The Kindness (33 page)

In the hotel bar the music was trancey and loud enough for a gym. The pictures of petal-eyed ducs in the vestibule gave way to erotic nudes. Arching her back on one side of the rear wall, in tasteful sepia and crackled glaze, a nymphet displayed the pale patisserie of her buttocks and, on the other, her caramel-tipped breasts. The light flickered with cinnamon candles and dim gold, the chandelier drops were the colour of burning sugar. There was a man in a brown corduroy suit whose breath stank of old meat. She was grateful to him.

Julian’s face rises above her. ‘You wanted to fuck him, didn’t you?’ Lights come straight at her out of the fog. The lorry is on the wrong side of the road. She’s swerving, hears Ruthie’s scream as the windscreen explodes and the world turns red. ‘I did. I did. I did.’

Twenty-nine

Brighton was overcast, hazy white, the seagulls swooping and flapping about as though they’d been cut from the same cloth as the sky. The sea was pearl grey. There was barely a ripple and it merged with the sky in a rolling bulge so it was impossible to tell where water finished and air began.

She left her van at Hove Lawns, anxious that she might not find another space closer, and stopped at a café to ask for directions to Karl’s hotel. ‘The Ida Heights.’ The man pointed east. ‘A couple of miles that-a-way.’ The traffic had been on her side all the way from North London and she was fretful as well as early. A walk along the seafront might help to settle her nerves.

The tide was almost halfway in or halfway out, she couldn’t decide. Karl would be at the conference all day; there was no point coming sooner, he said. She passed the Conference Centre: an incongruous lump that hogged the sea view. He’d be back at his hotel with ‘a window’ at six. A dinner he couldn’t miss with some French biochemists at eight.
A window
.

She wore a dress to meet Karl in Brighton. She wouldn’t want Julian to know that, nor the care she’d taken with her appearance before setting off. None of it would make her look good in the eyes of the prosecution.

The dress was vintage rose brocade, sleeveless. It swirled around her legs as she walked and its many tiny mother-of-pearl buttons glinted. Her hair was loose and shining clean. Her sandals were supple leather with a braiding of pale gold, comfortable. Before dressing, she kneaded her skin to a glow with a breathtakingly redolent olive rub that she’d found in the back of a drawer.

The air was warm beneath its white blanket of sky, the gentlest of breezes brushed her face. She cast layers of clothing as she walked, swinging her coat from her shoulder, tying her cardigan around her waist. She stuck close to the railings and looked down at the pebble beach and a group of young gulls hunched in drab feathers receiving instruction from a debonair elder in splendid morning dress. A canoeist was coming to shore with slow, deliberate strokes, his head bowed like a mournful boatman, and she stopped to watch him, her elbows to the iron rail. Stones washed to and fro at the edge of a sea that was strangely monotone, with bulging clouds in shades of grey where the horizon should have been.

She was thinking only of Julian as she drew closer to the Ida Heights. Not that he would ever know.

Again and again she imagined him transfixed over the microscope in Karl’s student room. She suffered a stab of jealousy each time she thought of the girl who was with him that night getting the sample.

‘Azoospermia.’ Karl had been quite explicit in his explanation. ‘This means there are no sperm cells at all in the semen.’ He’d hung his head between his hands and shook it. ‘I was stupid. I switched the slide,’ he said, hiding his face. ‘I wish I hadn’t.’

‘I tested him again, several times. It wasn’t hard to persuade him, he needed the money. He donated at the lab. It was for research, not reproduction, so he didn’t worry. And it was quite natural that I should ask him for blood tests.’

Julia held out her hands to make him to stop. She kept saying, ‘No,’ as he lobbed facts at her, because now he’d started it seemed nothing would make him stop.

‘I’m sorry, but Julian’s condition is not a blockage, which was what I’d been hoping – against all the evidence. I consulted a professor: in every sample his FSH was elevated, inhibin was absent. There was fructose in the semen, which indicates that the channel from the epididymis is open. I’m afraid the defect is in production and the professor confirmed my diagnosis. Zero means zero and that is unlikely to change.’

