Guilt Trip

by Judith Cutler

  I’d practically charged someone down; in my efforts to swerve, I lost my footing and would have fallen if strong arms hadn’t grabbed me. Robin’s. He used to be a boxer and still kept very fit.

  ‘Long time no see,’ he said mildly. I could recall the time his Adam’s apple would have danced a hornpipe just at the sight of me. ‘Come on, we’ll have a coffee. And you can tell me all about it,’ he added, peering into my face.

  ‘I can’t. It’s Griff. Heart.’

  ‘Attack?’

  ‘Angiogram.’

  ‘Routine. I know you two are like this,’ he said, crossing his fingers, ‘but you really don’t need to worry. Just a test. What they do is . . .’ By now he’d got me walking towards the hospital, almost as quickly as I wanted, with far more details of the procedure than I liked. Griff would be scared witless.

  ‘There’s something wrong,’ I insisted. ‘I have to go to him.’

  He stopped by a desk and spoke to one of the women behind it. I let him get on with it. I’m sure my jabbering wouldn’t have got through to her as quickly as his quiet authority. That was vicars for you. Or their dog collars.

  ‘Hasn’t got back to the ward yet,’ he said, ‘so panic not. And, as I said, coffee. And a sandwich, because I’ll bet you didn’t manage to eat any breakfast, and if you did it was a long time ago. Come on.’ I’d never been vicar-talked before, but he was very good at chattering away – what sort of sandwich, did I want a cake? – to take the pain from the moment.

  ‘What are you doing here?’ I asked, able to get a word in at last as we sat down.

  ‘Seeing a parishioner. Very near the end, so they waived the usual visiting regulations. I gave him Communion –’ he patted a neat little case I’d scarcely registered – ‘and hung on till he died.’

  ‘You seem remarkably cheerful,’ I observed.

  ‘Death doesn’t have to be a sad thing – not when you’re in your nineties and pretty well paralysed with arthritis and you buried your wife of sixty-five years only two weeks ago. I can’t say he willed himself to die, but he certainly didn’t want to hang about on this earth any longer.’ When he saw I was having difficulty speaking, he continued, ‘I want you to be one of the first to know that I’m leaving Bossingham. I haven’t even told the churchwardens yet, not officially. I couldn’t carry on as I was, not with Freya’s job in Maidstone, so I’ve found another parish. Actually, it’s close to you and Griff. Near Loose. So Freya can be a Loose Woman.’ He paused so I could laugh at a very, very old Kentish joke.

  ‘Freya? How is she?’

  He looked briefly furtive. ‘You and she had a bit of a falling out, didn’t you? Her making,’ he added, before I could protest, ‘which she freely admits. You know – better than I – how stiff-necked she is. You’ll wait till Domesday for an apology. But if you could, you know, turn the other cheek, she’d love to see you. And be very grateful for a fresh face, I should think.’

  ‘Fresh face? You’ve missed something in the story, Robin.’

  ‘Oh! Of course! She’s in hospital back in Pembury. You remember all that business about reducing maternity services in Maidstone? Quite. And from theoretically opposing them, she’s now experiencing the problems first-hand – it’s such a schlep over to Pembury that not as many of our friends make it to see her as often as we’d like.’

  There were still a few pieces of narrative missing. ‘So it’s a problem with her pregnancy? If only I’d known . . . Why did none of her police colleagues tell me?’

  ‘Because her overnight departure – yes, a real emergency – left a big hole in their staffing, and I’d imagine that whoever took over her role has been running to stand still, just to deal with the stuff on her desk. And her in tray.’

  ‘And probably the floor, if I know her,’ I said, grinning to show there were no hard feelings. Not many, anyway. ‘But she’s all right? And the baby?’

  ‘Fine. Though she’s on complete bed rest. Hence the need for visitors. She’s having a scan this afternoon – so I can’t hang about here too long.’ He gave a serene but wondering smile. ‘It’s so amazing what prayer can do – plus a bit of help from the dear old NHS.’

