Love Song

by Charlotte Bingham

  The nurse reached up and adjusted the light above Hope’s head so that it did not shine directly into the patient’s eyes, a pair of apparently non-reacting orbs which Dr Teal was holding open with the aid of two small steel fixtures.

  ‘We shall get a proper picture once we get a scan,’ he said, addressing the young doctor who had just been dealing with Jack Tomm. ‘However, I have to say that you are quite right. So far is not so good. There is very little definite physical reaction to light and the surface of the eye would appear to be insensitive to touch. I shall know better when I remove the clamps and test deliberately for involuntary blinking, although such a test is not the be-all and end-all. The system could still be in total shock, as you are possibly aware. Which means these stimuli tests can often be misleading to say the least, and is why a scan will be altogether more revealing. Even so, I doubt if any messages are getting through to the brain. We would certainly have no lung function were we to turn off the ventilator momentarily, as we have already seen – though again that could still be due to shock trauma. That too is standard in such cases. Once the blast wave has passed, so to speak, we often find responses return and the initial damage is nowhere near as severe as originally diagnosed. However, as I say …’

  Carefully he loosened the two eye clamps and eased them out of Hope’s sockets.

  ‘As I say, so far is not so good. I have to confirm your diagnosis and prognosis, and it is, as you surmised, an obvious one. Mrs Merriott has suffered a cerebral embolism, one which has left the right hand side fully paralysed and the left partially. What we will obviously need to confirm for a second time is the damage done to the brain. How much bleeding, how much oxygen deprivation. The good thing is we shall be doing an MRI scan, not a CAT, so we’re going to get a very clear picture indeed.’

  ‘Yes, well, that is something we really are going to need, not just for Mrs Merriott’s boyfriend, poor guy, but for her husband.’

  The specialist stared at the young doctor.

  ‘He is coming this afternoon. Although they are divorcing, or were, but still are. Or whatever.’

  ‘Bit of a muddle—’

  ‘You could say.’

  ‘Nice woman, I should have thought.’

  They both stared momentarily down at their patient and then looked at each other, each knowing without saying what so many patients told their doctors and nurses – namely that the state of the unconscious, for some reason, does not preclude being able to hear.

  Later that afternoon the same doctor who had addressed Jack on the subject of Hope’s machine’s being switched off found himself facing Alexander, newly arrived in Muffin Hatherleigh’s Range Rover. It was a surprise to him to find Mrs Merriott’s husband waiting for him, and as soon as he entered the room he found that he had taken a powerful and irrational dislike to the handsome, self-satisfied man introducing himself as ‘Alexander Merriott, Hope’s soon-to-be, or was soon-to-be-going-to-be ex, you know? But I had to come, had to find out what the prognosis might be, for everyone, myself included, of course.’

  ‘It may help you if we backtrack a little,’ the doctor suggested, looking up from Hope’s notes, once they had shaken hands and sat down again. ‘Do you know whether or not there was any family history of strokes, pulmonary embolism, deep vein thrombosis – anything related like that in your wife’s family?’

  Alexander hardly bothered even to give the question much thought. He simply shook his head and tried to look sufficiently serious.

  ‘Your wife’s blood pressure was apparently perfectly normal throughout the pregnancy, she was a non-smoker, there’s no history of diabetes, or heart disease – none of the usual risk factors.’

  ‘More importantly, doctor, if I may say so,’ Alexander wondered, ‘as well as more pertinently, since there’s no point as I’m sure you know in shutting stable doors once horses have bolted – what precisely is the damage? And the expected span of recovery? If there is a hope of recovery, which I most surely hope there is.’

  ‘We did yet another MRI scan a few hours ago, Mr Merriott, and while we are still looking at it in detail, the prognosis is still not good, I’m afraid.’

  ‘How bad is not good?’

  ‘Mrs Merriott is in a very deep coma, Mr Merriott. There is very little chance that she will ever recover from it.’

