by Peter James
Georgie looked at Roger then back at Kath. ‘What do you recommend in your experience?’
‘Well, it’s such a personal choice, Georgie. Knowing helps you plan, for instance the colour of your baby’s room, clothes, things like that. And, of course, the name.’
‘We’ll have a chat and let you know.’
‘What we can do is put it in a sealed envelope and give it to you. Did you know this? Then if you change your minds at any time, you can open it and find out, with reasonable certainty. Also, Roger, I think you might find it helpful to attend our Expectant Fathers programme. I’ll grab you a brochure on it. There are also a number of websites you can both take a look at – one’s called What To Expect. And ask me anything whenever you want, guys – you know I’m here on a professional basis but I’m always on the end of the phone for you.’
A few minutes later, hugging Kath Clow and thanking the midwife profusely, Roger held the door and Georgie walked out into the corridor.
As the two of them headed towards the exit, Marcus Valentine, in blue scrubs, happened to see them from the far end of the corridor. Unable to stop himself, he followed them, at a safe distance, past a hand sanitizer, a noticeboard and then the antenatal nursing station, where a row of thank-you cards hung on a rail outside.
The happy couple stopped at the lift. He watched from a distance as they looked lovingly into each other’s eyes. Holding hands. Georgie whispered something to him, and Roger kissed her.
They looked so excited. It reminded him of when he and Claire were first expecting. Happy times. Georgie was really – as they say – blooming. Pregnancy suited her. Roger was such a lucky man.
The thought was eating Marcus up inside.
23
Wednesday 19 December
As the lift doors closed, Marcus Valentine chided himself.
Got to stop this. Now.
Ridiculous!
Snap out of it!
He’d seen what affairs had done to his parents’ marriage and remembered the vow he’d made long ago not to be like them.
Don’t let history repeat itself. Appreciate what you have. A wife and three young children who all need you. Now is not the time for having thoughts about straying. Just think of the grief if it happened. This could fuck up your whole career. He reminded himself of the mantra, Success is not getting what you want – it is wanting what you have.
Putting Georgie Maclean out of his mind, he focused on his busy day ahead in theatre. First up was a very charming Jersey lady, the mother of a three-year-old boy he’d delivered by C-section. It had been her first child and she was planning to have a large family, she’d told him. But the unfortunate woman had been suffering ever since from constant vaginal bleeding due to severe endometriosis, and a hysterectomy was the only real solution. He felt for her.
Life’s a bitch.
After Marina was an induction for another lady suffering acute symptoms of pre-eclampsia. And waiting in the wings was a woman in her early thirties with a potential breech birth. He would try to turn the foetus to head-first by external cephalic version if still showing breech on scan. But if that did not work, she would also require a caesarean.
It was a short list. If there were no complications.
Which might see him getting home in daylight. In time to go for a run. A nice early run, maybe swinging by the gym and catching a glimpse of Georgie again, and finally going in this time.
Or perhaps just look up her activity on RunMaster? And check out the results of the race he missed last night on the running club page.
The thought put him in such a good mood that he didn’t challenge the operating theatre team’s choice of heavy metal for today – music he normally avoided.
Riding on razor’s edge . . .
Holding out his hands for the scrub nurse he thought about Georgie again. You and me? Riding on a razor’s edge?
24
Wednesday 19 December
Three hours later, after he had finished in theatre and changed back into his consultant’s uniform of suit, shirt and tie, ID card hung from a red cord around his neck, Marcus was ravenous. It was 3 p.m. He bought a cheese and ham sandwich, a Twix and a bottle of water from the cafeteria counter and carried them up to his office. There was a pile of letters on his desk which his assistant, Eileen, had put there for him to sign.
Carefully placing his jacket on a hanger behind the door, he moved the pile out of his way, then began working on the plastic wrapping of his sandwich. He put the sandwich on a plate and cut it into quarters. As he did so he was interrupted by his registrar wanting advice on a patient, a woman who was presenting with problems. She and her partner had been trying to conceive through IVF for five years, and she was now twenty-one weeks pregnant with triplets. Marcus looked at her notes then agreed to come and see her in half an hour in the Antenatal ward.
‘I hope you don’t mind me bothering you while you’re having your lunch,’ Cardigan went on, irritating Marcus, who just wanted to get on with his sandwich. ‘Isn’t that Resmes a bit intense with his patients? He’s always got his head in his books and he hardly speaks to me, do you find that, too? I’m starting to get a complex!’
‘He’s fine with me, and that’s the second time you’ve mentioned it. What have you got against him?’ Marcus asked.
‘Oh, nothing, but he always listens to you, yet it’s like he doesn’t hear or respect me. Perhaps it’s just a clash of personality. And he doesn’t find my chart funny.’
They both walked over to the other side of the office. Fixed to one wall, high up, was a rack of shelves containing a neatly stacked row of folders and essential medical reference books. On another wall was a whiteboard on which several notices were attached by coloured magnets. Below these were fixed a collection of thank-you cards from happy patients.