  ‘Do you need to be on your knees and in church for prayer to work properly?’ I asked, not quite idly.

  ‘You’re winding me up, aren’t you? Come on, you know better than that. You can ask God for help whenever, wherever. But if you want a bit of kneeling and a bit of church, I’m happy to oblige. With or without you.’

  He meant it, too. ‘I could do with a shed load for Griff. Thanks.’

  He got to his feet, checking his watch, then hovered.

  ‘Do you know why Freya felt embarrassed about getting back in touch with me? You know I was only a phone call away. You should have phoned me.’ I looked at him. The Adam’s apple was on the move. ‘She told you not to, didn’t she? Robin, she’s the nearest thing I have to a woman friend – I wouldn’t have done or said anything to upset her.’

  ‘It’s more what she did or said. The thing is, she was, in her own words, grossly unprofessional – even I can see that, though I blame the pressures of the job on top of a difficult pregnancy.’ He sat down again, fidgeting with someone else’s empty KitKat wrapper. ‘She sounded off about you, and the fact you were badgering her, in front of other people. And walls have ears. She thinks she might have mentioned stuff about you to people she shouldn’t.’

  ‘One of whom might just be an acquaintance of Charles Montaigne, aka Christopher Mills? Shit and double shit! How could she?’

  ‘Because he was a very senior officer? You know that Morris of yours was investigating police corruption at Interpol? This guy’s name came up on the radar, and now he’s awaiting trial, I believe.’

  ‘The dock’ll be nice and full then.’ I gave him the briefest rundown of what had been going on in Paris and back here in England. ‘But maybe we shouldn’t tell Freya about all this just yet. It won’t do her blood pressure any good, will it?’

  ‘I can tell her you forgive her, though?’

  ‘Big word, Robin, forgiveness. Tell you what, if God brings Griff through all this, I’ll see what I can do about forgiving Freya.’ It might sound flip, but it was all I could do to make my mouth work. There was pain in my back and chest so bad that I nearly cried aloud.

  ‘I don’t think God works quite like that. Hey, are you all right? You’re not, are you?’

  I clutched my chest, then my arm. I was dizzy with the pain. Reeling with it. And then it stopped. I could breathe again. And then I couldn’t. He tried to push my head between my knees, but that made it worse. Great yellow blobs swam across my eyes. I started to plunge between them.

  Then the breaths came again. Just like that. And the pains went. All of them.

  Robin was on his feet yelling. People were running towards me. I couldn’t stop them, but I could stop Robin. I grabbed his hands.

  ‘Don’t you understand? It’s not me who’s ill! It’s Griff! And I think he might have died.’

  The NHS doesn’t like people keeling over on their premises, so willy-nilly they were going to treat me. Furious, I sent Robin on his way. He needed to see his baby and to hold Freya’s hand. Meanwhile, on a stretcher, I protested all the way to A and E, where they stuck clips and pads on me. If I twisted round, I could see the nice regular rhythm of my body on a monitor. So they tried to find other things wrong. It was only when a young Asian doctor paused to listen to what I was trying to tell them that they stopped.

  ‘This happened to my mother,’ she said with the same quiet authority as Robin, ‘when my father had his heart attack. They were a thousand miles apart, physically, but she knew. I suggest we contact the cardiac unit and ask about Mr . . . Griff?’

  ‘Griffith Tripp,’ I gasped. ‘He’s supposed to be having an angiogram. And I’m just so afraid—’

  ‘Oh, just an angiogram,’ she said, dismissively. ‘Routine. But we’ll check, anyway. Stay where you are, please.’ She withdrew from th
e cubicle, drawing the curtain behind her.

  With all those wires and things I pretty well had to. As exhausted as if I really had been ill – or perhaps it was a result of all the previous day’s problems – I allowed myself to sink back on to the bed. But I couldn’t switch my ears off. I tried to track what was going on by footsteps and murmured voices. If I hadn’t still been attached to the monitor, I’d have got up and followed them.

