‘I’d better go,’ she said. She smiled again – which was more than she deserved, Flora thought. ‘It’s been nice meeting you.’
*
Watching her companion disappear through the door to the cabin, Flora felt strangely bereft. It wasn’t that she’d wanted to continue the conversation; simply that there had been a connection between the two of them for a little while, and now it was at an end. Perhaps she should expect this, she thought – that every insignificant parting would hurt a little, and every small loss would invoke the larger losses she’d suffered. She remembered, then, saying goodbye to Landon after the funeral, thanking him for his eulogy and feeling, at that moment, a greater grief for his departure than for Henry’s death. Remembering that other funeral, of course, and what had come after it, although she’d fought the memory down – and must again, she told herself, as another bewildering tide of emotions rose in her throat. How could she deal at once with the complications of the past and the future? Oh, damn Henry for dying: at least he had understood her. Whatever secrets they’d kept from each other had been outweighed, vastly outweighed, by the comforting certainty that they understood each other, and knew how they fitted together. How was she to explain herself to the world now, when she barely understood herself?
As the Dover cliffs came steadily closer, Flora forced herself to consider her situation. Six months ago she’d been at full stretch as clinician and teacher and researcher. Now here she was, retired as well as widowed; entirely without occupation. It seemed to her suddenly that she’d found herself in this position unwittingly: almost – almost – against her will. Flora the clear-thinker, the maker of rational decisions, outmanoeuvred by Fate in some sleight of hand she was still narrowing her eyes to spot.
She shifted slightly, turning away from the approaching port as she examined this thought. She certainly wouldn’t have retired at sixty if Henry hadn’t been dying. She might not have done if they’d had a different sort of marriage all those years. She was grateful for those last few months, though. That much was true: she didn’t want to come to regret them. But she needed to manage the next bit of life gracefully. She couldn’t bear people to look at her with pity – or worse, with that shifty look she’d seen on several faces at the funeral.
And then she heard the echo of the other woman’s voice: You could turn round and go back to France if you wanted.
It was a mad idea, of course. But she thought about Alice’s private view that evening; about seeing her daughters and Landon – quite possibly Landon – and the well-meaning questions she would be asked. She thought about Orchards, half-empty after the furious clearing-out of the last few weeks. She thought about signs and coincidence; about the oppression and the opportunities of free choice; about the flame of life burning stubbornly inside her.
When they arrived at Dover and her fellow passengers joined the crush to get back to their cars, Flora hung back. When the stream of traffic headed out of the port and towards the motorway, Flora circled round, and without thinking very hard about what she was doing, she bought a ticket on the next ferry back to France.
March 1995
As Flora drives away from the hospital, her mind is full of heroism. Waiting at the traffic lights, then heading out onto the dual carriageway, she relives the hours under the lights, the glint of instruments, the counting in of swabs – all the rites and pageantry of the operating theatre, brought to bear on the body of one ordinary citizen. She conjures up the face of her patient, a young man with a faint tinge of green in the hollows of his cheeks, being coaxed back to consciousness among the reassuring paraphernalia of drips and drains and monitors.
And then she remembers the size of the tumour, the length of gut they had to remove, the bleakness of the prognosis. As the orderly lights of the ring road give way to unlit country lanes, Flora feels the adrenaline ebbing away. There is always this moment, this crunch of reality, when the elation of exercising her craft evaporates and the patient comes back into focus, a person with a life that has been interrupted by medical catastrophe. She never deceives herself about such things, but it’s necessary to put them away while you get on with the job, focussing on the gaping abdomen before you.
Flora slows for a difficult corner then picks up speed again, shifting into fourth for the straight run along to the final crossroads. But, she tells herself, it’s the person who wakes up in the recovery room, whom she’ll see tomorrow morning on the ward, that she’s made a difference to. She has done what she can to help him beat the odds. She thinks again of the hours of concentration and the expertise of her team: five hours multiplied by five, six, seven people. It’s more than going through the motions, surgery. It’s always more than that; always a battle fought to the last ditch. This afternoon they halted two hours in, wondering whether to abandon the resection, but they were right to go on. There are always the cases that turn out better than you dare expect, she tells herself, as well as those who do worse.
