Gemma's Journey

by Beryl Kingston

  ‘Well?’ Catherine asked. ‘What d’you think?’

  ‘It’s gorgeous,’ Gemma said.

  ‘The furniture was Gran’s,’ Catherine explained, ‘but we left it as it was. We thought it was too good to change.’

  Gemma was suddenly aware that atmosphere in the room was heavy with unspoken emotion. Nothing was said, but to her trained eyes, Catherine’s body cues were clear and touching: the anxious expression – eyebrows slightly raised, blue eyes strained – the stoop of her spine and the slight, defensive hunching of her shoulders. She values this room, Gemma thought. She doesn’t want it altered.

  ‘If I come here, I won’t change a thing,’ she promised.

  ‘Haven’t you got some furniture you want to bring?’ Catherine asked.

  ‘Only odds and ends,’ Gemma said. ‘Books and clothes and things like that. I’ve been a student for the last three years. I don’t have many possessions.’

  There was a rush of cold air in the inner hall and Dr Quennell appeared in the doorway. His arrival changed the atmosphere immediately, as though he’d switched on another, brighter light. His face was glowing with success, his hair bushing above his temples, his grey eyes bright.

  ‘There you are!’ he said, taking command. ‘Did you see it? What did you think of it? Hello Gemma. Making a good recovery, I see.’

  They answered him together. And were then confused by the clamour they’d made.

  ‘First things first,’ he laughed and turned to Gemma. ‘Are you taking the flat?’

  Direct question, direct answer. ‘If you’ll have me.’

  ‘Oh I think we can put up with you for a week or two,’ he said, accepting her as a tenant and prescribing her tenancy in the same breath. ‘Until your prosthesis is fitted and you’re comfortable with it. That’s what you need, isn’t it? Halfway house.’

  ‘And an electric wheelchair,’ she said, her mind very sharp now that she’d made her decision. ‘I shall need to be independently mobile.’

  ‘You’ll have to buy one,’ he warned. ‘They’re not cheap.’

  ‘I’ve got money coming from my insurance.’

  ‘It’ll be about a thousand.’

  ‘I can manage that.’

  ‘I’ll see to it,’ he promised. ‘Right. That’s settled then.’

  And so quickly, Gemma thought, but there wasn’t time to say anything else because he was leading them out of the flat, declaring that TV was thirsty work and he needed a drink.

  And once they were all back in the living room, he hardly gave either of them a chance to say a word. He dispensed drinks, analysed the programme, told them stories about the way the studio was run, made them laugh and was still entertaining them when the phone rang, its double bell shrill in hall and kitchen.

  ‘I’ll get it,’ he said and was gone in two strides, leaving them still laughing at his last joke.

  Even when the laughter eased, he still focused their attention. They could hear his voice, booming in the hall. ‘Speaking.’ … ‘Yes. I am.’ … ‘That’s very short notice.’… ‘What time would you want me to be there?’ … ‘I see.’

  ‘That’ll be a call,’ Catherine said. ‘What a nuisance.’ But it was neither, as she could see from the grin on his face when he breezed back into the room.

  ‘That was Capital FM,’ he announced, looking round at them both. ‘Will I give them an interview about the state of the NHS? How about that? I seem to have started something,’

  ‘When?’ Catherine wanted to know.

  ‘Tomorrow evening. I shall have to sneak an hour away from surgery.’

  ‘So you’ve agreed to do it?’ Catherine said.

  ‘Yes, I have. Don’t look so worried. It’s all right. I’m in a good position. Damn nearly retired. They can’t touch my pension. I can say what I like. It’ll give me something to do in my retirement.’

  ‘I thought you were going to tackle the garden,’ Catherine said, smiling at him.

  ‘There’s too much backache in gardening.’

  ‘There’s too much heartache in television,’ she said. ‘You ask Gemma. They trample all over you, don’t they, Gemma?’

  Gemma wouldn’t admit that. ‘Only if you let them,’ she said. ‘You have to fight back.’

  ‘You had to handle them in a public place,’ Andrew pointed out. ‘I shall be in a studio. It’s a bit more civilised there.’

