The Sick Rose (33 page)

In the lean-to porch, Paul took a moment to kick the snow from his shoes and wipe his soles on the stiff bristles of the mat before pressing the entry buzzer. The nurse who opened the double doors had a tan and red hair that didn’t go together, but he couldn’t tell which was fake. Her name badge, pinned to a uniform that was so tight that the badge looked skewered through her breast, said that she was called Lenka.

‘I came to see Mrs Murray,’ he said. Lenka made him sign his name in the visitors’ book on the ledge. It wasn’t the kind where you left happy comments about what fun you’d had, but a record of who was going in and who was coming out again. Practised now at subterfuge, he wrote
Dan Smith
in disguised writing, the alias hand that had once masqueraded as Daniel’s.

‘Follow.’

Paul and Lenka, who had a nice arse, an amazing arse in fact, walked a maze of corridors with insipid watercolours on the walls, plastic runners protecting the carpet and railings at waist height. The place stank of cleaning fluid and fish. In the opposite direction, an old man in a medal-decked blazer was shuffling along using two clawed hands to support himself. They appeared to be making their way towards the building’s sole source of noise, a vast room crammed with high-backed chairs and a television playing at such volume the words buzzed with distortion.

None of them looked up when Paul came in. One of the inmates – what else were you supposed to call them? – stared right through him, tongue lolling in a toothless mouth. Paul had thought Mrs Ball was old, but these people were in a different league, so aged they were beyond human, and he made a mental note to kill himself before he reached that state. Much as Mrs Ball claimed that all black people looked the same to her, all the elderly women were identical to Paul. Theresa Murray could have been any of them.

‘Um, it’s a long time since I’ve seen her,’ he said, and was guided over to a dusky rose chair containing the oldest person he had ever seen. She had skin like a dry riverbed. Even so, it was immediately apparent that Theresa Murray was of a different class from Mrs Ball and his own grandmothers. She too wore jewellery, but it was a necklace of chunky amber beads, and the only gold chain she wore held a pair of glasses. Her hair was short and straight and a huge paisley scarf was folded in half and draped evenly over her shoulders, symmetrical pointed edges resting on each of her elbows. A little red New Testament lay in her lap. She looked smart and alert. Paul felt a flare of panic. There was no way he was going to be able to soft-soap this one, he thought. And then she spoke.

‘Alan!’ she said, and jerked her body upwards. It was only then that Paul noticed the wheelchair.

‘Is not Alan,’ said Lenka. ‘Is Dan.’

‘I think I’d know my own son if I saw him. You’ve never met him. You people weren’t even in this country when he was born, so don’t you tell me who he is and isn’t.’ Lenka wiggled off in a justified huff. ‘Alan, darling,’ continued Mrs Murray. ‘You didn’t tell me you were coming! What a lovely surprise. Come here to me.’ She patted a brittle-looking knee as though she expected him to sit on her lap. Paul took the seat beside her and she clasped his hand in hers. It was like holding a bunch of twigs in an old leather glove and he had the ridiculous, repulsive, notion that if cut she would bleed dust. He hadn’t banked on being mistaken for Alan, although now he thought about it, if the old dear didn’t get many visitors and she missed her son it was an obvious mistake for her to make. He understood the need to act quickly, while her delusion lasted.

‘You look better than I’ve seen you in years. Have you managed to stop the drinking?’ Paul nodded. ‘You have? Darling, that’s wonderful. I’m so proud of you. I’ve been so terribly worried. They thought you were living on the streets, you know, when they couldn’t find you.’

‘When who couldn’t find me?’ ventured Paul.

‘Oh, Alan, we’ve been over this a million times. I thought your memory was better? Are you sure you’re still taking your medication?’

Paul nodded. ‘Um, just a bad day. Tell me what happened again.’

