Читать книгу Every Woman Knows a Secret - Rosie Thomas - Страница 6

Lizzie and James sat down in their nightclothes on the end of their double bed. They held hands, shocked into immobility by the news that Jess had just telephoned from the hospital. The bedroom with its soft blue paint and heavy drawn curtains felt cold instead of cosy.

Lizzie said, ‘You know, if it happens, if he does die, I’m afraid of what it’ll mean for Jess. Danny’s been her whole life. She always loved him best from the day he was born.’

‘It might not happen. He might come round.’

James drew his wife’s head down on to his shoulder and stroked her hair. He wanted to fuel her with enough love to carry her through the hours ahead. Even though concern for Danny and sympathy for Jess squeezed his lungs hard enough to make him breathless, most of his immediate concern was for Lizzie. He was afraid she would find the intensive care unit disturbing, and he would have gladly gone to the hospital if he had thought Jess would accept him in Lizzie’s place. But he knew that it was not even worth suggesting it. Someone had to stay with Sock, and the sisters were too close for Jess to want anyone with her instead of Lizzie.

The telephone had woken the baby. Sock stirred in his cot beside the bed and then sleepily hoisted himself on all fours. He smiled at the sight of them, a radiant beam that revealed the tiny, perfectly white pegs of his teeth. James released Lizzie’s hand and went to pick him up. He smelled of baby sleep and ammoniac nappy, and James squeezed him so tightly that Sock whimpered a little as they watched Lizzie stumble out of her nightdress. She had grown plump, and her stomach and thighs quivered with marble-white folds of flesh. As she bent over to step into her panties James felt himself stiffen and he crossed his legs, shamed by the inappositeness of his response. But yet, he acknowledged, sex was one of the many happy aspects of their partnership. He was still capable of being surprised by Lizzie’s imaginative appetites.

After his first, childless marriage had ended when he was forty, James had existed through a series of more or less unsatisfactory but prolonged affairs that had left him feeling dried out and bored and sceptical of ever having a relationship in which mutual criticism was not the driving force. And then, at the age of fifty-one, he had met Lizzie Bowers at an unpromising cocktail party given by one of his clients. James was an accountant, the head of his own small practice. Very late that same night naked Lizzie had smiled up at him. ‘As the actress said to the accountant,’ she’d murmured busily.

Lizzie had pulled on a sweater and jeans. She ran unconsidering fingers through her hair.

‘Let me make you some breakfast,’ James offered, but she shook her head.

‘I must go. Jess needs me.’

There was no argument. James followed her down the stairs still holding Sock in his arms.

‘I don’t know when I’ll be able to get back. Oh God. The bloody handcream voice-over.’

‘Don’t worry. I’ll speak to your agent. Go to the hospital now and stay with her. Call me as soon as you can.’

‘Will you and Sock be safe?’

He knew what she was asking. If something so terrible could happen in a single instant to Danny, who had been so strong and carefree, what different nameless horrors might threaten their baby?

‘We will,’ James promised her as firmly as he could. ‘We’ll be here waiting for you.’

He watched her climb into her dented Golf and haphazardly reverse through the gate.

‘Drive carefully,’ he said inaudibly. He knew her faults and he still loved her, as she knew his and loved him in return. It seemed that that was the miracle.

Rob discharged himself from the hospital simply by walking out of the ward. From the depths of his being he hated institutions. All of them, of every variety, with their smells and sounds and associations. His mother had died when he was ten and his father had disappeared, and after that he had spent too much time in too many such places. He had made it one of his adult ambitions never to be trapped in one again. And yet now it seemed that the threat was closing in on him once more. He walked as fast as he could through the wet early-morning streets, ignoring the stares of the few passers-by.

His room, when he reached it, was exactly as he had left it only a day, only twenty-four hours ago, before meeting Danny at the gym. There was the double mattress on the floor in the corner, the quilt covered with a crumpled Indian-print cotton spread. A desk and shelves that he had built himself occupied the whole of the opposite wall, and the floor space in between bed and desk was scattered with discarded clothes and paperbacks and cassettes.

Rob stared at it all, then his mouth twisted as he pushed some of the mess aside with the toe of his boot. It was hard to comprehend how something so terrible could have intervened between yesterday and this moment and yet leave all these pieces of his existence the same, unmarked.

He crossed to the window and leaned his face against the murky glass. The view, a slice of garden matted with dripping evergreens and the backs of more houses, mocked him with its sameness. He screwed his eyes shut and rolled his forehead in the acrid condensation formed on the pane, but when he opened them and looked again there was still no change. He stumbled to his bed and sat down. He put his hand up to cover his face and waited in the silence for what would come next.

