He wanted to go into the kitchen, pour himself a drink, and see what if anything there was for a non-labour intensive supper since the prospect of the takeaway seemed increasingly remote. Also he suspected Mags was right: he was a little too close to Freya to be objective, constantly checking her breathing, her temperature and her appearance. He would hear her if she woke, and in the meantime it would be nice to have a break from this nibbling, low-level anxiety.
He still had the music on in the drawing room and so couldn’t be quite sure when she actually woke up again, but it could have been no more than fifteen minutes before he became aware of small sounds from upstairs. His own injuries forgotten he dashed up the stairs and found her with the duvet kicked back and the crocheted blanket in a tangle, her face blotched red. The worst thing of all was that she wasn’t crying properly, simply whimpering as though that was all she had the strength for.
Full of remorse, he scooped her up, bundling the blanket round her. The skin of her face scorched his, and felt slightly papery. Her weird, weak voice continued its eery complaint as he carried her back down and into the drawing room, where he turned off the music.
The wind was coming from all directions now, buffeting the house in a blind fury; even the leaves on Annet’s plants trembled before its invasive breath. A distant clattering signalled some wretched householder’s dustbin taking flight. He crossed the hall to the study. As he did so the lights wavered and dimmed, but mercifully returned. Clutching Freya to his shoulder he rummaged one-handed for the address book and found the number of the health centre. A recorded voice said that in the event of an emergency the number of the doctor on duty was – followed by an eleven digit number he recognised as being in town.
Never mind, he told himself, a tiny baby with a high temperature was an emergency.
He was halfway through the number when the line went dead.
‘Damn! Damn, damn …!’
He began to dial again, but from the sound of the keypad he could tell the phone wasn’t working. Trying not to panic he lifted the fax phone, but it was the same story. The wires must be down – must in fact have gone down only seconds before. He let out a moan of frustration. Freya leaned against him, emitting her pathetic mewings of distress. As he stood there he heard the splintering crash of a roof-slate falling on the terrace.
He returned to the drawing room and sat on the edge of the sofa with Freya lying on his knees, trying to gather his resources. Stupidly, he thought he could always call Mags again, and then remembered why that was impossible. He supposed he could put Freya in the car and take her to the hospital, leave a note for Annet. But the conditions were atrocious out there. As well as the wind there was now heavy rain battering on the windows. The prospect of all three of them, incommunicado and out on the roads in a hurricane, was not a happy one.
Somewhere, he remembered, Annet had a book … the new mother’s bible by some guru or other. Clasping Freya, beseeching a God from whom he had no right to expect anything, he went upstairs to find it.
The tree fell almost slowly across the lane in front of Annet, but she had to brake violently to avoid crashing into it. It seemed to bounce slightly on landing, a shock of roots appearing on the bank to her right like electric wires. Standing in its rightful place, flanking the lane with the rest of its family, it hadn’t seemed a particularly big tree: lying sprawled across the narrow space in front of her it was an obstacle akin to Beecher’s Brook. Stunned by the closeness of her escape she sat with her arms braced on the steering wheel, and as she did so the tree rolled slowly, a half-turn like someone settling in bed. Instinctively she shrieked, and wrapped her arms round her head. Massive branches fell across the bonnet, pushing with dumb adamantine strength against the windscreen. Others, that she couldn’t see, mashed into the front of the car, stoving in the radiator grill and killing her headlights.
‘Well fuck you!’
Utterly enraged, swearing a blue streak she got out of the car – with difficulty, for a forest of sharp twigs impeded the door – and tried ineffectually to stamp the twigs underfoot with her high heels. In the confused darkness she could feel her tights being shredded, and the skin of her legs torn. Her clothes, already damp from their earlier outing, became instantly sodden and icy on contact with the wind and rain. Furiously she yanked at the branches that lay across the Toyota’s bonnet, searing palms already sore from the rope, and coming away with no more than tiny handfuls of dead leaves. After no more than a minute she was drenched to the skin, cut to ribbons and had achieved nothing. She got back into the driving seat and was deprived even of the small satisfaction of slamming the door because of the spikey resistant twigs.