‘Nobody knows, dear.’ She took on the contented, relaxed tones of a mother reading a familiar bedtime story for her small child. ‘You went missing, didn’t you, after you were expelled from Wellington. You wouldn’t come home to me but we always talked, I spoke to you the day your father died and then when you didn’t come to the funeral I was at my wits’ end. I knew something was wrong, whatever differences you’d had with your father, I knew you wouldn’t have missed that. A mother knows, Alan, a mother knows when her child is in trouble, no matter how old that child may be and how independent he thinks he is. The night you were born, do you remember that? When Daddy had gone home and it was just you and me in the hospital? I said prayer after prayer of thanks while you slept in my arms.’ She had a string of spittle, stretching between her teeth when she spoke. Paul recognised the beginnings of irrational distaste and wondered if old age was going to turn into a phobia, like blood. ‘I didn’t give up. You were on the Missing Persons Register and then one day they said there was a boy in a coma and it was you.’ He could barely keep up with her jumbled narrative and he wished he had brought a pen and paper. ‘You couldn’t remember anything after your sixteenth birthday, when you left home. I had to re-teach you all of it. You kept forgetting that your father was dead. That was the worst of it, the worst of it . . . I had to break the news to you again and again and again . . . it never got easier. Alan, darling, why are you rubbing your eyes? Are you still having the headaches? You know you’ve got to keep going for check-ups. It’s no good giving up the drink if you don’t take your pills. There’s a doctor here, he can see you now, I’m sure he wouldn’t mind. Lenka! Lenka! My son needs to see Dr Venables this instant.’

‘I’m all right, M—’ He was so into his part that he almost called her Mum.

While Lenka stiltedly explained that Dr Venables was not in the building and that anyway, he was employed to look after the residents, not their family members, Paul concluded that he had gathered as much information as he would get from Mrs Murray.

‘Where are you living? You never tell me where you live. Please, Alan. Leave an address for me. How will they know to contact you if anything happens to me? You’re all I’ve got.’ She started to dry-heave and it took a few seconds to grasp that she was crying. ‘You were such a loving little boy. You were so longed for. We
prayed
for you.’

Lenka returned and stood over them both, arms folded. ‘Please to stop,’ she said. Paul got up, despising himself for making this poor old woman think he was her son, even if she had started it.

‘It’s been lovely to see you,’ he said. ‘But I’d better go now. It’s snowing again.’

To his horror, she tried to get out of the wheelchair. ‘Alan darling, please come back soon. Please come and see me again. Will you be back tomorrow?’

Tears fell now from the body that had precious little moisture to spare, the water guided through the grooves of her cheeks. She held out her arms and Paul let her hold him for a few seconds, feeling that it was the least he could do. He had expected to recoil from the scent of her but she smelled floral and powdery. The effort of breaking away from her feeble embrace was heartbreakingly small.

‘I’ll be back soon,’ he said, knowing that he could never bear to return.

On the way out he said to Lenka, ‘How long have you been working here?’ She narrowed her eyes. ‘I was just wondering if there was anyone who’s known her for years,’ he said. ‘I’ve got some questions.’ He was met with a shrug.

‘Mrs Brown? Maybe she know.’

Mrs Brown turned out to be the manageress, whose office was behind the ledge containing the guest book. She looked up from her desk and did a double take.

‘Goodness me, I can see the resemblance,’ she said.

‘Oh, right,’ said Paul, wondering if she was as gaga as her patients.

‘Lenka says she thought you were him. I hope you didn’t distress her.’

‘I didn’t mean to. Does she do that with everyone?’

‘No,’ said the manageress. ‘Not at all. But then she doesn’t get many visitors, certainly not Alan.’

Paul felt a kind of proxy guilt. ‘How long since you’ve seen him?’

‘Years. Nine? Ten? Possibly more. Troubled young man. Well, you wouldn’t think he was young, I suppose, but your ideas about youth shift rather when you work here. Anyone under sixty seems young to me.’ She couldn’t have been far off that herself. ‘I only met him once or twice. Drunk both times, of course.’ Her voice dropped an octave in a one-sided conspiracy. ‘He was losing his looks and he couldn’t have been more than thirty. It started after the accident, apparently, although I gather he was a little wayward anyway and that they’d been estranged for some time before that, after he turned his back on the Church. Well, you’d know that better than me, wouldn’t you?’

Paul became acutely uncomfortable. Mrs Brown was probably breaching several kinds of patient confidentiality and, more threateningly, he had recognised the hallmarks of the gossip, the slavering for more information, and he knew that his visit would be the subject of staffroom speculation for days to come. It was time to get out before he gave something away. He looked at the white sky. He had used the snow as an excuse but it really was still falling. His bus would never get through the drift if he wasn’t careful.

‘It’s Alan you’re really looking for, rather than her, isn’t it? Do you mind me asking exactly how you’re related to the Murrays?’ Did she think he was Adam’s
son?
The idea was so distasteful it was almost funny.

