Eleanor rammed her laptop into the front basket and tugged her bike out of the thicket of pedals and handlebars that had grown round it during her spell in the library. It had not been a productive session: three hours, and she had spent most of it fiddling with and then deleting paragraphs that had seemed perfectly acceptable a month before. It was two weeks since Trevor’s book party. Her teaching duties at the tutorial college were in full, enjoyable swing, but her treasured writing project seemed to have stalled. Applying for the Bodleian reader’s card, earmarking Friday mornings – her one decent slot of free time – had been her big bid to rectify the situation. Instead, if word count was anything to go by, she appeared to be going backwards.
She had woken too early, that was the trouble, Eleanor reflected crossly, bouncing her bike over the cobbles towards the cut-through to the High Street. Knotted in her bedclothes, her hair sticking to her face, she had surfaced before dawn out of a bad dream. The dream itself had been a mangle of things, as they always were, images slithering out of reach as consciousness took hold, although a couple of things had remained very clearly: Nick Wharton, for one, sitting with his back to her in a handsome winged leather chair, a fire crackling in the grate to his right, a set of lead-latticed windows to his left, casting a crossword of sunlit squares across the floor. She had been standing behind him, happy in the anticipation of being noticed. But when he turned his head, with a slowness that smacked of physical difficulty, or reluctance – it was impossible to tell which – she had felt the first stirrings of anxiety. And with good reason, since the face, when it presented itself, turned out not to belong to Nick at all, but instead resembled the blind-eyed, gnarled features she had always imagined for Jane Eyre’s Mr Rochester, marooned amid his own loneliness and the charred embers of his once grand home.
‘Jane,’ he growled, ‘is that you?’
In her dream Eleanor had remained rooted to the spot. He had asked the question again, louder, more angrily, and for one terrible moment she had been tempted to say yes, that she was indeed Jane, out of sheer pity, because the poor man was so wretched and blind, but also because, in his maimed, unseeing state, there had seemed a fair chance he wouldn’t know the difference.
The bike jumped under her hands over the cobbles. The reason for such a mishmash of imaginings was laughably simple, Eleanor reminded herself. She had fallen asleep with her nose in Jane Eyre the night before, re-reading the novel being a part of her plan for kick-starting some life into that morning’s stint in the library. And though the shock of seeing Nick Wharton had not dented her resolve to discontinue their correspondence, the man was still, understandably, floating round her subconscious, causing unwanted and unwarranted mischief.
Being outside offered little immediate respite. The fresh warmth of early morning had turned muggy. They had edged into October, but still the Indian summer heatwave hung on, a foggy sultriness thickening daily between bitingly cold nights. The sky, murky when she had arrived at the library, was now filled with oppressive mountains of cloud, billowing round the city’s turrets and spires like thick smoke. A storm was coming, Eleanor decided gloomily, pedalling with her usual speed towards the Cornmarket, calculating that there was just time to grab a sandwich before her first afternoon class.
She went to the sandwich bar in the grid of alleyways near her tutorial college, a porthole of a place manned by two cheerful shouting Italians. A queue of people were snaking out of its entrance. Eleanor padlocked her bike and joined the end of the line, behind a wan little girl licking a blue lolly and clasping the thigh of a man wearing a set of big headphones.
When her phone rang, aware of the little girl staring, Eleanor turned away to answer it.
‘Eleanor, it’s Howard.’
She relaxed at once, leaning back against the sandwich shop window. ‘Howard. How are you? I can’t really talk. I’m in queue for lunch, then working all afternoon.’
Howard said something else, but she couldn’t make it out. She moved back into the queue checking the bars on her phone.
‘Sorry, but I don’t seem to have a great signal.’ The wan girl had lost interest in her and was batting ineffectually at a wasp busily trying to land on her melting lolly.
‘…your father has died.’ Howard’s voice burst through Eleanor’s mobile with sudden clarity. ‘Suddenly… this morning. I am sorry, Eleanor.’
‘He… This morning? How?’
‘The Bressingham just phoned. A member of staff found him in his chair. They are not sure yet of the exact cause, though they think it was a heart attack. They have everything in hand. They are going to get back to me. I said I would tell you.’ Eleanor could hear the tenderness in his voice, the recognition that despite everything, Vincent was still her father. He was her father and he had died. ‘Eleanor? Are you okay?’
‘Yes, I mean… I don’t know. I can’t really talk now. Thanks for telling me.’
‘I’ll call later, all right? When I know more.’
Eleanor slipped the phone back into her skirt pocket. She wanted some feelings but none came. She hadn’t been to The Bressingham since Howard’s kind offer to drive her there on Boxing Day. She had vowed never to go again and stuck to it. Eleanor folded her arms, acutely aware of her heart beating normally. The little girl was still batting at the wasp. The child was getting more frantic, the man ignoring her. It was difficult to watch. So difficult that Eleanor found herself reaching out to flick the insect away herself. She swung at it with the back of her hand, not only making contact but somehow managing to trap the creature between her fingers. Almost at once she felt a fizzing stab of pain. She cried out, shaking the insect free.
The girl squealed and the man removed his headphones. ‘What?’ He directed the question down at the little girl, making no secret of his irritation.
‘The lady got stung.’
‘I’m fine.’ Eleanor flapped her sore hand dismissively. In truth, the pain in her finger was piercing. She had never been stung in her life before and was stunned that something delivered by such a tiny creature, could have so much kick. Her hand appeared to be reacting badly too, swelling visibly. The finger that had been stung and the two on either side were like sausages. More inexplicably, she felt short of breath suddenly, so much so that she found herself falling against the sandwich shop window. She pressed both palms flat against the pane, staring down in some puzzlement as the colours spilling out of the rows of fat ready-to-go baguettes laid out before her – prosciutto, lettuce, tomatoes, eggs, tuna, cucumber, cheese – merged and ran like wet paint.
