‘Nothing. We think it’s a congenital thing, a defect; the consultant who saw him described it as a time-bomb that could have gone off years ago.’
‘When was he transferred?’
‘Two hours ago. He could be in surgery in Edinburgh already.’
‘How long will the procedure take?’
‘Four hours, minimum. At least, that’s what I recall from medical-school lectures. I’ve never seen one done.’
I ruffled Ellie’s hair and gave her a hug. He was critical, but he was alive, and they don’t make them tougher than Mac Blackstone. ‘Come on, sis,’ I murmured. ‘Let’s get down there. We’ll get him some bacon rolls on the way; if I know him he’ll be hungry when he wakes up.’
8
We didn’t burn any rubber on the road to Edinburgh Royal Infirmary; there was no need for we knew he’d be in theatre longer than it would take us to drive there. Before we left, Dr Oliphant phoned and found a colleague there, advising her that we were on our way. She promised to contact her media-relations people. It was necessary: when we rejoined Conrad and Mary we discovered that a Grampian Television crew was camped outside.
We gave them the slip. . I’m an expert at that, when I want to be. . and headed off in Ellie’s Peugeot towards Perth and the M90.
Conrad drove, with my sister navigating: I chose to sit in the back with Mary.
‘I should have known,’ she muttered, as we cruised along the A914. ‘I should have seen the warning signs.’
I looked at her in profile. It was night, but in Scotland there’s always a lighter blue glow in the north at that time of year, so I could see her clearly. ‘No, you shouldn’t,’ I reassured her, ‘because there weren’t any warning signs. The boy Oliphant said that a consultant cardiologist wouldn’t have spotted this before it happened, unless Dad had been hooked up to an ECG machine.’
‘I should still have known. I’m his wife.’
‘And Ellie’s his daughter: she saw him last weekend and she didn’t see anything out of the ordinary.’
‘Still.’
‘Mary,’ I said firmly, ‘stop blaming yourself. There might have been things in life you should have dealt with better, but not this.’
I don’t know what made me say that. Stress, I suppose: it can make your tongue do things you don’t mean it to, and I sure as hell didn’t want to get into that, not there, not then. I saw her frown, her profile sharp in the gloaming that passes for night in high-summer Scotland, and I looked forward. ‘See if you can find some local radio, Ellie,’ I called out quickly. ‘If someone at the hospital tipped off the telly, they could have it too.’
We had missed the eleven o’clock bulletin on Kingdom Radio by about ten minutes, but we caught up with Radio Forth at midnight as we drove along the Edinburgh bypass. Sure enough, there was a piece at the top of the news, read by a harsh-voiced woman, about ‘Scots movie star Oz Blackstone in mercy dash to the bedside of his sick father’.
They were waiting for us at the entrance to the hospital, three television crews, three radio reporters, and the rest of the pack, more than I cared to count. Conrad and I flanked Mary and Ellie, shielding them as best we could. They were reasonably polite and I knew that they were only doing their jobs. It was my fault that they were there, nobody else’s. There’s a price of fame, but it’s not just the famous who have to pay it. Ask the wee boys Beckham if you doubt me.
‘How is he, Oz?’ one of them called out.
‘That’s what we’re going to find out. I called ahead ten minutes ago and they said that he’s still in theatre.’ We reached the hospital doors. ‘Keep in touch with the PR people,’ I told them. ‘I’ll talk to you again when I have something positive to say, but don’t look for it to be tonight.’
The hospital press officer, who introduced herself as Sydney Wavell, met us as soon as we stepped inside: no doubt the poor woman had been summoned from a peaceful evening at home. She took charge of us and led us through several corridors into a small sitting room in what appeared to be the hospital’s office area, where we were given coffee and chocolate biscuits. At first I was embarrassed: genuinely, I never feel like a celebrity in Scotland, especially not in Edinburgh, and I try to avoid acting the part, yet here I was getting the full treatment. Still, Ellie and Mary were reaping the benefit, and that was good.
When we were settled in, Ms Wavell left us, returning a few minutes with a doctor. His name was Singh, and he exuded competence and reassurance. He didn’t give us any soft soap, but his approach was informed and up-beat. He told us he had just checked with the theatre and that although the operation was in its early stages, Dad was stable and his signs were good. He offered to talk us through the procedure, but I reckoned that was the last thing the girls needed to hear; I didn’t fancy it much myself.
We settled to our vigil. Conrad decided that he was going to sit in the corridor outside to guard the door, in case an over-zealous reporter sneaked inside in search of an exclusive. I thought he was suffering from an excess of zeal, until I realised something. He knew my dad, he had played golf with the two of us, and he liked him. He was anxious too, and was simply looking for something to take his mind off it, for a job on which he could focus. So I let him do as he wished.
Behind the closed and guarded door, Ellie curled up in an armchair and took refuge in sleep. She’s always been able to do that in a crisis. When our mother was in her last illness, I’d often go into her room at the hospice and find her awake and reading, or listening to music through her headphones, with Ellen counting Zs in a chair by her bedside. Indeed, when I broke my arm as a kid, and they put me under to set it, the first sight I remember as I came to was the top of my sister’s head slumped forward on her chest, and the first thing I heard was gentle snoring.
Mary and I aren’t blessed in that way. We sat side by side on a small sofa in the glow of the only table-lamp we had left on, staring out of the window towards the city, watching it as it settled down for the night. We sat in silence, and yet both of us knew that there was something occupying the space between us.
I tried to doze off, but there was no hope of that. Instead I tried to occupy myself by thinking of the day that had ended; it had begun as just another summer sunrise, but it had ended with my life changed, profoundly. Mike Dylan’s return from his secret exile might have been seen as a shock, but no more than that. I had certainly tried to play it that way, but I couldn’t kid myself.
Susie and I had got together in the aftermath of his supposed death; she’d been the emotional equivalent of a sack full of psychotic monkeys, consumed by a cocktail of bereavement, loneliness and betrayal. Me, I’d been easy pickings; in truth, I’d always fancied her and, to be honest, Jan’s death had fucked my head up far, far more than I’ve ever admitted, even to you. Susie might have made the first move, but I made the second, no question about that.
All that apart, though, our relationship, the burgeoning thing we discovered to be love, and finally our marriage had been founded on the premise, in Susie’s mind at least, that Dylan was a goner, and that he had indeed died in that shooting in Amsterdam. Now she knew different; she knew what I had known since just after Janet’s birth, the truth I had kept from her. We still had to deal with that aspect of it between the two of us: she’d made nothing of it earlier, but I knew it would fester.
Beyond that?
You know me, and you know that if there is one thing the man Oz doesn’t suffer from, it’s a lack of self-belief. And yet when I thought of the way things had been with Susie and Dylan, how strong and vibrant their relationship had seemed, I found myself worrying about how she’d react to his return, in the longer term, whether she’d look at me differently, whether what she felt would change. There, in the dark, Alanis Morrisette’s blistering line came into my head: ‘Are you thinking of me when you fuck her?’ It stayed there for a while, too, because it touched a nerve and made me face up to another inner truth: after all the years that had gone, sometimes, when I’m with Susie, I think of Jan.