‘Very distantly,’ said Paul, watching her features change as his curt reply made an enemy of her. ‘Look, I’d better go. Can I ask you a weird question?’

‘Yes, but I won’t be obliged to answer it.’ She was professional again now, withholding information from him as he had done to her.

‘Do you think he’s still alive?’

Her face flickered until the urge to gossip trumped propriety.

‘I really don’t know. We won’t find out until she dies, I suppose. You’d be astonished who comes crawling out of the woodwork. Relatives who go to ground for years while they’re here suddenly turn up alive and well once they think there’s an inheritance up for grabs. Not that there is in this case – the house was sold to pay for her care – so I don’t suppose we shall have much cause to search for him. We tried to trace him when she had her last stroke and we didn’t think she was going to make it, but there comes a point when you can only expend so much energy. The thing is, some people just don’t want to be found; they might as well be dead.’

Chapter 44

White flakes tumbled through a black sky. The broken spires of the ruin shifted in the flurry. Louisa sat in the canteen with only Radio 4 for company, wearing two coats and lagged again with a horticultural fleece she had found in the boot room and wrapped around herself for warmth. The weatherman was still on about the cold spell, although now, a week into the New Year, it had become the Big Freeze of 2010. They had thought the worst of it was over in December but now they said it was about to enter a second, harsher phase; this new snow veiled lethal week-old ice. Feet were sliding from under bodies; cars were skidding down hills and crashing into walls all over the country. At Kelstice. The Mere was frozen solid, its surface a milky green plate.

It had been dark at four o’clock. Now it was getting on for eight and Paul should have arrived at three. He was always punctual, early even. Periodically she shivered her way to the office and called his mobile; it went straight to voicemail every time. An unanswered mobile was even more frustrating than an unanswered pager. Still wrapped in the fleece, she stared down the ride. Last night’s snowfall had hidden patches of frozen brown earth and restored the perfect white mantle. Where
was
he? There was no one around, just a little dun-coloured bird hopping towards her. It left a trail of footprints in the shape of convict-clothing arrows. She went back into the canteen to find a crust for it but it had gone by the time she got back.

In London, she had not had too much time to think about Paul during the day; it had been a relentless stream of activities from the presents to the pantomime and the endless DVDs and tobogganing on the Common. Her niece and nephew were ten and seven; it was the first time they had seen real, lasting snow and their delight was infectious. But at night, between the Cath Kidston duvet cover and the memory foam mattress in Miranda’s spare room, she thought of him constantly. Their telephone conversations had been stilted compared with the easy dialogue of their flesh. She found it hard to believe his protestations that he had been mostly staying in with his family – at eighteen, you would have had to cage her to keep her in – and he had missed her call on New Year’s Eve, which had been a source of much consternation. She pictured him in a Brighton club, getting off with someone his own age. The jealousy muscle had momentarily flexed, supple and strong despite years of atrophy.

Deliberately they had danced around the fact of her confession. At the time, she had taken it as a sign of Paul’s maturity and sensitivity. Now, hours after the tryst, in the swirling shadow of the ruin, she was attacked by a suspicion that turned to knowledge within seconds. It was obvious. He was not coming back.

Her mistake had not been in the telling of it but in its timing. She should have sprung it on him when they had days, weeks, to reflect on her revelation together; she should have been on hand to answer his questions, not unleash him on the world with gaps in his knowledge that she knew from her own experience his imagination would colour in shades of black and red, his initial understanding turning to revulsion. She cowered in her cocoon and cursed her stupidity. Perhaps he had made good on his threat to look up Adam’s murder and uncovered some new, terrible truth that she had not imagined, something that had sent him straight to the law. Louisa shrank into the wall as though cornered by police. Would Paul do that? She thought how little she actually knew him, how little she had ever known any of her lovers. She had been a catastrophically bad judge of character in the past and it seemed that she had learned nothing in the intervening years. She had trusted Adam with her heart and Paul with her secret. Neither of them had deserved it. She desperately wanted a drink but the only wine for miles around was in her caravan, so she fell back on an old yoga trick of breathing in through the nose and out through the mouth, trying to visualise the stress leaving her body. It didn’t work. Unable to sit still, she followed the swirling cumulus of her own breath and walked out into the night.