Learning to Dance (21 page)

Judith could imagine instantly what lay behind this obvious reproach. Hausmann had not minced words.

‘It was one of those impulse things,’ she whispered back. ‘I thought I would be back home before anyone noticed I’d been away.’

‘Yes. Quite. Will you be all right on that chair?’

‘Of course. I’m so grateful that I can stay with him.’ Despite what she had said to Matt, she had anticipated a battle.

‘Now you’ve been found we don’t want to lose you again.’ The words were a little tart, but the tone was softening all the time.

Judith tried to make her smile reassuring; she could think of nothing to say. However, less than ten minutes later another nurse, younger and uncritical, came in bearing a mug of very hot tea with no less than four packets of sugar.

‘Sister said to wake up your friend and ask him whether you would like tea or coffee, and he said tea with lots of sugar.’

Judith accepted the mug gratefully. ‘Did he say anything else?’

‘He told me to go away. But then he was all right.’

‘Oh good. Thank you so much.’

‘I’m going off duty now. Can I give him a message?’

‘That would be kind of you. Could you tell him to go away?’ She grinned at the girl. ‘And to come back in the morning.’

The girl returned her grin.

Judith did the usual thing with her tea; inhaling the steam, closing her eyes. When she opened them, Jack was looking at her. They stared. He tried to speak and she held up her hand.

‘No words, Jack. Later, perhaps. I am here and I am staying here, that is all we need to know for the moment.’ She
stirred the sugar into her mug. ‘Let this cool and then we’ll share it.’

He watched her every movement: from the tearing of the sugar packets to their disposal in the pedal bin by the door. When she presented him with a half-teaspoonful of tea, he pursed his lips and managed to swallow some of it. Then he closed his eyes as if exhausted. He did not open them again until she had almost finished the tea. She watched him carefully. This was Jack Freeman who really had flown the nest. She drank deeply, tipping her head to drain the mug, and when she put it on the top of the locker he was watching her.

She said, ‘It’s gone. But I can scrape out some sugar.’ She offered a tiny drop of syrup and he took it obediently and licked his lips appreciatively. She tried to reload the spoon, and wondered how they would pass the night. She proffered the empty spoon, and he took it from her and put it into his mouth like a lollipop.

She said, ‘I couldn’t believe it when Robert arrived this afternoon and told me you and Matt were the two he had rescued and taken to this hospital! I pictured you with Len. In Perth.’ She stood up and went to the washbasin and rinsed the mug. Then she washed her hands and face. When she turned back to the bed he had lifted himself slightly, put the spoon on a tissue, hung the oxygen mask on its hook. He said hoarsely, ‘I thought you might have known. It seemed to me we often shared a sixth sense.’

‘We did.’

His face showed that he understood she no longer had a sixth sense where he was concerned. She said slowly, ‘I dreamed about you one night. I did not see your face but I saw Matt chasing you. It was so … random.’

He shook his head, his voice slightly less hoarse. ‘But there
were other times. When you were sketching. Rocks. Then trees and a cottage. Not random. Lifelines for me.’

She felt her eyes stretch and looked down quickly. ‘For a time I thought you might be dead. The
Magnet
used your very first Fish-Frobisher strip. When I rang William he had no idea where you were.’

‘I wanted to be dead. Len promised he would block all phone calls.’

She wanted to cry out. She swallowed and kept staring down at the blue cellular blanket. At last she said, ‘How could you … how could you wish that?’

‘Because I hated myself. And still do. But there was Matt and Toby. And then Robert had this grand plan.’ She glanced up and saw that his eyes were closed and a ghost of a smile lifted his face. She looked down again and felt her own eyes fill stingingly.

Jack whispered, ‘The air on Lundy and you just across the water. We would stay there. Together. And everything would be all right.’

‘I know. He specializes in those sorts of plans.’

‘He needs someone like you to keep his feet on the ground.’

She knew he had opened his eyes and was watching her downbent head. She said, ‘This morning. When you arrived here and they connected you up to all this … stuff.’ She risked looking up as she indicated the drip stand. ‘Can you remember anything … I don’t know … anything happening?’

He stared at her and blinked fiercely, concentrating.

‘I was pretty delirious at times. I tried to picture you. Robert said he would bring you to the hospital, and I tried to imagine you away from home. Different place. But still … you. Doing things. Ordinary things.’

