State We're In (6 page)

‘I've already told the CEO that you are going out to see Rogers. That he wants you to meet his international team. The flight is business class and on expenses. By way of a thank you, you could pick me up a bottle of L'Interdit by Givenchy in the duty-free store. It's quite hard to come by over here.'

In the end it had been easier to go along with Lacey's plan, rather than unpick it. Dean's CEO had been extremely excited that the chances of winning the pitch appeared so promising; Dean couldn't find the energy to explain the reality.

He'd had no intention of visiting his father. He thought that perhaps he would swing by and see Rogers. It couldn't hurt. It might be the thing that would indeed clinch the deal; besides, he should cover his arse in case anyone ever checked up on him. He'd also go and see his sister, Zoe. That would be a treat. He'd look at this as a bonus break, a reward for the numerous late nights he'd clocked recently. He was not going to be burdened with grief or tempted by curiosity about a man he hadn't see in twenty-nine years. Edward Taylor could go to hell. Most certainly he
was
going to hell, and he could go there without a final chat with Dean.

And yet …

Dean's flight had arrived in the UK on time, he'd passed through immigration with unprecedented ease, there were no queues snaking the length of the concourse and then he'd caught a tube that effortlessly transported him into central London. He was surprised to discover that his hotel could accommodate an early check-in. He'd taken a shower and a walk to try to beat the jet lag that was likely to hijack later in the day. He'd set out aimlessly. Perhaps he'd drop by the smart Paul Smith store in Covent Garden, or maybe he'd grab a coffee and a croissant from Patisserie Valerie on Bedford Street. He'd had no intention of getting on a tube again, and certainly not pitching up at the hospital in Shepherd's Bush.

He'd been stunned to find himself outside the large red-brick building at ten in the morning, but told himself that just because he was there on the street didn't mean he had to go in. He didn't need to officially make himself into a visitor; he could remain a passer-by. Hospitals were like warrens anyway; it would probably be impossible to track down Eddie Taylor. Then a chilly spring breeze had bitten the back of his neck. He'd turned up his collar and gone inside.

The more Dean looked at this man, the more confused he became. There was nothing, nothing at all, about him that was familiar. For a moment Dean panicked and considered the idea that he might have been directed to the wrong bed. This might not be Eddie Taylor after all. He was probably in another ward. He would have a nurse sat on each knee and another giving him a head massage. Wouldn't he? Wouldn't that be the case? Because wasn't that how he had always been, at least in Dean's imagination and in his mother's stories? The serial philanderer. The womaniser. The commitment-phobe.

The bastard.

Dean rushed to the end of the bed and snatched up the patient's notes. There it was, typed up in black and white: Edward Charles Taylor. Proof. The other thing it said was that the patient has requested no more resuscitation, no life-prolonging drugs, nothing other than medication to ease the pain.

‘I'm sorry, visiting hours don't start until eleven a.m. I'm going to have to ask you to leave and come back then,' said a nurse, with a polite efficiency that didn't quite mask her exhaustion. ‘The patients need their rest.'

‘He's asleep,' Dean pointed out. He felt a mix of relief and frustration about this. If his father slept he wouldn't have to talk to him, but on the other hand, if his father slept he
couldn't
talk to him. Which did he want? It was a deep sleep, but not restful. Eddie Taylor's pupils darted left and right – the movement could be detected through his thin lids – and his chest rose and fell with a shuddering violence. This was not how Dean had imagined a death scene would be. It seemed wasteful to sleep through your last hours, but then maybe it was fitting. He and his father had wasted so much time, their entire lives. What did it matter if they wasted just a little bit more?

‘Visiting hours are eleven until one and then three until five and seven until nine,' the nurse replied firmly.

