Infidelity (24 page)

‘Which was?'

‘How long has Perry got?'

As we settled down to sleep, I pondered Sarah's trashing of her own bed rule. Jelly, Fox, E, Perry . . . all of them vividly present, crowded here in the bed with us. I had always got the point of the rule – it protected the status of our bed as our own most private, most intimate place. So why had neither of us realised what we were doing? Was this no longer to be our haven?

31

B
y the following Friday afternoon, with no more discussion between us, Sarah had edged closer to the decision I had long feared.

‘We need more information,' she said, out of the blue, as we were coming to the end of a long walk through Richmond Park. The park had worked a kind of magic on me – vaster and wilder than Sydney's Centennial Park, the only comparable park I had spent any time in; more mysterious as well, with ancient buildings occasionally looming up out of the mist. The peace of the place was curiously intact, despite the steady stream of aircraft passing overhead at ninety-second intervals, flashing their exotic liveries at us as they emerged from the cloud base and prepared to land at Heathrow. There were young deer everywhere, more enchanting to me than to Sarah. (I had been imagining showing them to a child.)

We emerged from the park and found a seat at the top of Richmond Hill, overlooking the town and the river, with cattle grazing on the slopes far below us.

‘More information about . . .?'

‘About Perry's condition. About how long he's likely to hang on. About how conscious he's even likely to be of the pregnancy, once it starts to show. It could be a few months before it becomes obvious, of course, especially with some judicious selection of clothing – looser tops and things.
Summer is icumen in
,
which could make it easier.'

(Summer. How little time Sarah and I had known each other. We had not even experienced a summer or an autumn together.)

This question had been dominating our thinking for weeks, yet I was struck by the intensely rational way Sarah now seemed to be approaching it. Was it really just a matter of short-term concealment? I wondered.

‘Isn't that rather dodging the issue?' I said, conscious that my own judgement about any of this was clouded not only by my desire to cling to whatever prospect remained of my becoming a father, but also by my private knowledge of the real reason for Sarah's regular appearances at Whitman House. Not surprisingly, I found myself drawn to E's initial position: why
not
come out and say what had happened, and deal with the consequences, if any? Of course I knew why Sarah could never agree to that; why it would have been pointless even to mention it. She might have declared, for my benefit, that Perry was no longer claiming her as his wife, his peculiar Easter declaration notwithstanding. She might have insisted that she was not caring for him in the way a wife might care for a husband. But beneath all such declarations lurked the lie. Any lie between us would have been disturbing; this one festered in me like a wound that wouldn't heal.

‘I just think we're debating in the dark without something more definitive to go on,' she said at last. ‘A prognosis, I mean. I've deliberately stayed clear of any contact with Perry's neurologist until now – I really felt it was nothing to do with me, given our history. But now it is very much to do with me. This literally does change everything. You can see that.'

‘It has already changed the world we both live in, Sarah,' I said, recalling the recent symbolic invasion of our bed. ‘But I think I need to know something. Is there . . . I don't know . . . is there a point . . . I suppose I mean, is there a point, a point already fixed in your mind, beyond which there's no room for debate?'

‘Let's start back,' she said, and we stood and walked in silence down Hill Rise. This was a silence I was determined not to break. I knew she was searching for the most honest answer she could give me. As we approached the town, we paused to read an inscription from William Hone's
Everyday Book
on a plaque set in a stone wall by the pavement:
Hither come ye whose hearts are saddened by the strife of life and the disturbance of the world.

(Well, we're here, William, I thought. What have you got?)

We came into Richmond and kept walking until we found another bench by the river, near the bridge. We sat close together, Sarah's arm wound tightly through mine. Led by their mother, a flotilla of ducklings cruised by, their tiny wakes scarcely rippling the surface of the Thames.

Sarah gave one of her exaggerated, rather theatrical sighs, lifting and dropping her shoulders as if to prepare herself, to brace herself, for what was to come. ‘Yes, Tom. You were quite right to ask me that. I think there are two fixed points, really.' She sighed again, less dramatically, and gave a tiny shudder. ‘The first is that I can't imagine giving you up. I really can't. I've weighed up all the things that could happen and the consequences that might follow. I could live without a baby, but not without you. You know what Christina Rossetti says:
My heart is gladder than all these because my love is come to me.
'

She squeezed my arm even more tightly against her body.

