I know of, but …’
Lydie’s tears began again, but this time her whole body seemed convulsed with sorrow. She felt hot, but not sweating hot – as though someone had speared her from head to toes with a white-hot rod.
‘But?’
‘I don’t know. I really don’t. I had been trying to ring him all afternoon to tell him about Grace but he wasn’t answering. I’ve been in Bath visiting my father. I’m sorry, I’m not being much use am I? I don’t know what it’s telling you on that screen but I was more than likely here in this hospital when Ralph had his first stroke. I’d had a call to say my daughter had been involved in an accident. A head injury. She’s upstairs in … in Bas-something Ward. Grace …’
More tapping of the keyboard as Dr Tucker made a search for Grace Marshall.
‘Bascombe Ward,’ he said, then fell silent as he scrolled up and down with the mouse, clicked on it a couple of times. ‘Temperature up a little at the last reading, blood pressure good, oxygen levels on the up. All things we would expect of a hospitalised patient, but the prognosis looks good for Grace.’
‘Thank you,’ Lydie said. ‘Could I see Grace?’ Although where she was going to begin when she finally did see her daughter, Lydie simply didn’t know. And when she did what was she going to say? Your father’s dead, but he wasn’t really your father? The man you thought was just your boss, Jonty, is actually your father? Poor Grace – wasn’t her known world crumbling around her too? ‘Please, let me see Grace.’
‘Um. Not at this moment. It’s not possible.’ Dr Tucker glanced at the clock on the end wall of his office. ‘Another couple of hours or so and staff will be waking Grace for a cup of tea. I expect she’ll be parched. I’ll arrange for you to see her then. I’ll ring the ward sister and tell her to let you in. And we’ll arrange for Grace to be put into a private ward. Is there anyone we can call to come and be with you?’
‘No.’ Lydie hadn’t been in Dartmouth long enough to make friends. She hardly knew anyone, not even to nod ‘hello’ to in the street. And Lydie’s entire family, apart from her father, was in this hospital. Grace was alive, thank God, but Ralph was dead. ‘Dead! Dead! Dead!’ Lydie said, flinching, pulling herself upright as she realised she was shouting the words, not just thinking them.
‘I think,’ Dr Tucker said, leaping up from his desk and rushing around to where Lydie was sitting, ‘we’ll get you into bed, give you a little something to help you sleep. You’re having rather a time of it at the moment. I’m so sorry. A couple of hours and the Coroner’s officer will be here to talk to you.’
‘No! I want to be by myself for a …’ Lydie wriggled from underneath Dr Tucker’s gentle but restraining hand.
‘I think it would be a good idea – a comfortable bed, a cup of tea, someone to be with you. I’ll arrange for someone from the League of Friends to sit with you so there’ll be someone there when you wake up. You’re living the stuff of nightmares at the moment. I’m so sorry.’ Dr. Tucker lowered his voice an octave, his voice soothing, appealing, cajoling.
‘No!’ Lydie said again. ‘There is someone I can ring, I’ve remembered now. I can ring him.’ She slid a hand into the back pocket of her jeans and found Jonty’s business card, slid her fingers across the smooth surface. ‘A …’ Lydie hesitated. What could she call Jonty? Old lover? The person who has rarely been from my mind for over thirty years?
‘A friend?’ Dr Tucker supplied the end of Lydie’s sentence for her. ‘The friend you were with when Ralph had his stroke?’
‘How dare you! How dare you judge me!’ Lydie yelled at him, aware her buried guilt was uncovered as she immediately sprung to her own defence.
‘I’m not judging, Mrs Marshall. And trust me, the police will be far more probing than I have been. Now, may I respectfully suggest …’
‘I’ll ring my friend. I’ll go outside and do it now.’
Lydie stood up, shook hands with Dr Tucker with as much dignity as she could muster, thanked him for his kindness and apologised for her uncustomary outburst. Then she ran down the corridor out into the car park to ring Jonty, aware that although Ralph was dead, he had been spared the pain of knowing the truth about Grace’s conception. And for that she had to be thankful.
‘“Til death us do part”. Oh Ralph, oh Ralph,’ Lydie whispered into the night sky, as if seeing Ralph’s soul float heavenwards. ‘At least I kept that marriage vow, didn’t I? At least I kept that.’
Chapter Twenty-Three
‘What’s wrong?’ Grace asked. ‘Is it me?’
For the third night in as many nights Justin pushed her hand
away as she slid it across his chest, circled a nipple with her finger. And that was just this week. It had been months now since they’d made love.
‘I’m tired.’
‘Who isn’t in this business?’ Grace asked. She raised her head off the pillow and kissed the side of Justin’s neck, where it was soft and smelled of the shower gel he used.
‘Lay off, Gracie,’Justin said. He rolled away and turned his back on her.
‘If you go any further near the edge of the bed,’ Grace said,‘you might as well get out altogether.’ She shuddered. Whatever would she do if he did? And what on earth was wrong with their relationship?
‘Can I watch TV?’ Grace asked. ‘I’m feeling much better now.’
‘I don’t think there’s much on, love.’ The tea lady’s face almost disappeared in the hiss of steam from the water boiler. ‘Open University maybe?’ She pulled a face that said the Open University was as exciting to her as a bin bag full of dirty rubbish.
Grace laughed, then wished she hadn’t.
‘Ouch.’
‘Still hurts a bit?’
‘A bit.’
‘I’ll get a nurse, shall I? Give you some painkillers or something. Nasty bruise you’ve got there.’
‘No, it’s okay. I’ll just lie here for a bit.’
‘Right. Okay. Don’t expect they’ll be calling you to audition for Strictly Come Dancing anyway – you know, get thrown about the floor by that James Jordan vision of sex on legs, or somebody – so you might as well.’
‘Stop trying to make me laugh!’
‘Why? Part of my job, except they don’t pay me for it, of course. Better than all the muck they pour down your throat in here, a laugh is. Right, what’s it going to be? Tea? Coffee? With or without the white stuff? With or without the sweet stuff? Name your poison. Whoops, sorry, shouldn’t use that word in here, should I?’
Red is for Rubies Page 18