by Tessa Hadley
He made his way down the other side of the lake and then around the far side of the park to where it was partitioned by a road, and he could cut back. Traffic was busying and had lost its glamour. He imagined the locked park, circling it, as if it contained his fate. Inside there, unknowable yet, was what was going to happen next; in the time that ticked away on his watch the park would be opened up, a difference might be made to everything through his act, whatever it was going to be. Of course Kate might not answer the door. He could still imagine having to get into his car and drive to work as if nothing had changed. As he made his way back up along the last stretch to Firenze, an ambulance passed him, not using its siren in the momentarily empty road; it turned into Kate’s street. It didn’t occur to David at first that it could have anything to do with him. When he himself turned that corner away from the park-side road, he saw that the ambulance was stopped where the Firenze drive began between its two brick gateposts, one with its polished red stone knob missing: the black gates were permanently pushed back, grown into the grass and weeds. Two ambulance men stood at Firenze’s front door; David broke into a run. ‘Not Kate, not Kate,’ he bargained as he ran. ‘Not yet.’
Of course it wasn’t for Kate. As the ambulance men turned to watch him approach he saw through the glass windows of the porch that she also came running: the door swung open. She had pulled on some skirt and sweater that didn’t match, her hair was scraped back in an elastic band, she was wearing her glasses: he knew the look of an emergency. She flung one bewildered glance at him past the ambulance men.
—Yes, come inside, come in, she’s upstairs. She’s awake, she’s looking at me, but she can’t talk. What does that mean? Is she concussed? She’s hit her head, blood everywhere. I thought I shouldn’t move her. David’s all right, he belongs here: he’s a doctor, anyway.
In her panic Kate was clumsily assertive, fell back upon the hauteur of her upbringing. He could imagine how she might not be liked: it made him protective. Tactfully he explained himself to the ambulance men. They were professionally steadying and charming, their solid tread in the hall and on the stairs filled up the wild private space of disaster. David had never been upstairs in this house before: at the top of the flight was a stained-glass window, girls carrying water jugs in some Old Testament scene, suspended oblivious above crude hurrying intrusion. Kate’s story, tumbling out, hadn’t settled yet into the pattern it would acquire by the time she’d repeated it over and over: she had woken, heard a crash, found her mother on the bathroom floor.
There was a step down into the bathroom, and the old lady was lying, diminutive as a child, on her side on the lino: her face was drained and yellow, her hair was soaked in blood. Probably she had managed somehow to hit her head as she fell on the side of the ancient claw-foot bath. Kate had covered her with a blanket: she was alive, her eyes were open and conveyed somehow apology for her indignity, as well as fearful confusion. She seemed to see Kate, who crouched down again beside her where she must have sat waiting for the ambulance to arrive. Kate told her mother everything would be all right now, help had come. The men bent over Billie; David held back, they knew what they were doing. One of them was a talker, with a small tight face like a jockey and soothing hands; as he had been trained he explained everything he was doing to the old lady, whether or not she could hear him. There was nothing, he seemed to tell her, bringing the unknown out of the dark, that he and his companion hadn’t seen. Once he called her ‘Billie darling’. David was alert for any condescension, or signs of the tedium of routine, but he couldn’t fault them.
While they manipulated Billie onto the stretcher Kate stood out of the way and grabbed at David for support. He put his arm round her, held her tight, felt how she quaked. She remembered to puzzle at him: —How are you here, anyway?
—I was coming to see you.
—But it’s the crack of dawn.
—I walked round the park, so as not to wake you too early. Now I wish I hadn’t. I could have been here.
—What’s going to happen?
—They’ll take her into A & E, do lots of tests, find out if she’s broken anything, why she fell. Shall I come with you?
—But you’ll need to be at work.
—I’ll phone in.
—All right. Come in the ambulance with me. I’m terrified of that. I’ll tell them you’re my brother.
—I’ll follow in the car, he said. —I don’t want to be your brother.
