Under Gemini (28 page)

Isobel withdrew out of reach and instantly became more firm. “Now, I never make promises unless I know I'm going to be able to keep them.”

“Please.”

Isobel had reached the safety of the door. “You have a little sleep and then you'll feel better.”

She slept and was deviled by dreams. She was on a beach and the sand was black and full of spiders. Rose was there, too, in a bikini, walking along the edge of an oily sea with a long queue of men following her. But all at once the men saw Flora and Flora had no clothes on whatsoever. And Rose started laughing. Flora tried to run away, but her feet wouldn't move and the black sand had turned to mud. And there was a man behind her, he had caught her, he was hitting her face. He was going to kill her …

She awoke in a cold sweat to Nurse McLeod's gentle shaking. She looked up at Nurse's bespectacled, horsey face, Nurse's crisp white hair. “There now,” said Nurse. “Time to wake up. Dr. Kyle's here to see you.”

“But I'm not going to see him,” Flora told her clearly. She was still trembling from the nightmare.

“That's too bad.” Hugh loomed up at the end of the bed, a hulk of a man, scarcely focused. “Because he's going to see you.”

The dream faded into oblivion. Flora blinked, and his image resolved into detail. She stared at him glumly, feeling betrayed.

“I
told
Isobel not to tell you.”

“Like the rest of us, Isobel doesn't always do what she's told.”

“But she promised…”

“Now, then,” said Nurse, “you know Miss Armstrong never did anything of the sort. If you'll excuse me, Doctor, I'll leave you for a moment, and go back and see to Mrs. Armstrong.”

“That's all right, Nurse.”

Nurse left them, with a rustle of her starched apron. Hugh, gently, closed the door behind her, and came back to Flora's side. He sat, unprofessionally, on the edge of her bed.

“Isobel says you were sick.”

“Yes.”

“What time did it start?”

“In the middle of the night. I don't know what time. I didn't look at the time.”

“Well, let's have a look at you.” He pushed back her hair to feel her clammy forehead. His touch was cool and professional. She thought,
last night he slapped my face.
The memory was so impossible to believe that it could have belonged to another nightmare. She prayed that it did, and knew that it didn't.

“Did you have a lot of pain?”

“Yes.”

“Where?”

“Everywhere. My tummy, I suppose.”

“Show me exactly.” She showed him. “How's your appendix?”

“I haven't got one. I had it out four years ago.”

“Well, that's one possibility eliminated. Are you allergic to anything? Any food?”

“No.”

“What have you been eating? What did you have for lunch yesterday?”

The effort of remembering was exhausting. “Cold lamb and baked potatoes.”

“And dinner last night?”

She closed her eyes. “I had a steak. And some salad.”

“And before that?”

“Oysters.”

“Oysters,” he repeated, as though approving her choice. And then, again, “Oysters?”

“I like oysters.”

“I like them too, but they have to be fresh.”

“You mean I ate a bad oyster?”

“It would appear so. Did you taste it? They're usually unmistakable.”

“I … I can't remember.”

“I've had trouble with the Fishers' Arms and their oysters before. I see I'll need to go and have a word with the proprietor before he kills off the entire population of Arisaig.”

He stood up, produced from some pocket a silver case containing a thermometer. “It's funny,” he mused. “I haven't had a call yet from Ardmore.” He picked up her wrist to take her pulse.

“Brian had scampi.”

“Pity,” murmured Hugh, and stopped up her mouth with the thermometer.

She was, it seemed, trapped, prostrate, at the mercy of his cutting tongue. To escape from him Flora turned away her face and stared bleakly out of the window. Slow morning clouds rolled across the sky. A seagull was screaming. She waited for him to be finished, to take the thermometer out of her mouth, to go away and leave her to die.

But the moments passed, and he did none of these things. The room seemed to have been invaded by a curious stillness as though everything it contained had been frozen or petrified. After a little, mildly curious, Flora turned back to look at him. He had not moved. He stood by her bed, holding her wrist, his eyes downcast and his expression thoughtful. The loose sleeve of Isobel's bedjacket had fallen back and from folds of shell pink wool, Flora's arm emerged looking, she thought, as thin as a stick. She wondered if she were suffering from some wasting disease, and he was trying to summon up the courage to tell her she was doomed.

