Chapter Ten
James tried to feel sympathy for his wife.
But so many times he’d witnessed this same sad scene — Tamzin attempting to talk something over with her mother, Valerie waving it away — and it pissed him off. Valerie didn’t dismiss Tamzin through being a bad person and it wasn’t completely because Valerie drank more than was good for her or all those around her. It was because Valerie couldn’t face up to Tamzin’s problems. Better, much, to cram her life with fun and toys.
Valerie was reasonably good at pretending to listen, he acknowledged, observing her features fixed in an expression of interest. But poor Tamz, no matter how much she practised, never quite got the hang of being satisfied with pretence.
‘Dad wants me to start my sessions with Lynsay, the therapist, again.’
Valerie smiled.
‘But you don’t think I need to, do you?’ Tamzin waited. ‘Mum?’
Valerie smiled more widely. ‘Yes, darling.’
‘Yes?’ Tamzin’s mouth turned down.
Valerie hedged. ‘What does your father think?’
Tamzin responded patiently, her expression reflecting hope now a dialogue had creaked into being. ‘That I should.’
‘Well . . .’ Valerie paused and her eyes slid to the door to the room as if visualising herself slipping her body out of plaster and traction and sneaking out into her lovely fun world again. ‘Tell you what, why don’t you pop out to the coffee shop and I’ll have a little talk with him?’
Tamzin nodded, not quite managing a smile.
When she’d shut the door, James propped his chin on his fist and waited. He knew Valerie wasn’t going to talk about Tamzin.
‘James.’ Her voice was a murmur, her smile just for him.
He remained unmoved.
‘Darling.’ The smile widened. ‘Darling, now I’m getting better, would you mind bringing me in something to liven up this bloody endless squash? Just a half bottle will do, some voddy or something. Or maybe a bottle and I won’t have to ask you again for ages.’
‘You know not to ask me, Val. Waste of breath.’
‘Oh, James . . .’ She pushed her fingers through her hair. It was bushy and dull, probably she’d been pushing her fingers through it all day. The roots were quite grey, he noticed with a shock, a line marking her last visit to the colourist. She stepped up from wheedle to exasperation. ‘Darling, don’t be sanctimonious. I’m in pain and I’m terminally bored; a little drink will take the edge off.’ Her eyes were still darkly bruised like a racoon’s, the rest of her face turning sepia with brown accents. She sighed, shifting slightly, wincing.
‘Sorry. No can do. Not unless you can get the doctor to prescribe it along with your painkillers.’ There was no point getting angry with her, he reminded himself. It wasn’t her — it was the drink.
But sometimes he was angry, unbelievably angry, with the woman that the drink had made her. Like over her mortifying performance at the Furness Durwent party last Christmas when she’d put her head down on the table, in front of everybody from Charlie, the CEO, to the lad in the post room, and gone to sleep. How could he forget the humiliation of hearing Charlie’s wife say under her breath, ‘Valerie’s had too much to drink — again.’
He must remember that it was the drink. Not her, the drink. He should make more effort to get her straightened out.
He tried to sound understanding. ‘I’m sorry, Valerie, I can’t bring you alcohol. Don’t you think—’ He decided to plunge in. ‘Don’t you think that it’s time you got help to stop drinking? For your health? For Tamzin? Being in here is bloody awful, I know, but it’s the perfect opportunity. You can’t smoke and you can’t drink. By the time you come home, you’ll be off both.’
Valerie snatched up her jug of water, slopping it over a get-well card with a picture of a Spitfire. ‘Oh, James, since when have I been an angel? Why expect me to start?’
Abandoning the idea that she might want to pull herself back from an abyss, he produced four envelopes from his inside pocket. ‘Post for you.’
Valerie riffled through them, halting, as he’d known she would, at the one with the familiar dark blue and white logo. Hand trembling slightly, she ripped open the envelope and unfolded the letter. Then sagged, miserably. ‘The CAA have suspended my licence pending investigation.’
