‘You have the right to know, Grace. You must hate the police for this. I understand that. But I promise you we’ll get it put right.’
She was so awkward with me, not realising how much I like her now.
You were worried that telling me this, on top of Jenny, would sap the remaining life force I have. But Sarah understands that for a mother, when your children are threatened, your life force isn’t sapped but galvanised.
You stand up. Don’t go! But you’re just pulling the flimsy ugly curtains around us, blocking out the bustle of the ward, and somehow, although it contradicts even key-stage-two Science, the noise of the ward seems blocked out too.
You hold my hand.
‘Ads doesn’t want me near him,’ you say.
‘That’s not true. And you need to go to him right now and tell him you know he didn’t do this and be with him. Sarah can stay with Jen for a bit. The detective stuff can wait for a little while, surely.’
You are silent.
‘You’re his father and no one else can be that to him.’
But you can’t hear me, nor can you guess now at what I am saying to you.
You stare at my face, as if staring at it will make my eyes open.
‘We always do this, don’t we, Gracie?’ you say. ‘Talk about Addie or Jen. But I’d like to talk about you and me, just for a few minutes, alright? I’d really like to do that.’
I’m touched. And yes, I’d really like to do that too – change the subject onto us – just for a few minutes.
‘Remember our first date?’ you ask.
Not so much a change of subject as a rewind of twenty years to a safe past. Leaving this white-walled London hospital far behind for a tea shop in Cambridge.
For a little while I’ll let myself join you there.
Pouring with rain outside; inside, fuggy with talk and damp anoraks.
You told me later you thought it would be romantic but some milk must have been spilt and not cleaned up and the rancid smell permeated the fug. The chintzy curtains were designed for tourists. Your hands looked absurdly big around a silly little china cup.
It was your first ‘first date’.
‘The only girl I’d ever asked on a date,’ you say.
You came clean about this amongst the chintz and the china.
Later I found out that usually you just went home with a girl after a party and sometimes would find her still there the next morning under your hideous duvet – I think Sarah chose the cover in the hope of it acting as a contraceptive device. If you liked the girl it stayed that way for a while. Nice things just happened to you – pretty girls ending up under your ugly duvet.
‘I courted you,’ you say.
We talked about attraction.
You, a scientist (what was I doing with a Nat Sci?), were all pheromones and biological imperatives while I was all coy mistresses and eyebeams threading on a double string. ‘You thought Marvell was a comic.’
‘You quoted something about a man spending a century admiring each bosom and I got the hint.’
In that prim little tea shop you told me that you were desperate to be away from the confines of university and ‘out there doing stuff ’.
I didn’t know anyone who used the word ‘stuff’. I’d done a year of Art History and then a term of an English degree and had never once used the word. My friends were all black-clothed, earnest arts students with a thesaurus for a vocabulary.
I liked the word ‘stuff’. And I liked it that you weren’t pale with cheekbones studying Kant but were muscular and robust and wanted to be mountaineering and canoeing and white-water rafting and abseiling and bivouacking the world rather than reading and philosophising about it.
‘I liked the climbing-a-volcano thing,’ I say. ‘Mad, but kind of mad in an attractive way.’
‘I wanted to impress you. You were so fucking beautiful.’
‘Thanks so much.’
‘Sorry. Are so fucking beautiful.’
As if you’d heard me but it’s just a verbal fluke, isn’t it?
‘You had two Chelsea buns,’ you say. You remember that? ‘And I liked it that you ate so much.’
I didn’t want you to guess that I was nervous so I ate to prove that I was cool about this.
‘It rained.’
Lashing against the ditzy little windowpanes, and the sound was wonderful.
‘I’d brought an umbrella.’
You asked if you could walk me home.
‘I knew we’d have to get close.’
I spotted your bike and you looked annoyed that I noticed it.
‘That bloody bike. Should have locked it round the corner.’
You walked me back to Newnham through the rain, pushing your bicycle on the road with one hand, but staying on the pavement next to me with your other hand holding the umbrella.
‘I couldn’t touch you at all.’
The first night we spent together – two weeks later, me not being a coy mistress – we reran our first date, creating our own mythology. But that was years and years ago and we should be talking about our children now. And we both know that. And we will, in a few moments. They are with us all the time. But there is a tiny glimmer of happiness here in the time before them, and we want to hold it a little while longer. Just a little while longer. So I carry on walking next to you through the bitterly cold Fen rain, your stride so much longer than mine, wondering what will happen when we reach Newnham.
But of course I know what happened.
You wanted a second date that very evening, ignoring Marvell completely, and I danced – danced!, an absurd robotic thing that made people stare – the entire way down the second longest corridor in Europe.
The memory pulls me towards you until I reach you right here and now in this room; somehow closer than before. This close to you, I can feel your brave optimism for Jenny go into me; making love with courageous hope.
And as you hold me tightly, I too believe that Jenny will get better.
She will get better.
The curtains are abruptly pulled back and Dr Bailstrom is there.
‘Can you come for the meeting now?’ she asks you.
‘I’ll be back a little later, my darling,’ you say to me; telling Dr Bailstrom that I can hear and understand.
I get to the door of the Dr Bailstrom’s office where the medical staff are waiting and imagine her putting on a black hat before reading out my fate. I think she’d like the dressing-up aspect. But if I have the language to form a sarky sentence about Dr Bailstrom then I’m clearly not a cabbage – why did a cabbage get chosen? – so no need for her to have a black hat.
I am on the ball, switched on, marbles still there, compos mentis. The same Grace I was yesterday. But somehow I’ve become split from myself.
In our conversation when this is over, you’ll tell me that this splitting in two idea is ‘total bollocks, Gracie!’ But that’s because you abseil and bivouac through life rather than learn about it second-hand. Because if you’d read more and climbed up mountains less, you’d know about Cartesian dualism, and ids and egos, and body versus soul. You’d know about a whole strand of literature called ‘the divided self’. Really. So I’ll remind you, as you scoff, of the fairy tales you read Jenny when she was little – princesses dancing in the fairy world every night and frogs really being princes and girls turning into swans. If you’re really unlucky, I’ll start quoting Hamlet: ‘There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in our philosophy.’
You’ll hold your hands up, enough! But I’ll ignore you.
The visible world isn’t the only world and the writers of fairy tales and ghost stories, mystics and philosophers, have known that for centuries. Jenny unconscious in her bed and me in mine isn’t who we really are; the only way that it is.