‘Fuck!’
With wet, numb hands she located her bag, rummaged for her mobile phone and dialled her home number with fingers that felt like lumps of wood. After getting the protracted ‘not obtainable’ tone twice she dialled the operator.
‘I’m sorry but due to the adverse weather conditions there are lines down in that area.’
‘So when are they likely to be working again?’
‘I really can’t say at present. There is a team out, but you’ll understand the conditions are such that—’
Annet rang off, swore some more, drew a couple of deep breaths and found her wallet. By the tiny light of her car-key torch she picked out her AA card and dialled the emergency number. It rang perhaps a dozen times before anyone answered, and as she embarked on an inventory of details the signal began to break up. In an agony of frustration she raised her voice, as if that would make any difference, but the warning blips and the increasingly distant ‘wha—?’, ‘Sorry—?’, ‘You’ll have to – tha – ’gain’ told her it was useless.
At this point she wept out of sheer frustration, swiping the tears off her face with what she knew were filthy hands.
‘OK,’ she said aloud after a minute. ‘ OK!’
She was not, she told herself in the Gobi Desert or on the Russian Steppe. She was no more than two miles from people, functioning phones and a bottle of Jack Daniels. She’d walk back to Stoneyhaye.
David went by the book. The author was not a professional, but a woman famous for having many children (and now grandchildren), who wrote anecdotally from her own experience, with the endorsements of various experts. He felt disposed to trust her judgement.
The gist of it was, not to panic. Almost every infant indisposition will go away of its own accord, she said, so not to worry if you can’t get hold of a doctor right away. Don’t wrap the baby up, keep her cool. Give her boiled water to drink. If her temperature gets very high, she may fit, though this is relatively rare. If she does, chafe her and keep her limbs moving. Take her to hospital. Shell almost certainly be fine. The author went on to tell a story about one of her own daughters, ‘a frequent fitter’ as she put it – very frightening at the time, but duly grown out of, and the aforementioned daughter was now apparently a strapping teenager crossing continents.…
He laid Freya on the hearthrug, unwrapped her and sponged her gently with a clean J-cloth soaked in tepid water from a mixing bowl. More than her heat, it was her inertia that frightened him. When she was a little cooler he wrapped her loosely in a Viyella sheet and tried to persuade her to take some boiled water from a bottle. He was almost pleased when her face convulsed with distaste and she arched backwards to avoid the horrible thin stuff. But as she did so the sheet parted and he noticed for the first time, with horror, a red stippling on her chest between the tiny mauvish nipples. Swaddling her again he went to the kitchen, he had some idea that Annet had brought back a plastic card from the hospital which detailed the symptoms of meningitis. Yes, there it was. He tried to make himself read the whole thing, but the part that leapt out at him was the tumbler test … he’d seen it done on television. He fetched a liqueur glass from the cupboard and pressed it to Freya’s chest. Her arms flew up in shock at this and she wailed, still feebly but with a welcome hint of annoyance. Also, to his great relief, the ra
sh changed its complexion when viewed through the glass – a good sign. However, the card indicated, the test should be performed at regular intervals because in rare instances the rash had been known to change.
He was astonished, when he looked at the clock on the kitchen wall, to see that it was half past nine. Annet wasn’t back, he hadn’t eaten, and he was exhausted with worry.
Freya appeared again to have gone to sleep, but he had been lured once too often into a false sense of security. He took her upstairs and laid her on the centre of the double bed, where she looked tiny and vulnerable. He then went back down, buttered a piece of bread and folded it round a piece of cheese, opened a can of beer and put these items on a tray, along with Freya’s water bottle, the damp cloth in its bowl, and the liqueur glass, which he carried upstairs.
