by David Beaty
‘Here, let me …’ He dropped the keys in his pocket and came round the bonnet. But Jane was already helping her on her left side, while Harriet leaned her right hand heavily on the stick.
‘That doesn’t get any better, does it?’ he remarked accusingly, feeling oddly left out.
‘You make it sound as if it’s all her fault!’ Jane flung over her shoulder.
‘Not her fault, by God!’ he shouted. ‘Yours. Yours!’ he repeated, choking with rage. ‘ Yours, you little bitch!’—
He clenched his fist and half raised it. For the first time in her life, he almost hit her. Yet even as the anger welled up, he knew it wasn’t against Jane, but against something nameless and terrible of which he was mortally afraid.
Jane turned. She saw the aborted angry gesture. She stared fixedly at her father for several seconds. Then she helped her mother over the threshold and said, ‘I’ll phone for a taxi. Then I’ll pack. It’s time I left anyway.’
Harriet said nothing, almost as if she’d expected it. It was left to Paul to say inadequately, ‘Look, Jane! Please. Don’t let’s go all through that again …’
But she had swept past him as if he didn’t exist.
Chapter Seven
‘So that was what it was all about, was it?’ Paul asked bitterly as the door closed behind Jane and the sound of the taxi died away. ‘The new curtains for her room? The clothes I know bloody well you bought, though God knows what she did with them? That’s what it was all about? A fortnight with you and not even a hello-how-are-you to me?’
‘No, damn you!’ Harriet replied in a low furious voice, ‘That wasn’t what it was all about!’ Her eyes filled with tears. ‘ Naturally you would say that.’
He jumped up and went over to the drinks tray and poured himself a stiff whisky. His hand trembled. His encounter with his daughter had upset him more than he would have thought possible. He would not have been human had he not inevitably compared her to Belinda. Her scruffy careless appearance with Belinda’s groomed one. Jane’s antagonism, with Belinda’s admiration. Even when Belinda was being thoroughly naughty and scheming as he had been at the Wheatsheaf, that naughtiness had its own endearing quality. Never had she looked at him in Jane’s hard, assessing way.
‘You females stick together. You’ve always got on better with Jane than I have.’
‘You were away so much,’ Harriet said, her anger seeming to die down now into a sad acquiescence.
‘Oh, don’t tell me you’re going to admit it wasn’t all my fault!’ He couldn’t switch off his anger like Harriet seemed able to. He felt as sore as if his ungrateful family had physically kicked him.
‘It was partly your fault.’ Harriet tilted up her chin and spoke with her usual candour. ‘Of course it was.’ She emphasised her point by hammering her stick on the floor. ‘ Mine. Yours. Circumstances. Airline life.’
‘And hers! What about hers?’
‘She was a child.’
‘Still is, if you ask me.’
‘Then she still needs our guidance.’
He laughed loudly, but without mirth. ‘Needs it? Oh, brother, does she need it! But whether she’ll accept it is an entirely different story. She wouldn’t before. I told her Adams was a little twit.’
‘You did more than tell her. You flung him out.’
‘And quite rightly too. Because she doesn’t take advice.’
‘I think she might have done this time if . . ’
‘If I’d done something different, no doubt?’
‘If you’d treated her as if you loved her. If you’d said something warm and welcoming. Kissed her.’
‘I didn’t feel like saying anything warm, and welcoming. She’d behaved disgracefully. Not a word of explanation, let alone apology!’
‘Such as?’
‘An explanation of why she stays away.’
‘She explained a little to me.’ Harriet drew a breath. ‘She’s living with someone, Paul.’
He drained his glass and looked at her.
‘Just like that! My daughter is living with someone? That is supposed to be an explanation? An explanation for which I am supposed to be grateful? Why is she living with someone?’
‘They’re in love.’
He snorted. ‘Then why don’t they marry?’
‘Because he’s married.’
‘Good God!’
‘His wife is a Catholic. She won’t divorce him.’
‘Better and better!’
