The Ecliptic (53 page)

Victor Yail, 46 Harley Street, London.

The operator must have found him.

The road was flanked by leafless trees and ordinary grass verges. Every so often, we would pass under an empty footbridge and the lane-markings would curve slightly to the left
or right, but we seemed to have been driving in one straight line since leaving the hospital. Cars that were just dabs on the horizon closed in fast and thumped right past us. The day had not yet
ceded to the darkness, but it was readying itself. All the streetlamps had the bleary orange makings of a fuller light in their glass hoods. Victor kept an even speed: not more than fifty and not
less than forty-five. He drove with one loose set of fingers on the steering column and his elbow on the windowsill. His other hand stayed poised on his left knee, occasionally reaching up to flick
the indicator with the sedateness of a man collecting tickets at a kiosk. Soon, the hummocks began to rise in the narrows of the road ahead. And then the soot-dark loch was spreading in the
windscreen and I followed it with my eyes, round to the driver’s side, till Victor’s profile fuzzed out in the window, and it all bled into an open stretch of sea.

‘How are you holding up?’ he said.

I looked away, worrying the glove box. ‘It’s difficult to say.’ I let my eyes recalibrate. There was plenty between me and the water out there—hedgerows, pasture,
thickets of trees—but it was hard to reconcile it all. Every time I saw a cluster of pines I felt both homesick and at home. Being in a car, flashing over land without questioning its
sureness beneath the wheels, following the road back to a place that I felt certain I had left years ago—all of these things were not easy to accept or comprehend, and yet they seemed to be
the smallest of my problems. ‘I’m trying not to think about it till we get there. How much further is it?’

‘Oh, not far now,’ said Victor. ‘Five or ten minutes. We’ll pick up a sign in a moment, I should think.’

He was driving me back at my own insistence. It had taken a while to convince him. He had tried to deflect me with excuses. But now we were just five or ten minutes from Luss. Five or ten
minutes from knowing.

A staff nurse and a porter had run out to fetch me. Blood was trailing in a chute all down my arm. I had an oozing hole where the butterfly had torn the skin, and I was standing
in a car park in blue hospital pyjamas and a sling. ‘Come on, lovey, let’s get you inside,’ said the nurse, her kindly hand on my good shoulder. She steered me back to the
entrance, under the annexe, past the waiting ambulances. The porter held the bay doors open for us, asking if I needed a wheelchair. I said no, I could walk. But voices kept sputtering in and out
like mistuned radio. I was still seeing cadets in uniforms: the corridor was teeming with them. They parted for us, shaking their heads as we slow-marched through, muttering their insults in
Turkish, spitting on the floor. ‘Here you go, pet—let’s put you in here,’ said the nurse, and she sat me down near the lifts between potted plants. The soil in them was dry
and strewn with bent cigarette stubs. When the lift doors parted, cadets loitered in the strip-lit cavities, mouthing words at me I did not understand. The walls still seemed to be covered with
pictures: old vessels in gilt frames, tall ships and steel frigates. I got lost in them for a while. I thought I smelled fresh
salep
. The nurse wiped my arm with a stinging wet tissue.
Then Victor Yail came hurtling out of the lift, right past us. The nurse called: ‘Doctor, she’s here!’ and the porter whistled after him.

Victor’s shoes went sliding as he tried to change direction; he teetered and regained his balance. Seeing me between the plants, he held a palm to his chest and said, ‘Oh, thank
goodness. You’ve got her. Well done.’

‘Where d’you want her?’ said the porter.

‘Back in the ward,’ said the nurse. ‘She needs that drip put back in her.’

‘Yes, she’s got to have that,’ said Victor. ‘But let’s put her in a chair this time.’

‘She didn’t want the wheelchair,’ said the porter.

‘No, I mean a normal chair.’

‘Aye, that’ll be fine,’ said the nurse.

They were talking about me as though I were a truant child caught stealing.

‘All right then. Up you get, love.’

Then Victor said, ‘Hang on. Let me check her over first.’

The nurse said, ‘Right. I’ll go up and sort that drip out then.’

‘Thank you. Yes.’

The porter lingered. ‘D’you want us to help you take her back?’

‘No, I can handle it from here.’ Victor crouched. ‘But, thanks—I’ll shout if I need you.’

‘Aye, all right.’ The porter wandered away, towards the bunched cadets playing dice games in the corridor. They did not seem to pay him any mind.

I felt Victor’s hands upon my knees. He was on his haunches in front of me, leaning in to get my attention. ‘Ellie? You remember me, don’t you?’ he said.
‘It’s Dr Yail.
Victor
. Can you hear me?’

I stayed quiet. The lift pinged, but when the doors slid back, the cabinet was bare.

‘Elspeth,’ he said, ‘look at me now. Look at me.’

