Keeping Secrets (45 page)

‘Tess!'

Tony lay looking at the room in the light from the open door, at the dark chest of drawers, the long wardrobe mirroring the beams above the bed, his clothes and Miriam's heaped on the floor. He began to feel an immeasurably long way from home, a feeling quite different from nights spent in hotels, or other family houses, where he slept in the spare room. This was not a spare room. And this image of Alice, unbidden, was not what he was used to summoning when he stayed away: the children asleep and Alice sitting up in bed, reading, pushing back her hair; he had imagined her switching out the light, curling up long slender legs in her white cotton nightdress, missing him. Now he realised that perhaps she enjoyed those nights alone – perhaps she craved them. Yet even this knowledge, which had changed everything, and even what had happened between him and Miriam – unimaginable until now – could not stop this sense of her reaching out for him, nor his longing, suddenly overwhelming, to be with her. He closed his eyes and saw her again, floating, like Ophelia, lost without him. Or perhaps he had that wrong, too.

‘I can't find her.'

‘What?' He looked up to see Miriam beside the bed again, slipping in beside him, shivering. ‘You're frozen.' He held her close, as he would do a child.

‘I called and called. It's terrible out there.' Her teeth were chattering.

‘She'll be all right.'

‘She might not be – she's been pining for Jon, she might have gone looking for him.'

‘In this lot?'

‘Who knows? Animals are different, aren't they?'

‘Most of them hate rain,' he said, glad to have something ordinary to bring him down to earth. ‘She's probably in the garage. Do you want me to go and look?'

‘No.' She had stopped shivering, and reached up to kiss him. ‘If she's there it's not worth catching a chill for, and if she's not I'll worry even more. I just hope she is.' She kissed him again, and said gently: ‘Are you all right?'

‘Yes.'

‘No, you're not. You've been thinking. Look at me.'

Her dark eyes regarded him gravely; she moved until she was lying on top of him, holding his face in her hands. ‘I feel I should be reassuring you now,' she said slowly. ‘We've given each other something. Haven't we? That's all, that's enough. You said – didn't you? – that this was just for us. Please don't regret it.'

For a long time they looked at each other, searching, answering. Out in the lane the wind rose higher, and another tile crashed to the ground. He brought her mouth down on his, and no longer thought of anything.

Early morning, barely that. Tony woke wondering where he was; he lay still, taking in the unfamiliar room, looking at a thin crack of light between the curtains. The storm had died away; beside him Miriam slept deeply, her bare arm across his chest. He went on lying there, knowing he had been dreaming of Alice, and that that was what had woken him, although he could remember nothing else. After a while he reached for his watch from the bedside table: just after six. In London, the children would be waking up soon, clambering into bed with Alice, asking where he was. He thought of them all in their nightclothes, still half-asleep, their hair tangled, Annie's thumb in her mouth. If he left now he could almost be home by breakfast.

Slowly, he slid out of bed and went to the window; he lifted one of the curtains aside and looked out. Above the torn and broken trees the sky was a roughly washed grey; water lay deep on the lane's uneven surface and there was mud flung up everywhere. Pieces of smashed roof tiles lay all down the path, and from somewhere up here he could hear dripping water. He let the curtain drop and moved quietly to pick up his clothes, and went out to the landing, looking for the bathroom; when he found it he saw that this was where the water was coming in – a steady drip from the ceiling in the corner; already a large pool lay on the floor. He had a pee, and dressed, and put on his glasses; he looked in the airing cupboard for a bowl to catch the drips, found one and put it carefully beneath the leak. Then he went back along the quiet landing and down the stairs.

In the hall, he felt in his coat pockets for notebook and pen; he leaned on the hall stand, beneath the mirror specked with mildew, and wondered what to say, or if it was right to leave a note at all. Worse, surely, to leave nothing. In the end he wrote simply: Thank you, and then folded it, and went quietly up the stairs again, and along to the bedroom. Miriam had not stirred; her hair was tousled on the pillow, and for a moment, as he crept across the room, and left the note by her hand, he remembered a Leonard Cohen song, from a very long time ago, when he had been the one to sit in lecture halls: ‘I loved you in the morning, Your kisses sweet and warming …' Mornings could be the best time, and Miriam was going to wake alone. He bent over and brushed her face with his lips.

