‘Do you know about this?’ Calum’s voice sharpened. ‘Who was she?’
Jane shook her head. She was overwhelmed by a sudden sense of betrayal. ‘She was a gypsy girl your father knew when he was a boy.’ She paused, remembering suddenly the spread of black hair on his pillow. ‘He and Liza got it fixed in their heads that she had put a gypsy curse on them. Years go by and we don’t hear anything about her, and then something reminds your father or Liza and suddenly they get all superstitious again and start making signs against the evil eye all over the place. Take no notice, Calum.’
Calum was watching his mother through narrowed eyes, able to read her with no trouble at all. ‘You’re worried about her too.’
She shook her head. ‘Not really. No one truly believes in that sort of stuff. It’s superstition. Complete nonsense.’
‘It certainly is. For God’s sake, Mum, you don’t seriously think Dad believes it? I can imagine Liza getting all sucked up in that sort of thing, and Julie, she’s really into all that sort of weird stuff – vibes –’ he waved his arms above his head and fluttered his hands – ‘but not Dad. He’s a doctor!’
‘And science knows it all.’ Jane smiled faintly.
‘Well of course it does. We’re civilised now. I sometimes think Julie’s a bit nuts.’ His fond smile contradicted the words immediately. ‘But she’ll come round.’
Jane raised an eyebrow. ‘You mustn’t try to change her, Calum. That would be a disastrous start to a relationship. Just as she mustn’t try to change you. I know you love each other, but you could be chalk and cheese.’
Calum laughed. ‘Rubbish.’ He flung his arms round her and whirled her round till she was breathless. ‘Silly old Mum! You wait and see. We’ll have the happiest marriage ever!’
Jane was sitting companionably in Adam’s study, sewing, when he at last got round to telephoning Ivor Furness again. ‘I can’t think what the man wanted so urgently. He hasn’t rung back.’ He sat with the receiver to his ear. ‘I’ll try once more and then I’d better get back to the surgery.’
Jane sat back and broke off a thread. She patted her handiwork and held it at arm’s length to admire it before reaching down into her basket for another reel of cotton. ‘Do you want me to leave? Is it confidential?’
He shrugged, listening to the line ringing the other end. ‘I’ve no idea. It must be about some patient or the other, I suppose.’ He paused as the phone was picked up the other end.
‘Dr Furness? This is Adam Craig. I understand you have been trying to reach me?’
There was a moment of silence. Adam was not to know that Ivor Furness had stood up and edged round the desk, carefully looping the telephone flex over the piles of books and folders on his blotter in order to stare out of the window. It was a reflex action as though trying to make sure that Brid was outside. She wasn’t. He wasn’t sure where she was but he always had the strange feeling that she knew what he was doing and worse, that she knew all the time what he was thinking.
‘I wanted to talk to you about one of our patients, Dr Craig. Her name is Brid.’
Adam stood for a moment, stunned into silence, then he sat down slowly and put his elbow on the desk, instinctively turning a little away from Jane as she glanced up at him.
‘We have the woman here as an in-patient, and she claims to know you – or at least she claims to know a Dr Adam Craig. I don’t have a full name for her, but she is young – early twenties I should say – attractive, long dark hair.’
‘Early twenties you say?’ Adam felt a rush of relief. He hadn’t realised he was holding his breath. ‘I knew someone of that name once, or a name like it.’ Perhaps he had misheard. ‘But the age is wrong. She would have been in her forties I should say, by now.’
Attractive. Long dark hair. Brid.
‘So, you don’t know her?’
Slowly Adam shook his head. ‘No. I’m afraid not.’
‘What did he want to know?’ Jane asked as he hung up. In spite of his obvious relief, his face was ashen.
He shrugged. ‘Oh, a patient they are trying to identify. For some reason she had my name.’
‘And you didn’t know who it was?’
‘No. Never come across her.’
‘Perhaps there is another Dr Craig.’
He nodded. ‘Perhaps there is.’