  ‘But if she were to?’ Alexander wondered.

  ‘She won’t, Mr Merriott, believe me. She won’t.’

  ‘But miracles have happened and continue to do so.’

  ‘Yes, although I wouldn’t necessarily call them miracles. Medical misunderstandings leading to unexpected results is the way I would put it, Mr Merriott.’

  ‘That at least is honest. Most doctors would rather not admit to misunderstandings.’

  ‘This must be very hard for you to accept, Mr Merriott, I realise that. Very hard indeed.’

  ‘It certainly isn’t easy, doctor,’ Alexander replied. ‘I loved my wife. I don’t like to think of her dead, as I am sure you will appreciate. But of course I have to think of the future of my daughters, I must think of them.’

  There was a small silence as Alexander stared at the doctor who yet again wondered what it was about medicine that brought you into contact with such dilemmas.

  ‘The situation,’ the doctor began again, ‘as I understand it, is obviously pretty complicated, but it cannot be allowed to influence any decision we make in here about your wife.’

  The doctor suddenly saw, and all too clearly for even his peace of mind, that for this self-satisfied man in his cashmere coat and Rolex watch, his crocodile shoes and his hand-made shirt and silk tie, life would be a helluva lot easier if his wife was totally ex. If the machine was switched off. Dead people had very few rights. It would just make things simpler for him, more straightforward somehow. All this technical hanging about for a man like him was irritating. Not more, the doctor would not have thought. Just irritating. Like waiting for his private plane to land or take off.

  ‘If your wife was a divorcée the final decision about the switching off of the machine, the absolute say, would be with her children. As your wife’s heirs, it would be, in law, up to them to say whether or not the machine should be switched off. It is not within the rights of her boyfriend, who has no legal status, but in the circumstances I would have said it is the moral right of those of her daughters who have achieved their majority to say what they want done about their mother, since you are, or were, in the process of divorcing. I should have thought. I mean I am not talking legally here, Mr Merriott, I am talking morally. That is how I would see it. But of course what I am saying is off the record. I am only putting my own spin on things. A lawyer would tell you quite differently, because until you are legally divorced, you are still her husband, and she is still your wife.’

  Following a small pause the doctor nodded at Alexander Merriott, and picking up his notes and clipboard left him.

  How much better was the lover, he thought to himself. And how right poor Hope Merriott had been to leave the one for the other, for the husband was quite simply what his own wife would call ‘not a nice man’.

  For, while the lover was difficult, and hurt, while he was wrecked by his sorrow, he was a complete man, the way, it seemed to the doctor, that a man should be, whereas the husband was at best a lightweight, at worst a destroyer.

  * * *

  Feeling oddly isolated, Alexander went into the room where his wife lay. To Alexander, Hope was already dead, removed from reality, resembling only someone or something he had seen on one of those ever present, absurdly popular hospital series on television.

  He stared at the sight she presented to him. There hardly seemed to be one part of her body which was not wired or tubed to some machine or other – there were tubes into her mouth and her nose, into her arms, and some even running out from under her bedclothes. There were pads with wires on them attached to her throat, her chest and her arms, their leads running up to an array of monitors and other ma
chinery set on various shelves above and away from the bed. From large shiny steel stands hung drips, saline, aqueous and medicinal, Alexander supposed, while wondering All for what?

  For keeping someone who was no longer alive half alive. Just one pull of the plug, one turn of a switch, and the whole pretend business of her being alive would be over. That’s all it would take. Someone just had to switch Hope off and that would be that, there would be no more – anything. Just him and his new life, just fun with Muffin, and forget the rest.

  He sat back on his chair, pushing his long legs out under his wife’s bed. This was one scenario he had not imagined. Death, yes, but not this. For a second he was frightened, because as he stared at her amid all the paraphernalia of late twentieth-century medicine it seemed to him that she moved, or that she was about to move, and he pushed the chair he was seated on backwards suddenly, his heart beating, his nerves suddenly feeling red raw. And while he still went on reassuring himself that she was unconscious, he sprang off the chair.