Annet was dismayed at how short a distance it was before she had to admit defeat. Jesus, she thought, survivors of air crashes tramp miles through rainforests without food or water to reach civilisation … snowblind mountaineers with limbs gnawed by frostbite struggle out of ravines and rejoin their companions … perfectly ordinary couples go potholing and rock-climbing at weekends for fun … and yet she, who thought of herself as fit and energetic, couldn’t walk a quarter of a mile in the dark.
It was the dark that was the problem. Once she neared the woods it grew almost opaque and she became disorientated. She was wet through and shivering with cold and each blast of wind seemed to tear right through her so that her teeth chattered. She couldn’t feel her feet at all and what with that and her unsuitable shoes she kept turning her ankle over and at one point went off the road completely and slid, her leg painfully bent, into the ditch at the side. Cursing roundly she struggled out, but a hundred yards later she was so cold and wretched and still nowhere near the turning to the house, that she gave up. After all, she reasoned, someone was almost certain to come along, if only a farm vehicle, and the worst that could happen was that she’d be there all night. It would be a sign of near-terminal decrepitude if she couldn’t even contemplate spending the night in a car.
She returned, got in, locked the doors and decided to run the engine for a while to generate some warmth. She was going to need rescuing anyway so it would hardly matter if the battery was flat.
The engine failed to start. She got out again, fetched the sheet of brown tarpaulin from the boot, got back in, arranged it like a giant bib under her chin and over the rest of her, and prepared to stick it out.
For David, that night was like a long dark hangover of the soul. His own discomfort, along with anxiety about Freya, kept him from sleeping, and at those rare moments when sleep did seem to be overtaking him the slightest sound or movement from her would jerk him fully awake with every nerve tingling. On half a dozen occasions during those lonely, dragging hours he changed her, bathed her with the cool cloth and offered her the bottle of water. At around three-thirty, the digital display informed him, she finally accepted a drink, and swallowed steadily for some forty seconds, making him feel like a man who’d conquered K2.
Annet woke to find a stranger’s face, streaming with rain and reddened with cold, grimacing at her from no more than a foot away on the other side of the window. Disorientated by a night of bitter cold and miserable discomfort she couldn’t at first make sense of her surroundings. He beat on the glass and she could only stare back at him.
The gale was still blowing. The branches pinned against the Toyota’s windscreen shuddered and vibrated, those further away tossed crazily against the churning grey sky of first light. The man was shouting something at her, she could hear his voice but not what he was saying. He wore a balaclava and a khaki cape, and seemed huge and menacing, a Magwitch-like figure. She hesitated and he rapped again with growing impatience.
Unable to activate the electronic window, she was obliged unwillingly, to unlock and then to open the door. The minute she’d done so the man pulled it right back on its hinges and she noticed that most of the surrounding small branches that had made her life so difficult last night had been cleared.
‘Thank God for that!’ he exclaimed with rough cheeriness. ‘A couple of minutes back I thought you might be dead! Have you seen yourself?’
When David woke to find the bedroom in half-light, and the retreating rain and wind no more than a desultory patter on the window, his first thought was that Freya might have died while he slept.
He turned over cautiously in case he should roll on her, and propped himself up on his elbow. She lay there quietly, still and pale and – he touched her cheek – quite cool. Perhaps too still and pale, perhaps even cold! He picked her up and at once she registered her objection with one of those familiar movements, a twist and stretch, her mouth pursing, her small fingers clutching as if at sleep itself. Poleaxed by relief and gratitude he laid her down again and snuggled the duvet round her, a couple of pillows on either side to prevent the quilt from covering her face.
His relief was shortlived. The clock said six-o-five. Annet still wasn’t back.
As good Samaritans went, Annet’s rescuer might not have got the role from central casting but he had the qualifications that really mattered – a tractor and chains, a functioning mobile phone, and an unfazeable wife who brought coffee and bacon sandwiches.