  ‘And you’ll be the centre of attention,’ Catherine said.

  ‘Yes,’ he agreed honestly. ‘You’re right. Undivided attention flatters the ego. And there’s nothing so totally undivided as a camera. Makes you feel important. Powerful, even. As if you might have some influence. I could develop a taste for it.’

  ‘Dr Quennell, media star!’she teased.

  He made a self-deprecating face. ‘I don’t know about that,’ he said, heading for the drinks cabinet, to refill glasses and change the subject. ‘So when are you moving in, Gemma?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Gemma said. ‘That’ll depend on Mr Barnaby, won’t it?’

  And whether he needs the bed, Andrew thought. But he kept his thoughts to himself.

  As Catherine was doing. Now that the decision had been made she was wondering how they were going to break the news to Nick and what he would say when they did. It was all very well offering this girl a helping hand but she didn’t want him to be upset by it.

  He rang her later that evening and, rather as she’d feared, he wasn’t pleased. There was a long pause while he digested what she’d said and when he spoke his voice was full of controlled anger. ‘You’ve done what? You’re joking!’

  ‘Your father thought it would be a good idea.’

  ‘This is a family house we’re talking about, not a convalescent home. Who’s going to look after her?’

  ‘She’ll look after herself. She’s independent. As you very well know.’

  He had to admit that but he wasn’t mollified. ‘And what about Sue’s anniversary?’ he asked. ‘We’re all supposed to be going up to York in a fortnight. How’s she going to cope then, all on her own? I don’t suppose you’ve thought of that. Or are you going to stay at home and look after her?’

  ‘I shall ask Polly to come in on Saturday instead of Friday,’ Catherine said. Polly Okino cleaned the house while she and Andrew were at work and over the years had become more of a friend than a housekeeper. ‘I’m sure she wouldn’t mind.’

  ‘And how will she manage at night? You can’t ask Polly to live in. Gemma’s had twenty-four-hour care with us.’

  Catherine was beginning to feel cross. There was no need for him to be quite so negative. It was out of character. ‘She’ll be fine,’ she said firmly. ‘You’ll see.’

  But he was determined to disapprove. ‘It’s ridiculous,’ he told her and she could hear the scowl in his voice. ‘It’ll never work out.’

  Chapter 12

  After such an eventful evening, Gemma found it difficult to settle back into the sedate pace of the ward and almost impossible to get to sleep. The bed was too hard, the night too long, the problem she was facing too pressing. Exciting though it was to think that she would soon be out of hospital and living in her own flat, she couldn’t help feeling that her Dr Quennell wouldn’t approve. She thought about it off and on all through the night, wondering what he would say to her about it and preparing answers, as though she was learning a part, thinking up one-liners and possible put-downs, even jokes about having a patient as a lodger. By breakfast time, she felt she’d covered all the angles and when he finally came striding into the ward for the morning round, she was ready for anything.

  It was all a total waste of time because Mr Barnaby was in one of his decision-making moods and took the rounds at such speed that the team had to run to keep up with him. Gemma was examined, congratulated on her progress and told that she could be measured for her prosthesis that morning. Then before she had a chance to answer, and before she could even look at Dr Quennell, they were all whisked down the ward to
see what could be done to get the oldest inhabitant into a nursing home. ‘High time we sorted that out.’

  At which point, it started to rain. As the team charged out of the ward, Gemma could see flurries patterning the window opposite with sharp white dots. She reached for the headphones, took up a magazine, and tried to block out the ward and the weather by listening and reading. But the print sloped away from her understanding and the music was simply a throb. How could they behave like that? It was so impersonal. Crash, bang, interview over, on to the next. It left her feeling flattened and, what was worse, none the wiser about Dr Quennell’s reaction.

  Despite her strong character, she’d always been careful not to do anything to upset other people. Her mother had dinned that into her from a very early age. She could hear her voice now, chanting their mantra: We’ll make our own way, my darling, and look after ourselves, and we won’t be a burden to anyone. And now she’d probably annoyed this prickly young man and she hadn’t had a chance to explain or answer back or anything. It was very irritating. He’d stood there at the foot of her bed, with ink all over the pocket of his white coat, looking horribly handsome and horribly disapproving, and he hadn’t had a chance to say a word. Even if he’d wanted to. Had he wanted to?

