Tree of Hands (6 page)

‘You are
the
Benet Archdale, aren't you?'

‘I suppose so. Yes, I am.'

So much for his being interested in her as a woman. She almost laughed.

‘I liked your book very much. It must be the worst cliché a writer hears when people say they don't have time for reading. I made time to read it and I hope my patients didn't suffer.'

She was so warmed and delighted by what he said that it carried her for a few moments above her worries over Mopsa and James. It was somehow as gratifying as getting her first good review had been. She smiled with pleasure. How could she have been so foolish, so female in the worst possible way, as to fancy she would have preferred sexual attention to
that
?

‘How do you come to know so much about India?'

‘I was there for six months with James's father. He was planning a series of articles about an Indian mystic.' She began telling him about Acharya the Learned One and his 40,000-mile walk.

A nurse came in to say he was wanted. Could he come now? Benet had forgotten to ask him if it would be all right for her to go home for an hour to look for Mopsa. But now she could see that this would in any case be impossible for her. James couldn't be left. He lay on his back, listlessly holding the tiger cub. His eyes were wide open, unblinking in their distress at the shallow noisy breaths he was forced to take. At this time yesterday she had been in the children's playroom with him while he trundled a wheelbarrow full of bricks and drew on the blackboard.

They said now that he had a virus infection. There was a drug to treat it but it was very new and still only in use
in certain teaching hospitals. It might be thirty-six hours before James began to respond to the drug. After a while he cried to be taken out of the tent. Benet lay on the bed and held him against her, rocking him gently. It was wrong to keep him out of the tent. The more he was kept in there, even against his will, the more quickly he would recover. And he must recover soon, he must be up and about and playing by tomorrow so that she could put an end to the imprisonment that kept her from her responsibilities to Mopsa. Somehow she knew that one day he would see it that way too, he would share in the burden his mother and grandfather had. She imagined him a teenager, becoming responsible, and talking to him about his grandmother, teaching him to understand.

If Mopsa were still alive when James was a teenager. If she were still alive now . . . He fell asleep, lying against her, and she put him gently back into the tent, hating that breathing of his, physically hurt by it. But he was sleeping and the vaporizer was steaming up the tent and the antiviral drug had begun its work. She left him and went back down the corridor to the phone.

A young woman with a child on her lap was using it. The playroom door was open so she went in and sat on one of the chairs for five-year-olds that were set round the table. There was a Wendy house in the playroom, a bookcase of books, boxes of toys, a cage with two gerbils in it and, all over the walls, posters and drawings and collages. Paper cut-out witches riding up the window panes on paper cut-out broomsticks reminded her of Mopsa, though she needed no reminding. On the inside of the door a dozen or so children had written, or had had written for them, their names underneath the heading:
We have had our tonsils out
. The dominating collage was a piece of bizarrerie, the brainchild evidently of someone with a B.Ed and flair, a mural whose paper base sheet filled half a wall.

Benet, when she had seen it the day before, had immediately dubbed it a tree of hands. She had liked it then, it had even made her smile. Now it seemed to her sinister,
Daliesque, haunting, something about which one might have bad dreams. On the white paper base sheet had been drawn a tree with a straight brown trunk and branches and twigs, and all over the tree, on the branches, nestling among the twigs, protruding like fungus from the trunk, were paper hands. All were exactly the same shape, presumably cut out by individual children using a template of an open hand with the fingers spread slightly apart. And the children must have been allowed to decorate them as they pleased, for some were gloved, some tattooed, some ladies' hands with red nails and rings, one in mittens and another in mail, mostly white but some black or brown, one the stripped bone hand of a skeleton. And now to Benet all those hands seemed to be held upwards, to be straining upwards in silent supplication as if imploring mercy. They reached out from the tree begging for relief or freedom or perhaps for oblivion. They were horrible. There was an essentially mad quality about them. She found that she had got up from the low chair and gone close to the tree of hands to stare at it with fascinated repulsion. As soon as she realized how hypnotically she was staring, she pulled herself away and went, out into the corridor to the phone which was now free.

