The Eunuch's Ward (The String Quartet) (22 page)

‘What troops?’ Hugh shouted, but turned back as instructed.

‘But, if Hugh is here, the man up there...’ I felt more than heard the door to the balcony open a little. It was only a waiter and I turned back to catch another glimpse of Hugh, ‘that must be Xango. That’s definitely Xango.’ I said aloud and quickly covered my mouth.

Hugh and Xango were here with an airplane. They were going to rescue me and take me somewhere very safe. Mother was right, nothing bad could possibly happen to me now. Hugh had said that he was going to fly his friend to the Giant’s Causeway. This wasn’t as much of a coincidence as it first seemed. He had to fly from an airfield, why not from here. It was closer to central London than most. I couldn’t think of any place safer than Giant’s Causeway.

I turned around at another creak of the door. ‘Mother!’ I shouted again, this time more quietly lest I attracted the wrong kind of attention at the wrong time.

‘The waiter’s told me that you ordered Xango,’ she handed me a long glass of a pink liquid and ice cubes. ‘It’s lovely, I’ve brought the whole bottle with me. Try it, Bakir. Very unusual.’

Bakir joined us bringing his own glass with him.

Neither of them took any notice of the astonishment that must have been showing on my face. I’d always been told not to even think of playing poker. With all that nonsense going on, Hugh was out of sight by now, no doubt rallying the troops as he was told. The man by the plane had three more people with him, two men and a woman, all the three looking at their feet as he talked to them in a low voice.

A glass of icy Xango?

Jesus! This was certainly one of those days.

‘Look, Nat, look,’ said my mother in a raspy whisper, ‘things must be looking up...’

‘They are,’ Bakir mumbled, but she ignored him.

‘He’s finally decided to buy a private jet,’ she pulled at my sleeve. ‘An odd time to consider that kind of purchase.’

Father must have joined the little group by the plane and interrupted the informal business meeting while I was looking for Hugh on the other side. The man, Xango if my guess was right, was talking to Father, gesticulating, pointing to the top of the stairs.

‘The owner’s keen to sell,’ Mother commented and tugged at my sleeve again.

‘May I have that bottle of juice, please?’ I took it out of her hand without waiting for her answer. I knew exactly what I was going to find on the label.

‘Lion’s had a drop too many,’ Mother giggled. ‘It’s taking three youngsters to haul him up the stairs.’

Ela had said it once. At my last birthday party she said ‘Sounds like exotic fruit.’ I thought it was funny then, especially coming from her, but no one else laughed, therefore I didn’t either. It wasn’t at all funny now.

‘What are they doing?’ Mother asked of no one.

I had no real reason to expect it to happen, but I did. The engines were turned on, this close they sounded deafeningly loud, and a cloud of dust ended up in my mouth as the wheels moved and the small jet careered down the runway at speed. On my right, Hugh was racing up the slope towards the field, his head tuned upwards. He was just about reaching the top when the plane, airborne, turned its nose sharply upwards to increase the height.

The hot rays of the afternoon sun made the metal surface sparkle intensely until it turned into an intensely orange sphere of fire and I fainted.

Chapter 19

When I woke up in a hospital bed I was told that I was in the Berlinger Clinic near Alton, the same place where I’d had my tonsils taken out when I was about eight, that it was almost Monday, and that I was going to be fine, just fine. Then I was asked to repeat all that back and, reportedly, I answered ‘Fine. Just fine. Tropical fruit.’

The next time I opened my eyes, it was daylight, grey and rainy. I was alone in the room, but through the observation window I could see my mother, Bakir and Hugh talk to a woman in hospital blue in the corridor. One of them must have noticed that I was looking at them for they all dashed in, smiling broadly and saying
Good Girl and Clever girl and How are you feeling
? The hospital person in blue, a woman, shooed them off to sit in the far corner, while she inspected the instruments that I was attached to, took my pulse and blood pressure, checked my eyes with a small torch and ordered me to look at the tip of her finger and follow it as she moved it slowly from one side to the other.

‘How are you feeling?’ she asked and checked the oxygen supply through my nose again.

‘I think that I’m hungry.’

I’ve hardly said it when Bakir jumped up and placed a dish of freshly peeled and pitted lychees on the over-bed table next to me.