  But the thought would come into his head, and it terrified him. What if her eyes open and she turns her head and stares at me? What if she dies and becomes a wraith and leaves her body for a while before I can leave the room? What if she sits up and stares at me, or speaks to me?

  He stepped back towards the door, unwilling to turn his back on her in case she might suddenly spring from the bed and somehow surprise him. Or he might hear her laughter, that light laugh of hers that suddenly seemed to be coming back to him so clearly, the way he had used to hear it all over the house in the old days, before they moved to Hatcombe. The days when they had used to laugh at funny things and she would always be asking him, Are you all right? Are you all right, Alexei?

  Finally he shot out of the door and closed it behind him, and all the way out to Muffin’s Range Rover he found he was repeating to himself that one word. Yes.

  Yes, he was all right. He had a private jet. He was all right. He had two Range Rovers. He was all right. As soon as he was free he was going to marry a beautiful woman with three large houses and a villa in the south of France. He was all right. Yes, he was all right, all right. Of course he was. He was just so all right. Which was strange, because as he drove off, too fast, from the hospital car park, if he was so all right, why was he crying?

  From inside the peace of her silver-green shell Hope smiled. Jack would be here soon and she would hear his voice, only his voice. Jack would be there on the shore, or Melinda, or Rose, or Claire, or little Letty – some voice which would echo into her silver-green shell and tell her of things, of precious things that she had ever held dear in her life, in the times when she had been there with them on the shore, that far distant shore from where sometimes she could hear their voices carrying to her over the waters, down into the dark, and into her peaceful silver-green shell.

  On his way out Alexander had momentarily stopped at the reception desk in IC.

  ‘If there is the slightest change, even the tiniest indication, make sure to ring me at once on any of these numbers.’

  The two nurses on duty had watched him as he removed an immaculate card with all his reachable numbers in Scotland, London and Paris on it, and then when he left one turned and smiled at the other and sighed loudly.

  ‘A bit of that I would not mind,’ she said, sighing.

  * * *

  Jack had called all the girls over to the Mill House. They had resolutely refused to what Melinda called muddy the waters with us tramping about your house since Hope had been in hospital, and even now they arrived in their best clothes, all brushed and beautiful, carrying the baby in his Moses basket, as if they were visiting a relative with whom they must be on their best behaviour.

  Seeing how posh they looked Jack felt unaccountably hurt, as if they did not trust him any more, the way they had when Hope was still about in all their lives, as if now they had to dress up to see him the way they might dress up to go to meet someone they did not know.

  ‘How’s my son?’ Jack stared into the basket while they all stared at each other, briefly, and then carried on into the Mill House, walking in an embarrassed way, maybe wishing that he had not said anything, that he had not verbally laid claim to him, or even, perhaps, not believing him?

  They all sat down in his drawing room primly smoothing themselves, or so it seemed to Jack, as if they were in church, not at the dear old still familiar Mill House with its exuberant colours and its abstract paintings, with its memories of them all together, Hope, and him, and all of them.

  ‘Would you like a mineral water with elderflower?’

  Jack could see that they quite definitely would, and so he poured them all out their preferred drink, and himself a Scotch and water, and sat down opposite what might be in some ways a jury, he thought, or a tribunal of some kind, which in others ways it was.

  ‘Right. So. Best to come right to the point, or rather the person. Hope. The outlook is not good, kids, as you probably know?’

  They nodded in unison, their eyes staring almost blankly at him as if they were about to be bored by what he had to say, or as if they had already guessed why they had been suddenly called over to the Mill House.

  Taking that presumption as a given, Jack therefore continued, ‘As you know, there is talk among the doctors about switching off your mother’s life support machine, and there is a case for this, of course. Although James is my child—’

  Rose put up her hand. ‘And you are therefore responsible for why she is like she is!’ she reminded him.