‘And,’ Harriet said, looking down at her hands, ‘she thinks she’s expecting a baby.’
For several seconds Paul said nothing, and simply hammered the fist of one hand onto the palm of the other in a gesture of helpless rage.
At last he said quietly, ‘I’m glad you didn’t tell me that while she was here.’
‘She wanted to tell you.’
‘And this no doubt was why she came crawling home.’
‘No. Certainly not! It was why she didn’t want to come home. But it was why I wanted you to give her a bit of love.’
‘Well, I’m sure you gave enough for both of us.’
‘I hope I did,’ Harriet said slowly, raising her eyes to his. ‘She was very good to me. She looked after me.’
Something in her tone frightened him. He seemed suddenly to have slipped through a crack in time, to be twelve years old again, holding his father’s hand to pay what his father called his last repects to his mother. He knew that same moment of trying to gather himself together for the opening of the door to that cold bedroom. Harriet was going to tell him something he didn’t want to hear, something that was going to change his life, something before which Jane and her doings became insignificant, before which Belinda disintegrated into pretty, scented dust. He wanted to push his fingers into his ears, put his hand over Harriet’s mouth.
But he did none of these things. With a supreme effort of will he got himself under control, crouched on the floor in front of her chair, took her thin hand in his strong ones and asked softly, ‘What is it, love? What are you trying to tell me? Whatever it is, we can face it together.’
‘I’m not very well,’ she said, with a smile of such abject apology that he knew the worst had happened and that she was going to die.
‘Going to die? Your wife?’ The smooth-faced consultant smiled at him, as doctors always seemed to, with a superior and distant compassion. ‘ We’re all going to die, Captain Harker. The one immutable fact in all our lives. In your job you must know it better than most.’
‘Yes, Dr Vansittart, of course I know. But I don’t want to play with words. You know what I mean.’
‘Of course. Of course.’
The consultant’s smile was replaced by a frown of concentration. He leaned his elbows on his wide desk top, and placed his pale clean fingertips scrupulously together. ‘Let me put it this way, Captain. We’re all going to die. We’re all on a train of sorts.’ He peered at Paul over the top of his spectacles, inviting his approval. Then he moistened his lips. ‘Your wife, however, is on a somewhat faster train.’
For a moment, Paul digested the awfulness of this euphemism.
‘How much faster?’
The consultant shrugged his white-clad shoulders.
‘Difficult to say.’
‘Try to say.’ He could hear his own voice climbing into shrillness. ‘Years? Months? Not weeks, surely?’
‘Very difficult to say.’ Dr Vansittart stood up, walked round the desk, and leaned against one corner of it. ‘But probably months rather than years. And perhaps weeks rather than months.’
‘What sort of an answer is that?’ Paul asked indignantly, feeling a hopeless anger rising inside him. Against what, he thought. Death itself?
‘It’s the only sort of answer I can give you. Your wife might have a remission. I have older patients who have had the disease longer and who still enjoy life. But I am sure you would rather I told you the truth.’
The truth! That dreadful searing only-to-be-taken-in-
small-doses commodity. The truth couched in clean antiseptic medical terms, the gaping wounds bound in the bandages of words. Death was reduced to a terminal like Heathrow or Kennedy.
‘The malignant cells, the leucocytes, are being bombarded by cobalt,’ Dr Vansittart said, pleased at how well the Captain was taking it. Occasionally, he lapsed into more everyday words. Bone marrow and blood cells, transfusions and bleeding. Then he was off again into chemotherapy and total irradiation and palpable spleen, a strong important drug called tri something or other and a long sounding word that began like thrombosis but which wasn’t.