The woman pressed a button on the control panel and that lifted me into a sitting position. With her free hand, she stopped the other three from invading my space. ‘You’ve been talking about tropical fruit all along,’ she said and positioned the table top over me.

I was laughing so hard and for so long that the others looked worried, and yet I couldn’t stop myself. ‘It sounds like tropical fruit, it sounds like tropical fruit,’ I kept repeating and just a look at the lychees sent me into another fit of hysterics.

‘Maybe better out than in,’ the woman said doubtfully, and that brought me back to my senses.

‘Sorry,’ I said, wiping the tears of laughter from my face with a tissues and popped a few globules of lychee into my mouth. ‘Sorry. Hugh...’

He walked past the nurse, sat on the bed and brought my hand to his lips.

‘Hugh, the last thing I remember before it... before it all went belly up, I worked out why Xango was nicknamed Xango and who he was. Ela once said that he sounded like a topical fruit. Xango is a fruit juice made of mangosteen. Or, mangusteen? Not sure. Doesn’t matter. I had a lot of it when Father first visited the Pacific Islands and took us both with him. Didn’t he, Mother?’ There were very few pieces of fruit still left in the dish but I was still starving.

She and Bakir followed Hugh’s example and pulled the chairs to the bed on the other side. ‘Not exactly the same islands as this year, but, yes, we both loved their mangosteen.’

‘No need to speak so quietly and clearly, Mother,’ I patted her hand. ‘My brain is in perfect order as is my hearing. I’m not going to faint or do anything else stupid again. ‘Mungo Steen,’ I turned back to Hugh. You’re... were best friends with Mungo Steen. He was the one who ruined my father and wanted to marry me afterwards.’

‘I didn’t know that you knew Mungo. He never said...’ he looked amazed. Confused.

‘During summer holidays, a long time ago, my father let me join a Probation Service project. Mungo was the Project Leader and I had an almighty crush on him.’

‘Two years ago,’ Mother added.

‘You remember?’ It was my turn to be amazed. ‘And there was me thinking that you were asleep all the time. Off with the fairies.’

She and Bakir exchanged a quick look. ‘Plenty of time to talk about that when...’ Mother leaned forward and kissed me on the cheek. ‘You’re still in shock. Get back on your feet first.’

‘I’m fine, Mother, just fine. I can walk all the way home if I have to. But not in the rain.’ I lifted the covers and swung my feet over the edge of the bed when the room turned around me and the fruit erupted out of me.

* * *

Leaving the hospital two days later was a triumph of organisation and deception.

Bakir was coming and going every day, sometimes twice a day, fetching things for Mother and me from the house, or doing some simple shopping, or keeping an eye on the alternations at home that Mother was keen to complete before I was discharged.

His normal practice was to put the car window down at the hospital gate and answer as many questions as the journalists were able to ask him in the time it took for the gate to open.

‘How is she?’

‘Fine, fine, thank you. Miss Sonata is doing very well.’

The journalists loved the ‘Miss Sonata’ bit spoken in what they called an ‘exotic accent’, and he obliged as often as he could.

‘When will she be leaving the hospital?’

‘Soon. Very soon, we hope and pray. Thank you.’

‘Will she be holding a press conference?’

‘She’ll be taking advice from her medical and legal team.’

‘Will her mother come out to talk to us any time soon?’

‘As always, Miss Sonata is her mother’s first priority. Mrs. Ganis hasn’t left her bedside ever since her daughter’s been admitted. I’m sure that she will want to give you good news herself as soon as she can. Thank you.’

And with that, Bakir would glide off and repeat the entire procedure at our gate at home.

He’d written the entire script himself, and got Hugh to edit and polish it for him.

Hugh was popping out as rarely as he could, but when he had to, it was inside hospital delivery vans, either as a co-driver or a bag of potatoes.

Bakir and Hugh both used their usual methods on the day when I was allowed to leave. Mother and I were bundled into the hospital minibus, full of patients undergoing hydrotherapy at the nearby sports centre. Hugh met us in the centre’s underground garage and took us home. As arranged, Bakir had made sure that the gate swung open the moment Hugh’s car approached it, and quickly closed again once we were through. We caught the media people by surprise. As far as they were concerned nothing much was going to happen for at least half an hour after Bakir’s arrival to the house at his usual time. They had erected some kind of a rain shelter for themselves, a red-and-white tarpaulin often seen over market stalls. By the time even the most alert among them made the hundred yards to the gate, it was safely locked again.

