False Hope Page 2

  And I had just amputated his.

  Chapter 2

  Things I inherited from my little sister when she died: her Italian leather jacket, the emerald earrings our paternal grandmother left her (I’d been given the matching necklace), and her collection of Thomas Hardy novels, several thoughtfully annotated, and in an unexpectedly neat version of her idiosyncratic, spiky writing. Reading her notes in the margins still had the power to make me cry, because it reminded me that there was so much I never knew about my little sister. Things just like this, hidden away behind the avatars our parents chose for us. Who or what was she analysing them for?

  Hope left me something else, too. Her most cherished possession.

  Her son, Dillon. Her and Aidan Kennedy’s son, Dillon.

  And, consequently, a horrible, ugly, protracted mess. The last in a long chain of interlinked messes that spiralled through Hope’s life like a strand of DNA. A mess she knew for a fact would outlive her.

  There was no time for a mental regroup, much less any kind of impact assessment. Though the impact this man had already had on my and Matt’s life was whispering darkly at the edges of my attention. I quickly adjusted my stunned expression – how could I have failed to recognise him earlier? – because the nurse by his bed was two steps ahead of me.

  ‘Mr Kennedy,’ she was saying, ‘here’s your consultant, Mrs Hamilton.’ And up I swept, because I had no choice but to do so.

  He was on a PCA, groggy, no doubt stupefied by his situation. As seemed to be his wife and the two little girls, one of which was such a mini Aidan that she was unmistakeably his daughter.

  The woman’s gaze flicked up towards me, anxious, uncomprehending, and I smiled to reassure her as I walked round to the far side of the bed. She looked even more sleep-deprived than Siddhant. I wondered how much of the circumstances around the accident she knew.

  Finally, having seemingly been fixed on the middle distance, Aidan Kennedy’s unfocused gaze rested on me. Buried deep beneath the swelling, which was extensive, particularly on his right cheek and brow, those dark-lashed eyes, stuff of way too many idealistic romantic novels, were the same glacial blue I remembered. I could literally drown in them, Hope – seventeen then – once gushed at me. And I remembered finding just enough forbearance to resist explaining the meaning of the word ‘literal’ to her. She, on the other hand (we always dutifully inhabited our respective family boxes), naturally failed to resist explaining to me that I would never understand. Never. About true love. About anything. Anyone. Her or him.

  There was a good deal of door-slamming at home back then. Months of it. Hope was a good bit younger than me, and I’d long since left for medical school, but my mother was on the phone to me, often – Grace, for pity’s sake, can’t you try and knock some sense into her?

  It meant nothing now. It meant nothing then, either. All those rows, all those entreaties, both mine and my mother’s, had served no purpose. She would move in with him – and she did – she would follow her heart’s desire, and I would never understand.

  I met those eyes now, and despite Aidan Kennedy’s rather different-from-his-usual brand of drug-induced confusion, realised the penny had dropped for him too. That he knew who he was looking at, and, given the way he stared at me before he looked away again, that he was equally astonished to find me standing there.

  Which was perhaps understandable; there are still very few female surgeons around, after all. Disbelief that I should be let loose with a scalpel is commonplace. As is the belief that any male registrar with me must be my boss.

  But this was personal. He looked traumatised now. Scared, even. Like the bad boy in school – the one who never seems to get into trouble – finding himself finally in the head teacher’s office, with no choice but to brace for the reckoning. The fingers of his left hand were clenched white against the bed rail, and it occurred to me that he was probably as anxious to pretend ignorance of our common history as I was. Though for different reasons, I suspected. Three of them, on the other side of the bed.

  ‘Do you know where you are, Mr Kennedy?’ I asked. ‘Do you understand why you’re in hospital?’

  He blinked at me, squeezed his eyes shut, as if trying to clear his vision. Mumbled something in which I could make out the words ‘skidded’ and ‘car’.

  I nodded. Said, ‘I’m afraid you were in a serious car accident, and your right hand and forearm were so badly damaged that we weren’t able to save them.’

  The eyelids flickered open. Shut again. Reopened. The little girls’ heads turned in unison towards the bandaged stump.