‘A little longer. Please.' Dean wasn't sure why he'd asked for more time. He didn't want to be here. He didn't think he should be here. He couldn't remember when he'd last been inside a hospital. During his twenties he used to visit various A&Es on a fairly regular basis on a Saturday night; in fact, a stag weekend wasn't really considered to be a total success unless someone broke a limb or needed stitches. His company had insisted he take a medical, for insurance purposes, but he hadn't had to visit an actual hospital, rather a luxurious consultant's practice on the second floor of a swanky Chicago office block. He couldn't remember ever visiting anyone in hospital. Sitting by a bedside. Watching, waiting, festering. When his sister had her babies he'd been in the States and so he'd met the newborns once Zoe was safely back at home, surrounded by soft toys, piles of disposable nappies and welcoming flowers.

The hospital was bleak, rammed with blatantly baffled patients who drifted through the wards and corridors. There appeared to be an infinite number of anguished or sorrowful souls propping up the walls or slumped on the bedside chairs. Some were no doubt anticipating news about their friends and families; others had already received it. Dean sighed. This was not his sort of place. He liked attractive, successful, resilient sorts. He liked to be cushioned by the lucky and the charismatic. He worked hard to surround himself with luxury, decadence and delights. Now he was surrounded by skinny hardback chairs, tubes, trolleys and a faint smell of disinfectant.

Dean didn't want to be sitting on one of the uncomfortable chairs by Eddie Taylor's bed. Why didn't he simply leave? It was true that he was anti-authority and it was possible that he wanted to negotiate extra time just to prove that something as petty as rules regarding visiting hours didn't apply to him, didn't tie him.

Maybe. Or maybe he actually wanted to stay by this man's bedside.

He wasn't thinking straight. He probably needed some fresh air.

‘Sorry, I didn't know the rules.' He treated the nurse to one of his grins. He flashed this particular grin regularly. It was practised, perfect, showing off a line of teeth that had had the benefit of a top Chicagoan orthodontist. He used this grin when he needed a shop assistant to accept his returned item even though he had failed to retain proof of purchase; he used it when he needed a female maître d' to find him a table, even though he'd failed to make a reservation, and he used it when he needed some hot woman to drop her morals and her knickers. It never failed.

‘Are you family?' The nurse was already looking for a way to allow this man to stay until official visiting hours started, even though she could get into trouble for doing so.

‘I'm his son,' said Dean, turning back to glance at his father, as though he too needed confirmation that this was the case.

‘Eddie's never mentioned a son,' pointed out the nurse, unaware, or at least unconcerned, about any potential hurt her comment might cause.

‘No, he wouldn't,' admitted Dean with a sigh. The sigh seeped like an ink stain on to the hospital sheets. ‘I think I'll go and call my sister. I'll come back at the proper hours.'

‘Oh, he has a daughter too?' The nurse turned toward Eddie Taylor and beamed, clearly pleased for the sick man. ‘How lovely.'

‘Yeah, lovely.' Dean turned away quickly so she wouldn't see his glower.

‘Hi, Zoe.'

‘Dean. Is everything all right?'

Dean wondered whether there would ever come a day when his sister would simply pick up the phone and be pleased to hear from him. He doubted it. She'd probably always assume that he was the bearer of appalling news. Their exposed and lonely childhoods had taught them to expect the worst. They both made a valiant effort to pretend that this was not the case; they'd clawed their way out of their inheritance and become decent, hard-working members of society, but the fact was, they lived with an awareness of the world's underbelly.

Zoe was the epitome of upright and reputable. She drove an old but reliable estate car to toddler dance classes and to resident association meetings; she dressed in White Stuff jumpers and bought her jeans from Gap. She usually carried a cotton shopping bag; ordinarily it was filled with responsibly farmed produce which she made into delicious meals for her family. Most people would probably peg Zoe at a little older than twenty-nine; she had dashed towards being an adult, as childhood wasn't a place either sibling had wanted to linger. But if anyone watched her striding through the cobbled streets of Winchester, where she lived in a small but cosy house, they would never guess that she wet her bed until she was thirteen and that she still couldn't sleep without leaving a light on.

