The Private Patient (4 page)

Her mother said, “It's never too late to find someone to love. You're a handsome woman, Rhoda, you should do something about that scar.”

Words she had never expected to hear. Words which no one since Miss Farrell had dared to speak. She remembered little of what happened afterwards, only her own reply, spoken quietly and without emphasis.

“I shall get rid of it.”

She must have dozed fitfully. Now she woke into full consciousness with a start to find that the rain had passed. Darkness had fallen. Glancing at the dashboard, she saw that it was four-fifty-five. She had been on the road for nearly three hours. In the unexpected quiet, the noise of the engine as she bumped cautiously from the verge jarred the silent air. The rest of the journey was easy. The turns of the road came where they should and her headlights on the signposts lit up reassuring names. Sooner than expected she saw the name Stoke Cheverell and turned right for the final mile. The village street was deserted, lights shone behind drawn curtains and only the corner shop with its bright crowded window, through which two or three late shoppers could be dimly seen, showed signs of life. And now there was the sign she was looking for,
Cheverell Manor.
The great iron gates stood open. She was expected. She drove down the short avenue which widened into a half-circle, and the house was before her.

There had been a picture of Cheverell Manor in the brochure handed to her after her first consultation, but it was only a palecoloured similitude of the reality. In her headlights she saw the outline of the house, seeming larger than she had expected, a dark mass against the darker sky. It stretched each side of a large central gable with two windows above. These showed a pale light, but most were blank except for four large mullioned windows to the left of the door, which were brightly lit. As she drove carefully and parked under the trees, the door opened and a strong light streamed out over the gravel.

Switching off the engine, she got out and opened the back door for her overnight case, the cold damp air a welcome release after the drive. A male figure appeared in the doorway and moved towards her. Although the rain had stopped, he was wearing a plastic mackintosh with a hood that reached over his head like a baby's bonnet, giving him the look of a malevolent child. He walked firmly and his voice was strong, but she could see that he was no longer young. He took the case firmly from her and said, “If you give me the key, madam, I'll park the car for you. Miss Cressett doesn't like to see cars parked outside. They're expecting you.”

She handed over the key and followed him into the house. The unease, the slight sense of disorientation she had felt sitting alone in the storm, was still with her. Drained of emotion, she felt only a mild relief at having arrived and, as she passed into the wide hall with its central staircase, she was aware of a need to be again solitary, relieved of the necessity of shaking hands, of a formal welcome, when all she wanted was the silence of her own home and, later, the familiar comfort of her bed.

The entrance hall was impressive—she had expected it to be—but it was not welcoming. Her suitcase was placed at the foot of the stairs, and then, opening a door to the left, the man announced loudly, “Miss Gradwyn, Miss Cressett,” and, picking up her suitcase, made for the stairs.

She entered the room and found herself in a great hall which brought back pictures seen perhaps in childhood or on visits to other country houses. After the darkness outside, it was full of light and colour. High above, the arched timbers were blackened with age. Linen-fold panelling covered the lower part of the walls and above it was a row of portraits, Tudor, Regency, Victorian faces, celebrated with varying talents, some, she suspected, owing their place more to family piety than artistic merit. Facing her was a stone fireplace with a coat of arms, also in stone, above it. A wood fire was crackling in the grate, the dancing flames casting gules over the three figures who rose to meet her.

They had obviously been sitting having tea, the two linen-covered armchairs set at right angles to the fire, the only modern furniture in the room. Between them a low table held a tray with the remains of the meal. The welcoming party consisted of a man and two women, although the word “welcome” was hardly appropriate, since she felt that she was an intruder inconveniently late for tea and awaited without enthusiasm.

The taller of the two women made the introduction. She said, “I'm Helena Cressett. We have spoken. I'm glad you've got here safely. We've had a bad storm, but sometimes they're very local. You may have escaped it. May I introduce Flavia Holland, the theatre sister, and Marcus Westhall, who will assist Mr. Chandler-Powell with your operation.”