‘Making tea?’ she encouraged.

‘Yes. Making tea lots of times.’

There was a long pause. She looked up and their gazes connected.

She said, ‘Something else?’

‘A space. An exhibition space? Thunder – but that was here, too. You held something. Not one of your pencils. A charcoal stick. And you started to draw. Quickly. You’d done it before – rocks and cliffs. This was different. Brief.’ He drew a sharp breath. ‘We were together. Jude, we were together.’

He fumbled one hand towards her and she took it and held it between both of hers. ‘The Fish-Frobishers!’ His whisper escalated roughly. ‘So ordinary, Jude. Our bread and butter. Tell me how it turned out.’

She told him, and added that the strip was on its way to the
Magnet
offices. When she stopped speaking he was smiling. He turned his hand within hers and lay back, and within minutes she saw that he was asleep.

Time went slowly. There were too many questions still to ask, but she understood that he had established something for them both: their closeness had somehow survived these past weeks and months. She rummaged in one of her bags and came up with a pencil and her sketchbook. She captured Jack in five lines, then added two more to take in his hair, which was standing on end. She drew a pillow and a bedhead to frame him.

It was past midnight when the night sister came in. She brought a carton of soup and some supermarket bread and saw the cartoon drawing on the cellular blanket. She nodded.

‘You’ve got him exactly. But he will look better soon – I promise you.’

‘He’s looked like that most of this year. I didn’t see it until now.’

The sister shrugged. ‘When you see someone every day you often don’t notice changes – they come gradually. He must have been very low to become so ill. And so suddenly, too.’ She went to the drip stand and started to dismantle it. ‘He probably felt terrible and hid it.’

She removed a cannula from Jack’s arm; he smiled but did not open his eyes.

‘Why don’t you use the bathroom while I’m here? You might be able to sleep for an hour or two. That soup is scalding hot.’

Judith found her sponge bag and went into the tiny bathroom. She swilled her face with warm water and did her teeth. When she came back into the room the sister was leaving. She had pushed two chairs together, lined them with one blanket and placed a pillow and more blankets on top. She smiled and was gone.

Judith sipped her soup and chewed on the bread, and felt drowsiness spreading from her eyes and face, through her arms and legs. She remembered putting the carton in the flip bin and settling herself into the pillow and knowing she would sleep.

When she woke it was disappointing to glance at her watch and see it was only just gone 2 a.m. She shifted so that she could see Jack; every muscle in her arms and back protested.

Jack was sitting almost bolt upright, the blanket pushed down to his waist. She groaned.

‘Oh, Jude … you looked so relaxed.’

‘I was. But I thought it would be about seven o’clock and it’s only two.’

‘And you’re stiff and uncomfortable.’

‘You could say that. How come you’re awake, sitting up and talking normally?’

‘I woke up, went to the loo, drank some water and came back to bed!’

‘Brilliant.’

‘It is. I’m better!’

‘Rubbish. Go back to sleep.’

‘Only if you come and share the bed. Come on. It’s just about wide enough. You can sit on my lap.’

She lifted her head sharply. ‘Oh, Jack.’

‘I know it’s what Eunice used to say – you’ve said it practically every night since we went to Paris. Come on – it works, and there are no bits and pieces of tubing to get in our way. Bring your own pillow.’

She stumbled away from the chairs, pulled her pillow to her chest and collapsed next to Jack. He moved carefully to make room for her, then put his cheek against the nape of her neck and whispered, ‘Sleep tight, darling.’

She thought, totally bewildered: There’s no other woman. Nothing, no one between us.

And she closed her eyes again and was gone.

They went home the next afternoon. Jack was weak, but all his tests were positive and he seemed utterly content. The last two months might never have happened. The doctor who discharged him assured the four of them that all Jack needed was rest and a good sensible diet. It sounded routine … easy.

Judith seemed alone in finding the whole situation bizarre. Robert drove them in Bart’s car, which made it odder still. He had to have been back to Castle Dove to fetch it, clean himself up and change his clothes, but although Judith asked him twice about Nat and Sybil she learned nothing.

