The Kiss (13 page)

“Do you know who it was by any chance?” Gordon asked, appearing casual. Absolutely nothing unusual showed on his face.

“We know his name, but we don't know much more than that about him. His name is William Robinson, he's American. I believe his family is flying over now. They're due here tonight.” Gordon nodded, as though he was expecting old friends, and he turned the name over in his mind for a moment, as it clicked, and he wondered if it was the same man. There was a William Robinson he had met several years before, an important figure in the political world. And he knew that Robinson and the ambassador to France were old friends. But he couldn't imagine what he'd been doing with Isabelle. He wasn't even sure they'd ever met. He couldn't remember if Isabelle had been with him when they were introduced at the embassy. It was so rare that she went out. It was a complete mystery what Isabelle had been doing with him.

“Will he be all right?” Gordon asked with a look of concern, which masked the unspoken questions on his mind.

“We don't know. He fractured his neck, and damaged his upper spinal cord. There are some internal injuries as well, but none as severe as your wife's.”

“It sounds like she took the worst of it,” Gordon
said, “but not by much. Will he be paralyzed from the spinal injury?”

“It's too soon to tell. He's still unconscious, he never regained consciousness after the surgery. It could simply be a reaction to the trauma of the accident, or something more complicated as a result of his neck. He's in critical condition as well.” It occurred to Gordon as he listened to him that they might both die without ever explaining to anyone what they had been doing together that night. Gordon was wondering if it had just been a coincidence. If she had old friends in London from her youth that he didn't know about that she had gone to see, perhaps she and Robinson had shared a limousine leaving the hotel. But why would she be out at that hour? Where were they coming from? Where were they going? Where had they been? Why were they together? Did they even know each other? Had they just met? There were a thousand possibilities and questions racing through his mind. And there was no way of getting answers to any of them, certainly not if they didn't survive. He thought he knew Isabelle well, he was sure he did. She was not the kind of woman to be having an affair, or even having clandestine assignations with a man. And yet they had been together, in a limousine, at two A.M., and whatever the reason was, there was no way to discover it now.

“Would you like to spend the night here at the hospital with your wife?” the young doctor asked him, but Gordon was quick to shake his head. He had a horror of sickrooms and hospitals and sick people. They reminded him of his mother in a sinister way.

“As she's not conscious, I don't see what purpose I'd serve here. I'd just get in the way of your staff. I'll stay at the hotel. I'll be at Claridge's, and you can call me if anything changes here. That seems more sensible. I appreciate your time, and your efforts on my wife's behalf,” Gordon said formally, and looking uncomfortable, he stood up again. It was obvious that he was extremely ill at ease in the hospital, and had no desire to go back to his wife's room. “I'll just stop in and see her again for a moment before I leave.” He thanked the doctor again, and walked back down the hall, and when he reached her door, there were five members on the team working on her, and there was still no sign of life. He made no attempt to enter the room, watching them for only the briefest moment, and then turned and left, without saying another word. He had never touched her, never kissed her, never approached Isabelle's bed, and he took an enormous breath of fresh air as soon as he reached the street.

Gordon detested hospitals and sick people and infirmities. It was why Teddy had always been hard for him. It was something he simply couldn't tolerate, and as he hailed a cab, with his overnight bag in his hand, and gave them Claridge's address, he felt slightly ill. He was enormously relieved to have escaped the intensive care ward, and in spite of the fact that he felt sorry for her, he hadn't been able to bring himself to walk into the room and touch even so much as her hand. It was merciful that she was unconscious, he thought, and it would be more so if she didn't survive to be brain-damaged. That was a fate that he didn't wish for her. But in spite of how sorry he felt for her,
he couldn't seem to feel anything about it for himself. He had no sense of loss, no despair, no terror of losing her. She seemed like a stranger to him now, lying so broken and still in her hospital bed. She looked like a lifeless doll, and it was hard to understand that the woman he had just seen had been the young girl he once married, let alone his wife of twenty years. Her spirit already seemed to have fled, and all he wondered as the cab pulled up in front of Claridge's was what she had been doing in a limousine with Bill Robinson. But there was no one except Isabelle whom he could ask. She alone knew the answer to the mystery, and Bill of course, but he was just as unable to answer Gordon's questions as his wife.

