Something Dangerous (Spoils of Time 02) (45 page)

‘In the hallway of course.’ He sounded irritable. ‘It’s hardly likely to be private, is it?’

Two minutes later she was back, ashen-faced.

‘I have to go. Back to New York and I must book a passage to England.’

‘To England? What is this, Barty, have you gone mad, what on earth are you going to England for?’

‘It’s Wol. Oliver Lytton, you know. He’s had a stroke. Twenty-four hours ago. And I didn’t know. I never heard. What must they all have thought of me. I—’

‘How could you possibly have known?’

‘They sent me two cables, Jamie said. Thank God he phoned, he said it was just a hunch he’d had, they all thought it was so strange. Laurence, they sent me two cables, one to the office, only of course I was out all day and one to the house. I never saw it, how could that have been, it wasn’t on the table with the post, oh God, this is so awful, so terribly awful—’ She began to cry, looking at him helplessly like a child.

Laurence suddenly stood up, put his arms round her.

‘I have no idea what could have happened to your cable. Obviously. But thank God we know now. Of course you must go to England. As soon as possible. And if you like I’ll come with you. In fact, I insist. No, don’t argue. You’ll have so much to cope with. I want to be there with you. Now stop crying and go and get your things. I’ll order the car straight away. And I’ll see if I can book a call to London if you like, so you can speak to someone there yourself.’

How could anyone possibly think he was wicked, Barty thought, giving him a quick kiss, turning to run up the stairs to the bedroom. How could they?

CHAPTER 18

‘You’ve got to tell him. You’ve just got to. It’s not fair on him otherwise.’

‘But he’ll be so angry. You don’t understand. He won’t be pleased, he can’t be. He’ll think I’m incompetent that I’m going to be a burden on him and—’

‘Adele! Stop it. What are you, some kind of Victorian miss? I’m ashamed of you. Look, you’re pregnant. The father is Luc Lieberman, I presume—’

Adele looked at Venetia, saw the touch of amusement in her eyes, and smiled back reluctantly.

‘Yes, of course he is.’

‘Well then. You didn’t seduce him while he was asleep, I presume. I mean he must know this could be a possibility, mustn’t he?’

‘Yes. Yes, of course.’

‘Well then. He has to know, Adele, I will not have you rushing off to some clinic in Switzerland to get rid of a baby, without making sure that that’s what Luc wants. If it is – well, then it’s up to you, I suppose.’

‘But it’s so – so stupid of me,’ said Adele, her eyes filling with tears again. ‘I’m usually so careful. It was just that one time—’

‘Oh darling, we’ve all said that,’ said Venetia cheerfully.

Adele ignored her. ‘And then I was so worried about Daddy, and I thought that was what had held up the curse, you know, and it was only when I missed another, and started to feel sick – oh God, Venetia, what am I going to say—’

‘Not many ways of saying it, really. If you mean in French, I have no idea.’

‘I do,’ said Adele, ‘you say “
je suis enceinte
”. Oh well. Best get it over quickly. I’ll go back tomorrow. I think I’ll fly, I’m quite getting to like it, you know. If the sea’s rough that’ll finish me off.’

It was very, very frightening. More frightening than anything Sebastian could ever remember. Except of course – well, of course. But this was so totally unexpected, that was the worst thing. Nothing could have prepared him for it. For going into his study every morning and being quite unable to find anything to fill the day’s pages. Well, he could find something, obviously. He sat there right through the day, struggling; that had always been his advice to other writers with the dreaded writers’ block. He had always despised it anyway, privately declaring it an excuse for laziness. Just get back to your desk, and work through it, he had said over and over again, and in the lectures he gave; work through it as you would a cold. That’s all you have to do. Drive the germs out, the demons away.

But his own advice was quite useless. And day after day the pages found their way into the waste-paper basket. Waste paper, wasted paper: that exactly described it. He had always known when he had written something poor, not up to standard; however much he had tried to ignore it, tried to pretend that it was fine, that he could move on tomorrow, he still knew, with a dreadful leaden certainty. It was like indigestion of the soul: that was how he had described it to Celia. And the only cure was ripping up the pages, quite ruthlessly. No use keeping them, in case: although he had done that a lot lately. Kept them until the morning, gone back to them after a restless night, telling himself he was worrying about nothing, that it would be fine, looked at with a fresh eye, that the new storyline was really rather good, maybe not quite so fresh, but then what could be after fifteen years.

