Wife On Demand

by Alexandra Sellers

  Her father regained consciousness later that day, and the doctor assured her his prognosis was good. “Of course, it’s a concern after the last one,” he said. “He’s going to have to take it a lot more carefully now.”

  “The last one? I think there’s been a confusion,” Hope said. “My father has never had a heart attack before.”

  “I’m afraid he has.” He looked at her, and named the time she had been in the Maldives on the yacht. Hope closed her eyes with disbelief. “He had a heart attack? Why didn’t he tell me? I would have come home!”

  But of course the doctor couldn’t answer that.

  Things suddenly fell into place. She understood why her father had not told her about his illness—because loyalty and emotion would have demanded that she go back to architectural college, and by then her father had realized, if she had not, that architecture was not for her. She saw, too, why he had taken Jude into partnership.

  Over the next few days he slowly recovered, came off the oxygen and could sit up. “I want you to call Barry Ingelow and get him down here,” he told Hope. Barry Ingelow was his personal lawyer.

  “Dad,” she said, “I’m sure you shouldn’t be worrying about legal affairs right now.”

  He didn’t have breath for apologies. “Get Barry,” he said. So she got Barry, and she supposed, her father signed a new will, though she didn’t ask and no one told her.

  Friends came and sat with him, so that Hope could go to the office and help with the carnage. Work on everything else stopped as they organized and supervised the cleanup. It was an appalling task, and the pressure was the greater because there was constant fear that there would be a wind before they had cleaned up, blowing glass dust over the city and into people’s lungs. The site was soaked with special chemicals every day to prevent this, but every day new dust was created as workmen shifted the tons of glass fragments. In addition, the entire area had been cordoned off by police. Traffic was fouled, and people had to walk through long, hastily built wooden tunnels to get to work in the surrounding buildings.

  Of course it was not long before people were publicly wondering what had gone wrong. Everybody accepted that extreme weather conditions had been the cause—but why had the building not been built to withstand extreme conditions?

  Jude was looking for the cause. He spent long days poring over the design calculations, over the site, and over the broken glass—which now lay spread out on the floor of a giant warehouse where he was joined by officials whose job it also was to come to some conclusion.

  One of Hope’s tasks, meanwhile, was to locate the documentation that showed the manufacturer’s test results and outlined the stress capabilities of the curvilinear glass, which wasn’t in its proper place in the files. Hope and Lena and Sarah daily extended their search.

  Between the hospital, the office and Jude’s apartment, she was stretched to breaking point. Worst was the helplessness she felt. She could not find the documentation, and she could offer Jude little comfort, except to sleep beside him, and be there when he awoke in the night, restless and disturbed, to take solace in her body.

  Then Toronto’s afternoon newspaper called Jude to say they would be running a story in the next day’s paper in which the glass manufacturer would declare he had warned Thompson Daniels in a letter weeks ago about unexpected late results in the testing of the glass, and advised him to modify the design to accommodate for extra thermal expansion; and did Jude want to comment?

  After that everything happened too quickly to absorb. The Serious Crime Squad came and searched the office, and impounded certain files. Two days later the papers were full of a police leak: the police had found the missing test results, and a letter from Bill Bridges, the owner of Environmental Glass Systems, advising Jude that “form 31AA is on the safety borderline for thermal expansion and we recommend the use of a channel frame to enclose these pieces.”

  Jude Daniels was likely to be the subject of a criminal charge.

  “Jude, I just don’t understand where those results got to!” she pleaded.

  They had gone to her father’s house, where he was hoping to find a copy of the glass test results in her father’s desk. Hal Thompson sometimes copied things he wanted to bring home to look at or work on. But not, apparently, the test results.

  “Shall I ask my father about it?” she asked, after a futile search.

  Jude shook his head. “It doesn’t matter,” he said. “There is no reason to distress your father.” His doctor had forbidden him all newspapers and the television news. “They’ll have to show them to us anyway if there’s going to be a trial.”

  Trial. Hope felt tears burn her eyes and squeezed them shut.

  “They can’t!” she protested hoarsely. She meant, charge him. “Surely they won’t! You don’t think they will, do you?”

  He only shrugged, and she remembered his background. His mother had died in a political prison, and she knew that his expectations of justice from the state were not as high as her own.

  “How did it happen?” she whispered. “How did it all happen so fast?”

  “Don’t, Hope,” he said roughly, and she swallowed and controlled herself. He was under too much pressure for her to add to it. He couldn’t afford to crack.

  That night, as consciousness of their own mortality hovered over them, they turned to each other with a deep, hungry ferocity, as though sex and only sex could keep the demon at bay. She clung to him and wept, and he held her so tight and drove her so hard he left bruises. They reached the desperately sought peak together, and as it tore ruthlessly through their too-fragile flesh and spirit and they gasped and cried the powerful release, it almost seemed as if something must have changed in the world.

  But nothing was changed. They came for him in the morning. Jude Daniels was arrested and charged with manslaughter. In spite of loud protests from his lawyers, bail was denied on the grounds that, as a Czech national, there was cause to fear that he would flee the jurisdiction.

