Megan launched into an energetic account of the joys of rearing Red Highlands on the Welsh–Shropshire borders and the TV programme featuring specialist cattle that had summoned her to town for a meeting that morning. She then began pulling out her trophies from the January sales, all items of clothing for her sons, apart from a dark green fleece size XL which was for Billy. She held it up for Eleanor’s full appreciation. ‘Good colour on Bill, don’t you think? He’s got a bit of a tum these days.’ She pulled a goofy face.
‘Fantastic.’ Eleanor was fighting a fresh yearning to come clean. She and Billy had been so drunk. Everyone knew people did stupid things when they were drunk. Maybe Megan would understand. Truth might matter, Eleanor reflected frantically, but did that justify causing unnecessary pain? Kat clearly hadn’t thought so. Kat had thought protecting Eleanor mattered more than anything. Eleanor blinked slowly. Her sister might be gone, but she was understanding her better and that felt good.
Megan was still talking, about underwear now. She had bought a thong and matching skimpy bra – gleefully flashed over the top of a little bag – which she hoped would make Billy happy. She was giggling, mischievous, content.
Eleanor grinned at her. Shattering that contentment was beyond her. It would not be the act of a true friend.
A huge blue velvet butterfly had somehow got trapped in Doctor Wharton’s room. It bounced along the wide polished panes of the glass that framed the even wider seascape of Cape Town sky outside and then flew at the Monet print hanging by the door, coming to settle on the bridge spanning the water lilies.
Pat Driscoll watched it over the rim of her glasses before returning her attention to the desk computer. She had come in to look for a couple of files and have a general sort-out. There had been a lot of stuff to deal with since the accident, reassigning patients, collating letters for files, checking post, but it was mostly done with now. The consulting room was starting to feel empty. Even the thank-you letters from past happy patients, pinned to the cork board behind the door, seemed to hang with a new listlessness, like petals ready to fall.
Swimming, who would have thought it? Pat shuddered, thinking of the stairs down to the shared pool at the new development where she lived and how many times she had told her two young children never to venture there alone.
The emails arriving for Dr Wharton were usually advertisements of various kinds now – drug companies mainly. Pat worked her way through the latest batch with quick, practised fingers, aware of a certain guilty pleasure at sitting in her erstwhile employer’s big comfortable rotating chair. Only when she came across what turned out to be a personal email, from someone called Eleanor Keating, did she hesitate. There had been a couple of other pieces of private correspondence in recent weeks which she had forwarded to Mrs Wharton without a thought. But this one was clearly different, not just because of its hint of real hidden drama, but because of the unequivocal suggestion that it was a matter for Dr Wharton’s eyes alone.
Pat swung the big chair round in circles, trying to think. Dr Wharton was such a nice man that she couldn’t imagine him ever doing anything untoward. From the start he had been so sweet with her, never taking her or her time for granted in the way the previous doctor she had worked for had done.
She looked over at Dr Wharton’s most recent desk photograph of the stunning wife and the two still gawky daughters, legs like gazelles and with their big, full-lipped smiles. They were a family that had everything, but there was little to be envious of now, Pat thought sadly. An indicator, if one needed it, that the most solid-looking things could be snatched away in an instant.
Pat glanced again at Eleanor’s email and then picked up the desk phone. She dialled the mobile number it gave, first forgetting to add the UK code and then a second time with all the correct digits. She braced herself as it rang. But no one answered and after a while it cut out without even going to an answering machine. Pat sat still for a few moments before, in a quick rash movement, stabbing the delete button. She had had a go at telephoning, after all. And what did any of it matter now, when there was no question of Dr Wharton going to England, or anywhere else for that matter.
26
March 2014 - London
January came and went, taking the notion of Nick’s visit to England with it. Eleanor’s hopes of hearing back from him receded like a pinpoint on a horizon, bringing relief as well as an underlying sense of let-down. She had geared herself up to do a difficult thing and it felt tantamount to failure to turn her back on it. Yet he had clearly decided he had had enough of the Keating sisters and she could hardly blame him. As a pair, they hadn’t exactly wrought him much luck or happiness.