The village is quiet this evening, but the lights are on in the house, and a cheerful glow filters through the curtains as she turns into the drive. Flora thinks of Henry and the girls inside, cooking supper or watching television or finishing homework.
But in the moment between turning off the engine and opening the car door, the complications of home creep back into her mind: an almost tangible shift from comforting allegory to untidy reality. She recalls last night’s row, left hanging this morning, and her earnest assurance to the children that she’d be home early tonight. It’s her birthday, she remembers. They promised her a cake. She glances at the clock on the dashboard – it’s almost nine. Will Kitty still be up? Will Lou be sulking by now?
There’s no one around when she opens the door, just a hushed murmur of voices which she takes for the television. But in a moment Lou rushes down the stairs and throws herself against her chest.
‘Mummy! You’re back!’
Lou is twelve, and not much given to throwing herself at her mother anymore. Holding her tight for a moment, Flora can feel her small heart thudding.
‘I’m so sorry I’m late,’ she says. ‘I really meant not to be, today of all days.’
‘It’s OK,’ Lou says. ‘We’ve got . . .’ She draws away now a little awkwardly, as though she’s not sure how she found herself plastered against her mother. ‘Daddy’s in the kitchen,’ she says. ‘I was on look-out.’
Flora catches a note of something – warning? – in Lou’s voice. Her eyes sweep round the hall, halting for a moment on the portrait of her husband that hangs at the bottom of the stairs: a handsome boy of nineteen, drawn by his friend Nicholas Comyn during a tour of Italy, smiling at the world in the assurance of a warm reception.
‘Is Kitty still up?’ she asks – but before Lou can answer, Henry appears from the kitchen, carrying a bottle of champagne and some glasses on a tray. Henry resplendent in silk shirt and cravat, every inch the elegant host, the eminent critic, the reassuring Radio Three voice-over.
‘Darling,’ he says, ‘Happy Birthday. Has Lou . . .?’
He leans forward to kiss her, swinging the tray to the side so he can get close enough to reach her lips. Last night’s row hovers between them, less easy to dodge than the tray. Flora can smell wine on his breath, and can detect it, too, in the flush across his cheekbones. The soft skin there is a reliable barometer for excess consumption of several kinds.
‘Sorry I’m late,’ she says. ‘Unavoidably detained at the operating table.’
‘You’re here now,’ he says. ‘Let me pour you a drink.’
Flora’s eyes are caught now by another picture, another Comyn, of Kitty and Lou on the beach last summer. Something about it lights a fuse inside her: the image of happy family life. The same image she almost allowed herself to believe in a few minutes ago. She’s been fobbed off too often with a glass of wine, she tells herself. She glances towards Lou, but Lou has vanished again. She’s become an expert at vanishing, Flora thinks, with a flash of pain.
<
br /> ‘Wait,’ she says, as Henry moves towards the sitting room door. ‘We need to talk.’
Henry halts, but he doesn’t turn to face her. ‘Not now,’ he says, his voice almost jovial.
‘Why not?’ Anger has flared more quickly than usual, provoked by the way Henry’s dress and demeanour speak of an evening of celebration, and by her guilt about Lou. By the too-familiar chain of complication and compromise. The last vestiges of surgical adrenaline urge her on. ‘It’s always “not now” ,’ she says. ‘Perhaps this is the moment, Henry. We can’t simply –’ She raises a fist, half-clenched – not as a threat, not exactly, but as evidence of her strength of feeling, her seriousness of intent.
And then the sitting room door bursts open. The murmur of voices swells suddenly and Kitty flies towards her, pink tutu fluttering, full of the wildness of a not-quite-three-year-old allowed to stay up beyond her bedtime.
‘We’ve got a party for you!’ she shouts.
