Sheer Abandon (10 page)

Helen loved her mother, and she was very proud of her. She knew how Jilly had struggled to bring her up successfully, but Helen had known she was something of a disappointment—too quiet, too shy, not ambitious enough. And not nearly successful enough with men. In her late teenage years, she had suffered agonies of embarrassment as her mother had organised little supper parties so that she could meet the eligible sons of her friends, and had watched Jilly’s irritation as she failed to attract any of them. That was why it had been so wonderful to meet Jim. Who was nothing to do with her mother, or her mother’s friends, who didn’t have to be charmed or flirted with, who was just—well, just right. Calm, kind, interested in her.

Helen had never even considered going back to work (she had been a secretary); one of the many things Jim and she absolutely agreed on was that mothers should be at home to look after their children, even as they grew older.

Just the same, financially life was a struggle. There was very little money for luxuries and, as the girls grew more expensive—Kate, particularly, wanting what Jim called “label clothes,” and sound systems and mobile phones—it became more of a problem. Kate had been arguing for months now to be allowed to do a Saturday job. “Sarah works at the hairdresser, she really likes it and they pay good money, I just don’t see why not.” Both Jim and Helen saw very clearly why not.

Jilly helped as much as she could, passing clothes on to Helen for nothing which she swore the shop couldn’t sell and which Helen was too grateful for to argue about. There was nothing else Jim would accept—apart from the occasional treat—and there had been an appalling row when Jilly had offered to help pay for school fees.

“In the first place, I wouldn’t take the money, and in the second, there’s no question of the girls going to private schools.”

Kate was at the local comprehensive; it was a very good school and she was extremely happy there. But there had been a considerable problem when Juliet had won a music scholarship at the local independent school. The head of her primary school had suggested she try for it and that she had a really good chance of getting in; Jim said that his principles and indeed his own situation would make her taking the place impossible. Helen, unusually firm, said it was a wonderful chance for Juliet and she wasn’t having her deprived of it “simply because it goes against the comprehensive ideal. Sorry, Jim, but it’s either Gunnersbury High School or me. If she gets this place she’s going and that’s that.”

He was shocked into agreement.

When they got to the restaurant, Jilly was already at the table, with a huge box at her side. It proved to be a beautiful soft leather biker jacket; Kate was enraptured with it and insisted on wearing it throughout the meal. “Isn’t it gorgeous?” she kept saying, stroking it and getting up to do a twirl. “Isn’t it great?” Each time followed by a hug and kiss for her grandmother, and a demand that they all agreed how cool she was. Jim was painfully furious that Jilly should have given her something so expensive; Helen knew why: it made their own gift—a new mobile—seem very puny by contrast.

The girls enjoyed the meal, rather noisily spotting celebrities—Zoë Ball was there, and so was Geri Halliwell and a star from
EastEnders
who Helen had never heard of—and when the waiter arrived with a cake and candles, and led the singing of “Happy Birthday,” Kate’s dark eyes filled rather unexpectedly with tears. “This is just so cool,” she kept saying. “So cool…”

Jim managed to join in the singing, but said, as soon as the cake had been cut and handed round, that it was a bit of a waste of the cake Helen had baked at home.

“Dad,” said Kate plaintively, “don’t piss on my bonfire.”

“Kate, don’t talk like that,” said Helen quite sharply, and Jilly told her not to be silly, that Kate was overexcited.

“Now let’s all calm down, shall we, and enjoy our cake. Juliet dear, eat up.”

“It’s gorgeous,” said Juliet politely and then defusing the situation nicely, “Hey, Kate, isn’t that Dr. Fox?”

“Speaking of doctors,” said Jilly, “I—”

“Gran!” said Kate. “Foxy’s not a real doctor! He’s a DJ. I thought you’d have known that.”

“Take no notice, Mummy,” said Helen. “Go on.”

“What? Oh, yes. I have a very nice new GP. Charming girl, just arrived at the practice. I liked her enormously. So much nicer than that old bore Gunter.”

“Good,” said Helen politely. “You’re all right, are you, Mummy?”

“Of course I’m all right,” said Jilly, almost indignantly.

“Just a social call, was it?” said Jim, his voice edgy. “As she was so charming.”