  That afternoon she got an emergency call from the hospital. Her father had had another heart attack. Though his doctor had forbidden all newspapers and television news, someone had ignorantly responded to his request for a paper and brought him one headlined Jude Daniels Charged With Manslaughter. When Hope arrived, he was unconscious.

  Suddenly, after so much activity, there seemed to be nothing Hope could do. She sat helplessly by her father’s bedside, reading the brief report of Jude’s arrest over and over, waiting for nothing.

  Late, late in the night, her father regained consciousness. He looked at her and she saw recognition in his eyes. “Hope,” he said.

  “Dad,” she whispered. “How do—”

  Her father smiled at her. “I’m glad I had time to sign the will, sweetheart. You’ll be all right now.”

  “You’re going to get well,” she began, but he was frowning at something and seemed not to hear.

  “He’s lying about that letter,” he said urgently.

  She shot to her feet with astonishment. “Who?” she cried. “Who’s lying?”

  And then he seemed just to fade out. Her heart leaping, Hope pressed the panic button and held on, shouting, “Dad, Dad! Don’t go!” until a nurse burst into the room. “My father spoke to me!” she cried. “He was looking right at me! And then—don’t let him die!”

  Within seconds, the room seemed full of people dragging instruments to his bedside, bending over the bed, pushing her out of the way and calling unintelligibly to each other.

  At the end of half an hour, her father was in a coma. They warned her there was little hope of recovery.

  There never seems to be any reason, Hope reflected, why some stories become big news and others fade away. The approaching trial of Jude Daniels for manslaughter became big news, a cause célèbre. A lot of influential people disliked Jude, mostly fellow architects whose feathers he had ruffled at some time in his career, and their friends; and letters and articles kept appearing in the press about i
ndividual artistic ego and whether an architect had the right at any time to put his vision above the common good.

  “This is rich, coming from Richard Sawyer,” Jude said appreciatively, reading the architect’s personal manifesto that declared that the “end user’s” needs always took priority, in the magazine that she had brought to the detention centre.

  Richard Sawyer’s biggest and most prestigious building had been the subject of one of Jude’s more scathing reviews, condemned for inhospitable space inside and inadequate response to the environment outside: the building reflected blinding sunlight directly into the eyes of motorists on a busy street, and had been blamed for several accidents and near misses before an entire facade of mirrored glass had been replaced with something less brilliant.

  Slowly the tide turned against Jude. Few journalists had what it took to stand up against the opinion of so many of the city’s wealthy and influential citizens, especially in an area where expertise was not easily come by. You could not phone someone up and get the lowdown on the architectural questions involved as easily as in other areas.

  Gradually it became the accepted wisdom that Jude Daniels had counted on the hope that the freak weather conditions that might cause the glass to break would never occur. Although there was no evidence to back up the idea, it came to be assumed that his reason for doing this was that the fabulous Rose Library design would have been spoiled if he had had to accommodate for such conditions.

  “He should have modified his design, but artistic ego got in the way,” people said wisely at dinner parties and in letters to the editor, shaking their own more level heads.

  Hope hardly knew what to believe. Her year of architecture had not given her any insight into the mechanics of Jude’s design. It was far too innovative and unusual for her to make any judgement based on knowledge of fact. She had only character information to go on. She did not believe that Jude, of all architects, would have refused to modify his design if he had known about the possibility of the failure of that glass.

  Set against that was the manufacturer’s clear statement to the contrary...and perhaps her own father’s testimony. He’s lying about that letter. Which “he” had he meant? Jude, or Bill Bridges?

  Between these worries, visits to the hospital, and trying to keep the office going, she was worn thin. Her hip began to ache with the shadow of that old pain, and the thought that stress would undo the results of her operations and months of therapy frightened her and added more stress to the load.

  One place she did not often visit was the detention centre where Jude was held. The sight of her only reminded him of the madness of the system that surrounded him, and neither of them could bear to see each other and not touch. There was no reason why the Detention Centre, which was mostly peopled by those accused but as yet unconvicted of any crime, should be so much more restrictive than a true prison, which housed the convicted; it was only one of many irrational results of dysfunctional group human endeavour. But for Jude, it was additional evidence of the evil at the heart of human organization. Just like what had killed his mother.

  In the end he told Hope not to come. Visits from his lawyers were all the contact with the outside world he could stomach.

  She stayed away as long as she could. When she could not stay away any longer, she would stare helplessly at him through the glass that divided them, seeing the awful resignation in his eyes, the acceptance of pain that her visits brought, and hate herself for her weakness.

  “How are you, Hope?” he would ask.

  “Fine, I’m doing all right.” she would say, “How... how...” And then, although she had sworn to herself she would not, she would be struggling against tears. “Jude, are you—is it horrible?”

  “It’s all right,” he would say in a flat tone. “It’s manageable, Hope, stop worrying so much. How’s your father?”

  But her father was still in a coma, alive only at the behest of machines that breathed for him.

