Saturday (32 page)

‘Prognosis,' he tells her.

‘Right. So doctor, what's the prognosis?'

‘Excellent. Your chances of a total recovery are 100 per cent.'

She shrugs herself deeper into the bed covers. ‘I love hearing you say that. Do it again.'

He obliges, making his voice as sonorous and authoritative as he can. He's decided that whatever's changed in Andrea Chapman's life is written down in her notebook. He taps its cover with a finger.

‘What do you like to write about?'

‘It's a secret,' she says quickly. But her eyes are bright, and her lips part as if she's about to speak. Then she changes her mind and clamps them shut and with a mischievous look stares past him at the ceiling. She's dying to tell.

He says, ‘I'm very good at secrets. You have to be when you're a doctor.'

‘You tell no one, right?'

‘Right.'

‘You solemnly promise on the Bible?'

‘I promise to tell no one.'

‘It's this. Right? I've decided. I'm going to be a doctor.'

‘Brilliant.'

‘A surgeon. A brain surgeon.'

‘Even better. But get used to calling yourself a neurosurgeon.'

‘Right. A neurosurgeon. Everybody, stand back! I'm going to be a neurosurgeon.'

No one will ever know how many real or imagined medical careers are launched in childhood during a post-operative daze. Over the years, a few kids have divulged such an ambition to Henry Perowne on his rounds, but no one has quite burned with it the way Andrea Chapman does now. She's too excited to lie covered up. She struggles up the bed, plants her elbow on the mattress, and as best she can with her drain still in place, rests her head on her hand. Her gaze is lowered, and she's thinking carefully before asking her question.

‘Have you just been doing an operation?'

‘Yes. A man fell down stairs and whacked his head.'

But it's not the patient she's interested in. ‘Was Dr Browne there?'

‘Yes, he was.'

Finally. She looks up at Henry with an expression of pleading honesty. They are at the heart of her secret.

‘Isn't he just a wonderful doctor?'

‘Oh, he's very good. The best. You like him, do you?'

Unable to speak, she nods, and he waits a good while.

‘You're in love with him.'

At the utterance of the sacred words she flinches, then quickly checks his face for mockery. She finds him impenetrably grave.

He says delicately, ‘You don't think he's a little old for you?'

‘I'm
fourteen
,' she protests. ‘Rodney's only thirty-one. And the thing is this…'

She's sitting up now, still pressing her pink book to her chest, joyous to be addressing at last the only true subject.

‘…he comes and sits where you are, and says to me about how if I want to be a doctor I need to get serious about studying and that, and stop clubbing and that, and he doesn't even know what's happening between us. It's happening without him. He's got no idea! I mean, he's older than me, he's this important surgeon and everything, but he's so
innocent
!'

She outlines her plans. As soon as she's qualified as a consultant – in twenty-five years' time, by Henry's private calculation – she'll be joining Rodney in Guyana to help him run his clinic. After a further five minutes of Rodney, Perowne rises to leave. When he reaches the door she says, ‘Do you remember you said like you'd make a video of my operation?'

‘Yes.'

‘Can I see it?'

‘I suppose so. But are you really sure you want to?'

‘Oh my God. I'm going to be a neurosurgeon, remember? I really need to watch it. I want to see right inside my head. Then I'm going to have to show it to Rodney.'

 

On his way out, Perowne lets the nurse know that Andrea is awake and lively, then he takes the lift up to the third floor again and walks back down the long corridor that runs behind the neurosurgery suite and brings him by the main entrance to intensive care. In soothing gloom he goes along the broad avenue of beds with their watchful machines and winking coloured lights. He's reminded of neon signs in a deserted street – the big room has the ephemeral tranquillity of a city just before dawn. At the desk he finds the nurse in charge, Brian Reid, a Geordie, busy filling out forms, and learns that
all Baxter's signs are good, that he's come round and is dozing. Reid nods significantly towards the two policemen sitting in the shadows near Baxter's bed. Perowne was intending to walk home as soon as he was satisfied his patient was stable, but as he comes away from the desk, he finds himself going across. At his approach the constables, bored or half asleep, get to their feet and politely explain that they'll wait outside in the corridor.

