Want to Know a Secret? (32 page)

James felt as if his insides had been turned to stone.

He held Tamzin in his arms. Not the happier Tamzin that he was daring to get used to but a gasping, keening, grey-faced Tamzin whose arms and legs jerked out of control.

Her wails of anguish, ‘
No
!
No
!
No
!’ were choking her. Crowing for breath, she ripped sobs out from the pit of her stomach.

James tried to hold her tightly, to keep her tipping into hysteria. ‘I’m here, Tamz.’ But her frantically pedalling legs trampled his toes and drew lines of fire down his shins.

Two nurses encouraged her back down the corridor, voices soothing. ‘Let’s get you to the relative’s room, dear. You’ll be better, there.’

It was ineffective.

Tamzin was in some private agony zone and seemed quite unable to control her pumping legs.

And then, like an answer to a prayer, Diane was racing up the corridor towards them, compassion all over her face. ‘James?’

Tamzin yanked herself free and threw herself at Diane. ‘Diane! Oh, Diane. Mummy
died
. Right there in front of us. She began to gasp and panic and Dad pressed the red button and people raced in and they were trying to help but she just
gasped
and gasped. And then she stopped. ’ Her voice spiralled. ‘She
stopped breathing
!’

Diane cradled the shuddering body, her horrified eyes seeking James’s. Dumbly, he nodded. Stroking Tamzin’s back, Diane murmured, ‘Oh, darling.’

With her other hand she reached out to James.

Helplessly, he let her arm slide around him. But the bad stuff didn’t go away. It was like the sweating, terrifying kind of nightmare when a family member is torn away by the slavering fangs of a monster. This time the monster was death and there would be no grateful awakening.

Diane helped him haul Tamzin along to the relative’s room and a doctor came and gave her something to calm her. James held her, repeating endlessly, ‘I’m here. I’m here, Tamzin.’ Eventually, she slumped, her head on his shoulder, quieting in the protective circle of his arms.

James began to shake as awful reality sank in, the images of the last few minutes hanging ghastly before his eyes. Valerie’s strange colour. The life draining from her face. She had always been so alive, so animated, her eyes alight with laughter or gleaming in scorn. But never as they were now – with no expression.

He thrust away the image of what he’d just witnessed, letting his tendency for logic and control carry him into action. ‘I must tell Natalia and Alice, and Harold. Be with them.’

Diane was seated on his other side. He could feel her hand, firm on his arm. ‘Do you want to leave Tamzin with me? You could break the news, gather everyone at your house, then I’ll bring her along. Just give me a few minutes to tell the nurses so that when Bryony comes –’ She halted, suddenly. ‘Oh, no. Gareth.’

They stared at each another bleakly. Diane grimaced. ‘I’ll have to tell him. Stay with him.’

She helped James down to the car with Tamzin sleepwalking between them, James half-carrying her. She weighed no more than a child. Diane took his keys and opened the car door and they loaded her into the front seat and fastened the seat belt.

The car door shut, Diane put her hand on James’s forearm. ‘I’m so sorry.’

‘Yes.’ His voice was a croak. Nausea waited in his throat.

‘If you want to talk, ring me.’

For an instant, normality stirred. ‘Could I?’

‘Of course. Of
course
. Don’t be the strong one all alone. Everyone will need you. It’s OK for you to need somebody.’ Her eyes shone with sympathy.

He managed, ‘Thank you.’

Diane made her way slowly back upstairs to tell her husband that his sister was dead.

Gareth went a brilliant, startling white, a contrast to the rainbow face he’d sported until recently. ‘But I was going to visit her tomorrow. Tomorrow. They were going to put me in a chair and let me see her. She was nearly better. Wasn’t she nearly better? She was going home, like me.’

Shoving all the hurts and frictions aside, Diane took his hand. ‘I know. It was a complete shock. James and Tamzin were with her and called the crash team but it was so quick.’