Jess sat in the long, narrow waiting room next to the IT unit. There was a row of dingy armchairs, a tray with a kettle and cups, a payphone and a contorted rubber plant on a corner shelf. The sister in charge of the unit had shown her the tiny bedroom provided for relatives and told her that she could buy breakfast down in the hospital cafeteria, but Jess could not imagine sleeping or eating. She sat with her fingers laced around a coffee mug, staring unseeingly at the curling posters on the wall. They were performing some procedure on Danny that they preferred her not to watch.

She heard a loud, strong voice asking questions outside in the corridor. A second later Lizzie appeared and Jess leaped up. Wordlessly the sisters clung to each other.

Lizzie had thrown a loose coat over her jeans. Her hair was tangled and her expressive actress’s face was taut with anxiety and bare of any make-up. As they hugged, Jess noticed that Lizzie no longer smelled of cigarettes, although she always expected her to. Lizzie had stopped smoking when she was pregnant. Jess rarely smoked but she craved a cigarette now with an addict’s longing.

‘I’m so glad you’re here,’ she whispered.

‘How is he? What’s happening? Why can’t we go in to him?’

Lizzie’s voice was husky, fully modulated. Her words and wide gestures seemed too pronounced for the cramped room.

‘They’re doing something in there now. We can go back when they’ve finished. You haven’t got a cigarette, have you?’

Lizzie looked at her. All Lizzie’s feelings were always clearly visible in her face. ‘No. Do you want me to go down and get you some?’

Jess shook her head. ‘Stay with me.’

After a few minutes Danny’s nurse came to tell them they could come back to the ward again. Jess took Lizzie’s hand and drew her through the double doors into the unit.

At the foot of Danny’s bed Lizzie stopped. She drew in her breath with a sharp gasp, hand to her mouth, staring at the bandages and the tubes.

‘Oh God, Jess. He looks so hurt.’

Jess tried to reassure her. For her own benefit as well as Lizzie’s she said firmly, ‘No. It’s just all the technology; it looks worse than it is because we can’t understand what it’s for. He moved his hand in mine, and stretched out his arms. I told you.’

Apprehensively Lizzie tiptoed closer. She put her hand over Danny’s, but he did not move. She sat down, and Jess drew up a stool next to her. The nurse circled around them to the other side of the bed, unclipped a bag filled with dark blood-stained urine and replaced it with an empty one. To Jess and Lizzie she was sympathetic, but Danny was her concern. Even his mother was irrelevant here.

On the train, Beth had been in a limbo. She had left London and Sam behind her, the monotony and the contradictory knife-sharp intervals of happiness that made up her everyday life, and she hardly dared to imagine what she would find at the hospital. On the phone after breaking the news Jess had tried to reassure her, but the attempt was a weak one. Beth interrupted, too sharply. ‘I’ll see for myself when I get there. Don’t take up any more time.’

After she had hung up she bit her lip regretfully. Even today, it was too easy for the two of them to wrong-foot each other. Fighting down a queasy surge of anxiety and guilt, Beth dialled her office and left a message on her boss’s overnight answering machine to say what had happened. She packed a bag and headed for the station.

On the way north she huddled into her seat in her damp raincoat, staring out of the train window at grey sidings and fields and factories. Instead of Danny, because that was too fearful, she thought about Sam. She spent too much time thinking about Sam, she knew that, but the central question never diminished in urgency.

Would he leave his wife for her?

Beth had been having an affair with a married man for more than a year. Originally, in her second job after secretarial college, Beth had been Sam Clark’s secretary. He was forty to her twenty-two, the good-looking and urbane editorial director of a publishing house, and within three months of her arrival in his office they had become lovers. He had taken her to a book launch party after work one evening, then to a restaurant, and – much later – to a hotel, because in those days Beth’s flat was shared with a friend from college. The next day, back on opposite sides of their desks, Beth had been surprised to remember her compliance in all this. But Sam was used to getting what he wanted, and Beth was deeply flattered to discover that what he apparently wanted was herself. Within days, she had fallen incontrovertibly in love with him.

There had been difficulties from the beginning, of course. Sam’s job was a demanding one, and his wife and young family took up almost all the rest of his time. Beth had to be content with the few hours a week that he could spare for her, after fulfilling all his other obligations. But she knew that these hours were what mattered most to him. The handful of people at work who knew about the affair seemed unsurprised by it, yet Beth had judged it best to sacrifice the pleasure of being near him all day in favour of the discretion of a different job. With Sam’s glowing recommendation she had moved on to the rights department of a rival publisher, a job that suited her well. She was on the way to becoming modestly successful. Sam had helped her to find a little flat of her own, in a suburban north London red-brick terrace. The relationship that had seemed so breathtaking at first had settled almost into a painful routine.

