Thorn in the Flesh (2 page)

Chapter Four

Leaving hospital at last, on a bright Monday afternoon towards the end of April, was more of a physical strain than she had anticipated. Nicky picked her up early in the afternoon, after the consultant had given the go ahead, and the two women walked out down the narrow, antiseptic corridors of the hospital into the sharp light of spring. Kate wanted to leave with dignity but instead found herself scurrying for items she’d borrowed or bought while she was here: soap, toothpaste, a small pink comb she’d never have imagined possessing before now. Somehow it seemed impossible to leave them, even though they were no longer necessary.

Nicky said nothing, but simply watched as Kate stuffed the items strewn round her now vacant bed into the bags her friend had brought. Once, she stretched out to try to help, but Kate hunched away.

‘No, please. I can manage. You’re being kind enough.’

Outside, the afternoon sun hit Kate as if it were an enemy, uncaring, distant. She could hear people talking, the sound of laughter, and it made her shiver, though it wasn’t cold.

‘The c-car?’

‘It’s here, darling. I parked as near as I could.’

Four paces to the left brought Kate to the familiar bright red of Nicky’s Polo. Something she recognised in this unfamiliar place, and she blinked the tears away.

‘Thank you,’ she said again. ‘Thank you.’

In response, Nicky gave Kate a quick hug and then helped her into the car. It felt to Kate as if she were an old lady unable to bring her limbs quite under her control, but at last it was done and Nicky was putting the bags into the boot. Kate gave her friend a quick smile and then leant back on the seat and shut her eyes. She didn’t want to experience the journey between here and Godalming. She simply wanted it to be over.

At this time of day however, such a miracle was beyond both of them. It was a little after 3.30pm and the hospital roundabout was busy with shoppers at the nearby Tesco. They would just have to wait.

As they drove past the supermarket, Nicky spoke, ‘I don’t think you need anything. I’ve got milk, fruit and bread and some ready meals in the back of the car. That will keep us going for a day or two, if that’s okay.’

Kate had never in her life eaten a ready meal; it wasn’t something that had ever occurred to her, though she knew her friend, as a busy working mother, saw them as a frequent lifesaver. However, that wasn’t her main concern.

‘Us?’ she said, opening her eyes and watching the straight, bleak lines of the A3 rushing towards the windscreen before being swallowed up behind them.

‘Yes,’ Nicky said. ‘Us. I thought you might like me to stay with you in the house for a couple of days. I thought it would be best, and David is okay about it. I’ll have my mobile anyway, and it’ll be fine. If it’s okay with you?’

Yes, it was all right with Kate. Far more than that. She didn’t know how to reply or whether she was even capable of doing so, and instead reached over and squeezed her friend’s arm.

‘Yes, please,’ she said. ‘But what about the twins?’

‘Don’t worry about them. I’ve bribed them with toys and it will be a good chance for David to get some father and daughters’ quality time in. Anyway, it’s about time he pulled his weight.’

Kate couldn’t help it. She laughed and the sound of it was like plunging into cold water.

‘Yes, I suppose it is,’ she said.

For the rest of the journey back to the house, Kate stared out of the window and listened to the low murmur of Classic FM from the car radio. Nicky’s choice, not hers, but today that was fine. Today wasn’t a day for stimulation of any kind, musical or otherwise. Outside, the brief stretch of A3 was soon abandoned, and they were turning down the slip road to Godalming, sweeping past the tall crosses marking the walkers’ route and into the country roundabouts on the way to Charterhouse. Kate leant her head against the window where the glass, cooled by the air conditioning, contrasted with the heat of her skin. The road narrowed and the trees and hedges grew denser, skipping past Prior’s Field School, where she and Nicky had grown up, deepened their friendship, made their teenage mistakes and from where they had finally left to part temporarily for their different universities. She had gone to Durham, and Nicky to a year abroad in the Far East and Australia, followed by London.

