Separate Beds (26 page)

Jake edged past his father. ‘Come on, Gran. I’ll help you upstairs.’

Tom heard their slow ascent and overheard Jake say, ‘Gran, your brooch isn’t fastened properly. Would you like me to do it?’

‘Oh dear …’

‘I’ll deal with it.’ Jake was both gentle and consoling, neither of which had he been with Tom.

‘Would you, Jake? How helpful you are.’

Tom abandoned the idea of tea, let himself out into the street and headed for the pub. It was full of punters – who, no doubt, all had jobs. Pushing his way through them, he ordered a pint and made rapid inroads into it. There was a band tightening around his head and a sour, bitter taste in his mouth.

Channels of communication? Debates, ideas and cam p aigns? A duty to others? The precepts by which he had previously lived had lost their clear-cut certainty. And so had he. Instead of the enlightenment, the mode of good living, the salary and the status he had fondly imagined he
had achieved during his career, he realized that he had been merely a fish gasping for air.

Maisie was crying again …

Annie shuddered mutinously up from a deep sleep and her wilder dreams and forced herself to concentrate. No, it wasn’t the baby. It was Hermione.

Beside her, Tom slumbered peacefully. One half of her protested:
I have a job, for goodness’ sake
. The other, the better trained, polite and sentient half, belonged to the generous Annie (which she tried to be), who knew that Tom was exhausted from having got up to see to Hermione for several nights running and who would be grateful if she was to take up some slack.

The night light, which Hermione insisted should be in her room, cast a muted glow. The rest of the room was in shadow. Apparently asleep, Hermione lay on her back, the bedclothes trailing on the floor. One hand, with a snake vein crawling over the wrist, was out-flung. She was restless and, every so often, she muttered a word or two.

Just visible above the bed was the painting of Hermione the young woman. In a light and frivolous yellow frock, she was seated on a bench beside open french windows, surrounded by a garden, which the painter suggested ached with scent and colour. The picture always managed to shock Annie – the contrast between the dreaming girl then and the Hermione of now could not have been crueller. That transition was happening in her, too. In all of them. Perhaps one needed to be reminded of how young and feeling one once had been or the future appeared too fearful. In order to counteract the indignities and inconveniences
of physical decay, the spirit supped greedily on memories of a time when the senses were wild and full of desire.

As unobtrusively as possible, she rearranged the bedclothes over the older woman and bent to tuck them in.

Hermione’s eyes snapped open. ‘Is that you, darling Max?’

Tom’s father had been William, known as Bill, and had died when Tom was nineteen. ‘Hermione,’ she whispered, ‘it’s Annie.’

The other woman fixed her eyes on her. ‘But Max should be here. He promised, and I’ve been waiting for a long time.’

‘Who’s Max, Hermione?’ But Annie already knew it was the man in the photograph.

Hermione was neither fully awake nor asleep but sliding along the boundary between the two. ‘Max?’ The pause that ensued was painful, expectant. ‘He promised to come back.’

Annie was taken aback by this revelation. She placed a hand on Hermione’s shoulder. ‘Hermione, you’re with us, Tom and Annie, in your bedroom in our house.’

The older woman rested her gaze on the younger – and Annie fancied that she could see Hermione’s yearning and lovely dreams dissolve into the dark-hued present. ‘Of course,’ answered a now fully awake Hermione, with her customary hauteur.

‘Shall I make you some tea?’

‘What makes you think I want tea? It’s the middle of the night.’

‘Are you uncomfortable?’

‘Wouldn’t you be if you were me?’ she flashed back.

The words cut into Annie. To be old.
To be old?
In that moment Annie understood better the struggle to keep
positive and cheerful when your life was dwindling. She sat down on the edge of the bed. ‘Who’s Max? Is he the man in the photograph?’

Hermione pulled herself up on to the pillows. ‘Who’s talking about Max?’

‘You were.’

‘He’s no one.’

Annie picked up one of Hermione’s brittle-looking hands. ‘We’ve known each other a long time. And don’t look like that, Hermione. We’re stuck with each other.’ She rubbed the fingers that once had been pliable and surging with blood. ‘You were waiting for Max. You said he never came.’

