The Vows of Silence (11 page)

Twenty-three

“You know too much,” Richard Serrailler said, “inevitably.”

The radiography waiting area was empty, quiet for the night. The plastic tiles had been mopped and a bright yellow V-board planted in the middle.
DANGER OF SLIPPING. WET FLOOR.

“I know what people mean,” Cat said, “when they say they can’t stand the smell of hospitals. You don’t notice it when you work inside one all day but when you come in like this, it’s unbearable.”

“Listerine,” Richard said. He was standing, looking at a poster about tuberculosis.

“I wish I didn’t know anything. Right now, I wish I was waiting for a neurologist to come and tell me good news and I wish I was able to hang on to it.”

“You can do that.”

“Can I?”

He went on reading.

“I rang Simon,” said Cat.

“I hope Simon is busy catching people who shoot young women dead.”

“Dad …”

Anyone else would have helped her out, turned, smiled, made some gesture, but her father was not like that. She had something to say so he waited to hear what it was. He was not unkind, not unfeeling, as Si believed, he was rational. “Simon was a bit surprised to meet Judith. But don’t hold it against him. He wasn’t expecting it and he misses Ma more than any of us.”

“How can you be the judge of that?”

“Sorry. But you know.”

“And you? What do you feel?” Now he did turn to look at her.

“I miss Ma, of course I do, I miss her now, I wish she was here now more than anything.”

“I meant what do you feel about Judith?”

Cat looked at her father. I have never understood you, she thought, never known what makes you tick. None of us has—almost certainly Ma never did but she found a way of living with you, and I have always felt that you and I had a good relationship in spite of it. Simon is the only one who does not, cannot and probably will not. Yet at this moment you might as well be a rather unsympathetic stranger.

“I like Judith,” she said. It sounded lame but exhaustion and anxiety hit her like a fist in her gut so that she felt suddenly faint.

Richard did not speak, he simply walked away, out of the waiting area and down the corridor.

Cat thought nothing. She was beyond thought. And perhaps it was easier to be here alone.

He returned with a plastic cup of coffee and handed it to her. “Difficult,” he said. “I know it’s difficult.”

Cat sipped. It was black and sweet.

They had not talked in the car: Richard had driven and Cat had sat in the back with Chris, who had grumbled for a short time that he had no reason to be going to hospital and had then fallen completely silent until they arrived. He had remained silent, not meeting her eye, responding curtly to the immediate questions, nodding agreement to the scan.

“He knows,” she said now. “He knows the score as well as we do.”

“He knows the options but it is always harder to make objective judgements about oneself.”

The door of the scanning suite opened. How could she have sent so many patients here and never had any real idea of what it was like for them to go inside, and for their families to wait out here, wait for the news, wait for someone in a white coat to start talking to them in language they did not know, give them news they could not interpret? Not yet. Not here.

She stood up. The registrar was a young woman.

“Shall we talk here or do you want to come into the office?”

“Is my husband …?”

“He’s going onto the ward. I need to admit him at
least for the rest of tonight and Dr Ling will see him tomorrow, if you’re happy with that?”

Christina Ling. Consultant neurologist.

“May I see the scans?”

“Yes of course. Dr Serrailler?”

“I am not an experienced interpreter of MRI pictures,” Richard said.

“Come with me all the same,” Cat said. She did not need her father for emotional support, she would not ask for his shoulder, she needed to draw on his detachment, his professionalism, his ability to rationalise, even with his own family. It was a sort of strength.

The screen glowed neon blue, the strange, impersonal image like an illustration in a textbook.

Cat stared. The cross section—the slice, the layers of this image inside the bony cavity—was the inside of her husband’s brain, Chris, the father of her children, Dr Chris, the man she loved and had been with for fourteen years. Chris. Chris’s brain.

Dr Louise Parker
, the badge read in black letters on pale blue plastic.
Neurological Senior Registrar
.

She was leaning forward, pointing at the screen with the cursor.

Richard Serrailler cleared his throat.

“Yes,” Cat said. “I see it.”