Here and now, the road widened into the outskirts of the town itself and past the ancient Charterhouse School, with its great playing fields, stately buildings and magnificent chapel. She was glad it was still there and let her eyes drink in the familiar sights she hadn’t really noticed for years; it was something traditional, something that had been here before she was born and would be here after she died. For a moment or two it put everything in perspective, but she knew even then that it wouldn’t last. And as Nicky pulled up in front of Kate’s house and switched the engine off, she found her skin was once again too hot and she couldn’t catch her breath.

Staring straight ahead, she tried to glance to the side, simply to see her house – her home – again, but found she couldn’t look at it. Instead her mind was filled with the memories of twelve years ago, when she’d been searching for somewhere to live.

The building in front of her had been at first glance nothing out of the ordinary. A red-bricked Victorian house in a long line of others similar in age and build, each with their own square of regimented front garden. But something about the gleaming windows and the way the morning light fell on the clusters of yellow and cream roses had made her feel safe. Welcomed. As if the house itself was beckoning her onwards. A too fanciful notion and at the time she’d shaken her head to dispel it.

Crunching her way up the narrow gravel path – it had no gate – she’d brushed past a yew hedge that threatened to spill onto the lawn’s composure. The porch announced its existence by means of two chipped concrete steps that she had mounted with care. Inside it, the remains of three or four plant pots lay strewn across the shelved alcove to her left, their contents long since vanished. Across them, a fierce net of spiders’ webs sparkled and undulated in the breeze. On her right, a half-broken broom leant against the furthest column, waiting for someone to come and mend it. Even before she’d reached for the key the estate agent had given her half an hour earlier, Kate had known that someone would be her.

Now, all those feelings had vanished.

‘Kate? Are you okay?’

Nicky’s voice spun her to the present again.

‘Yes. Yes thank you, of course I’m all right.’ She pushed the door open and stumbled out into the crisp air. Under her shaking hand, the roof of the car felt as if it was burning.

Nicky leapt out of the driver’s side and was next to her in a second.

‘I’ll get the bags,’ she said. ‘We’ll be fine. It’s just the two of us.’

Just the two of us, just the two of us … a simple phrase, but a deadly one, in ways Nicky could never know and, somewhere in Kate’s head, it wasn’t true. It wasn’t just the two of them. Already, a third shape was crystallising in her mind with the sort of power she couldn’t ignore. She tried to tell herself it would be all right; after all, David had repaired the broken window, added a bar across it so nobody could get in that way again, checked the other windows for safety and fitted new locks to the doors, hadn’t he? Even so, here more than anywhere she couldn’t get away. Perhaps the doctors had been right, perhaps she did need someone to talk to, a counsellor, but even if she did they couldn’t help her now. There was so much she couldn’t say.

Nicky was beginning to move away, towards the car boot, and Kate knew it was no good. She wouldn’t be able to do this.

‘No,’ she said.

And as she said it, the sun shivered in the sky and all the trees seemed to sway where no wind existed. The world receded for a few moments and she felt as if she were looking down on a scene over which she had no control, where her friend was reaching for bags and she herself was leaning against a car as if she would fall.

‘No,’ she whispered. And the world righted itself, at least in a physical sense, and she was the possessor of her own body again.

‘Kate?’ Gentle arms were reaching towards her and she could see the concerned frown on Nicky’s face. ‘It’s okay. We don’t have to do anything. We can do whatever you want. Stay. Go. Whatever. I’ll be with you, okay?’

‘Yes. I know.’

‘Good. So what would you like to do?’

Turning, Kate looked straight into her friend’s light brown eyes.

‘Can I stay with you? At your house?’ she said. ‘Just for a while. Please?’

Later, sitting in the large, untidy kitchen of Nicky’s home on the other side of Godalming, Kate felt safe for the first time. This came as a surprise as she hadn’t been aware of any insecurity while she’d been at hospital; although it was true she’d had strange, wild dreams and hadn’t slept well. At the time she’d assumed this was natural, bearing in mind what had happened, and the fact she was in an unfamiliar bed. Not to mention trying to cope with the constant noise and movement of a busy hospital. But here the feeling of comfort came rushing in so powerfully that its former absence couldn’t help but be obvious. What else might be missing from her realisation? She would have to be careful.