Eleanor drummed the matter out of her mind with her new, feverish work ethic, tutoring her pupils to keep her meagre finances afloat and focusing on a final drive on Trevor’s memoirs. By mid-March the manuscript was ready for copy-editing under the agreed title ‘For My Sins’, with a publication date set for mid-autumn. Despite Eleanor’s protestations, Trevor was sufficiently thrilled to insist on taking her out for a pub lunch to celebrate. The one on Clapham Common, he declared, so that we can have a nice walk first.
He was going to be at something of a loss with the book done, Eleanor realised, agreeing to the idea even though she didn’t really have the time, and then showing as much interest as she could, while Trevor talked non-stop about new plans for building permission to extend his only recently finished conservatory.
Once in the pub, they settled into a corner seat and ordered two rounds of scampi and chips and a couple of glasses of white wine. Eleanor took herself off to the Ladies, returning to find Trevor absorbed in a newspaper that someone had left behind. She delivered a playful finger-flick to its outer pages as she sat down. Trevor gave the paper a shake and peered over the top of it, pretending to look affronted. He had reached the obituaries. Trevor liked the obituaries: the frisson of gratitude that one’s own heart was still beating, the unexpectedly gripping details of a life, emerging usually from under the most unpromising of names and job specifications. He was even daring to wonder if he might not occupy a paragraph or two of national press-space himself one day: A man who knew how to command an audience, both on and off the stage… Yes, that would be nice. And with For My Sins all set for national release, maybe such hopes weren’t so wide of the mark. Thanks to Eleanor, the book was beautifully written, as well as containing all his best stories and some serious gossip. It might make quite the splash.
Trevor’s gratitude towards Eleanor sat like a warmth in his gut, along with a certain mystification. Just when he had been prepared to give up on the girl, she had come good. How unpredictable life was.
Trevor glanced again round the side of his paper at his ghostwriter, now studiously ignoring him and checking her phone. She had taken some getting to know, he mused fondly; such a sensitive and buttoned-up soul, endearingly old-fashioned in many ways, and so brave, too, with all that she had been through. It was time to put the paper down and stop teasing her, he decided, but in the same instant his eye was caught by one of the smaller notices on the obituary page, a couple of paragraphs under a smudgy passport-sized photo of man with a Clark Gable moustache: …born in Moscow in 1948… significant contribution to the polemics dominating twentieth-century moral philosophy… Igor…
‘Okay, so now you are just being rude,’ Eleanor quipped, flicking the paper again. ‘What?’ she asked, noticing suddenly how his expression had changed.
‘What do you mean, what?’ Trevor slapped the newspaper shut and tried to put it under the bench, but she grabbed his arms mid-movement.
‘You’re being odd. Why are you being odd?’
‘No, I’m not. I just…’ Trevor pressed the paper to his chest. She was staring at him in the way he had come to know well, her dark eyes glinting with challenge and a readiness to be hurt. Yes, that was what stirred him most about her, Trevor decided, the hovering expectation of being let down. He sighed. ‘That Oxford ex of yours… I am afr
aid he… he has died.’
‘Died?’ The word caught in Eleanor’s throat. ‘How do you mean, died?’
‘Unless I have got the name wrong,’ Trevor faltered, genuinely alarmed by the look on her face. ‘That Russian academic you told me about…’
‘Igor?’ For one despicable moment Eleanor felt relieved. Her heart was performing leapfrogs. She had thought he meant Nick. She snatched the paper from Trevor and found the page. ‘And no need to go into panic-mode, Trevor, because I’m fine.’