Maybe I am in shock, she thought. Maybe this is grief. No sooner had the idea formed it felt as if fingers were squeezing round her throat. In the same instant, the ground, hard, cold and smelling faintly metallic, slammed against her face. Under the flutter of her eyelids, a floating, wide, strange face briefly peered into hers, so close she could see the glossy dark tendrils of nostril hair. She wanted to speak but her throat had closed and appeared to be on fire.
If she could have spoken, she would have said, ‘I can’t see the sky. Please move so I can see the sky.’ But then blackness came and everything was gone.
Nick was almost back at his car when it occurred to him that it would be wise to visit the hospital toilets before embarking on the return drive to Cheltenham. After the interview, he had had lunch in the canteen with Peter Whycliffe, who had been the one to give him a heads-up about the vacancy. It had been a welcome surprise to find how easily they picked up after so much time, exchanging more details of their potted personal histories than their sporadic email contact had allowed and slipping straight back into the vein of relaxed dry humour that had connected them as young men. Nick had insisted on paying for the lunch by way of a minor thank-you and they had agreed to fix a date for a pub supper.
Nick whistled as he retraced his steps across the hospital car park. The interview had gone well. Nothing was certain, of course, and there would be further rounds, but it was a good solid start. The professor in charge of the task of interrogation had appeared genuinely impressed with his CV as well as pleasingly unfazed by his undisguisable, still somewhat limited physical strength. It wasn’t a marathon runner they were after but a dermatologist, he had joked, far keener to quiz Nick about interesting cases and the excellent reputation of Queen Elizabeth’s, a hospital with which it turned out he was well-acquainted thanks to a stint of working in Cape Town himself.
Crossing the entrance to Accident and Emergency, Nick came to a halt, leaning on his stick as an ambulance swept in. As the doors of the vehicle opened and the crew jumped out to go about their work, a frisson passed through him, but when the stretcher came into view, he began to move on, both out of respect and because the need to pee was growing. Then a wild thatch of dark curly hair caught his eye and he stopped again, staring hard, heedless of anything else. He was a good ten yards away, but from what he could make out, the face, half hidden by an oxygen mask, was severely distorted with bruising and swelling. Nick gripped his stick, trying to process what he was seeing dispassionately. It was certainly a woman. With hair like that it had to be a woman. Lots of women had long thick curly dark brown hair, he reasoned. Not many were that tall, however; from head to toe this one filled almost the entire stretcher. Even then, Nick might have persuaded himself to walk on, had his eyes not alighted upon a foot encased in a scuffed black leather pump.
Nick found himself running, quite effectively, for the first time in ten months. His full bladder seemed to have evaporated. Without thinking, he charged towards the A & E entrance, stopping bewildered, as the jaws of its automatic doors slid shut in front of him, snapping the stretcher and its bearers from view. He then loped back round the side of the building to the main entrance, where he had originally been heading. Once inside, he blinked gormlessly at the array of signs for departments and wards. All he could see was Eleanor flying off her bicycle. Head first, like a human rocket, her rangy limbs thrashing as she landed. It had to be a bike accident.
Nick slumped into one of the big square visitor seats. Eleanor’s face, from the snatched glimpse he had had of it, looked in a bad way. She wouldn’t have been wearing a helmet. Helmets wouldn’t be her style. He groaned quietly, closing his eyes.
‘All right, sir?’
‘Pardon?’
It was an elderly woman with a soft kind face sporting a large laminated badge saying, ‘Volunteer’.
‘Oh yes, thanks. Just… taking in some news.’
‘I see. If you need somewhere quieter…’ She pointed towards the main corridor. ‘The chapel is just a little way down there on your right.’ She touched his shoulder and moved on.
Nick got out his phone, scrolling to Peter Whycliffe, but then put it away. There was nothing the man could do. Nothing anyone could do that wasn’t being done. The ache in his bladder came back with a push of pain, so he got up and stumbled in the direction of the toilets, leaning heavily on his stick with each step. His knees and hip-joints felt shaky and peculiar, as if on the verge of dislocation. The running was to blame, he knew, a ridiculous adrenaline-charged burst well beyond his still cautious limits in the gym.
On the way back, he noticed the chapel, empty, the door open. It was just a room, with a grey carpet, some upright purple chairs and a gaudy gold crucifix on a table beside a vase of flowers. Nick shuffled inside and went to sit on one of the purple chairs. He tried to think about Eleanor but his thoughts kept straying back to her father instead. The Reverend Vincent Keating. Eleanor and Kat’s father had given Nick the creeps, but that hadn’t changed anything.
More pertinent, Nick decided savagely, was that God, to whom Vincent ostensibly devoted his life, could have been so hoodwinked. Humans could be forgiven for being blind, but not God. Some of the sentences Eleanor had used in her letter swam into his mind; such a bleak, brave attempt to understand what might have gone on that his heart had gone out to her.
Kat was so like Mum. I keep thinking that maybe, in some terrible way, he saw an echo in her of what he missed when Mum died. So maybe it was love that warped him; or what he thought was love.
And where were you today, God, when the bus hit the bike? Nick demanded, as the small square room and its gaudy centrepiece came back into focus. Were you looking the other way then too? And if you were, please could you make sure she pulls through.