He sat for a moment looking at her. Dear, sweet, comfortable Jane who was always there for him, always supportive, always cheerful no matter how tired or irritable he got. He loved her so much, and yet … He bit his lip, wondering suddenly how long it had been since they had last made love. That was the trouble with the twin beds, you didn’t roll into each other’s arms by accident. You didn’t find one another embracing for comfort, for warmth, for security, or even just because the dip in the middle of the bed precipitated you, in memory of earlier, more passionate encounters, into each other’s orbit. You just went to bed, too tired sometimes to stand up a moment longer, just glad that the day was over, and crashed out without a thought for the other human being on the far side of the bedside table.
The thought of the bedside table made him glance down at his desk drawer. He really must take the amulet to be mended. He pushed the memory of Brid’s dark hair, her passionate lips, out of his head. When he looked up, his eyes focused on the wall in front of him, his brain had started to work again.
A girl in her twenties. Young enough to be Brid’s daughter. But not his. Surely not.
He glanced at Jane again and then slowly standing up he tore the page with Dr Furness’s number off his pad and put it into his pocket. He went over to her and stooped to drop a kiss on the top of her head. ‘I’m off, darling. I’ve got a late surgery this evening, so don’t wait supper. I’ll grab a sandwich when I get back.’
Jane sat where she was for several minutes after she heard the front door bang behind him, then she put down her sewing and stood up. She went over to his desk and looked down at the pad. Every instinct screamed at her that something was wrong. She had seen the sudden stillness of his body as he spoke to Dr Furness, the whiteness of the knuckles on the black telephone receiver, the defensive posture as he turned away from her as though by doing so he could blank out her presence in the small room. This had not been an impersonal call about a patient. This was something that had touched him deeply.
Twenty-five. If he and Brid had had a child she would be twenty-five. Adam sat in his office at the surgery, staring at the packet of notes referring to his first patient. Outside the waiting room was full. He could hear a rasping cough going on and on in the background. A daughter? A daughter by Brid? His brain kept returning to the thought of his bed at home, to the dreams, the fantasies, when she came to him and tormented him with her beauty and her passion. He reached for the telephone – he would call Dr Furness back, perhaps go and see the young woman – then he pushed it away again to the very edge of the desk. That would be madness.
Madness.
Why was the girl in a mental hospital at all?
Because she was the child of a different world, out of time, out of place? But why was she called Brid?
He shook his head slowly and began to pull the wadded notes out of their envelope. Now was not the time to think about her.
‘I think Julie is going to fail her exams, Mum.’ In the kitchen Calum was eating the final portion of shepherd’s pie out of the dish as she cleared the table.
‘Calum, that was your father’s!’
‘He won’t eat it. You know he won’t. He’s always too tired when he comes in. I mean it, Mum. She says you don’t need exams to be an artist.’
Jane sighed. She went back to her place and sat down opposite him. ‘Does Liza know how she feels?’
Calum shrugged. ‘I don’t think so. Julie doesn’t care. She’s going to travel round the world. She’s going to paint and swim and explore for a year or two before she settles down.’
‘I see.’ She knew what was coming.
‘I think that’s a b
rilliant idea. After all, one can always go to university afterwards. Loads of people take a year before they go up.’
‘Provided they have brilliant exam results.’
‘Oh yeah, of course.’ He shrugged again. ‘That goes without saying.’
‘Does it, Calum?’ She fixed him with a gaze of such intensity that he looked away.
‘Don’t let her distract you too much, Calum. Julie is a bit of a tomboy, darling. I know you love her, and I’m sure you can both settle down fine, but she’s wild. She doesn’t know what it is to have a vocation like you.’
‘Have I?’
‘Yes, Calum. You have.’ Where was Adam when she needed him? ‘Just get your exams first, then you can do a bit of travelling.’ It was only three months until his A levels. Please God let him get through those.
She washed the dishes and dried up. It was her contribution to the exam effort. It allowed him to disappear upstairs and turn on his radio or put on some records full blast and, according to him, revise. Some nights a friend would come over and they would work – that was what they called it – together. Other nights he would go over to Roger’s house, or to Paul’s or Mark’s and a reciprocal arrangement was entered into. Every night, after school before revision, Julie rang and they would talk in whispers for what seemed like hours. She had learned now to bring supper forward. It interrupted the flow, put a damper on the endless exchanges of endearments and plans.
