Harvest

by Celia Brayfield

  Around them, lesser conversations dwindled. Head on one side, listening intently, Amina Bhatia filed information for future programmes. Devlin followed the exchanges with surprised, unblinking eyes. Scenting their fascination, Moynihan moved up to take an abandoned chair. Molfetto’s wife materialized in time to hear her husband make an ill-advised attempt to get a toehold in the dialogue; they did not hear him, and he was forced to fall back and pretend interest in silence.

  Michael returned, and the scene momentarily threw him. Two centres of power had appeared in the group. His wife was the closest of several people listening to the man who was married to Grace; his guest of honour was almost holding court in a larger gathering, with the irritating Stephen prompting him. Grace was also in the centre of that group, with that fathomless, admiring expression her face acquired when she was fascinated. Michael’s first alarmed assumption was that the young man had made some typically maladroit approach to Stern which was being politely evaded. Then he took in the intense rapport between the two, and the rapt attitudes of their listeners.

  Stern was now aware of his audience, and addressing his answers generally. ‘We had to take account of the culture that the people had developed in the townships. Apart from the struggle against the whites, that was what had unified them. So our aim was give the positive things in that culture the space to flourish. At the same time we had to make it difficult for the negative aspects to persist. And with a good amount of flexibility so people had no feeling that a way of life was being imposed …’

  ‘What did you identify as the negative aspects?’ A good interviewer would have picked up that point earlier; Michael frowned, reluctant to concede that Stephen was doing well. Amina Bhatia became aware of his presence and moved aside from his respectfully unoccupied chair.

  ‘Clever young man,’ she whispered. ‘He’s discovered what’s close to the boss’s heart.’

  ‘A township is typically very volatile, a place where it is easy for a riot to start. We decided to look at the factors in that which our buildings could address, the way that most of the time most of the people were out on the street, for example …’

  Grace watched Michael hesitate, guessing that he was anxious for Stern’s approval, positively annoyed, concerned to disguise it and reluctant to give Stephen the tribute of his attention. Waiters distributing coffee and petits-fours saved him, disturbing the company enough to break the spell.

  Stern took his memo pad from his shirt pocket and made notes. ‘I think you should come out and talk to the people working on Jansendorp – what kind of funding do you have for this thesis?’

  ‘Funding? I haven’t considered that aspect yet …’

  ‘Why don’t you put a proposal together for me? Let me get someone in touch with you.’

  Almost incoherent with gratitude, Stephen withdrew to his own place and Michael prepared to reoccupy his territory, where further discomfort was in store.

  ‘That’s a very worthwhile young man,’ pronounced Stern. ‘Tell me about him. He came with your daughter.’

  ‘They’ve been close for years. In fact, last year they were talking about marriage. We thought they were too young, really, but you have to let children go their own way in the end.’

  There it was, deadly and precise as the coup de grâce; Michael had annexed Stephen to his own glory. Inwardly Grace sighed with frustration. But Stern was not persuaded.

  ‘In the end, maybe, but that’s a long way off. They are both young, and it’s an important decision. Actually, I think it’s the most important decision a man can make, the woman he marries. There are very few choices in life which you can’t reconsider, but that is one of them. At least, that was how I was brought up. I hope he takes his time.’ He nodded, and devoted himself to the coffee, his face reverting to a graven mask.

  Michael defensive was a rare phenomenon, and not an inspiring one. In too loud a voice he started talking about his daughter’s determination to study in Paris. Stern shifted uncomfortably. This time Amina Bhatia mounted the rescue mission, recounting the negotiations before her own marriage, a good story delightfully delivered. Grace looked around for Nick, and saw that he was still in deep conversation with Jane and Andy Moynihan.

  Presently Berenice Stern picked her way back to the party, and after her followed Michael’s final disgrace.

  ‘Daddy, have I missed the ice cream?’ Imogen was drifting towards her father. ‘Say I haven’t, say you saved some for me.’ Her frock hung loosely from her bony shoulders, the ends of the belt dangling untied. Her necklace was missing. She had smudges of mud on her skirt and a brown smear down one of her bare arms, but more than her dishevelled dress her manner was alarming. Her eyes were huge and she was obviously having difficulty in coordinating her limbs enough to walk.

