by Bella Pollen
‘Go on,’ Tom encouraged.
‘Those waves send out a signal to the muscles of the heart which, in turn, pump the blood through the body. Now, if there’s an interruption in those electrical waves, it causes an abnormal heartbeat – as in when your heart skips a beat.’
‘And this is what Jamie has?’ Tom asked. ‘An abnormal heartbeat?’
‘Well, yes and no. For most people, skipping the odd beat happens from time to time and normally when the electrical waves are interrupted the heart simply reboots itself – but in those suffering from cardiomyopathy, the heart lacks the capability to reboot. Instead it panics and this causes a sudden and potentially fatal drop in blood pressure.’
‘Fatal?’ Letty stumbled over the word. ‘Wouldn’t we know if Jamie had something wrong with his heart?’ She tried to exorcise the shrillness from her voice. ‘Wouldn’t we have found out before now?’
‘Well, patients are almost always asymptomatic. There are literally no clues whatsoever. Sudden Cardiac Death can happen at any time during a person’s life. Too much exercise, one coffee too many, an over-strenuous walk, a shock to the system. It can happen in your sleep, or when you’re quietly reading in a chair. A person might experi- ence palpitations or feel faint but that would be all. One minute they’re here, the next they’re gone. And I have to say – ’ he shook his head – ‘given the enormous amount of physical and emotional stress your son has been subjected to, it’s quite amazing that . . .’
‘Yes, thank you so much, doctor.’ Tom stopped him with a warning look.
The doctor took in Letty’s ashen face. ‘Oh no, Mrs Fleming, please don’t worry. Jamie is in no immediate danger. Now we know what we’re dealing with, we can treat it.’ He put the pen back in his pocket, hesitated. ‘Look, the miracle isn’t that your son survived a sixty-foot fall. The miracle is that he fell in the first place. If he hadn’t been brought to hospital, his condition might have gone undetected.’
Letty felt like a weak imprint of herself, a cardboard cut-out. She leant against the wall. ‘Thank you.’
‘Yes,’ Tom said, ‘thank you very much.’
The doctor grasped Tom’s outstretched hand. ‘We have a few more tests to run and then we’ll have a talk about treatment.’
‘Of course.’ Letty stared through him unseeingly. He turned to go. The first light of dawn was seeping between the shutters on the window.
‘By the way’ Tom put a hand on his arm. ‘Why were you so interested in the family history? You never explained.’
‘Yes, well, I’m afraid usually it’s the family of the sufferer we get to treat.’ The doctor crinkled his eyes at the light. ‘Cardiomyopathy is very often a hereditary disease, and in those cases where it is hereditary – well, it’s almost always passed down from father to so—’ He cut himself off. ‘That’s right. You told me earlier that Jamie’s father had an accident.’ He looked eagerly at Letty. ‘Exactly what sort of accident was it?’
It had happened then. In the weightless gap between not knowing and understanding. Letty realized that she had stopped breathing, she realized that in truth she hadn’t really been breathing for a very long time. And just like that, she’d gone down.
85
The Island, September 1979
Letty was sleeping a dreamless sleep. She slept as if sleeping was a new hobby, one that she’d lately discovered and now couldn’t get enough of. She had finally understood what it meant when people said they slept like the dead.
It meant they were at peace.
When she woke, her thoughts veered off to the same place they had gone every morning since she’d returned from the hospital. To the embassy in Bonn, to Nicky’s office and the desk where he’d sat writing, practising his confession, crumpling up his first draft, summoning up his courage. She imagined him stealing up to the roof, smoking a cigarette and smiling as he watched the ropes tighten on the Big Top of the circus below. Then, perhaps a frown as pain sliced across his shoulder to his chest. A moment of dizziness as his faulty heart skipped that beat, like a stone, the doctor had said, skimming across a pond or the final guttering of a candle. Either way, he’d have been dead before he hit the ground, dead before he even fell, and she could come to terms with that. It was a death she could live with.
Nicky’s arrhythmic, asymptomatic heart. It would not have shown up on an autopsy. It might have looked somewhat pallid in appearance, but no suspicions would have been aroused.
‘I told you,’ Jamie said in the hospital. ‘I told you there was something wrong with my heart.’ He hadn’t remembered much about what had happened on the cliff, but Alba remembered. Alba remembered everything.
If the child knows no fear, the doctor had said. If the body is completely relaxed. If somebody up there is looking out for him.
‘He jumped,’ Alba said simply. ‘He just rolled away and let go.’
Jump. Letty saw Nicky under her bedroom window, his arms opened wide.
Let go and I’ll catch you.
So much unfinished business.
Jamie had inherited his father’s heart and his father had come back to warn him. At least that’s what Jamie believed. Letty didn’t know what she believed, but maybe she didn’t have to. It was no longer a requirement of life that it should make good sense or even reasonable sense, only that it should make Jamie sense. And recently Letty had begun to understand that sense to Jamie was a complex and wonderful thing.
Squirrelled away in his brainbox were soaring columns of words and phrases, fragments of song and the frayed edges of poems. There were tall stories and short stories, the vibrations of truth and lies and a thrumming of tiny fibs between; there were the spores of magic, the residue of dreams, a few sharp splinters of reality and then there were the shapes and patterns of wishful thinking all merging, intersecting with overlapping dimensions of hope and optimism. These elements together had created an infinite number of dots and dashes that constantly orbited his brain, sparking, colliding and joining in an ever-changing, multifaceted kaleidoscope of possibility.