“Yes,” said Jilly firmly, “yes, it was. Now where’s that waiter? I’d like a coffee.”

“Do you know,” said Kate half dreamily, looking across the restaurant at a waiter bearing an ice bucket, “I’ve never even tasted champagne.”

“Well, you must now,” said Jilly. “I’ll order us some.”

She knew exactly what she was doing, Helen thought; Jim’s last words had annoyed her and she knew she could annoy him back. She had raised her hand to call the waiter; Helen gently put it down again.

“Mummy, please don’t. It’s such an extravagance, and the girls have already eaten so much rich food. They’ll be sick.”

“We will not,” said Kate. “Will we, Jools?”

“No,” said Juliet slightly nervously.

“Jilly, no,” said Jim. His voice was heavy, his dark eyes hard. “If you don’t mind.”

“Dad—”

“Oh, never mind, Kate,” said Jilly quickly. “I tell you what, next time you come for the weekend, I’ll get some in. How’s that? Shall we set a date now?”

“All right,” said Kate sulkily, “but it would be more fun now.”

Helen felt a wave of rage against her mother. Deliberately setting out to annoy Jim. And what about Juliet, when did she get her chance to have a glamorous champagne-fuelled weekend with her grandmother?

“Perhaps Juliet could come some time. For a weekend,” she said, aware even as she spoke how crass it sounded, and how embarrassed Juliet was.

“Of course!” said Jilly. “That would be great fun. We’ll arrange it very soon. Now, has everyone had enough, and shall I get the bill?”

“Quite enough, thank you,” said Jim.

Helen suddenly wanted to burst into tears.

Kate’s birthday always made her emotional, just as it did Kate. She thought of Kate’s mother, giving birth to her all alone, with no one to help her; she thought of the newborn Kate and the physical danger she had undoubtedly been in; and then she thought of her being abandoned, left cold and alone, in all her dreadful vulnerability, as her mother walked so determinedly away.

How could any woman do that? How? And where was she now, and on this day of all days, how much was she thinking about that tiny vulnerable baby she had so callously and ruthlessly abandoned?

A lot, Helen hoped; and she also hoped it hurt.

Chapter 5

         It hurt. It really hurt. It was like a physical pain sometimes.

And it was so unfair. That he should belittle her and what she did. He was supposed to love her, for God’s sake. He was always telling her he did. And that he needed her.

Sometimes, just sometimes, she actually thought of confronting him, telling him she couldn’t stand it, that this wasn’t marriage as she understood it. But she lacked the courage, that was the awful truth. And besides, he was too clever for her: he always won any argument. He should have been a barrister, Clio thought savagely, pressing the buzzer for her next patient, not a surgeon, he—

“Oh, Clio. Before I send Mrs. Cudden in, Jeremy’s been on the phone. Apparently he’s at home. Do you want to call him quickly?”

“Um…” She thought fast. If she didn’t he’d be angry; if she did he’d still be angry because she couldn’t talk to him properly.

“No, it’s fine. Mrs. Cudden’s been waiting ages. If he rings again, tell him—tell him I’ve been called out.”

“OK.”

She loved Jeremy, of course she did, and she was happy being married to him: most of the time anyway. She also—rather perversely she knew, given her professional achievements and ambitions—enjoyed running the house. She found the mechanics of housekeeping rather soothing, a contrast to her chaotic life at the practice. She liked keeping the house clean and tidy, now that the endless building work had been finished; liked keeping the fridge and food cupboards well stocked, adored cooking, enjoyed arranging flowers and putting clean linen on the beds.

Her friends teased her about it, telling her she was just a little woman at heart, an anachronism in an age where women were fleeing from such tasks, and claiming them as symbols of male tyranny. Clio didn’t see any of it like that. She saw it as the means to the end of a calm, pleasing environment, where she and Jeremy could recover from the stress of their difficult professional lives and entertain their friends. And she had loved dressing the house up with curtains and carpets and lamps and pictures, and slowly filling the rooms with furniture she and Jeremy chose on long, exhaustive trips to sale rooms and antique shops.