The doorman took Gordon's overnight case from him. He had only brought a few shirts and some underwear. He wasn't intending to stay long. He had come to assess the situation, and he was planning to return to Paris in a day or two. And come back to London again if need be. She might be dead by then, or she may have remained the same. The young surgeon had told him that night that she could stay in the coma, without change, for weeks or even months. And there was no way he could stay in London with her. He had to go back to tend to his own affairs, to monitor Teddy now, and see what was happening at the bank. If he had to, he would go back and forth between London and Paris every few days. But he realized that if this was going to take a while, it was going to be best if he called Sophie in Portugal and asked her to come home. If nothing else, she could take over watching Teddy for him. He dreaded calling her, but after what he'd seen tonight, he
was beginning to think that he should. He needed to prepare her in case Isabelle died.

Gordon stopped at the desk, and asked for Isabelle's key, and an assistant manager came out from an office instantly, and told Gordon how sorry he was.

“It must have been a dreadful accident. We're all so sorry … such a terrible thing … such a lovely person … no idea it had happened until the police called …” He went on for several minutes as Gordon nodded his head and agreed with everything he said. “How is she doing, sir?” the assistant manager asked solicitously.

“Not very well.” And then he decided to see what else he might know. “Apparently Mr. Robinson was severely injured too.” He searched the young man's eyes for whatever he could discover there, but it was just more of the same. Sympathy and an endless wringing of hands.

“So we understand” was all the young man said. It was awkward asking him if he knew why they'd been sharing a limousine, and Gordon was searching for the appropriate question to satisfy his needs. But it was not an easy thing to do.

“So unfortunate, such a shame they were riding together,” Gordon said noncommittally “He's an old friend of mine, they must have run into each other here.”

“Yes, I suppose,” the assistant manager said, nodding his head. “I believe I saw them having tea together in the lobby yesterday afternoon.”

“Do you know where they might have gone last night?” Gordon inquired, as though investigating the accident, but the young manager shook his head.

“I can ask the hall porter if he made reservations for them anywhere, perhaps he did.” He stepped away for a moment and inquired, and the hall porter said Mr. Robinson always made his own reservations when he was in town, and rarely asked anything of them, except hiring a car, as he had this time. But he believed the other hall porter had made a reservation for them at Mark's Club. “He's off today. I can ask him when he gets back. Or I can call Mark's Club, if you like. Unfortunately, the driver died, as I'm sure you know. One of our best men, an Irish fellow, he had a wife and four boys. A terrible tragedy,” he said, obviously distressed by what had happened, and Gordon thanked him as he took the key, walked to the elevator, and rode upstairs. He was still thinking about what the manager had said about their having tea in the lobby the previous afternoon. He wondered if they had met through art circles somehow, or if he had just picked her up. She was such an innocent that she might just be naive enough to befriend someone like that, and tea in the lobby was certainly a relatively harmless pursuit, but in Gordon's mind being out at two in the morning in a limousine with a man was not. He still couldn't imagine what Bill Robinson had been doing with her. He didn't like the sound of it, and if it were anyone other than Isabelle, he would have jumped to the obvious, but in Isabelle's case, there may well have been some foolish, benign reason why she had been in the car with him. Gordon was still puzzling over it when he stepped into her room.

There was an eerie feeling to it suddenly, as though she had just gone out, and as he looked around, it made him feel almost as though she had already died. Her makeup
was spread out on the table next to the sink. Her nightgown was hanging on a hook behind the bathroom door. Her clothes were neatly hung in the closet, and there was a collection of pamphlets and brochures from museums and art galleries sitting on the desk. And then he saw that next to them, there was a book of matches from Harry's Bar, and as Isabelle didn't smoke, he thought that was somewhat odd. And what on earth would she be doing at a place like Harry's Bar? Or Mark's Club? And then he saw that next to the matches from Harry's Bar was another matchbook from Annabel's. And when he saw it, he felt a finger of anger run down his spine. Perhaps the evening with Bill Robinson hadn't been as innocent as he hoped. He wondered if she had been to those places with him. He looked around the room for further evidence, but there was no sign of a man's clothes, no letters, no notes, no flowers with cards from him. There was nothing but two matchbooks from two fashionable watering holes that he somehow knew she had kept as souvenirs. Maybe Robinson had just picked her up, and she had been vulnerable to it. In all likelihood it was innocent, and whatever had happened between them that night, or before, they had certainly paid a high price for it. But he couldn't help wondering what their bond to each other was, or if there was one at all. He slipped the two match-books into his pocket, sat down, and looked around the room, and then rang for the waiter and ordered himself a stiff drink.