They shook hands, faces creased into smiles. Rhoda's impression of new people was always immediate and strong, a visual image implanted on her mind, never to be totally erased, bringing with it a perception of basic character which time and closer acquaintanceship might, as she knew, show to be perversely and sometimes dangerously misleading, but which rarely was. Now, tired, her perception a little dulled, she saw them almost as stereotypes. Helena Cressett in a well-tailored trouser suit with a turtleneck jumper which avoided looking too smart for wearing in the country while proclaiming that it hadn't been bought off a peg. No makeup except for lipstick; fine pale hair with a hint of auburn framing high prominent cheekbones; a nose a little too long for beauty; a face one might describe as handsome but certainly not pretty. Remarkable grey eyes regarded her with more curiosity than formal kindliness. Rhoda thought,
Ex–head girl, now headmistress
—
or,
more probably, principal of an Oxbridge college.
Her handshake was firm, the new girl being welcomed with circumspection, all judgement deferred.

Sister Holland was less formally dressed in jeans, a black jumper and a suede jerkin, comfort clothes proclaiming that she had been released from the impersonal uniform of her job and was now off duty. She was dark-haired, with a bold face that conveyed a confident sexuality. Her glance, from bright large-pupilled eyes so dark that they were almost black, took in the scar as if mentally assessing how much trouble could be expected from this new patient.

Mr. Westhall was surprising. He was slightly built with a high forehead and a sensitive face, the face of a poet or an academic rather than a surgeon. She felt none of the power or confidence which had so strongly emanated from Mr. Chandler-Powell. His smile was warmer than those of the women but his hand, despite the warmth of the fire, was cold.

Helena Cressett said, “You must be ready for tea, or perhaps for something stronger. Would you like it here or in your own sitting room? Either way, I'll take you there now so that you can settle in.” Rhoda said she would prefer to have tea in her room.

They mounted the broad uncarpeted stairs together and passed down a corridor lined with maps and what looked like earlier pictures of the house. Rhoda's suitcase had been placed outside a door midway down the corridor. Picking it up, Miss Cressett opened the door and stood aside as Rhoda entered, rather, she thought, as a hotelier might briefly indicate the conveniences of a hotel suite, a routine too often undertaken to be more than a duty.

Rhoda saw that the sitting room was both agreeable in its proportions and beautifully furnished, obviously in period furniture. Most of it looked Georgian. There was a mahogany bureau with a desk large enough for comfortable writing. The only modern furniture were the two armchairs before the fireplace and a tall, angled reading lamp beside one of them. To the left of the fire there was a modern television on a stand with a DVD player on a shelf beneath it, an incongruous but presumably necessary addition to a room which was both distinctive and welcoming.

They moved next door. Here was the same elegance, with any suggestion of a sickroom rigorously excluded. Miss Cressett placed Rhoda's suitcase on a folding stand, then walked over to the window and drew the curtains. She said, “At present it's too dark to see anything but you'll be able to in the morning. We'll meet again then. Now, if you have everything you want, I'll send up the tea and the menu for breakfast tomorrow. If you prefer to come down rather than have it in your room, dinner is served in the dining room at eight o'clock, but we meet in the library at seven-thirty for a pre-dinner drink. If you'd like to join us, ring my number—all the extensions are on the card by the telephone—and someone will come up to escort you down.” And then she was gone.

But for now Rhoda had seen enough of Cheverell Manor and hadn't the energy to engage in the to-and-fro of dinner conversation. She would request dinner in her room and have an early night. Gradually she took possession of a room to which, she already knew, she would return in just over two weeks' time without foreboding or apprehension.