So I did. I stared right into his face. There was a flaky ridge upon his nose from the chafing of his glasses. His beard was dense but neatly clipped. He had a waxy quality to the skin below his
eyelids, and rich green irises, like two halves of an olive. These were things that I had noticed many times before. He had not changed much in ten years. Hardly at all. ‘I can hear you,
Victor,’ I said.

There was a visible release in his expression. ‘Good girl. I knew you could.’ He patted my knees and stood up. ‘I’m very glad to see you in one piece.’ He helped me
to my feet. ‘You’ve had a lot of people fretting after you.’

‘Did you get my messages?’ I said.

‘Mm-hm. Don’t worry about that for now. The registrar was showing me your bloodwork. Your liver enzymes are still elevated slightly. We’ve got to sort that out before we do
anything.’

‘I’m so sorry about Jonathan,’ I said.

‘Yes. I know you are. But we don’t need to talk about that now.’ He guided me by the elbow, jabbing at the lift button. ‘I want you resting and I want you getting
fluids—nothing else for the moment.’ The lighted numbers were not moving. ‘Where the heck
is
this thing, Jupiter?’ And when it finally reached our level, doors
sliding back, a sea cadet was waiting for us in civilian clothing. ‘Can you hit three for me, please?’ Victor asked him. The cadet rolled his eyes but still pushed the button.

I was cleaned up, given a dressing gown, and put into a day room on the ward. Victor made them turn my armchair towards the window. ‘Let’s see how much of this you
can register, eh?’ he said to me. ‘I’m not sure what you’ve been used to recently, but there are worse places to be.’ He sat near me on a plastic chair, reading
quietly through the notes in my folder, while a pouch of clear medicine seeped through me. Now and again, he looked up to check on my progress, smiling when I caught him looking, or getting up to
fuss with my drip-stand.

I still could not understand how I had got there. For a while, I studied the movements of the cars below. I watched them reverse parking. I saw a man climb out of a little Ford Anglia, place his
fedora on the roof to get a bouquet from the back seat, and walk off hatless. I even saw an ambulance crawl by with
VALE OF LEVEN HOSPITAL
painted on its flank, noticed the
same words stencilled on the backs of wheelchairs and on signs outside the annexed buildings. But I could not trace the path from where I was to where I used to be. I could not see the joins
between the mornings and the afternoons, from one month to the next. And my mind kept painting things that I could not be sure were there. Coiled ropes left on the kerbside. Lifebuoys hung along
the railings. Naval uniforms. So I just listened to the forward-ticking of the wall clock behind me and studied the drips as they came down the tube in perfect synchrony. I found that counting off
the minutes soothed me. I sat there for sixteen more of them, Portmantle getting further from my mind, the bay of Heybeliada drifting away, and the mural escaping my reach. I got up and tried to
point my chair in the other direction. ‘Woah, hold on there,’ Victor said, ‘let me do it. Are you sure you don’t want to look at the view?

‘I want to see the clock,’ I said.

He slatted his eyes. ‘All right.’ And he swivelled me round and moved my drip-stand.

I watched the thin red second hand circuiting the clock face, marvelling at it, feeling more and more secure with each shift of its mechanism.

After a moment, Victor folded his notes under his arm. My drip was finished and he went to tell the nurse. When he came back, he had taken his blazer off, and was scrolling up the sleeves of his
shirt. He dragged his plastic chair very close to me. ‘They’re going to take some more bloods from you now, I think. We’ve got a good dose of thiamine in you, though, and that
should make things a bit less foggy. You’re still quite undernourished. We need to start building your strength up again—so it’s a therapeutic diet for today. Once you’re
eating properly, they’ll let me sign you out of here. OK?’

I shrugged, wincing.

‘The collarbone’s going to hurt you for another month or so. But that’s the least of your concerns.’ He smiled consolingly. ‘Your bloodwork’s telling us
you’ve had some toxins in your system—we think it’s a reaction to your tablets, but the tests have been a little inconclusive. So they’ve been trying to see how you’ll
respond after some fluids. You’re starting to look a little better. A healthier colour, at least.’

I watched the second hand complete another lap. ‘Is Jonathan all right?’ I said, addressing it to the clock.

‘He is,’ said Victor matter-of-factly. ‘My secretary, on the other hand, you almost gave a coronary. She’s on a fortnight’s leave to make up for it.’

‘I really did think—’

‘I know,’ he said.

Victor reached to throw my notes onto the bank of chairs beside him. ‘The police aren’t sure how you injured yourself. Do you remember anything?’

‘I fell,’ I said.

‘From what? The sky?’

I had forgotten how much he liked his little jokes. ‘An escarpment,’ I said. ‘And then I hit my head. On the ground, I think.’