She was rescued from this impasse by the arrival of Isobel, edging her head gingerly around the door before she entered, as though she were afraid that Flora might spring from the bed and start strangling her.

“How's the invalid?” she asked brightly.

Hugh dropped Flora's wrist and took the thermometer out of her mouth.

“We think she had food poisoning,” he told Isobel. He put on his spectacles in order to read the thermometer.

“Food poisoning?”

“It's all right, don't sound so alarmed. You're not going to have an epidemic. She ate a bad oyster at the Fishers' Arms last night.”

“Oh, Rose.”

Isobel sounded so reproachful that Flora felt guilty all over again.

“I couldn't help it. And I like oysters.”

“But what about the dance? You'll be in bed for the dance.”

“Not necessarily,” Hugh told her. “If she does what she's told, she should be up and about in good time for the dance. Just starve her for a couple of days and keep her in bed.” He picked up his bag and stood, resting one hand on the brass knob at the foot of the bed. He said to Flora, “You'll probably feel very depressed and a bit weepy for the next day or so. It's one of the nastier symptoms of food poisoning. Try not to let it worry you too much.” The moment he mentioned the word
weepy
Flora knew that she was going to cry again. Perhaps he realized this, because at once, ushering Isobel firmly before him, he made for the door. As he went out, he looked back over his shoulder gave her one of his rare smiles, and said, “Goodbye, Rose.”

Flora, bawling, reached for the box of face tissues.

*   *   *

He was right about the depression. Flora spent most of the first day sleeping, but on the next was overwhelmed by gloom. The weather outside did not help. It was gray, it rained, and there was nothing to be seen from the window save scudding black clouds and an occasional wet, wheeling gull. The tide was in. The waves breaking on the shingle beach below the house made a deeply melancholy sound, and the darkness invaded the house so early that lights had to be turned on at three o'clock.

Flora's thoughts, inward-turning, self-pitying, churned incessantly but, like someone treading a mill, got nowhere. Lying there in the strange bed in the strange house, she suffered once more from a dismaying loss of identity. And she could not believe that she had ever embarked on the mad charade with so much hopeful confidence, which, on hindsight, looked more like sheer stupidity.

“Identical twins are meant to be two halves of the same person, and separating them is like cutting that person in half.”

Rose herself had said that in London, but at the time Flora had not thought it important. But now it was important because Rose was vile, without principles or morals. Did that mean that the seeds of the same vileness lay latent in Flora?

If their mother had taken Flora and their father had chosen Rose, would Flora have grown up into a person who, at seventeen, would cheerfully jump into bed with a married man? Would Flora have ditched Antony just when he most needed her, and flown to Spetsai with a rich young Greek? Would Flora have been sufficiently unscrupulous to use Rose as Rose had used Flora? At first all this had seemed beyond the bounds of possibility, but after that terrible scene with Hugh in his car, Flora was no longer so sure of herself.
Your wife destroyed you by dying the way she did.
Those were Rose's words. But it was Flora who had spoken them. The dreadful sentence seared across her conscience. She shut her eyes and turned her face into the pillow, but that did no good, because she still couldn't get away from the inside of her own head.

And if this weren't enough, there were other anxieties, other uncertainties, which seemed to be heaped on top of her, like some deadening weight. How, when the time came, she was going to bear saying goodbye to the Armstrongs? And when she went, where would she go? She couldn't return to Cornwall. She had only just left, and Marcia and her father surely deserved a little time on their own. London then? It would have to be London with all its attendant problems. Where would she live? Where would she work? What would she do? She saw herself waiting for buses, queueing in the rain, shopping in the lunch hour, paying the rent, hoping to make new friends, trying to find old ones.

And finally, there was the specter of Hugh. But she couldn't let herself think about Hugh, because every time she did, she found herself once more dissolved into pointless floods of tears.

If you were Rose, you wouldn't care what the Armstrongs thought of you. You'd just say goodbye, and go and never look back.

