The Things You Do for Love

by Rachel Crowther

  ‘Weird to think this is Martin’s house and he’s in yours,’ Daniel said.

  ‘I don’t really want to think about Martin.’

  ‘Poor Martin. It’s not his fault.’

  ‘Even so,’ Kitty said. ‘Fair enough, eh?’

  Daniel grinned. ‘Anything’s fair enough, just as long as . . .’ He caught her foot and pulled, and she squealed as she slid towards him.

  ‘Stop – I’ll fall off. I’ll . . .’

  He was leaning over her now, the travel-smell of him filling her lungs. It felt very good to be held, to be kissed, but . . . She was like an invalid, she thought; after the last week or two she needed a little convalescence, a gentle recovery.

  ‘Stop,’ she said again. ‘Not now. Not just yet.’

  Daniel drew his eyebrows together, half serious and half teasing.

  ‘Talk to me, then,’ he said.

  ‘What about?’

  ‘About anything. Tell me about France.’

  ‘I haven’t exactly seen much of France.’

  Kitty smiled, and then she took his hand, holding it against her cheek. ‘Daniel, I’m happy to – I wish it meant more, but I’m happy to give him to you,’ she said.

  ‘Henry?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You don’t mean that,’ he said, ‘and I don’t expect it. I’m just happy to have you.’

  Kitty felt her eyes pricking with unexpected, inexplicable tears.

  ‘Oh, Kitty.’ Daniel moved his hand, gently, to wipe a tear off her cheek. ‘I’m glad to know who my father was, but I can’t feel anything more than that. I never met him.’

  ‘You did,’ Kitty said. ‘Him and me. With your mother.’

  Daniel stared at her, and Kitty felt another reversal of emotion: a sudden awareness of his being alone in the world, of her knowing so much more than he did.

  ‘When he took me out on Saturdays,’ she said, ‘to the park, or the zoo – you and your mother were there, sometimes.’

  ‘Do you really remember that?’ Daniel asked. ‘You must have been very young.’

  ‘Four, maybe. The time I ran away – remember that story? – I did it because you were there, and I was jealous.’

  Kitty felt a little breathless now.

  ‘You can’t be sure,’ Daniel said. ‘It could have been anyone. A friend.’

  ‘I’m sure,’ Kitty said. ‘A woman with long dark hair and a little boy. I remember Henry picking him up.’

  ‘Well, so,’ said Daniel. ‘But I don’t remember, and when she died, he didn’t see me again.’

  ‘That was wrong,’ said Kitty. ‘Whatever his reasons, it was wrong. But I don’t want –’

  She stopped, looking at him again, every detail of his face so familiar that she couldn’t disentangle the elements of it.

  ‘Kitty,’ Daniel said, ‘what I’ve blamed him for most is making it impossible for me to have you, and now that’s gone away I honestly . . .’ He hesitated. ‘I’ve done fine all these years with an invisible father who gave me money and nothing else, and now I’ve got a dead father with a name and a face. It’s you who . . . You’ve lost your father twice over.’ He reached out a hand to her again, tentatively this time. ‘I know I’m a poor substitute.’

  ‘You’re not,’ Kitty said. ‘You’re really not. You’re more than I deserve.’

  ‘So then marry me,’ Daniel said.

  ‘What?’

  Kitty pulled away before she could stop herself. She could see from the expression on his face that Daniel regretted those words, but whether he regretted his impulsiveness or the impulse itself she couldn’t tell. Her own reaction dismayed her. Surely now – they’d come through a test, she thought, worthy of The Magic Flute. Worthy of Tristan and Isolde. She’d wanted him with her, in the wake of all the drama: shouldn’t that have swept away even the tiniest fragments of doubt and reservation? But looking up at him again, she suddenly saw how much he looked like Henry – his expression, just now, exactly Henry’s. For an instant she saw Henry looking at Flora, loving, concerned, amused. Untrustworthy. Oh God. Her heart accelerated with the terror of analogy: Flora had fallen for Henry and she had fallen for Henry’s son. Oh God, oh God. Had she deceived herself horribly? Got Daniel here on false pretences? That surge of joy when she’d realised she could have Daniel back – was that all bound up with Henry too?