Paul found himself unable to take it in. He stared down at his hands, flexing his fingers. His brain was a blur of sounds and sights. Dr Vansittart had a small vase of choice red roses on his desk. Paul hated their thornless perfection. He hated Dr Vansittart. He looked like some Nazi genetic experimenter in his clean white coat, his cropped hair, his pince-nez spectacles, his bland composure in the face of the torture he was inflicting. Paul didn’t want to see those extracts from her case notes, those biopsy reports, those illuminated fragments of her on the X-ray screen which Dr Vansittart flipped on and off for his information. He didn’t want to hear the diagnosis, leukaemia. He didn’t want to know what was happening to the marrow of her bones. He wanted to shut his ears to it, just as he had averted his eyes from it on the case notes. He didn’t want to know about radiotherapy and chemotherapy. He wanted hope. He wanted Harriet restored to him again.
‘How long has she had it?’ Was that his voice?
‘Difficult to say.’ The consultant paused. ‘Her lassitude. You may have noticed?’ The pale eyes regarded him through the pince-nez. When he said nothing, Dr Vansittart continued, ‘Ah, I see. Mrs Harker always gave me the impression of being a person who never complained. And then of course, being an airline pilot, you’re so often away.’
‘I worried that her foot didn’t clear up … that she was always using her stick. I thought … I thought …’
But what he had thought, if indeed he had ever thought, eluded him. Instead of pursuing such meaningless diversions, the consultant continued to his own bitter end.
When Dr Vansittart had finally finished with him, when he had switched off his X-Ray viewer and folded away the notes, he asked pleasantly, ‘Now are there any questions you would like to ask me, Captain?’
‘Yes. Is there anywhere in the world I could take her? Anywhere, literally. New York? San Francisco? Tokyo? Anywhere at all where there might be a treatment that could cure her? Money’s no object. Travel’s no problem. I could take her anywhere. I could …’
The doctor held up his hand.
‘Nowhere that I know of Captain. But don’t despair. We must hope for a remission. Miracles still happen.’
That was the most despairing news of all, Paul thought.
‘It would need a miracle then, would it?’
The consultant didn’t answer. He straightened and clapped Paul on the shoulder.
‘May I say, Captain Harker, how well you’ve taken it.’ He ushered him out into the warm October afternoon. He shook his hand on the step. Birds were still singing in the bushes that lined the path to the car park. Chrysanthemums blazed in the beds. The air was full of their sad bitter fragrance. Miles up in the sky, a high-flying jet trailed its white woolly thread against the unbroken blue. The world looked unbelievably beautiful and sweet. Yet he had just lived through the worst moments of his life.
The weeks that followed ran that afternoon a close second. The world remained beautiful, his role in it all the more hideous. The company, apprised of Harriet’s condition, were as usual embarrassingly sympathetic. He was given encouragement simply to come and go as he felt able. A junior Captain called Portman who had failed a medical was drafted to help him with the office work. He was not expected to fly, though he kept his hand in with a few hours on the simulator. In the face of Harriet’s tragedy, Archie remembered not to recite other people’s tragedies, concentrating instead on talking about television programmes.
Madge was, of course, a tower of strength. She did the daily shopping, she helped Mrs Webb who came three mornings a week to do the housework, and with some hitherto undemonstrated discretion avoided any mention of Fandango and his exercise.
As it happened, Jane phoned two weeks after Paul had spoken to the consultant and said she and Mick had been round to the stables and given Fandango a canter. She phoned now several times a week, but she rarely spoke to him. Harriet however seemed pleased.
Between Harriet and himself, it had been a slow relentless torture. She had persisted with her course of treatment, though the after-effects were nausea and pain. He hated driving her to the hospital for them, knowing what it would be like when he took her home. Yet between times, on what she called her ‘on days’, life was sweet. They picnicked on the Berkshire Downs, with Harriet insisting on tapping her way afterwards over the springy turf to Norland Beacon. They went down to the south coast in the car. Colin, having duly received his father’s solemn letter, phoned from Hong Kong. And in the course of evening sherry in the camellia house they managed to discuss Jane and her baby, and Harriet said that she for one was glad.
But as week followed week, the torture blacked out the sweetness. He was unbearably relieved when, collecting her from the hospital after one of her treatments, she said lightly, ‘Dr Vansittart wants to try some new pills on me, and he’d prefer it if I was admitted so that he can monitor them properly.’