It was always the way. You knew, but you pretended you did not; you feared the worst, not because you were a pessimist but because you knew the medical facts. It was your job.

She had known.

“The lesion is here,” Dr Parker said, highlighting the shadowed area. “It’s already quite large. He must have had symptoms, but they can grow pretty rapidly as you know. The pressure just reached a point where it triggered off some electrical activity, causing him to fit. It would explain the mood changes—personality changes.”

“Yes,” Cat said.

“Has he complained of headaches?”

“He has, but he didn’t imply they were severe—I put it down to the stress of packing up and travelling. Jet lag. He’s been very tired—I should have realised. I should have known it wasn’t prolonged jet lag.”

“Easy to miss. He says he’s vomited a couple of times in the last few days.”

“He didn’t tell me. Why didn’t he say anything?” She looked at her father but could not read his expression because there was none. He might not have heard the conversation.

Chris’s brain. She looked at the shadowed portion, trying to assess exactly where the tumour lay in relation to the rest, to assess the prognosis, to behave as if she were a doctor and this were a patient’s scan. To behave like her father.

“It doesn’t look good,” she said at last.

“No. Dr Ling will look at it first thing tomorrow and talk to you about the options.”

“May I see Chris?” I am a helpless relative, she thought. Everything has changed.

“Of course. I’ll take you along. Dr Serrailler?”

“I’ll wait in the car. No point in crowding him.”

*

Chris was in a side ward. The lights were dimmed. Three other beds, one with a prone figure, one humped over. One with the curtains drawn. Murmured voices. Drip stands. Cat felt a swell of fear.

He was propped up on a pillow rest. Hospital gown.

“I’ll go and see if someone can find him pyjamas,” the registrar said.

Hospital pyjamas.

But he was Chris. He looked no different. Somehow she had expected him to have changed.

He looked at her. Looked away.

“Why didn’t you tell me?” She hadn’t meant to accuse. “You must have known it wasn’t just jet lag.”

“I used to have migraines—in my teens. I thought they’d come back.”

She put her hand on his.

“Seen the scan?”

“Yes. MRI diagnosis is for the experts. You’ll see the neurologist in the morning.”

“Where are the children?”

“With Judith.”

“Who’s Judith?”

“Dad’s friend. You’ve had a sedative, don’t worry.”

Chris was silent. Drowsing? Thinking?

She moved to get up but he turned his hand quickly, pinning her own down. Cat leaned over and stroked his forehead. “I’ll come in early.”

“If it’s a grade-four I want you to give me a morphine overdose. Promise me.”

“Don’t try and diagnose yourself.”

“
Promise me
, Cat.”

She was silent. She could not promise. She could not begin to think of what it would mean if he was right. But he wasn’t right.

“A glioma. Anything above a grade two. Please.”

“Try to sleep. But you know there are plenty of other brain tumours. Don’t leap straight to the worst. Don’t think about it any more tonight.” For God’s sake, she thought, how stupid. How stupid, stupid, stupid.
Don’t think about it any more
. As if.

She leaned over to kiss him.

Chris turned his face away.

“Strange,” Richard said as they turned out of the hospital car park. “The symptoms are contradictory. The epileptic fit and the drowsiness indicate a brain stem tumour whereas the mood changes are consistent with one in the frontal lobe. Glioma, would you say? Has he had eye problems? There’s certainly no ataxia that I could see.”

Cat struggled to reply. The car seemed to be airborne, streaming ahead down the bypass. Her father had always been a careful, safe and very fast driver. Her mind was a swirling mass of images and nothing would stay still.

“What did Chris have to say?”

She meant to reply that he had been sedated and not very communicative. She said, “He made me promise that if it was a grade-four I would give him an overdose.”

“Ah. Interesting.”

“
Interesting?
”

He did not reply.

“For heaven’s sake, there are dozens of possibilities, aren’t there? It could be benign, in which case it might be amenable to surgery and he’ll make a full recovery. It could be amenable to radiotherapy. It may not even be a tumour. An MRI is hard to read, you said so yourself.”

“Not that hard.”

“My God, you are a comforter. I’m struggling here, Dad. I need you to help me.”