When they’d arrived, David had opened the front door ready to greet his wife but, at the sight of Kate too, he’d half-smiled, passed one hand through his receding brown hair, stepped forward and, from an instinct she’d been grateful for, had hugged her. Relaxing into his tall, angular body with its mixed smell of spiced aftershave and orange juice, from the twins she presumed, she’d almost wept. His gesture, more than anything, made Kate feel real again. In less time than it took to boil up the kettle, he’d installed her bags in the spare room and hung up her coat.

Now she was sitting in their bright, yellow kitchen watching Nicky make drinks while David played with the twins near the window onto the garden. Kate wondered briefly why he wasn’t at work, but then realised he must have taken the afternoon off from the Accountancy firm he worked for in Godalming. It was kind of him, and she found her eyes filling with tears. The girls were giggling with their father, scribbling shapes she couldn’t see onto blank sheets of paper. It was amazing how alike they looked in certain lights and then, on the other hand, in others they were both so different.

‘Are they too noisy?’ Nicky raised her voice to be heard over the shrieks and chuckles from the corner. ‘They can play in the other room with David, if you like.’

Kate shook her head. ‘No. They’re fine. It’s nice to be somewhere … normal.’

It wasn’t true of course. Kate had never known how to deal with her friend’s children but had done her best under the circumstances. A maternal instinct had never been granted her, but Nicky hadn’t seemed to mind.

Now her friend simply smiled. ‘You can stay here as long as you like, you know. I should have thought about it before, but I didn’t want to presume. I know how independent you are.’

‘Am I? I’m not sure. Not any more. But I’m grateful. You don’t know how much.’

In the middle of the noise and play going on around the two women, a moment of silence ensued between them. When it looked as if her friend was about to speak, Kate spoke first.

‘So,’ she said, nodding towards the source of the rowdiness. ‘You don’t think they’re identical now, do you? Even though they’re still so alike sometimes.’

Nicky’s face softened further as she turned to consider her daughters. ‘True, I don’t think so. Anyway, the hospital have stopped offering the tests now, so I’m happy just to let them be.’

Kate nodded. When Charlotte and Louise had been born three years ago, one of the major topics of conversation had been
are they or aren’t they identical?
On the – for Nicky’s sake – much discussed issue, Kate had found herself swaying between the two camps but now the differences were more obvious. Charlotte, the elder, was the bigger of the two, but that was because Louise had been in intensive care for the first six weeks of her life and had more catching up to do. They both had Nicky’s petite bone structure and large brown eyes, but Charlotte’s face was rounder, whereas Louise had delicate, longer features. It was noticeable too that the younger twin had turned out to be the bolder, more sociable one.

As if to prove her point, Louise danced onto her feet now, swayed a little as if uncertain what to do and sprinted towards Kate, holding the paper she’d just been drawing on in her outstretched hand. Pushing down the instinct to turn away, Kate grabbed her before she could do any damage to herself on the table’s edge and pulled her up onto her lap. As she did so, she caught the fresh scent of talcum powder and almost-baby skin.

‘Careful, Louise,’ Nicky said, half-standing, but Kate shook her head.

‘No, it’s fine. Don’t worry. What have you got here then?’

In answer, Louise thrust out the precious drawing for inspection. It appeared, to Kate’s untrained eye, to be a landscape with the grass crayoned in red and the sky in green, with two black stick figures drawn in heavy strokes in the middle. She made a wild guess.

‘Is that your garden, Louise? With Mummy and Daddy?’

Her guess was right. The girl’s face broke into a huge smile.

‘Yes,’ she trilled and hugged Kate breathless before leaping onto the floor again and running back for more art. She left the drawing behind. As she plumped herself down again and reached for more crayons, Charlotte leant round her sister’s bent frame and gave the visitor a brief, shy smile. Knowing Charlotte was unlikely to come to her for attention, Kate felt herself relax.