The Making of Us (39 page)

‘She’s lovely, isn’t she?’ said his mum, watching him tenderly.

He nodded and smiled and then, without thinking about it, he kissed the top of his baby’s head. Her hands were bunched up around the metal zip and his fingers, the whole area a mass of warm drool. He watched her for a moment and then a terrible realisation hit him: she might accidentally bite the zipper off! It might end up untethered in her mouth! She might swallow it! She might die! He gently pulled the zipper from her mouth and squeezed her to him, his precious, precious baby girl.

Marc greeted Maggie at the door of Daniel’s flat on Friday morning and as much as she had been preparing herself for it, his exact resemblance to his brother still took her breath away. She tried to override the sense of shock she felt and forced a bright smile on to her face. ‘Good morning!’ she said.

‘Good morning, Maggie,’ said Marc, flattening himself against the wall so that she could squeeze past him.

‘Did you sleep well?’ she asked.

‘I slept very well. In the way of twins, my brother appears to own the very same mattress as myself so it was almost like being at home. And I have just eaten my breakfast on the terrace. Thank you so much for the provisions.’

‘Oh,’ she smiled, ‘you’re welcome. I wasn’t sure what you’d want to eat so I got a bit of everything.’

‘So,’ said Marc, ‘I am ready to go. But maybe I could get you a cup of coffee before we leave?’

‘No, honestly, I’m fine. I had one before I left. Well, two, in fact. I didn’t sleep so well last night.’

Marc looked at her sympathetically. ‘Now I feel bad,’ he said. ‘Maybe it is wrong that I slept well.’

‘Of course it’s not wrong!’ she exclaimed. ‘It’s good. You need to stay strong.’

‘Yes,’ he said, ‘you are right. Oh, and before we go, some letters arrived this morning. The postman rang on the door. I had to sign for one thing. Here.’ He turned and pulled a pile of mail from the hall table and handed it to her.

As she flicked through the letters, her eye was caught by the postmark of the Donor Sibling Registry and she stared at the envelope for a moment before carefully opening it. She caught her breath as she unfolded the letter and then she let it out through a half-smiling mouth as the words sunk in.

A girl. Robyn Inglis. She lived in North London and she wanted to meet up with Daniel. A giddy laugh escaped Maggie’s mouth. She put her hand to her heart and then she laughed again, more loudly. At last! And just in time! She read on. The girl was studying medicine at a London university and lived with her boyfriend, a novelist, in Holloway. She said she liked clothes and worked part-time in a fashion shop on Oxford Street, that her mum and dad were a secretary in an estate agency and a building services manager respectively, and that she was originally from Essex. ‘But I’m not a stereotypical Essex girl, honestly!’ She’d given a mobile phone number and an e-mail address and seemed absolutely certain about her desire to meet up with Daniel, but the message was quite restrained nonetheless. Maggie read the letter three times before folding it carefully into three and sliding it back into the envelope.

‘It is good news?’ said Marc, who had been watching her, thoughtfully.

‘Yes.’ She smiled. ‘It is very good news. I will tell you all about it in the car.’

It was hard for Maggie to stop her expression from giving away the wonderful surprise as she and Marc scurried down the corridor towards Daniel’s room at the hospice an hour later. Her mouth twitched, her eyes sparkled. Daniel had asked her to do something for him, something important, something that would make him happy in these closing chapters of his life. She’d done it, never quite believing that at the end of this strange and impersonal process there might be some real people, never truly believing that she might really be responsible for bringing one of these people into three dimensions and into Daniel’s sunny hospital room. She had assumed that they would write too late, or that they would not write at all. She had assumed that it could not possibly be that easy. And it was not until they were on the very threshold of Daniel’s room that the fear gripped her: what if it was already too late?

The muscles in her face stopped their strange dance and hardened. She had been so busy feeling giddy with relief that it
was not too late
, that she hadn’t considered the possibility that it might already be too late. That even as she was ripping through the paper of the envelope with her index finger; Daniel could have been fighting to expel his last breath that as she parked her car outside, jiggling and twitching with anticipation, he might have been closing his eyes for the last time. She stopped at the door and she inhaled deeply. Marc threw her a look of encouragement.