The repeated hollow ringing had a dull meaningless sound. Benet listened to the ringing, she let it ring on and on. An idea had come to her that Mopsa might simply have decided not to answer the phone but she would have to if it rang long enough. She let it ring forty times, fifty times, until going on any longer became absurd.

The best that could have happened to Mopsa was that the change of scene, the new ways, being abandoned to look after herself, had been too much for her and she had wandered off in the manner of the Northampton escapade. Looking out at the clear hard blue sky and the racing wind, Benet hoped she hadn't done it in her nightgown. But that was the best. There were other options. The overdose of sleeping pills and the rest of the brandy or the sleeping pill
ten minutes before she took a bath or the barricading of herself in one of the rooms with a can of paraffin and a box of matches. Surely there hadn't been any paraffin in the house or matches either for that matter . . .

If she phoned the police, they would want her to go to the police station and fill in a ‘Missing Persons' form. Of course she could ask them to come here and collect her key and let themselves into the house in the Vale of Peace. But would they do that? She must try, that was all. As soon as Mr Drew, the ear, nose and throat specialist, had been to see James, she would go back down the corridor and phone the police.

He came at two, accompanied by Ian Raeburn and a couple of house officers. Mr Drew was shortish, thick-set, wearing a brown tweed suit and gold-rimmed glasses. James began crying at the sight of the white coats which the house officers hadn't remembered to take off. When he cried, it made him choke.

Drew was one of those doctors of the old school who never tell a patient or a patient's next-of-kin anything if they can help it. If they can't help it, they talk to them as if they were illiterate half-wits or simple-minded peasants. He said nothing at all to Benet, talked to Ian Raeburn in polysyllabic words of Greek aetiology, and walked out leading his little procession. James put out his arms to be picked up but the nurse said he had to stay inside the croupette. The hectic flush had faded from his cheeks and he had become pale again. His pulse was taken and Benet asked what it was.

Was there ever a nurse born who would answer that question? ‘He's not a very well little boy, are you, sweetheart?'

When they were alone again, Benet put her hand inside the tent for him to hold. Her hand did not interest him. He let her take his, he suffered her touch. All his energies, all his will, seemed concentrated on maintaining his own breathing. Benet held his hand and came as close to him as she could. To leave him and phone the police, to leave
him even for those few short minutes, she could see was out of the question. If Mopsa were wandering, she would be found, and if she were dead – well, she was dead and it was too late. Benet took James's wrist and began to count his pulse beats, looking at her watch. A hundred, a hundred and ten, twenty, forty, sixty, eighty . . . He couldn't have a pulse rate of a hundred and eighty a minute, she must have counted wrong. His forehead was cool and dry, his temperature was normal.

So perhaps he was not so very ill. The first infection had passed off quickly so it was very likely this secondary one would too. If only he wouldn't breathe in that awful way, puffing like a little weak, feverish, anxious bellows, the way she had never heard anyone breathe before. The door opened, the procession came back, Mr Drew leading it.

‘Now then, this is James, isn't it? And you are the mother? I'm going to have to do a little operation on James to relieve his breathing.'

Benet stood up. She felt as if a heavy stone, for some while lodged in her throat, were slowly rolling down through her body.

‘An operation?'

‘Nothing too serious. Just to relieve the breathing. For a few days he'll be breathing through his neck instead of his nose and mouth.'

The stone rolled out of her, leaving her with a sick, dry, bruised feeling. ‘Do you mean a tracheotomy?'

Mr Drew looked at her as if she had no business to know the word, much less utter it. It was Ian Raeburn who answered.

‘It will be a tracheotomy, yes. The larynx in a child of James's age is very narrow, only about four millimetres across. If you get a millimetre and a half swelling on one side and a millimetre and a half on the other you haven't much space left to get air through. Now James's larynx is closing up and we aren't able to dilate it sufficiently with the ventilator.'

A nurse came up with the form for her to sign consenting to the operation. Her hand wasn't very steady.

‘Mr Drew is very experienced,' Ian Raeburn said. ‘Only a week ago he had to do a tracheotomy on a child with diphtheria, so he's had some recent practice.'

‘Can I be in the operating theatre with him?'

‘He'll be under anaesthetic, he won't know whether you're there or not. Mr Drew would say he doesn't want two patients on his hands.'

