had finally left Jess two years before, for a younger woman he had met through his work as a salesman. Ian had always been good at selling; he had a cheerful, dependable manner that masked his uncertain temper. Throughout their married life he had often been away travelling his territories, and the regular absences had helped them to ignore the truth that they had never made each other happy. Then Ian had met an Australian girl in her late twenties who had chosen to finance one leg of her European journey by working as a temporary administrator in the electrical goods company in which he was a sales manager. It was not the first affair he had had, but it was the first time Ian had fallen in love. He had been a conscientious if rather impatient father, but by this time Beth and Danny were both grown up. He had told Jess that he was leaving her; her response had been bitterness, followed by relief, and at last a kind of weary indifference.
Ian was married to Michelle now and they were living in Sydney, her home town. Jess had never been to Australia but she imagined a paved garden with tree ferns and hibiscus and a view of the blue bay, and heard the telephone ringing in a room barred with sun and shadow.
Jess lifted her head. She remembered that she had left Danny’s holdall in the waiting room near the operating theatre. Glancing back down the night’s tunnel it seemed a black joke that she had imagined Danny needing jeans and a sweatshirt to come home in this morning. She remembered seeing a telephone cubicle in the corridor outside. She would make the calls from there.
In the waiting room was an Indian family, elders and adults and small children crowded and perched on the plastic chairs. Their faces turned up to her like so many thirsty plants, then drooped again. Robert Ellis was sitting in one corner on the chair he had originally occupied. Dan’s holdall was gripped in his hands.
Jess stepped backwards into the hallway and he followed her out.
‘Tell me how he is,’ Rob demanded.
He no longer looked larger than life. His face was hollow and grey and his eyes were ringed with murky shadows.
Jess thought, with anger piercing her, Good. It’s right that he should suffer too. Why should it all fall to Danny, and why should this young man only have bandages on his face and arms after drunkenly smashing her child into a bridge?
Her mouth tightened. Then she remembered that Danny had stirred in his coma and stretched out his arms, and that she had been sure that all would be well. That certainty was already draining away, water dripping into the dry sand of anxiety.
She told Robert Ellis what she knew and he listened silently with his eyes fixed on her face. At the end he nodded.
‘Thank you.’
‘You should go back to your ward. Go to bed.’
‘I’m going home. I don’t want to stay here.’
‘You’re lucky,’ Jess said in a hard voice.
‘If I could make it me, I would. And I’ll be coming back. If you won’t let me see him I’ll wait outside.’
Jess shrugged. There was no space to admit anger for more than a passing instant. She held out her hand for Danny’s bag, and after a second he handed it over. She was already turning away when he caught her arm.
‘He moved, did he?’
He was searching at second hand for the reassurance she had sought from the surgeon.
‘Yes.’
He was so close that she could smell his sweat and skin, a remembered and denied scent that caught in her throat and stirred the hair on the back of her neck. She withdrew her arm from his grasp.
‘Yes,’ she repeated softly. ‘His surgeon said it was a response, but it’s too early to tell anything yet.’
She walked away, to the telephone, and left him.
Lizzie and James sat down in their nightclothes on the end of their double bed. They held hands, shocked into immobility by the news that Jess had just telephoned from the hospital. The bedroom with its soft blue paint and heavy drawn curtains felt cold instead of cosy.
Lizzie said, ‘You know, if it happens, if he does die, I’m afraid of what it’ll mean for Jess. Danny’s been her whole life. She always loved him best from the day he was born.’
‘It might not happen. He might come round.’
James drew his wife’s head down on to his shoulder and stroked her hair. He wanted to fuel her with enough love to carry her through the hours ahead. Even though concern for Danny and sympathy for Jess squeezed his lungs hard enough to make him breathless, most of his immediate concern was for Lizzie. He was afraid she would find the intensive care unit disturbing, and he would have gladly gone to the hospital if he had thought Jess would accept him in Lizzie’s place. But he knew that it was not even worth suggesting it. Someone had to stay with Sock, and the sisters were too close for Jess to want anyone with her instead of Lizzie.
The telephone had woken the baby. Sock stirred in his cot beside the bed and then sleepily hoisted himself on all fours. He smiled at the sight of them, a radiant beam that revealed the tiny, perfectly white pegs of his teeth. James released Lizzie’s hand and went to pick him up. He smelled of baby sleep and ammoniac nappy, and James squeezed him so tightly that Sock whimpered a little as they watched Lizzie stumble out of her nightdress. She had grown plump, and her stomach and thighs quivered with marble-white folds of flesh. As she bent over to step into her panties James felt himself stiffen and he crossed his legs, shamed by the inappositeness of his response. But yet, he acknowledged, sex was one of the many happy aspects of their partnership. He was still capable of being surprised by Lizzie’s imaginative appetites.
After his first, childless marriage had ended when he was forty, James had existed through a series of more or less unsatisfactory but prolonged affairs that had left him feeling dried out and bored and sceptical of ever having a relationship in which mutual criticism was not the driving force. And then, at the age of fifty-one, he had met Lizzie Bowers at an unpromising cocktail party given by one of his clients. James was an accountant, the head of his own small practice. Very late that same night naked Lizzie had smiled up at him. ‘As the actress said to the accountant,’ she’d murmured busily.
Lizzie had pulled on a sweater and jeans. She ran unconsidering fingers through her hair.
‘Let me make you some breakfast,’ James offered, but she shook her head.
‘I must go. Jess needs me.’
There was no argument. James followed her down the stairs still holding Sock in his arms.
‘I don’t know when I’ll be able to get back. Oh God. The bloody handcream voice-over.’
‘Don’t worry. I’ll speak to your agent. Go to the hospital now and stay with her. Call me as soon as you can.’
‘Will you and Sock be safe?’
He knew what she was asking. If something so terrible could happen in a single instant to Danny, who had been so strong and carefree, what different nameless horrors might threaten their baby?
‘We will,’ James promised her as firmly as he could.
