‘I did see her in here once, actually,’ I said. ‘She did a plate, a yellow one, for her sister’s birthday.’
‘Wow,’ Charlotte marvelled, ‘you’ve got a good memory.’
My brother rang me when he discovered that for two weeks in a row his regular weekend visit to the hospital had been the only one Dad had had all week. ‘They say you haven’t been up for a while,’ he said. ‘Is anything wrong?’
‘There’s been something I’ve had to deal with here,’ I said. ‘It’s been… upsetting.’
‘I thought you split up with Matt ages ago?’
‘Not Matt.’ Oh, the innocence of an amicable break-up with a single man!
Phil paused, not one to pry.
‘I will go and see Dad,’ I told him. ‘I hadn’t realised how long I’d left it. I’ll go this evening. How was he when you saw him?’
‘The same.’
So
something
was the same in this upturned world, but it was hardly heart-warming news. ‘It’s not the same, though, is it, Phil?’ I cried, and after that words came tumbling from me before I could scoop them back: ‘
He
’s not the same. He’s unrecognisable. It’s unbearable, don’t you think? All those years he sacrificed everything for us and now we’re older and in a position to give something back, we can’t. There’s nothing he wants. He doesn’t
know
what he wants, he doesn’t know us!’
There was a moment of cold shock, for this statement of helplessness was years out of date. Like me, Phil had grown expert in pretending, at least in conversations between the two of us. Perhaps he bared his true torment to his wife Julie, as I did –
had
– to Arthur. ‘He wouldn’t want you to think like that,’ he said, voice determinedly steady. ‘Don’t crack up, Em. It’s actually good that he’s stable at the moment and not deteriorating.’ Another pause. ‘You know what we just talked about?’
‘What?’
‘You. When you used to have nightmares.’
‘Cheery stuff.’
‘Oh, come on, we were laughing about it. The third bunk, remember?’
‘The third bunk?’ I willed myself to get into the spirit of this, but I was out of practice. I knew what he was talking about, though. For months after Mum died, I’d had terrors in the night and become frightened of the dark, of sleeping in my room alone, and so Dad had moved me to the lower bunk in Phil’s room. It was a tiny cabin of a space, every breath amplified, and all that happened now was that my crying woke him up and set him off. So Dad laid out a mattress of sleeping bags for himself next to my lower bunk, the three of us sleeping in a space not much bigger than an airing cupboard. And it worked well enough, until one morning Phil sprang down from the top bunk, forgetting about our new roommate, and landed on Dad’s head. Somehow Dad managed to hide his pain from us and get us to school. Years later, he admitted he’d taken the morning off work to go to A&E to be treated for concussion.
‘He didn’t actually remember,’ Phil confessed. ‘But he enjoyed hearing about my clumsy, pubescent phase.’
At last I managed a chuckle, if only to end the call on a warmer note. Scenes from our childhood were like make-believe now, at best fables, instructive to the listener – if only for a minute or two.
Emily
As I say, Arthur had to all intents and purposes dispossessed me. He’d also made it impossible for me to contact him. Having discovered that the mobile line on which I had always reached him was no longer in service, I called his secretaries at St Barnabas’ and the Harley Street clinic. Both parroted the official line: he had taken compassionate leave for an indefinite period and they were not able to promise that any message would be returned. They were sure I would understand.
For the first time I turned on the old laptop Matt had left when he moved out and began checking for email from Arthur – sometimes, at weekends, obsessively, several times an hour – but there was never anything, of course. I went back to the beginning and tried the options again: mobile phone (out of service), hospital extensions (the party line), email (nothing) – an eternity ring of futility.
I had, by then, all but given up on the possibility of seeing him on the Grove or anywhere else in the neighbourhood. He had moved out of his house, at least temporarily, that was the only conclusion I could draw after I’d passed it several times a day for weeks – not only to and from the bus stop to work as of old, but also late at night, when I would find myself attracted against all reason uphill to the pavement outside number 11. Every time, without exception, I found it dark and unchanged, the blinds at his study windows that had been pulled low to conceal me never again opened. Occasionally I would go to the door and ring the bell – its abrupt grind penetrated my soft tissue like a death knell – but no one came, of course, and I would scuttle away, fearful of catching the eye of a neighbour or mourner. There were numbers of the latter at any given time – often teenagers standing in pairs or clusters, the girls weeping openly – and there were bouquets of flowers in various states of decomposition. Little messages I couldn’t bear to stop to read, and even drawings, had been tied to the railings with ribbon.