Of course Sam would leave his wife; to doubt that was to doubt her entire life. But when? When would he tell Sadie the truth? Beth’s bones felt brittle with the strain of waiting for it to happen, before everything else in her life could begin. She had grown thin, and her skin seemed to stretch too tightly over her face.

The train pulled in to Ditchley station. Nothing looked any different since her last visit home, in the summer. To her relief, a line of taxis waited outside the blackened stone entrance. On the way to the big Midland Hospital she gazed at the numbingly familiar streets without seeing a yard of them, only willing the traffic to move faster. She was afraid of what she would find, but longed for the slow journey to be over. The Asian driver tried to chat to her, then gave up after a glance in the mirror revealed that there were glassy tears on his fare’s cheeks.

At the doors of the IT unit, a nurse intercepted Beth and led her into the waiting room. Beth saw her mother sitting with Lizzie. Jess’s body was rigid and her face was transparently pale except for black shadows under her eyes. With a wash of sympathy that was still tainted by resentment Beth thought, This is the worst for her. If it was me lying in there instead of Danny she would be unhappy, but she wouldn’t look like this. Always, Danny was the one.

She felt sometimes that she had made her escape to London just to avoid this simple truth.

As they jumped up Lizzie saw the pleading, hungry, uncertain look that Beth darted at her mother. The two women went to her and held her between them.

‘Mum, what’s going to happen?’

Jess hugged her close. ‘We don’t know yet. They’re doing everything. Everyone keeps saying so. We’re waiting to see the neurosurgery consultant after his round.’

‘I got here as quickly as I could. It took for ever.’

‘It’s all right. There’s no change. I’m so glad you’re here,’ Jess said, as she had to Lizzie. She stood with her daughter at arm’s length, studying her face, then touched her cheeks with her fingertips. ‘You’ve been crying.’

‘I’m okay now I’m here. I want to see him.’

‘We have to wait until after the surgeon’s round.’

The scope of the waiting was only just becoming plain to them. Every minute that painfully stretched into an hour had to be waited through.

‘Is Dad coming?’

Jess nodded. Ian’s response had been immediate. ‘I’ll be there as soon as I can get a flight.’ He loved Danny, of course.

At last Beth stood beside the bed. Dispassionately the machines did their work. Then she leaned close so her cheek almost touched his and whispered, ‘Dan. It’s me. It’s Beth, can you hear me?’ When the only response was the sound of the respirator and flickering traces of the monitors she straightened up again.

Looking across at her mother and aunt she thought for the millionth time how alike they remained, even though they had evolved so differently. They were close in a way that excluded everyone else; in the whole world only Danny was more important to Jess than her sister was. Almost all her life, Beth had understood that with her mother she came a poor third.

Now she said coolly, ‘Can I talk to him on my own for ten minutes?’

Jess was going to protest but Lizzie restrained her with a touch on the arm.

‘Come with me, Jess. We’ll get a coffee or something.’

After they had gone Beth sat down on a stool at the bedside. She held Danny’s hand.

To begin with ‘I’m sorry’ was all she could think of to say.

It was only recently she had begun to think of her brother as an ally instead of a rival. When they were children Danny had always been quick and handsome and strong. She had been shy and serious, lacking the self-confidence that Danny revelled in. In everything except schoolwork she had been slower and weaker. She had longed fiercely to be his equal, but in Jess’s eyes she never could be. Her mother had shielded her from his mockery and bullying, and defended her against the world, but Beth knew she was never admired the way her brother was.

‘Mummy’s girl,’ Danny used to jeer at her.

But it was the opposite of the truth. Beth was closer to her father, and Jess was eternally seduced by Danny’s bright, careless energy. She forgave her son everything, even though he was often in trouble.

Beth thought of these things as she held Danny’s hand and tried to convey to him that none of them mattered now.

After Beth had left home, Danny and she had begun to grow close in a way they had never approached before. It was as if, once their parents’ uncomfortable marriage had ended, the two of them had been set free to like each other without competing. Danny had lately even been down to stay with her in her flat in London. She had taken him to the theatre, and he had taken her clubbing.

‘We had a good time, didn’t we?’ she asked him aloud. ‘We can do it again. I won’t complain about techno music if you don’t complain about boring theatrical crap.’

‘Can he hear me?’ she asked the nurse.

‘We believe all our patients can hear.’

Beth fixed her eyes on his waxy face. He seemed almost hidden by the tubes and bandages.