6

It was six-forty on the same Tuesday before George Chandler-Powell had finished his list of private patients at St. Angela's Hospital. Pulling off his operating gown, he felt paradoxically both exhausted and restless. He had started early and worked without a break, which was unusual but necessary if he was to get through his London list of private patients before leaving for his customary Christmas holiday in New York. Since his early childhood, Christmas had become a horror to him, and he never spent it in England. His ex-wife, now married to an American financier well able to maintain her in the state both she and he regarded as reasonable for a very beautiful woman, held strong views about the necessity of all divorces being what she described as “civilised.” Chandler-Powell suspected that the word applied solely to the generosity or otherwise of the financial settlement, but with the U.S.A. fortune secured, she had been able to substitute the public appearance of generosity for the more mundane satisfaction of monetary gain. They liked seeing each other once a year, and he enjoyed New York and the programme of civilised entertainment Selina and her husband organised for him. He never stayed longer than a week before flying to Rome, where he stayed in the same
pensione
outside the city he had first visited when at Oxford, was quietly welcomed and saw no one. But the annual visit to New York had become a habit, and one which at present he saw no reason to break.

He was not due to arrive at the Manor until Wednesday night for the first operating session on Thursday morning, but two NHS wards had that morning been closed because of infection, and the next day's list had had to be postponed. Now, back in his Barbican flat and looking out at the lights of the City, he felt the wait was interminable. He needed to get out of London, to sit in the great hall at the Manor before a wood fire, to walk in the lime avenue, to breathe a less cluttered air, with the taste of wood smoke, earth and mulched leaves on the unencumbered breeze. He flung what he needed for the next few days into a grip with the careless exhilaration of a schoolboy released for the holidays and, too impatient to wait for the lift, ran down the stairs to the garage and his waiting Mercedes. There was the usual problem getting free of the City but once he was on the motorway the pleasure and relief of movement took over, as it invariably did when he drove alone at night, and disconnected thoughts of the past, like a series of brown and fading photographs, came untroubling to mind. He slotted a CD of Bach's Violin Concerto in D minor into the player and, with his hands lightly on the wheel, let the music and the memories merge in a contemplative calm.

On his fifteenth birthday he had come to conclusions about three matters which from childhood had increasingly exercised his thoughts. He decided that God didn't exist, that he didn't love his parents and that he would become a surgeon. The first required no action on his part, merely the acceptance that since neither help nor comfort could be expected from a supernatural being, his life was subject, like any other, to time and chance and that it was up to him to take such control as he could. The second required little more of him. And when, with some embarrassment—and on his mother's part some shame—they broke the news to him that they were thinking of divorce, he expressed regret—that seemed only proper—while subtly encouraging them to end a marriage that was obviously producing unhappiness for all three of them. The school holidays would be a great deal more pleasant if not disrupted by sullen silences or rancorous outbursts. When they were killed in a road accident while on a holiday planned in the hope of a reconciling fresh start—there had been several such—he was visited for a moment by a fear that there might be a power as strong as the one he had rejected, but more ruthless and possessed of a certain sardonic humour, before telling himself that it was folly to abandon a benign superstition in favour of one less accommodating, possibly even malign. His third conclusion remained as an ambition: he would rely on the ascertainable facts of science and concentrate on becoming a surgeon.

His parents had left him little but their debts. That hardly mattered. He had always spent most of his summer holidays with his widowed grandfather in Bournemouth, and now this became his home. As far as he was capable of strong human affection, it was Herbert Chandler-Powell that he loved. He would have been fond of him even had the old man been poor, but was glad that he was rich. He had made a fortune by a talent for designing elegant and original cardboard boxes. It became prestigious for a company to deliver its goods in a Chandler-Powell container, for presents to be wrapped in a box with the distinctive
C-P
colophon. Herbert discovered and promoted new young designers and some of the boxes, issued in limited numbers, became collectors' items. His firm needed no advertisement beyond the goods they produced. When he was sixty-five and George was ten, he sold the business to his largest competitor and retired with his millions. It was he who paid for George's expensive education, saw him through Oxford, required nothing in return but his grandson's company in the holidays from school and university, and later for three or four visits a year. For George these requirements had never been an imposition. When they walked or drove together, he would listen to his grandfather's voice reciting stories of his depressed childhood, commercial triumphs, the Oxford years. Before George himself went up to Oxford his grandfather had been more specific. Now that remembered voice, strong and authoritative, broke through the high trembling beauty of the violins.