Pulling off her rubber gloves she hung them on the side of the sink and sighed. A few more months and he would be gone. Off to travel, off to university, off to his new life as a grown man. Then what would she do? She had thought about it a lot. Cook and housekeeper for Adam; was that her destiny for the rest of her life, with occasional coffee mornings with Sarah Harding, whose no doubt well-meaning interference was still sometimes more than she could bear, as the only relief to the monotony? It was depressing. As depressing as when she sat down at her dressing table and stared at her reflection, noting the newly appearing wrinkles, the sagging at her jaw line, the expression of exhausted defeat on her face. She could see her own mother’s face when she looked in the mirror and the thought didn’t please her. Her mother had been a good-looking woman, and a strong character, busy and bossy. She thought back to when she was a child and her father had more and more often taken refuge on the golf course. Adam did that now. Was that because she and her mother were destined to follow parallel paths of duty and sacrifice and, in her case, terminal boredom?
She turned off the lights and made her way upstairs. The noise from Calum’s room was less boisterous than usual. She could hear the mournful notes of a Bob Dylan ballad echoing sadly down the landing as she pushed open her bedroom door and went in.
Walking over to her dressing table, she picked up a hair brush and glanced in the mirror at the reflection of the bed. A woman was sitting there watching her, a young woman in a blue, ill-fitting dress. A young woman with beautiful long dark hair and silver-grey eyes.
With a cry Jane swung round. ‘Where did you come from? Who the devil are you?’ Her heart was thundering in her chest and she had to bite back the scream that was rising in her throat.
The young woman had not moved. ‘I come to see A-dam.’ She had a strange accent, pronouncing his name as if it were foreign and exotic.
‘You came to see my husband,’ Jane accentuated the word possessively, ‘and you wait for him sitting on his bed?’
‘Of course.’ The grey eyes narrowed provocatively. ‘You are no use to A-dam. He loves me. He has always loved me.’
Brid. You are Brid!
She wasn’t sure if she had said the words out loud. This was a dream. It had to be a dream. If she counted to ten she would wake up. She swallowed, strengthening her grip on the brush. ‘Look, young lady, I don’t know why you want to see Adam, but you can come back in the daytime when he is at home. I want you to leave now.’
The young woman smiled. ‘I have come often to visit A-dam in his bed. I make love to him. I make him cry out with pleasure.’ She ran her hand suggestively over her thigh. ‘He does not love you any more.’ She licked her lips. ‘Why did you take him away from his Liza? He loved her.’
‘He loved me!’ Jane heard herself cry out indignantly. ‘That is enough. You little hussy, go away! Do you hear? Go away! I don’t know who you are or what you’re doing here, but you must go away. Now!’
The young woman stood up slowly, uncurling from her position on the bed with a cat-like grace which made Jane stiffen. It’s a dream. I know it’s a dream. Then why can’t I wake up? ‘Get out!’
Brid shook her head. ‘I don’t think so. I don’t like you.’ She stepped towards Jane, as she did so feeling inside the embroidered bag Jane had noticed she wore across her shoulders. As Jane watched, horrified, the young woman brought out a small silver knife.
‘Oh no!’ Dropping the brush, Jane whirled round and grabbed the first thing that came to hand on her dressing table – a metal nail file. Out of the corner of her eye she saw Brid coming, knife upraised. Panic-stricken, she turned and lunged back at her, catching the young woman’s shoulder with the sharp blade.
Brid let out a screech. With a hiss of pain she shot past Jane and out of the door.
‘Mum?’ Calum had flung open his door and hurled himself along the landing. ‘Mum, what on earth is the matter? Where did that cat come from? Oh Mum, it scratched you!’ He stood in the doorway, his eyes round with horror. In the interval between changing one record for the next he had heard the commotion and the scream through his bedroom door.
