Authors: Diane Johnson
She sat on the bed and telephoned her mother in London, to recount things as they had found them. ‘The doctor says there isn’t much hope, and that he probably won’t wake up, but they haven’t quite finished warming him.’
‘How do they do that?’
‘They’ve covered him with blankets, and I think they put warm salt water in his veins, something horrible like that. I didn’t quite understand the doctor, his English was rather…’
‘Dear God,’ said Pamela, thinking that it was redundant to ill-wish someone who was so badly off; one was left with nowhere to stand, tipped off balance. Her innate kindness, and the good memories of twenty-three years of marriage, however much of a philanderer he had been, softened her tone momentarily.
‘The baby is cute, but he doesn’t look anything like Father,’ Posy said. ‘There’s a boy taking care of him, the
younger brother of the wife. It’s quite a strange situation.’
‘Probably I should call his solicitor,’ said Pamela, whose heart was very hard toward that individual, Trevor Osworthy, who had acted for Adrian during the divorce, against herself. ‘Or, at least, a British doctor.’
‘Could you, Mummy? Maybe you could even get them over here today. I’m afraid it may be – you know. Over.’ At this her voice broke, reassuring her that she was indeed capable of feeling some more decent emotion than the superficial exasperation that seemed to be rising in her.
‘I’ll call Mr Osworthy. Give me your number there.’
Posy finished unpacking and went down to the lobby again. It seemed odd to her to be attending a tragedy when the world outside the hotel seemed so full of health and cheer. The hotel guests were suited up in vivid Gore-Tex parkas, booted, chatting in the lower lobby. The youthful personnel of the hotel, wearing plain morning faces, scurried through the corridors with the guests’ skis and dry cleaning. She and Rupert faced the grim duty of returning to the hospital, when anyone would rather have been on the slopes. She envied the bronze skins and air of mindless health emanating from one and all, the same people to be seen in their bikinis in summer – she had twice been to Cannes and Nice in the school holidays, and had felt the bad luck of being a pale, large-scaled Brit who only had limited holidays, next to these slim, carefree people who had, apparently, nothing to do, and all the time they needed for pleasure and laughter.
Again at the hospital, they saw no change in Father, who had been lying just like this when they had seen him earlier in the morning, so unmoving he might as well be
dead, preserved like Mao or Lenin, except for the wheezing of the machine and the almost imperceptible rise and fall of his chest. The color of his skin was not altogether alive, but not altogether dead, his eyes were closed serenely. Posy could not believe that thoughts weren’t streaming across his interior mind.
Oh, ha, isn’t this ironic, she imagined his mind’s voice saying, lying here in the power of all those I have wounded, who are now assembled together to wreak their collective vengeance because I am helpless, off in another realm. They did love me, I see that now, I shouldn’t have abandoned them. Aren’t you sorry now, Venn, foolish sod, to have forsaken poor Posy, poor Pam? Oh, and poor Rupert, of course.
‘I think that by late this afternoon or tomorrow, things will be clearer,’ the doctor said, interrupting her reverie. ‘But you must be prepared. I would like to speak to Mr Venn’s family this afternoon, say at five,’ he said.
Kip had the idea of taking Harry to the hospital to see his mother, in hopes that the voice of her baby would penetrate her coma, as on
General Hospital
. Harry’s voice might melt through the ice in her brain. He had weighed the question of whether the fright to Harry of seeing his mom frozen and inert would outdo the good to her of hearing her baby; and concluded that since Harry was so little, even if he recognized her, he’d forget the weird sight of the tubes. Anyway, he had to take Harry with him because he didn’t think he could ask Tamara to sit anymore, and had no money to pay her besides. He also didn’t think he could ask Christian Jaffe for another ride to the hospital,
but there was a shuttle to Moutiers that ran often. Harry was cute in his bunny-eared snowsuit, and people laughed when he chased a dog at the bus stop.
Standing at the bus stop keeping Harry out of the road, Kip was scared, even more scared than yesterday. Something about the ordinary Alpine morning slowly lightening the gray sky, a trace of sun piercing the clouds, the mighty peaks looming all around, dwarfing the merely human village, the cold – it all made him feel desperate whereas yesterday he had only been shocked.