  Jack was just about to point out the relevant fact that it takes two to tango, or make love, when he stopped.

  No! No, he thought, both his eyes twitching with fatigue, while the Scotch he was sipping was filling him with a warmth that was almost shocking, as if it was a furnace, so long was it since he had trusted himself to have a drink and not burst into a torrent of tears that might never cease.

  He must not emphasize his role in Hope’s life, or Hope’s role in his. These girls were her daughters, not his, and as in all moments of life and death, she, in their eyes, belonged to them, not him. He had to be careful to tread the line between commitment and possession, a line that he recognized as being so fine as to make the gossamer threads that ran at dawn between the wild flowers and leaves, over the grass and around the spiders’ webs, seem as thick as tow rope. He just had to find that thread and keep himself close to its weaving path, for Hope’s sake.

  ‘Of course I am responsible,’ he agreed, ‘there is no doubt about that at all. I am responsible, as the father of James, for Hope’s condition.’

  He paused, and for a second the black guilt of it all smothered him, and he could have wept and wept, but he sipped at his Scotch again hoping against hope that they had not noticed that his lips were trembling as much as the hand holding the glass.

  But of course they had all noticed and Claire frowned at Rose, and Rose felt terrible for what she had said. As usual it had burst out of her in a way that was so her, and so wrong. And now it was agonizing just to sit there in silence while a grown man like Jack, whom Mums after all had loved to pieces, looked like a forlorn little boy, his lips trembling so hard, and his hand holding his glass too, that she thought he might collapse completely.

  ‘I am the reason that darling Hope is in a coma.’

  There, it was out, and as soon as it was the girls all tried not to look at Jack, only stared at their feet, or at the baby, knowing that Jack had a lump in his throat which was probably the size of the ice in his Scotch, and that it was only with the greatest effort that the words he had just said had been uttered at all, as if they had been cut out of him, not spoken.

  ‘But we have to accept what is, and try to make the very best of everything. That is all, absolutely all, that is open to us.’ Melinda looked round at her two sisters. As usual she could be relied upon to be reasonable without being as tactless as Rose.

  ‘Yes,’ Claire agreed, in her deep little voice, ‘the past is the past, and no
mistaking it for anything else.’

  Aunt Rosabel had used to say that to Claire, which was why she thought to say it now, and she was quite glad that she had when she saw how relieved Jack looked that she was not going to blame him as much as he had perhaps thought she might.

  ‘What do you think, Jack?’ Melinda put her finger into the baby’s tiny hand, and felt his strong grip and smiled down at him, by way of distraction. ‘What do you think we should do?’

  ‘I have no status here. It is for you three to say, no-one else.’

  ‘If we leave everything as it is,’ Rose put in suddenly after a short, awkward pause, ‘well, there is nothing to lose, but if we just – if we—’

  ‘Switch off the machine?’

  ‘Yes.’ Rose nodded at Claire. ‘If we do that, then wouldn’t we always wonder if we should have? Whereas if we leave it for a while longer, to see, just to see if there’s not something there, she might come back to us, mightn’t she? I mean that is what this is all about, really, isn’t it?’

  ‘Yes, I think so.’

  ‘Mellie?’ Rose stared at Mellie really hard because she seemed so distracted, as if she was not really with them all in the room, which perhaps she was not, perhaps in her mind she was really at the hospital sitting beside Mums, talking to her, as Claire had told Rose she was so often, just talking and talking to her, the way she had used to sit talking to her in the kitchen at West Dean or at Hatcombe in the garden while Hope did her needlepoint.

  ‘Yes, I think we should hang on in there for a few more weeks, or months, not do anything just yet. She might be still wanting to stay on. Or she might, who knows, suddenly defy them all, and wake up!’

  The others had not really taken this idea into account, and so now they stared at Melinda.