‘And the second point?' I said, feeling strangely unmoved, perhaps unconvinced, by that poetic declaration. Though my heart welcomed it, I was wishing it had not merely been borrowed from a poet, Sarah herself never having once declared her love for me in so many words. (‘Say it with flowers' Interflora used to advertise, but sometimes we need the words themselves.)

Sarah nodded as if to confirm what she had said, and lapsed into another silence. I had already known she could live without a baby; I found myself wondering, not for the first time, whether she could live without Whitman House or the river of Whitman gold. But I thought I knew the answer.

‘The second point is, I refuse to thrust this pregnancy in Perry's face.' She paused, nodding her head again. ‘Yes, that's right. Those are my two non-negotiable conditions. Everything else is negotiable.'

Everything else? I could think of only one negotiable thing left. But I had known that was negotiable, almost from the start.

Before we went to bed that night, Sarah told me she had resolved to make an appointment to see Perry's specialist in Guildford as soon as it could be arranged.

‘I think I've come to a pretty clear position, Tom. If Perry has only weeks to live, which is how it's looking, I think we should probably go ahead.'

‘Really? That would be the clincher for you? You'd definitely be prepared to go ahead with this?'

‘I think so – yes. Probably.'

‘But?'

‘Let's not jump to any conclusions. We're trying to be rational about this, aren't we? Let's wait and see what the neurologist says. I think . . . well, if he thinks Perry might linger for five or six months, or even more, that would open things up a bit.'

‘Open things up?'

‘Well, it wouldn't be . . . I'm thinking it wouldn't be nearly so clear-cut. Would it? I can't really imagine trying to keep this a secret for more than three or four months – not just from Perry, but from Mrs Hepworth and anyone else who might come into contact with Perry. That's still my real home, Tom. Whitman House. Littleton is my village. I wouldn't be prepared to hide from those people. Or my friends in Compton. That was the crazy part of E's first suggestion. There's no way I could bury myself in London for months on end. So I suppose . . . if it was going to be more than a couple of months for Perry . . . I suppose I would be more open to the idea of a termination. But that's
our
decision, Tom, not only mine. I'm not as tough as Fox, you know.'

Nothing in Sarah's manner or tone gave me any comfort. I knew, at that moment, it was to be her decision, not ours. And I had no reason to think Fox was any tougher, in any way, than Sarah.

And yet I loved her.

32

S
arah returned to Vincent Square in a state of barely suppressed fury following her visit to Perry's neurologist. Even the train trip from Guildford back to London had failed to calm her. She slammed the door, let her handbag fall to the floor and threw herself onto the couch without even a kiss.

‘What an appalling, appalling man! I've never met anyone like that before. Not ever.'

‘Would you like tea, or something stronger?'

Sarah looked at me for a moment, not appearing to have registered my offer.

‘Oh, tea. Yes, sorry. Tea would be lovely.'

I kept the ceremony brief, poured the tea into mugs, and sat beside her on the couch.

‘You'd better tell me all about it,' I said, bracing myself for news that seemed bound to be unpleasant.

‘He truly was an appalling man. I could tell that from the very beginning – a cold, dry, supercilious type of man. His tiny rimless glasses suited him perfectly and so did his mean little waiting room. Not a single picture on the wall apart from a faded photograph of his Cambridge college. He asked me why I hadn't come to talk to him about Perry before and I told him the truth, of course.'

‘What did you say? How did you put it?'

‘Oh, I explained as coolly as I could that Perry and I were married only in the legal sense and hadn't lived as man and wife for several years.'

‘Did that satisfy him?' (I wondered if I would ever again be able to believe it fully myself.)

‘Actually, he raised his eyebrows at that and I sensed Perry had given him a quite different impression. So we got off on the wrong foot, really. Anyway, naturally enough, he wanted to know why I was so interested in Perry's wellbeing at this late stage. So I decided to tell him the whole truth.'

‘You mean the baby?'

Sarah frowned. ‘The pregnancy, yes. I didn't like this man at all – I didn't even trust him particularly. But he was the only person who could tell me what I needed to know. So I told him about my relationship with you and the unplanned pregnancy and my doubts and uncertainties and not wanting to confront Perry at the eleventh hour.'