‘I had no intention—’
‘It was a very long time ago. Igor had a good life. A successful life. My time with him was… a rite of passage, for both of us.’ Eleanor looked at the photo, struggling to see the man she had known, her lover for eight years, in the blurred young face. ‘A couple of inches in a national newspaper is impressive though, isn’t it,’ she murmured, carefully closing the paper and slotting it into her handbag. ‘I really am okay, Trevor,’ she added, ‘I just want to look at it later, that’s all. Can we toast your book now?’ She grinned, picking up her wine.
‘Your book,’ Trevor corrected her, beaming as they chinked glasses.
‘I had an affair with a dinosaur,’ Eleanor cried, on the phone to Megan a few hours later. ‘For years. He was so old. Why did no one stop me? Why didn’t you stop me?’
‘You were still rebounding from one Nick Wharton, as I recall, and wouldn’t listen to a soul,’ declared Megan, adding rather more sombrely, ‘So, are you all right instead of just pretending to be?’
‘So all right. You’re sweet to ask. Trevor was sweet too. Everyone is so kind to me. Honestly, the only annoyance is that there was no mention of my bloody book. A last chance for some sales totally squandered. I am sure Igor would have been outraged on my behalf.’
After the call, Eleanor nonetheless cut out the obituary and gave the photo a little kiss, before placing it between the pages of the book she had written about Igor’s life. She hadn’t lied to Trevor or Megan – it had been fun and important to laugh with them – but there was a thread of sadness running through her jollity. Relationships were like stepping stones, she mused, each one leading inexorably to the next. The thought made her rummage for a writing pad and her fountain pen. Nick had not replied to the email, so, short of getting on a plane to South Africa, only the option of pigeon post remained. She would google the address of the Queen Elizabeth Hospital and send it there. Nick might not want to hear the truth, but she needed to tell it to him. People died. One never knew how much time there was, for anything.
Dear Nick…
Eleanor paused, aware that she was about to alienate a man who had once meant so much to her, for good. There would be no going back, not when he knew everything, about her, about Kat, from the very beginning to the very end.
She began writing slowly, aware that what she was going to say would cause Nick abhorrence as well as pain.
This is the hardest letter I have ever had to write. If you are not sitting down, then please do so now…
But soon her pen began to move more fluently and freely. The words she chose thrummed with their truthful power, so that even as Eleanor hated what she was doing, a part of her loved it too.
27
March 2014 - Cape Town
Pat pulled up under the trellis of yellow trumpet-shaped flowers positioned along one side of the car park. The tarmac gleamed in the March sunshine. The building served by the car park looked more like a grand private home than a convalescent unit for neurological patients; which of course was exactly what it must have been once upon a time – one of thousands of big gated properties all over the Cape, designed to keep the privileged safe.
Pat crossed the car park briskly, checking Eleanor Keating’s letter was still safely zipped inside her handbag and bracing herself for what would be the first face-to-face encounter with Dr Wharton since his accident. With the initial coma – the result of several minutes under water – the outlook had seemed bleak, but now, three months on, the reports filtering out were all about astonishing strides in his recovery. The turnaround had set Pat reading up about near-drowning cases on the internet, discovering in the process that, while the first six months were always crucial, recovery could in fact continue for years. Health, age, fitness, intelligence, as well as luck, played a part in it. ‘It’s also a hell of a battle,’ one of the Queen Elizabeth doctors had remarked grimly, ‘some patients simply aren’t up for it.’
Eleanor’s letter had arrived the previous week. A plump envelope, studded with English stamps and with the name of the sender on the back, it had stood out at once among the thinning pile of mostly junk mail. Recognising the name, Pat’s fingers had itched with curiosity. Yet there had been no doubting her conscience this time. The neurological centre was quite a drive away, but she had resolved at once to take an afternoon off to deliver the letter in person.
Inside the centre, the high-ceilinged circular reception area exuded the air of a luxury hotel. Tall terracotta vases of dried flowers stood in alcoves, skirting a ring of elegant curve-backed chairs set round a low glass table laid out with orderly lines of magazines and a bowl of polished red apples. Overhead, ceiling fans whirred quietly, rustling the fronds in the vases.
