The Lie of Love

THE LIE OF LOVE

Belinda Martin

Belinda Martin

THE LIE OF LOVE

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The Lie of Love 

Alistair Jordan’s clinic room always had a strange aroma.
Darcy could never quite decide what the overriding constituent was, but
somewhere within the layers of smells that made up the whole unsettling fugue
she could always detect disinfectant, stale coffee and pine air freshener.
Today there was probably a new smell creeping through the synthetically
controlled air, and she recognised it coming from herself: desperation.

‘The procedure you’re asking me
for simply isn’t available in the UK.’
Alistair sat forward in his chair slightly, leaning over the desk to hold Darcy
in what he obviously thought was his sincerest gaze. ‘We don’t have a
specialist in this country
who
can perform it…’ he sat
back in his chair again, thoughtful for a moment. ‘I think there’s someone in Germany,
and I know for certain there is a chap in Canada.
If you want my opinion on who is the best surgeon, however, I’m aware of Ted
Steinbeck in Florida who has a
very good success rate indeed.’

As Darcy measured her response,
her gaze was drawn to his desk. It was littered, as always, with photos of his
own perfect brood, as if to remind his patients and their families just what
fully working limbs looked like and that he was more than capable of producing
offspring who sported them. He had six children of his own, he’d once told her,
by two different wives.  As Darcy looked at him now, larger than life in
every sense, she couldn’t imagine how any woman had the physical strength and
stamina required to stay beneath him long enough to get pregnant. The
possibility of them being female sumo wrestlers had occurred to her more than
once, although one of the photos showed a slim and very pretty Asian woman,
whom Darcy presumed to be wife number two judging by the ages of the children
pictured clinging to her various limbs.

Whatever the juicy details of his
personal life, Alistair Jordan was an excellent consultant – the best the NHS
had to offer in his field – and because of this Darcy had been only too happy
to pack her daughter, Sophie, and all her equipment up for the sixty mile round
trip as many times as necessary to see him. In the course of Sophie’s nine year
life, this had been quite a lot.  Before Sophie had been diagnosed with
cerebral palsy at the age of nine months, Darcy had already known, with all the
unerring precision of a mother’s instinct, that something was very wrong with
her daughter. The trouble was, nobody else seemed to see it, not even
Ged
, no matter how many times
Darcy explained the tiny strange reactions that she had never seen in her older
child, Jake, and the developmental milestones that Sophie just didn’t seem to
be moving towards at the same pace as Jake had done. All children develop at
different rates,
Ged
had told her in the kind of
measured and slightly condescending voice that made her want to slap his face
raw.

‘You’re telling me that
nobody
in Britain can
perform this?’ Darcy
asked,
a note of scepticism in
her voice. ‘Or are you telling me that the NHS isn’t willing to pay for it?’

He smiled slightly. ‘Perhaps a
little bit of both would be nearer the truth.’ Darcy began to speak again but
he held up his hand to halt her. ‘I’ve known you long enough now to see there’s
an argument brewing…’ He gave a wider, more affectionate smile now, the
professional veneer fractured to allow a glimpse into the soul of the man.
Darcy had long suspected that he had a bit of a thing for her – it wasn’t
arrogance on her part and she didn’t particularly revel in it like many women
would, but it was plain and simple intuition. As he looked at her now she saw a
flash of that fondness or attraction – whatever you wanted to call it. She had
never mentioned it to
Ged
,
of course, who would have been straight over to the clinic with his fists
ready. ‘And no amount of research on the internet or logic or cajoling me can
change what is beyond my power to change. There are battles you can win with me
– and that’s probably most of them,’ he laughed, ‘but this is one battle where
you don’t even have a battleground to fight on.’

‘So you’re telling me my daughter
has to continue to suffer when the surgery exists to ease that?’

‘It’s not that simple. This
procedure isn’t guaranteed by any means. In fact, there is a very high failure
rate, which means she goes through a long and complicated series of operations
followed by months of punishing physiotherapy and still might not walk at the
end of it.’

‘But it might stop the spasms and
the constant pain?’ Darcy asked.

‘We can do our best to keep that
under control through other means.’

