Desperate Measures (2 page)

Peggy’s breathing was worse. Roy checked that the oxygen mask was in the right position and that the cylinder had plenty in reserve.

Peggy was asleep, she’d barely woken in the past few days. The medicine that helped with the pain also made her drowsy.

He wondered if he should send for the priest yet. She was dying. He knew that. Dr Halliwell had explained it clearly, talked to them about hospices, but Peggy wanted to be at home. And Roy wanted her there. Nevertheless calling the priest seemed so final, like throwing in the towel. But if he delayed and she died before having the last rites she’d never forgive him. No, that wasn’t true, he thought, Peggy had always been a forgiving sort, a peacemaker, a good Catholic. It was more that Roy would feel bad for letting her down if he misjudged the timing.

She was so young, only sixty, most people lived into their eighties or nineties now. But Peggy had never been strong health-wise: asthma all her life and then the emphysema and the heart trouble, problems to do with her weight, too. She tried to lose some, countless times, diets and Weight Watchers, eating Ryvita and cottage cheese after making hot pot or pie and chips for Roy. Roy had gained weight too, and more since he stopped work to look after Peggy. At the warehouse he probably used to walk a few miles a day, overseeing the packers, dealing with snarl-ups in the system when incoming stock didn’t match the dockets or the goods were faulty.

Now and then, as a young man, he used to go out hiking in the countryside, down to the peaks in Derbyshire. After he met Peggy, walks were gentler, on the level, along riversides or through country parks, the deer park at Dunham Massey, that sort of thing.

Peggy still had a pretty face, round cheeked, warm brown eyes, even though the grey had replaced her chestnut curls.

She stirred a little, made a croaking note as she inhaled, but her eyes didn’t open. It was two hours until her next dose was due, though if she woke sooner and asked for it she could have some of the Oramorph. He wouldn’t see her suffer. He was clear on that. And the doctor had said there’d be no need.

He’d have to see if she’d take some Movicol as well to help with the constipation. She’d not eaten today. He’d made her Weetabix and warm milk but she couldn’t have swallowed more than a teaspoonful.

He left the room quietly and went into the kitchen. The parish bulletin was pinned up on the notice board. Roy took it down and turned it over to read the phone number then keyed it in, ready to speak to Father McDovey.

Father McDovey put out his hands, took Roy’s between them and grasped tightly.

‘How are you bearing up?’

‘I’m OK,’ Roy said, ‘thank you, Father. Come through. Would you like a drink?’

‘No, thank you,’ the priest said, ‘I’ve been plied with tea and biscuits all morning.’ He smiled. ‘Now.’ He set his briefcase down on the kitchen table. ‘In here I have an order of service for you, so you can follow what I’m doing.’ He drew out a laminated card and passed it to Roy. ‘Is Peggy awake?’

‘She’s drifting in and out,’ Roy said, ‘but never awake very long now.’

‘So Communion?’ the priest asked.

‘I’m not sure,’ Roy said.

‘She can swallow?’

‘Yes, small amounts.’

‘Well, we’ll see how it goes. It’s a sad time but she has the love of God and his mercy.’

Roy nodded, a lump in his throat.

As the priest began his ministrations, touching Peggy’s eyes and nose and mouth with the oil and reciting the prayers for the ceremony, Roy held her hand. He had first met Peggy at church. Roy and Ann, his wife, had separated by then. Roy was still driving the wagon.

During his marriage he’d be away for days at a time, and it got so he dreaded coming home what with Ann complaining about everything, wanting him to be different, to be something he wasn’t. He never really understood what she wanted from him. She complained of his silence, his ignoring her, said she wanted holidays, so they went on holidays and then she complained that he was a miserable sod.

‘Why did you marry me, then?’ he blurted out one day when Ann was having a go.

‘I thought I loved you,’ she said, ‘and I thought you’d change. Wrong on both counts.’

That hurt and she knew it. She looked away and shook her head and said, ‘I think it was a mistake, Roy, I’m sorry. I’m just so unhappy.’

So they had parted ways and split the money from the sale of the house. She’d never tried to claim maintenance, at least that was something. Ann moved away, she met a man who was taking over a salon in Alicante and set up with him.

Roy started going to St Agnes’s, near his new digs – though his visits were irregular, depending on his schedule. Peggy went too. She got chatting to him one day after mass. Their mothers had known each other, Peggy said. Peggy and he had been to the same primary school, though she’d been three years ahead of him so she would never have noticed him back then.

The next time he saw her, she asked if he’d come with them as a helper for the trip to Lourdes. He was about to refuse, he saw enough of the continent as it was with the truck driving, but the way she smiled changed his mind.

It went on from there, the friendship growing quite slowly, unlike the sudden both-feet-first nature of him and Ann.

After a while he plucked up courage to invite Peggy out for a meal, to an Italian restaurant. He appreciated the company. She would chatter away but it wasn’t like the gossip Ann had shared, spiked with putdowns or disapproval. Peggy was more positive than that. She didn’t seem to be bothered by his reticence, either. She never chivvied him to talk which made it easier for him to do so.

That evening, outside the house she still shared with her parents, she had kissed him.

‘I can’t marry you,’ Roy said.

‘I know,’ she said, ‘we’ll just have to live in sin.’

He stared at her, shocked to the core. He knew how much her faith meant and what it might cost her once word got out.

‘It wouldn’t be fair,’ he said, ‘what about church, and your family?’

‘It wouldn’t be fair if we were kept apart because of some outdated dogma.’ Her eyes were warm, merry.

‘But people – you know what they’re like?’

‘Yes. We might have to go to a different church,’ she said.

He looked at her – did she mean it, would she really live with him outside of marriage?