But it was no good: day after day it was no good, the new storylines were feeble, sickly things, devoid of passion, humour, originality. And day after day, it got worse and the panic increased. Time passed and the annual deadline neared and all he had was a few thoughts and a couple of dozen pages of manuscript that were completely worthless and for the first time since he had first begun to dream of Meridian, the impossible had at last happened and he had nothing to say. And the worst thing of all was not the fear that it would go on for ever, not that there was no one he could talk to about it: but that the one thing which had been his panacea, the drug in which he could take refuge for his grief, all his loneliness, was suddenly quite useless and there was no escape from anything to be found anywhere.

‘Barty, how is your friend Abbie?’ Venetia was quite surprised to hear herself asking the question; it was over six weeks since what she always thought of afterwards as The Moment, since Boy had walked into the room where she and Abbie were and neither of them had said or done anything, anything at all and yet…

‘I – don’t know, really,’ Barty said, her voice immensely casual. ‘We’ve – sort of lost touch.’

‘Really? But she was your best friend. You used to do everything together. What happened?’

‘Oh – well, you know, I was going to America and she’s always so involved with a hundred things, and we kind of drifted apart. Venetia, I really wanted to – ’ She felt terribly sick. This was awful. Horrible. This was what she had gone to America to escape from. The quicksand, the dangerous, deadly quicksand.

‘She came to see me, you know.’

Don’t look at her, Barty, keep calm, just go on answering her questions, she can’t know, she—

‘Did she? Whatever for?’

‘Boy wanted Henry to learn the piano. Mummy had heard that Abbie gave lessons and—’

‘Your mother?’

‘Yes. Abbie went to see her to get some more books for her school and it turned out that she gave lessons and Mummy suggested I got in touch with her.’

‘Oh really?’ She’d faint in a minute. Or be sick.

‘Yes. But – Boy didn’t think it would work.’

No, he probably wouldn’t.

‘Really?’

‘Yes. So I had to say no to her. She seemed quite upset at first, in fact she rang me twice to try and change my mind. But of course she doesn’t know Boy.’

‘No.’

‘Anyway, I just wondered if you’d seen her. More tea?’

Barty shook her head. ‘No, thank you. I only came in to say goodbye, I’ve got so much to do before tomorrow. It’s been so lovely seeing you all, Venetia, and I think your children are just wonderful—’

‘You sound like an American.’

‘I hope not. I still feel absolutely English.’

‘Good for you.’

Better this: moving away from the quicksand now. She felt a wave of rage towards Abbie so powerful it hurt physically. She must speak to Sebastian, see what he could do. Venetia was still talking . . . she tried to concentrate.

‘Now give my love to Maud and Uncle Robert and next time you come, bring the wicked Laurence with you.’

‘He’s not wicked,’ said Barty firmly, ‘he’s – difficult, and a bit tortured and spoilt of course, but he most definitely isn’t wicked. Do you know, when I first found out Wol was ill, he insisted on coming with me to England. To be with me. It was only some terrible crisis at the bank that stopped him. He’s terribly generous and thoughtful and—’

‘Those are lovely pearls. Were they from him?’

‘Yes. Yes they were. I’m glad you like them.’

‘They’re absolute heaven. And – is he truly disgustingly rich?’

‘He is very rich,’ said Barty laughing, ‘I don’t know about disgusting.’

‘How did he not lose it all in the crash?’

‘I’m – not sure. He’s very vague about it. He said it was best explained by asking if the royal family had lost all their money during the Depression here. I said no, of course not, and he said well there you are.’

‘I hope he doesn’t liken himself to our royal family.’

‘No of course not. He meant – I think – that if you had that much of everything you could ride over any depression.’

‘I’m sure he must be terribly attractive. Oh, Barty, it really is exciting. What a terrible pity Maud and you have fallen out over him.’

‘It’s only Maud falling out,’ said Barty. ‘I’d still love to be friends with her. I think if she’d come over to see Wol, I’d have been able to talk her round.’ She sighed; Maud’s flat refusal to come over as soon as she heard Barty was booked on to a ship on the Monday had hurt her dreadfully. Robert had come and on the same ship but she had seen little of him; the sea was extremely rough for the time of year; Barty had stood on the deck one particularly wild day, as the ship rode the great waves, her anxiety over Wol temporarily eased, thinking of Robert suffering in his cabin. When it was a little calmer, she had gone to see him, begged him to come outside and join her: ‘It’s so wonderful, it just takes hold of you and you feel part of it, part of the wind and the sea’, but he looked at her in horror and closed his eyes again.

He had been touched by her concern for him, by her daily visits, and as the weather eased, and they had been able to talk, they had become friends again. She could see he was baffled and even shocked by her devotion to Laurence, and that nothing would change his view of him, but she also managed to convince him there was no need for the two of them to be enemies.