The hospital, by daylight a frayed nineteenth-century mansion with remodelled windows and doors, seemed inadequate and retrograde, but there was a reassuring, professional smell of antiseptic and medicine. Today no one stopped Kip from walking into the intensive care room, where nothing had changed. In the daylight, he could see that the covers mounded over Adrian were an ugly pale green. Kerry was more lightly covered in folded sheets. A third person in another bed had been placed between the two Venns, and a nurse was doing something to this new person’s machine. She looked at Kip and said
bonjour
. A fourth bed was occupied too. He wondered if these were also avalanche victims.
It seemed to Kip that today Kerry looked somehow rosier, was more alive looking, though really there was no sign she was coming to, she lay as still as ever. The noise of the machines was more terrible today, wheezing and beeping, gasping and strained, the monitors pale like old black-and-white TVs. Some of Kerry’s clothes were folded over the foot of her bed, as if she were at camp. Kip held Harry up and said, ‘Say “Hi, Mommy.”’ Harry
stared and said nothing. ‘Hi, Mommy,’ Kip repeated. After a few more promptings, Harry said, ‘Hi,’ in a wee voice.
Kerry didn’t react, didn’t budge. ‘Hi, Kerry, it’s me, and Harry’s here to see you.’ Kip went on like this as long as he could bear to, until he began to feel as if he were berating her, so resolutely still did she lie, refusing to listen or react. When the nurse wasn’t looking, he held Harry closer, his hand over Harry’s tiny hand, and together they patted Kerry’s arm. ‘Hi, Mommy,’ squeaked Kip in Harry’s voice.
‘There is not much change today,’ said the nurse. ‘But she is definitely not worse.’
Kip tried putting Harry down, but had to pick him up again when he saw the dangling bags of urine and rolling carts and other things Harry could push over or pull off. When he had stared long enough at Kerry’s inert body, he turned to leave, his notion of correct behavior warring with his wish to be out of there. What could you do in a sickroom, anyhow, and what good did it do to just sit there, which wasn’t really an option with Harry there, but you did hear that talking to coma victims helped them.
‘So, bye for now, Kerry, I’ll come back later. Harry says bye-bye. Harry says you’d better wake up soon, Mommy. Uh – bye, Adrian,’ he added, remembering that Adrian had no one to talk to him in his coma, in case it made a difference, though the brother and sister could do it, but did they know to?
In the hall the doctor approached him. Kip felt wary – the doctor hadn’t sought him out before. ‘If you could be here when Monsieur Venn’s children next come, I would
like to speak to all of you together. Perhaps late this afternoon? Say at five?’ Kip was about to protest that he wasn’t a family member, but he saw that he sort of was, on Kerry’s behalf, maybe even on Harry’s behalf, in case there was something he had to represent Harry’s opinion about. Kip promised to be there, but he felt full of dread.
As they left the hospital, the Venn brother and sister were coming in. It seemed to Kip that as Harry was their half-brother, they ought to take a turn with him, but he could see from their grim, distraught faces that they weren’t going to. In the chill of their unconcerned glances at Kerry, Kip felt his and his sister’s isolation. Kerry wasn’t the object of these people’s concerns, Kerry was just collateral damage, he himself a forlorn emissary of a small state whose fate was incidental. He foresaw that no one but he would lift a finger or make an inquiry in Kerry’s behalf. No one would ask whether she was getting good care or if she ought to be taken someplace else or what she was like, a sister sometimes nice, sometimes horrible, like all sisters he had ever heard of. He saw he’d have to fight for Kerry, but he had no idea how.
For a while, they walked around Moutiers. There was a newsagent and some little restaurants and not much else. He wondered how old you had to be to drive in France. He didn’t have his license yet but he knew how to drive. What was he going to do with Harry for a whole day? Ski school? How old did you have to be to learn how to ski? He’d seen some really little kids in the ski school, tiny toddlers with short little one-foot-long skis, going like bombs, but none of them was as small as Harry.
Eventually they took the bus back to the hotel. The doctor’s words, so portentous and uninformative, stayed on Kip’s mind all afternoon, even when he managed to stash Harry with the chambermaid Tamara for a nap after lunch, and make a couple of runs down the
boucle blanc
. He told himself that his not making a couple of runs wouldn’t help Kerry. On his board hurtling downhill, he could feel free, unencumbered, outrunning tragedy. Once he saw his new friend Amy, who was supposed to be helping him, but she was talking intently to a ski instructor at the bottom of the lift and didn’t see him. Kip thought she was incredibly foxy. Someday he would be a ski instructor. It was a well-known perk of being a ski instructor that women would do anything you wanted.