All Robert said was: ‘I saw Bart when I collected the car keys. No one else.’ Matt, who sat beside him, made no attempt at conversation, and Jack was not strong enough to make more than appreciative noises at the autumnal trees and the first glimpse of the sea as they came off the motorway. These escalated to near-ecstasy as they manoeuvred on to their own drive.

Robert came in with them, and while Judith settled Jack into his armchair next to the gas fire he switched on the heating and told Matt rather brusquely to make some tea. He shook his head at Matt’s offer of a mug and left soon
after. Judith thanked him and held the door open while he scribbled something on a piece of paper and put the paper by the telephone.

‘Ring me if you need me,’ he said. Then he was gone, and Judith was left holding open the door, looking at the empty road and feeling bereft.

The rest of that week seemed to belong to some kind of time warp. Judith found herself checking the calendar, glancing at her watch, frowning with disbelief as she read the account of Arnold McCready’s funeral in the weekly newspaper. Matt’s presence in the house was as strange as Jack’s, yet just as normal. He picked up the threads of his Englishness, as both boys did every time they came home. He accepted his father’s ‘breakdown’ and subsequent illness as ‘one of those things’. He said in his serious voice, ‘Mum, we’ve got to put it behind us. Otherwise it makes it worse for Dad. He’s been ill, and now he’s better. It always helps to simplify things – like Dad used to say, one line is better than two.’ He followed his own advice and settled into local life, as he and Toby did twice a year. Judith heard him on the phone to Perth and unashamedly listened in.

‘It was hairy, of course. But that artist chap – Robert Hausmann – he arrived soon after we got home … yeah, he sort of took over. What? Batty? Well, I guess so, but he conjured Mum up, and then of course everything was OK.’ There was a long pause while he listened, then he said, ‘That’s fine by me, Tobe. I’ll do the rescue stuff, I’m kind of into that now. Tell Doc Zack I carried my dad down the side of a cliff in a hurricane last Monday – that should impress him!’ He laughed, and Judith had a sudden memory flash of the Long Gallery creaking in the winds from the Atlantic. She
turned into the kitchen, where she was preparing vegetables for the evening meal. That time and place felt more real than this one – the storm and the lightning and Sybil hiding her face. Not this house and the blandness of meals and bed-making. She stared through the window at her beloved garden, bathed in typically mellow September sun; was she no longer a nest-maker?

The rain had stopped at last, and the countryside was clean and washed bare of the fallen leaves. The house was not quite as tidy as she had left it: Matt’s predilection for reading newspapers in the bathroom meant that the laundry basket was piled high with the previous week’s sports news. Her computer was loaded with messages from Martha Gifford, which she high-mindedly did not read. Likewise with messages going to Martha. She tried to be interested, speculating as to whether they kept up a regular correspondence, and whether Martha might become a nuisance, as she so often had in the past. She had been very much younger than the boys, always trying to play football, always in the way. But Matt was nearly thirty now. Might there be something in it? Might she go to Australia to be with him or … might he come home?

Not even that prospect made much impression on Judith, however. The house had waited for her return, yet failed dismally to wrap her in the usual comfort of homecoming. Castle Dove and the countryside around it had been strange but exciting. Home was even stranger and not exciting. There were times when it became worse than unexciting: full of unexpected fears. She waited for Jack to talk to her, yet dreaded to hear what he might say.

On the Saturday, after four days of living in this limbo, Matt went into Bristol city centre to meet with a school
friend, and Jack and Judith had the house to themselves. They went through the motions: Jack was in the bathroom for a long time while Judith cleared the breakfast things and tidied generally. The post came, and there was a slip of a letter for her and a thick one for Jack from the
Magnet
. He had already fielded an email from William about Judith’s contribution which had said simply, ‘Keep ’em coming!’ so the gap of his two-month absence had been bridged. She weighed this large envelope in her hand and wondered what was in it, then put it on the hall table without further interest, stuffed her letter into her pocket, and went into the living room to look at the garden. The wind that had rocked the Long Gallery at Castle Dove had wrecked most of the late flowers here, but surprisingly she noticed a group of dahlias against the wall still holding aloft their blossom heads to dry in the sun. That’s what she would do with this long empty day without Matt: she would spend it in the garden. Jack no longer needed constant ‘surveillance’; he might even make them some lunch. And there was his letter from William … She went into the utility room and put on her wellingtons and an old fleece, found gardening gloves and went outside.