Baxter is lying on his back, arms straight at his sides, hooked up to all the systems, breathing easily though his nose. There's no tremor in the hands, Perowne notices. Sleep is the only reprieve. Sleep and death. The head bandage doesn't ennoble Baxter the way it did Andrea. With his heavy stubble and dark swelling under the eyes he looks like a fighter laid out by a killer punch, or an exhausted chef, kipping in the storeroom between shifts. Sleep has relaxed his jaw and softened the simian effect of a muzzle. The forehead has loosened its habitual frown against the outrageous injustice of his condition, and gained him some clarity in repose.

Perowne brings a chair over and sits down. A patient at the far end of the room calls out, perhaps in her sleep, a sharp cry of astonishment repeated three times. Without turning, he's aware of the nurse going towards her. Perowne looks at his watch. Three thirty. He knows he should be going, that he must not fall asleep in the chair. But now he's here, almost by accident, he has to stay a while, and he won't doze off because he's feeling too many things, he's alive to too many contradictory impulses. His thoughts have assumed a sinuous, snaking quality, driven by the same undulating power that's making the space in the long room ripple, as well as the floor beneath his chair. Feelings have become in this respect like light itself – wavelike, as they used to say in his physics class. He needs to stay here and, in his usual manner, break them down into their components, the quanta, and find all the distal and proximal causes; only then will he know what to do, what's right. He slips his hand around Baxter's
wrist and feels for his pulse. It's quite unnecessary because the monitor's showing a reading in bright blue numerals – sixty-five beats per minute. He does it because he wants to. It was one of the first things he learned to do as a student. Simple, a matter of primal contact, reassuring to the patient – so long as it's done with unfaltering authority. Count the beats, those soft footfalls, over fifteen seconds, then multiply by four. The nurse is still up at the far end of the ward. The constables in the corridor are just visible through a window in the unit's swing doors. Far more than a quarter of a minute passes. In effect, he's holding Baxter's hand while he attempts to sift and order his thoughts and decide precisely what should be done.

 

Rosalind has left a lamp on in the bedroom, by the sofa, under the mirror; the dimmer switch is turned low and the bulb gives less light than a candle. She's lying curled on her side, with the covers bunched against her stomach, and the pillows discarded on the floor – sure signs of troubled sleep. He watches her from the foot of the bed for a minute or so, waiting to see if he disturbed her as he came in. She looks young – her hair has fallen forwards across her face, giving her a carefree, dissolute air. He goes to the bathroom and undresses in semi-darkness because he doesn't want to see himself in the mirror – the sight of his haggard face could set him off on a meditation about ageing, which would poison his sleep. He takes a shower to wash away the sweat of concentration and all traces of the hospital – he imagines fine bone dust from Baxter's skull lodged in the pores of his forehead – and soaps himself vigorously. As he's drying he notices that even in poor light, the bruise on his chest is visible and appears to have spread, like a stain in a cloth. It hurts less though when he touches it. It feels like a distant memory now, months ago, when he took that blow and felt the sharp ridge of a shock wave run through his body. More insult than pain. Perhaps he should turn the light on after all and examine it.

But he goes into the bedroom, still with his towel, and switches off the lamp. One shutter stands ajar by an inch, casting a blurred rod of soft white light across the floor and up the facing wall. He doesn't trouble himself with closing the shutter – total darkness, sense deprivation, might activate his thoughts. Better to stare at something, and hope to feel his eyelids grow heavy. Already, his tiredness seems fragile, or unreliable, like a pain that comes and goes. He needs to nurture it, and avoid thoughts at all costs. Standing on his side of the bed, he hesitates; there's enough light to see that Rosalind has taken all the covers, and has knotted them under her and against her chest. Pulling them free is bound to wake her, but it's too cold to sleep without them. He fetches from the bathroom two heavy towelling dressing gowns to use as blankets. She's sure to roll over soon, and then he'll take his share.