Hermione’s narrowed eyes sheltered her secrets. ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

‘OK,’ conceded Annie. ‘Go back to sleep now.’

Shuddering with cold and fatigue, Annie slid back into bed. Feeling was slow to creep back into her feet, and she craved warmth as the addict craved the fix. She wrapped her hands across her body. Suddenly nothing was as important as to be in the sun, limbs spread out to catch every last ray. To be dizzy with heat – swimming in heat.

Tom edged his leg over to Annie. ‘Warm up on that.’

His leg was alien, his body for so long unexplored – but it was the surprise of his gesture that sparked the ember to warm her cold flesh.

‘Annie,’ Tom whispered. ‘Thanks.’

She closed her eyes and Tom removed his leg. They lay without touching, the cold air between them.

‘Annie.’ Again Tom’s whisper: ‘Am I … have I been … such a bad father?’

How did we end up like this?
she asked herself, while painful feelings of regret and pity raged through her for both of them. Whatever Tom had done, whatever she blamed on him, and whatever the many things she had
not
done, she could not bear that he was suffering as result. ‘Oh, Tom, you did your best. You did.’

The following morning, Chuck summoned Annie into the big meeting room for a five-minute strategy overview. They faced each across the specially commissioned table (why hadn’t Jake made it?) on which reposed folders stamped with St Brigid’s crest.

‘How’s it going?’ Then he threw in the rider, ‘God, you look tired, Annie.’

Feeling dreadful was bad enough, but to be told you looked it was definitely not helpful. ‘Mother-in-law,’ she admitted. ‘Acclimatizing.’

Chuck assumed his managerial face designed (she and Sarah agreed) to be magisterially annoying. ‘Annie, are you up to this at the moment? You would say if you weren’t, wouldn’t you? I can’t emphasize enough how important it is we get this up and going.’ He stabled his pen on the crested folder and his voice deepened into the health-andsafety variety of caring. ‘If things are too much …’

During her working life, it had become habitual to ignore the veiled threats of senior management, so much so that they weren’t an insult any longer. ‘Chuck,’ she favoured him with her top reassuring smile, ‘there’s no need to worry. Shall we start? Samuel Smith. A and E have submitted their report, and the lawyer has responded. I’ve also read … the parents’ account.’ She glanced at her right hand, naked of
her mother’s ring, and thought,
A mother has lost her son
. ‘It’s not good, Chuck. By any measure, he should not have died. He could have been saved.’

Samuel’s mother had choked out: ‘No one should lose a child unnecessarily. No one should go through what we’re going through.’

‘Negligence?’

‘I’m sure of it.’

Chuck leaned back in the chair and digested the implications. ‘No one is to say anything. Understood?’

Samuel’s mother was in hell.
I know a little of it
, Annie thought.
Desperation and misery, they are good companions
. Surprised by how deeply the case was affecting her, she slid the folder that contained the facts and preliminary conclusions about Samuel Smith’s death to Chuck. ‘I didn’t want to email this, just in case. We should discuss it privately before you respond.’

‘I’ll read it.’

Annie crossed to the coffee machine and poured two cups into Admin’s expensive china. ‘OK. We also have to talk superbugs. Thinking about the infection rate and how we present it … It’s true that the rate has gone up but I’m convinced that if we’re draconian in approach we can change that very quickly.’ Cups in hand, she turned. ‘Schedule a meeting with the cleaning companies and the unions. Look again at the procedures for pre-assessment of incoming patients.’ She placed the coffee in front of him, expertly orchestrating her boss into quiescence. ‘We’ve got another five minutes. I’ll run through some options.’

Tom rang her in the lunch hour, which was a first for many a month. ‘Bad news. Telly’s on the blink.’

Phone tucked into one shoulder, Annie kicked the filing cabinet shut and sat down. ‘No surprise. We’ll get a new one.’

‘We can do without it for a couple of months. Then, you never know, things might have changed.’

Annie grew suspicious. ‘What are you up to?’ He didn’t reply and she continued, ‘We can afford a new television.’

‘I think we should wait and see.’

Annie looked up and into the corridor along which a couple of orthopaedic cases were shuffling. An all too vivid vision of being forced to talk to Hermione of an evening danced a merry jig. ‘I could swing a discount with the hospital suppliers.’

