Every Woman Knows a Secret

Jess stepped backwards into the hallway and he followed her out.

‘Tell me how he is,’ Rob demanded.

He no longer looked larger than life. His face was hollow and grey and his eyes were ringed with murky shadows.

Jess thought, with anger piercing her, Good. It’s right that he should suffer too. Why should it all fall to Danny, and why should this young man only have bandages on his face and arms after drunkenly smashing her child into a bridge?

Her mouth tightened. Then she remembered that Danny had stirred in his coma and stretched out his arms, and that she had been sure that all would be well. That certainty was already draining away, water dripping into the dry sand of anxiety.

She told Robert Ellis what she knew and he listened silently with his eyes fixed on her face. At the end he nodded.

‘Thank you.’

‘You should go back to your ward. Go to bed.’

‘I’m going home. I don’t want to stay here.’

‘You’re lucky,’ Jess said in a hard voice.

‘If I could make it me, I would. And I’ll be coming back. If you won’t let me see him I’ll wait outside.’

Jess shrugged. There was no space to admit anger for more than a passing instant. She held out her hand for Danny’s bag, and after a second he handed it over. She was already turning away when he caught her arm.

‘He moved, did he?’

He was searching at second hand for the reassurance she had sought from the surgeon.

‘Yes.’

He was so close that she could smell his sweat and skin, a remembered and denied scent that caught in her throat and stirred the hair on the back of her neck. She withdrew her arm from his grasp.

‘Yes,’ she repeated softly. ‘His surgeon said it was a response, but it’s too early to tell anything yet.’

She walked away, to the telephone, and left him.

Three (#u0e70d9c9-3115-52c5-b303-79f3546613b4)

Lizzie and James sat down in their nightclothes on the end of their double bed. They held hands, shocked into immobility by the news that Jess had just telephoned from the hospital. The bedroom with its soft blue paint and heavy drawn curtains felt cold instead of cosy.

Lizzie said, ‘You know, if it happens, if he does die, I’m afraid of what it’ll mean for Jess. Danny’s been her whole life. She always loved him best from the day he was born.’

‘It might not happen. He might come round.’

James drew his wife’s head down on to his shoulder and stroked her hair. He wanted to fuel her with enough love to carry her through the hours ahead. Even though concern for Danny and sympathy for Jess squeezed his lungs hard enough to make him breathless, most of his immediate concern was for Lizzie. He was afraid she would find the intensive care unit disturbing, and he would have gladly gone to the hospital if he had thought Jess would accept him in Lizzie’s place. But he knew that it was not even worth suggesting it. Someone had to stay with Sock, and the sisters were too close for Jess to want anyone with her instead of Lizzie.

The telephone had woken the baby. Sock stirred in his cot beside the bed and then sleepily hoisted himself on all fours. He smiled at the sight of them, a radiant beam that revealed the tiny, perfectly white pegs of his teeth. James released Lizzie’s hand and went to pick him up. He smelled of baby sleep and ammoniac nappy, and James squeezed him so tightly that Sock whimpered a little as they watched Lizzie stumble out of her nightdress. She had grown plump, and her stomach and thighs quivered with marble-white folds of flesh. As she bent over to step into her panties James felt himself stiffen and he crossed his legs, shamed by the inappositeness of his response. But yet, he acknowledged, sex was one of the many happy aspects of their partnership. He was still capable of being surprised by Lizzie’s imaginative appetites.

After his first, childless marriage had ended when he was forty, James had existed through a series of more or less unsatisfactory but prolonged affairs that had left him feeling dried out and bored and sceptical of ever having a relationship in which mutual criticism was not the driving force. And then, at the age of fifty-one, he had met Lizzie Bowers at an unpromising cocktail party given by one of his clients. James was an accountant, the head of his own small practice. Very late that same night naked Lizzie had smiled up at him. ‘As the actress said to the accountant,’ she’d murmured busily.

Lizzie had pulled on a sweater and jeans. She ran unconsidering fingers through her hair.