It turned out, as David had expected from the moment he saw her, that Billie had had a stroke. Probably that had caused her fall rather than the other way around; in the fall she had fractured her hip. The cut on her temple was only minor, although she had some nasty bruising. David saw she was admitted under the neurosurgeon he most trusted; she was put in intensive care, sedated, given an anti-clotting agent, monitored. They explained to Kate that what mattered for Billie’s prognosis was what happened in the next twenty-four hours; she needed to be prepared for the possibility of a second stroke. David sat with Kate. In the afternoon he drove to Firenze to pick up a few necessary items; Kate said that if Billie came round she would want to be surrounded by her own possessions.
It was strange to be in that house on his own. With clumsy hands he fumbled shyly through the drawers of Billie’s night-things, not good at deciding which were suitable; Kate had warned he’d find improbable quantities of clothes. The cat came complaining around his feet and he fed it. Consulting Kate’s list, he took pleasure in her bold spiky black italic writing. Also while he was there he ran hot water and found bleach and cleaned up the blood in the bathroom as best he could. He was mysteriously happy while he did all this. He was sorry for the old lady, and for the troubled days he knew lay ahead for Kate, but he also felt, among Kate’s things here, that she came close in a new intimacy. He took in the old house as he never properly did when she was home, peeking into the absurd vast pompous bedroom at the front, probably not changed since the place was built, murky because all its blinds were down. Not wanting to pry inside, he stood in the doorway to Kate’s own room and took in her desk with its computer and open books, the scatter of her shoes and clothes, the paintings stacked against the walls, the piles of papers and journals everywhere, the duvet in its brilliant red-and-gold cover thrown back where Kate had leaped out of bed: all the mess and drama and colour of her life.
He rang home to tell them what had happened, warn that he would be late.
—But how were you there? asked Jamie. —How did you know? What time was this?
—I was passing. I saw the ambulance. Is Suzie back?
—D’you want to speak to her?
—No. Just to know.
Of course there would be so many complications: he hadn’t begun to think of the consequences, if Kate would have him, for his children. No doubt at first there would be all their suspicion and resentment to contend with; but he was not afraid.
Eleven
BILLIE DIDN’T HAVE another stroke within twenty-four hours, but she never spoke again; she lived for three weeks in the hospital. Kate spent most of every day there (although Carol tried to persuade her to let her take turns) so that it became her world: its routines were her element, the nurses were her allies or her enemies, even her dreams at home in Firenze were suffused with its noises and smells, its clattering trolley-pharmacopoeia. Billie’s transfers from ward to ward, each with its own culture and atmosphere to be learned, were convulsions. Kate brought in books, old books from her childhood and youth that she’d read over and over; she sat beside Billie’s bed absorbed in them, lost, rousing with a shudder when she had to return to the burden of moving and speaking and being herself. The hospital was both a visionary space – from the upper floors at night a vast ship, lit up, sailing out into blackness – and a real place she walked about in, knowing her way, heels tapping loud in the bright labyrinthine corridors. She had never felt herself so taken up inside the common machinery of living and dying, its momentum like a hum from great
engines below.
Billie in those three weeks after the first stroke had some movement on her left side: convulsively sometimes she gripped Kate’s hand, sometimes she seemed to be rehearsing fingerings on the bed sheet. She could swallow, although she could only drink with help from a cup with a spout, and had to be fed liquidised foods with a spoon. She didn’t want anything. She lay on her back, slipping between sleep and waking; her immobility, her high prow of a nose, seemed carved out of some ancient denser material than flesh, yellowed and smoothed with wear. She dribbled and groaned while she slept, and once or twice, awake, she made effortful noises; Kate, encouraging her, saw a familiar convulsion of distaste twitch the still mask of her mother’s face. The whole thing was too awfully ugly: Billie repudiated it, she hated ugly things. Girls with paper sheets of drawings – a cup of tea, a sad face, a happy face, a toothbrush – came and sat at her bedside, encouraging her to point, to communicate: only Billie’s eyes were eloquent. She was such a good patient, she made no trouble, she lay in her pretty nightdresses among her flowers and cards with her angel-hair combed and plaited (Kate plaited it). She wasn’t, for example, like one dreadful old woman who cried and fought and shouted for her mother and at night for hours on end rubbed her feet fiercely noisily together; whose visitors – meek husband and daughter of no doubt once-meek wife – dropped their eyes in shame. Nor like Kate, who, when she wasn’t sunk in her book, sometimes complained, protested that the nurses condescended to Billie, questioned whether the doctors were doing enough.