  The wait seemed to last forever. People came and went to the cubicles either side. There were moans and comments I tried to do more than ignore – I wanted them shut out.

  At last feet stopped outside my cubicle. Dr Lal popped her head round the curtain and stepped inside, followed by a couple of people about my age, not wearing white coats but sporting stethoscopes.

  ‘You’ve had a very interesting experience, Lina,’ Dr Lal said. ‘I wonder if you’d mind talking about it to these students.’

  I sat up and started literally to tear my hair. ‘I will do nothing – nothing, do you hear? – until I hear about Griff.’

  She pulled my hands away, but as soon as they were free I started smacking my face. This time her grip was much tighter.

  ‘He’s fine, now. Fine. We’ll talk about your anger management issues another time, maybe.’ She smiled kindly. I glowered. ‘Someone should have come to tell you. He’s in Cardiac ICU, and he’s stable.’

  ‘ICU?’ I repeated stupidly.

  ‘Intensive care,’ one of the students explained.

  ‘But he was only supposed to be having an angiogram.’ I was totally bewildered.

  ‘He was, and he did. But even while he tried to phone you to tell you to collect him, he had a cardiac incident. A very severe attack of angina,’ she added.

  ‘Bugger me,’ I said. ‘So much for the cat on the roof.’

  THIRTY

  Apparently, in the Intensive Care Unit each patient had his or her own nurse. Griff’s, a woman not much older than me, and not much bigger, emerged to speak to me. Much as I wanted news, I wanted her back there watching him.

  ‘He’s fine,’ she assured me. ‘Fine. In fact, he’ll probably be moved to the High Intensity Unit soon. And then he’ll have his bypass tomorrow and—’

  ‘Bypass?’

  ‘Yes. A quadruple bypass. The arteries round his heart have serious lesions – that means they’re in poor condition.’

  ‘Why? Because of the stress of rescuing me? Have I fed him the wrong stuff? Not made him exercise enough?’

  She shook her head, trying to talk across my questions. ‘I don’t think, given your age, it’s anything to do with you. Such a problem is not surprising for a man of eighty.’

  ‘Eighty?’ Why hadn’t the old bugger told me?

  ‘What happens in the operation is this . . .’

  I’m not sure how much I took in. Half the time I was willing her to go back to him. Once she did break off, only to come back to tell me he was worrying about me. Since visiting was just over, all she could let me do was stand by the door and wave at him. I could speak to him this evening, she promised.

  He looked tiny, lost in a huge space station of a bed, with wires and cables and even bigger, more sophisticated monitors than the ones I’d been briefly attached to. We smiled and waved. That was it until the evening. But at least he was still alive, and, the nurse assured me, once he’d got his operation over, he’d be better than he’d been for months. Years, even. She made it sound so easy.

  ‘Just remember,’ she said, very seriously, ‘not to talk to him about the earlier incident. And don’t mention your reaction.’

  Did she think I was stupid?

  ‘We’ll deal with that in the recovery period. You must be as positive as I’ve been with you. And to do that, you’ve got to believe that I’ve told you the truth. No more, no less.’

  Ashford isn’t much of a place to kill a few hours in, but there was nowhere else to go. I just walked; if I passed anyone I knew, I didn’t recognize them. I made myself eat, because I’d got to drive back home eventually. Then I walked some more. I found a bench in the late sun and texted Morris and Aidan. Then I nipped into Boots and bought some cheap make-up: I might not be as good as Griff when it came to applying slap, but I’d do my best.

  As I sat in the car outlining my lips, it dawned on me for the first time that the oast house dream was well and truly over. It wasn’t just me who’d not tread the boards – a lot of people, from Wine-Box Lady down, would be bitterly disappointed. How ironic that ordinary illnesses should end the show, not Charles Montaigne or whatever his real name was. Poor Emilia. A death sentence, by the sound of it – though I tried to work out a scenario for her fit that would convince Griff for tonight at least. And Griff – the only acting he’d be doing, if I knew him, was trying to convince me he wasn’t in pain and that he was fine. Perhaps, if the nurse was to be believed, in time he would recover and he wouldn’t need to pretend.