“I was a grammar-school boy, you see, there on a county scholarship. Difficult for you to understand. Things may be different now, although I doubt it. Not that different. I wasn't mocked or despised or made to feel different, I just
was
different. I never felt I belonged there—and, of course, I didn't. I knew from the first that I had no right to be there, that something in the air of those quads rejected me. I wasn't the only one to feel that, of course. There were boys not from grammar schools but from the less prestigious public schools, places they tried not to mention. I could see it. They were the ones avid to be admitted to that golden group of the privileged upper class. I used to imagine them, edging their way with brains and talent into the Boars Hill academic dinner parties, performing like court jesters at the country weekend parties, offering their pathetic verses, their wit and their cleverness to buy their way in. I hadn't any talent except intelligence. I despised them, but I knew what they respected, all of them. Money, my boy, that's what mattered. Breeding was important, but breeding with money was better. And I made money. It will come to you in time, what's left after a rapacious government has extracted its loot. Make good use of it.”

Herbert's hobby was visiting stately homes open to the public, motoring to them by carefully devised circuitous routes with the aid of unreliable maps, driving his immaculate Rolls-Royce, as upright as the Victorian general he resembled. He travelled magisterially down country roads and little-used lanes, George at his side reading aloud from the guidebook. He thought it strange that a man so responsive to Georgian elegance and Tudor solidity should live in a penthouse in Bournemouth, even if the sea view was spectacular. In time he came to understand why. His grandfather, approaching old age, had simplified his life. He was looked after by a generously paid cook, housekeeper and general cleaner who came in by the day, did their work efficiently and quietly and left. His furniture was expensive but minimal. He neither collected nor coveted the artefacts which were his enthusiasm. He could admire without wanting to possess. George from an early age knew himself to be a possessor.

And the first time they visited Cheverell Manor he knew that this was the house he wanted. It lay before him in the mellow sunshine of an early-autumn day when the shadows were beginning to lengthen and trees, lawns and stone took on a richer intensity of colour from the dying sun, so that there seemed only a moment in which everything—the house, gardens, the great wrought-iron gates—was held in a calm, almost unearthly perfection of light, form and colours which caught at his heart. At the end of their visit, turning to take a last look, he said, “I want to buy that house.”

“Well, one day, George, perhaps you will.”

“But people don't sell houses like that. I wouldn't.”

“Most don't. Some may have to.”

“But why, Grandfather?”

“The money runs out, they can't afford to maintain it. The heir makes millions in the City and has no interest in his heritage. Or the heir may be killed in a war. The landed class have a propensity for getting themselves killed in wars. Or the house is lost through folly—women, gambling, drink, drugs, speculation, extravagance. You never know.”

And in the end it had been the owner's misfortune that had gained George the house. Sir Nicholas Cressett was ruined in the
1990
s Lloyd's disaster. George only knew that the house was coming on the market by alighting upon an article in a financial broadsheet about the Lloyd's Names who had suffered the most, and Cressett was prominent among them. He couldn't remember now who had written it—some woman with a name for investigative journalism. It had not been a kind article, focusing more on folly and greed than on ill luck. He had moved quickly and acquired the Manor, driving a hard bargain, knowing exactly what possessions he wanted included in the sale. The best pictures had been reserved for auction, but he wasn't greedy for those. It was the contents, which had caught his eye as a boy on that first visit, that he was determined to collect, among them a Queen Anne armchair. He had been moving a little ahead of his grandfather into the dining room and had seen the chair. He was sitting on it when a girl, a plain, serious child who looked no more than six years old, wearing jodhpurs and an open-necked shirt, came up and said aggressively, “You're not allowed to sit on that chair.”

