‘I know, but …’ she hesitates
,
‘family is different isn’t it, Lawrence.’
Of course it is. For most people it is.
‘Who’s carrying out the procedure?’ I wonder suddenly.
‘Wilhelm.’
Great.
That’s just great
. I frown. A quick glance at
Sunny's
notes on the foot of his bed and I see it’s the young Belgian guy who’ll be operating on him. Why couldn’t it have been Ranjavati? The Belgian surgeon isn’t all that experienced. He’s cutting his teeth out here, to put it crudely.
‘Are you going to the staff social, later on?’ Saila puts in tentatively. ‘Tent 15 A. A few of us have got hold of some beer. You’d be very welcome to join us and … I could fill you in on how the op goes?’
‘Maybe.’ She’s the third person to ask me today. All female. She’s nice, but I’ve made a point of not getting too close to anyone out here. Not in the relationship department anyway.
‘I think my line manager would prefer it if I stayed away from the beer tent,’ I pull a wry grin.
‘I heard about that fracas,’ she murmurs. Did she hear what I did to that guy, I wonder? The memory makes me feel uncomfortable. I don’t drink. It’s not my drinking that’s the problem. It’s what booze does to other people that I have a problem with. I watch as she straightens up the edges of Sunny’s bed.
‘How did your EO take it?’
‘I’m not his favourite person right now. He’s under pressure to put me on a disciplinary for it and that’s put him in a difficult position. He’s a good man and I’m sorry for that.’
She smiles slightly.
‘You’re a real enigma, aren’t you, Lawrence?’
‘Am I?’
‘Yes. I see you go out of your way all the time to help people who are suffering - like this lad here - but then you’re equally happy to …’
I feel my jaw tense. That guy in the beer tent the other night was blotto. He thought he was going to have some fun smacking his girlfriend around. I showed him different, that’s all.
‘He had it coming to him, Saila.’
Her eyes search mine for a moment. I swear I see her give a little shudder, but she decides to leave that topic.
‘He’s got to you though, this little one, hasn’t he?’ When she comes and stands by me she is so close, her shoulders are touching mine. ‘Why is that, do you think?’
‘You tell me,’ I catch her gaze and hold it but she just giggles.
‘He tells me you’re going to take him home with you?’
Home? I am not going home. I turn away from Saila, frowning, as the tent flap goes up. The surgeon’s just come in and her manner becomes professional now, brisk.
‘I’m going to look for his Amma.’ I tell her. ‘I’ll be in later, okay?’
Something about her last comment has stayed with me though, rankling under my skin. I am never going
home.
But why is it the thought of Macrae Farm has been in my mind so much lately? It bugs me. I’ve been catching echoes of it in my dreams.
As if something - or someone - is calling me back.
‘The day you were born,’ my father points a gnarled finger towards the window, ‘there was a sky just like this one. Cold and so still and full of snow ...’
‘In March?’ I turn and look at him curiously, wondering what’s brought this on. He doesn’t talk much about his life before. I know it brings back mixed memories.
Right now I’ve got his tablet-box on the table where I’ve been counting out the pills. Four little white ones, two large white ones and... there
should
be one new red pill per day. I frown. We seem to be out of red pills. We can’t be, surely? I rummage in the drawer and he turns to me, angling the wheels of his chair a little away from his permanent look-out post at the window;
‘I’d been awake since 2 am, waiting to hear.’ He stops and draws in a laboured breath. ‘It was awkward. My wife knew about you,’ he glances at me, suddenly pained. ‘I don’t think she ever loved me, but she threatened to divorce me if I visited you and your mother in the hospital. Promised me she’d sue for every penny. I knew she would, too.’
‘Did she?’ I let out a breath. He’s never told me this
before.
‘Oh yes,’ he dismisses that briefly. ‘It wasn’t pretty. I worked for her father. I knew I’d lose my job. It was wrong in so many ways and yet …’ he draws his shoulders up, as if to say -
I had no choice
- ‘when the phone call came I ran out of the house so fast I left my wallet behind. The car ran out of petrol two miles from the hospital and I walked the rest of the way. By then,’ he pulls a faint smile, ‘it had already begun to snow. In mid-March! Imagine that. All the way down to you I kept seeing all the daffs and the tulips out everywhere, all those brave yellow-golds and crimson-reds suddenly shuddering under a mantle of ice...’