Dean had pulled off an even more stupendous transformation. He was a wealthy and extremely successful advertising executive, who oozed charm and composure. There was nothing about his expensive and elegant style of dressing, his confident swagger in the boardroom, his affable generosity when buying rounds at the bar that suggested that as a child his wardrobe was limited to charity shop purchases and second-hand clothes donated by well-meaning do-gooders. Nor was there anything to betray that he had been treated by a child psychiatrist for anger management until he was sixteen. They had managed to construct convincingly respectable, balanced personas for the benefit of almost everyone else they knew. It was trickier with each other; they couldn't hide the truth of their histories from one another.

‘Hey, don't panic,' he said soothingly.

‘It's just that it's so early for you. Ten fifteen here means it must be just four fifteen your time. If you call in the middle of the night Chicago time then of course I'm going to assume that something is wrong.'

‘Actually, I'm in the UK.'

‘Are you?' Dean could hear Zoe's relief and pleasure. ‘You never said you were coming over.'

‘Yeah. It was sort of impulse.'

‘Great! Will you get time to squeeze in a visit to Winchester and come and see us before you have to fly back?'

‘That's my plan.'

‘I know your work is always hectic, but we do love seeing you. The kids have grown so much since you last saw them. You won't recognise Hattie.'

‘I'm not here on work as it happens.' Dean paused, searching for the right words. He wasn't sure he'd ever find them, so he just blundered on. ‘It's our father.'

‘Our father?' Zoe sounded stunned.

‘Edward Taylor,' added Dean, just in case she didn't know who he was talking about.

‘Is he dead?'

‘No.'

‘More's the pity.'

‘Come on, Zoe, you can't mean that. You're too lovely to think that way.' Dean thought that way but he considered Zoe to be the more compassionate of the two of them.

‘I really do. I am lovely, except when it comes to him.'

‘He's dying.'

‘And?'

‘And I thought you'd want to know.'

‘You thought wrong. I'm not interested.' Dean could hear her breath down the phone line; it was increasingly rapid, as though she'd just completed a ten-kilometre run. She must be wondering why he'd called her about Edward Taylor. Why had he brought this to her Thursday morning? She was probably just on her way out to take the kids to the park, walk their dog. She didn't need this. ‘How do you even know?' she demanded.

‘He got a nurse to call me.'

‘How did he know where to find you?'

‘I don't know. I can't imagine I'm that hard to find.'

‘Yet it took him twenty-nine years.'

Dean ignored the interruption and carried on. ‘I've never been missing. He was the one who disappeared.'

‘Oh, so you do remember that much.' Dean did remember that much. Every day of his life.

‘Zoe, I'm as angry with him as you are.'

‘No, you clearly are not, or else you wouldn't have come from Chicago to be by his bedside. I'm assuming that is why you are here. You're planning on visiting him.'

He couldn't lie to her. ‘I'm actually at the hospital right now.'

‘You've spoken to him?' Her fury and disbelief caused her voice to crack, and she squawked down the phone. Zoe had always suspected that Dean nurtured a secret need to forgive his father; she did not harbour any similar compunction.

‘No, he is asleep or maybe unconscious. I'm not sure.'

‘Why has he got in touch after all this time? Does he want a vital organ?'

The thought hadn't crossed Dean's mind and now he felt stupid. It was possible. ‘I don't think so,' he mumbled.

‘What
are
you thinking?'

‘They said he only has days.'

‘I don't care. I don't know him.'

‘That's my point.'

‘You think you are going to get to know him in his last few days?'

‘Maybe.'

‘You're an idiot to visit him. A bloody idiot. Has he ever visited us?'

Silently the siblings began simultaneous but independent mental tallies of the times that they had waited in vain for Edward Taylor to come and visit them, maybe even rescue them. For the first three years after he'd left, Dean had believed his father would turn up at his school sports days; he'd hoped for this with all the energy and commitment that a young boy could muster. His size had given him an advantage and he'd always been a good athlete, but there was never anyone to cheer him on or witness his victories. What was the point of romping home a good ten metres in front of the other boys if there was no one to feel proud? Dean would be shocked to know that Zoe had harboured similar secret fantasies until she was much older. Right up to her wedding day she'd dreamt that maybe her father would turn up out of the blue to give her away. But he didn't, of course, underlining the fact that he'd already done so, many years previously.