“Then you ought to have a cord round it.”

“There should be a cord. There usually is.”

“Well, there isn't now.” After five seconds of silent glaring, George stood up.

Without speaking, she lugged the chair with surprising ease over the white cord separating the dining room from the narrow strip available for visitors to walk and sat firmly down, her legs dangling, then stared fixedly at him as if challenging him to object. She said, “What's your name?”

“George. What's yours?”

“Helena. I live here. You're not supposed to cross over the white cords.”

“I didn't. The chair was on this side.”

The encounter was too boring to be lengthened, the child too young and too plain to excite interest. He had shrugged his shoulders and moved away.

And now the chair was in his study, and Helena Haverland, née Cressett, was his housekeeper, and if she remembered that first childhood encounter she never mentioned it, nor did he. He had used the whole of his grandfather's legacy to purchase the Manor and had planned to maintain it by converting the west wing into a private clinic, spending from Monday to Wednesday each week in London, operating on his NHS patients and those in his private beds at St. Angela's, and returning to Stoke Cheverell on Wednesday nights. The work of adapting the wing was done sensitively; the changes were minimal. The wing was a twentieth-century restoration following an earlier replacement in the eighteenth century, and no other original part of the Manor had been touched. Staffing the clinic had never been a problem; he knew whom he wanted and was prepared to pay over the odds to get them. But staffing the operating suite had proved easier than staffing the Manor. The months while he awaited planning consent and when the work was in progress presented no problem. He camped in the Manor, often with the house to himself, looked after by an elderly cook, the only member of the Cressett staff, apart from the gardener, Mogworthy, who stayed on. He looked back now on that year as one of the most contented and happiest that he had ever known. He rejoiced in his possession, moving daily in the silence from the great hall to the library, from the long gallery to his rooms in the east wing with a quiet, undiminished triumph. He knew that the Manor couldn't hope to rival the magnificent great hall or the gardens of Athelhampton, the breathtaking beauty of the setting of Encombe, or the nobility and history of Wolfeton. Dorset was rich in great houses. But this was his place and he wanted no other.

The problems began after the clinic had opened and the first patients arrived. He advertised for a housekeeper but, as acquaintances in similar need had prophesied, none proved satisfactory. The old servants from the village whose forebears had worked for the Cressetts were not seduced from old loyalties by the high wages offered by the interloper. He had thought that his secretary in London would have time to cope with the bills and bookkeeping. She hadn't. He had hoped that Mogworthy, the gardener now relieved by an expensive firm who came in weekly to cope with the heavy work, would condescend to help more in the house. He wouldn't. But the second advertisement for a housekeeper, this time differently placed and worded, had produced Helena. She had, he remembered, interviewed him rather than he her. She said that she was recently divorced, independent with a flat in London, but wanted something to do while she considered her future. It would be interesting to return, even temporarily, to the Manor.

She had returned six years ago and was still there. Occasionally he wondered how he would manage when she decided to leave, which she would probably do as unfussily and determinedly as she had arrived. But he was too busy. There were problems, some of his own making, with the theatre sister, Flavia Holland, and with his assistant surgeon, Marcus Westhall, and although by nature a planner, he had never seen sense in anticipating a crisis. Helena had recruited her old governess, Letitia Frensham, as a bookkeeper. She was presumably either a widow or divorced or separated, but he made no enquiry. The accounts were meticulously kept, in the office order was produced out of chaos. Mogworthy ceased his irritating threats to resign and became accommodating. Part-time staff from the village became mysteriously available. Helena said that no good cook would tolerate the kitchen and, ungrudgingly, he provided the money required for its upgrading. Fires were lit, flowers and greenery found for the rooms in use, even in the winter. The Manor became alive.