* * *

Mother was the first to broach the subject. She gave me a day to settle in before mentioning my new private secretary.

‘Do I rate a secretary?’

‘Very much so. You’re not just a schoolgirl any longer. You’re a very wealthy young woman with serious responsibilities. We waited for you to recover, there are lots of things that we don’t understand yet, but there are aspects that we’ve been made aware of almost immediately...’

‘We being you and Bakir?’

Mother nodded. Her eyes slid off my face. ‘He’s been very loyal to both of us. Very supportive.’

‘He’s handsomely paid for it, I presume.’ I shrugged. ‘Could be worse. It’s not as if you’ll be moving him to your bedroom any time soon.’

‘The secretary, Nat. There’s something you need to know before you decide.’

‘What?’

‘Ivan Prentice was Mungo Steen’s private secretary?’

Was it ever going to stop? Why couldn’t there be an end to it?

‘Mungo’s? We are talking about Mungo Steen, my father’s robber and murderer?’

‘Is that how you feel about him?’

‘No, mother, that’s what I know about him. I feel nothing,’

That was true. I knew that I loved my mother and Hugh, but I felt no love towards them. I knew I loved Rosie, Asha and Ela, but I didn’t miss them or want them around. All my feelings were reduced to hot or cold, tired or scared, full or hungry, to senses, not emotions.

‘And talking about which,’ I continued seamlessly, ‘Hugh was very close with Mungo. It would be very disloyal of me to continue seeing him. I’ll ask him to stop visiting.’ The decision was rash, made on the spot, but it made me feel better. Everything was so much simpler now.

‘No, Mother shouted, ‘no, Nat. You can’t do that. There are things that you and Hugh need to look at together. I don’t want to influence your choice of boyfriends, that’s entirely up to you, but as I’ve said, you’ve acquired huge responsibilities...’

‘That I can decline? That I’m declining to take on.’

‘Not before you know what they are and what consequences for other people, a large number of families, may be.’

‘Stop it,’ I turned to leave. ‘Stop it. I’ve spent all my life in a trap. I’ll never let myself be trapped again. Not in love, not in duty, not in...’ I opened the door and was about to step out into the hall without looking back.

‘You prefer to trap yourself in freedom. Freedom is a very lonely place, Nat.’

* * *

I was wading through the rain-drenched rose garden with a masochistic zeal of a self-appointed victim. I actually enjoyed the sharp needles of cold water in my face and down my neck, the thorns viciously digging into my hands every time I tried to move a branch out of my way, the too large, inhospitable wellington boots that allowed rain to fall inside and bathe my toes in mud and gravel.

Less than a week ago I was expected to be a respectful, trusting, and obedient child. Today, I had to turn into a fully fledged, responsible adult. What’s happened to my youth? What’s likely to happen to what’s left of it if I don’t protect it from the vultures?

Hugh had said that he’d be here by 5 pm. At ten to his helicopter landed on the pad behind the garages and stables. I waited for him at the pergola that marked the boundary between the park and the grounds behind the house.

‘Hope you’re not getting wet on my account,’ Hugh smiled.

I couldn’t tell how he felt about the new, unspoken but sacred rule of no touching. Nor did I know how I felt about him being here versus not turning up. Don’t fool yourself, I told myself with my burgeoning cynicism. He’ll be here until we make our way through that pile of papers that Mother’s holding above my head as a Damocles’ Sword.

‘Mother thinks that it’s time we, you and I, that is, had a look at the paperwork. Why together?’

‘Because it’s addressed at both of us. Do you feel up to it?’

I shrugged. ‘Yes, I want to know what’s the bastard got to say for himself.’

We entered the house through the back. In the little used utility room we stopped to take off our waterproofs and wellies and shake them off above the stone sinks that would have otherwise long lost their usefulness.

‘Nat?’

‘What?’

‘There were no police in that hotel on Saturday.’

‘So?’ I knew full well what he was getting at, but I chose the obtuse path.

‘Mungo wasn’t married. He’d never been married.’