Every Woman Knows a Secret

She shook her head, unable to speak.

In the ward the Indian family were clustered around their daughter’s bed, and the grown-up children of a heart-attack victim waited silently beside their father.

Ian went straight to Danny.

‘Hello, son,’ he said.

He bent forward and gently stroked his cheek, and touched the hank of black hair that protruded from the white bandage. Danny lay wax-faced and motionless.

‘Hello,’ Ian whispered again.

Jess watched and listened to him murmuring to her son. Her dry eyes were wide and staring.

Later, when the grey light was beginning to fade, Ian and Jess went out to walk for a few minutes in the damp air. Cosy yellow lights were coming on in the buildings on the opposite side of the road, and as they passed under a street lamp it kindled with a blood-orange glow. They walked in silence, a little way apart. In the last months of their marriage, when Ian had met Michelle, they had become used to opposition, then to acrimony. But any expressions of regret or attempts at self-justification were choked by the desperation of this moment. There seemed to be nothing to say about the past that mattered any longer.

At length Jess said dully, ‘I think they are preparing us for the worst.’

‘We don’t know that. They may not know themselves.’

Ian would not anticipate the worst before it befell him. At times his optimism was almost wilful. Jess recalled the tired old differences between them, the way that their separate needs and shortcomings had chafed each other for so many years. Their mutual failure seemed merely sad now, belonging to some long-ago time. She stopped in the middle of the pavement and threw her head back.

‘What can we do?’ she cried, a wail of anguish escaping her.

Ian put his hands on her shoulders. The extreme familiarity of his face only reminded Jess that they were hardly more than strangers now. She didn’t know anything about his new life.

‘We can’t do anything,’ he told her patiently. ‘Not even us. Only the doctors, and Danny himself.’

Looking beyond the man who had been her husband, into the lighted windows and the rooms containing remote ordinary life, Jess told herself with simple certainty, If he dies, everything will end. And her thoughts spun away to the beginning, to when Danny was born, and back before the beginning, as if to another life.

Lizzie had come back from an afternoon with her baby and had taken her place beside the bed. Beth was in the waiting room, drinking a plastic beaker of tea. She looked up as soon as the door opened, as everyone confined in the room always did.

Rob’s leather jacket was slung over his shoulder, concealing the plaster cast on his arm. The right side of his face had darkened with bruises and scabs. His eyes met hers and Beth knew at once who he was.

‘You’re his sister, aren’t you?’

‘Yes.’

The girls’ school she had attended was separate from the boys’, but Beth was almost the same age as Rob Ellis. She knew from somewhere, from long-ago whispered gossip of girls, that there was a strangeness about him. Something to do with his past. The cloudy associations had regathered as soon as her mother had told her who had been driving the van.

‘What do you want? What are you doing here?’

Brusquely he dismissed her questions with his own. ‘How is he?’

‘In a coma still. On a ventilator. Do you care, since you put him there?’

He had almost turned away but now he rounded on her. His face made her step back, wishing she could take back the words as well. But he only said, ‘Yes, I do.’

Lizzie was sitting beside the bed. The registrar had just made his routine visit to Danny. There was no change. She heard the footsteps and looked up. Rob was standing a yard away from her, wrapped in his jacket, his eyes fixed on Danny. He came closer, until he leaned over him. His hair fell forward over his shoulder and the leather of his coat creaked as he stretched out a hand.

Beth had followed him in. She signalled to Lizzie, This is him. Lizzie leapt to her feet.

‘What do you want?’

Rob gave no sign of having heard her. He was watching Danny, his good hand resting on the edge of the bed. Lizzie ran round to him and shook him by the elbow. He turned very slowly. He was tall, looming over her.

She repeated more loudly, ‘What do you want?’

The boy shook his head. He had long hair in thick coils caught back in a rough tail. She heard the rustle of it against his collar. He was unshaven, his cheeks unevenly pricked with a reddish stubble. His lips were cracked and there were dark patches beneath his eyes. A fresh dressing on one side of his head looked startlingly white.

‘To see him. What do you think?’

His voice sounded rusty in his throat, as if he had not done much talking lately. Lizzie pushed his arm with the flat of her hand.

‘You can’t stay here.’

‘You can’t tell me what I can do.’

His effrontery amazed her. There was a glaze to him, a carelessness, that seemed utterly repellent. What if Jess should come back and see him here? Lizzie pushed harder, anger rising up through her exhaustion and anxiety.

Rob grabbed her wrist. His fingers were like steel, making her wince.

‘He’s my friend. See? Who are you?’

‘His … aunt.’ She felt frightened now as well as angry.

‘Yeah.’

Beth was at Lizzie’s side, trying to separate them. The Indian family timidly looked on. Rob flung away from the two women and turned back to Danny. He bent over him for a moment, his lips inaudibly moving. Beth saw it and hesitated but Lizzie was already bringing across the Irish charge nurse.

‘I’m afraid you can’t stay without the family’s agreement,’ the nurse said. He was much shorter than Rob. Two doctors looked up from the desk in the middle of the ward.

At the same time Jess and Ian came back.

Ian recognised in an instant who this was, and saw the way that Lizzie and Beth squared up to the intruder, fending him off.

‘Come on. Out of here,’ Ian said sharply. His hand was already raised.

The director of the unit was on his way across to them, wearing a plastic apron like everyone else who came into the room. Except for Rob.

‘I’m sorry, this is too many people around one bed. It’s disturbing for other patients.’ To Rob he said, ‘You are an infection risk. You will have to leave.’

No one had been looking at Jess. But now she said, ‘Let him stay. Just for a few minutes.’

She went to the dispenser beside the door and pulled out a disposable apron. She held it out to Rob without looking at him. He took it from her and Danny’s nurse helped him to pull it over his head and tie the strings.

‘We can go outside,’ Jess said.

They went into the empty waiting room. Jess crossed to the high window and stared out unseeingly. It was almost dark.