She whispered urgently to him, ‘Come on, Dan. Come back. Don’t leave me alone now, after all, after everything.’

After examining Danny the consultant took the three women aside.

‘I’m afraid he isn’t responding very well,’ he said gravely.

‘What does that mean?’ Jess asked.

‘His reactions to stimuli are less marked than they were last night. The outlook may not be very bright. I wish I could tell you more, or something different, but for the moment we can only watch him and wait.’

Jess looked straight into the man’s eyes.

‘You are doing everything you can?’

‘Everything.’

Unable to bear the familiar confines of his room any longer, Rob went out into the rain. Exhaustion and hunger, as well as shock, began to make him feel disorientated; he knew that last night he had been under arrest, that today he must go to the police station with a solicitor. There was a duty solicitor available; the police had informed him of that. But some independent instinct made him want to appoint his own legal representative.

He stood on the corner of the street, measuring in his mind the distance he would have to walk into the centre of town. It was quite a long way. In his head there were repeating images of his van smashed into the bridge, of Danny lying on the verge. All Rob’s tools for work were in the back of the van; what would happen to them? Even as he thought of this he was ashamed that he should consider it worth worrying about.

He began to walk, pushing himself into a rapid clockwork stride although his body felt disjointed, almost dismembered. An hour later he was waiting in a legal aid solicitor’s reception area. The solicitor’s girl receptionist took one look at him and hurried into a back office.

A man came out to see Rob. He was young, dressed in a tie and a clean shirt, Hugh Grant hair. A public schoolboy, Rob thought, as the solicitor held out his hand for Rob to shake awkwardly with his left one. He introduced himself as Michael Blake.

‘You’d better come and tell me what’s happened,’ he said, showing Rob into an office.

In a flat monotone Rob described the previous evening and Michael Blake listened without interrupting.

At the end Rob said, ‘I’m in trouble. How bad is it likely to be?’

Blake put his head on one side, thinking before he spoke. Rob warmed to him a little.

‘It depends partly on what happens to your friend. And on what charges the girls decide to press relating to the earlier part of the evening.’

Rob nodded tiredly. ‘I’ve got some form,’ he admitted.

‘You’d better tell me about it.’

It had happened in an empty car-park, three years ago. He had been taking a short cut across it on the way to meet a girl. He had been nineteen, Danny’s age. He remembered the exact shade of the summer twilight, the tarmac blotched with oil, cinema and gig posters peeling off a hoarding. There had been three of them sitting on a low wall, a big shaven-headed boy, pink and bristly as a prize pig, school bully grown up, and two of his smaller, feral-looking mates.

The big one crooned, ‘Look ‘ere, it’s Bits. C’mon, Bitty. What you got in your lunch box, Bits?’ The others laughed and Rob crossed over to them, pushing his face close to the big one.

‘Shut the fuck up,’ he said.

He thought he had grown out of both the nickname and the shame of it. They belonged to the time when he was much younger, when he was being shuttled between the children’s home and foster care. ‘Bits’ referred to the clothes he was dressed in and the food he was fed on, and also to a day when he was hungry and envious of another boy’s packed lunch. ‘Give me a bit,’ he had demanded.

By the time he was sixteen Rob had become big and tough and independent enough for the old name not to stick any more. To hear it again after so long stripped him down to a discarded version of himself.

‘Who are you telling to shut up, Bitty?’

There had been a fight, in which he came off badly. As he hauled himself out of the car-park Rob heard his attackers laughing. A thick, red pall of anger dropped around him like a curtain, overcoming all restraint. Suffocated by rage, he saw a short length of scaffolding pole in a skip at the roadside and armed himself. He crept in a wide circle back to where the three men were sitting on the wall, drinking canned lager. Then he came out of the shadows and hit the big one on the back of the head with the pole. He went down like a pig in an abbatoir.

Rob was charged with common assault. He was fined and placed on probation.

Michael Blake nodded. ‘I think I can understand the provocation,’ he said.

Rob did not discuss his fear of violence, most of all of his own which seemed buried in him like some atavistic threat.

They went to the police together, in Michael Blake’s car.

‘We were about to come looking for you, my son,’ said the officer who met them.

Rob was interviewed under caution and not re-arrested. In an interview room a police inspector tape-recorded Rob’s account of the day before. As Rob talked he could hear Danny’s voice, his laughter, as if he and not Michael Blake were sitting beside him.

Before he came to the crash itself the inspector interrupted him.

‘You can have a break for a cup of tea, if you want.’