  ‘We’ve had to amputate, Mr Kennedy,’ I finished. ‘I’m so sorry.’

  Already aware, as she couldn’t fail to be, and meek-looking as she was, the woman’s cry of anguish was loud enough to make Siddhant jump.

  I left Aidan, I think, as stunned by the encounter as I was. Though, in my case, it wasn’t just about him. It wasn’t even primarily about him. It never had been. Because once he’d walked out on my sister, he had ceased to be a problem. No, my first worry, as I joined the ribbon of Sunday afternoon traffic out of Brighton, a couple of hours later, was that wherever Aidan Kennedy was, his mother might be too. And she was someone I wanted to bump into even less.

  She hadn’t been there, though. And if she could be, she surely would be. So was she dead? Or in a home? Perhaps suffering from dementia, like my own mum? I knew she was older than Mum – Aidan, the product of a second marriage, had had a much older half-brother, I remembered – so it was definitely possible. It was a pretty low thing to wish for, but it crossed my mind even so. At least, the wish that she would be somewhere far, far away from where I was, because I really didn’t want to cross swords with her again.

  It had been one of the reasons we’d not moved to the city itself, but a village to the east, up on the South Downs, twenty minutes’ drive away. And it seemed Aidan Kennedy was back here as well. Just visiting? I could only hope so. The last I’d heard, via Facebook, from one of Hope’s old friends, Daisy, was that he’d run out on the last girl he’d cheated on my sister with – even before Hope had died – and got himself a new job, and a new life, up in Hull. But that news was almost a decade old in itself. Suppose he’d returned to Brighton to be closer to his mother, like I had? After all, we didn’t just have my sister in common. With his half-brother long dead, he was in the same place as I was; we were both our mothers’ only remaining children.

  My second thought was that I must have a word with one of my colleagues asap, and ask that he be put under their care. Explain the circumstances, the connection, the potential difficulties of my overseeing Aidan’s recovery and rehabilitation. But just rehearsing what I might say made me feel uncomfortable – it felt too much like hanging out dirty laundry, much too personal, particularly since I’d only been in post for a matter of months.

  But perhaps I wouldn’t need to elaborate too much, I reasoned. This kind of thing happened. ‘For personal reasons’ would be enough, wouldn’t it? Perhaps the less said, the better.

  I wondered if he’d said anything about knowing me. I had no idea what his wife knew of events before he met her but, based on his past form, it was conceivable that she didn’t even know Dillon existed. And even if she did, was it likely she’d know the whole story? A romantic CV that included ‘I abandoned my dying partner and our son’ wasn’t one you’d want to shout about, after all. I wondered how the facts might have been altered. What backstory he’d created to make his actions sound less questionable.

  But I didn’t wonder for long because as I visualised him lying there in his hospital bed, newly helpless, my principal emotion about Aidan Kennedy was pity. Pity about his accident, but also because, by any yardstick, pitiable was exactly what he had always seemed. A weak man who, when faced with a hard choice, had behaved badly – which hardly made him an endangered species.

  I don’t believe in karma; in my line of work, you tend not to. Bad things happen to good people all the tim
e, just as good things often happen to bad people. And though he’d clearly contributed to his current crisis, I took no pleasure in what had happened to him, because I wouldn’t wish his misfortune on anyone. Certainly not on his wife, who, as a consequence of his accident, now had so much on her plate. Judging by her tears, which had begun to flow unchecked as I’d left them (her little girls had been scrabbling to hug and comfort her), even more, perhaps, than I knew.

  I forced my head away from work. I had to. I had plenty on my own plate. Mum, for example, whose deterioration up to now had been slow and mostly manageable, suddenly seemed to have reached a tipping point and hurtled over it. It was almost as if her dementia, previously hesitant to unleash its many demons, was saying, ‘Ah, Grace, you’re here, finally. Bring it on.’ Perhaps our moving here had even contributed to her confusion, just as her deterioration, seen close up, had been such a shock for the boys.

  I reached the roundabout where I’d usually turn right, and turned left. Going to see her, and hopefully getting to the bottom of her repeated small-hours phone calls, would be more productive than going straight home and having dinner, interrupted by yet more nonsense calls, before Matt headed back to London. I needed to return with some sense of having taken control.