To their right was a graph that Cardigan had obtained from a New York psychiatrist who had given a paper on parenthood at a conference he’d attended a few years ago. It charted the moment a couple first met, rising in steep increments as they fell in love, peaking the day they got married. The line remained at the top of the happiness level right through that first period of their married life, until their first child was born.
Whereupon it plunged down to the very bottom. And remained there before eventually rising sharply again at the twenty-year mark.
The psychiatrist had gaily said that happiness went out of couples’ lives the moment their first child was born and didn’t return until the day that child – and any subsequent children – left home. There would of course be spikes in the interim, every time the child looked into its mother’s or father’s eyes and said, I love you, Mummy/Daddy. At which moment the parents would forget all the shit their lives had become and go completely gooey-eyed. Cynical, he knew, but Cardigan loved the irony of it. And, just occasionally, he took pleasure in pointing it out to expectant parents. He’d pinned this copy up on Marcus’s wall as a gift. And Marcus did actually find it quite funny.
Cardigan left and Marcus finished his lunch. He wheeled his chair back up to his desk and placed his long fingers – his ‘pianist’s fingers’ as his mother had often told him, through a haze of alcohol – on his keyboard, logging on to his computer. There were several emails which needed immediate responses. He dealt with them.
Then he hesitated.
Pondering. Hesitating again.
Should I be doing this?
The boss inside his head said, Yes, you should! You have to, they are your friends.
The boss that sometimes took control, whether he liked it or not.
But he was thinking, wary of leaving an audit trail. Some while ago, he’d seen Kath Clow entering her password and he’d chided her for using her date of birth instead of something more secure. He wondered if she had changed it – with luck, she would have forgotten.
She had.
He entered it and was in. It took him only a matter of seconds to find her file on Georgina Maclean. He read Geor
gie’s estimated due date. Her blood pressures. The supplements she was on. And all the rest of her notes.
Just looking after your welfare, guys. Two heads are better than one!
Thoughts went through his mind. All kinds of thoughts.
He told himself to stop. Enough. Log out. Forget it. Let it go.
But the boss chided him. Taunted him.
You can’t, Marcus, can you?
25
Wednesday 19 December
After leaving the hospital, Roger hurried off to the airport for a flying lesson that had been booked with him for the last hour of full daylight. Georgie headed to the gym, where she had wall-to-wall clients for the next four hours. She felt so excited, she wanted to share the news with all of them.
So far, she and Roger had only told their close family and friends, in case . . .
In case of the unspoken word. Miscarriage.
Kath Clow had told them today that many couples tended to keep it a secret until that first scan, but now if they wanted to shout about it from the rooftops, why not? There were still risks, of course, but those would diminish with every week of the second trimester.
And they would need to decide whether they wanted to know if it was a boy or girl. Maybe Kath was right, knowing it would enable them to make the right choices about the baby’s room. As well as giving them time to focus on the name.
She liked the idea of the envelope and made a mental note to ask Kath for it.
Turning off the main road, she wound up the steep, narrow drive of the hotel. It was lined with tall shrubbery on either side and even on a bright day it felt dark and gloomy, more like the approach to a creepy cottage than to one of the island’s popular tourist hotels.
Cresting the rise, there was a magnificent vista across the bay of St Aubin towards St Helier. And an unimpressive view of the rear car park of the hotel, with the wheelie bin storage shelter and a skip overflowing with building debris, which had sat there all winter so far, as if someone had forgotten it. But right now, she didn’t care, she was in such a great mood. And hey, they would shortly be past 21 December, the shortest day, and it would begin, very gradually, getting lighter again in the evenings. Which would make this place feel slightly less desolate.
She let herself into the freezing gym, switched on the lights and heater, and then the music. Eminem’s ‘Till I Collapse’ began pounding out of the ceiling speakers. Playfully, she flipped all three egg timers over – one minute, three and five – and went into the back room to change into her tracksuit and trainers. Then, with half an hour before her first client, she dutifully started her check of the guest rooms on that floor.
Opening door after door onto the rooms and suites, all with dreary maroon carpets, washed-out candlewick bedspreads and trouser presses awaiting their pensions, she tried to imagine under what circumstances she and Roger would stay here. And couldn’t. It felt like such an old-fashioned seaside resort hotel, compared to so many really great ones the island offered. As she opened Room 211, she heard a cough and it startled her. She’d thought she was here on her own. She looked across in the gloom and saw the stick-thin figure of Edouardo standing in the doorway of the en-suite, staring at her.
‘I didn’t realize you were still here, Edouardo.’
‘I leave now, Miss Georgina. You join me this weekend on jog round the island?’ he asked, jokily, in his thick Portuguese accent.
‘Same answer as always, Edouardo, big N-O, but thanks for the offer.’
‘You fast! You know? You really fast last few runs. I see your times.’
‘You’ve seen my times? How do you know my times?’
‘I follow you.’
‘You do?’
He held up his phone and tapped it. ‘I follow your routes! You do always short, you should do long, like me. Ultramarathon!’
She gave him a slight forced smile. ‘Great. But I’ll stick to my shorter runs. What on earth do you think of for all those miles out there on your own? Over twenty miles some days, right?’