One afternoon Kate went for a coffee downstairs in the hospital foyer, and while she drank it Billie died. She tried to recall afterwards what she had been thinking about while she drank her coffee. The foyer had been refurbished in the last few years. It had been once an austere antechamber to terrors, painted in institutional colours, smelling of disinfectant; bandaged and disfigured patients, in her memory, were wheeled to the WRVS counter by their visitors for tea and sandwiches. Now it was like a mall, with a bookshop, shops for flowers and gifts, an outlet of one of the coffee chains. Kate thought it was more ghoulish. No doubt there were statistics to prove that the sick were more likely to recover if they were encouraged by well-known brand names. She had bought a Times Literary Supplement, astonishingly available, and had read an article in it reviewing a book on Milosz; she had thought about the late Pope, whom Milosz had lunched with, and about a film she had seen of the Pope losing his temper with demonstrators protesting against the persecution of radical priests in El Salvador. Then she went back up to the ward, and when she got there the curtains were drawn around Billie’s bed: no big fuss, only the one nurse, Sarah, was standing inside at Billie’s pillow, and Kate knew Billie must be gone because Sarah wasn’t holding her hand but just standing there.
—I’m sorry, Sarah said. —Sometimes it seems as if they just wait for the relatives to leave, wanting to slip away by themselves.
Sarah was one of the nurses Kate liked, half-Turkish, dark-haired, soft-bodied, with a crisp quick mind and intolerant politics: she hugged Kate against her large elastic breasts and Kate yielded to the embrace, although she didn’t cry. She felt bereft – not quite of Billie, yet, but of these weeks of her illness, the medical ceremonial, its importance. An hour later she was leaving the hospital. She said she would come back the next day for her mother’s things. It was dusk, and windless: the fountain outside was still turned on. In an area laid out with benches and trees, and a reedy pond with ducks, shadowy figures were moving and speaking, smoking; she couldn’t hear what they were saying. Briskly staff and visitors passed one another, moving up and down the covered walkway from the car park: through windows they could see into a lit-up swimming pool where someone in goggles and a swimming cap strove effortfully through blue water reflected choppily against white tiles.
Sarah had asked Kate if she was all right, if she had someone to go to; impatiently she had said it didn’t matter. Now she stopped short before the crossing to the car park, and had no idea where her car was, or which floor she’d left it on. Day after day she’d driven here, paying a fortune in tickets: now all the days were one day and she had no picture whatsoever of an arrival. She imagined herself searching for her little Citroën on floor after floor of the monstrous building, unpeopled, hollow, stinking of oil, only resonant with the roar of engines, its darkness criss-crossed with headlights descending round and round the ramps. Something appalling surely lay in wait in there. Then she couldn’t remember what colour the Citroën was anyway. She thought, not figuratively: I am in hell. She also realised that she hadn’t ought to drive anyway, in this state. In her bag she found the mobile David Roberts had given to her on that first day when Billie was admitted, showing her how to use it, telling her to call him any time of day or night she needed him. She hadn’t called him; in the evenings he had rung her at home for news. But in the evenings she had had so many calls.
