Come to Grief (38 page)

Archie and Norman, too, looked shocked.

I sighed. “I didn’t understand that then, of course. I didn’t understand it until the night before last, when everything sort of
clicked.
But now... I think it wasn’t just because of Ellis’s terrible guilt that Ginnie killed herself last Monday, but because it was Gordon’s guilt and reputation as well . . . and then the trial was starting in spite of everything . . . and it was all too much ... too much to bear.”

I paused briefly and went on, “Ginnie’s suicide sent Gordon berserk. He’d set out to help his son. He’d caused his wife’s death. He blamed me for it, for having destroyed his family. He tried to smash my brains in the morning she’d died. He lay in wait for me outside my apartment ... he was screaming that I’d killed her. Then, last night, in the actual moment that the picture in
The Pump
was taken, he was telling me the bullets were for Ginnie ... it was my life for hers. He meant ... he meant to do it.”

I stopped talking.

The white room was silent.

Later in the day I phoned the hospital in Canterbury and spoke to the ward sister.

“How is Rachel?” I asked.

“Mr. Halley! But I thought ... I mean, we’ve all read
The Pump
.”

“But you didn’t tell Rachel, did you?” I asked anxiously.

“No . . . Linda—Mrs. Ferns—said not to.”

“Good.”

“But are you—”

“I’m absolutely OK,” I assured her. “I’m in Hammersmith hospital. Du Cane Road.”

“The best!” she exclaimed.

“I won’t argue. How’s Rachel?”

“You know that she’s a very sick little girl, but we’re all hopeful of the transplant.”

“Did she go into the bubble?”

“Yes, very bravely. She says it’s her palace and she’s its queen.”

“Give her my love.”

“How soon ... oh, dear, I shouldn’t ask.”

“I’ll make it by Thursday.”

“I’ll tell her.”

Kevin Mills and India came to visit before ten o‘clock the following morning, on their way to work.

I was again sitting up in the high bed but by then felt much healthier. In spite of my protests, my shot and mending arm was still held immobile in a swaddle of splint and bandages. Give it another day’s rest, I’d been told, and just practice wiggling your fingers: which was all very well, except that the nurses had been too busy with an emergency that morning to reunite me with my left hand, which lay on the locker beside me. For all that it didn’t work properly, I felt naked without it, and could do nothing for myself, not even scratch my nose.

Kevin and India both came in looking embarrassed by life in general and said far too brightly how glad they were to see me awake and recovering.

I smiled at their feelings. “My dear children,” I said, “I’m not a complete fool.”

“Look, mate . . .” Kevin’s voice faded. He wouldn’t meet my eyes.

I said, “Who told Gordon Quint where to find me?”

Neither of them answered.

“India,” I pointed out, “you were the only person who knew I would turn up at Kensington Place at eight o‘clock on Sunday evening.”

“Sid!” She was anguished, as she had been in Church Street when she’d found me shot; and she wouldn’t look at my face, either.

Kevin smoothed his mustache. “It wasn’t her fault.”

“Yours, then?”

“You’re right about your not being a fool,” Kevin said. “You’ve guessed what happened, otherwise you’d be flinging us out of here right now.”

“Correct.”

“The turmoil started Saturday evening,” Kevin said, feeling secure enough to sit down. “Of course, as there’s no daily Pump on Sundays there was hardly anyone in the office. George Godbar wasn’t. No one was. Saturday is our night off. The shit really hit the fan on Sunday morning at the editorial meeting. You know editorial meetings ... well, perhaps you don’t. All the department editors—news, sport, gossip, features, whatever, and the senior reporters—meet to decide what stories will be run in the next day’s paper, and there was George Godbar in a positive
lather
about reversing policy on S. Halley. I mean, Sid mate, you should’ve heard him swear. I never knew so many orifices and sphincters existed.”

“The boss had leaned on him?”

“Leaned!
There was a panic. Our lord the proprietor wanted you bought
off
.”

“How nice,” I said.

“He’d suggested ten thousand smackers, George said. Try ten million, I said. George called for copies for everyone of the complete file of everything
The Pump
has published about you since June, nearly all of it in India’s column on Fridays. I suppose you’ve kept all those pieces?”

I hadn’t. I didn’t say so.

“Such
poison,”
Kevin said. “Seeing it all together like that. I mean, it silenced the whole meeting, and it takes a lot to do that.”

“I wasn’t there,” India said. “I don’t go to those meetings.”

“Be fair to India,” Kevin told me, “she didn’t write most of it. I wrote some. You know I did. Six different people wrote it.”

India still wouldn’t meet my eyes and still wouldn’t sit in the one empty chair. I knew about “policy” and being burned at the stake and all that, yet week after week I’d dreaded her byline. Try as I would, I still felt sore from that savaging.

“Sit down,” I said mildly.

She perched uneasily.

“If we make another dinner date,” I said, “don’t tell anyone.”

“Oh, Sid.”

“She didn’t mean to get you
shot,
for Chrissakes,” Kevin protested. “The Tilepit wanted you found. Wanted! He was shitting himself, George said.
The Pump’s
lawyer had passed each piece week by week as being just on the safe side of actionable, but at the meeting, when he read the whole file at once, he was
sweating,
Sid. He says
The Pump
should settle out of court for whatever you ask.”

“And I suppose you’re not supposed to be telling me that?”

“No,” Kevin confessed, “but you did give me the exclusive of the decade.”

“How did Gordon Quint find me?” I asked again.