  As with Hope, Mum was my blood, and my problem. Had been so, it had sometimes felt, since my father walked out. They’d both been teachers in the same school – her maths, him geography. And he’d left her for the French teacher he’d been having an affair with. Her name was Aurélie, which meant ‘the golden one’. I’d looked it up in the library. I was sixteen, turning seventeen. Hope just eleven. My mother fell apart. Completely.

  With so many Sunday shoppers on the road – presumably buying last-minute presents – my detour took longer than I’d expected. I texted Matt – Just checking in on Mum, won’t be long – before heading into the development that housed her flat, an assisted-living place called The Beeches (though no beech trees had been planted there) that she had moved into five years previously. And where it was becoming clearer by the day that the level of assistance she required would soon be more than they could provide for her.

  It was a bridge I’d cross when I got to it, which is why I felt guiltily relieved that, being a Sunday, their new house manager, Holly, wasn’t there, so couldn’t collar me with tales of Mum’s latest misdemeanours. Though once up on her floor, I was presented with one anyway – the TV (always hers) was turned up so loud that I could hear it from the corridor.

  I knocked and waited before putting my key in the lock, so she was already in the hallway by the time I entered.

  Mum was a good bit shorter than me (Hope and I both got our height from our father) and seemed shorter still every time I saw her, which only heightened the sense of who was mothering who. She was in her stockinged feet, in beige trousers and her favourite stone- and sand-coloured top. The only splash of colour in her usual muted palette was a shocking-pink fascinator, which was perched on her head, spewing feathers. The one she’d worn, as per the style sheet, to Hope’s funeral. Hope, who, since the dementia, was coming alive again in all sorts of ways; every time I came here, Mum seemed to have unearthed a new photo of her. Some were framed, some were not, some just scraps torn from bigger photos, which she’d tuck between her many ornaments, or Blu-Tack to the walls, or arrange in overlapping lines (a muddled timeline of mini Hopes) over photographs of Dillon, which unnerved me. Wherever you looked, basically, there was my sister. It was as if my moving here had, in itself, inspired the endless trawling. Was she hoping she could magic Hope back to her as well?

  Mum seemed oblivious to her unlikely headgear. Had probably forgotten she even had it on, much less why. She was clearly more interested in my own head.

  ‘I don’t know why you insist on scraping your hair back like that,’ she said, as I picked up the TV remote and turned the volume down. ‘It really doesn’t do anything for you.’

  Along with the nocturnal phone calls, the casual barbs were a new thing. As if her thoughts (I had always been ‘the brainy one’, and Hope ‘the pretty one’, she’d told me recently) had found a shortcut, a rat run, direct from brain to mouth.

  I understood that this happened. I tried not to mind. ‘I’ve come from work,’ I reminded her, even though I knew it was pointless. I kept forgetting that the concept of my going to work had no meaning for her now. I was either there, or I was not.

  I glanced around me, pleased to see her tea things were washed up and on the drainer – it meant her carer had been – but dismayed by the chaos on the living-room floor. ‘Have you been having another sort-out?’

  Sorting things out was something else that was suddenly burgeoning on my mother’s daily, always treble-underlined, to-do lists. Though I understood the reasoning – it must be a comforting illusion that constantly reacquainting yourself with familiar treasures will help shore up failing short-term memory – it came with a side order of anxiety as well. For everything found, another recollection would bubble up, prompting an ever more frantic search for some other previously forgotten thing.

  Mum shook her head as she returned to where she had been kneeling on the carpet. ‘I’m trying to find something,’ she snapped. ‘For Mary.’

  ‘Mary?’

  ‘Yes. Mary.’

  ‘Mary who?’

  ‘You know. Mary.’

  Another resident from The Beeches, no doubt. Since the dementia, it seemed everyone else had slipped too far away. Or she had.

  ‘What thing?’

  Mum scowled at me. ‘The thing she phoned about. And that other thing.’

  ‘What other thing?’

  ‘You know. That postcard.’

  ‘Postcard?’