She stopped someone passing, a young man in a boxy grey coat with a scarf wrapped over his mouth. Perhaps it was cold: Kate hadn’t noticed. She gave him the phone and asked him to help her dial the number written on a crumpled piece of paper she fished from her pocket; David had put his number into the phone but he had also written it down for her, guessing she might not know how to access it. It occurred to her that Jamie might well answer the phone, or Suzie: but they didn’t.
—Wait there, David said. —Just wait exactly where you are.
It seemed as if she waited for an hour beside the crossing while people passed, some looking curiously at her; the road was only an internal road running round inside the hospital, but it was busy at this time of the evening. She watched groups of pedestrians accumulate at the red crossing sign, then spill over when it turned green and the cars stopped: she forgot that all these individuals were separately purposeful and imagined them only as a flow moved along by the changes of lights. Eventually she forgot what she was waiting for: when David did come (he said he had only taken fifteen minutes), he had to leave his car at the kerb, indicators flashing, and cross to where she stood, collect her, lead her over, see her into the passenger seat of his big warm comfortable car (she only knew then how cold she’d been before).
—I can’t go home, she said, as soon as he pulled out into the flow of traffic. —I can’t go back to the house, not tonight.
—Of course not, he said. —Come to my place.
—I don’t know. Who will be there?
—No one. I have it all to myself. Suzie’s taken the kids away for the weekend.
—Oh, is it the weekend? What about Jamie?
Probably he was surprised she even remembered the name of his older son.
—At his grandmother’s: Francesca’s mother’s. Her seventy-fifth.
—I don’t know.
She closed her eyes. Nothing mattered.
Kate had never been to David’s home. They came to where the city dissolved at its edges into the surrounding dark; when they got out of the car she heard the drone of traffic on a fast road nearby, hurrying elsewhere. The house was a box among others just the same, arranged around a little curving cul-de-sac in a pretence of organic accumulation, the raw new gardens hardly grown. David steered her indoors, kicking aside with his foot children’s junk littered everywhere – trainers, school bags, toys: he didn’t want to frighten her off, she thought, didn’t want her to take in the thickness of his life apart from her, his belonging to these others. The place was a mess: even she, who was not domesticated, could recognise it. It was strange to be seeing his taste for the first time (or if not his taste, then at least what he was satisfied to live with): pink carpet, blowsy flowered faux-Victorian wallpaper, gold-framed school photographs. Kate felt her own discrimination humbled, she was stricken with envy of a life so innocent of style.
—I really just need to sleep, she said. Solicitously he eased her free of her heavy coat. —I’m so tired. I haven’t slept properly for weeks.
—Won’t you let me make you a drink? A hot drink? Or an
alcoholic one? Brandy? It might do you good.
—No, really. I think I’d just be sick.
She accepted his offer of sleeping tablets though; then he took her upstairs to his own room – it must be his, his clothes were lying about everywhere, a drying rail hung with his socks was against a radiator. He turned on a wall-light over the double bed; to close the curtains across the window he had to undo tie-backs, then pull a cord (how touchingly well trained he was).
—I’ll find you something to put on, he said. —Suzie’s got pyjamas somewhere.
—No: I’ll be fine like this, if I take off my shoes, take out my contact lenses. I haven’t even got the strength to get undressed. I’ll just lie in my clothes under the duvet. It is a duvet?
—This sort of cover thing we take off first; and those top pillows are only ornamental. Give them to me, I’ll put them on the chair.
—Ornamental pillows!
—Are they horrible? he wondered.
—Not horrible. Only I am.
Kate with fumbling fingers couldn’t undo the tiny buckle on the strap of her shoes; he crouched with concentration and did it for her, and she imagined him helping his daughter put on her shoes for school in the morning.
—I don’t know if it’s the right moment, he said. —I hope it’s not clumsy of me: but I wanted to say that there was no chance really that Billie would ever have got back to what she was before. You won’t feel it now, but really this probably was the best thing. That’s a brute of a doctor’s opinion.
Kate nodded. —I know it. Of course I know it.