  For a moment they just looked at each other, then Daniel smiled, raised an eyebrow, and laid a finger on her nose as if to forgive her for misreading a jest. Her heart beating furiously, Kitty dragged her gaze away from him and stared out of the window. She could see the garden from here, a view of it from above, waiting in the sunshine: the intricate, laborious arrangement of box and lavender and rose, the little paths between them and the places to sit. Life was horribly complicated, she thought. More complicated for them, despite Landon, and that was all very raw, still. Perhaps it was just a question of taking a deep breath and trusting that things would work out; that you’d find a way through. Perhaps the trick was not to let the complications stop you trying.

  ‘I’m glad you’ve come, Daniel,’ she said. ‘I’m glad you’re here. But I need you need to give me a bit of time.’

  ‘Of course,’ he said. He looked relieved: there was a hint of vulnerability about him, a rare glimpse of uncertainty that moved her deeply. Henry had abandoned him, Kitty thought. The least she could do was give him a chance.

  55

  It was almost more than Flora could bear, seeing one daughter happy and the other miserable. It was true that Kitty’s happiness since Daniel’s arrival had been more muted than she’d expected – but, deducing that there had been some kind of difficulty between them, Flora was wise enough to know that it was unlikely to evaporate overnight, whatever resolution they might have reached. There was something about the two of them that gave her pause – something that niggled at her, when she saw them together – but nonetheless it was Lou who occupied most of Flora’s thoughts during the day or two when they all waited for Alice’s letter, and Lou’s endurance began to falter.

  At breakfast on the second day after Daniel’s arrival, when the letter should have come but had not, Flora resolved to take action.

  ‘What about an outing today?’ she asked.

  ‘That’s a good idea.’ Lou didn’t quite manage a smile, but her gloom seemed to shift a little, at least. ‘I was reading last night about the château of Montallon. I found a leaflet. It looks interesting: there’s a maze.’

  ‘Oh, a maze!’ Kitty’s face lit up. ‘Let’s definitely go there.’

  Montallon, of all places. Flora nodded, trying not to let her dismay show. ‘I’ve been to Montallon,’ she said. ‘It is interesting.’

  ‘Oh, well, if you’ve already seen it –’ Lou began, but Flora shook her head.

  ‘You three go,’ she said. ‘I’ll stay here. I’ve got some emails to catch up on. I haven’t quite shaken off the last vestiges of the NHS yet.’

  Kitty began to demur too, but Flora raised a hand to stop her.

  ‘Really,’ she said. ‘You can take my car. Go. Enjoy yourselves.’

  *

  An hour later, Flora stared after the departing car with a flare of panic. Surely she hadn’t meant to send them all away? She’d lost the discipline of solitude, this last week. What could she do with herself for an entire day?

  For a while she drifted through the empty house, as though searching for somebody who might have stayed behind after all; searching in vain for an explanation for her perversity. Passing the door of the sitting room, she went in on impulse and sat down at the desk to check her email, hating herself for her lack of resources.

  There was nothing from her usual correspondents. Lou and Kitty were here, of course, and the traffic from her colleagues had dwindled steadily. Martin had written several times, rather formal emails with some clearly flagged purpose: a list of local restaurants, or a description of something in the garden that should be flourishing
just now. Looking back over his correspondence, Flora remembered his frown across the table at the end of their farewell dinner. There had at least been some nicety about that parting, she thought. Landon had seemed to feel nothing at all. How could she have imagined there was any prospect of appealing to that closely guarded heart? We both deserved it, he’d said. She should have listened more carefully. She should have slept with him when they were both sixteen and got it out of her system for good. But then there would have been no Kitty, and how could she ever regret that?

  She scrolled on resolutely through the ranks of spam messages, deleting them one by one. And then something caught her eye: there, as though summoned by her casual reference to the NHS at breakfast, was an invitation to review an article for a surgical journal. Fuelled by idle curiosity and a fleeting waft of nostalgia, Flora clicked the link to read the paper’s abstract.

