‘Did you get some sleep?’ he said.
‘A little. Ed… we are due at the hospital this morning to give them the final go ahead…’
‘Yes.’
‘…to switch off Izzy’s life support and take her organs?’
‘That’s right.’
‘I know we’ve talked about this many times already, but I want to ask you this once more – and I shall never ask you a more important question.’
‘Ask then.’
‘Please don’t answer immediately. Think about it as if for the very first time. Is there any chance – even a one per cent chance, even the tiniest chance that you can’t even quantify – that if Izzy was kept alive, that perhaps there might be some change in her condition or perhaps a breakthrough in medical science, some new development that would restore her brain and allow her to resume her life?’
‘Marianne…’
‘I said don’t answer immediately.’
‘Alright…’
Marianne lay in silence for several minutes while Edward got up and went to the bathroom. She didn’t doubt what his answer would be but she felt that she owed it to Izzy to make this one last plea.
‘The first thing to understand,’ said Edward, coming back into the room, ‘is that Izzy is already dead. Although we use the expression “life support”, what we really mean is that her tissue and organs are being temporarily kept in a viable state by artificial means. No one is going to end her life by switching off the ventilator and disconnecting the feeding tube, or indeed by removing her organs.’
Coming around to Marianne’s side of the bed, Edward sat down and held her hands in both of his. ‘Brain death is a very conservative diagnosis, Marianne, there is no such thing as being almost brain dead. Like pregnancy, it’s either yes or no. Every possible test has been carried out to confirm the diagnosis. But to answer your question directly: without a sufficient blood supply, the cells in the brain begin to break down – soon there won’t even be the remnants of a brain to restore. Also, without an active brain, it’s not possible to preserve the body’s organs artificially for very long. Everything will soon begin to decay.’
She put her arms around Edward’s neck and pulled him down towards her, holding him tightly to her chest. ‘Thank you. I love you, Ed – and I’m sorry to go on…’
‘I wouldn’t expect anything else.’
‘Do you mind if I spend some time alone with Izzy this morning?’
‘Of course.’
‘Can you come back for me at lunchtime? I’m going to need you then.’
‘I’ll come back whenever you want.’
So Marianne went alone to the little side ward in the hospital where Izzy, or whatever was left of her, was being kept in that state which Edward insisted was death, but which to her non-medical mother still looked cruelly like a form of life and she said all the things that she couldn’t say in front of Edward. She begged for Izzy’s forgiveness where she thought she had failed her, and forgave her for the occasions she had disappointed them. She rejoiced with her in all that she had crammed into her short life; she was happy that she had known love and sexual fulfilment; she praised her courage in keeping her child and gave thanks for the satisfaction that motherhood had brought her. She congratulated her on the early stages of academic success and thanked her for the love and happiness she had given to her parents. Above all, she promised she would do everything in her power to ensure the security and happiness of Callum.
She wished there had been some part of her that still believed in the possibility she could be with Izzy again in an afterlife, but if she had ever believed in that fairytale, such time had long since passed.
When she had exhausted everything she had to say, she let her tears flow until she was choking with heavy sobs, like a steam train slowly gathering speed out of the station. This time she didn’t hold back; she lay on the bed beside Izzy and howled in anguish at the death of her beloved daughter; a long series of tortured, animal howls came from deep inside her until the noise she was making brought two nurses into the room. Gently they prised her from the bed and sat her in an armchair and wiped her face with a warm cloth while one of them called Edward and told him she was ready to go home.
13
When she thought about it afterwards, Marianne would acknowledge the curiosity she had felt when she first saw the hand-written envelope with its Russian stamps. Curiosity, but not alarm. She didn’t recognise the handwriting as belonging to either of her academic correspondents. Who was the mysterious Russian letter writer, she wondered? Perhaps a fan of her novel – but that would normally come via her publishers. Perhaps an invitation to attend a conference or give a lecture? This was certainly possible now that the old Soviet Union had come to an end.
Dropping the bills and junk mail onto the kitchen table, Marianne opened the envelope and studied the contents. Her first reaction was to laugh – but it was a laugh with a distinctly hysterical edge. I am being blackmailed, she thought. Good old-fashioned blackmail for money. Twenty thousand pounds or the photos go to her husband, her parents and anyone else the blackmailer thought ‘would be interested to see them’. Inside the envelope, folded in a square, was a colour photocopy of one of the pictures Colonel Petroff had shown her nearly twenty years earlier.
A good thing Edward’s at work, she thought, as she studied the picture carefully for the first time. Although wincing at its pornographic nature and at the long-forgotten images of Larry, she couldn’t help a frisson of self-regard – I was pretty fit in those days, she thought – and Larry wasn’t so bad either. Then she carefully burned the picture in the sink and washed the ashes down the drain. The letter itself she concealed in her study.
Marianne had watched with growing satisfaction the implosion of the old Soviet Union and the collapse of communism. With every new development, she had felt further removed from any lingering anxiety that the past still had power to harm her. Now, with a sharp constriction in the muscles of her stomach, she realised how naïve she had been. Chaos, economic collapse and wide scale corruption were what characterised Russia under its new president, Boris Yeltsin; what better environment could there be for a former KGB file keeper to make a bit of money on the side?
Marianne went to her car to drive into Cambridge. She and Edward had moved out of the city two years earlier; it was a move facilitated by Edward’s inheritance from his father, but it suited Marianne to escape the constant reminders of Izzy. Their new house, a strangely shaped piece of Victorian gothic in a village a few miles from Cambridge, had appealed to her; a bit of an ugly duckling, one of her friends had called it, but to her it had already become an elegant swan.
For the rest of the day Marianne tried not to think about the letter. Holly, her child minder, would be picking Callum up from school. She had two student supervisions in the afternoon. It was absurd, she thought, to be worried about what happened all those years ago. With some degree of success, she ploughed through her day, returning to the house in time to help Callum – now nearly six – make a tower from Lego, practise his piano and his writing and then read to him before he went to sleep. As usual with Callum, the book had to involve machines – this time a submarine called Penelope.