Rob drank the thick brew gratefully. When the interview began again he sat with his head bent, trying to remember. The opaque spot at the centre of his recollection had thickened and spread. One minute he had been racing away from the police, the next Danny was lying on the grass and the whole world had changed.

‘Do you have any more to add?’ asked the inspector.

Rob shook his head. Nothing.

The inspector told Rob and Michael Blake that the breath test performed at the roadside had shown an immediate positive. The result of the blood test would not be available for some weeks, and in the meantime the police would collect evidence and statements. Officers would interview Cat and the other girl, and statements would be prepared. After that a report would be submitted to the Crown Prosecution Service, with a recommendation as to what the charges should be. Until that time, Rob was free to go.

‘By the way,’ the inspector added, ‘it seems from the accident investigator’s preliminary report that your nearside rear tyre deflated before the crash.’

Rob nodded his head again, too numb to make much of the information.

‘Is there any more news from the hospital?’ he asked.

‘There’s no change.’

Michael Blake said, ‘Mr Ellis is a self-employed carpenter and cabinet maker, and all his tools necessary to conduct his business are in the back of the van. When can he expect to have them back?’

The inspector looked at his notes. ‘After the examiner has finished with the vehicle the contents of it will be put in our store. Mr Ellis can collect them once they are approved for release. Probably in about a week’s time.’

Outside, Michael said, ‘You’ll be able to work when the plaster comes off, at least.’

A bus filled with shoppers passed beside Michael’s parked car. A boy with a school bag slung over his shoulder ran and jumped on to the platform.

‘Yeah,’ Rob said softly.

‘Can I give you a lift somewhere?’

‘No thanks,’ Rob told him. He walked away, in no particular direction, only wanting to place himself somewhere else.

The waiting stretched into the next day and the days that crept after it. The ward and the stuffy waiting room became as familiar to the women as their own bedrooms. They sat on the plastic chairs and held one another’s hands. When they spoke they talked about the past, editing it for one another so that it seemed to consist only of happy times. For the present they watched the hands of the clock and the nurses and the flickering screen above Danny’s bed. They tried not to consider the future at all.

Lizzie drove home to Sock for part of each day, and when they could stay awake no longer Jess and Beth took it in turns to snatch a few hours of sleep in the cramped bedroom near the unit.

Danny’s condition did not improve. He did not stretch out his arms again, or clench his fists when the nurses pinched his bruised flesh or pressed on his sternum. The machines did their busy work and Danny lay inert between them.

In the middle of the third day Ian arrived from Sydney.

It was more than two years since Jess and Ian had separated, and over a year since she had last seen him.

In the shabby hospital surroundings he looked fresh and fit, even after the long flight, and his suntan was incongruous beside the women’s strain-etched faces.

Beth leapt up and ran to him with a cry of relief. She clung to her father.

‘I’m here,’ he soothed her with his mouth against her hair. ‘I’m here now.’

As if the mere fact of his arrival altered everything, Jess thought, then let the thought and its bitterness slide away from her. She had no capacity now to focus on anything but her fear for Danny, and beyond it the dark bulk of awakening grief that was beginning to diminish even the fear.

When Ian looked to her she awkwardly extended her hand, but he pushed it aside and took her in his arms. They stood without speaking as the old familiarity of touch and shape and scent reasserted itself. Jess resisted a sudden blind impulse to give way and hide her face against her husband’s shoulder. She would not allow herself to weep here, not yet.

‘How is he?’ Ian asked.

She shook her head, unable to speak.

In the ward the Indian family were clustered around their daughter’s bed, and the grown-up children of a heart-attack victim waited silently beside their father.

Ian went straight to Danny.

‘Hello, son,’ he said.

He bent forward and gently stroked his cheek, and touched the hank of black hair that protruded from the white bandage. Danny lay wax-faced and motionless.

‘Hello,’ Ian whispered again.

Jess watched and listened to him murmuring to her son. Her dry eyes were wide and staring.

Later, when the grey light was beginning to fade, Ian and Jess went out to walk for a few minutes in the damp air. Cosy yellow lights were coming on in the buildings on the opposite side of the road, and as they passed under a street lamp it kindled with a blood-orange glow. They walked in silence, a little way apart. In the last months of their marriage, when Ian had met Michelle, they had become used to opposition, then to acrimony. But any expressions of regret or attempts at self-justification were choked by the desperation of this moment. There seemed to be nothing to say about the past that mattered any longer.

At length Jess said dully, ‘I think they are preparing us for the worst.’

‘We don’t know that. They may not know themselves.’