  A world she had almost forgotten rose up before her: a world of ethics committees and randomised controlled trials and the painstaking design of surgical equipment, as well as the blood-and-guts reality of the operating theatre. A world she had turned her back on, she told herself firmly, but before she could stop herself she had clicked the ‘accept’ button and downloaded the full paper.

  For the next twenty minutes she read, with ghoulish fascination, an account of a multi-centre trial that she could see almost at once was flawed. Too bad, she thought, for all that time and money, all those months of human life, to be wasted on a study that couldn’t advance the cause of science as it hoped because the recruitment of subjects had been badly managed, and the results were therefore hopelessly biased. Useless, in fact. Why had no one scrutinised the methodology more closely before they started?

  But might it be possible . . .?

  Flora had become, over the years, a proficient statistician. She grabbed a piece of paper and started skimming through the pages of text looking for numbers and details, making calculations. The results were certainly dramatic. Even with a weighty adjustment for selection bias they might still be significant, and worth a public airing.

  But then she stopped. She stared out of the window at the blunt tops of the pollarded lime trees that flanked the front of the house, the heat hanging over them like a glaze. For a moment she had no idea what she was doing here. What – dragging her attention back to it – she was doing with this research paper, specifically. Was she being a wise elder, or a sentimental has-been? She pushed back her chair and went out into the garden. She was like a recovering addict, she thought, with a stab of amusement: one brief exposure to the old ways risked undermining the careful construct of her new life.

  It was almost noon. The sun streamed through the vines on the terrace, throwing a wallpaper pattern across the back of the house. For a few minutes Flora surveyed the flowerbeds she had weeded, the lawn she had watered, the hedges she had clipped with Martin’s secateurs. She’d better write to the editors of the journal and tell them she couldn’t do the review after all. But then the paper might be reviewed by someone who would pass it without noticing the errors – or by someone who would reject it out of hand because of them. Damn and blast: why the hell had she opened it?

  Perhaps, said the devil’s advocate in the corner of her mind, because she needed to be needed, and it was easy to be persuaded that the world of medicine needed her. Because she could perfectly well go back to teaching or research, if not to the operating theatre, at the end of the summer. And what else did she plan to do, exactly? She might have thought she was feeling her way towards an answer to that question a week ago, but now . . .

  Flora sighed, tipping back her head to let the dappled sunshine play over her face. It was vexing, the way her perspective shifted so capriciously. She’d sent her daughters away today, then wished she hadn’t. She’d congratulated herself, not so long ago, on establishing a life for herself at Les Violettes, but lately she’d felt her stay here had amounted to nothing at all. The fairytale ending she didn’t know she’d hoped for wasn’t to be, and she couldn’t stay in this sunny garden forever, keeping company with the chortling fountain and the simmering bees. Perhaps this paper had been sent, with pinpoint timing, to make her think again about the future.

  Someone had suggested, after Henry’s funeral, that she might go abroad, work for a medical charity somewhere, and she knew they’d thought it uncharitable of her to reject the idea out of hand. Oddly, though, it wasn’t so much a matter of arrogance as of humility: Flora was well aware of her limitations. She could hardly go to sub-Saharan Africa to operate on the gastro-oesophageal junction, and it was years since she’d ventured far beyond the small intestine. She’d become too expert to be useful – not just as a surgeon, but as a person. That was what she’d thought at the time. The narrowness of her focus, the clarity of her purpose in life, had left her ill-equipped for anything else.

  A little breeze wafted towards her, bringing with it the scent of the Mediterranean shrubs against the far wall; bringing, too, a waft of comfort. That light-footed association of ideas – the leap from the professional to the personal – had less conviction now, she conceded. She had learned something this summer, after all, about her capacities as mother and friend and – yes, even lover. She might not be an expert in any of those fields, but she wasn’t completely inept, either. There was surely a future for her that didn’t involve a retreat, a falling-back on what she knew best.

  The paper was still open on her laptop, and she knew that she’d do the responsible thing: she would write a detailed report, setting out the problems with the methodology and suggesting how the data might be analysed to yield more reliable results, and then she would hand it back to the editors. She would do her bit, this time, for the furtherance of scientific knowledge, but she would not do it again.