  There was nothing they could say. They had always communicated through the physical, and being deprived of that was like having their tongues cut out.

  Soon she stopped going almost entirely. They would send each other messages through his lawyer, whom of course she was helping in every way she could.

  He was allowed a certain number of phone calls, and at least they talked on the phone, even though it was only about the business.

  “Johnny Winterhawk is sending one of his architects down from Vancouver to supervise the last stages,” she told him, about the Concord House East project, and that was one load off his mind. But there were others that did not go away so easily.

  Thompson Daniels had won two contracts in the weeks before the tragedy. Both clients were willing to put their projects on hold for the immediate future and await the outcome of the trial, but a decision like that could not be indefinite. The defence was agitating for an early trial date.

  Eleanor, her father’s office manager, had recovered, and a decision had to be made. She had the offer of a job elsewhere, but if Thompson Daniels needed her, she would return. It was clear that Hal Thompson would never recover now, and anyway, if something did not change soon, the entire office staff would be out of work. And yet, it seemed impossible just to let her go like that. It seemed to be going to meet the horror halfway.

  Hope made one of her rare visits to Jude. These were now always about business, involving paperwork that he had to see. During these visits she would press the various sheets up against the bulletproof glass while he leaned forward to read.

  This time, reading one long document, he leaned close, one hand on the glass, his other hand over his mouth, frowning as he read. Hope, taking the sheaf of papers down every few minutes to flip the pages, saw his hand there, and, putting the pages back up to the glass, as if absently, rested her own hand on the opposite side of the glass to where his lay.

  Immediately the familiar psychic heat of him invaded her system through her hand, making her arm weak, her skin shiver down her back. Her breathing quickened, and she watched him covertly from half-lidded eyes.

  Reading intently, he took his hand away from the glass and shook it, as if he had received a little electric shock, or it had gone to sleep. Then, suddenly aware of the sensation, he switched his black gaze from the written words to her hand helplessly pressed against the glass, and her face behind.

  He was immediately flooded with passionate desire for her, and she knew it. “Hope, damn it!” he exploded.

  “I’m sorry, Jude, I’m sorry!” she pleaded. Her body was melting now, as if his desire came off him in waves and invaded her, and the glass was no barrier.

  He went back to his reading, but it was no good. Her head felt too heavy for her neck, she was suddenly aware of the thin T-shirt he wore, and the chest that rose and fell beneath it in time with his breathing as, again and again, his eyes returned to the same place in the document and she knew that he could not take anything in.

  She was remembering how that rhythmic breathing felt under her cheek, under her hand, within the circle of her clinging arms, and she was nearly blind with the need to touch him again.

  There was one way she could touch him. With words.

  “Jude,” she said, taking the document away, and with the resigned breath of a man who is going to suffer, he looked at her.

  “Jude, we never said it, it never seemed necessary, but now I wish we had. I wish I had,” she amended. “I—I love you, Jude. I want you to know that...I always will.”

  His jaw clenched, and he looked away. “Jude?” she whispered.

  Now when he looked at her his eyes were blazing with the light of anger. “What do you want me to say, Hope?” he demanded ruthlessly. “Do you want me to say I love you? What kind of a fool are you? How can I say to you now that I love you? Do you know what kind of weakness that would be? Binding you to me now when I have no future, nothing to offer you except ruin?”

  “We’re going to beat this,” she said firmly.


  “Fine, we’re going to beat it!” he mimicked ironically. “What will be left? We have just had another postponement from the Crown Prosecutor! There will be nothing left of what I have built, Hope,” he said slowly, as if for an idiot. “No clients, no offices, no reputation!”

  “Jude, I love you!” she cried.

  But he only shook his head, stood up, and signalled the keeper that he wanted to go back to the cells.

  Chapter 6

  Sometimes Hope was capable of understanding why he refused to say he loved her. Other times she could only believe that it was because he didn’t. The shadow pains she was now experiencing in her hip brought back all the weight of the old sense of physical and sexual inadequacy she had lived with for so long.

  Of course she had been carried away by the first passionate lovemaking she had experienced. Jude was an incredible lover, and in her relative inexperience she had taken that personally, had believed that it was something that had happened between the two of them. But maybe it hadn’t been special for him at all. He might be used to women responding in that way with him. Perhaps he didn’t even realize that with other men sex was significantly different.

  She knew that he desired her, was aroused by her presence when she went to see him, but what she did not know was whether he would have been just as turned on by some other woman.

  Maybe, while in the aftermath of their suspended passion she was discovering that what had underpinned it was love, he was merely suffering from sexual deprivation. After all, if he loved her, why hadn’t he said so while they were lovers? There had been opportunity enough.

  The summer turned into autumn, the nights getting longer and longer, nights during which Hope lay in her bed and yearned and hungered and ached for him. She imagined him lying on his bunk, in his cell, and tried to send her spirit to him, seeking and offering solace. Sometimes, in a half-dream, half-trance state, it was as if she did see him, and putting out her hands she would touch him and shiver over her whole body as if the contact were real.