Looking back, I believe it started that time when Bob was stabbed, and almost died; it was a ridiculous thing, a random street knife crime incident that could have happened to anyone. He hung on the edge for a while, but he pulled through. He has great physical strength, and his body made a complete recovery, but his mind didn’t. It was a different person who emerged from the chemical coma. While the man that I married had been single-minded, the one to whom I found myself married after the stabbing was obsessive, to the exclusion, at times, of everything else.
It was never the same from then on. He shut me out of his life, and for a while I took myself out of his, until I went back, out of stubbornness as much as love. But he never let me close to him again. We had a married life, and we had a second child, but Seonaid’s birth gave pleasure, not joy. We had meetings of the body, but never of the mind. I put a face on it, but inside, I was living in a bubble.
When, finally, I left him for good, I believed that I would be a whole person again, an independent spirit able to interrelate completely with another. But it didn’t work out that way. Oh, it was fine with my New York guy Armando at first, sex and that was all, but as it can be with these things, we started to drift into something else, and that was okay too, up to a point, until he started wanting more and more from me in commitment terms, and then became more and more frustrated when I found that I couldn’t give it, until one night he asked me how it was that he could be in bed with me and still feel alone, and I realised that I felt the same way.
So we split, last January, and that was probably the lowest point of my life, lower even than when the witch stole Bob from me. I’d had suppressed anger to fuel me then and a clear path to a new life that I thought I wanted. But when Armando and I parted, calmly and rationally (that must be the only way I can do it), my tank was drained. All that I had was my isolation. I had a big empty house, I had a job at which I was okay, but at which I knew I did not excel, and I missed my kids so much it hurt. I was back in the bubble, in a country whose passport I carried, but in which I felt alien.
I don’t know what I’d have done if Master Yoda hadn’t made contact, but he did, on the third Friday in February, out of the blue. His email told me that he’d met Andy Martin at a conference and that Andy had let him have my address, and went on to ask me to please call him on the cellphone number he gave me.
I didn’t leap to the phone: Professor Joe Hutchinson was part of the old life I’d left, and even then I’d rarely ever seen him unless we were surrounded by bits and pieces of human beings. I mulled it over for a couple of days, but on the following Sunday I was feeling so low and weepy after a Skype video chat with Mark, Jazz and Seonaid, and more than a little pissed at having seen the witch passing by in the background, that I dialled his number.
‘A long time ago,’ he began, once we’d got past the ‘hello, how are you’ stage, ‘I found that it was much more fun finding out how the dead died than administering mostly palliative care to the mildly unwell, and pandering to malingerers. Maybe I’m being cynical,’ You could say that, Joe, I thought, ‘but I believe that all doctors should be specialists. You’re not a specialist general practitioner, Sarah, and you never will be, but you are a gifted pathologist. There’s a vacancy here at Edinburgh University, linked with the health authority at consultant level, and I’m sufficiently eminent for recruitment to be entirely in my hands. The person appointed will be my number two, and will succeed me as Professor of Pathology, by the end of next year, no later. I owe my wife some time, before she becomes my widow. I’ve put a lot into this department, and I want to leave it in good hands. That’s why I’m offering the post to you.’
I was silent for so long that he thought I’d hung up on him, and hung up on me. I waited for five minutes before I called him back. When I did there were pieces of metaphor all around me on the floor. That bubble was burst. I had purpose; I had self-belief. I was smiling, no, I was beaming.
‘What would I have to do?’ I asked, as soon as we had reconnected.
‘Practise and teach,’ he replied, ‘as I do. You’ve been in the academic word before; you know how it works.’
‘When do I start?’
‘When can you start?’
‘Give me three months to extract myself; May.’
‘That’s ideal, but don’t you want to know about salary and conditions?’
‘No.’
I resigned my New York job next morning and put my property on the market. The kids were with me for Easter when it sold, but I didn’t say anything to them. The only person I told was Andy Martin, out of courtesy because he’d put Joe in touch with me in the first place, but I didn’t give him any details other than that I was coming back to Scotland in May. Bob and the witch? They would find out in due course.
And they did, when I moved into a rented apartment in the city centre a few days before I took up my unannounced appointment. By that time, Bob had heard from Andy that I was coming, but he had no idea that I was back for good. I called him, at the office, and invited him to lunch with me in a restaurant of his choice. He wasn’t keen on a public meeting; instead he proposed the senior officers’ dining room, a small oasis of privilege in the police headquarters building.
We ate there, and I told him about my career move. He congratulated me, without meaning a word of it, I’m sure, but we chatted politely about it, and about his appointment, although he had been in post for nine months by then. We did our real talking afterwards in his office.
‘What do you want?’ he asked, abruptly, as soon as the door closed on us.
‘What do you mean?’ I played the innocent, badly; it doesn’t come naturally to me.
‘You know bloody well what I mean,’ he snapped; just like towards the end of our old times.
He’d asked for it, so I laid it out. ‘I want what’s best for the children,’ I told him. ‘I’ve bought a house in the Grange, and I’m moving in in a month. During the school term, I’ll have them with me at weekends. Okay?’
‘I don’t know,’ he grunted. ‘I’ll need to think about that; they have their own weekend routines. The Jazzer plays mini-rugby on Saturday mornings.’
‘All year round?’
‘Of course not.’ He frowned. ‘Look, Sarah, you’ve bounced this new situation at me. The first thing I need to do is explain it to the kids. Then Aileen and I need to discuss it.’
I felt a chill, as if an ice cube had fallen into my cleavage. ‘Excuse me.’ I suspect that it came out as a hiss. ‘This has nothing to do with that woman.’
‘Oh, it has,’ he murmured. ‘And you’d better believe it.’
Two minutes alone and we were at loggerheads: I’d expected it to take at least five. I stood to leave. ‘Weekends, Bob,’ I repeated. ‘And holidays. For a while.’
That’s how it’s playing out; even if the witch opposed it, although I’m quite certain she didn’t, she’d have been overruled by a higher authority. That same evening, after a brief call to check that I was free, I had a visit from Alex. She brought a bottle of wine, and we had a girlie chat. It wasn’t until the she was leaving that she murmured, ‘Sarah, please don’t hurt my dad, or embarrass him.’
‘I don’t want to do either,’ I told her truthfully. ‘I never did.’
She gave a small smile, and patted me on the shoulder. ‘I’ll talk to him,’ she said.
The arrangement that Alex had brokered was the one I’d proposed, but outside term time, Bob has them at weekends rather than me. Their carer, Trish, is the glue that holds the routine together; she transports them between homes, and has every weekend off.