Relative Love (17 page)

The trauma of phoning Charlie was something Elizabeth had left to Serena. Their suffering she knew, even at this terrible early stage, was private territory, a path they had to tread alone. Serena had gone into a corner to make the call, curling up on a hard chair with her mobile as if
she wanted to hide herself for ever from the world. Elizabeth, holding Serena’s styrofoam cup of lukewarm tea, had retreated to the hospital corridor, overcome by the realisation that her darling brother and his lovely wife were at the beginning of something not only endless and terrible but also isolating. Serena, bending protectively over Tina at the roadside, had already looked so alone in her suffering that it had taken all of Elizabeth’s courage to push her way through the crowd and crouch next to her. While ambulancemen, heroically gentle and kind in their plastic yellow livery, had gone about their business she had groped feebly for words to offer comfort, all the while knowing that no such words existed. As an aunt this was the greatest tragedy yet to befall her. As a mother she could hardly begin to glimpse the pain.

Slowly Cassie returned her phone to her handbag.

Mrs Shorrold laid down her teaspoon. ‘I’m so sorry, my dear, has something happened?’

‘Yes … I … My niece … just a baby … has been run over. I’m afraid I have to go.’

‘Of course, of course. I’m so sorry.
So
sorry. I’ll fetch your coat, unless … Are you sure you wouldn’t like a cup of tea – or maybe a brandy?’ she added, alarmed by the pallor of Cassie’s face. ‘Something like this … such a shock for all of you … Does she … Are there other children?’

‘Yes, three,’ Cassie murmured, reluctant to admit the fact for fear that it in some way diminished the magnitude of the tragedy; as if people with several children could afford to lose one. ‘But Tina was so … such a …’ She stopped, biting her lip as she plunged her arms into the sleeves of her coat, not wanting to break down in front of a woman she barely knew and for whom she felt neither affection nor empathy. ‘I’ll call you.’

‘Oh, heavens, don’t worry about that.’

Once outside, Cassie ran to her car, the tears now pouring down her cheeks, so thickly that it took her several minutes to locate her keys. She knew she should call her family – her parents and, of course, poor, poor Charlie and Serena – but first she wanted, needed, Dan, more fiercely than she had ever needed anything in her life before. Not just because she loved him but because he was a doctor and would understand better than most what they were all going through. They had talked of death several times and how he dealt with it. He had once moved her to tears describing the final minutes of a young man with cancer. The sense of the spirit leaving the body was almost palpable, he had said, as if the invisible human component had got up and walked away, leaving the shell behind. Cassie found it hard to think of Tina as a shell, impossible to imagine her chubby limbs and dimpled smile without the energy that animated them.

She closed her palm round her phone and willed Dan, through some telepathic power, to sense her need and call. It was impossible for her to call him because it was Saturday and he would be with his family. They hadn’t spoken since the previous afternoon when he had offered the tenuous thread of a hope that Sally might visit her mother. Silence meant that she hadn’t. All Cassie could do was sit and wait until Monday. The thought was suddenly so appalling – so unmanageable – that Cassie, abandoning all their rules, punched in his mobile number anyway. It rang ten times before he answered.

‘Darling, it’s me.’

‘Cassie? Jesus … hang on.’ There followed a series of muffled footsteps and the sound of a slamming door. ‘What the hell are you doing? Jesus, Cassie, I’ve told you
never
to call me at home, it’s just too dangerous.’

‘Sorry, Dan, sorry … It’s just – Oh, Dan, Tina, my baby niece, has been killed, knocked down by a motorbike, and I just – I feel so – I’m sorry, I know I shouldn’t call you, but I just had to. I feel
so wretched and alone and so bloody helpless and I knew you would be the only person in the world to understand.’

‘How terrible. Cassie, I’m so sorry.’

‘Oh, Dan, I want to see you.’

‘And I want to see you,’ he whispered fiercely, ‘but I can’t. You know I can’t. Sally’s decided to stay in London because two of the kids have got birthday parties to go to. I’m sorry, darling, but there’s no way round it. Your niece,’ he added, more gently, ‘how old was she?’

‘Seventeen months, something like that.’

‘Where did it happen?’

‘Off Oxford Street somewhere – a motorbike, it didn’t stop.’

‘Which hospital was she taken to?’

‘I’m not sure … I … Dan, I need you.’

‘And I need you, Cass.’

‘No, Dan, I need you with me now.’

‘Cassie, I can’t, I just can’t. Look, I can hear one of the children coming, I’ve got to go. I’m so sorry, my love, I’ll call you when I can.’