‘You know what it’s about,’ Posy had said to Rupert at lunch, talking of the doctor’s summons at five.
‘Perfectly. We’re going to have to decide whether to pull the plug on our father,’ Rupert said.
‘Of course we couldn’t possibly.’
‘How can we know? We haven’t heard the medical details. Maybe it would be a kindness, or maybe…’ His voice betrayed the poorly mastered panic she felt herself. She saw that he had shaved and cut himself since they arrived, and had stuck a little tissue on the place.
‘This is so – so extraordinary. What a thing to happen,’ said Posy. ‘Father has always been just a bloody whole lot of trouble.’ She dabbed at tears and tried to sound calm. It was true. Growing up, their lives had always been organized around his comings and goings, trips to France, purchases – new car, new place in the country, boat, once
even a racehorse – the sorts of things that would suddenly be sold. When he and Pam had divorced, a sort of boring lull had oppressed them, and she had thought it was Father they missed; perhaps it was only the excitement.
‘This cheese is remarkable,’ sighed Rupert, unwilling to talk any more about it all. ‘They do cheese better in France.’
‘I like France, I’ve always liked France,’ Posy said, looking around at the comfy dining room, with its pink tablecloths, flowers, displays of porcelain edelweiss, and glass cases along the walls featuring Chef Jaffe’s signature china.
‘Except for the French,’ Rupert said. It was an Englishman’s obligatory rejoinder.
‘Even the French,’ Posy insisted, suddenly in a better mood, her spirit armed by the wine against the sorrow and pain they had come to France to experience. ‘The doctor was nice.’ Though she didn’t like doctors.
‘Doctors are always nice, it’s their duty, even French ones,’ Rupert said.
‘I think doctors are foul,’ declared Posy.
At four Kip came in from the slopes, checked on Harry, who was napping under the glowering supervision of Tamara, and started again the cumbersome bus trip down to Moutiers, hoping vainly that the English brother and sister would offer him a ride. He had been too shy to remind them that he, too, had been sent for, and they had not approached him at lunch. They had sat together at a window table, seeming to have little to say to each other, though Kip could see them sometimes waving their
hands and shaking their heads in a burst of animation. They never, that he could see, looked at him or even at their brother Harry.
10
The meeting was in Dr Lamm’s office, and the doctor was just coming in, perhaps had himself been delayed. His office was a small, windowless room behind the nurses’ station, where extra chairs had been brought. The Venn brother and sister were there, another man Kip had never seen, who laid his overcoat, Burberry lining carefully folded out, over the back of his chair, and a man in hospital green. The doctor took off his white coat, which gave the impression that he was eager to be off home, though his tone was stately and somberly unhurried. Posy and Rupert sat, nodding vaguely at the others, then subsided into fixed stares at the doctor but not at each other. The room was warm.
‘Who are you, monsieur, if you please?’ the doctor asked the Burberry man in French.
‘I am Jacques Delamer, from Saint-Gond – Monsieur Venn’s man of business – do you say “business manager”? I direct the vineyard and his affairs generally. I consider him a close friend as well. I read the news in the
journal
this morning, and called here immediately, I was given the grim details, and I leapt into my car. V
oilà
. We are only two hours south of here.’
The doctor nodded and without preamble began in English. ‘I must repeat to you what you know already, that we are not happy with Monsieur Venn’s condition,
Monsieur Venn has not revived.’ He said this again in French, perhaps for the benefit of the stranger. ‘He has warmed up to normal body temperature, but he still needs powerful medicaments to support his blood pressure and heartbeat. These have not returned by themselves as is necessary, and worst of all, he has not regained any brain function. None at all. In fact things have worsened as his body warms. His brain shows no signs of returning as it should have by now – frankly we are afraid he will not revive. That is a possibility you must prepare yourself for.’ His tone was direct, though he had tried to infuse it with sympathy.
‘Not revive?’ cried Posy and Rupert. Posy mistrusted the doctor’s tone of sympathy, the concern, her own ignorance of medical details. What were they hearing?