I'm not Rose.

If you were Rose you wouldn't need to find a job and queue for buses. You could take taxis for the rest of your life.

But I'm not Rose.

If you were Rose, you would know how to make Hugh love you.

There didn't seem to be any answer to that one.

Everybody was extraordinarily kind. Isobel brought messages from Antony, whom she had telephoned in Edinburgh to let him know that Rose was ill. There was a clumsy bunch of flowers which Jason had picked, and a deep pink azalea from Anna Stoddart.

I am sorry you are under the weather, and hope you'll be up and about by Friday. Brian and I send our love.

Anna

“It's out of the Ardmore greenhouse,” Isobel told her. “They have the most beautiful greenhouses over there, the envy of my heart. Rose … Rose, you're crying again.”

“I can't help it.”

Isobel sighed, and patiently reached for the tissues.

There were also sessions with Nurse McLeod, who, once she dropped her professional manner and stopped talking about draw sheets, became quite cozy, bringing up her sewing to let Flora see how her “ballgown,” as it was now designated, was getting along. “You see, I'm attaching the lining to the dress. It gives it much more body, and I thought I'd make a wee belt. Mrs. Watty has a pearl buckle in her button box that she can spare.”

There was a get-well card from Mrs. Watty, and from Tuppy a bunch of the last of her precious roses, which she had directed Watty to cut for her. Tuppy had arranged them herself, standing the vase on her bedside table, and snipping the wet stalks all over the eiderdown. Isobel had carried them down the passage. “From one old crock to another,” she told Flora, and put them on Flora's dressing table.

“Does Hugh come every day to see Tuppy?” Flora asked Isobel.

“Not every day. Not any more. He just drops in when he happens to be passing. Why?” There was a smile in her voice. “Did you want to see him?”

“No,” said Flora.

*   *   *

Thursday morning dawned a beautiful day. Flora awoke to a morning bright as a new coin. There was sunlight, blue sky, and now the screaming of the gulls reminded her of summer.

“What a day!” Nurse McLeod crowed, bouncing in to draw back the curtains, retrieve Flora's cold hot-water bottle, and tidy the bed, which meant tucking in the sheets so tight that Flora could scarcely move her legs.

“I shall get up,” said Flora, bored with her invalid existence.

“You'll do no such thing. Not until Dr. Kyle says you may.”

Flora's spirits sank immediately. She wished that Nurse had not mentioned his name. Despite the cheerful weather, she was still miserable, although the miserableness now had nothing to do with being ill. It was just the usual routine stuff, and it was centered, pinpointed, on that unforgiveable thing she had said to Hugh. It hung over her like a great sword, and would continue to hang there, she knew, until somehow, she had made herself apologize to him.

The very idea made her feel ill all over again. She slid down under the covers, and Nurse cocked a professional eye at her. “Are you not feeling better yet?”

“Yes, I'm all right,” Flora told her dully.

“How about something to eat? Are you hungry? I'll maybe ask Mrs. Watty to make a little semolina.”

“If you bring me semolina,” Flora told her coldly, “I shall throw it out of the window.”

Nurse tut-tutted and went down to the kitchen with the news that one of her patients, at least, was well on the road to recovery.

Isobel appeared later on with a breakfast tray—not a very lavish one, to be sure, but there was toast on it, and some marmalade jelly and a pot of China tea. “And some mail for you,” said Isobel. She took a postcard out of her cardigan pocket and laid it, picture side up, on the tray. Flora saw bright blue sky, bright green chestnut trees, and the Eiffel Tower. Paris?

Puzzled, she turned it over. It was addressed, in an untidy and unformed hand, to Miss Rose Schuster, Fernrigg House, Tarbole, Arisaig, Argyll, Écosse. Bewildered, Flora read the message, which had been written extremely small in order to accommodate it on the space allowed.

I said I'd be in touch. It was super finding you. Decided to stop off here for a couple of days on my way to Spetsai. Am sending this to you at Fernrigg, because I have a strong suspicion that by now you're there, in the bosom of the family and, who knows, perhaps married to Antony. Give him my love.