Dryden looked into Laura’s eyes. Did she know what was happening?
‘They’ve come,’ he said, gripping the fingers still harder. ‘August found them. Trust August. She’ll be fine now.’ He tried a smile and hoped Laura couldn’t see its fragile confidence.
One of the shadows stood and parted the curtain. Lyndon Koskinski stood over Laura’s bed. ‘I’ve wondered, you know, about her,’ he said. ‘When we’ve been visiting, we’ve often sat here, talking, and thought about her. I’m sorry.’
Dryden, confused by kindness, shrugged. For the first time he’d caught the tension in Koskinski’s accent: the preppy college correctness only just obscuring the twang of the Deep South.
Dryden looked at Laura too, catching again a regular sensation that he was seeing her for the first time. ‘She’s getting better. That’s what they say, anyway.’
‘She wants you now,’ said Lyndon simply, turning back towards the screen. Dryden stood, aware that he was about to be asked to play some role other than sceptical observer. He felt unease seep through his guts like a bad curry.
Estelle Beck sat at her mother’s bedside. Her slim, athletic body squeezed into a pair of stone-washed jeans and a white T-shirt. Her hair was a trendy blonde bob cut asymmetrically, which captured what little light surrounded her mother’s bed. The bedside lamp showed a face younger than her twenty-five years. The unmarked, olive skin held a bloom in both cheeks; the eyes a sensational lichen green. She could have been looking out of a sixth-form end-of-term picture. Dryden had met her at visiting time, and once out at Black Bank before Maggie had been admitted for the cancer treatment. She’d told Dryden her daughter was a teacher, in a primary school out on the Fens. He couldn’t remember where: Ten Mile Bank, or Barrowby Drove.
She smiled now, seeing him. ‘Hi. Thanks, for everything. I just feel so guilty we were away…’ she said, her hand seeking out her mother’s on the counterpane.
The heat was suddenly overpowering. Dryden felt a trickle of sweat begin on its long journey from his hairline down one temple. It wasn’t just the heat. Since childhood he had feared being asked to play any role other than bystander. Why did Maggie Beck want him now?
Estelle must have known it was going to happen just before it did, because she leant forward and stretched out a hand towards Maggie’s face. Her mother’s eyes opened slowly and she raised her head from the uncreased pillows with surprising force.
‘She’s not going to die,’ thought Dryden, mistaking the morphine-induced serenity for self-possession.
‘Estelle?’ Maggie said, taking her daughter’s hand. She smiled then, and Dryden saw the truth – the irrational exuberance the drugs were pumping through her bloodstream.
‘I’m here,’ said Estelle. ‘And Lyndon. And Dryden, as you asked.’ Dryden felt even less comfortable, like an interloper. He saw the fear in her eyes as she clutched at her own wrists, as if seeking a pulse. Lyndon crouched down beside Estelle and the three held hands together. Maggie’s other hand covered her mouth, afraid perhaps to tell a secret she had vowed to keep. Suddenly exhausted she slumped back and let her hand fall, the eyes closing and rolling back. Lyndon stood, retreating to the shadows. In the long silence that followed he retrieved the lighter from his pocket and sat, rhythmically flicking the flame on and off. On and off.
In the silence Dryden considered Maggie’s life. A life of predictable Fen insignificance, flat and featureless except for that single night of unspeakable horror. What had it done to her? What scars had lingered within, as the corkscrew burn on her cheek had faded with the years?
They all jumped at Maggie’s voice, suddenly loud in the hushed space around the deathbed. Her eyes remained closed and still but the tendons in her neck flexed visibly with the effort of speech. ‘I lied,’ she said, and Dryden was astonished to see tears running in a beaded stream from one eye. She struggled with herself, twisting in the bed as if resisting questions in an interrogation.
They waited. The windows were open in the heat and the sound of a bus changing gears came across the fields from the main Cambridge road. Dryden watched skylarks in the patch of china-blue sky which marked where the sun had set. The Tower was silent except for the cool snapping sounds of linen being folded by a nurse in the corridor outside. The caretaker whistled, perhaps outside, crossing the lawns.
Maggie’s eyes opened again, but this time she saw nobody, at least nobody there.
‘Dryden. My witness. I lied.’
She raised a hand. ‘Lyndon?’ He came forward from the shadows and folded long tanned fingers around hers, enveloping her wedding ring, which had caught the light like a candle in the darkness in the shadows of a church.
‘We all lie,’ he said, and Dryden noticed a glance of complicity with Estelle.
‘I’m sorry, Lyndon,’ Maggie said. ‘It was your life. I stole your life and ended it. Matty didn’t die, Lyndon. He’s never died. I lied. I lied to the coroner. To the police. To…’ She fought for breath for the first time and Lyndon made to get help. ‘No. Stay, please stay. This is all I have left to do. I lied to give you a different life. You’re Matty… You’re my son…’
There was silence as Lyndon half-knelt again at the bedside. Estelle sank back into the shadows, regrouping as the fixed points of her life were scattered by a single confession. She had a brother now, not a yard away, while she’d been putting flowers on the grave of a stranger for twenty years. And Lyndon? He’d gained a mother, on her deathbed, and lost a father he’d loved as a hero, but had never touched.
Dryden thought about Maggie’s confession. She said she’d given Matty away to give him a new life. Could that really be all that had driven her; driven a new mother to give away her only child? What was so terrible about the life he would have had? From what did Maggie want to save her son?
Maggie struggled to say more. She turned to Estelle and offered a hand. Dryden watched her daughter’s arm rise up, as if from under water, to clasp the fingers. And Dryden saw fear for the second time in Maggie’s eyes. But this time the fear was specific and had an edge. The whites of her eyes were oddly vibrant in a dying face as she scanned their circled faces, pleading, searching. She had more to say, more she had to say, but she couldn’t say it. Like a scream for help in a nightmare, the sound wouldn’t come. Estelle kissed her mother’s head and held her tight. But still there were no words.
Lyndon went for the doctor and a nurse gave Maggie more morphine, despite her feeble struggles.
‘She’ll sleep now,’ said the nurse, so they went outside to take in lungfuls of cool air. Then Lyndon and Estelle went back and sat by the bedside again. But when Maggie spoke it was only with the echo of a whisper, so they didn’t hear. There were just two words, spoken as she died that morning at 3.30am.
‘The tapes,’ she said.
Saturday, 7 June
12
The cathedral clock tolled four, a cold light tore the black edge of the horizon, and rooks rose in a cloud over the town. But it was the nightmare which woke Dryden. Always the same, and always in red. The gurgling blood, slipping past, with Laura clutching for his hand. He stretched out but never reached her, screaming silently for her to reach out to him. But she never did. Her eyes just asked a question: ‘Why did you leave me to die?’
He jolted awake, his heart racing, and the fear so vivid that his hand still stretched out for Laura’s.
Dawn greyed the hospital’s Gothic tower as two orderlies carried Maggie Beck’s body out of the foyer on a sealed stretcher. The silence and the lack of urgency told Dryden all he needed to know. He got out of the cab and stood, shivering, as the ambulance crept past.