‘They don’t work!’ Darcy paused,
aware that her voice was getting higher and louder.  Sophie hadn’t been
due a review for a few weeks but Alistair had agreed to see Darcy in between
his other patients to discuss this. The last thing she needed right now was to
erode his goodwill and even in her agitated state she could see that shouting
might just do that.

‘Darcy,’ he began, apparently not
phased at all by her outburst, ‘I understand more than you know how distressing
this condition can be for the parents and I understand how desperate you must
be to do everything in your power to help. But there is no cure, no matter what
doctor you see, and you know that. We must do everything we can to manage it,
but managing is all we can do.’ He folded his arms and leaned back in his chair
as he regarded her thoughtfully. ‘If you want to have a chat with Ted Steinbeck
I can give you a contact email. He can explain the procedure to you and you can
make a more informed decision as to whether it’s something you want to pursue.
But I’m warning you now that I know two families who have gone down this road
and they’ve gone to enormous lengths to find the funds. It’s by no means an
easy option and particularly stressful on the family as a whole, not just the
child undergoing the surgery.’

‘I’d like
that,’ Darcy said, relief coursing through her. She had expected more of an
argument from him, if she was being honest, but she had gone determined to get
something from the meeting. This was nothing more significant than an email
enquiry, but at least it was a start.

Ged
chewed a mouthful of pasta slowly, glancing across the table at Sophie and Jake
in turn, and then returning his gaze back to his wife. ‘So, it wasn’t really
worth going all that way to see him?’

‘That’s not what I said,’ Darcy replied,
trying, for the second time that day, to keep her temper in check. ‘I said that
the NHS couldn’t help us, but I didn’t say that help wasn’t out there.’

‘In
Florida
?
How’s that help? We can’t afford to go to Florida
for three weeks, not to mention the huge medical bill we’d run up whilst we
were there having this magic fix done.’

‘No, we can’t. But I’ve been
researching –’

‘Oh… here we go,’
Ged
cut in, ‘bright ideas from the
internet again. I ought to rip that cable out and maybe we’d have some peace around
here. Or maybe you could get a job so you wouldn’t have the time to
prat
around on the internet all day…’

‘Other people have done it –
raised the money,’ Darcy continued, ignoring his jibe. ‘If others can do it,
why can’t we?’

‘I’m not putting this house at
risk by securing a loan of that size on it.’

‘That’s not what I meant. Of
course I wouldn’t ask you to do that. I’m talking about fundraising, like
raffles and stuff.’

‘Sounds a bit
of a pain if you ask me.
And one hell of a lot of raffles to raise sixty
grand… which, by the way, sounds like the sort of figure plucked from the air
anyway.’
Ged
shoved another
forkful of pasta into his mouth. Darcy glanced across at her children. Jake was
reading a comic as he ate, clearly oblivious to the conversation his parents
were having and Sophie was staring out of the window. Darcy couldn’t tell
whether she was listening or not and most of the time she was so quiet and
secretive anyway that Darcy wondered just how much of what was discussed at the
dinner table ever went in. There was simply no way of knowing.

‘You would say that.’ Darcy
swiped savagely at a fly that had been droning in lazy circuits of the dining
table. ‘If it takes a bit of effort you never want to know. And as for the
plucked out of the air figure, I’ve done my research.’ Darcy enunciated the
last word forcefully and crooked her fingers into the air as mock speech marks.

‘That’s unfair. My job is
demanding enough and the tiny bit of free time it affords me is precious.’

‘More precious
than your daughter?’
Darcy shot her husband a confrontational stare.

‘What you’re asking for is more
than a bake sale at the village hall. What you’re asking for is full on months
and months of commitment. I don’t think you have any idea of the magnitude of
this task you’re trying to get us all signed up to. Have you forgotten that you
also have another child who doesn’t get enough time from us as it is?’

‘Of course I haven’t! I do
nothing but remember him. I spend my days feeling torn and guilty that I don’t
pay him enough attention; that he suffers because Sophie needs such a lot of
care. And some days I want to run a knife across my wrist because I blame
myself for the way Sophie turned out.’ Darcy jabbed a finger at her husband.
‘You didn’t carry her… you don’t wonder whether every tiny thing you did while
you were pregnant could have been the thing that caused her disability. She’s
in constant pain, she’ll never have a normal life, and it’s
all
my
fault.’ Darcy drew a deep breath to compose herself as the wide eyes
of both her children were now fixed firmly on her. ‘Can’t you understand that I
just need to do something… anything, to make it right?’