I picture them. All those tender young shoots getting nipped in the bud, all the glorious colours that never got to unfurl that spring, destined to wither away on their stalks... I close the tablet box with a snap.
‘So you walked two miles,’ I say. ‘In a blizzard.’
‘I’d have walked a thousand miles.’
I know. I feel a momentary pang of sadness for him. There’s nothing that my father wouldn’t have done for me and my Mum.
‘Before that, I’d believed I had everything, Rose; a comfortable lifestyle with my wife; money, power. But suddenly the rest of my life - it all seemed like … like grey dust, worthless ashes because there you were, this beautiful, vibrant new thing. I held you up high and counted all your fingers and your toes. Only a few hours old; you were so tiny I couldn’t believe how perfect you were ...’
I smile at him, because I know he’s trying to tell me that he loves me; he’s always loved me, that he’s grateful to have me in his life. I’m grateful to have him too. A dad who’s always been prepared to go to the moon and back for his wife and his daughter; a dad who’s only concern was always to honour the commitments he made to those he loved best in his life. I’m grateful for that, yes. But he can’t know - I won’t let him know - that right now I’m feeling something else, too. A little envy, perhaps? Because once, long ago, my dad found a way to escape from the thing in his life that was trapping him. He fell deeply in love with my mother, and that was what gave him the strength to leave his unhappy marriage.
But me - I push the tablet-box back into its drawer, making a mental note about the red ones - am
I
ever going to escape my current situation? Will I ever get the chance?
‘
If we’re making you a new offer for next year you’ll hear from us before Christmas,’
the interviewer’s words, uttered as I left the room at Downing College two months ago, are ringing in my ears for the hundredth time. ‘Before Christmas’ she said. And it’s already nearly midday on Christmas Eve. There isn’t very much of ‘before’ left now. It’s almost all gone.
‘I knew then there was no way I was ever going to let you slip out of my life.’ Dad’s voice is suddenly apologetic, full of remorse, ‘But I wonder sometimes, Rose. When I see how things have turned out for you, I wonder if I did the best thing?’
‘Of course you did the best thing,’ I tell him firmly. ‘Feet up,’ I say and I click the foot-rest on his chair into a higher position so I can slide one slipper off now, begin the process of gently rotating one ankle round in an anti-clockwise direction ten times before I do the other.
‘You did it out of love,’ I remind him. ‘Because you loved Isla. You left your old life behind for me and Mum out of love, and that can never be wrong.’
‘Maybe sometimes love
can
be wrong, though?’
I lift my eyebrows.
Can it? It makes me uncomfortable that he even asks the question. Is he saying now he regrets the choices he made eighteen years ago, the Spring I was born? If he hadn’t chosen to go with my mother then I’d have had a very different life, I know. So would he. If he hadn’t loved Mum so much, he’d never have made her that promise he did before she died. He wouldn’t be in a wheelchair now, would he? He wouldn’t be trapped here, unable to go anywhere else, or ever get out of Merry Ditton.
Neither would I.
‘Love is what’s keeping you here right now, isn’t it? That, and loyalty to me.’
I feel a slight burning in my face. I don’t like him to talk like this. As if he were a burden. He’s
not
. He’s right that I’m here because he needs me but love
does
matter. Loyalty matters.
‘Things’ll all work out in the end, Dad.’ When I pick up his hands to tuck them back in under the blanket they feel so cold. The skin on the back looks papery and thin, almost translucent, and the sight of it catches at my heart. If I leave here, I leave him. And I don’t want to leave him.
‘I’ll make it out of here when the time is right.’ I feel a complete hypocrite saying that now. I was that desperate I even tried to cast a spell, didn’t I? Only last night. A spell to get me out of here, but he mustn’t know about that...
The truth is, University offer or no offer, I’m never going to make it out of here unless he gets better. Dad’s got limited mobility but he’s often wheelchair-bound and there’s no way he can fend for himself on just the six hours a week care the council have said they’d provide for him. When I explained that wasn’t enough, a woman came round from the council and took us round Forsythe’s home for the disabled elderly ‘Just so you know you have an alternative’ she told us both on our way out. But I saw her face. Forsythe’s was so awful she must have known that what she was really saying was -
there is no alternative, if you can’t manage things between you.