Ian would not anticipate the worst before it befell him. At times his optimism was almost wilful. Jess recalled the tired old differences between them, the way that their separate needs and shortcomings had chafed each other for so many years. Their mutual failure seemed merely sad now, belonging to some long-ago time. She stopped in the middle of the pavement and threw her head back.

‘What can we do?’ she cried, a wail of anguish escaping her.

Ian put his hands on her shoulders. The extreme familiarity of his face only reminded Jess that they were hardly more than strangers now. She didn’t know anything about his new life.

‘We can’t do anything,’ he told her patiently. ‘Not even us. Only the doctors, and Danny himself.’

Looking beyond the man who had been her husband, into the lighted windows and the rooms containing remote ordinary life, Jess told herself with simple certainty, If he dies, everything will end. And her thoughts spun away to the beginning, to when Danny was born, and back before the beginning, as if to another life.

Lizzie had come back from an afternoon with her baby and had taken her place beside the bed. Beth was in the waiting room, drinking a plastic beaker of tea. She looked up as soon as the door opened, as everyone confined in the room always did.

Rob’s leather jacket was slung over his shoulder, concealing the plaster cast on his arm. The right side of his face had darkened with bruises and scabs. His eyes met hers and Beth knew at once who he was.

‘You’re his sister, aren’t you?’

‘Yes.’

The girls’ school she had attended was separate from the boys’, but Beth was almost the same age as Rob Ellis. She knew from somewhere, from long-ago whispered gossip of girls, that there was a strangeness about him. Something to do with his past. The cloudy associations had regathered as soon as her mother had told her who had been driving the van.

‘What do you want? What are you doing here?’

Brusquely he dismissed her questions with his own. ‘How is he?’

‘In a coma still. On a ventilator. Do you care, since you put him there?’

He had almost turned away but now he rounded on her. His face made her step back, wishing she could take back the words as well. But he only said, ‘Yes, I do.’

Lizzie was sitting beside the bed. The registrar had just made his routine visit to Danny. There was no change. She heard the footsteps and looked up. Rob was standing a yard away from her, wrapped in his jacket, his eyes fixed on Danny. He came closer, until he leaned over him. His hair fell forward over his shoulder and the leather of his coat creaked as he stretched out a hand.

Beth had followed him in. She signalled to Lizzie, This is him. Lizzie leapt to her feet.

‘What do you want?’

Rob gave no sign of having heard her. He was watching Danny, his good hand resting on the edge of the bed. Lizzie ran round to him and shook him by the elbow. He turned very slowly. He was tall, looming over her.

She repeated more loudly, ‘What do you want?’

The boy shook his head. He had long hair in thick coils caught back in a rough tail. She heard the rustle of it against his collar. He was unshaven, his cheeks unevenly pricked with a reddish stubble. His lips were cracked and there were dark patches beneath his eyes. A fresh dressing on one side of his head looked startlingly white.

‘To see him. What do you think?’

His voice sounded rusty in his throat, as if he had not done much talking lately. Lizzie pushed his arm with the flat of her hand.

‘You can’t stay here.’

‘You can’t tell me what I can do.’

His effrontery amazed her. There was a glaze to him, a carelessness, that seemed utterly repellent. What if Jess should come back and see him here? Lizzie pushed harder, anger rising up through her exhaustion and anxiety.

Rob grabbed her wrist. His fingers were like steel, making her wince.

‘He’s my friend. See? Who are you?’

‘His … aunt.’ She felt frightened now as well as angry.

‘Yeah.’

Beth was at Lizzie’s side, trying to separate them. The Indian family timidly looked on. Rob flung away from the two women and turned back to Danny. He bent over him for a moment, his lips inaudibly moving. Beth saw it and hesitated but Lizzie was already bringing across the Irish charge nurse.

‘I’m afraid you can’t stay without the family’s agreement,’ the nurse said. He was much shorter than Rob. Two doctors looked up from the desk in the middle of the ward.

At the same time Jess and Ian came back.

Ian recognised in an instant who this was, and saw the way that Lizzie and Beth squared up to the intruder, fending him off.

‘Come on. Out of here,’ Ian said sharply. His hand was already raised.

The director of the unit was on his way across to them, wearing a plastic apron like everyone else who came into the room. Except for Rob.

‘I’m sorry, this is too many people around one bed. It’s disturbing for other patients.’ To Rob he said, ‘You are an infection risk. You will have to leave.’

No one had been looking at Jess. But now she said, ‘Let him stay. Just for a few minutes.’

She went to the dispenser beside the door and pulled out a disposable apron. She held it out to Rob without looking at him. He took it from her and Danny’s nurse helped him to pull it over his head and tie the strings.

‘We can go outside,’ Jess said.