The room behind her is full of people, looking nervously, smilingly, in Flora’s direction. The smell of festivity is unmistakable: wine and perfume and the pepperiness of hot breath billow out into the hall.
Caught in the dismay of an ill-timed surprise, Flora can’t muster the appropriate response. Memories of her mother’s parties swim into her mind, and she feels suddenly very tired. Henry looks at her, raises an eyebrow infinitesimally, and then he goes on into the sitting room, and there is nothing for it but to follow him.
‘What a nice surprise,’ Flora says.
The guests – mainly from the village: not many of them friends, to be honest – are clearly embarrassed by the anticlimax, after keeping quiet for so long. They glance at Flora as though they know they should be pleased that their hostess is here at last, but are not sure they are. Why on earth has Henry invited them? To create a party, she thinks. A diversion. Because it would be hard to muster a houseful of people, otherwise, with whom they could go through the motions. Goddammit: and it’s she who looks ungracious now. Heartless, even. Well, she’ll show them. She scoops Kitty up and swings her round, kissing her hot little face.
‘My darling,’ she says, ‘how beautiful you look.’
‘You haven’t got your party clothes on,’ says Kitty. ‘Have you been in the hospital all the time?’
‘All the time.’ Flora settles Kitty on her hip and turns away from Henry, who is coming towards her with a glass of champagne. ‘All this long time. Now, Kitty, come and help me say hello to everyone.’
*
Flora hears the phone ringing, but for once it doesn’t call her to attention. She’s talking to a feisty octogenarian who lives opposite the church, but she hears Lou answering the phone and registers a flicker of pride at her daughter’s self-assurance as she says yes, and who is it, and hang on a moment. Then she sees Lou coming towards her – and there, belatedly, is the catch in her chest.
She takes the call in the kitchen. It’s Paul Briggs, her Registrar. In the instant before he speaks she glances at the clock and calculates the possibilities.
‘We need you to come back in,’ Paul says, his voice deadpan as always. ‘We need to take him back to theatre. Cal Nevitt’s getting him prepped right now.’
Lou is hovering beside her, and when she’s put the phone down Flora pulls her in close. She smells of apples and milk, a little girl scent still, without the pungency of adolescence. Flora shuts her eyes, extending the moment as long as she dares. But when she opens them again the party, the noise and colour and warmth of it, looks like a film, something happening at one remove.
‘I have to go, darling,’ she says. ‘I’m so sorry. The lovely party and everything.’
Lou takes Flora’s hand and squeezes it, and then she lifts it away from her shoulder, gently, as though prising a toy out of her mother’s grasp. ‘I’ll tell Daddy,’ she says. ‘I’ll tell him you won’t be back till late.’
‘Not too late, I hope,’ Flora says, but she knows it’ll be hours before she’s home again. She knows that Lou knows, too. She hesitates a moment, thinking of the party guests, the flush in Henry’s cheeks, her fist stalled in mid-air.
‘I’ll go out the back way,’ she says, ‘so I don’t cause any fuss.’
She kisses Lou, thinks of Kitty, hesitates again.
‘Will you put Kitty to bed?’ she asks. ‘I really can’t . . .’
‘I’ll tell her it was a murgency,’ says Lou, employing Kitty’s word to make her mother smile.
Flora feels tears pricking then, not so much at Lou’s competence as at the need for it; the need for a twelve-year-old to smooth things over for her parents. She wants to say she’ll make it up to her, wants to believe she’ll have the chance.
Her car keys are still in her pocket. Once the door is shut behind her she runs round the side of the house and slides into the driving seat. The last waft of merriment from the party trails behind her as she backs out of the drive and heads away up the lane.
2
Leaning against the wall in the far corner of the gallery, Lou shut her eyes as another wave of nausea flooded through her. The air was thick with stale breath and perfume: she longed for an open window, for a glass of water, for her bed. Where was Kitty, she wondered, and Flora? Where was Alice, for that matter? She could see Alice’s sculptures dotted around the room, but she hadn’t paid proper attention to them yet, and she certainly hadn’t given more than a glance to any of the other artists’ work.