Somehow, partly by lingering inside my front door and listening like an animal for signs of life on the other side of the wall, I avoided running into Sarah and Marcus. I did see Nina once. We were walking towards each other in the street and I scurried to the kerb well in advance of any potential collision, my guilty eyes kept low. Of course a guiltless person would have stopped the best friend of the dead woman to offer her heartfelt condolences, but I was not guiltless; I was the offender who had repeated ‘it’s every woman for herself’ back to the victim, no longer sure whether I had meant it in sincerity or mockery. It was a horrible coincidence that when Nina and I passed we were in easy sight of the Woodhalls’ house, all those wilting flowers at the railings. She did not speak to me, but if she had, she would have said, ‘This is your fault. I don’t care what the coroner decides,
you
are the cause of death.’
The cause of
three
deaths. The magnitude of that defeated me: I could not absorb it. Two boys, one only eighteen, the other still at school and young enough for his mother to have begged for his father to stay to parent him to adulthood. Sons and heirs, pride and joy, apples of eyes, they must have been those things to Arthur and yet I knew so little about them, having either suppressed my interest or not considered it necessary to have any in the first place. I knew from photographs I’d seen in the house that they’d taken after their mother physically, both fair-haired and blue-eyed; I knew that Alex had been the adventurer, Hugo more introspective, both equally high-achieving academically and headed for universities that would make Arthur and Sylvie proud. But what else? Were they popular? Did they have girlfriends? Had they been virgins? What were their hobbies and passions? Were they alert before they died or dozing, having been awoken against their will and herded into the car in what was supposed to be only their holiday cut short, not their lives? How many friends and classmates and teachers wept for them, for the monstrous robbery of youth and potential? Many more, I supposed, than the ones I’d seen outside the house. Their school would be in mourning, the summers of a hundred or more families darkened by the horror of this. When Hugo’s class returned for the new term, it would be all anyone talked of; they’d offer the students counselling, beseech them to stop thinking, as every last one of them surely had, That could have been me. And Alexander’s class, off to university or gap-year travels. What a bitter send-off they would endure, were they to continue with their plans at all.
My fault: at least some of it and maybe all of it.
Other than Gwen at the coroner’s office, only one person made contact regarding the Woodhalls: Toby texted me some weeks after the event to say that the family appreciated my help on the morning of the accident and that Arthur was coping as well as could be expected. Frustrated by the stock phrases and by the absence of any coded personal message, I rang the number back, but when connected to the voicemail service I could not think how to express myself.
Tell him I love him and miss him. Tell him he’s my whole life. Tell him I’m sorry for what I said to her. I wish I’d said…
No, better to say nothing.
Though Arthur’s absolute silence during this period could be interpreted only as absolute rejection, I persisted with my phone calls to his office, and at last the available information altered: he had returned to work at St Barnabas’. I found out which day he was next seeing patients and, discovering that the hours overlapped with my lunch break, I went to the clinic myself.
It surprised me that any Tom, Dick or Harry was free to walk straight into the Ophthalmology Department without a security check, though I suppose the assumption was that no one in his right mind would want to unless they had an appointment, for it was bedlam down there in the basement unit. Every wall of the corridors leading from the stairs and lift to the reception desk was lined with plastic seats, every seat taken. The surplus patients stood or squatted, while new arrivals continued to press towards a desk staffed by a single figure acting as both receptionist and porter; with every second enquiry, he would leave his station to help or accompany an elderly, half-blind arrival to safety, having to negotiate each time for a seat already occupied. The only other authority figure I could see was an interpreter for an Asian woman, who spoke rapidly and anxiously in a language I could not identify. The clinic was plainly oversubscribed; it reminded me of bus stations in developing countries or a logjam at airport immigration lines when too many flights have touched down at once.