They went into the empty waiting room. Jess crossed to the high window and stared out unseeingly. It was almost dark.

‘Mum,’ Beth began.

Jess didn’t look round. ‘It’s what Danny would want. What does anything else matter?’

Rob stood at the bedside without moving. The nurse frowned at him, then returned to writing on the charts. The doctors resumed their low-voiced conversation and the eyes of the Indian family turned back to their child. Rob looked at Danny’s face. In his stillness he seemed hardly recognisable. The tube taped sideways into his mouth looked incongruously like a dog’s bone.

‘Dan,’ he said softly. But Danny didn’t turn his head or open his eyes.

Rob began to shake. It had taken courage to come here and now it was deserting him.

The hiss and sigh of the ventilator and the flicker of coloured traces across the screen above the bed were nothing to do with Danny. Danny was not here. But all of this hardware was real and present, and the ward and the waiting room and the people trapped in it. And it had taken on its lurid and threatening hyper-reality in the short days since the crash and he could do nothing to banish it again. He closed his eyes and opened them, and bit the inside of his mouth to suppress the groan of horror that rose up in him.

Wake up, he silently begged. Just for a minute wake up and look at me. Be yourself again and let me not have done this. Or let it be you standing here and me lying with the thing in my mouth and the machine breathing for me instead. Go on. Why don’t you?

But Danny’s absence and stillness only proclaimed the futility of wishing. Nothing would make the past into the present again. The wasteful truth ignited Rob’s anger. He said more loudly, ‘Danny, mate, can you hear me?’

Nothing. Rob stepped back from the bed, still staring at the face that injury had unshaped.

‘I’ll see you,’ Rob said. ‘I’ll see you around, right?’

And then he turned and ran down the ward. At the door he tore off the plastic apron and aimed it at the bin but the air caught it and it floated, like a sloughed-off dry skin.

Rob ran past the closed door of the waiting room and down the deserted tunnel of the corridor towards the lifts. But someone standing in a shallow alcove formed by some cupboards saw him coming and stepped out to block his path.

Danny’s father. A stocky, sandy-haired man with a freckly tan and gingery hairs on the backs of his fingers. The fingers were balled into fists now.

‘Don’t you come back here ever again,’ Ian Arrowsmith said. ‘Don’t you think it’s enough to get pissed and smash our boy into a wall, without coming back to look at what you’ve done?’

Rob was still shaking. He made an effort to swallow but he was dry-mouthed with anger. He saw red flashes of light around the man’s congested face.

‘What do you think it’s like for his mother and sister, seeing you here, knowing what you did?’

Rob clenched his left fist ready to hit him. But then he made his fingers slacken again. Rob ran away, his boot soles squealing on the polished hospital lino.

The surgeon asked to see Jess and Ian.

He said gently, ‘Mr and Mrs Arrowsmith. We are going to perform some tests on Danny. These tests will determine for us if there is some hope of a partial recovery, or if the damage his brain has suffered is irremediable.’

Jess looked down at her knees, at her hands tidily clasped and resting there. For a panic-stricken instant she thought she couldn’t recall Danny’s voice or summon his face. But then she saw and heard him, and lifted her head.

‘When?’

‘This evening. Mr Barker, my senior registrar, will do the tests. And first thing tomorrow morning I will repeat them myself. We don’t want to draw any conclusions until everything has been looked at twice.’

‘I see,’ Jess whispered. ‘It’s bad news, isn’t it?’

Ian reached out and touched her arm. Jess barely felt it.

‘We don’t yet know for certain,’ the doctor answered. ‘But I’m afraid it may be. I’m very sorry.’

He was as kind and sympathetic as it was possible to be. Jess shook her head, understanding that even as the news worsened she had until now nourished the hope, even the expectation, that Danny would recover.

The registrar came to do the first series of tests. Screens were placed around Danny’s bed and his family waited outside. Jess imagined what the tests might involve and forbade herself to ask, for fear of what she might hear.

Mr Barker came to see them afterwards. He shook his head sombrely.

The night crawled past. Beth went home with Lizzie after they had assured her that nothing would change before the morning. Jess and Ian alternated in their watch beside the bed. Ian’s face had already lost its ruddy colour and taken on a grey pallor. Jess could not look at him to see his pain. She left her place to the nurse and went to lie stiff-limbed on the narrow bed in the rest-room.

The morning came inevitably and Lizzie and Beth returned. Beth was white-lipped and red-eyed, and as soon as she saw Ian she began to cry again with her father’s arm around her. Lizzie had brought a croissant for Jess, wrapped in a linen napkin, and a flask of proper coffee. While they waited Jess drank the coffee and crumbled the flaky richness of the croissant into the napkin. The everyday luxury of it seemed utterly foreign in the here and now.