‘Was he sympathetic? Did he get it?'

‘He listened in stony, expressionless silence. Didn't take any notes. Didn't smile or nod at all. Just heard me out. Of course I filled the void, as usual – I just kept talking until I'd said everything there was to say. The termination issue. Needing to know how long Perry has got. I tried to make it clear this was out of sensitivity to Perry's feelings, even though Perry had never spared
my
feelings. Ever. I said that, too.'

‘Perhaps that was going a bit far?'

‘Actually, there was a flicker of response when I said that. He raised his eyebrows again. It was barely perceptible, but his forehead did crease. I basically ran out of things to say, so I stopped talking.'

I couldn't recall ever having seen Sarah as agitated as this.

‘More tea?'

‘No. No, thanks.'

She kicked her shoes off and stretched out on the couch, her head in my lap.

‘Without having said a word, that man managed to make me feel weak, defenceless and rather pathetic. I waited for a long time before he said anything in response. And when it came, it was brief to the point of contemptuous.

‘“With respect, Ms Delacour,” he said, “you are not my patient. Mr Whitman is my patient. And Mr Whitman has explicitly asked me, on several occasions, not to offer him any prognosis. From the very beginning, from the time he came into my care with the diagnosis already established and protocols for his management fully laid out by his Boston medical team, he has consistently requested that. He does not wish to hear any estimates of how long he might expect to live with the disease.”

‘I asked him if he was certain it
is
motor neurone disease, and he completely ignored me, as if the question were too naive to deserve an answer. He spelt out for me, as if I were a child, that if his patient didn't want to know how long he might live, he was certainly not going to discuss such a question with someone who wasn't his patient, especially someone who denied any intimacy with his patient. He went on about how unwise it would be, in such cases, to offer a prognosis as precise as the one I was hoping for. He trotted out all the clichés – nothing in this world is certain, people occasionally experience the most unlikely remissions, medical science might be on the very brink of new therapies to halt or even reverse the damage done by the disease, et cetera, et cetera. Even if nothing changes, he said, some people's life force carries them way past the average duration of a disease like this. He said Perry is already past the average for MND, but plenty of sufferers live far longer than he has. Nothing is ever certain, he kept saying. Every case is unique.'

I recalled Philip's statistic, quoted over lunch at Henley: up to twenty percent of patients survive for ten years. I hadn't mentioned that to Sarah at the time, and I was certainly not about to raise it now. Everything Perry's neurologist had said sounded reasonable.

‘I felt as if I were being scolded for my naivety,' Sarah said. ‘But he hadn't finished. He stood up to indicate our meeting was at an end and as he showed me to the door, he said: “Ms Delacour, I am compelled to say this. I've never encountered such a cold-blooded attitude in my entire career as a medical practitioner. To play some kind of roulette with three lives – your husband's, the unborn child's and the father's – is frankly beyond my comprehension. Trying to cast me in the role of croupier is an insult to my profession. Good day.”'

Sarah squeezed her eyes shut and folded her arms fiercely across her chest. I stroked her hair gently, but she discouraged me with a shake of her head.

‘I was furious, Tom. Shocked and furious. Can you imagine how that felt? Talk about crossing the boundaries! Talk about unprofessional! But of course I wasn't there as his patient and I suppose he could deny ever having said any of that if I tried to challenge him. I staggered, literally staggered, out into the street and found a coffee shop where I sat for ages, alternating between wanting to go back and tell him what I thought of him – maybe even thrust my knee into his nuts – and thinking his basic premise was correct. Perry
is
his patient and I had no right, in the circumstances, bursting in like that, trying to find out information for my own purposes.'

I placed my hand on her head and let it rest there.

‘That's true,' I said, ‘but plenty of doctors could have found a way to deal more gently with you.'

‘Luck of the draw. You're probably right – there must be a hundred other neurologists who would have treated me more kindly than that, even if they weren't prepared to divulge any more information about Perry's condition. They might at least have shown some sympathy for my dilemma. They might at least have acknowledged that I was trying to be sensitive to Perry's situation. Or that I was trying to weigh things up sensibly – to take everything into account. After all, abortion isn't a crime in this country – I don't expect praise for considering it, but a bit of understanding wasn't too much to hope for, was it?'

I kept my hand where it was and said nothing.