  She was still frowning over it when the physiotherapist arrived to put her through her paces and after that there was no more time for brooding. She’d just about got her breath back from her exercises when Staff appeared with a porter and the wheelchair to tell her that the prosthetist was ready to see her.

  ‘Never a dull moment!’ she said to the porter as he wheeled her along the corridor.

  ‘We aim to please,’ he smiled, trundling round the corner.

  She wondered whether she could ask him what the prosthetist was likely to do but decided against it, because he probably wouldn’t know. Were they just going to measure her stump? Or would they bring a new leg and fit it on? Or a selection of legs? If she hadn’t been so preoccupied thinking up snappy answers to Dr Quennell she could have asked someone. But she was already outside a door marked ‘Fitting Room’ and being pushed inside, her heart pounding.

  The prosthetist was a cheerful man with very curly hair and a wide smile. He sat in the centre of a room with a nurse beside him and what appeared to be half a bed behind him. There was no sign of a leg of any variety anywhere at all.

  ‘Gemma Goodeve?’ he said. ‘Let’s have a look at you. Can you get up on the table?’

  She struggled on to the half-bed and waited while the nurse removed her dressing and displayed her stump. It looked smaller than it had been the last time she saw it, shrunk and pathetic and exposed, and it occurred to her, looking at it with a sinking of the heart, that whatever was going to happen to her now would probably hurt.

  The prosthetist adjusted the bed to the height he required, sat himself at the end of it, and switched on a spotlight.

  ‘Did you do a lot of walking?’ he asked, peering at the stump.

  ‘I did, before all this.’

  ‘And will again,’ he said, touching the stump delicately. ‘What sort of job did you do?’

  She told him the straight truth, that she’d trained as an actress but hadn’t landed any parts – yet – that she’d worked in any job that offered, stacking shelves in Sainsbury’s, serving in a greengrocer’s, typing letters in an estate agent’s, delivering free newspapers door to door.

  ‘Sport?’ he said, lifting the stump and examining the scar.

  Relieved that he wasn’t hurting her too much, she told him that too. Swimming, tennis, athletics at school.

  ‘This is very clean,’ he said approvingly. ‘You heal well.’ Then he asked her a question she didn’t expect. ‘What do you think of it?’

  She gave him an honest answer. ‘I think it looks awful.’

  ‘In what way awful?’

  ‘Shrunk. Pathetic. I feel quite sorry for it. If that’s not a silly thing to say.’

  ‘Not silly at all. It shows you’re learning to love it. That’s important.’

  ‘Is it?’

  ‘Oh yes. Very important. We’re going to make it do a job it wasn’t designed for, you see, so you’ll have to look after it like a baby, keep it clean and dry, powder it, give it clean socks every day, really pamper it. Do you massage it?’

  ‘No. Should I? I haven’t liked to touch it.’

  ‘It helps. Do it in the shower or the bath. Not a rough massage. Just gently.’ He was soothing the stump as he spoke, holding it in both hands. ‘Like this. You’ll get a lot of benefit from it.’

  She could tell that, for really the sensation he was producing wasn’t painful at all. In fact, it was almost pleasurable.

  ‘Now,’ he said, still massaging the stump, ‘what we’re going to do today is to take a cast. That’s the start of the whole process. Once that’s done we’ll be able to make an interface that will fit you like a glove. Better than a glove, actually, because it will be a perfect fit. Once we’ve got a really good interface, we can fit your new leg. Are you ready?’

  She was ready for anything, and followed the whole process with great interest.

  ‘First,’ he said, working as he spoke, ‘I’m going to cover the stump with a layer of cling film so that we can get the cast off afterwards without hurting you. Right? Like that. Now we give you a nice layer of stockinet. Like that. Now we come to the sloppy bit. I enjoy this. Whacking on the plaster. Reminds me of my nursery school, playing with clay.’

