one of these tirades, an ugly storm in a private suite, and put her down as the spoilt daughter of a Birmingham industrialist who flew to see her in the company helicopter and indulged every whim
I visited St Mary’s once a week, supervising a new diagnostic system developed in collaboration with the Adler. Instead of facing a tired consultant eager for a large gin and a hot bath, the patient sat at a screen, pressing buttons in reply to prerecorded questions from a fresh-faced and smiling doctor, played by a sympathetic actor. To the consultants’ surprise, and relief, the patients preferred the computerized image to a real physician. Desperate to get Sally onto her feet, and well aware that her handicaps were ‘elective’, in the tactful jargon, her surgeon suggested that we sit Sally in front of the prototype machine.
I distrusted the project, which treated patients like children in a video arcade, but it brought Sally and me together. I rewrote the dialogue of a peptic ulcer programme, adapting the questions to Sally’s case, put on a white coat in front of the camera and played the caring doctor.
Sally happily pressed the response buttons, revealing all her anger over the injustice of her accident. But a few days later she swerved past me in the corridor, almost running me down. Pausing to apologize, she was amazed to find that I existed. Over the next days her good humour returned, and she enjoyed mimicking my wooden acting. As I sat on her bed she teased me that I was not completely real. We talked to each other in our recorded voices, a courtship of imbeciles that I was careful not to take seriously.
But a deeper, unspoken dialogue drew us together. I called in every day, and the nursing staff told me that when I was late Sally climbed from her bed and searched for me, dispensing with her wheelchair. As I soon learned, she was a more subtle psychologist than I was. Gripping her volume of Frida Kahlo paintings, she asked me if I could track down the make of tram that had injured Kahlo in Mexico City. Was the manufacturer by any chance an English firm?
I could grasp the anger that linked the two women, but Kahlo had been grievously wounded by a steel rail that pierced her uterus and gave her a lifetime of pain. Sally had crossed a foreign street without looking to left or right, and lost nothing of her beauty. It was her curious obsession with the random nature of the accident that prevented her from walking. Unable to resolve the conundrum, she insisted that she was a cripple in a wheelchair, sharing her plight with other victims of meaningless accidents.
‘So you’re on strike,’ I told her. ‘You’re conducting your own sit-in against the universe.’
‘I’m waiting for an answer, Mr Markham.’ She played with her hair as she lay back against three huge pillows. ‘It’s the most important question there is.’
‘Go on.’
‘”Why me?” Answer it. You can’t.’
‘Sally…does it matter? It’s a fluke we’re alive at all. The chances of our parents meeting were millions to one against. We’re tickets in a lottery.’
‘But a lottery isn’t meaningless. Someone has to win.’ She paused to get my attention. ‘Like our meeting here. That wasn’t meaningless…’
Heathrow approached, a beached sky-city, half space station and half shanty town. We left the motorway and moved along the Great West Road, entering a zone of two-storey factories, car-rental offices and giant reservoirs. We were part of an invisible marine world that managed to combine mystery and boredom. In a way it seemed fitting that my former wife was lying in a hospital here, within call of life and death, in an area that hovered between waking and the dream.
Sally drove with more than her usual zest, overtaking on the inside, jumping the red lights, even hooting a police car out of her way. The Heathrow bomb had recharged her. This vicious and deranged attack confirmed her suspicions of the despotism of fate. For all her wifely concern, she was eager to visit Ashford Hospital, not only to free me from my memories of an unhappy marriage, but to convince herself that there was no meaning or purpose in the terrorist bomb. Already I was hoping that Laura had made a sudden recovery and was on her way back to London with Henry Kendall.
I switched on the radio and tuned in to the reports of rescue work at Terminal 2. The airport was closed indefinitely, as police searched for explosives in the other three terminals. Scarcely noticed by the newspapers, several small bombs had detonated in London during the summer, mostly smoke and incendiary devices unclaimed by any terrorist group, part of the strange metropolitan weather. Bombs were left in a Shepherd’s Bush shopping mall and a cineplex in Chelsea. There were no warnings and, luckily, no casualties. A quiet fever burned in the mind of some brooding solitary, a candle of disaffection that threw ever-longer shadows. Yet I only heard about the incendiary device that destroyed a McDonald’s in the Finchley Road, a mile from our house, when I glanced through the local free-sheet left by Sally’s manicurist. London was under siege from a shy, invisible enemy.
‘We’re here,’ Sally told me. ‘Now, take it easy.’
We had reached Ashford Hospital. Outside the Accident and Emergency entrance the ambulance lights rotated ceaselessly, hungry radars eager to suck any news of pain and injury from the sky. Paramedics sipped their mugs of tea, ready to be recalled to Heathrow.
‘Sally, you must be tired.’ I smoothed her hair as we waited to enter the car park. ‘Do you want to stay outside?’
‘I’ll come in.’
‘It could be nasty.’
‘It’s nasty out here. This is for me, too, David.’
She released the brake lever, pulled sharply onto the pavement and overtook a Jaguar driven by an elderly nun. A security man leaned through Sally’s window, noticed the adapted controls and beckoned us into the car park of a nearby supermarket, where the police had set up a command post.
The Jaguar pulled in beside us, and the nun stepped out and opened the door for a grey-haired priest, some monsignor ready to give the last rites. I was helping Sally from the car when I noticed a bearded figure in a white raincoat outside the Accident and Emergency entrance. He was staring over the heads of the police and ambulance drivers, eyes fixed on the silent sky, as if expecting a long-awaited aircraft to fly over the hospital and break the spell. He carried a woman’s handbag, holding it against his chest, a life-support package that might work its desperate miracle.
Distractedly, he offered the bag to a concerned paramedic who spoke to him. His eyes were hidden by the ambulance lights, but I could see his mouth opening and closing, a subvocal speech addressed to no one around him. Despite all our years at the Adler, the tiresome clients and their impossible secretaries, this was the first time I had seen Henry Kendall completely at a loss.
‘David?’ Sally waited for me to lift her from the driving seat. When I hesitated, she moved her legs out of the car, seized the door pillar in both hands and stood up. Around her were endless rows of parked cars, a silent congregation that worshipped death. ‘Has something happened?’
‘It looks like it. Henry’s over there.’
‘Grim…’ Sally followed my raised hand. ‘He’s waiting for you.’
‘Poor man, he’s not waiting for anything.’
‘Laura? She can’t be…’
‘Stay here. I’ll talk to him. If he can hear anything I say…’
Five minutes later, after trying to comfort Henry, I walked back to Sally. She stood by the car, a stick in each hand, blonde hair falling across her shoulders. Carrying Laura’s handbag, I stepped around the monsignor’s Jaguar, sorry that our aggressive driving had delayed his arrival by even a few seconds.
I embraced Sally tightly, aware that I was trembling. I held the handbag under my arm, realizing that Laura’s death had driven a small space between us.
AS I LEFT the chapel and