‘For God’s sake, we’ve been over
this,
Darc
. I’ve told you it’s not your fault, the
doctors have told you it’s not your fault, your counsellor has told you it’s
not your fault… what do you want, a bloody certificate or something?’

Tears sprung to her eyes, tears
she didn’t want to shed, not in front of her children. She felt the lump
burning her throat. Sophie watched her carefully through huge blue eyes that
appeared too large for her tiny frame –
Ged
had always joked, with somewhat bad taste Darcy felt, that his daughter looked
like the archetypal Dickens’ waif, but as Darcy looked at her now that
description had never seemed so fitting.  Her long hair had been loosened
from school so that it fell around her shoulders, swamping her already thin
features and her clothes hung from her, as they always did. It was part of her
condition that Sophie was thin, but it was just another thing that Darcy saw as
somehow her fault.  As these thoughts ran through her head, Sophie
continued to regard her steadily, seemingly without comprehension of the
situation, only an attuned instinct that her mother was distressed.

‘Please…’ Darcy croaked, turning
her gaze back to
Ged
.
‘Please let’s at least try. If it looks bad, if we get so far and it looks as
if we won’t make it, we’ll stop. Whatever we’ve raised up to that point we’ll
give to charity and I’ll never mention it again, I promise.’

Ged
paused. He looked at the children, both hanging
on his every word
now,
and then back at Darcy who was
doing the same.  He clearly knew when he was beaten.

‘Alright,’ he sighed. ‘But I’ll
hold you to that promise. We need to impose a timescale on this, a point at
which we call it a day if we haven’t reached the goal.’

‘Typical architect, all deadlines
and work schedules,’ Darcy laughed, relieved that she had finally got him to
agree. In the end, it had been easier than she had feared it would be. Perhaps
that was because the children had decided to pay attention and
Ged
secretly wondered whether this
one, pivotal conversation would stay with Sophie into adulthood, whatever the
outcome of it was. Darcy certainly didn’t believe for a moment that her speech
about guilt had been the decider – he had never been all that interested in her
feelings before. Whatever the reason he had for giving in, she was glad of it.
She thought quickly, running rudimentary and very instinctive calculations
through her head. A year… that was roughly twelve thousand pounds a
month.  Could she do it in a year? It would take an enormous amount of
help, practically everyone she knew and then some. It would also take plenty of
creative thinking and
Ged
was right about one thing: a few raffles at the village hall was not going to
cut it. ‘How about we give it a year?’ she asked.

Ged
seemed to be stifling a grin.
‘Sixty
grand in a year?
That’s a big ask.’

‘We need to get it together
quickly,’ Darcy replied defensively. ‘The older Sophie is the harder it will be
for her to go through the surgery and rehab, so setting a time limit of a year
makes perfect sense to me.’ 

Ged
picked up his fork again and
turned to his dinner with a wry smile. ‘A year it is. Good luck – we’re all
going to need it.’

Summer was a noisy season in
Lyme
Regis.  Traffic up and down the steep and wickedly twisting roads
increased to the point where any hidden corner could incite a road rage riot as
holidaymakers tried to negotiate routes that were a world away from the
dart-like carriageways of their concrete home towns. With it came the revving
of engines and the blasting of horns, the drumming of footsteps in and out of
the pastel-windowed boutiques and dusty fossil shops displaying remnants of a
long-dead age, the chattering of families, the screaming tantrums of children,
the squealing laughter of a race to the beach, the steady crash of waves on
shingle, the screeching of gulls on the hunt, keen eyed, circling over the
humans on the look out for their next chip or
pastie
meal.  And it smelled more in summer too: petrol fumes, ice-cream, every
other shop front a bakery or restaurant pumping out enticing aromas, the tang
of salt on the air at high tide.  Where many of Darcy’s neighbours had
moved into the town from surrounding counties, Darcy had lived here all her
life. Perhaps that was why she saw the annual transformation differently than
they did. Where they mostly saw income and life, Darcy saw the soul of her
beautiful town eroded, diluted by the influx, changed into a curiosity that
people came to gawp at, people who pushed and shoved and littered and forgot
that other people had to live with their mess long after they had left.