‘You are OK?’ he asked.

‘Yes,’ she said, ‘I’m fine.’

And then she rearranged her face into its usual innocuous contours and opened the door.

Her heart fell. Daniel looked terrible. He did not turn at the sound of her voice when she whispered, ‘Daniel, it’s me.’ He lay with his head tilted to face the window, eyes half-open, a dry crust at the corner of his slack mouth.

‘Daniel,’ she whispered again. She gently touched his shoulder and he turned his head just a millimetre or two and moaned.

‘How are you?’ she asked, still in a soft whisper.

‘Very tired,’ he replied. He let his head fall back against the pillow and then he closed his eyes.

‘Now, I don’t expect you to say anything, and please don’t try, but I wanted you to know, I’ve had contact. From the girl. The youngest one. Her name’s Robyn. Like the boy’s name but with a Y instead of an I. She sounds very nice, I must say …’

Maggie watched Daniel for some kind of reaction but there was none. She felt her joy beginning to drain away. This was not how she’d imagined the moment would be.

‘I’ll just go and get myself a coffee,’ she said. ‘Marc, will you stay here with him?’

Marc nodded, understandingly. ‘Of course,’ he said, settling himself on the side of Daniel’s bed and taking his brother’s hand in his.

‘I’ll be back in a few minutes,’ she said to Daniel. ‘We can talk about it then. About the girl. OK?’

‘Yes,’ he said, ‘yes.’

Maggie left the room quietly and immediately headed for the nurses’ station at the end of the corridor.

‘Hello!’ she said brightly to a small black woman called Cressida.

Cressida looked up from some paperwork and smiled back. ‘Hello,’ she replied. ‘How are you today?’

‘I’m fine,’ said Maggie, brightly, ‘are you busy? Could I talk to you?’

‘No. I’m not at all busy,’ said Cressida. ‘Come in, sit down.’

Maggie sat down and pulled her chair closer to Cressida’s desk. ‘Now,’ she began, ‘I know you can’t tell me anything for sure, I do understand that, but Daniel … he seems very bad today. He seems the worst he’s been.’

‘Yes,’ said Cressida, ‘he is very quiet. He’s been sleeping a lot.’

‘Yes. But he’s been sleeping a lot for a while now and still been fairly good when he’s awake. Just now, though, he seemed …’ She searched for the right words. ‘He seemed as though the lights had been turned down.’

Cressida smiled sympathetically. ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘it will seem like that. Things are shutting down now, you see. Bit by bit. It’s like shutting up a house for the season, if you understand what I mean?’

Maggie blinked. She thought of a story she’d read to Matilda at bedtime a few days earlier:
Teddy’s had enough now. Teddy has to rest
. The words were accompanied by a picture of an elderly and over-loved teddy, patched together, its head hanging by a thread. She’d gulped as the words caught in her throat.
Teddy’s had enough now
. She thought of her Daniel, his body filled with the poisons of death, his putty-coloured skin and his crusted mouth.
Teddy has to rest
.

‘I’ve just tracked down his daughter,’ she said, her voice cracking slightly. ‘They haven’t met before. She wants to see him. Do you think … do you think there’s still time?’

Cressida smiled again. ‘I don’t know,’ she said.

‘But in your experience … when a patient looks like that … when they’ve started to shut down? How long does it usually …’

‘In my experience,’ Cressida interrupted, kindly, ‘there is no usually. But I would also say that I have seen people, moments from passing, cling on for hours and even days in order to see a loved one. Does he know his daughter’s coming?’

‘Yes. I think so.’

Cressida nodded, clearly not wanting to say anything that could be construed as a prognosis.

‘There are others, though,’ Maggie found herself saying. ‘Other people who may want to see him. Should I … I mean, do you think they should come soon? Now?’

Cressida sighed. ‘It’s all so hard to say,’ she said. ‘Each situation is unique. Daniel might still be here next week. But equally he could be shutting down faster than we think. For the sake of a few days, it’s probably worth making sure he’s seen everyone he wants to see. Especially if they’ve got a long way to come.’