Jane sat down heavily on the dressing table stool. She was shaking like a leaf. Blood dripped from a long narrow scratch on her forearm.
‘I’ll get the first aid stuff.’ Calum ran back to his room and returned within seconds. ‘It’s not a bad scratch.’ He dabbed at it with some Dettol. ‘Here, let me find a dressing.’ As a potential doctor, he had all the right things neatly locked in a cupboard in his room. Jane doubted if there were any other first aid things in the house – doctors’ families did not often fare well in that department. Trying to steady herself she was looking at the bed. There was no crease on the cover where the woman had sat. The only sign that she had been there was the long angry scratch on her own arm.
‘You did see the cat?’ She smiled shakily at Calum.
‘Of course I saw it.’
‘It was real?’
‘Mum?’ He put his hand on her forehead professionally. ‘I think you’re in shock.’
She gave a weak smile and shook her head. ‘No. Just a bit shaken, that’s all. You didn’t see a woman up here?’
‘A woman?’ Now she knew he thought she had gone mad.
‘No, of course not. I’m sorry, darling. The truth is I fell asleep and I was dreaming, then this wretched cat came in and gave me a fright.’ She took a grip on herself with an effort.
It wasn’t until Calum had gone back to his maths books that she went downstairs again. She searched the house and checked that all the doors and windows were locked. They were, as she had known they would be at this time of night. Then she went to Adam’s study and opened the bottom drawer in his desk. She took out the broken amulet tree, still in its paper wrapping, and carried the pieces upstairs. Broken or not it was going back on the table between their beds.
It was evening when Nurse Wilkins rang Ivor Furness with the information that Brid was once more in some sort of coma. If she was in a coma, perhaps she was travelling.
‘It was when I checked that she was asleep, Doctor. Her eyes were open and she was smiling.’ Deborah Wilkins turned and followed him as he strode towards the ward and waited for her to unlock the door. ‘She is in bed now, and seems to be asleep, but I still cannot wake her.’
Brid was indeed in bed. He could see the hump of her shoulder beneath the sheet, the spread of her hair on the pillow.
He hesitated. Supposing she was not yet back in her body? Then he shook his head. For goodness’ sake, he was being
a credulous fool. In his own private study of this strange, enigmatic woman he must not at any point allow himself to be led to believe her passionate explanation of her exploits.
‘Brid!’ Gently he shook her shoulder. Deborah Wilkins pursed her lips as she stood behind him.
‘Brid, wake up.’ He was almost whispering.
For a moment he thought she was not going to respond, then slowly she opened her eyes and stared at him. It took several seconds for him to see recognition there, then she smiled. ‘Dr Furness?’
‘Hello, Brid.’ He turned. ‘Thank you, Nurse. You may go.’
Nurse Wilkins stared at him and for a moment he saw the hostility in her gaze, then she turned and flounced down the ward where most of the other patients were already asleep. He waited until she had closed the door at the end behind her, then he turned back to Brid. ‘Do you remember we said we would talk about your visits to Dr Craig?’
She nodded. He saw the slyness in her eyes as she turned over onto her back to look at him. He also saw her wince. ‘What is it, Brid? Are you hurt?’
For a moment he thought she was going to deny it, then he saw the slight shrug. ‘My shoulder hurts.’
‘May I see?’ He paused, watching for a nod of agreement, then gently he folded back the sheet. She was still fully clothed, and her dress was stained with blood. ‘Brid, you’ve cut yourself.’ Folding back the dress at the neck he saw the deep stab wound with a sense of complete unreality. ‘We’ll have to clean that up, it looks deep.’ He glanced at her face. ‘How did it happen?’
He expected her to prevaricate so it was with amazement that he heard her proclaim without any hesitation, ‘It was A-dam’s woman. Jane. She stabbed me with the little knife she had on her table.’ She snorted with derision. ‘A stupid little weapon; something for children. But she stopped me. I would have killed her. She is no good for A-dam. No good at all. He needs me there.’
Ivor Furness took a deep breath. This woman had been locked in her ward. She had been nowhere, certainly not miles away in St Albans.
On the Edge of Darkness Page 28