“Of course I’ll help you. What on earth do you expect?”

“You sound so clinical.”

“I’m a clinician. So are you. Just because I’m talking like a medic doesn’t mean I am without any feeling. I’m extremely sorry for Chris. It is not a road I would wish anyone to have to travel.”

“How can someone ask his wife to kill him?”

“He spoke only of one particular circumstance.”

“In any circumstance.”

“Easily. I would do the same.”

“Never ask me.”

“Martha,” Richard said now, as they stopped for a set of red lights, “would have asked for it, if she’d been able to. I see that now.”

“Martha?”

“As it was, your mother had to take the burden on herself. At the time, I was horrified. I was blinded by grief to the truth, which was that it was the right thing to do. I was unable to think rationally—to see reason. Your mother had to see it for me.”

The lights changed and a motorcyclist roared across their path as Richard accelerated. He braked and swerved and the bike vanished into the darkness in a trail of exhaust smoke. They turned right. They were on the country road. Three miles or so from Cat’s home.

“What is the statistic for the deaths of young men on motor bicycles?”

“I want you to stop. I need you to tell me what you mean.”

“No need to stop. It was perfectly clear.”

“No, it was not perfectly clear.”

“Don’t shout at me, Catherine.”

“I don’t understand what you just said. About Mum and Martha. You have to tell me.”

She looked at him as he drove. His narrow face was set in a neutral, calm expression as he watched the road. I do not know this man, Cat thought, but I do understand why Simon feels as he does.

“I would probably never have told you. But now you know. Your mother gave Martha an injection of potassium. She could not bear to see her existence continue in that way. She told me and I agreed to say nothing to anyone else. Until now I’ve kept that promise. But as the subject arose again it seemed appropriate to tell you. I presume you agree we should keep this between ourselves?”

Twenty-four

It was very late. Judith sat in the Deerbons’ friendly kitchen and thought about the day her husband had died.

She had been making notes for a case conference about a child they thought they would have to take into care. There had been a cat then too, huge and grey with scarred ears. Gasper, named by David. Fifteen years before. A scrap of pathetic fluff found in a puddle by her daily help and brought to them in a duffel bag. Now David was in the Congo saving lives, Vivien in Edinburgh doing her vet training and Gasper was spreadeagled in a patch of late sunshine on the kitchen table beside her, one paw occasionally reaching out to scratch half-heartedly at her file. Don had gone fishing, leaving at dawn. He never woke her. She had come downstairs just after seven but he had been long gone to his favourite stretch of the Test.

The Deerbon cat, Mephisto, was on the chair opposite her, a tight, neat ball, paws tucked away.

She remembered making a pot of tea and looking at the clock to work out when to put the casserole in, thinking about her case, worrying about it as she always did. Taking a child from its parents was never easy, she never felt other than anxious about it, that was why she had been reading the case notes again.

She remembered the child’s name. Campbell Wild.

Don should have been home by eight. There had been the sound of the car a little after seven. Good, she had thought, I can go for an early bath and Don can peel the potatoes after he’s sorted out his fish. Assuming there are fish.

And then there had been the sound not of his key in the door but of the bell. Ringing, ringing.

He had managed to struggle to the bank before falling onto it, face down, as the pain of the coronary hit him, and had lain there half the day before a couple had come by, walking their Labradors.

It had been her husband’s registrar, who had turned up one Sunday morning a month later and simply told her that he was going to drive her there and that perhaps she might want to pick some flowers to take with her. He had been the week before, he said, on a recce. Knew where to go, found the spot. He had been gentle and firm, a nice boy with a strangely domed forehead, rimless spectacles. When they reached the exact place on the riverbank, he had gone away and left her alone for about twenty minutes. Afterwards, they had gone
to eat a steak in a nearby pub. He had sussed that out in advance too.

Mephisto stirred and yawned and burrowed more deeply back into sleep and then there were the lights of the car swinging into the drive.

But it was Simon who came into the kitchen, and then stood looking at her, glancing around then back at her again, and she saw that his initial surprise and disapproval had been quickly shuttered. His expression blanked to nothing.