‘I like be with nature, close to God. It give me time to sort the shit in my head.’
‘Do you have a running partner to keep you company? Does your wife like running?’
‘No partner, no wife, marriage doesn’t work. Women change.’
‘Well, that’s quite a statement!’
Then, tapping his head, ‘They tell me things.’
‘Who tells you things?’
He gave a strange smile. ‘They.’
Edouardo was weirding her out again, as he often did.
‘OK, right, I better get on, maybe see you tomorrow,’ she said. ‘I’ve ten more rooms to check tonight.’
He was quite sweet, but Christ, he made her feel uneasy, she thought. As if being here in the dark wasn’t eerie enough.
In the immediate post-war period of the 1950s, as life on Jersey had returned to normal after the harsh years of the German occupation, it had become again the UK’s favourite – and classiest – beach holiday and honeymoon resort. Package holidays and cheap flights to the Costa Brava and elsewhere on continental Europe had changed all that in the 1960s, and Jersey had changed with it, becoming a major financial centre, its hotels forced to sharpen up to the standards expected by the international business community.
But it seemed to Georgie that this hotel was still locked back in a time warp. At least the gym had been modernized, and over this winter all the rooms were going to be updated – although there was little sign of it so far.
She was three-quarters of the way done before she saw through a rear window that her first client, a banker, was arriving, a few minutes late, at 5.05 p.m. Georgie had been intending to share the news of her pregnancy with her, as normally they got on really well and because, in honesty, she wanted to tell the world. But the woman was in a neurotic mood, launching into a monologue about the precociousness of one of her three young – and clearly spoiled – children, and a tirade about a teacher at her school who had totally confused her nine-year-old by trying to explain gender neutrality to her. She was going to kick open the headmaster’s door tomorrow, she threatened darkly, and render the weedy little prat gender neutral himself.
Her next client, an architect who had been going through IVF with his wife for the past two years, arrived at a few minutes to six. Not the moment to share her news with him, either. Then she got an apologetic text from her regular 7 p.m., a woman who worked in financial services, who was stuck in a meeting and wasn’t going to make it.
After the architect had left, the cancellation gave her the time to continue her dutiful weekly inspection of the remaining rooms. It was dark outside now, and despite having a powerful torch as back-up, and switching on every light, she found the long, dimly lit corridors and silent doors unnerving. Especially – ridiculously – the door of Room 237, the same number of the Overlook Hotel room in which, in The Shining, the slime-covered dead woman had climbed out of the bathtub. Here, it was one of the honeymoon suites.
She opened the door with her key card and heard a steady, echoing plop . . . plop . . . plop . . .
Like the dripping-wet woman in the film.
She hesitated, scared suddenly. Should she get Edouardo? But it was well past seven, he would have gone home by now. She snapped on the light and looked around the room, heart in her mouth.
God, I’m a bag of nerves!
She’d read in one of the books on motherhood that pregnancy caused heightened awareness – all part of your genetic programming to help protect your baby. Was that why she was so tense recently?
PLOP . . . PLOP . . . PLOP . . .
The sound was much louder now in the complete silence. Coming from the en-suite bathroom. She walked across, then stopped by the door, which was ajar.
PLOP . . . PLOP . . . PLOP . . .
Louder still. Definitely coming from in here. Plucking up courage, she pulled the door wide open, turned on the light and walked in. And immediately saw the problem. Large droplets of w
ater falling onto the tiled floor from a bulge in the ceiling. A leak or a burst pipe in the roof space above.
She hurried along to Edouardo’s office. The cluttered little room was in darkness – he’d gone for the day, as she had suspected. Pinned to a cork noticeboard on the wall was a list of numbers for tradespeople as well as after-hours emergency services. She dialled the one for plumbing and the woman who answered said she would have someone there within the hour.
She emailed Tom Vautier to alert him, then headed back down to the gym.
As she approached it, she could hear the Black Eyed Peas were playing, ‘I Gotta Feeling’.
She had a feeling. But not a good one. Something was wrong.
The gym was in darkness. She had left the lights on. All of them.
She stopped. How could the lights be off? Had a fuse blown? But music was still on? Frowning, she switched on her torch and stepped forward, flashing the beam around the gym, at the bank of treadmills, the cross-trainers, the racks of weights.
Something moved. Out of the corner of her eye. A figure stepping forward from the darkness.
26
Wednesday 19 December
In the jigging light of her torch she saw a circus clown moving towards her, smiling through thick lipstick. He wore a pointed hat, polka-dot pantaloons and a painted face, and held a small dumbbell in each hand.
She took a step back, trying to scream, but her voice came out in a muted yammer of terror.
Another step back.
‘Miss Georgina, don’t be afraid. Smile! I make you laugh!’
It sounded like Edouardo’s voice.
She aimed the beam at his face, and he put his arms up to shield his eyes. ‘Edouardo?’
‘Yes, Miss Georgina, it’s me, Edouardo!’
She lowered the beam a little. ‘Jesus, you scared the hell out of me.’