It took her a moment to understand what he meant. ‘You mean I might be sick or I might pass out?' She tried to smile. ‘It's possible. How does one know?'

He took her hand and held it. He held it tightly. ‘You can be just outside. It won't take long.'

The nurse unzipped the tent and lifted James out. Benet put out her arms to him, was about to say she would carry him herself when the door swung open and Mopsa walked into the room. Benet stared at her, stunned. She looked serene and happy, years younger. Her hair was covered by a pink and red scarf and she wore a rather dashing bright red coat.

‘I've been trying to get you on the phone,' Benet said. ‘I've been trying for hours.'

‘Have you really? I heard the phone ringing when I first woke up and then I thought it couldn't be you, you'd be too occupied with him to bother about me. So I thought I'd find your spare car keys and come down here and get your car and practise driving. And that's what I did. I've been doing it all morning. I'm quite an expert now.'

Benet said nothing. It was better not. It was always best to control one's temper with Mopsa. She turned away, first managing a strained smile. Her mouth felt dry and there was a pain pressing on the bone above her eyes. James, his skin bluish, was taking a breath every second now. For one brief instant she thought of, she pictured, that tiny narrow passage, no thicker than a darning needle, a thread, the stem of a daisy, through which all the air for James's lungs and brain and heart must pass, and then she pushed
the thought away with such force that she made a little sound, a stifled ‘ah!' Mopsa looked at her. They were going up to the operating theatre in the lift, all of them.

‘Croup? He has to have an operation for croup? I can't believe it. There must be something they're not telling you.'

Ian Raeburn said, ‘There is nothing more complicated than a swollen larynx.'

Benet noticed a harsh, even ragged, edge to his voice she hadn't heard there before. Did he too find Mopsa almost unbearably irritating? He went between the double doors into the theatre and the nurse carrying James went with him. Mr Drew was already there. Benet wondered if she should have insisted on going in there with James. He would be having the anaesthetic now though, it would soon be over . . . There was a kind of waiting room here, comfortless like all waiting rooms, with armless chairs and unread magazines. Four floors higher than the children's ward, it overlooked a panorama of roofs and spires. The old workhouse windows showed a spread of the top of London with a horizon of Hampstead Heath, so green it hurt the eyes. The sunshine looked warm because it was so warm inside, a still, constant hospital heat, smelling faintly of limes.

‘He's going to be all right, isn't he?' Mopsa said. ‘I mean he's not in danger?'

Benet felt sick. ‘As far as I know, this is just routine. I don't really know any more about it than you do.'

‘Mrs Fenton's sister had one of those trach-whatever-they-are things done. She had cancer of the throat.'

I must not hate my mother . . .

‘Your father phoned when I got back last night. He was very worried about me. He'd been phoning all the evening. I didn't say anything about James. I thought it best not to.'

Pointless to argue about that. A waste of time even to attempt to find out why Mopsa thought it best not to. Benet picked up one of the magazines but the print was
a black and white pattern, the illustrations meaningless juxtapositions of colours. She found herself thinking of the tree of hands, all the hands upraised, supplicating, praying.

The double doors opened and Ian Raeburn came out. He stood there for a moment. Benet jumped up, still holding the magazine, her nails going through the shiny paper. His face was as grey as James's had been. He took a step towards her, cleared his throat to find a voice and began apologizing, saying he was sorry, they were all sorry, beyond measure sorry. He stopped and swallowed and told her that James was dead.

The floor rose up and she fell forward in a faint.

EVERY OTHER SATURDAY,
Carol was allowed to have Ryan and Tanya home and sometimes they stayed overnight. It was usually Barry who went over to Four Winds at Alexandra Park to fetch them. Carol liked to have a lie-in on Saturdays. She had a bath every morning anyway, it was a rule of life with her, but on Saturdays she made a special ritual of it, putting avocado-and-wheatgerm bubble bath in the water and rubbing body lotion on herself afterwards, washing her hair and giving it a blow-dry and painting her nails. There wasn't a mark on Carol's body from having had three children. It was white and firm with taut muscles. The only scar of any kind Carol had was a curious curved pit on her back just below the left shoulder blade. She told Barry how she had come by it.