‘Why should I have to choose between my faith and a chance at happiness?’ she said, ‘I want both.’

He kissed her then and she responded.

They moved in together a few months later and started going to St Edmund’s. Roy bought her a gold ring. Peggy began to use his surname. She had one proviso, she asked if he would consider doing a different job, if he could find something so he wasn’t away so much.

He agreed and got the job at the warehouse. He didn’t think he could be any happier and then they had Simon.

Now the priest began to recite a Hail Mary. Roy listened, one thumb stroking Peggy’s hand, but he didn’t join in. He didn’t pray anymore. He didn’t believe in it.

‘Thank you, Mrs Halliwell.’

‘You’re welcome, Oliver, tell your mum that I’m very pleased with you. And have a think about the exam will you?’

‘Yes, Miss.’

Norma shut the front door. He was a sweet child, polite and good-mannered but natural enough to get the giggles sometimes when he made mistakes that sounded comical. And she laughed along with him. He was her last pupil of the day.

She put the music away in the piano stool, went through and turned the lamp on in the living room and closed the curtains.

An hour later, Don still wasn’t back. After all the strain of the inquest and with him completely exonerated she thought he might have come home to relax and well – perhaps celebrate wasn’t the right word – but give thanks that the ordeal was over, share that with her. She had made a Boer chicken pie with a beautiful puff top pastry and some cauliflower cheese. It would re-heat in the microwave. She wondered whether to have some herself or to wait and decided that she would have a glass of wine and if he wasn’t home by eight then she’d see if she was still hungry.

He had someone else to share his good news with, she was almost certain. That side of things had dwindled between them over time, especially since the menopause. It still happened, but rarely. When they did have sex she wondered why they didn’t do it more often. Norma never initiated it, never had, the thought made her toes curl. What if Don said no and turned her away? Sometimes she had dreams and woke aroused, even had an orgasm, but she had never told him.

Norma suspected he had a lover because his hours had got longer again, the partners’ meetings more frequent. And she had sensed a new energy to him. At least before the inquest loomed. You don’t live with somebody for thirty years without being able to read the smallest changes in mood and behaviour.

There was no point in dwelling on it. There had been other women, other flings. Discreet and short-lived. He would never leave her. She knew this like she knew the scales on the piano keyboard or that the sun would rise in the morning. There was too little loyalty these days, people gave up on marriage at the first hurdle. She was loyal to Don and vice versa.

Norma hadn’t attended the Marcie Young inquest. She had offered, dreading that Don might take her up on it, but he’d said, ‘I’d only be worrying about you. I’ll be fine.’

He wasn’t fine though, she had seen the signs of strain on him as the start date drew closer. Last night when he came home, he was ashen-faced, distracted. She teased it out of him, ‘How was it, did you have to speak?’

He said a little, then added to it, then elaborated until he was giving full vent to his sense of outrage at the whole charade. He was drinking more, a tumbler of whiskey as soon as he crossed the threshold, wine with his meal. But who was she to comment? He’d been under so much pressure, what with the inquest and problems at the surgery.

Don generally got along with people but one of the GPs, Fraser McKee he was called, got right up Don’s nose. A younger man, he was trying to tell Don how things should be done. He wanted to coach patients and staff to use the Internet, to research current medical thinking, he had ideas for setting up clinics for this, that and the other, as though Don’s thirty years in the job counted for nothing.

At first Don had appreciated Fraser’s clumsy attempts to innovate, then he began to complain mildly about him, putting it down to the man’s inexperience but as the months went on Don became increasingly hostile.

‘He’s after a partnership,’ Don had said, ‘he talks as though it’s a sure thing.’

‘And it’s not?’ Norma said.

‘Over my dead body,’ Don had said, ‘he’s no idea how to work as a member of the team. If you don’t agree with his projects and his buzzwords he writes you off.’

‘What do the others think?’ Norma said.

‘He’s not made himself popular,’ Don said. ‘I don’t think anyone will disagree.’

Norma wondered now, as she ironed his shirts, what sort of doctor she herself would have made, if things had turned out differently. Would she have gained the loyalty and affection of her patients and colleagues like Don had or been an irritant like Fraser? Would she even have been a GP? Perhaps she’d have chosen a specialty and gone for a hospital career instead.

At eighteen all she knew was she wanted to study medicine, to save lives. She had worked so hard to get her A levels, to get into medical school, swotting late into the night, taking diet pills to keep awake. Diet pills and black coffee. There were extra classes at school, too, and she went to every one of them. There were about a dozen girls selected for the fast stream, about half of them doing science.

The exams made her terribly anxious, a tightening across her back, churning in her stomach and a clammy sensation across her forehead. She gripped the pen so hard that the indentations remained on her fingers for hours. Once, half way through the first chemistry question, she tore a hole in the paper.

They were in France when the results came out and she had rung Uncle Marty who had opened the letter and read out, ‘Four As: biology, chemistry, physics and maths.’ Four As! She had her place in Manchester.

The relief was like someone releasing her from an iron lung or something and she’d spent the rest of the holiday having fun with the friends she’d made from the village where the gîte was, in a haze of Gauloises and cheap wine, holiday romance and Pernod.

There were three weeks after they got back from France to get ready for student life. She was going into halls for the first year. She’d never been north and imagined it to be pretty grim but when the training was done she would be able to work pretty much anywhere, even abroad. Doctors were always in demand.

Mummy and Daddy drove her up one fine Saturday afternoon. She felt sick with excitement as they carried clothes and records, her books, sheets and blankets and her castor oil plant up to the room.

Once lectures had started, it didn’t take long for that excitement to be replaced with the crushing realization that if swotting for exams had been hard going at school then studying medicine was ten times worse. Until she met Don.