They heard the coming and going of the morning’s business on the unit, and then the consultant arriving.

It seemed a long time that they sat in their familiar positions, listening without speaking.

Beth said at last, ‘I want to hear too. Don’t go off to see him without me, like yesterday.’

Jess was sitting between Lizzie and Beth. She needed them both with her; Beth’s instinct was right. Their closeness excluded Ian and emphasised her sense of separation from him more sharply than ever before. His plain suffering stirred the currents of guilt in her.

Then the surgeon came to them. Jess found herself wondering if he had had breakfast this morning with his own children in some warm pine-fronted kitchen. She imagined two neat little girls in private-school uniforms.

He said, ‘I have just done the brain stem tests on Danny myself. I’m very sorry I have to tell you this. But I am quite sure your son is dead.’

‘No.’ It was Ian who loudly contradicted him. ‘He’s alive, and moving. I can see it.’

‘The movements you can see are reflex contractions. Danny’s brain stem remains technically alive so long as we continue artificially to feed and drain and ventilate him, but the thinking part of his brain is dead.’

‘Has anyone ever recovered from this state?’

Mr Copthorne looked at Jess. ‘No one has. Ever.’

Beth made a small animal noise and turned her face into her father’s shoulder. Lizzie was crying too, big tears rolling glassily down her cheeks. Her weeping was theatrical, Jess thought, with the first cold detachment of her grief. And when she turned her eyes to Ian she saw that he was ashamed. Embarrassed by their loss. It was or would become a part of their mutual failure, the final terrible emblem of it.

Danny was dead. He had gone away somewhere while the machines hissed and flickered pointlessly around him. It came to her that she had known it all along and her insistent hope had been only a subterfuge.

Dry-eyed, Jess faced the doctor.

And it was to Jess he said, ‘What I’m about to ask you is an imposition and an intrusion into your grief. But terrible and unfair as it may sound, other people can live through your son’s death. Could you find it in yourself to make his organs available for donation? I believe there is even a kind of solace in the giving, if you were able to do it.’

Without hesitation, without looking at Ian because Danny was hers now, not his, Jess answered, ‘Yes. Take what will help someone else.’

‘Thank you,’ the man said.

‘May we see him first?’

‘Of course.’

With Ian walking slowly ahead of them and with their arms linked round each other, the three women went back to the ward for the last time.

In the end Jess was left alone with him. Ian helped Beth away and Lizzie stayed for only a moment longer. She groped her way between the white screens that surrounded the bed, blinded by tears.

Jess sat in silence, watching Danny’s motionless face. A continuous ribbon of thoughts ran through her mind, bright images from the past punctuated by a conversation with Danny that she knew must not end now. She would talk to him – how could she not? – and he would answer. She possessed him within her head and the sudden certainty of it was like a light flashing on after days of darkness.

She stood up now and gently lifted the blanket from his shoulders, folding it back so that she could look at him. With an effort of will she made the white discs taped to his chest invisible, and the tubes and wires running out of him. She closed her ears to the gasp of the ventilator and the subdued noises of the ward.

Danny’s shoulders were broad and there was dark hair on his chest and forearms. The slow rise and fall of his chest was steady, as if he were sleeping. His skin was smooth and still coloured by the residue of his summer tan. His mother looked at the knitting together of muscles and sinews and the hollow at the base of his throat and the strong arch of his ribcage, and thought how beautiful he was. While she looked at him he was a man and not her child any longer. She would have liked to stretch herself out beside him and take him in her arms. The flush of longing for him made her skin shiver with tiny currents of electricity, as if she were a girl, as if he were her lover.

Jess touched the tips of her fingers to his warm shoulder. She bent down as if to whisper in his ear, and then put her lips to the tiny scar on his jawline.

Then, tenderly, she folded the blanket up again, patting it in place around him.

All the time the conversation ran on in her head, threads of talk they had shared about Danny’s college work, his girls, small speculations about the future. She heard his voice again and saw him moving, smiling, moving on as he would not, now.

Jess straightened up, stood back a step.

She did not articulate the word goodbye.

She opened the screens and walked down the ward, somehow placing one foot in front of the other. She saw the faces of the unit director, a nurse, one of the doctors, waiting to help her. She even smiled her thanks at them, feeling the movement of it spreading lopsided over her face. The nurse put an arm round Jess’s shoulders. They guided her away from the unit and the hateful waiting room, so that she would not see or hear when they came to wheel the body down to the theatre.