‘No.’

‘No,’ she conceded. ‘Not good.’

He sounded very close. ‘Not good.’

Passing through the hospital corridors, Annie found herself thinking about Tom in a way she had not done for years and it struck her that she hadn’t really
looked
at him properly either. Exactly when had the joint on his left forefinger become swollen, or the line between his nose and mouth deepened? She couldn’t have said. Of course she knew he ate toast and marmalade for breakfast but she didn’t really
know
if it was force of habit or if he actually enjoyed them.

Mia’s departure had killed many things, among them curiosity about her husband, which had come to a slap-bang stop. True, before Mia left they had grown apart but until that cataclysm Annie had always wanted to
know
about Tom: if his tastes were changing, or his knees hurt, or what he felt about the book he was reading.

Five years later, Mia’s words still burned: ‘You and Dad are so selfish, so
inward-looking
, so
self-absorbed
.’ Maybe that was right and she and Tom had been guilty as accused. Whatever the truth, Mia’s words had finally smashed up the already damaged icon still cherished by Annie of the happy family.

She turned into ‘Yellow Street’, then right into ‘Blue Street’. At the entrances to the wards, notices admonished visitors to use the handwash and offered in bold type some rather lurid statistics on
C. diff
and MRSA. She inspected them carefully and was satisfied. And that was
another
thing. Once upon a time, a hospital was considered a place of safety, a place in which you could lodge absolute trust. Where you would be tended, defended and healed. Samuel Smith had asked for those things – and he had been denied them.

Nobody believed in the place of safety any longer.

She passed the map of the hospital (which, she was proud to own, she had insisted should be posted at regular intervals in every corridor). Honeycombed as it was with departments and offices, people got lost looking for wards, theatres, labs. Often anxious and fearful, they found themselves doubling back, adrift in an alien setting. ‘If you’re frightened,’ she had argued the case with Chuck, ‘you lose your bearings quicker.’

G2 and G3 were the senior assessment wards. Obedient to the dictate, Annie paused to squirt the alcohol rub on her hands. The double doors to the ward swung open and a flock of physios and therapists surged through, their pleasure at being released registering in their chatter and easy lope.

She made her way to the nurses’ station, asked for her beautiful sister-informant, and found her in a side office
deep in paperwork. They exchanged greetings, Annie put her request to her and the sister agreed she would be willing to address the board on the subject of superbugs.

The sister pointed through the door to a side ward across the corridor. ‘There’s a statistic for you.’ She indicated the group of relatives huddled around a bed. ‘He got infected, beat it, but it’s left him too weak to survive.’

As Annie retraced her path, the bodies and faces in the beds, and the visitors who sat beside them, impressed themselves on her as never before. The patients were old, some very, and the immediate effect was of shrunken bodies on the edge – a murmur of souls about to be set loose in goodness knew what infinities. Yet if Annie was to make a huge effort, climb out of her mental straitjacket, peel away the scales from her eyes, she would see that this was not true. Wrapped up carefully in the hospital beds, the bodies of the old did not represent the whole story. That would be to deny the gleam of interior life, the flashes of humour – ‘nice to see you, dear’ – and the love between patients and visitors, which was present, one way or another, in these wards.

With a bit of luck, Leonardo’s angel had them all in his sights. And, with a bit more luck, he’d spotted the Nicholsons too.

The doors swung shut behind her.

Chapter Sixteen

Hermione did not settle into the family easily. The night wakings were frequent and she quickly developed a habit of ringing the hand-bell and demanding of whoever answered it a cup of coffee, a book, help with some task or other.

Added to which the weather remained cool and resolutely unsunny, and the days slid towards July without respite from the dullness. Annie wore a jacket to work and there had been several pleas at number twenty-two for the central heating to be switched on in the evenings. ‘No,’ said budget-conscious Annie. Tom had looked at her quizzically but said nothing.

He didn’t appear to understand the panic, approaching desperation, that had crept into Annie’s almost daily tallying of the accounts. Of course, they were not destitute – like so many – but they were stretched. One day, it might be to breaking point. She would have liked to talk over her worries with Tom and for him to say, ‘You’re overreacting,’ but their habit of reserve was too entrenched.