  He took a very long time over the cast, watching it most carefully as it began to set and marking it with a pen. ‘You don’t want any pressure,’ he told her. ‘I know this takes a long time but you want the most comfortable fit I can get for you. It’ll be worth it in the end.’

  ‘I don’t mind how long you take,’ she joked. ‘I’m not going anywhere.’

  ‘Are you not?’ he asked. ‘I understood you were going home tomorrow morning. You’ve got a flat with Dr Quennell, isn’t that right? Can you just turn your leg slightly this way?’

  Tomorrow morning, she thought, her heart leaping. Hooray!

  But there was still a lot more to be done that day: forms to fill in, instructions to gather, a final check on her plastered leg to ensure that it was still healing as it should, even another fleeting visit from Mr Barnaby ‘more to wish you luck than anything’ – although no sign of Dr Quennell. Packing had to wait until after tea, by which time she was so excited she couldn’t even manage a biscuit. One more evening, she thought, as she folded her clothes, one more night, and then I can start living my life again. Roll on tomorrow.

  She was sitting on the edge of the bed with her stump on a pillow, folding up the last of her clothes and tucking them into plastic bags, when her mother arrived, out of breath, flushed and obviously excited.

  She didn’t stop to ask Gemma how she was but plunged straight into her news. ‘You’ll never guess what’s happened,’ she said. ‘I came to tell you yesterday only you’d gone out. Where were you? Never mind. You can tell me later. Oh Gemma, darling, you’ll never guess. Your father’s come back.’

  Gemma was so astonished she didn’t know what to say. ‘What?’

  ‘Your father,’ Billie repeated happily. ‘Just turned up out of the blue on Sunday afternoon. I was hoovering the bedrooms and there was a knock at the door and there he was.’

  ‘Good God!’ Gemma said. She was almost too stunned to take it in. ‘After all this time!’ I’ve spent an entire childhood wondering where he was and what he was like and why he’d gone and whether he’d love me if we ever met up again. And now he just turns up. It’s like something out of Mills and Boon. But then she was curious. ‘What’s he like?’

  ‘Well older, naturally, but still a dreamboat.’

  ‘And he just turned up?’

  ‘Yes,’ Billie said, her face softening at the thought of it. ‘Out of the blue. All the way from South Africa. He read about the crash – it was in one of their papers – and the minute he knew it was you
he caught the first flight here to find out how you are. Isn’t that wonderful!’

  ‘But why?’ Gemma wanted to know. There had to be a reason. Absent fathers don’t just reappear without a reason.

  The answer was so exactly what she’d always wanted to hear that it sounded unreal. ‘To look after you. What d’you think of that? He’s come all this way to look after you.’

  She didn’t know what to think or say. It was too overwhelming. The old annoyance flickered in her because they were both assuming that she needed looking after but on the other hand it would be wonderful if he really had come back because he wanted to care for her. He might have stayed away all these years because he didn’t know how to make contact. He could have been too ashamed. And the accident could have given him the chance to show his feelings. What if …?

  Her mother was still talking. ‘He saw your picture first. That’s what did it. It must have been a shock to see you after all these years. His own flesh and blood in a rail crash. He says it brought him up short and I’m sure it did.’ Her brown eyes were shining between the butterfly blue of her eye-shadow and the thick fringe of her mascaraed lashes.

  She still loves him, Gemma understood. After being left on her own all this time, she still loves him. The knowledge touched her. Poor old Mother.

  ‘He wants to see you,’ Billie said, earnestly. ‘He’d have come tonight only he thought you ought to have a bit of warning. I mean, he didn’t want to give you a shock or anything like that. So I said I’d come here and tell you and then we’d fix a time between us. Isn’t it wonderful. I knew he’d come back sooner or later. Didn’t I always say so? He says he’s always loved us and I’ve always felt that, haven’t I? It was just having to get a good job made him go. That’s all it was. A man’s got to get on in the world, hasn’t he, when all’s said and done. You can understand it. Anyway, that’s all water under the bridge. He’s back now. So what do you think? Shall I bring him tomorrow?’