He looked straight at her into the silence that followed, reached out to where she’d fallen back in her chair. His brows were steepled with misery.

‘Oh God, Julia. I am so sorry and now I’ve made it worse by telling you instead of him.’

‘Well yes,’ she said. ‘But I suppose you’ve at least told me.’ She felt a rush of fury. ‘You’ve managed to tell a woman who would very much like to have Julian’s baby, in fact.’

Karl hung his head so she could see only the thinning curls at his crown. ‘I’ve been on the verge of confessing for years, but something always makes me chicken out. Once it was confirmed, I wrestled with my conscience night after night. In fact, it was my despicable moral cowardice in this matter that made me decide I could never become a doctor.’ Karl raised his eyes. They blazed straight into hers as he told her of the evening he’d finally won over his conscience and set off to Julian’s digs. His mouth twitched in the tiniest of sneers. ‘When I got there he told me you were pregnant.’

Karl leant in to where she sat slumped in the peapod chair. Through the shock of it all, a sudden vision: Wychwood, her red shirt in tatters, Chris kneeling over her and spitting into his hand.

‘Listen, Julia,’ Karl was saying. ‘It’s not the end of the world. I can give you some telephone numbers. It is not difficult to obtain what you need.’

She shook herself. ‘Oh yes, easy for you to say.’

‘Listen. Throughout my first and second year of studies, I was able to buy myself good dinners with wine every Saturday night with what I made at the wank bank – sorry, crude, I know. We med students were targeted as soon as we arrived on campus. It was twenty quid a pop and I didn’t think about it too much then. Now, of course, I can’t help wondering about how casually I scattered my DNA.’

Julia used the back of her hand to wipe a tear from her cheek and her voice surged forth, interrupting him, forming the words unbidden: ‘I’d rather you than a stranger.’

Now she stood at the rails and closed her eyes. The wash of sea on shingle took the edge off, like a dream that she might wake from. Hush little baby, don’t say a word.

It was quiet all along the prom: only the occasional serial-killer breath of a runner coming up behind shook her from her thoughts, or a dog skittering for a stone. A man and a woman stood hip by hip painting the door of their beach hut, companionably touching as they worked, Blur from the radio at their feet. She was almost soothed by the shush of sea against shingle. She swung her arms a little as she walked, licked the back of her hand and found it was salty. She passed students hunched over tables outside a bar, a few skateboarders, the two piers, the wrecked one glittering with broken glass, its walkway rusting and forbidden with notices. Beyond it the iced white peaks of the Palace Pier called to punters with lights and union flags, a red, white and blue helter-skelter pointing a finger to the sky.

Julia turned off the seafront, crossed to a faintly sinister rise where latticework iron arches enclosed the pavement. She climbed a steep flight of concrete steps. Clumps of yellow wallflowers grew in the cracks and she stopped for a moment and, seeking calm, took a breath or two of their sweetness. There was an elevated walkway, which at first seemed deserted. She heard scufflings in the bushes, and grunting, and bolted up the second flight, found herself on a street of bus fumes and furious cyclists. She weaved through the traffic to a crescent where the houses were gracious, even the crumbling ones, windows curving to the sea, and passed through a square where a gang of happy children played in a communal garden, hanging from a tree and whooping like gibbons.

She arrived at Karl’s hotel on the dot of the hour. He’d left a message with the concierge and she was shown straight up to his room on the first floor. As she was ushered from the foyer into the lift she just about had time to pull her dress straight and run her fingers through her hair. She waited a moment outside his door before knocking, flushed with shame when he opened it and caught her glossing her lips with balm.

Karl wasn’t long out of the shower; there was warm steam and bath essence, something woody, cedar maybe. He was half-dressed for dinner in a smart silk shirt, untucked and the deep blue of permanent Quink. The cuffs were yet to be fastened, his forearms dark with hair. His charcoal wool trousers made his bum look neat. They were part of a suit, the jacket was slung over the back of a chair with his tie.

They didn’t touch one another. He looked as nervous as she felt as he gestured for her to come inside. He had shaved closely. His forehead was shiny with sweat. She went across the room, gripping her basket, and stood at the window looking out at the sea.