Pat signed in and was directed down a long corridor. Dr Wharton’s room was on the ground floor and easy to find since there was a name on the door. When there was no reply to her knock, Pat tried the handle and put her head inside. Double doors onto the garden were half open, the long white curtains at their corners lifting in the breeze. Through their folds, Pat glimpsed an empty private square of decking and a wheelchair ramp leading down to the terraced lawns.
‘Hello?’
Her voice echoed back at her. She guessed he was enjoying some afternoon sun, but it didn’t seem right to go through his room uninvited, so Pat withdrew into the corridor and made her way outside via a fire exit a few yards further on. If she was Dr Wharton she would have been in the gardens every chance she got, with the sun on her face. To have fought for his life in that cold sea, while his wife and friends took so long to appreciate what was going on, made her shudder every time she thought of it.
Pat found herself on a narrow path which snaked down the side of the building towards the main gardens. She set off at a quick walk but stopped abruptly as two voices came into range, very close by, one shrill and female, the other male, and harder to make out. Pat peered round the corner of the building, only to pull back again sharply. Not more than ten feet away, seated on a garden bench with their backs towards her, were Dr Wharton and his wife, Donna, arrestingly elegant in a long blue silk dress with panels that billowed round her slim legs. Dr Wharton looked painfully frail in comparison, a coat-hanger of a man compared to what he had been. His hair had got very long, Pat observed with a stab of tenderness, curling over the collar of his shirt in a way that would have been impossible to imagine when he was the spruce, smart doctor she had once worked for. What had to be his wheelchair was parked several yards away under a tree; which Pat hoped meant he had been able to walk unaided to the bench.
It took only a moment to realise they were arguing. Pat knew this meant she should retreat back up the path, leave them to their troubles. But the conversation was so compelling that she found herself pressing back against the wall instead, listening in mounting disbelief.
‘Of course I’m glad you are better. How could you accuse me of not being glad?’
‘I am not accusing you of anything,’ Dr Wharton replied, in a weary voice. ‘Though I do wish that over these last few months you had brought the girls more…’
‘It upset them to see you.’
A silence followed. Pat held her breath, her heart pounding on Dr Wharton’s behalf. There were so many possible responses to so terrible a statement.
‘And they have been staying with your parents,’ was all he said. ‘All this time. And only now you tell me.’
‘Well, yes. Daddy – and Mum – have been fantastic. I have n
eeded their support… and I have been there a lot too. Look, Nick,’ she blurted, ‘your accident, it has happened to me too, you know. None of this has been easy for me.’
Pat shovelled her knuckles into her mouth, to stifle her gasp.
‘Yes,’ he said quietly, ‘yes, I see that.’
‘And Daddy has had to help out with money,’ Donna went on with some energy, ‘because paying for this place has got way beyond what was covered under our health scheme. And when not getting your full salary kicks in, it is going to be a real stretch… I mean, Christ, Nick, why did you never tell me we owed so much?’
‘I did tell you. Maybe you didn’t listen. And, anyway, it is not a question of “owing so much”. It’s just that we have a very high standard of living, substantial outgoings, all of which I have often tried to explain—’
‘You should have done more of the cosmetic clinic work that Dad got you, that’s the truth of it. Started it earlier, taken on more hours…’
‘You don’t love me.’
The sentence seemed to slice the air. Pat gripped the stone behind her with her fingernails.
Donna barely hesitated, countering, ‘Oh, don’t be so dramatic, Nick, and, if I may say so, in spite of what you have been through, a little bit childish. Of course I love you, you are my husband.’
‘That doesn’t mean you love me.’ His voice had gone hard and solid; a battering ram beating on a closed door.
‘Oh for god’s sake, Nick, now is not the time for this. We have some serious things to sort out.’
Good Girls Page 25