‘How could she die? She was never in danger from her injuries.’

‘James assumed it was her heart but the team are talking about pulmonary embolism – a blood clot that went to her lungs.’

‘But she was nearly better.’

‘I know.’

Presently, Bryony crept in to give her father a huge hug. ‘Dad, the nurse told me. Poor Valerie! Dad, poor you. And Pops and Tamzin and everyone.’ She put her head down on her father’s chest and began to cry.

Diane didn’t feel she could leave Gareth until well on in the evening but did have to take Bryony home in the end, promising Gareth that she’d be back in the morning and that they’d talk to the doctor then about getting Gareth to the funeral. ‘I must get to the funeral,’ he kept saying. ‘I’ve got to be there.’ Fixating on it, where it would be and when it would be and how he’d manage.

Diane drove home in a dream, Bryony beside her, dazed into silence, apart from the occasional, ‘I so can’t believe it. Poor Dad! Poor Tamzin. Poor, poor Pops, he was so happy this afternoon.’

And Diane’s automatic, practical, ‘We’ll have to help everybody as much as we can.’

She didn’t think she’d sleep but she climbed into her new bed in her new bedroom to watch mindless TV for a while. Bryony padded in, her big spotted T-shirt making her look about twelve – if not for the bump of the baby. She perched cross-legged on Diane’s bed. ‘I’ve got something to tell you. It’s been such a weird day.’ Her eyes looked very big in her pale face.

Diane reached up to tug a curl. ‘We’re going through a weird time, aren’t we? Poor Valerie, Dad in hospital, you going to be a mum, me to be a grandmother – I haven’t got my head round that, by the way.’

‘There’s something else for you to get your head round.’ Bryony looked sheepish, almost embarrassed. She hesitated. ‘Pops told me today that all his grandchildren come into some money when they’re twenty-one. He set up a trust, or something.’

Diane felt a smile spread across her face. ‘Does that mean that you’ll get a bit of money on your birthday? He’s such a sweetheart.’

Bryony looked awed. ‘I get forty thousand pounds.’

Chapter Twenty-Nine

Tamzin had spent the night in her bed, curled on her right side.

She wasn’t aware that she had slept. Whatever the doctor had given her had locked her up like a fly in amber so that she felt immobile and remote.

And it hadn’t altered the horrible truth.

Now, as the light stole around the curtains, she tried to make herself believe that her mother was dead.

Mum’s dead. Mummy. My mother is dead.

She can’t be. She was right there, propped up in bed and talking about coming home in a few days and how odd her legs felt and that the physio was a sadistic bastard and then she began to frown and get short of breath. My God, James, open the damned window, I think I’m having an asthma attack. Gasping, panicking, grabbing her chest, coughing for breath, suddenly white and waxy and Dad shouted her name and slammed his hand against a red button on the wall.

People had run in like a scene from Casualty. Heart monitor. Oxygen mask. A tube in Valerie’s arm. Then Valerie passed out. And even though they tried, even though they’d worked and worked, ignoring Tamzin and her dad backed fearfully into a corner, Tamzin had known that Valerie was dead before they stopped trying.

But still she’d wanted them to carry on, had even shouted, ‘Don’t stop!’

Horror.

My mother is dead.

She can’t be. She was right there in the room with me. She was coming home.

Tamzin thought about the house without Valerie in it, not just as it had been the past few months, waiting for her to return. But forever. The same house she’d grown up in. But different.

Growing up with Valerie had been like being a living doll. Natalia and Alice were tomboys who were always building tree houses that were too high for Tamzin or jumping brooks too wide for her to clear.

So Tamzin had hung out with Valerie. She could still hear her mother’s proud laugh. ‘You should hear my baby fuss about her hair. Everything has to be just so for my pretty princess.’

But that had been then, not now. In the last couple of years, when the pretty princess had been wandering the grey caves of depression, Valerie had done exactly what Tamzin wanted everyone to do. Leave her to find her own way out.