When Cynthia Robinson and the girls got off the plane, it was eleven-thirty P.M. in London. Both of the
girls had slept on the plane, for a while at least. But Cynthia had spent most of the flight lost in thought, and staring out the window. The full impact of what had happened to Bill was beginning to hit her. And she was anxious to see him. Maybe, with any luck at all, he would be out of the coma by the time they got to the hospital, and maybe, just maybe, the blow to his neck and spine wouldn't have any long-term effects. It was all she could hope for, for his sake.

It took them half an hour to get through customs, and Claridge's had a car waiting for them. They went straight to the hospital, and were there at one o'clock in the morning. The intensive care ward was still bustling at that hour, and four new trauma patients had come in just before Cynthia and her daughters arrived. But Cynthia had no problem making herself known to the nurses, or finding a doctor to talk to her about Bill. Cindy was good at things like that. She managed to stop a doctor on his way to Bill's room.

The same young surgeon who had spoken to Gordon earlier sat down with her in the hall, and spelled it all out for her, as Jane and Olivia listened. Bill was still in a coma, and there was no sign of any improvement so far. He had begun having a considerable amount of swelling in the spinal area, which was pressing on damaged nerves, and the fractures in his neck were severe. By the time the doctor had finished explaining it all to her, the outlook for Bill seemed very grim. And when Cynthia saw him, she was only slightly better prepared for the way he looked. He was trapped in a hideous-looking contraption on his neck, a full body brace, and he was covered with stitches
and cuts and small lacerations and bruises. The nurses were watching him, the monitors beeped endlessly, and he was so deathly pale that both girls started crying when they saw his face. All Cindy could do was stare at him, and suddenly all the emotions she'd resisted since she'd heard the news overwhelmed her all at once. Tears welled up in her eyes, and he was no longer a conglomeration of symptoms and broken parts anymore, he was the boy she had fallen in love with in college, and she could see how desperately injured he was. It took all the strength she had to get control of herself again, and be of some support to her girls.

Jane and Olivia just stood in a corner of the room, hugging each other and crying silently, as one of the nurses adjusted the respirator, and Cindy slowly approached his bed. She touched his hand, and it didn't even feel like him, and she was crying too hard to bend down and kiss him. There was a terrible smell of disinfectant in the room. His chest was bare, and there were monitors taped to him everywhere.

“Hi, baby,” she whispered as she stood next to him. “It's me, Cindy.” She felt like a girl again, as she watched him, and a thousand images raced through her head, of the day she had met him, and the day she'd married him, the day she told him she was pregnant. So many memories and moments, and now he was lying here, and their lives were forever changed. She couldn't imagine how they would ever achieve normalcy again. And suddenly, she knew she didn't want him to die if he was impaired, she didn't care how damaged he was, she didn't want to lose him.

And for the first time in years, she realized that she still loved him. “I love you,” she said again and again, “I want you to open your eyes now. The girls are here. They want to talk to you, sweetheart.”

“He can't hear you, Mrs. Robinson,” one of the nurses said gently.

“You don't know that,” Cindy said firmly. She wasn't a woman one would have wanted to argue with, at the best of times, and at this particular moment, she did not want to hear what the nurse was saying to her. Besides, for years she had heard stories about people in comas who had heard what the people around them were saying. Cynthia continued talking to him, and she and the girls stayed with him for two hours, until a doctor checking him suggested that they get some rest themselves, and come back in the morning. There was no change whatsoever in Bill's condition so far.