‘She kisses my cheek and her kisses feel like a bite. A bite of love so startling I want to die in her milky arms. I want her to untie the white ribbon wrapped round the end of her plait and I want her golden hair to cover me like a shroud. She says: “One day I will take you to visit the Netherlands. In Holland we are nice to our children. Especially in Limburg, where my parents were born and where many mushrooms grow. Yes, I will take you to see the castle gardens at Arcen.”’
Elena pleaded with me to stop him but I pretended not to notice. I had to fill Nick in. I wanted to give him more information. He would need to know how my Dutch tutor stood up in court wearing her white leather heels, holding the Bible in her soft hand as she told the jury in some detail (my fingers were in my ears) how my father beat me and how my mother looked the other way. I needed to feel through Nick whatever it is I felt then because I feel nothing now, but the two female doctors suddenly appeared and took over. They asked me to leave the room while they wrote notes in spidery black ink and clipped them to a file on the end of Nick’s bed.
I drove home feeling more optimistic about the future than I can remember for a long while. When my mother rang my mobile to enquire about the weather, I parked in a lay-by and told her not to feel so bad about ‘the events’, as we called them. I even asked her if she recalled the name of the Dutch tutor she had employed to look after me all those years ago? I could imagine the colour draining from her face as she thought about this. After a long, tortured silence, she whispered, ‘Cornelia. Yes, her name was Cornelia. She liked to collect mushrooms in the orchard. You called her Cokkie.’
I made a note to give Nick this new information. Cornelia was Cokkie. But I would have to get past his guard-dog sister first.
Elena did not usually come to the hospital on Wednesdays so I decided to make Wednesday my main visiting day. I would take Nick for a walk in the grounds and fill him in. When I arrived he was sitting in an armchair in his dressing gown watching a Laurel and Hardy film on TV. I noticed he was wearing his outdoor shoes rather than slippers and that his suit and a few magazines had disappeared from his locker. He waved to me cheerfully and asked if I’d mind getting him a cup of tea from the canteen.
‘Of course,’ I smiled. ‘How about a couple of scones as well?’ The canteen at The Abbey provided a homemade cream tea that I had shared many times with Nick. I even spread strawberry jam on his scone for him, as if he was a child.
The canteen appeared to be entirely deserted. A clock ticked loudly on the wall. As I made my way to the counter (longing for a cigarette) and searched for scones among the white plastic plates on which biscuits were paired with various fruits (two gingernuts with a wedge of orange, two bourbons with a slice of kiwi), I heard someone call my name.
‘Thomas. Come and sit next to me.’
Elena had got to the canteen before me. In fact she had put her coat over two of the green leather armchairs in the far corner as if she were expecting me to arrive. She had even bought a pot of tea and two slices of cheesecake. I was forced to sit down with her, vaguely nervous to be alone with this enigmatic but stern sister. We chatted generally about Nick’s recovery but that was obviously not what she wanted to talk to me about.
‘Why are you so attached to my brother, Tom?’
Elena spooned the cherries off the cake and seemed more relaxed than usual.
‘I don’t really know.’ I told her the truth. ‘I just think your brother is an exceptional person.’
‘You really smell of drink,’ Elena leaned forward. ‘You’re a drunk, aren’t you?’
‘Yes, I’m a drunk.’
She closed her eyes as if trying to gather her thoughts. I noticed that her eyelids were dusted with pale blue eyeshadow that glittered and sparkled under the lights. When she opened her eyes again her manner was no longer amiable. I quickly understood that I was not out of my depth, it was just that Elena was swimming alongside me in the deep end.
‘The doctors think my brother is having a nervous breakdown.’
I attempted to smile.
‘Your brother is very sick.’
She leaned forward.
‘Yes. He’s suffering for you.’
Elena licked a few crumbs of cheesecake off her lips and gazed out of the window at a black Jaguar with tinted windows driving out of the car park. Its engine suddenly stalled near the poppies growing on the banks of the moat — and then started again with a jump. Even this did not wake the two sleeping swans adrift on the dark water.
Elena turned her gaze back to me.
‘It’s very difficult for my family. You see, Tom, I know my brother has a lot of empathy. . but your kind of problems are not Nikos’ kind of problems.’
‘Yes,’ I replied solemnly. ‘I can appreciate that.’
‘His kind of problems when he was a kid were having the electricity cut off because Dad couldn’t pay the bills. He never had a Dutch tutor. He went to a comprehensive school off the Holloway Road.’
I poured myself another cup of Earl Grey, the tea my mother drinks alone in one of the twelve rooms of the family house she refuses to sell.
‘Yes. I read his CV when I employed him, Elena.’
One of the female doctors walked into the canteen and lit a cigarette, despite the No Smoking sign displayed on the wall.
Dr Agnes Taylor had prescribed most of Nick’s medication and overseen his occupational therapy. She waved at Elena with the bottle of mineral water she had just purchased.
‘The taxi arrived. All fine.’
Elena nodded.
‘I saw it go past, thank you.’
I felt unspeakably queasy at this exchange. The Jaguar pulling out of the driveway had made me shiver slightly. Did I imagine that Nick was waving to me from the other side of the tinted windows?
Dr Agnes Taylor glanced at me and smiled.
‘How are you feeling today, Tom?’
‘My heartbeat is very good today, thank you.’
‘Your heartbeat? Well it’s good that it’s good, isn’t it?’
Something was pressing down on my left wrist. I realised Dr Taylor had placed two of her fingers on my pulse, her perfume mingling with the sugar and cream of the cheesecake.
‘A rest here at The Abbey will do you good, Mr Banbury.’
‘Yes,’ I replied, though in fact what I said was ‘Ears’. Which is how men of my class say yes.
‘Ears.’
For an hour after Elena left the canteen, my forehead was streaked with eczema, the twenty-four hour psychosomatic weather that can turn my face into a blazing sunset at any moment of the day.
Ah. Where am I? We will have to spin time forwards to where I am now.
How reassuring it is to sit on the edge of my own bed again. To sip an eggcup brimming with cognac and glimpse the London dawn. The car alarms that pierce the calm of the early morning are a relief after The Abbey’s more panicked silence. The woman who owns the flower stall across the road is setting up for the day. She is bashing the stems of her lilies with a small hammer and placing them in silver buckets of water. It is now 6am and I’m too drunk to use a toothbrush. Too drunk to splash my face. I’ll make my way to McDonald’s on the High Street. Have you seen them, those men and women who sit on the red Formica chairs early in the morning? Eating their breakfast? No longer mad, but dazed instead. Medication has culled them. Chomping on the hash browns. Sucking up sweet strawberry shakes through the straw. Have you seen the expression in their eyes? The way the muscles in the face hang down to the floor? Don’t be frightened. We are all of us breathing in atoms that were once forged in the furnace of a star. There are tiny shards of your life inside them and their life is inside you too. Do you know what they are saying to you?