  The car park was almost as full as it had been earlier, but I refused to panic about finding a slot. If I was to convince Griff that I was calm, I simply had to be calm. Full stop. So when I eventually grabbed a place, I did the deep breathing exercises my therapist had taught me. I pulled a face – she wouldn’t have thought much of my efforts today, would she? Or last night?

  Still in a spaceship bed, but now sharing the attentions of the nurse with a couple of other patients, Griff beamed at the sight of me. No flowers, of course, any more than poor Emilia could have flowers. No choccies, no anything. But I brought him what he wanted. My love. We nattered about the Toby Jugs, and he gave a little whoop of pleasure when I told him about Ulysses and his next journey.

  ‘A nest egg, dear one. I wanted you to have a nest egg. Just in case.’

  ‘But—’ Was that why he’d splurged on those designer clothes? But he didn’t want questions, that was quite clear, so I shut up. For some minutes we just sat without saying anything.

  ‘Have you heard from Morris?’

  ‘A text. He’s got full-blown flu, bed, can’t keep anything down, hopes he hasn’t passed it on to either of us.’

  ‘Poor man. That’s what happens when you work every hour God sends – your immune system takes a battering.’

  ‘You sound like Pa!’

  ‘Oh dear. But you could have done with Morris to hold your hand, my love.’

  ‘I’ve got Tim the Bear for hand-holding. In fact, he’s predicting Morris will produce yet another wildly expensive bear with stiff fur and hard paws.’

  ‘Tim’s probably right. When will you tell Morris you don’t like posh teddies, only cuddly ones?’ He looked at me with narrowed eyes. ‘You ought to be straight with him, dear one. Straighter, at least. For your sake. Happiness never comes from half-truths.’ He coughed. ‘I ought to have said this before, but I was afraid of losing you. Now you might lose me, I must try. Dear one, your life is wrapped up in old men. Me, your Pa, Titus – even Morris is old enough to be your father. Your only woman friend is – let us say, not good at friendship. I’ve made you into a middle aged lady – I’ve taken away your youth.’

  ‘It wasn’t much of a youth,’ I managed. ‘And if it hadn’t been for you, the chances are I’d be dead by now – dodgy drugs, dirty needles . . .’

  He couldn’t deny it, but his mouth became stubborn. ‘We must redress this. If the operation fails, you will have to redress it on your own. I have to say it, my sweetest Lina. I have to. You do understand, don’t you – everything?’

  I took his hand and kissed it, not letting it go.

  Eventually, he asked, trying to sound casual, not wistful, ‘Any news of Aidan?’

  ‘Bad news about his sister, but good for you – he’ll be on the first plane after her funeral next week. He promises you the pampering of your life. And Robin – I ran into him earlier – tells me that Freya and the baby (can you call it a baby at this stage?) are doing fine, and that he’s popped you on his prayer list. I still think knees-bent-in-church prayers might be better than muttere
d-under-your-breath-on–a-motorway prayers.’

  ‘I’m happy with either,’ he said, squeezing my fingers.

  He didn’t mention Emilia, and neither did I. And if he had, I’d probably have lied through my teeth and said she was fine and being as rude to the medics as she had been to the cast.

  We sat in silence while the hands of the clock moved round. Then, just as I was about to leave, he pulled me back. ‘I had such a funny turn today, Lina. Did anyone mention resuscitation or anything?’

  I shook my head. ‘Not a word. Now, I can’t see you till tomorrow evening, remember – and even then you probably won’t know I’m here, they say. But I will be. Right beside you.’

  ‘Of course you will. We’ll get through this together, dear one. I promise.’

  ‘We’ll get through this together,’ I agreed, desperate to be telling the truth.