  Guilty because he had left her alone so long, Stephen intercepted her and pulled her down to a seat beside him.

  ‘I’m so hungry, Stephen. Find me something to eat.’ She leaned imploringly on his shoulder.

  ‘Do you think you could find my daughter some dessert?’ Having commanded a waiter, Michael stood up and held a chair for Berenice, freshly scented and lipsticked, rigidly composed as if she could make the embarrassing creature vanish by sheer force of will.

  A sorbet plate was found for Imogen, who gulped the exquisite composition down as if she had not eaten for a week. All the remaining petit-fours within reach of her long arms followed. Then she threw up, the first time quite quietly into her lap, the second time noisily and copiously as she was lurching to her feet with her hand over her mouth. Most of the company were watching the third time she spewed, with such force that the mess splattered Stephen, the table in front of her and the polished knees of the Moynihan kids, who scrambled back with faces that said oh-not-again as loudly as voices.

  She staggered a few steps away, spitting and heaving, then Stephen was by her side, holding her waist as she began to retch uncontrollably.

  After a short exchange with Jane, whose face was scarlet, Nick patted her arm and nodded, then left his seat to help. ‘Let’s take her into the house,’ he said, stooping to put his sturdy arm around Imogen’s body. She was able to take the napkin from him and wipe her mouth; her stomach was empty but she was still bringing up bile and mucus. In the mellow afternoon sunlight the two men half-carried her across the meadow, followed by the young Moynihans pointing disgustedly at each other’s soiled legs.

  Jane watched her step-daughter’s departure with resignation. She knew it would be better not to follow, that there was nothing she could do for the miserable girl. In fact, there never had been anything she could have done for her. She had become a mother-substitute for a child damaged beyond the power of love to restore. Perhaps Imogen had been born as she was; perhaps a secure home would have made no difference. She had never acquired the inner strength to survive her life. For all she could give herself good counsel, Jane felt the girl’s wretched existence as a constant reproach.

  Michael wanted her help with damage limitation. ‘Oh dear,’ he said, as if nothing significant had taken place. ‘My poor girl. Too much champagne, I suppose.’

  ‘Not at all,’ Berenice Stern corrected him. Her timing was spot-on. ‘I don’t think she drank very much, and it was mostly water. But she was shooting up in the bathroom a few minutes ago.’

  The faces. The whole circle frozen with shock. Most of all Amina, good clean-living woman that she was. Stern’s frown projected four hundred and fifty years of Calvinist disapproval.

  Michael took care not to speak too soon. ‘Are you sure?’ he demanded, an outraged parent to the core.

  Berenice was taking no prisoners. ‘Of course I’m sure, Michael. I saw her. She had the goddamn needle hanging out of her arm.’

  ‘Surely not.’

  ‘Do you know what it was?’ Grace interjected in her most down-to-earth voice. She was shocked at Michael’s lack of concern and wanted to get away from him, immediately, before she had to listen to one more pol
ished, self-serving speech. ‘My husband is a doctor, he’ll be able to take care of her, but it would help if we knew what she’s using.’

  ‘Well, no, I’m afraid I didn’t stop to enquire.’

  ‘Which bathroom was it?’

  ‘The one in the pool house. She didn’t bother shutting the door.’

  ‘Do excuse me, everybody, won’t you?’

  Grace ran. Her long strides swallowed up the distance at a speed she hadn’t reached for years. She was too full of outrage to look at the entire picture of Jane and Michael going about their businesses while the wretched creature they had raised collapsed in front of them. More, she was appalled by the reality of Michael’s family. Eight years of her life she had laid on their altar, believing the sun-kissed picture he had projected of his home life. Night after night she had wrenched her imagination away from the vision of the man she loved reentering the family which excluded her. Now here was the reality, and here he was among them, a manipulative stranger.