But as he's getting into bed, she puts her hand on his arm and whispers, ‘I kept dreaming it was you. Now it really is.'

She lifts the covers and lets him enter the tent of her warmth. Her skin is hot, his is cool. They lie on their sides, face to face. He can barely see her, but her eyes show two points of light, gathered from the tip of the white bar rising on the wall behind him. He puts his arms around her and as she moves closer into him, he kisses her head.

She says, ‘You smell good.'

He grunts, vaguely in gratitude. Then there's silence, as they try out the possibility that they can treat this like any other disturbed night and fall asleep in each other's arms. Or perhaps they're only waiting to begin.

After a little while Henry says quietly, ‘Tell me what you're feeling.' As he says this, he puts his hand in the small of her back.

She breathes out sharply. He's asked her a difficult question. ‘Angry,' she tells him at last. Because she says it in a whisper, it sounds unconvincing. She adds, ‘And terrified still, of them.'

As he's starting to reassure her they'll never come back, she speaks over him. ‘No, no. I mean, I feel they're in the room. They're still here. I'm still frightened.'

He feels her legs begin to shake and he draws her closer to him and kisses her face. ‘Darling,' he murmurs.

‘Sorry. I had this shaking earlier, when I came to bed. Then it calmed down. Oh God. I want it to stop.'

He reaches down and places his hands on her legs – the shivering appears to emanate from her knees in tight, dry spasms, as though her bones were grating in their joints.

‘You're in shock,' he says as he massages her legs.

‘Oh God,' she keeps saying, but nothing else.

Several minutes pass before the trembling subsides, during which he holds her, and rocks her, and tells her he loves her.

When she's calm at last she says in her usual, level voice, ‘I'm angry too. I can't help it, but I want him punished. I mean, I hate him, I want him to die. You asked me what I felt, not what I think. That vicious, loathsome man, what he did to John, and forcing Daisy like that, and holding the knife against me, and using it to make you go upstairs. I thought I might never see you again alive…'

She stops, and he waits. When she speaks again her tone is more deliberate. They're lying face to face again, he's holding her hand, caressing her fingers with his thumb.

‘When I talked to you at the front door, about revenge I mean, it was my own feelings I was afraid of. I thought that in your position I'd do something really terrible to him. I was worried that you were having the same ideas, that you'd get in serious trouble.'

There's so much he wants to tell her, discuss with her, but this is not the time. He knows he won't get from her the kind of response he wants. He'll do it tomorrow, when she's less upset, before the police come.

With her fingertips she finds his lips and kisses them. ‘What happened in the operation?'

‘It was fine. Pretty much routine. He lost a lot of blood,
we patched him up. Rodney was good, but he might have had trouble dealing with it alone.'

‘So this person, Baxter, will live to face charges.'

Henry doesn't reply to this beyond an uncommitted nasal hum of near-assent. It's useful to consider the moment he'll broach the subject; Sunday morning, coffee in large white cups, the conservatory in brilliant winter sunshine, the newspapers they deplore but always read, and as he reaches forwards to touch her hand she looks up and he sees in her face that calm intelligence, focused, ready to forgive. He opens his eyes into darkness, and discovers he's been asleep, perhaps for only a few seconds.

Rosalind is saying, ‘He got terribly drunk, maudlin, the usual stuff. It was hard to take after everything else. But the kids were fantastic. They took him back in a taxi and a hotel doctor came out and looked at his nose.'

Henry has a passing sensation of travelling through the night. He and Rosalind once took a sleeper train from Marseilles to Paris and squeezed into the top bunk together where they lay on their fronts to watch sleeping France go by and talk until dawn. Tonight, the conversation is the journey.

In his comfortable, drifting state he feels only warmth towards his father-in-law. He says, ‘He was magnificent though. They couldn't intimidate him. And he told Daisy what to do.'

‘He was brave all right,' she agrees. ‘But you were amazing. Right from the beginning I could see you planning and calculating. I saw you look across at Theo.'

He takes her hand and kisses her fingers. ‘None of us went through what you did. You were fantastic.'