As I waited in the queue for reception I became aware of various medical staff emerging every so often from an adjoining corridor, calling out patient names and shepherding the chosen ones off into examination rooms. Arthur was not among those who appeared, but twice I left the queue to collar one of them, hoping to discover which room he was in and present myself unannounced. Both times I missed my chance, the patient already having begun to bombard the staff member with questions, and I was waved back to the same queue I’d left.
After twenty minutes, I reached the desk. ‘I don’t have an appointment,’ I told the receptionist. ‘I’m here to speak to Arthur Woodhall, the consultant.’
‘He told you to come without an appointment? He doesn’t normally do that. What’s your name?’
‘Emily Marr, but no, he isn’t expecting me. I just need you to tell him I’m here – or if you could show me which room he’s in, I could —’
He cut me off. ‘I can tell you now that if you haven’t got an appointment he won’t be able to see you today. Yesterday’s clinic had to be cancelled and we’re running that alongside today’s post-op – you can see how crazy it is.’
‘Yes, of course.’ I tried to smile. I’d forgotten by then that I used to be considered very pretty, that I’d once caught male eyes routinely and been able to extract myself from trouble on that basis alone. ‘I’m a good friend of his. He’ll know my name. I don’t mind waiting right till the end, when everyone’s been seen. Shall I just do that?’
But I no longer had the power to charm. The receptionist looked only wary and irritated by my suggestion. ‘I’ll have to check his schedule with his team upstairs…’
‘No, please. Could you just tell him I’m here?
Please
.’
At last he made the call, not connecting directly to Arthur, I gathered, but at least passing on my name and request to a member of his office staff. ‘Yep, I’ll hold.’ I waited to the side of the desk, watching him check in patients one-handed, hardly able to contain myself when his phone exchange resumed: could this be it, finally? Would I be summoned to the phone and permitted to hear Arthur’s voice, or directed along that overcrowded corridor to the room that held him? He could be twenty feet from me, right this minute! The yearning to be physically close to him was so strong I felt on the verge of levitation as I stood there on the tips of my toes, ready to hasten wherever I was summoned.
The receptionist replaced the phone and called me forward. ‘Mr Woodhall would like you to leave,’ he said. He’d tactfully lowered his voice, but the tone was quite different now, implicit of grave consequences were I to choose not to cooperate.
Though I felt as if I’d been booted in the solar plexus, I feigned mild surprise. ‘He hasn’t got time to see me?’
‘He is only seeing registered patients today. There are already several he might not get to as it is. When he finishes his clinic he goes straight upstairs into theatre. He doesn’t have a minute to spare.’
My control began to slip. ‘But he must! He must have a minute,
one
minute! What about after he’s finished in theatre?’
He gestured sharply, losing his patience with me. ‘Look, I’m sorry, but you can see for yourself we’re up to our necks here.’ As those behind me agitated to check in, he reached across me to take the next appointment card and rattled the computer mouse to refresh the screen. ‘This isn’t the place for personal calls,’ he added in a mutter.
‘Then where
is
the place!’ I cried, not noticing I’d raised my voice until silence fell among those waiting around me. Realising I was creating a scene, one that might later be reported to Arthur, I began sobbing into my hands.
A second member of staff now materialised, asking the first, ‘Want me to call Security, Bob?’
He and Bob frowned at me in joint query.
‘No,’ I told them, wiping tears and mucus from my face. ‘Forget it. I’m going.’
Such was my loss of a hold on reality that by the time I reached Earth, Paint & Fire I had convinced myself that my message had never reached Arthur, that his staff had refused the request without consulting him, overprotective of him in his bereavement. At the first opportunity, I phoned his St Barnabas’ secretary and left a cheerful voicemail asking her to confirm that Arthur had been informed of my visit. When she did not call back that day, nor after I’d left an urgent second message early the following morning, I phoned his private clinic in Harley Street. It was nine o’clock, just before I had to leave for work, and this time I had my strategy ready. I would not claim private acquaintance but would make an appointment as a patient. But of course the first thing I was asked was if I had a referral or a health-insurance policy number, and right away I was floundering.