  Once she gained the terrace, there were urgent, practical tasks to be done. On the floor by the lavatory in the pool house she found a glass, some empty green gelatine capsule cases and Imogen’s long necklace of silver discs joined by leather thongs. She collected them carefully and went to find Nick. As she entered the hallway of the house she heard the Sterns’driver being called to bring their car to the door in ten minutes.

  ‘Almost everything, at one time or another,’ Stephen was saying as Grace found them in an upstairs bathroom. ‘What I mean is, she was never an addict or anything like that. It’s when she’s stressed sometimes she’ll just take whatever she can get her hands on. I didn’t know she had anything, I went through her place yesterday and there was nothing.’

  As he spoke he was dabbing at Imogen’s upturned face with a towel, supporting her with an arm around her shoulders. Eyes closed and clean of heavy makeup, she had a look of dreamy innocence. An angelic smile played around her slack lips. Sitting swaying on the edge of the bath, wearing a vest and old shapeless knickers discoloured from much careless washing, she seemed to be a child who had mysteriously outgrown her strength, bolting away into a long, pale, odd-shaped adult. In spite of the fleshless condition of her arms and legs her body carried some fat; she still had breasts, wide and flat with sharp nipples, and a distinct mound of belly looking almost like a pot because of her collapsed posture. The dress was a heap under the running shower.

  Nick, kneeling at her side, was holding one of her wrists, taking the pulse.

  In the act of releasing her arm he noticed something, and took the other hand to examine it as well. Stephen was talking on. ‘There was nothing in her place. Nothing. No tabs or E or anything, not that I could find and I know the places. She had a bottle of aspirins and some vitamins, that was all.’

  ‘She was taking vitamins.’ In the most unobtrusive and neutral way, Nick was prompting. Grace recognized the technique; it drove her mad when he used it on her when she was trying not to burden his good nature with the piffling evils of a newspaper day just because he was there.

  ‘Oh, Imogen really takes care of her nutrition. She’s been vegetarian for years and she knows she has to make sure she gets Vitamin B and iron and things. Actually, there were just a couple of them, loose in a little box.’

  ‘Capsules or tablets?’

  ‘Capsules.’

  ‘Any idea of the colour?’

  ‘Oh God, no. They were all one colour, not blue and white. I’m sorry, I should have remembered …’

  ‘Were these the ones?’ Grace held out her hand with the evidence. ‘After you left, Berenice said she’d seen her in the pool house with a syringe, but this was all I could find.’

  ‘Oh yes. At least, I think so. But …’ Stephen mumbled into silence, using a corner of the towel to clean the last of the smudged mascara from Imi’s eyelids. The evidence told him that she must have used a needle; in fact, her insistence on stopping at a pharmacy must nave been in order to buy the syringe.

  Taking the upper arm between his careful thumb and finger, Nick massaged a particular spot, trying to feel what he could not see in the dim room. ‘There was a mark here earlier, wasn’t there? Can you put the light on?’ Grace reached for the switch and he peered closely at the white skin. ‘Yes, she made a real mess of it, look at these marks. When you arrived together, was she like she is usually?’

  ‘Well, not quite. Seeing the family always stirs up a lot of feelings, you know. We were together all the time on the train, but while we were driving here she said her period was starting and insisted we stop at the chemists and then a café on the way so she could use the lavatory. And she put on all that makeup. By the time we got here I thought she was withdrawn, a bit out of it. I suppose she could have taken something back at the café.’ He had wrapped the towel around Imogen’s shoulders, and kept pulling it up as it slipped.

  ‘Her pulse is slow but it’s quite strong and regular so I’m not concerned on that score. The capsules are temazepam. It’s a major tranquillizer which she could have had on prescription. Seems to be quite a fashionable thing to inject it at the moment, and that’s obviously what she’s done – not very efficiently because there are several punctures here, quite ragged, she bled a bit. You didn’t find the syringe?’ This was a question to Grace. He was getting heavily to his feet, satisfied with his diagnosis.

  ‘No, but I didn’t look for long.’

