‘Or Dr Bishop,’ I said. Then asked: ‘Is it true?’
‘The point is,’ she said, leaning forward, ‘that it’s no use trying to find scapegoats. He’d been on call for twenty-six hours. And they found the bed as quickly as they could. I was horrified when I heard about it this morning, but I don’t know why. As I said, it happens all the time.’
I tried to take this in. ‘So … I mean, what kind of effect are we talking about here?’
‘It’s hard to say. I don’t think the pneumonia would necessarily have taken hold the way it did. Not if she’d been put on to a ward straight away, and given her antibiotics last night.’
‘Look, if you’re telling me that her life’ – I didn’t want to say this; just by saying it, there was a danger of making it real – ‘that her life has been put in danger through somebody’s negligence –’
‘I’m not talking about negligence. I’m talking about people trying to work under conditions which are becoming impossible.’
‘Somebody must create those conditions!’
‘The decision to close wards is taken by managers.’
‘Yes, but on what basis?’
She sighed. ‘These are not people who feel a personal involvement with the hospital. They’re brought in from outside on short-term contracts to balance the books. If they balance the books by the end of the financial year then they get their bonus. Simple.’
‘And whose bright idea was that?’
‘Who knows? Some cabinet minister, some civil servant, some academic guru sitting on a policy-making committee.’
A name immediately flashed through my mind: Henry.
I said: ‘But that’s the only consideration, is it – finance?’
‘Not always.’ Dr Gillam smiled bitterly. ‘Another ward was closed a few days ago. Do you know why?’
‘Go on, I’ll buy it.’
‘War casualties.’
‘But we’re not at war,’ I said, not even certain that I’d heard her properly.
‘Well, somebody obviously thinks we will be soon, unless Saddam pulls his finger out. And this is one of the hospitals which has been told to clear some room for our gallant lads out at the front.’
There was no option but to believe her, however incredible it might seem. But I hated the way we were now expected to take this war for granted: where had it come from, this breezy assumption of inevitability? In any case, it was supposed to be nothing to do with me – something that was happening thousands of miles away, on the other side of the world: on the other side (which was further still) of a television screen. So how could I suddenly accept that it was now one of the forces conspiring against Fiona – that it had already crept into her blameless life? It was as if cracks had started to appear in the screen and this awful reality was leaking out: or as if the glass barrier itself had magically turned to liquid and without knowing it I had slipped across the divide, like a dreaming Orpheus.
All my life I’d been trying to find my way to the other side of the screen: ever since my visit to the cinema in Weston-super-Mare. Did this mean that I’d made it at last?
∗
Dr Gillam warned me about the ventilator. She told me not to be alarmed by what I saw. A chatty and efficient nurse led me on to the ward and, as before, I was struck by the contrast with the rest of the hospital. Everything here seemed quiet, modern and clinical. There were expensive-looking machines next to every bed. Lights flashed and pulsed, and I was subliminally conscious of a discreet electric hum which had a strangely calming effect. I walked straight past the other beds, not glancing to either side. I felt that to look at any of the other patients would be invasive.
Was the woman I saw that evening really Fiona? She bore no relation to the woman who had come with me to Eastbourne seven days earlier, or even to the woman who had sat up in bed and smiled at the prospect of our formal dinner for two on New Year’s Eve. She looked like a victim on a sacrificial altar. She looked like she was being attacked by snakes.
There was:
a tube for oxygen coming out of her mouth, its corrugated pipes forming a T-junction
a tube attached to a vein in her neck
a tube thrust into an artery in her wrist
a tube coming out of her bladder
a temperature probe on her finger
a drip for liquids
a drip for antibiotics
a mass of wires and tubing and pumps and brackets and supports and tape and cords, all connected up to a box-like machine which was covered with knobs and dials.
Fiona herself had been heavily sedated, and paralysed. Her eyes were open but she was barely conscious.
I asked her if she could hear me. There was a tiny movement behind her eyes, unless I was imagining it.
I said: ‘You don’t need to worry about a thing, Fiona. Dr Gillam’s been explaining everything, and I understand it all now. It turns out that I was right all along. I was right, and you were wrong. I don’t believe in accidents any more. There’s an explanation for everything: and there’s always someone to blame. I’ve found out why you’re here, you see. You’re here because of Henry Winshaw. Ironic, isn’t it? He wants you to be here because he can’t bear to think that his money or the money of people like him might be used to stop things like this from happening. It’s obvious, really. Not very difficult, as whodunnits go. An open and shut case. All we need now is to get hold of the murderer and bring him to justice. And bring in the rest of the family, while we’re at it. They’ve all got blood on their hands. It’s written all over their faces. There’s no end to the people who’ve died because of Mark and his obscene trade. Dorothy was the one who killed off my father, feeding him all that junk; and Thomas added a twist of the knife, making his money vanish into thin air just when he needed it. Roddy and Hilary have certainly done their bit. If imagination’s the lifeblood of the people and thought is our oxygen, then his job’s to cut off our circulation and hers is to make sure that we all stay dead from the neck up. And so they sit at home getting fat on the proceeds and here we all are. Our businesses failing, our jobs disappearing, our countryside choking, our hospitals crumbling, our homes being repossessed, our bodies being poisoned, our minds shutting down, the whole bloody spirit of the country crushed and fighting for breath. I hate the Winshaws, Fiona. Just look what they’ve done to us. Look what they’ve done to you.’
Perhaps I didn’t say any of this. It becomes so hard to remember.
∗
I sat on a black vinyl chair in the Relatives’ Room and tried to read a newspaper, but must have been so tired that I dozed off. I had a strange dream in which the hospital became a film set and I was sitting in the darkened auditorium of a cinema, watching myself on the screen as I held Fiona’s hand and spoke to her. Such scenes, I find, are rarely very involving, and after a while I got up from my seat in the stalls and went to find the bar, where I was served a drink by Dr Gillam. I swallowed it in one draught, then sat down on a black vinyl chair in a corner of the bar and started to doze. Some time later I awoke and looked up to find Joan standing over me and smiling in recognition. It took me several seconds to realize that this was not part of my dream. It really was Joan: here, in the Relatives’ Room, before my very eyes.
‘What are you doing here?’ I said.
‘Oh, Michael.’ She knelt down and hugged me. ‘It’s so nice to see you. It’s been ages. It’s been years.’
‘What are you doing here?’
She told me that she was now married to Graham, and that Graham was the patient who had been brought into the hospital unconscious last night. Thanks to the attention he had received from Dr Gillam and Dr Bishop in the early hours of the morning he was now out of danger and they expected to be able to discharge him soon. Possibly I should have been astonished by these revelations but I found myself wearily incapable of rising to the occasion: even when she told me that Graham had almost been killed while trying to make a documentary about Mark Winshaw, it didn’t provoke either laughter or outrage. I simply chalked it up mentally as another point against the family, to add to my already substantial tally. I told her about Fiona, and tears came into her eyes. She wanted to start hugging me again and saying how sorry she was, but I wasn’t having any of that. I had to keep holding things in for a little longer. So I started asking her questions instead about how she’d been and what she’d been up to. She was still in the same line of work, it seemed, but she’d moved back to Birmingham now. They lived no distance at all from where the two of us had grown up together. None of this information was really sinking in, and I can’t have been thinking straight, because I now asked her a very stupid question: I asked why she’d never tried to get in touch.