“George said our noble lord was babbling on about you promising not to send him to jail if you walked out free from somewhere or other, and you
had
walked out free, and he wanted to keep you to your promise. George didn’t know what he was talking about, but Tilepit made it crystal that George’s job depended on finding you within the next five minutes, if not sooner. So George begged us all to find you, to say
The Pump
would confer sainthood immediately and fatten your bank balance, and I phoned India on the off chance, and she said not to worry, she would tell you herself ... and I asked her how ... and where. There didn’t seem to be any harm in it.”

“And you told George Godbar?” I said.

Kevin nodded.

“And he,” I said, “told Lord Tilepit? And
he
told Ellis, I suppose ... because Ellis turned up, too.”

“George Godbar phoned Ellis’s father’s house, looking for Ellis. He got an answering machine telling him to try a mobile number, and he reached Gordon Quint in a car somewhere ... and he told Gordon where you would be, if Ellis wanted to find you.”

Round and round in circles, and the bullets come out
here.

I sighed again. I was lucky to be alive. I would settle for that. I also wondered how much I would screw out of
The Pump.
Only enough, I decided, to keep His Lordship grateful.

Kevin, the confession over, got restlessly to his feet and walked around the room, stopping when he reached the locker on my left side.

He looked a little blankly at the prosthesis lying there and, after a moment, picked it up. I wished he wouldn’t.

He said, surprised, “It’s bigger than I pictured. And heavier. And
hard.”

“All the better to club you with,” I said.

“Really?” he asked interestedly. “Straight up?”

“It’s been known,” I said, and after a moment he put the arm down.

“It’s true what they say of you, isn’t it? You may not look it, but you’re one tough bugger, Sid mate, like I told you before.”

I said, “Not many people look the way they are inside.”

India said, “I’ll write a piece about that.”

“There you are then, Sid.” Kevin was ready to go. “I’ve got a rape waiting. Thanks for those Japs. Makes us even, right?”

“Even.” I nodded.

India stood up as if to follow him. “Stay a bit,” I suggested.

She hesitated. Kevin said, “Stay and hold his bloody hand. Oh, shit. Well ... sorry, mate.
Sorry.”

“Get out of here,” I said.

India watched him go.

“I’m really sorry,” she said helplessly, “about getting you shot.”

“I’m alive,” I pointed out, “so forget it.”

Her face looked softer. At that hour in the morning she hadn’t yet put on the sharply outlined lipstick nor the matte porcelain makeup. Her eyebrows were as dark and positive, and her eyes as light-blue and clear, but this was the essential India I was seeing, not the worldly package. How different, I wondered, was the inner spirit from the cutting brain of her column?

She, too, as if compelled, came over to my left side and looked at the plastic arm.

“How does it work?” she asked.

I explained about the electrodes, as I had for Rachel.

She picked up the arm and put her fingers inside, touching the electrodes. Nothing happened. No movement in the thumb.

I swallowed. I said, “It probably needs a fresh battery.”

“Battery?”

“It clips into the side. That boxlike thing”—I nodded towards the locker—“that’s a battery charger. There’s a recharged battery in there. Change them over.”

She did so, but slowly, because of the unfamiliarity. When she touched the electrodes again, the hand obeyed the signals.

“Oh,” she said.

She put the hand down and looked at me.

“Do you,” she said, “have a steel rod up your backbone? I’ve never seen anyone more tense. And your forehead’s sweating.”

She picked up the box of tissues lying beside the battery charger and offered it to me.

I shook my head. She looked at the immobilized right arm and at the left one on the locker, and a wave of understanding seemed to leave her without breath.

I said nothing. She pulled a tissue out of the box and jerkily dabbed at a dribble of sweat that ran down my temple.

“Why don’t you put this arm on?” she demanded. “You’d be better with it on, obviously.”

“A nurse will do it.” I explained about the emergency. “She’ll come when she can.”

“Let
me
do it,” India said.

“No.”

“Why not?”

“Because.”

“Because you’re too bloody
proud.”

Because it’s too private, I thought.

I was wearing one of those dreadful hospital gowns like a barber’s smock that fastened at the back of the neck and shapelessly covered the body. A white flap covered my left shoulder, upper arm, elbow and what remained below. Tentatively India lifted and turned back the flap so that we both could see my elbow and the short piece of forearm.

“You hate it, don’t you?” India said.

“Yes.”

“I would hate it, too.”

I can’t bear this, I thought. I can bear Ellis unscrewing my hand and mocking me. I can’t bear love.

India picked up the electric arm.

“What do I do?” she asked.

I said with difficulty, nodding again at the locker, “Talcum powder.”

“Oh.” She picked up the white tinful of comfort for babies. “In the arm, or on you?”

“On me.”

She sprinkled powder on my forearm. “Is this right? More?”

“Mm.”

She smoothed the powder all over my skin. Her touch sent a shiver right down to my toes.

“And now?”

“Now hold it so that I can put my arm into it.”

She concentrated. I put my forearm into the socket, but the angle was wrong.

“What do I do?” she asked anxiously.

“Turn the thumb towards you a bit. Not too far. That’s right. Now push up while I push down. That top bit will slide over my elbow and grip—and keep the hand on.”

“Like that?” She was trembling.

“Like that,” I said. The arm gripped where it was designed to.

I sent the messages. We both watched the hand open and close.

India abruptly left my side and walked over to where she’d left her purse, picking it up and crossing to the door.

“Don’t go,” I said.

“If I don’t go, I’ll cry.”

I thought that might make two of us. The touch of her fingers on the skin of my forearm had been a caress more intimate than any act of sex. I felt shaky. I felt more moved than ever in my life.

“Come back,” I said.

“I’m supposed to be in the office.”