  ‘There’s so many little kids about, we ought to find it before they do. Needles … it can be tricky stuff. There’s a risk of embolism, I read a paper on it just recently. Injected, temazepam acts fast but wears off quickly. Probably feels pleasantly swimmy, like a valium drip at the dentist. The danger is that it can solidify in a vein, stop the circulation. Anywhere in the body. Could cause a stroke, pulmonary embolism. There’ve been cases of gangrene, mostly with multiple users who perhaps weren’t very aware of pain or numbness in their limbs. And there’s a bad reaction with alcohol, fatal in fact.’

  ‘She only drank water.’ Hope flickered pathetically across Stephen’s eyes.

  Briefly, Nick put a hand on the younger man’s arm. ‘Good. But my guess is that she did take something else earlier. I remember noticing when you both arrived, she had that look of being withdrawn. It was obviously difficult for her to get the needle into her arm. You said she sometimes used psychedelics? You can never predict a bad trip. People use temazepam to cool things out if they don’t like what starts coming down.’ Out of his mouth, street language sounded as bland as a weather forecast. Grace listened in fascination. This was the man she seldom met, Dr Nichols, who sat in his Friday clinic and opened a file on a new tragedy every fifteen minutes. He was at home here; she felt proud of him.

  ‘I thought she didn’t have anything with her.’

  ‘Those little tabs are so small. Easy to miss.’

  Stephen felt that he had failed. He had so much wanted Imogen to carry off the day successfully. ‘I suppose she seems pretty messed up to you?’

  Nick considered this as if it were an interesting but not very sound academic proposition. ‘Well, yes,’ he conceded, ‘but I see a lot of messed up people and compared … Put it this way, from what you say, she has a pattern of using drugs, but at present it’s more at the level of attention-seeking. It’s dangerous of course, there are dangers obviously inherent in that lifestyle, but it’s a phase a lot of people go through and if she leaves it behind her then it won’t amount to more than a sort of mild neurosis of growing up in this crazy world.’

  Since this was his own opinion, Stephen was gratified. ‘Do you think she could …’

  ‘Anybody can do anything, can’t they?’ Bothered by the young man’s assumption of responsibility for the girl’s future, Nick glanced in the mirror. His shirt was speckled with sauce and crumbs. He was letting Grace down in this grand gathering. He looked back at Stephen with a spark of mischief in his eyes. ‘Do you know how many psychotherapists it takes to change a lightbulb?’
/>   Bewildered, Stephen answered, ‘No …’

  ‘Only one, but the lightbulb must really want to change.’

  ‘Oh. Yeah, I get it. But she … no, forget it, nothing.’ The joke had disappointed him. ‘So what should I do now, try to keep her awake?’

  ‘No, I think she could sleep quite safely now, but while she’s like this there’s a danger of the Jimi Hendrix thing, breathing in your own vomit.’

  ‘So I should stay with her?’

  ‘Somebody should, all the time. And she may still be tripping when she wakes up, of course. The embolism thing is quite rare, but if it did happen, it could be any time in the next few days. Pain and swelling where the blockage is perhaps, but they can be symptomless.’ He paused to think. ‘In Paris, I’d send her for ultrasound. I know there’s a clinic in Toulouse – let me make some telephone calls later. For now, we’ll put her to bed and I’ll stay here with her.’

  Stephen went to fetch a bathrobe. He knew which rooms Jane usually assigned to himself and Imogen – Michael would have balked at them sleeping together under his roof; in hers was a huge mahogany wardrobe, a traditional armoire from a much more ostentatious style of home. It contained a few of her clothes, items left behind rather than actually kept there, and a fresh white towelling bathrobe folded up and tied with mauve ribbon and lavender bags.

  Imogen sighed softly as she was picked up. They carried her easily to the room, where she lay flat under a sheet. The afternoon sun had not yet reached the windows, but the air was already close. Grace opened the window and saw departing guests in the car park; crucifying for Michael, but she banished the first shadow of sympathy and reproached herself. Was she merely in the habit of feeling sorry for people, whether or not they deserved it?

  ‘Perhaps you should let her parents know what the situation is?’ Nick was pulling a chair to the side of the bed, hinting to Stephen that there was no place for him there at present. ‘And if you would be kind enough – there’s a case in the back of our car, square and black. It’s the old red MGB, it’s not locked.’