Cassie looked bleakly through the windscreen. A small fly was crawling across the inside, hopping occasionally and making small buzzing sounds with its wings. She picked up a used tissue from the seat next to her and reached out to kill it, then froze, her hand poised, while her heart pounded with a doubt that had nothing to do with the fly. From nowhere a quotation popped into her head: ‘As flies to wanton boys are we to the Gods, they kill us for their sport.’ During her A levels she had been able to recite whole passages of
King Lear
by heart but only a few remained, filed on some indestructible hard disk in her brain. Dan’s love usually made her feel indestructible, but at that moment, more than ever before in her life, she felt crushed and powerless. She killed the fly with a twist of her wrist, then wept, unaware that Mrs Shorrold was peering anxiously at her through the window of her front room.

In the taxi Serena held Charlie’s hand. If she gripped his fingers hard she could, momentarily, halt the shaking that had started at some dim point in this dark, endless, timeless day. It might have been when they left the room where Tina lay. Or maybe as they went in. It was hard to know, hard to be sure of anything. But now every joint in her body ached from having been in so prolonged a state of perpetual motion; even her teeth were clacking together, as if resisting Arctic temperatures, when in fact the taxi’s heating vents were blasting at them, cocooning them in stale heat, drying the life from the air. There was no consolation in Charlie’s hand. Neither did Serena expect any. There was none for him in hers either. For there was none to be had, anywhere, ever again. He was a crumpled stranger next to her, stricken and unreachable. They held hands as two drowning people might grasp at a twig in an ocean; because, although it couldn’t save them, it was something to reach for. They had left their daughter, their
dead
(Serena stopped at the word, holding it up in her mind as someone might examine an alien object, feeling no connection to it) daughter at the hospital and were going home. Not that that seemed possible either. To be going home without Tina. Leaving her behind, never to hold her, never to feel her solid warmth again …

‘Oh, God, I can’t – I’m going to —’ Serena groped for the handle to wind down the window. ‘I can’t breathe – I can’t —’ She stuck her head out into the dreary London night, throwing her sobs, which were dry and stomach-wrenching, more like being sick than crying, into the mêlée of
car engines and hurrying figures. It was the end of the day and people were scurrying into buses and tube stations like rabbits into their burrows. Somewhere a siren wailed and Serena, remembering the other siren, opened her mouth wider, wanting to scream. But the sobbing had stopped and no sound came out, almost as if it had locked on to the unutterable pain inside. The shaking stopped too, quite suddenly. She brought her head back inside the taxi, but left the window open, letting the rush of night air dry the tears on her cheeks. She felt rigid and bruised and wide awake, so wide awake that it seemed possible she might never sleep again, even if she took the pills the doctor had given her. She had wanted to leave the hospital, but also not to. The still, waxy-faced child lying under the hospital sheet was not her daughter. Yet to leave felt like abandonment. Next to her Charlie groaned. He prised his hand from the grip of her fingers, put his arm across her back and leant his head on her shoulder. She could feel his tremors and his tears dampening the collar of her shirt.

‘Oh, God, the pushchair! We left the pushchair!’ Serena sat forward, knocking Charlie’s head off her shoulder, and tapped the glass divide.

Charlie stroked her back. ‘It doesn’t matter.’

‘It does, of course it does, it’s Tina’s pushchair. The hospital, please.’ Her voice was querulous but commanding. ‘We need to go back to the hospital.’ The cabby nodded and swung the taxi across the road to wait for a break in the oncoming traffic.

‘For God’s sake, Serena, we can call them, we don’t have to go back – I mean, it hardly fucking matters, does it, the fucking pushchair?’

‘It’s got her – Dolly’s in the pushchair, tied to the side.’

‘Oh, Jesus.’ Dolly was the rag doll with flaxen hair and pink sequined clothes that Cassie had given Tina for Christmas, so instantly and madly loved that Tina had refused to be parted from it. Charlie dropped his head into his hands. ‘All the same, it hardly matters, does it? After what’s happened, it hardly fucking matters.’

Serena, still sitting forward in the seat, turned to face him. ‘You might as well say it, Charlie, just say it. You think it’s my fault, don’t you? What happened, you think it’s my fault.’

‘Shut up.’ He groaned. ‘Of course I don’t – how could I blame you? How could I? Don’t say that ever again, do you hear me? I never want to hear you say that again, Serena, do you understand?’

The cabby was speeding back towards the hospital. The dim strains of his radio came through the sealed partition, headlines about the rugby, which England had lost, reports of traffic congestion on the M25.

Serena continued to stare at her husband, his mouth opening, the pain etched like knife cuts round his eyes and mouth. His words meant nothing to her. Nothing meant anything to her. ‘But it was my fault. I was there and I couldn’t stop it. It was –
preventable
and I didn’t prevent it.’

‘It – wasn’t – your – fault.’ Charlie forced each word out, saying what he knew to be true, but without the energy to give it conviction. ‘We must be strong. For Ed and Clem and Maisie. We must be strong.’