Of course he was arrogant and demanding: he was a surgeon. Clio had spent her working life around surgeons, she knew the culture of adoration and near-reverence in which they worked, knew how they expected perfection and absolute respect in theatre and brought that attitude home with them. Jeremy did see his place at the top of the heap—at home as well as at work. She simply didn’t mind. In the first place, he
was
top of the heap, and in the second, she had grown up with her fiercely supercilious father, with his huge intellect and distant manner, and it was something she accepted as the norm.

Her sisters, her beautiful and brilliant sisters, both now with doctorates—Artemis in classics at Oxford, Ariadne in chemistry at Cambridge—had always treated her as some kind of rather simple handmaiden, and indeed still did, on the rare occasions when they met. To be looking after someone who actually loved her and appreciated her was a genuine delight.

And she did love her job. Absolutely loved it. Yes, it was stressful, of course, giving patients enough time, fretting over the waiting lists, recognising the lifestyle problems that caused so much illness. But there was the great joy of getting to know her patients, being involved in their lives, knowing which ones to be brisk with, which to give extra time to. It was all so pleasingly different from hospital work where you saw people a very few times out of nowhere and then were parted from them, probably never to see them again. It was so good to become if not exactly a friend, then certainly an ongoing part of their lives, a comfort, a reassurance. Most of them were so brave and so grateful for whatever small thing she could do for them. Clio found the whole thing extremely rewarding.

What she had never realised before, when working in hospital clinics, was the extent to which the buck stopped with the GP. You were the end of the line, the contact with the patients. They relied on you. Especially the old people. She had one couple, the Morrises, of whom she was particularly fond; both in their late eighties, they were still managing to look after themselves at home together, an immaculately clean, ordered home. But they needed to take tablets and the dosage was quite complicated. If they didn’t take their tablets, they became confused and went on a hideously swift downward spiral—and their one daughter, living forty or so miles away, either couldn’t or wouldn’t help.

Twice now Clio had received calls from the social services, who reported uneaten Meals on Wheels, and had gone round to find Mrs. Morris in her nightdress, sitting in the garden, and her husband wandering about the house trying to find the kettle. Clio had located it in the utility room, inside the washing machine. “Another day and God knows what would have happened to them,” she said to Mark Salter, “but I got their medication into them, persuaded Dorothy back into the house, and called back later. They were already much more cheerful, tucking into their tea, watching
Home and Away
. Anyway, I remembered those samples of tablet dispensers a rep left and filled two of them with the right dosage for a week. I can just keep doing that.”

“You’re very good, Clio,” said Mark. “That really is over and above the call of duty.”

“Mark, think of the alternative. They’d be in a home inside a month.”

“It’s ridiculous,” he said wearily. “The carer who goes in the morning to help them get dressed could perfectly well give them the tablets, but she’s not allowed to. Bloody regulations. God, when I think of the old days, when my father ran his practice!”

“I know,” said Clio soothingly. “But things have changed. Nothing we can do about it, Mark. And the Morrises are on my way here—it’s not a problem.”

But Jeremy was a problem. It wasn’t so much that he constantly, albeit gently, belittled her work. It was that he assumed it could be pushed aside on demand. If he had an early night and she was still working, he would arrive at the surgery and send a message through that he was there and would like to take her out to dinner or the cinema, and then sit in reception, asking the receptionist loudly as each of her patients went in if that was the last one. He made an appalling fuss when she had to do her weekends on call (only one in five), and he had a genuine and complete disinterest in her patients and their problems, while expecting her to show an immense interest in his.

Things had got so bad that she had recently asked Mark if she could cut her days down to four; recognising the problem, he had agreed. She was an excellent GP; the patients loved her, especially the elderly ones, and she had the rare talent of being able to give enough time to each one to make them feel cared for, without running too terribly late on her list.

“You’re too valuable to lose,” he said, smiling at her. “If you can manage to do four days, I think we can accommodate that.”

It had satisfied Jeremy for a while, and she actually enjoyed having the extra day in the house. But now his agitation—she could only call it that—was building up again.

There was another problem too, or at any rate a worry: one which only she knew about and which was increasing by the day. Or rather the month.

She was just packing up her things when Margaret, the receptionist, rang through again.

“Sorry, Clio, but I’ve got Mrs. Bradford on the phone. She says she wants a quick word.”