Her own car was towed on to the verge as though it were a dinky toy, but in spite of the arrival of farmworkers in a Daihatsu truck, armed with chainsaws and accompanied by a mad-eyed Border collie the tree was going to take longer. The police were informed, and Annet tried yet again unsuccessfully to call David.
‘Your poor husband,’ said the woman, ‘ he’s going to be sick with worry. Why don’t I just take you straight home, and you can take it from there? We can always tow the car back to our place.’
They had to take a long way round, some six miles off the usual route, through a trail of devastation. Branches were scattered about like kindling, there were at least three abandoned cars, one with its nearside wheels in a ditch, and here and there they were obliged to circumnavigate debris which had clearly travelled some way – bin-lids, broken glass, tattered remnants of fencing.
When they reached Bay Court the woman declined Annet’s invitation. ‘Only too glad to help,’ she said, ‘but I think we’ve both of us got plenty to do.’
David tried the phone, which still wasn’t working. His bone-tiredness helped him to function, he hadn’t the energy to panic. In less than two and a half hours Lara would be here, if she was able to get through, and he could hand over to her and find a phone somewhere else. If she didn’t make it at the very least he could take Freya to Karen’s while he found out what had happened. On the other hand the phone might be reconnected at any moment.
He splashed his face with cold water, cleaned his teeth, and went downstairs. The drawing room with its unguarded fire, the phone, the baby bible, Freya’s blanket spread on the ground – all made him shiver with remembered anxiety.
He drew back the curtains. The front garden was like a battleground – shrubs flattened, twigs and branches scattered everywhere, stripped of their remaining leaves, a slab of corrugated iron roofing from God knows where, caught in the hedge as if left there by a receding flood.
And there, walking towards him, like someone emerging from a shipwreck – scarred, soaked and bedraggled but miraculously alive – was Annet.
His wife, returned to him.
They barely spoke. He took her in his arms and felt her relax, utterly against him. He made her tea, and ran her a bath.
In the bedroom doorway she picked up Freya and gave her a long kiss, her eyes over the baby’s head taking in the tray, the half-eaten sandwich, the towel, the beer can, the liqueur glass, the damp cloth.…
‘You got the loose women out just in time then.’
‘I knotted a couple of sheets.’ She laid Freya back down, managed the ghost of a lopsided
smile. ‘Tell me later.’
‘Plenty of time.’
He sensed that they both knew
how much there was to tell, and
how much time to tell it in.
While she was in the bath Freya woke, and he gave her her
bottle and tidied the room. On her return he was about to take
Freya downstairs, but she stopped him.
‘Please don’t go.’
‘You’ll want to sleep.’
She laid her hand on Freya’s head, her own forehead on his
shoulder. ‘Please, darl. Lie down with me.’
They lay quietly, and slept – Annet first, then Freya. Even,
eventually, David. Like lights being turned off, one at a time.
When the phone rang he awoke with a start and raced down the stairs, but Annet and Freya barely stirred.
On his return, Annet had her arms behind her head, and asked drowsily:
‘Back in touch at last – who was it?’
‘Louise.’
She sat up. ‘ Oh God.…’
‘No. Marina’s fine. More than fine, they all are. Louise is pregnant.’
She gave something that might have been a laugh or a sob.
‘Just think, darl … All this is waiting for them.’
He sat down on her side of the bed and pulled her to him for a kiss. She sank into his arms, her mouth opening under his, a homecoming. Afterwards as he held her, her head beneath his chin he caught sight of their reflection in the wardrobe mirror. And glimpsed in their two so different faces, almost joined, the suggestion of a third face that he recognised but could not place.…
It didn’t bother him. He had the peaceful certainty that in time the truth would out. He would remember the face.
The kiss he would never forget.
Chapter Eighteen
In the village of Newton Bury, the season turned.
Hallowe’en, with its attendant minor atrocities, became All Saints. On this, their patronal festival, Maurice Martin reminded his congregation of their duty to each other and the community, the wider family of which they were part.
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