Downstairs again, he pulled on his coat and carefully, quietly opened the front door. The sky was lightening, but it was very cold, the wind still blowing, more than he'd realised. He closed the door and walked quickly along the wet path towards the garage, and down to his own car, which must have had a battering last night. He gave it the once over – wipers, wing mirrors – before he got in, and then he started up, with difficulty until the engine cleared of water, and backed down through the open gates. The car bumped as he turned into the lane; he drove off slowly, splashing through deep puddles; fallen branches lay on the verge beside the woods, and the trees dripped.

At the end of the lane he stopped, and turned left into the narrow road leading into Saxham; the village was shut up, asleep; he saw one or two garden gates flung off their hinges, and a shattered chimney pot outside the pub, but there was no one up and about to look at the damage and he drove on and picked up speed, feeling as if he were the last person left alive in the world. The wind blew at the car; he thought of Alice, switching on the radio, hearing news of the storm, and drove faster, wanting to get to her.

Out of the village the road was lined with trees again, he remembered this from last night, and here, too, were torn-off limbs, dangling or flung down. He felt as if he'd been driving through a storm-damaged landscape for ever, as if the sky were always threatening and dark, and there was no real need to pay much attention, the only thing that mattered was to get home. He came up to the junction with the Woodburgh road, and said aloud: ‘Alice, Alice,' and then he pulled out, too fast, much too fast, feeling the car slip on the wet road as he turned, and seeing, too late, but in terrible slow motion, the yellow dog, running with her tongue out after a dark figure on a motorbike, turning in towards him. With a shout he wrenched at the wheel, and felt the sickening, unstoppable thump of the dog against the front bumper, hurled horribly into the air and on to the bonnet, as he swerved off the road, and crashed headlong into a twisted, half-uprooted tree.

And Miriam, waking with a jerk, heard from outside the banging on the door, and Jon, shouting, and raced down the stairs, her kimono flying, and flung the door open to see him standing there, the limp and broken body of Tess in his arms, his face wet with tears. He staggered inside, and knelt over her, sobbing uncontrollably: ‘There's been an accident, get Dad, get Dad.'

‘Don't die,' said Alice. ‘Please don't die.'

Tony lay on a corner bed beneath a small high window. Drips ran into him, tubes led out of him; beside him the thin green line of a monitor rose and fell. Nurses came to check it, and make notes; they hooked up new bags to the drip stands and took his pulse and temperature; they brought Alice tea and went away, crepe soles squeaking on the vinyl floor.

Beyond the high window were pale, drifting clouds; Alice looked up at them and back at Tony's battered face, white beneath bandages, and the black tube of the ventilator. When she'd arrived he was still in the operating theatre; back in intensive care she had not been allowed to see him at first, but was put in a room to wait for the houseman to come and talk to her. Tony had broken ribs and a punctured lung; he had a fractured skull which might or might not mean brain damage, and might or might not mean that he was going to die.

When Alice had been told these things she was allowed, after another, longer wait, to go and sit by his bed; she held his hand in hers and watched strangers trying to save him. The morning's turmoil – police at the door, telephone calls, summoning Tony's mother to come and look after the children, the taxis and the endless train – it was all like a thick tangle of wool in her head, the details already forgotten. There was only now: this corner, this one bed, the patch of sky.

They buried Tess the following afternoon, under one of the apple trees. The ground was sodden after weeks of rain; she was a big dog and it took Stephen and Jonathan a long time to dig out her grave, breathing hard, piling up earth on the wet grass. Miriam watched, her hands in the pockets of her raincoat, Tess's body lying a few feet away on her blanket, mouth open, eyes glazed, one soft ear bent back. She felt numb, disbelieving, waiting for her to raise her head and get stiffly to her feet, as if she had been simply lying in her basket.