Life or death. Nobody understood the workings of either. There was only what you believed – what you managed to hold on to.
And what Letty believed was that Jamie’s logic had a cohesive quality that had glued their broken family together again. It had been the unfairness of tragedy, the agonizing futility of ‘if only’ that had trapped her in the past, but now all the interlocking connections of fate and chance which had saved Jamie’s life had rebalanced the scales of fortune and tipped her into the present.
Tom had taken the report back to London with him. It would have to be put into the right hands, he’d said. Someone outside the MoD. Someone powerful who could and would have questions asked in Parliament. A minister senior enough to oblige the MoD to commission a new report. ‘This is something I can do for Nicky,’ Tom said before he’d left. ‘Something I can do for you.’ And he’d kissed her, briefly, on the cheek.
Downstairs, she could hear Georgie moving about in the kitchen, putting on water for the porridge. In just over two hours, they would go to the church by the loch for the memorial service. She had brought Nicky home, back from Bonn, to a place where he belonged. Letty looked at
Alba and Jamie, both hot with sleep and stretched across her bed, their bare feet inadvertently touching. There was a lot of growing up left to do.
Life was unfinished business. It was time to begin living it.
Epilogue
In the summer of 1980, an eight-foot-four-inch grizzly bear named Hercules was taken for a swim in the sea by his owner, a rambunctious Scottish wrestler called Andy Robin, whilst filming an ad for Kleenex in the Outer Hebrides. His rope snapped and he was subsequently lost on the islands for nearly four weeks. It was widely feared that the bear, in order to survive, would quickly turn wild. A high-profile search was instigated involving the army and the navy, not to mention the islanders and the bear’s indefatigable and heartbroken owners, Andy and his wife, Maggie. Neverthe
less, he was eventually given up for dead. When Hercy was finally sighted and netted by helicopter it was estimated that he had lost more than half his body weight during his long weeks on the island. The bear, despite being on the point of starvation, never hurt a single living creature.
In 1981, the Naval Radiation Protection Services on behalf of the MoD commissioned a safety report on the missile firing base at ‘Our Lady of the
It was discovered that the range head and its surrounding area of land and beach had been contaminated by high amounts of Cobalt-60 – a radioisotope used to track missiles. The report concluded that ‘both the ammunition technicians at RA Range Hebrides and the general public were placed at considerable and unnecessary radiological risk’.
This report was suppressed by the Ministry of Defence.
Acknowledgements
First and foremost I’d like to thank my parents for just about everything.
My continued thanks to my friend and agent Sarah Lutyens for her support, patience and timely advice. The same in spades to my beloved editor Maria Rejt.
And all at Lutyens & Rubinstein and the stellar team at Mantle and Pan Macmillan.
Thanks, too, to both Kim Witherspoon at Inkwell and Elizabeth Schmidt at Grove Atlantic for their invaluable contribution.
Also to:
Carole van Wieck, as always, friend, reader and critic.
Marcela Bombieri for her contribution to charity on behalf of her daughter Leticia Bombieri Ganoza, after whom my lead character is named.
The wonderful Maria Fairweather, who died in March 2010.
I am more grateful than I can say to all those friends and family who have read, advised or helped me with research on The Summer of the Bear:
Maya Schönburg, Julia Samuel, Robert Salisbury, Katrin Henkel, James Henderson. Gina Thomas, Geli von Hase, John Alec MacLean, Angus Ferguson, Angus Macdonald, Annie Macdonald, Alisdair MacLean. Lisa Bryer, Minna Fry, Sylvie Rabineau, Susie Pollen, Hoagy Pollen, David Mac, Sarah Hodsall and her girls, Esme, Alba and Georgie. Eddie Wrey. Caspar and Madeleine Glinz. Torsten and Margaretha Mlosch. Christa D’Souza, Daisy Sworder. Dr Rodney Foale, Henry Porter, Lady Nicholas Gordon-Lennox, Dr Brian MacGreevy, Debby McGregor and Nick Haddow.
In fondest memory of:
John MacLean of Baile Raghaill
Donald Ewan Macdonald of Baile Raghaill
Mrs Macdonald of Baile Raghaill
Roddy Ferguson of Hogha Gearraidh
Hugh Matheson of Baile Sear
Donald Macdonald of Loch Eynort
Annie Macdonald of Loch Druidibeg
Doone and Jamie Granville of Grimsay
Marcia Leveson-Gore of Grimsay
Angus John Maclellan of Baile Raghaill
Katy Mary Ferguson of Baile Raghaill
Callum Macdonald of the Glebe
Donald John Macdonald of Baile Raghaill
And with great affection for all friends of the townships of Baile Raghaill, Taigh a’ Gheàrraidh, Ceann a Bhaigh and Hogha Gearraidh.
Finally, a thank you to Andy and Maggie Robin for their inspirational story.
The Summer of the Bear
Also by Bella Pollen
All About Men
Daydream Girl
Hunting Unicorns
Midnight Cactus
For my mother
First published 2010 by Mantle
This electronic edition published 2010 by Mantle
an imprint of Pan Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited
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Copyright © Bella Pollen 2010
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