Maggie nodded. She thought of this lovely girl, this Robyn Inglis, in her flat in North London, wondering how quickly she’d be able to get here. Would she throw on a jacket and head straight up? Or would she have commitments, appointments, arrangements to be honoured? Would it take her hours or would it take her days?

Maggie thanked Cressida for her time and then she got herself a coffee and a banana from the counter in reception and took them both out into the garden. She took a bench by the Koi carp pond and remembered how she had stood here just weeks earlier, being twirled and held by Daniel Blanchard. She stared into the inky depths of the pond, letting her gaze follow the erratic golden dance beneath the surface of the water. How had she ended up here? she wondered. How had her life brought her to this theatrical and tragic dénouement? How had she, Maggie Smith, mum, grandmother, receptionist, ended up taking responsibility for the outcome of so many people’s lives? When she and Peter had divorced all those years ago, she’d felt that it was probably the most dramatic thing she would ever experience. She’d thought it was more than she could bear: the court case, the brutal conversations, the talks with the children, breaking the news to their friends and family. She’d thought that none of it was really her style at all. But she’d weathered it, come through the other side, smiling and with a whole new trendy interior to show for it. Her subsequent relationships with her ex-husband, his girlfriend and both her own children had survived unscathed. Which was, she’d always secretly thought, almost entirely down to her.

But this … this was in another league of human drama entirely.

She unpeeled her banana and found she had no appetite for it. The joy and anticipatory giddiness of half an hour earlier had gone completely. Instead she sipped at her coffee, urgently, as though it might somehow help her cut through the sad fug in her head and decide what to do for the best.

In her handbag was the letter from Robyn. She glanced at her bag, surreptitiously. She glanced at the carp. She glanced back at the bag and then she took out both the letter and her mobile phone and began to compose a message. The message took her half an hour to write. It seemed such a cold and distasteful thing to be saying to a stranger. Eventually she settled for this:

Dear Robyn,

My name is Maggie Smith. I am friends with Daniel Blanchard. He has received your letter and would love to meet up with you but unfortunately his health is not very good at the moment – hence me writing this message. I think, if you would excuse the possibly rather dramatic sense of urgency, that it would be advisable to see him sooner rather than later. If you still want to see him, please reply to this message and I will be able to tell you the name of the hospital in Bury where he is a patient. I look forward to hearing from you.

This, she felt, conveyed the urgency of the matter without any upsetting or possibly off-putting detail. And she’d deliberately used the word ‘hospital’ instead of ‘hospice’, in case the idea of rushing to see a father who might then, potentially, pass away within moments of setting eyes upon her, put Robyn off making the journey. Maggie reread the message for a third time and then, with her eyes closed tight against the enormity of what she was about to do, she pressed send.

Hard, hot tears pushed against the lids of her closed eyes. She could feel the end rushing towards her like a tunnel of fire, and she wasn’t ready for it, not at all.

The following morning Lydia crept from the silent house before the sun was fully risen. She had not slept the night before, her body was too electrified after her experience with Bendiks and her mind was too overrun with new and remarkable things to think about, so she had lain upon her own empty bed – Bendiks had asked to stay with her, but she had needed some space – and watched the moon trail across the sky, reaching its peak of ice-blue illumination at about 2 a.m. and then slowly fading away as the sun emerged as a thick red band on the horizon. Her house, as she tiptoed through it to reach the front door, seemed riven with the essence of what had happened between her and Bendiks yesterday. It seemed to seep through the bricks and trickle down the stairs. It was in the air, pungent as perfume. She and Bendiks had had sex in this house. Not just once but three times. And not just in one place but in a number of places. In the sauna, in her bed, in the shower afterwards. They had scented every corner. And she loved her house for holding on to it. Because it had changed her, what happened yesterday, changed her from the inside out, and she wanted that change to colour everything else, including her big, characterless house. Having sex with Bendiks had given her house a soul.

She hit a long stride as she walked down her front path and out on to the street. She could feel the thin muscles that ran from her groin to her knees singing out in lovely agony with every step she took and she pulled her stride wider and wider, wanting to feel the sensation even more. The soreness was good. It meant she had been doing things that she had been designed to do, and doing them with whole-hearted enthusiasm.