She rather liked the glamorous Mrs. Bradford, with her sleek blond hair and her stylish clothes; she had come in a few weeks earlier to ask for some sleeping pills.

“Now please don’t tell me I can manage with a hot drink and some gentle exercise before bed because I can’t.”

“I should,” Clio said, “and it would be better for you, but we’ll take it as read, shall we?”

“Do let’s,” said Jilly Bradford, smiling at her.

Clio had scribbled the prescription and then said impulsively, “I do love your jacket.”

“Oh, how kind. Well it came from my—our shop. Do you know it? Caroline B in the High Street. The jacket’s MaxMara, we carry a lot of his stuff. Although this is last season’s, of course.”

“It’s just that I love dogtooth,” said Clio, “and I’ve been looking for something to wear to a conference in October.”

“Well, when the next collection comes in, I’ll give you a call. I’ll be delighted to help you pick something out. It saves so much time, I always think. Which we working women don’t have.”

“That would be wonderful, thank you,” said Clio, and promptly forgot about it.

“Mrs. Bradford?” she said now. “What can I do for you?”

“I’m just calling as promised,” Jilly Bradford’s rather dated upper-crust voice came down the phone, “to tell you the new MaxMara collection has arrived. With some very nice jackets. Would you like me to put a couple by for you? I would imagine you’re a ten.”

“I wish I was,” said Clio. “I’m a good twelve.”

“Well, his sizes are on the generous side. I’m sure you’d be a ten. When would you like to come?”

“Saturday afternoon?”

“Wonderful. I shall look forward to seeing you. I won’t take any more of your time now. Goodbye, Dr. Scott.”

“Goodbye, Mrs. Bradford. And thank you.”

Jeremy was in a foul mood when she got home: he was watching the Channel 4 news and eating bread and cheese.

“Oh darling, you shouldn’t fill up on that. I’ve got some lovely trout for our supper.”

“I couldn’t wait. I’ve been here for hours.”

“Why? I thought you had a full list.”

“Just try telling the hospital managers that. Them and their bloody targets. You know as well as I do what happens. Three hips this morning and then a tricky spine fusion this afternoon. Well, that wouldn’t do, would it? Only four operations in one day. Do three more hips, they said, and postpone the fusion. And then there was a shortage of nurses in theatre this afternoon, so I only got one done anyway. God, this system! Bloody interference. You know which department has just had its budget upped again? Day Surgery. And you know why? It provides a nice lot of ticks on the target sheet.”

“Darling,” said Clio soothingly, “I know it’s outrageous, but there’s nothing we can do about it, is there? Now, why don’t you come and chat to me, while I do the supper?”

“I thought we might go away this weekend,” he said, pouring her a glass of wine. “What do you think?”

“It sounds lovely. Yes.”

“You’re not on call, or anything ridiculous?”

With an effort she ignored the “ridiculous.”

“No. No, it’s fine. Jane Harding, the other junior partner, she’s doing it, because next weekend, when I
am
on,” she said bravely, thinking it wise to remind him, “her brother is coming over from the States and—”

“I thought it might be fun to go to Paris,” he said, interrupting her. “Would you like that?”

“Oh, Jeremy, yes. Yes, I would. Lovely idea.”

“Good. I’ll get a couple of cheap flights.”

Clio breathed a sigh of relief and asked him to tell her about the difficult hip operation.

She was doing her home visits when it happened. She had knocked on the door and was wondering rather irritably why a woman who was so worried about her vomiting, feverish child that she had been in tears on the phone should be so long answering her knock. She had actually seen her watching television through the window as she walked down the path. She knocked again.

The woman came to the door; she was white-faced and clearly shocked.

“Oh, Doctor. Yes. Hello. Have you heard the news?”

“What news?”

“A plane has just flown into one of the twin towers in New York. Right into it. Blown up. It’s so awful. It’s like watching a disaster movie. Yes, please do come in, Chris is in the front room watching it with me.”

And Clio, trying to concentrate on the feverish child, while watching at the same time what was to become the most famous piece of news footage in history, shocked and terrified by what she saw, the savage explosions and great mass of dark smoke bursting into the brilliant blue New York morning, suddenly heard Jane Harding’s voice talking about her brother. “He works in the World Trade Center, very high-powered…”