watched her climb into her dented Golf and haphazardly reverse through the gate.
‘Drive carefully,’ he said inaudibly. He knew her faults and he still loved her, as she knew his and loved him in return. It seemed that that was the miracle.
Rob discharged himself from the hospital simply by walking out of the ward. From the depths of his being he hated institutions. All of them, of every variety, with their smells and sounds and associations. His mother had died when he was ten and his father had disappeared, and after that he had spent too much time in too many such places. He had made it one of his adult ambitions never to be trapped in one again. And yet now it seemed that the threat was closing in on him once more. He walked as fast as he could through the wet early-morning streets, ignoring the stares of the few passers-by.
His room, when he reached it, was exactly as he had left it only a day, only twenty-four hours ago, before meeting Danny at the gym. There was the double mattress on the floor in the corner, the quilt covered with a crumpled Indian-print cotton spread. A desk and shelves that he had built himself occupied the whole of the opposite wall, and the floor space in between bed and desk was scattered with discarded clothes and paperbacks and cassettes.
Rob stared at it all, then his mouth twisted as he pushed some of the mess aside with the toe of his boot. It was hard to comprehend how something so terrible could have intervened between yesterday and this moment and yet leave all these pieces of his existence the same, unmarked.
He crossed to the window and leaned his face against the murky glass. The view, a slice of garden matted with dripping evergreens and the backs of more houses, mocked him with its sameness. He screwed his eyes shut and rolled his forehead in the acrid condensation formed on the pane, but when he opened them and looked again there was still no change. He stumbled to his bed and sat down. He put his hand up to cover his face and waited in the silence for what would come next.
Jess sat in the long, narrow waiting room next to the IT unit. There was a row of dingy armchairs, a tray with a kettle and cups, a payphone and a contorted rubber plant on a corner shelf. The sister in charge of the unit had shown her the tiny bedroom provided for relatives and told her that she could buy breakfast down in the hospital cafeteria, but Jess could not imagine sleeping or eating. She sat with her fingers laced around a coffee mug, staring unseeingly at the curling posters on the wall. They were performing some procedure on Danny that they preferred her not to watch.
She heard a loud, strong voice asking questions outside in the corridor. A second later Lizzie appeared and Jess leaped up. Wordlessly the sisters clung to each other.
Lizzie had thrown a loose coat over her jeans. Her hair was tangled and her expressive actress’s face was taut with anxiety and bare of any make-up. As they hugged, Jess noticed that Lizzie no longer smelled of cigarettes, although she always expected her to. Lizzie had stopped smoking when she was pregnant. Jess rarely smoked but she craved a cigarette now with an addict’s longing.
‘I’m so glad you’re here,’ she whispered.
‘How is he? What’s happening? Why can’t we go in to him?’
Lizzie’s voice was husky, fully modulated. Her words and wide gestures seemed too pronounced for the cramped room.
‘They’re doing something in there now. We can go back when they’ve finished. You haven’t got a cigarette, have you?’
Lizzie looked at her. All Lizzie’s feelings were always clearly visible in her face. ‘No. Do you want me to go down and get you some?’
Jess shook her head. ‘Stay with me.’
After a few minutes Danny’s nurse came to tell them they could come back to the ward again. Jess took Lizzie’s hand and drew her through the double doors into the unit.
At the foot of Danny’s bed Lizzie stopped. She drew in her breath with a sharp gasp, hand to her mouth, staring at the bandages and the tubes.
‘Oh God, Jess. He looks so hurt.’
Jess tried to reassure her. For her own benefit as well as Lizzie’s she said firmly, ‘No. It’s just all the technology; it looks worse than it is because we can’t understand what it’s for. He moved his hand in mine, and stretched out his arms. I told you.’
Apprehensively Lizzie tiptoed closer. She put her hand over Danny’s, but he did not move. She sat down, and Jess drew up a stool next to her. The nurse circled around them to the other side of the bed, unclipped a bag filled with dark blood-stained urine and replaced it with an empty one. To Jess and Lizzie she was sympathetic, but Danny was her concern. Even his mother was irrelevant here.
On the train, Beth had been in a limbo. She had left London and Sam behind her, the monotony and the contradictory knife-sharp intervals of happiness that made up her everyday life, and she hardly dared to imagine what she would find at the hospital. On the phone after breaking the news Jess had tried to reassure her, but the attempt was a weak one. Beth interrupted, too sharply. ‘I’ll see for myself when I get there. Don’t take up any more time.’
After she had hung up she bit her lip regretfully. Even today, it was too easy for the two of them to wrong-foot each other. Fighting down a queasy surge of anxiety and guilt, Beth dialled her office and left a message on her boss’s overnight answering machine to say what had happened. She packed a bag and headed for the station.
On the way north she huddled into her seat in her damp raincoat, staring out of the train window at grey sidings and fields and factories. Instead of Danny, because that was too fearful, she thought about Sam. She spent too much time thinking about Sam, she knew that, but the central question never diminished in urgency.
Would he leave his wife for her?
Beth had been having an affair with a married man for more than a year. Originally, in her second job after secretarial college, Beth had been Sam Clark’s secretary. He was forty to her twenty-two, the good-looking and urbane editorial director of a publishing house, and within three months of her arrival in his office they had become lovers. He had taken her to a book launch party after work one evening, then to a restaurant, and – much later – to a hotel, because in those days Beth’s flat was shared with a friend from college. The next day, back on opposite sides of their desks, Beth had been surprised to remember her compliance in all this. But Sam was used to getting what he wanted, and Beth was deeply flattered to discover that what he apparently wanted was herself. Within days, she had fallen incontrovertibly in love with him.
There had been difficulties from the beginning, of course. Sam’s job was a demanding one, and his wife and young family took up almost all the rest of his time. Beth had to be content with the few hours a week that he could spare for her, after fulfilling all his other obligations. But she knew that these hours were what mattered most to him. The handful of people at work who knew about the affair seemed unsurprised by it, yet Beth had judged it best to sacrifice the pleasure of being near him all day in favour of the discretion of a different job. With Sam’s glowing recommendation she had moved on to the rights department of a rival publisher, a job that suited her well. She was on the way to becoming modestly successful. Sam had helped her to find a little flat of her own, in a suburban north London red-brick terrace. The relationship that had seemed so breathtaking at first had settled almost into a painful routine.
Of course Sam would leave his wife; to doubt that was to doubt her entire life. But when? When would he tell Sadie the truth? Beth’s bones felt brittle with the strain of waiting for it to happen, before everything else in her life could begin. She had grown thin, and her skin seemed to stretch too tightly over her face.
