80
They were back at the hospital at two o’clock the following afternoon. Ashok was there, keeping watch, and when Rob arrived he headed off home with nothing of interest to report.
Rob, Daisy and Ruby went into intensive care to see Kit. He was out of it, fastened up to tubes and pumps and monitors, and his skin had a greyish tinge; he looked nothing like his usual robust self, and his chest was heavily bandaged, a drain attached to the left-hand side of it. Ruby started to cry the minute she saw him. Daisy hugged her. A dark-haired, bushy-browed nurse passed by, all kind smiles and compassion. ‘Talk to him,’ she said. ‘He might hear you.’
Talk to him about what?
‘When will we be able to speak to the doctors?’ asked Ruby.
‘They do their rounds at three thirty, they’ll see you then,’ said the nurse.
Rob patted Kit’s hand, where the IV line ran in. ‘All right, mate?’ he said, having to swallow hard. It hurt him to see Kit like this. It hurt him that he hadn’t been there to stop it.
Daisy wiped at her eyes and sat down beside Kit’s bedside and spoke to him. ‘You gave us all a terrible scare,’ she said. ‘We can’t wait for you to get better. If only so we can shout at you to take care of yourself in future.’
Ruby could only stand there and watch. Her beautiful boy! Seeing him like this was agony. Daisy’s bravery left her in awe, but then Daisy had been brought up to believe in the stiff upper lip, noblesse oblige; her class of woman – Vanessa’s class – never crumbled.
When the doctors came, the surgeon who’d operated on Kit was among them. He said Kit was making progress, but that he wasn’t out of the woods yet, and that the police would doubtless be in touch with the family to discuss the nature of Kit’s injuries.
‘It’s not every day we get a gunshot victim in here,’ he said.
After the doctors’ rounds, Daisy and Ruby went home, but Rob stayed on. At ten o’clock that evening, one of the other boys would take over. Until then, he would do what he always tried so hard to do: watch Kit’s back. This time, he wouldn’t fail in his duty.
The following day, Ruby spoke to Daisy over breakfast. Neither of them had slept.
‘This is a nightmare,’ said Ruby, refusing food. She couldn’t eat, the very thought of it made her guts heave. She could barely keep down a cup of coffee.
‘He’ll pull through,’ insisted Daisy.
‘Thomas Knox said he was going to look out for him,’ said Ruby numbly. ‘He promised.’
‘Knox? The man outside the church?’ Daisy was watching Ruby.
Ruby looked up at Daisy. ‘We’re… involved,’ she said.
‘Well, that’s good, isn’t it? I’ve been worried about you, since Michael died. That was awful for you.’
Ruby took a gulp of coffee. The strange and deeply sexual nature of her relationship with Thomas was something she didn’t feel able to discuss with anyone, especially not her own daughter. With Michael, she had felt loved, secure. With Thomas, it was so different: she was on tenterhooks. And now he had told her this thing, this terrible thing.
‘Thomas told me that Michael was unfaithful,’ she blurted out.
Daisy’s mouth dropped open. ‘He what?’
‘He said there was another woman.’
Daisy was silent for a moment. ‘Do you believe him?’
‘Why would he lie?’
‘To distance you from Michael? Maybe he’s jealous of how close you were.’
‘I don’t think so. I think he was telling the truth about it.’
‘But who’s the woman?’ Daisy was shocked by this revelation.
‘I don’t know.’
‘I can’t believe it.’
‘Neither could I,’ said Ruby grimly. ‘But the more I think about it? The way Michael was behaving in the weeks before his death? I’m starting to.’
Ruby’s brain was in turmoil. She had spent a wretched night again, wondering if at any moment the phone was going to ring and it would be the hospital, saying Your son is dead, he passed peacefully away, we’re so sorry.
She had been afraid to sleep, afraid to even lie on the bed, as if that might be inviting disaster. Now, hyped up on coffee and dazed from lack of sleep, she sat there and wondered what the hell was happening to her life.
Thomas
Michael
Kit
What Thomas had told her – that Michael had been unfaithful – devastated her. It had never occurred to her; in all the time they’d been together, not once had he given her cause to doubt him. And she had been utterly faithful to him. Had he lived, they would have married. Yet here was Thomas, telling her that Michael had betrayed her.
She had asked him to tell her who the woman was. ‘Come on. You know everything, don’t you?’
‘Sweetheart, I don’t know that.’
Maybe he was lying. If Michael could have lied to her, then so could Thomas. And that shocking thing he’d told her about the Danieri girl, Bianca, the one Kit seemed, according to Rob, to have become obsessed with…
She sank her head into her hands as she thought about Thomas. How easily he had reeled her in, how volatile and passionate their sudden affair was; how inappropriate. What was she thinking, getting involved with a cold-blooded crook like him? A man of secrets, a man who watched, who took note, who waited with the patience of a spider for Michael to come to grief, so that he could snatch her for himself.
And now Kit was lying in a hospital bed, teetering between life and death. She cast a fearful look at the phone. What if it rang, and they told her he was gone? She would never have the chance to make things right with him, never know the joy of having him love her as desperately as she loved him.
‘I’ll phone Joan,’ said Daisy, watching her mother with concern. ‘Tell her you won’t be in to work for a while.’
Ruby nodded, wiping away the tears that were streaming down her face.
She couldn’t think about work. Couldn’t even form a sentence. All she could do was cry.
Kit was surrounded by icy windblown blackness. There was nobody there but him, and this faint but biting pain, chilling him, eating into him like frostbite. He could hear murmurings, far away. Could be from another world, it was so distant, so unconnected to anything that was happening with him. There was not a thought in his head, there was simply… nothing. So this was what it was like. This was death.
‘Do you think he can hear me? Really?’ Ruby asked the nurse. She was staring at Kit’s face, so still in repose. Not the flicker of an eyelid. He looked dead to the world.
They let you in, mornings, in ICU. After all, the person laid up in here might not make it. It was a special consideration for the relatives, to be allowed in. The monitors beeped, pumps wheezed; this really was intensive care. It was a different nurse this time, a neat little pigtailed blonde. But she had the same smile. Patient. Kind.
‘Try it. Talk to him.’
So Ruby gulped, cleared her throat. Felt foolish, didn’t know where to begin. She started telling her son about living through the war, with a father who seemed to hate everything about her and with brothers, Charlie and Joe, who ducked and dived.
‘Joe was the nicer of the two,’ she told Kit.
She told him about the Windmill Theatre, and about Vi and about Cornelius Bray – the father Kit had never known, the father who had lavished whatever love he had upon Daisy, having washed his hands of his unacceptable and illegitimate dark-skinned son.
When she stopped talking, pouring her heart out to the man lying unconscious in the bed, the little blonde nurse was standing beside her, arms folded, listening. The nurse blinked; her eyes looked faintly red.
‘I hope he can hear you,’ she said.
Ruby nodded, and wiped at her eyes. She didn’t think he could. ‘Let’s hope,’ she said.