‘Did you find the list I left you?’ he asked when their silence became intolerable. ‘Shall I order up some drinks? Some medicinal cocktails?’

She nodded to both questions but didn’t turn around. She had found his list as soon as he’d gone from Cromwell Gardens, tactfully sealed in an envelope that he’d stolen from the kitchen drawer. He must’ve tucked it into the frame of the bathroom mirror while she was calling him a minicab. The second bottle of wine was empty, the table a mess of crumbled bread, smears of cheese, greasy bracelets of salami skin.

She continued staring at the sea. Now here they were, like strangers, tongue-tied, their words few and stilted, peppered with nervous laughter. And across the water came a thick mist that not even the sharpest eye of the sun would pierce. She took the cardigan from her waist to hang it over her shoulders. Her stomach knotted to think of the way she had blurted it out. ‘I’d rather you than a stranger.’

She remained at the window while he perched on the edge of the bed with the phone to his ear. He didn’t ask her what she’d like: vodka martinis, crisps, olives. She took a carrier bag from her basket, walked to the bed and offered it to him. ‘It’s all in here,’ she said. ‘You were right about Wigmore Street.’ He took the bag and patted the bed for her to sit beside him, started to open it. ‘OK, let’s have a look at what’s to be done.’

There was a knock at the door. ‘Oh, please put it down,’ she was already reddening at the thought of its contents. ‘Here’s our drinks.’

The martinis were strong and came with a twist. She sat at the window to drink hers. Karl remained on the bed.

Eventually he checked his watch, went back to the plastic bag. ‘Julia, if you’re still really sure about this, we’d better get on.’

She sat beside him, her hands in her lap, while he emptied the contents on to the pristine bedspread. She was glad that he hadn’t turned on the light as he picked through the surgically sealed packages, through the shiny, crackling cellophane, all too clearly the coiled loop of a catheter, a syringe, a cup with a screw-on lid, a speculum like the bill of the nastiest duck moulded in transparent plastic that made her shudder just to look at it.

‘These are all sterile, good.’ He reloaded the bag, and it was a relief not to have it all there, laid out like that. ‘I’ll need to go and wash my hands in a minute, but let’s get you comfortable first.’ She was instantly flustered. He gestured for her to lie on the bed. There were cushions and pillows; he arranged them, one for her head, the others set aside for her legs.

‘And you’re definitely ovulating?’

‘The line on the stick was pretty unequivocal this morning. I took it as a sign . . . that this was, you know . . .’ She trailed off, unsure what it was she took it as a sign of. She always felt ovulation as a swelling dull ache, the tester merely confirmed it once a month. A blessing perhaps?

A canopy fell from the ceiling and parted like a bride’s veil at the head of the bed. She stared from the folds of celadon silk up to the looped ring from which it flowed. The cornicing of the room was ripe with plaster pomegranates and lilies. It was silent but for their breathing, a chalky twilight through the window.

She lay on the bed, a pillow beneath her head, a sense of unreality as though she was floating in and out of a dream. He perched beside her, inspecting the backs of his hands, barely making a dent he’d positioned himself so gingerly on the edge.

‘It’ll be best if you remain lying here with your legs elevated for half an hour or so afterwards.’ He was pushing back each cuticle in turn. He showed her how to arrange the cushions, one beneath her bottom. She felt a fluttering hysteria, the quiver of a childhood memory of doctors and nurses, the cool slide of a stethoscope. He looked up from his fingernails with his twitching smile and her hysteria became a pulsing rush.

‘So, I’ll wash my hands now,’ he said, standing to go. Another smile, slightly apologetic. ‘And you will have to remove your pants, of course.’

He came back with his cuffs rolled to his elbows, rubbing and shaking his hands dry as he approached. The room was thrumming with her heartbeat. Fine drops of water fell from his hands.

She lay ready on the cushion with her dress hitched up her thighs. He sat with his back to her and emptied the bag of its contents, turning to show her each item like a visitor bringing fruit. He wouldn’t look at her while he spoke. So, not a kindly visitor at all, rather a doctor somewhat hassled on his ward rounds.