But then everything that had happened in the past forty-eight hours felt like this – unreal, dreamlike, remote: Tony's arrival, his face, his voice, his touch, the night of the storm they had spent together, her waking to find him gone, and Jonathan shouting, weeping about an accident. Surely all this could not have happened, so fast, so cruel. And now, somewhere in Norwich and Norfolk Hospital, Tony apparently lay in a coma. That felt crueller and more unreal than anything.

‘Okay,' said Stephen. He stood for a moment looking down at the grave, measuring it out, then he propped his spade up against the damp trunk of the apple tree and touched Jonathan's arm. ‘I think that's enough.'

Jonathan looked across at Tess, and then away; he propped up the other spade, borrowed from the Innes' farm, and then they both went over to her, and he bent down and wrapped the blanket over her, once, twice, and kissed her head. Miriam watched them and her eyes filled with tears; she went over and bent down to kiss her, too, stroking the cold, muddy face; she tried to bend the soft ear flap forwards, but it was stiff. Her hand met Stephen's, and she drew it away.

‘Okay,' he said again, and he and Jonathan lifted her in the blanket, one at each end, and carried her to the grave, and lowered her into it.

Jonathan covered his mouth; he leaned against Miriam and they cried and cried. Stephen stood apart, looking down into the grave where already the earth, disturbed by the body, had begun to fall and settle on it. After a while he came and put his arms round both of them, briefly; then he turned and began to shovel in earth, gently at first, and then quickly, to get it over with.

Miriam dried her eyes, and gave Jon her handkerchief. She stood looking at the fresh black earth covering the body of what had, after all, been something of a child, and certainly a dear companion. The air was cold and still; birds sang. She said to Jonathan: ‘Are you all right?' and he nodded, blowing his nose.

‘Just about.'

‘I'll make her a cross,' said Stephen. ‘Or something, anyway.'

‘Thanks.'

They looked at each other, and then away.

On the morning of the third day Alice came out of the hospital canteen and walked slowly along the corridor. She had spent the night sleeping fitfully in the monastic little visitors'room, furnished with bed and chair and basin, waking properly at six, when she was used to being woken, wondering where she was and then remembering; she scrambled out of bed, into her clothes, and ran across to the main hospital buildings, through the swing doors into intensive care.

‘How is he?'

‘No change, I'm afraid. Did you sleep?'

‘Not really.'

‘Would you like some breakfast?'

She shook her head.

‘You should eat something.'

‘Not yet.'

She sat by his bed again, watching dawn break in the square of glass, grey as ash, letting the tea the nurse had brought her go cold. Later she telephoned the children, before they left for school and playgroup.

‘How's Daddy?' Hettie asked.

‘He's still … not very well. Don't worry, darling. How are you, are you all right?'

‘Yes. I'm helping Granny find things.'

‘Good girl. How's Annie, can I talk to her?'

‘When are you coming home?' Annie asked.

‘Very soon, as soon as I can.'

‘When?'

‘Ssh, soon. Annie, please don't cry, you go and have a nice time at playgroup, all right … Let me talk to Granny now …'

Afterwards she wandered into the dining room because it was true, she'd hardly eaten anything since she got here, and had some toast and coffee; and now she was wandering out again, passing patients in wheelchairs and blankets, being taken off down other corridors for tests and X-rays. Doors swung open, porters laughed, students in white coats hurried past her. Except for Oxford, when she was ill, she had always connected hospitals with babies. Last time she was in a hospital was when Sam was born. Before that, Annie, before that, Hettie – with both of them the days had been charged, filled with excitement, tenderness, purpose. She thought now: no one knows what that felt like –
my
babies,
my
days, high as a kite, in heaven. I must have wanted it all my life without knowing it – thinking it was men, and being loved and wanted by men, when it wasn't at all: I ended up in the bin partly because of men, but mostly because no one was going to be born, and I wanted to die. It was Tony who made me want to live, because I knew I could have babies with him and be safe. And now I'm in a hospital again because of him, because he might be going to die, and I don't know what to do, I just know I love him much more than I thought. What should I do? What can I do?