He managed a neutral tone. ‘I was afraid that that would be the outcome. They took a blood sample, didn’t they?’
She nodded, just barely. All except her bruises had whitened, even her lips.
‘You tested positive for alcohol?’
She shrugged, folding the letter over again and holding it tightly so that he couldn’t read it.
‘Was it a particularly bad day?’
She shrugged again, eyes lowered, a frown nipping a pinch of skin between her eyes.
Impatience reared up. ‘God’s sake, Valerie! You risked your life and Gareth’s. What if you’d had one of our daughters with you? My daughters? You have to conquer this—’
Valerie snapped her head up, eyes glittering. ‘Don’t preach. I hate you when you preach, James.’
He took a deep breath, fighting hot red fury. It was a good time to leave the room. ‘I’ll collect Tamzin from the coffee shop.’
He stepped out into the carpeted corridor, shoulders rigid. It was not Valerie. It was the drink. He must remember that, when she snapped. It was not her; it was the drink. When she called him darling as if she still meant it — it was not her. It was the drink.
His attention fell on a hurrying figure ahead of him in a green summer dress threaded with white ribbons and his heart leapt. ‘Diane!’
The hurrying figure froze.
‘Diane?’
Slowly, she turned. ‘James.’ Diane flicked a smile on and off and turned towards Gareth’s room.
A fresh wave of anger hit him. Diane wasn’t Valerie and she had no business trying insincere smiles on him. Did she really think he’d be so easily dismissed? Three quick steps and he was able to grab her hand. ‘We need to talk.’
At first it seemed she’d twist away but then she gave a tut and allowed herself to be towed past her husband’s room and through the two cream doors that led to the comparative privacy of the stairwell.
She dragged her hand free as the doors swung shut behind them. Her eyes were slightly red-rimmed — had she been crying? — and she was pale and unsmiling. He made to pull her up against him but her coldness hit him like a truck.
‘I’m sorry that I didn’t ring you.’ He prepared to explain what had happened, what had been happening, since the night in the back of his Merc. The night that had sustained him ever since.
Her eyebrows rose a fraction, as if she hadn’t, until now, noticed whether he’d rung or not. ‘I expect you’ve been busy.’ She sounded remote and polite and she let her hand lie flaccid in his.
He tried to connect with her eyes, to make her understand. ‘Tamzin had a really bad week. She’s hardly slept and neither have I. I didn’t want to call you when I felt so—’
‘No explanation necessary.’ Diane removed her hand without letting him capture her gaze and turned back to the door, head high but hectic colour telling him that she might be pretending like hell to be cool but, inside, she was fighting mad.
Even as he shot out an arm to halt her, he cursed himself. All wrong, James. Wrong time (too late), wrong place (Gareth and Valerie in nearby rooms). Obviously she wouldn’t want to talk about their recent sexual congress here at the top of the stairs with nurses passing the other side of the doors. But he tried to inject into his voice the familiarity there had been between them. ‘About that night—’
She paused. Her voice was light. ‘It’s all right, I know the score.’ She ducked his arm and shoved open the door.
‘Diane! I should have—’
‘We shouldn’t have, more to the point. It was stupid and it was wrong.’
‘It wasn’t! It couldn’t be more right.’ Aghast, he watched her stalk off, her dress swinging against her bare legs.
He should have rung. Even if Tamzin had yanked him as taut as a violin string with her methods of expressing the deep melancholy that had sucked her into its scary embrace.
The ugly and frightening scores on her arm had been such a disappointment, after her recent good patch, that black moods had swum over him. He’d coped, he always did, but he hadn’t wanted to taint his next conversation with Diane with the misery that permeated him so thoroughly.
Sometimes he could only deal with things by compartmentalising. And so he’d tucked away the wonderful episode, to be brought out later and enjoyed.
With hindsight, one quick call to explain would’ve been a good plan . . .
He shouldn’t have presumed upon Diane’s understanding, when he hadn’t offered her anything to understand.