Serena sat back in the seat and began to cry again, silently this time, too exhausted either to fight the tears or to speak. When they got back to the hospital the cabby waited, his engine running, while they went inside. The pushchair, Dolly dangling at its side, had been parked behind the desk at Reception. Charlie explained who they were while Serena, with trembling fingers, undid the knot of string that she had – only a few hours and a lifetime before – tied round Dolly’s arm. It was tight and still faintly damp from having spent much of the day in Tina’s mouth, so it took a long time. Charlie and the receptionist watched in silence. When Serena had at last untied the string she pressed the doll to her face, absorbing the faint sweet traces of her daughter. Then she
held it against her chest, cupping the flopping head in the palm of her hand as she would a newborn baby.

Charlie began to wheel the pushchair, but then, unable to bear the poignancy of the empty seat, folded it up and carried it instead. When they got outside the cabby jumped out and opened the door for them, making a big to-do of helping to stow the pushchair. ‘I turned the meter off,’ he said, looking desolate.

‘That was kind, thank you.’ Charlie let Serena get in first, then slid into the seat next to her. On the dashboard, stuck down with a tatty bit of Sellotape, was a picture he hadn’t noticed before, a blurred family snap of a smiling woman and two children, with freckled snub noses and gaps in their teeth. Staring at it, Charlie experienced a fresh heave of shock, just as strong as the one that had sucked the air from his lungs that afternoon, when Serena, her voice ghostly, had phoned him at the rugby. He reached again for his wife’s hand, unable to breathe, seeing only the abyss before them. They would never be happy in the same way again. Not with each other, not with their children.

The house was so empty and terrible that Charlie said they should leave for Ashley House at once. Echoes of Tina were everywhere: a tiny blue sock on the hall radiator, a sticky beaker in the sink, a half-done wooden jigsaw of Goldilocks and the three bears. Serena moved as if in a trance, picking these objects up, stroking them and putting them down again. She had tucked Dolly inside the front of her shirt, so that only the top of the head was visible, its yellow stringy hair dangling over her shirt buttons. ‘I can’t go yet,’ she murmured. ‘Not yet.’

‘But the kids … they need to see us. It’s terrible for them too.’ She nodded, but Charlie could tell she wasn’t really listening.

‘I wish I knew there was a God,’ she murmured. ‘Then I’d know she’d see Mum.’

‘What?’ Serena’s mother had died of pancreatic cancer shortly after Ed was born. Deserted early in her marriage by her husband, she had brought up Serena and her elder sister, who now lived in Canada, on her own.

‘In heaven or whatever.’

‘Right.’ Charlie didn’t want to pursue the thought. The notion of heaven or any other religious construct seemed an unlikely prospect at the best of times. A God who steered small children under motorbikes wasn’t worth contemplating. ‘I’m going to have a drink. Do you want one?’

Serena shook her head absently. ‘I’m going to look for … They’ll want to dress her for … I must choose something nice.’ She started up the stairs, tugging roughly at the strands of hair falling out of her big combs. Charlie watched until she had turned the corner on the landing and was out of sight. He went into the kitchen, poured two inches of whisky and drank it in one go. Then he reached for the kettle and a tea-bag, dropped his head into his hands and wept.

In the evening light the mountains were towering white pyramids streaked with black and purple where outcrops of rock and forest scarred their sides. Several snowploughs were zigzagging their way across the slopes, moving like ants across a vast landscape, their flashing lights tiny fireflies pricking the darkness. Helen, standing on the balcony of their hotel room, shivered inside her fleece and tugged its collar round her ears. From the dining room several storeys below faint strains of jollity broke the silence. Their rooms, two doubles side by side, were positioned on the quietest, most expensive wing of the hotel, facing towards the mountains and away from the bubbling outdoor pool where Chloë, Ed and Peter had spent a good hour splashing off the grime of the journey before dinner. Helen had been prevented from joining them by a monumental ache
in her abdomen, an ache that had quickly translated itself into a rush of menstrual blood. In one way she was relieved – it went some way towards explaining her recent emotional turbulence. The arrival of a period, no matter how painful and unpleasant, always contained an element of catharsis, a sense of purging, not only of blood but of invisible tension. Less reassuring was that it had happened, on this occasion, and a couple of previous ones, so unexpectedly and with such vehemence. Helen had never been one of those women enslaved by her cycle; her periods had always been regular and easily managed. It was both alarming and disorientating to feel now that her body was losing touch with such patterns. Where once tampons and an occasional aspirin had put the matter from her mind, she had lately taken to using heavy-duty analgesics and wodges of sanitary towels to get through the ordeal of the first couple of days. The idea of joining her family for swimming had been both impossible and faintly abhorrent. The prospect of managing a day up the mountain, stuffing tampons and pads into the small zipped pockets of her ski-suit, then racing between the various lavatory facilities stationed round the slopes was equally unappealing. And there was the pain to contend with: muffled unsatisfactorily by pain-killers, it was a constant pulse – like the regular stabbing of a knife – that ran not only through her womb but into the deepest reaches of her lower back. She couldn’t imagine staying upright for more than thirty minutes, let alone leapfrogging down a mountain after her husband, who ski’d hard and well.