A waft of spiced oil reached her nose, and Lou made a soft crooning sound, something between a moan and a murmur of regret. This upheaval in her body seemed too violent for the cause – the few cells multiplying hopefully inside her. These should surely be the symptoms of something malign, aggressive, heart-stopping: something like the cancer that had killed her father, not the foetus conceived, with what now seemed such distasteful timing, two weeks before he died. She had hardly acknowledged the existence of that tiny creature yet, and this was absolutely the wrong moment for it to make its presence so compellingly felt.
Lou forced herself to survey the room, a cavernous space dense with people. The banner strung along the opposite wall matched the one outside, across the portico of the Taelwyn Gallery. The distinctive font trumpeted style and consequence: Morris Prize 2014, it said, and in smaller letters below, Open daily 10-6, 17th May – 21st June. Lou registered a flicker of the pride she’d felt when Alice was shortlisted, tempered now by something less straightforward. She scanned the crowd again for her mother and her sister, but there were only the faces of strangers, blurring into each other. The noise was considerable; the particular social pitch, Lou thought, of bohemian privilege, or artistic aspiration, or whatever phrase her father would have found to parody the occasion. And of course he at least – Henry Jones, music critic and man of letters – always did have more understanding of what was on display than the throngs of hangers-on in Armani and Missoni, even if his daughters did not.
Henry would have loved this evening, Lou thought. He would have loved his connection to Alice, his family gathered in public, his worlds converging. He’d have been pleased about the baby too, she thought, and tears rose in her eyes which she resisted furiously. Tears for her father were too complicated this evening. Too complicated altogether.
‘Hello,’ said a voice she didn’t recognise, and she looked up to see a face she did, vaguely. A friend of Alice’s: a very tall girl in her early twenties, wearing something that looked as though she’d made it herself, and wasn’t entirely sure about it now she’d got it on in a public place.
‘Hello,’ Lou said – and then, because she could see that the girl couldn’t remember her name either, and a few words of conversation seemed necessary, ‘Lou Jones. Alice’s partner.’
‘Nerissa Stapleton,’ said the girl, and she smiled and twitched at one of the drapes of fabric trailing from her waist.
‘Great dress,’ Lou said. She glanced down at her own black suit, unadorned by so much as a colourful scarf, and wondere
d if she should have made more of an effort.
‘Alice’s collection is fabulous,’ Nerissa said. ‘I love her work. Do you model for her?’
‘No,’ said Lou.
It was barely eight o’clock. There was still an hour to go before the results were announced, and whether or not Alice won Lou knew they’d have to stay for a respectable time after that, accepting congratulations or offering them, listening while artists and critics and dealers discussed the judges’ decision. Two hours, perhaps. Could she survive that long? Her mind skipped ahead, bargaining with probability. If they left by ten – ten thirty – ten forty-five . . . If the traffic wasn’t too bad . . .
The expectant expression on Nerissa’s face was beginning to give way to doubt. Even the bare minimum of social interaction was going to be a challenge tonight, Lou realised. It was the strangest sensation, every word and every thought having the same effect as the pitch and yaw of an aeroplane riding through a storm.
‘You’ll have to excuse me,’ she said. ‘I’m not feeling very well.’
She managed something she hoped would pass for a smile, and made a dash for the door.
The irony was that for the last few weeks she’d felt so well, so much the same as ever, that she’d wondered, once or twice, if the pregnancy test had been wrong. She’d almost wished for a sign to reassure her. And now she’d got it, she thought, as she slammed the loo door behind her and bent over the bowl with a groan of relief. How on earth did people keep pregnancies hidden?
When the retching finally subsided, Lou was conscious in its wake of a tangled, guilty sort of grief. Pressing her palms against the marble tiles, she wished fervently that she’d told Alice about the pregnancy sooner; certainly before risking exposure on such a public occasion. She should never have gone ahead without her, she thought: she should have waited until Alice’s misgivings, whatever they were, had receded.
The Things You Do for Love Page 2