  *

  The front doorbell rang just as she was finishing. It would be Francine, Flora supposed, bringing more rhubarb or a report on the Swiss visitors, and her spirits rose. Francine had a way of appearing when she needed a diversion.

  But it wasn’t Francine this time. Standing on the doorstep, and looking more than a little worse for wear, was Martin Carver.

  ‘Martin!’ Flora could keep neither the surprise nor the pleasure out of her voice. ‘You look as though you’ve driven through the night.’

  ‘Not quite. Very early ferry, then straight down.’

  Flora gazed at him, anticipating the little thrill of presenting him to the others, later on, and they to him. Reinforcements, she thought. Evidence of some kind, or affirmation. She couldn’t resist a surge of gratification.

  ‘Come in,’ she said. ‘The others are all out, but – I’ve got quite a houseful, actually. My daughters are both here, and Kitty’s boyfriend, but they –’

  She broke off: something in his face raised a warning.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I should have rung.’

  Flora stared at him, trying to decipher his expression. Stupid, she thought, to rush in, rush on, like that. ‘What’s the matter?’ she asked. ‘Has something happened?’

  ‘Actually, it has,’ he said. ‘Claude Abelard’s had a heart attack. He – I’ve come to . . .’

  His voice trailed off then, but that was enough; the rest Flora could deduce. It wasn’t her he’d come to see, but Francine. That would be fine, a commendable service for an old friend, except that it was painfully clear that even this brief conversation with Flora was making him deeply uncomfortable. It came to Flora in a giddy rush that she should never have underestimated the decades of history Martin had dismissed so lightly when he spoke of Francine.

  Come on, she told herself; brace up. What possible reason was there for thinking that Martin would drive five hundred miles, without advance warning, to see her? She couldn’t, surely, have nurtured subconscious hopes about this man at the same time as stumbling upon a lifelong passion for another? The score had always been perfectly clear with Martin: a dalliance, no more.

  ‘I saw Claude a couple of days a
go in the village,’ she said, her tone assiduously professional. ‘Poor Francine. Is he in a bad way?’

  She knew the answer to that question before she asked it – why else would Martin be here, if not to claim Francine back when widowhood released her?

  ‘It’s touch and go, I gather.’ Martin was still standing outside. ‘I should have rung,’ he said again, ‘but could I possibly –’

  ‘Of course.’ Flora stepped back from the door. ‘I’m sorry. What would you like: a shower? Something to eat? The others will be back soon; the girls and Daniel. We could all . . .’

  A stricken expression crossed his face again, and despite herself Flora was touched. He hadn’t meant to hurt her feelings, she thought. He’d hoped to avoid that. ‘It’s your house, after all,’ she went on, her voice less brisk.

  ‘You’re very kind,’ he said. ‘I’d better get up to the hospital. I might stay with – but would you mind if I took a key, so that . . .’

  Flora turned away. Really, she thought, she ought to be inured to this sort of thing: the discomfiture, and the dark humour of it. At least Henry had managed himself less clumsily. There was somehow less shame in being duped by a man who took the trouble to cultivate some expertise in it. She was grateful that no one else was here to witness her humiliation.

  ‘Please,’ she said, ‘make yourself at home.’

  56

  When she had finished reading the letter, Lou folded it carefully and put it back in the envelope. It was written on the thick cartridge paper Alice used for sketching, and felt plumply substantial – more like a medieval peace treaty than a twenty-first century lover’s account of her history.

  The others had vanished the moment the postman handed the letter over, and Lou had taken it into the garden. She wondered now whether they were waiting inside, or whether they’d all gone out somewhere. She couldn’t have said whether she wanted company or not, but the sense of finding herself in an unexpected place was accentuated by the silence and the stillness. It was as if this garden, enclosed by its high walls, could have been anywhere, set down on a far-off planet or at the edge of a foreign sea. Perhaps if she opened that locked door at the back she would walk out into the road that ran past Veronica Villa, or even into the dusty yard of the farm a hundred miles north-west of Des Moines where Alice was now.