  ‘You know.’ Her tone was irritable. ‘That postcard from Hope. The one she sent me when she went to Cambodia. I’ve been right through everything and I can’t find it anywhere.’

  Though she had managed Amsterdam – for the tulips, allegedly – just before her terminal diagnosis, my sister never made it to Cambodia. Mum had probably just seen something on the television and fashioned another of her Frankenstein memories. ‘Ah,’ I said, because it worked, ‘I know the one you mean. It’s at mine. You left it there last week, remember?’

  ‘Of course,’ she said. ‘I thought so.’ The anxious lines on her face softened. ‘That’s alright then. I’ll get it next time.’

  ‘Where is your phone, Mum?’ I asked, stepping over the muddle of stuff all over the floor. It fanned out from her in a circle, like a Georgian lady’s skirts.

  ‘Flipping thing,’ she muttered. It was her only comment on the matter.

  It was in her bag, as I’d expected. Along with the alarm necklace she was supposed to put on every morning, it spent most of the daylight hours there. Most of the time she professed not to even own one. Yet at night, for the last four or five, all those phone calls. I suspected, and hoped, there’d be a pragmatic reason. Another twist in the tale of the array of smart technology that I was persuaded, via an online article about ‘useful aids for seniors’, might be a good way to support her short-term memory. Hey Siri, what’s the date today? Alexa, turn on the radio. Despite the instructions I’d put up, in a variety of places, I had no idea if she’d ever said either of those things.

  What she had done, it turned out, when I inspected the pristine iPhone, was create a series of alarms, to be repeated every night – at two-hour intervals, from midnight till 6 a.m. This in conjunction with a note sellotaped to the back of the phone cover, which said Remember to call Grace, triple underlined, as per.

  Et voila. Notes and buttons. It was that complicated and that simple. There was no point asking why or how. Just notes and buttons. And, apart from mine, there were no calls in her recent calls log, either. It was just what it was, I supposed.

  I knocked the alarms off and dispatched the note to my pocket, while Mum, back on her knees, started returning paperwork to boxes. It was wholly random, but conducted with the same sense of p
urpose I used to see in the boys’ faces when they were clearing their toys away as toddlers and a bribe was involved.

  Except, in Mum’s case, the purpose had been mislaid. I kneeled down to help her. I wondered what she’d have to say about Aidan Kennedy if I told her. How much delight she might derive from his misery. What painful memories might surface. What furies might be disinterred.

  I wouldn’t. Couldn’t, in any case – I wasn’t legally permitted to. And what she didn’t know, and didn’t need to know, couldn’t hurt her. ‘I’m off, Mum,’ I said instead, touching her shoulder. And I wished, I wished, I wished, that I could feel a genuine rush of love for her. Something more, something deeper, than just knee-jerk compassion. It felt only right. But at the same time, I couldn’t.

  When I got back down to the car, the air was bitter again, full of ice spicules. I jumped in quickly, pressed the ignition button, turned up the heater. Then, infuriatingly, because I knew I really shouldn’t let her get to me, I reached behind my head and pulled out my scrunchie.

  I saw the house – our new, old house – earlier than I expected to, because its roof was loosely outlined in tiny points of light, shimmering on and off as I passed through the trees. It was a substantial house, double-fronted, much bigger than the one we’d left in London, but I’d yet to make friends with it; to feel anything like at home here. More worryingly, it was a feeling that seemed to be growing, rather than dissipating. Back in June, when we’d viewed it, it had sold itself to us utterly, partly because from upstairs we had a chunk of sea in view between two copses, but mostly because the outside was dripping with wisteria in full bloom. You will be happy here, it seemed to say. Stop worrying.

  But the promise hadn’t yet quite materialised. Where I’d imagined I’d feel liberated from the stress of caring for Mum remotely, my new reality – my new proximity – seemed to match the steady march of the seasons; as the house lost its gloss, buried under mounds of fallen leaves, so I felt the weight of what was coming grow increasingly heavy. Even the wisteria seemed to echo the same journey. Now skeletal against the brickwork, it was lifeless and grey. Spring felt a long way away, and I felt cheated.