‘I can’t help how I feel about him, and how I view him, and nor can you, but if we leave him out of our friendship altogether, then it should be all right. Anyway, it’s all much less important than Wol.’

‘It certainly is,’ he said, smiling at her weakly, patting her hand.

They were feeling more hopeful that day; a cable had reached them to say that Wol had finally recovered consciousness.

But nothing could have prepared Barty for what she found when she walked into Wol’s room at the hospital; he was indeed conscious, but apparently little more. He could see and hear, Celia told her in a brisk tone that denied her own distress, but so far couldn’t speak, and apart from his right arm, he appeared to be completely paralysed.

‘The specialist has said I have to accept this, that the stroke was extremely severe and we are lucky Oliver is still alive. However, I’ve told him I have no intention of accepting it, and I’m already arranging to see several other specialists. In any case, there is an improvement every day, however slight. I am convinced it’s just a question of time.’

Barty, looking at the fragile silent shell that had been her beloved Wol, found it extremely hard to believe her.

But the doctors had not encountered Lady Celia Lytton before; within two weeks, a rather grudging neurologist conceded that there did, after all, appear to be signs of Oliver recovering some movement in his left arm, and although he would not personally have described the patient’s awkward grunting as speech, it was certainly encouraging that he could make any sound at all. Celia told him that what she had observed were not signs of movement, but actual movement, more pronounced each day, and that what might sound like awkward grunting to him were easily discernible words to anyone who cared to take the trouble to listen properly.

‘Poor man, he was absolutely crushed,’ said Adele to Venetia, ‘left the room very quickly. And now Mummy’s found some other specialist. She’s having Daddy moved home, says he’ll do much better in familiar surroundings. I tell you one thing, I don’t envy the resident nurses he’s going to need.’

There were times in the ensuing weeks when Oliver himself, as he told Venetia later, would have given anything to be back in hospital. He was moved home to Cheyne Walk and into the morning room on the first floor, converted into a nursing home. ‘It has to be the front of the house so that he can see the river,’ said Celia, ‘he’s always loved it and it will stimulate him. Stimulation is all, Dr Rubens says.’

Dr Rubens was a name they all came to dread; Celia had discovered him by chance through a friend and while he was a qualified neurologist, he was also and most unusually a committed naturopath and chiropractor. She regarded him as second only to God – ‘and herself of course,’ said Adele with a giggle – and quoted him endlessly, not only in what she insisted on calling the convalescent room, but over the dinner table and even in the office. Dr Rubens had prescribed a strict diet of entirely raw food; in the early days before Oliver was able to eat properly, Cook had to spend hours chopping and sieving fruit and vegetables into a juice which was then spooned into him, either by Celia or one of the nurses.

He also insisted on a regime of gentle spinal manipulation, essential to the health of the central nervous system – this again against the advice of the other specialists, who had told Celia repeatedly that Oliver’s central nervous system was damaged beyond repair – and intense physiotherapy for several hours a day. ‘The muscles must not be allowed to waste, Lady Celia,’ Dr Rubens said. ‘They must be exercised to preserve their strength and this in turn will stimulate the central nervous system.’

In the few exhausted hours when he was not having his limbs massaged, flexed, pushed and twisted, Oliver was given speech therapy, and quite literally taught to speak once more. Much of this task was undertaken by Celia herself, who was a most unforgiving practitioner.

‘Not “nud” Oliver, “mud”. Mmm. Push your lips together, that’s better, and now make the sound. No, I couldn’t hear you. Try again. No. Mmm. Mud. MUD, Oliver, you’re not trying. Yes. That was better. Now again. No, don’t try to tell me you’re tired, plenty of time to rest later. This is much more important.’

The family watched, initially amused, then anxious, but finally awestruck as at the end of the second week, Oliver raised his left arm in a gesture of greeting as each of them entered his room, and by the end of the third, could stammer, albeit in rather strangulated tones, ‘Kit’ and ‘Barty’.

‘The two favourites,’ said Adele lightly, winking at Oliver, but it was of course that those were the simplest names; ‘Dell’ followed and then ‘Neesha’ in another ten days. Only ‘Giles’ continued to elude him; Celia told Giles this was simply that it was the most difficult consonant, and that Oliver hadn’t managed her name yet either, but Giles saw it as continuing proof of his guilt and his father’s hostility, and carried his hair shirt home in anguish for Helena’s inspection.

Helena was, perversely, rather impressed by Dr Rubens and his methods; amongst her earnest reading had been several studies on natural healing and what she called its near-miraculous results: ‘It’s all very well to scoff, Giles, but don’t forget the doctors more or less wrote your father off for the rest of his life. This man has achieved absolute wonders for him in just a few weeks.’