Eight

The heat in the hospital ward was oppressive.

They had drawn the blinds at eleven o’clock, and even pulled the yellow-sprigged curtains across the blinds, but the light pierced through in thin lines, a laser-like grid crossing the bed, the floor, the walls.

Dominic Aubrete lay now in a cot with raised bars. He was asleep, drugged into submission, but his mouth continually worked, as if laboriously forming letters, pulled first into one shape and then another. Occasionally his eyes flickered open, then closed with a screwing of expression. He was naked to the waist, wearing only a pair of pyjama bottoms whose cord had worn loose and the fabric of which was pulled tight across his hips. He looked uncomfortable, like a boy condemned to bed on a summer afternoon, and only fitfully sleeping, miserable in his solitude.

A tube led from his arm to a saline drip. His face, crossed by one of the pencil-thin lines of sunlight, seemed sectioned, as if for analysis or demonstration. It was red, fleshy, bruised. Other bruises showed on his body, on his stomach, elbows, hands, shoulders.

Laura Aubrete arrived at midday. She came to the side of the bed and bent down, so that her face was only inches from his. She smelled his breath, then, with a single fingertip, touched the largest bruise, the blood under the skin on his stomach. She straightened up, crossed her arms, and considered him. The contrast could not have been more acute: the woman in the acid green suit. The man on the bed.

A nurse put her head around the door.

‘Is Mr Aubrete with you?’

‘No,’ Laura said.

‘Is he coming in?’

‘No.’

‘Could doctor speak with you, then? … In a couple of minutes, when he’s finished the round?’

‘Yes,’ Laura said. ‘I’ll wait here.’

She walked to the other side of the room, and sat down on the only chair.

Dominic Aubrete turned his head.

‘What are you doing?’ he called.

Laura arranged herself, put her handbag on the floor next to her.

‘Come down,’ he whispered. ‘Or I’ll break your bloody neck.’

She could see that one eye was open, and the pupil rolled back in the socket. His mouth hung loose, and then he started to mumble incoherently, and his hand strayed to his face, where it picked at the flesh on his forehead.

‘Come down … off it … off the wall …’

Laura sat composedly, legs crossed, hands clasped over one knee.

She had first met Dominic ten years ago. There was not much comparison, now, to the man he had been then: the kind of man who had completely dominated a room. And that was something he was well used to doing, commanding the centre of the stage, expecting a silence to fall when he began to speak. It was incredible, even now, to think that Matthew was his son. Poor polite Matthew, who never quite knew which direction he ought to follow. Matthew who had grown up in Dominic’s shadow, where Dominic’s wife had lived until she had given up the unequal struggle and succumbed to pneumonia.

Laura looked down, now, at her nails. Pneumonia at forty-seven. Not so much an illness as a signal of defeat, of absolute withdrawal. Alison Aubrete had lain down, exhausted, humiliated, and she had never got up again.

The whole scenario always inevitably reminded Laura of one of those Victorian melodramas where, as the heroine falls dying in the snow, a child creeps from her skirts. Matthew was such a child, a sallow and eager-to-please little boy who had been no good at games, no good in the army, and whose only interest seemed to be the kind of fawning, dependent woman who reminded him of his mother.

Ten years since the Christmas party at the Manor.

Laura had been working as a secretary to the estate manager for just three months. Alison Aubrete had been dead for six. The house, as soon as you entered it, gave off an aura of swiftly escalating decay. Dust had clung to every corner. The curtains, an appalling moth-eaten red brocade, hung faded in pleats at the windows. The Christmas decorations were perfunctory, the food abysmal. It was only the drink that seemed to be in any abundance. Defeat and negativity clung to every piece of furniture, every inch of faded carpet. The guests hung about in awkward groups, afraid that Dominic might come into the room and begin talking at them. In the dining room, the table had been pushed back and a four-piece band was playing Knock Three Times. Stepping back from the sight, Laura had forced herself not to laugh. The whole house, and all its grounds, and tenant farms, were like ripe fruit hanging from the tree, waiting for a hand to reach out and pick them.

She had not met Dominic until that night. He had a flat in London, and spent most of his time there. So, when he at last appeared, she had positioned herself at the foot of the stairs to watch his descent, rightly calculating that what the lord of the manor wanted most of all was an audience. She stood, not to one side so that he would easily be able to pass her, but dead in the centre below the last step.

It was the Eighties, and she had bought herself what was then the height of fashion: a purple taffeta dress, an enormous Scarlett O’Hara balloon of a dress, with a full and flounced skirt, and a neckline that barely clung to the last inch of cleavage. Her hair was neatly taken up to the top of her head. She probably looked like a bridesmaid, and the effect could not have been more to Dominic Aubrete’s liking. If she were Scarlett O’Hara, he was not above believing himself to be Rhett Butler, and he had descended with a raddled gleam in his eye.

She had held his eye with a straight face, and had even given her hand up to be kissed.

‘It’s wonderful to meet you,’ she said.

‘The pleasure is all mine,’ he had responded.

He really believed himself to be attractive, and perhaps had once been. Now, he was nothing more than a great square block of a body with a wet handshake. His hair was thinning, and there were a few threadlike red veins over his face, and his clothes sagged over a large stomach. His hands were large and flat, the fingers long, the knuckles pronounced. She looked at his hands and thought of a prize-fighter coming out into a fairground ring for another bout, another parade in front of the ladies. He started to speak in that booming, overstated upper-class voice, that strangulated tone.

She had felt deeply, and very abruptly, sorry for him.

The door to the hospital room opened now.

Jolted out of her memories, Laura looked up.

‘Mrs Aubrete.’

The doctor and she shook hands: then they walked to the corridor, and to the seats arranged at the far end.

‘I see there’s no change,’ Laura said.

The doctor hesitated. ‘Actually, there is a change. We’d like him to go to ICU at the General.’

‘Oh?’ Laura said, raising her eyebrows.

‘Yes. The retention of fluid, the liver failure … his blood pressure needs monitoring more closely.’

‘I see,’ she said. She glanced out at the trees in the grounds. ‘Has he been conscious at all?’

‘No.’

‘Not any more than we’ve seen over the last few days?’

‘No.’

She wondered if she could push it any further. ‘Has anyone else been in to see him?’

The doctor looked at her, puzzled. ‘I’m afraid I wouldn’t know for sure. You might ask the nurses. Were you thinking of anyone in particular?’

Laura stood up, smiling. ‘No,’ she said. ‘Simply curious.’

‘Your husband was here last night …’

‘Yes. Yes, I know.’ She smoothed her hair. ‘When will you transfer him?’

‘Today.’

She nodded. They stood awkwardly together for a few seconds longer. ‘This is terrible to watch,’ she murmured. ‘After the stroke last year he seemed to rally …’

‘There’s only so much repair a system can manage,’ the doctor said.

They talked for a few moments longer, in hushed voices, discussing the man lying in the private ward behind them.

Alone in the airless room, Dominic Aubrete thrashed in the heat. For a few agonized seconds, his feet paddled the sheet in a parody of shuffling steps. His hand began to pull at the needle in his arm.

‘Anna,’ he whispered.

The name floated unheard, unanswered.

‘Anna …’