She came home only long enough to collect her things. When he left her again at the hospital she gave him Jane’s phone number. Just in case, she said.
Returning to the empty house after his second trip to the hospital that day, he immediately dialled Jane’s number. She was out. He spoke to a man with an Irish accent. Mick, Paul supposed, deliberately not revealing who he was or leaving a message.
When he had put the receiver down on that abortive call, he wandered from room to room. Though she said she was only going for what they hoped was a short stay, Harriet had taken quite a number of things – her radio, her travelling clock, a photograph of him, a photograph of him and Jane and Colin, a silver-backed brush he’d given her for their first wedding anniversary. Her various jars and bottles and shower cap had gone from the bathroom, leaving it empty despite all his own clutter.
Downstairs everything seemed hushed, unnaturally still. The leaves of the camellias were drooping but he lacked the energy to water them. The mower was still unserviceable, but he didn’t care. Longing for the sound of a human voice, he switched on the television. It was a children’s programme. He watched vaguely for a few minutes, soothed by its condescending jollity, till in sudden impatience, he switched it off.
Silence descended once again. He could feel it round him, palpable and suffocating. He was toying with the idea of getting into the car and just driving anywhere, when the front door bell rang.
It was probably Madge. He rather hoped it was Madge. He needed her Rock of Gibraltar stability at this moment. But Madge, Archie or whoever, it was someone to talk to. He struggled with the latch of the front door and threw it welcomingly open.
And there was Belinda.
For a few seconds, he couldn’t believe it. There she stood, looking more beautiful, more warm, more alive than he remembered.
Suddenly, the past with Belinda, carefully pushed to the back of his mind, came flooding in. He felt his hands tremble.
‘I heard your wife was ill,’ she said. ‘I came to see if I could help in any way. With the horse. Or … well, in any way.’
She made a little gesture with her hands to indicate her outfit. He saw with distant bitter amusement that she was wearing a pair of tight-fitting cream jodhpurs and an open-necked shirt. ‘I hope you don’t mind,’ she said, ‘I just wanted to help.’
For a moment, he stood there saying nothing, his eyes travelling from the top of her head to what looked like her brand-new jodhpur boots.
He took a deep breath and said s
lowly, ‘You’ll help by getting out of here. Now. Please, get out and stay out.’
Then he shut the door in her astonished face, leaning back against it in the coolness of the hall, cradling his arms across his chest, trembling with the most painful and humiliating desire.
Chapter Eight
Jane rang three days later. ‘She isn’t going to come out of hospital,’ she said, her voice harsh. ‘That’s why she gave you my number. She wouldn’t have otherwise.’
‘Why shouldn’t she give me your number? Of course she’s coming out.’ But he didn’t believe it either.
Yet two days later, he did believe it. Visiting Harriet as he did every afternoon and evening, he saw a slight improvement every day. The pills were wonderful, Harriet said. She had been sitting out on the verandah at the back, and by the weekend she was tapping her way down the path that led to a small rose garden at the bottom of the hospital lawn.
‘No, you don’t need to come home and look after me,’ he said to Jane on the phone in answer to her half-hearted offer. ‘Mrs Webb is very good and Madge comes round every day. It’s Fandango, if anything, that’s a bind. We’ll have to get rid of him.’
‘No, don’t, please. Mick and I will do something.’
‘Well, you can’t, can you?’ He was too embarrassed to add ‘in your condition’.
‘I can for a while yet. And Mick’s good with horses.’
‘Of course,’ Paul said trying to keep the disparagement out of his voice, ‘Irish,’ as if that explained everything.
Jane ignored the barb.
‘Anyway, Fandango’s still out to grass. But Mick and I will take a trip to see him for sure.’
She was beginning, he thought, to acquire an Irish sing-song lilt to her voice. It seemed to emphasise how much further she had grown away from him.
‘Jane phoned,’ he told Harriet that afternoon. ‘She seemed very well. And quite happy.’
‘I know she is,’ Harriet smiled. ‘She came to see me. She’s been twice.’