‘Let me make you some breakfast,’ James offered, but she shook her head.

‘I must go. Jess needs me.’

There was no argument. James followed her down the stairs still holding Sock in his arms.

‘I don’t know when I’ll be able to get back. Oh God. The bloody handcream voice-over.’

‘Don’t worry. I’ll speak to your agent. Go to the hospital now and stay with her. Call me as soon as you can.’

‘Will you and Sock be safe?’

He knew what she was asking. If something so terrible could happen in a single instant to Danny, who had been so strong and carefree, what different nameless horrors might threaten their baby?

‘We will,’ James promised her as firmly as he could. ‘We’ll be here waiting for you.’

He watched her climb into her dented Golf and haphazardly reverse through the gate.

‘Drive carefully,’ he said inaudibly. He knew her faults and he still loved her, as she knew his and loved him in return. It seemed that that was the miracle.

Rob discharged himself from the hospital simply by walking out of the ward. From the depths of his being he hated institutions. All of them, of every variety, with their smells and sounds and associations. His mother had died when he was ten and his father had disappeared, and after that he had spent too much time in too many such places. He had made it one of his adult ambitions never to be trapped in one again. And yet now it seemed that the threat was closing in on him once more. He walked as fast as he could through the wet early-morning streets, ignoring the stares of the few passers-by.

His room, when he reached it, was exactly as he had left it only a day, only twenty-four hours ago, before meeting Danny at the gym. There was the double mattress on the floor in the corner, the quilt covered with a crumpled Indian-print cotton spread. A desk and shelves that he had built himself occupied the whole of the opposite wall, and the floor space in between bed and desk was scattered with discarded clothes and paperbacks and cassettes.

Rob stared at it all, then his mouth twisted as he pushed some of the mess aside with the toe of his boot. It was hard to comprehend how something so terrible could have intervened between yesterday and this moment and yet leave all these pieces of his existence the same, unmarked.

He crossed to the window and leaned his face against the murky glass. The view, a slice of garden matted with dripping evergreens and the backs of more houses, mocked him with its sameness. He screwed his eyes shut and rolled his forehead in the acrid condensation formed on the pane, but when he opened them and looked again there was still no change. He stumbled to his bed and sat down. He put his hand up to cover his face and waited in the silence for what would come next.

Jess sat in the long, narrow waiting room next to the IT unit. There was a row of dingy armchairs, a tray with a kettle and cups, a payphone and a contorted rubber plant on a corner shelf. The sister in charge of the unit had shown her the tiny bedroom provided for relatives and told her that she could buy breakfast down in the hospital cafeteria, but Jess could not imagine sleeping or eating. She sat with her fingers laced around a coffee mug, staring unseeingly at the curling posters on the wall. They were performing some procedure on Danny that they preferred her not to watch.

She heard a loud, strong voice asking questions outside in the corridor. A second later Lizzie appeared and Jess leaped up. Wordlessly the sisters clung to each other.

Lizzie had thrown a loose coat over her jeans. Her hair was tangled and her expressive actress’s face was taut with anxiety and bare of any make-up. As they hugged, Jess noticed that Lizzie no longer smelled of cigarettes, although she always expected her to. Lizzie had stopped smoking when she was pregnant. Jess rarely smoked but she craved a cigarette now with an addict’s longing.

‘I’m so glad you’re here,’ she whispered.

‘How is he? What’s happening? Why can’t we go in to him?’

Lizzie’s voice was husky, fully modulated. Her words and wide gestures seemed too pronounced for the cramped room.

‘They’re doing something in there now. We can go back when they’ve finished. You haven’t got a cigarette, have you?’

Lizzie looked at her. All Lizzie’s feelings were always clearly visible in her face. ‘No. Do you want me to go down and get you some?’

Jess shook her head. ‘Stay with me.’

After a few minutes Danny’s nurse came to tell them they could come back to the ward again. Jess took Lizzie’s hand and drew her through the double doors into the unit.