Her gaze fell on the shelf above her computer. Empty. At some time since coming home from the hospital her CDs had been whisked away. James, probably, or one of her sisters, had – as they thought – removed temptation from her path.

Slowly, she straightened her legs, waiting out a storm of pins and needles. Sliding to the edge of the bed she rose, feeling the familiar whiz in her head that told her she hadn’t eaten recently. Opening the wardrobe doors she found her old brown suede coat and felt in the big square pocket at the front. The pocket was just the right size for the CD case. And if it wasn’t there she knew where there were others. Taped beneath the wardrobe, slotted behind the chest of drawers. They waited, like best friends, to be needed.

Back on the bed she drew the quilt around herself and carefully prised the CD case apart with her fingertips, discarding the dark grey inner and the paper inserts with the retouched photos of a moody-looking band. Her counsellor had known that most people like her had a favourite instrument – scissors, knives, shards of plastic. Tamzin had denied she had one, because she liked to keep bits of herself private. What was that phrase?
Knowledge is power
.

Delicately separating the clear plastic parts she chose the front and began to flex it between her hands, forcing it into a curve with her two thumbs.

It snapped almost immediately with a satisfying crack. It always made her jump, that bit. But she liked it.

She selected the biggest piece. It had broken on the angle to leave a long, knife-sharp diagonal edge. She pulled up her left sleeve and set the broken edge of the plastic against the soft white underside of her arm just below the elbow. Drew the clear plastic slowly across the skin. She winced. The first stroke always sent a strange sensation up the back of her neck. She waited for the beads of blood to appear. Grow.

And then came the burning that made her gasp and curl her toes. The throbbing would come later, so tender that she’d feel shadows glide over the wound. But at least she would feel something. Know that she was still here.

James had dealt with the formalities surrounding the deaths of each of his parents but that hadn’t prepared him for doing the same for Valerie.

An untimely death, he discovered, meant a lot of new stuff to deal with. There would be a post mortem and Valerie had been moved to the mortuary at the district hospital.

Two of his daughters were distraught and one had, quite obviously, retreated into her grey caves. His father-in-law had aged ten years overnight to become a silent old man.

Harold’s doctor had attended him at James’s house and pronounced himself concerned. Harold didn’t have much medication with him and the doctor left a prescription but there was nowhere in Webber’s Cross to fill it. James had to wait for a phone call from the mortician. Arrangements could only be pencilled in until James had a death certificate and the funeral director had a body.

Valerie’s body. The words made him feel sick. Once Valerie’s body had been something that filled him with desire. Now it was the name used to describe the husk left chilling in a drawer.

‘I don’t mind driving to the pharmacy in Wisbech,’ Natalia offered. ‘But I haven’t got my car because I came here in yours last night.’ She swallowed. ‘I suppose I could take Mum’s …’

Valerie’s car waited in the clean expanse of the garage and it was almost an obscenity that such a piece of machinery should stand unused. He’d given it a run periodically while she lay injured but it took too much driving for his taste. And it was so much Val’s car ...

‘Mum’s car isn’t insured for you and neither is mine. There’s Tamzin’s –’

‘For God’s sake, Dad!’ Natalia exploded. ‘Now is not the time to obsess about details. Who gives a crap about insurance, today?’

James kept his voice neutral. ‘I don’t see that you getting prosecuted for driving without insurance will make any of us feel better.’

‘I’ve been driving nine years and never been asked for my insurance details. How many years have you been driving? And have you ever been asked for yours?’

‘It doesn’t matter,’ offered Harold, trying to sound firm. ‘I’m absolutely fine.’

‘It does matter,’ declared Natalia and James, simultaneously.

‘Couldn’t she drive Tamzin’s car on her own car insurance?’ suggested Alice.

‘Oh, I expect that only covers me third party or some other bloody fusspot thing,’ declared Natalia, before James could say that it was insured for any driver, because he’d seen to it.