Because there is no way Dad is going to end up at Forsythe’s. Not while I’m around.
No; I’ve been thinking about this. The only way it could work is if Dad’s brother Ty would agree to have Dad at home with him and his family. He might, if Dad got on well enough with these new meds. It could happen. In my wildest dreams, it does. Ty’s eighteen years younger than Dad, only forty, and a flourishing entrepreneur in his own right. They’ve got a big house. Heaven knows, they’ve got enough space at their house but I know space wouldn’t be the issue. I figure if we sold Clare Farm maybe I could help pay for a carer who’d look after Dad most of the time so Ty and his family wouldn’t feel too tied down by it all.
In my fantasy, that’s how it all works out but I haven’t actually asked Ty yet. I haven’t said anything to Dad either. I know he won’t want to move. He promised Mum that he wouldn’t and he’s a man who keeps his promises. I never made that promise though. I never said I’d stay here and yet ... how can I go? My head is beginning to hurt, now. I need to concentrate on these foot rotations, I’m losing count.
Five … four … three …
‘You don’t mind, do you Rose?’ He’s looking disconcertingly straight at me now.
‘I don’t mind what?’
‘You don’t mind that we’ve stayed on at Clare Farm?’
I mind. I’ve minded it every hour of every day since Mum passed away. But I know very well why we’re still here.
‘Why d’you ask?’
Two … one.
I glance back over at Dad who’s suddenly gone quiet and is just sitting there, looking at me in an understanding and sorrowful way.
‘Because I know you’ve been wanting to get away from here for a long time ... I want you to,’ he stops and puts his hands to his throat. His voice is deserting him again. It comes and goes, even with the new medication that’s supposed to help. Sometimes he can’t utter a sound for days, and then the only thing that’s left is whatever he can tell me with his eyes.
‘Postman might just be late,’ Dad gets out eventually. He
knows
what I’ve been waiting for all morning.
‘He isn’t late, Dad. He’s not coming. He has no letters for us today, that’s all.’
‘You may still get your offer, Rose.’
Dad,
please
. He’s looking at me in that funny way he has sometimes, like he could make the world all right for me just by the wishing of it but he can’t. He can’t make everything all right. He hasn’t been able to do that for a long time.
‘You know,’ he leans over and his hand touches my shoulder softly. ‘….why I never moved us away from here, don’t you? It’s because this was the only one thing left that I could still do for her, Love.’
‘I know.’ I give the end of one of his socks a little tug, pinch his toes before he gets too maudlin. ‘Next foot, please.’
‘And you know what would happen the minute we left this place -
if
we ever left it?’ I follow his gaze out beyond the window again and I feel my heart sink.
‘They had the big diggers out again earlier. I saw them, three of them, making for the Topwoods,’ he mutters darkly.
Treacherously, I think
; let them. Let them wrench every single tree in the Topwoods out by its trembling, earth-caked roots and let them build a block of new high-rise flats up there. I don’t care about the sodding trees! The trees were Mum’s pet project.
I look at Dad painfully.
They were never mine, Dad. They were never yours. Mum was the only one of us who was passionate about conserving the land and now she’s gone ...
‘You’ve done your best, Dad,’ I remind him gently. ‘You’ve kept your promise to Mum for as long as you’ve been able, despite your injuries. But - if they ever did build on that land ...’ I say casually, ‘w
ould
you be prepared to leave?’ the shock in his eyes leaves me with no option but to immediately back-peddle furiously.
‘They can’t erect any buildings,’ I remind him neutrally. ‘Not as long as we’re living here. They know you’re …’ I correct myself - ‘that
we’re
keeping an eye out.’ Like David and Goliath, I think. Only Goliath has the big diggers and between us, me and Dad couldn’t even make up one half of a David.
‘We’re not going anywhere just yet,’ I say softly. But when I stand up, I can’t resist going over and hoisting up the sash window behind him, leaning out as far as I dare, to see further up the lane, because I still
wish
I was going somewhere.
Omigod, there he is.
The postman.
The flutter of anticipation struggling with the possibility of impending disappointment in my belly is poignantly familiar. It is, after all, Christmas Eve.