James patted her arm, avoiding words like,careful,medicationandrest. ‘I could drop you off at your sister’s. Nat won’t mind you crashing in her spare bed. She’ll fix you up with night things and something to read.’
Shaking her head mutinously, straw hair quivering, Tamzin’s voice tightened, a great tear trembled on her lashes. ‘I want to seeMum.’
James had to relent. ‘All right, we’ll take Pops home and pick up Mum’s stuff.’
He noticed Diane watching them gather their things. ‘Rather than staying here alone, you could come with us,’ he offered.
‘No, thanks,’ returned Diane, cordially. ‘I’ll be OK.’
‘Fine.’ It might be a struggle to look after his exhausted father-in-law, his waif-like daughter,andthis agoraphobic nervous wreck half-sister-in-law of his wife’s who never left home. But, unaccountably … here she was out.
Still, she was a woman alone in the middle of the night, far from home, and she’d just sustained a series of bruising shocks ... He sat down again, ready to cajole her into co-operation. ‘It might be better if –’
‘– you stop knowing what’s best for me. Because I’ll probably slap you if you use that patiently patronising voice on me again.’
He frowned horribly to disguise the almost overwhelming urge to laugh at her awful politeness. ‘I’m not patronising.’
‘You bloody well are, you know.’ She patted his hand. ‘I’m not a child, I’m not an imbecile and, as we now all know, I’m not ill. So I’m the one who makes up my mind. OK?’
Chapter Two
‘Oh-kay,’ he conceded.
Diane watched them leave, the big man and his lame ducks, leaving behind them only silence and space.
She fetched herself another drink and settled down in contemplation of her world gone mad. Two years, Harold said he’d known Gareth.Two years. Had Gareth’s behaviour changed in that period, had he been more than usually secretive? Done anything that should have alerted her to the fact that for two days of each week he was not at work, but…
… where? Almost any other man who was leading a double life would have a mistress tucked away. But Gareth’s secret, it seemed, was a nice family.
She was word perfect on the story of Gareth’s childhood and how Wendy had brought him up any way she could. In the sixties, the benefit system hadn’t been what it was now. Unmarried mothers had found it hard to scrape by and, like many others, Wendy had drifted into a relationship, trading sex and housekeeping for a man to put his roof over her family’s head. Or surviving on jobs that paid peanuts.
So why hadn’t she made Harold cough up for Gareth’s keep?
Diane’s eyes grew gritty as the wee hours stilled the antiseptic corridors. James returned with weary tread, a wraith-like Tamzin drifting beside him, just in time to be allowed in to see Valerie.
And Diane’s vigil was rewarded when she was shown in to see herpoorly, battered, but stablehusband. ‘Just ten minutes tonight, please.’ The nurse consulted Gareth’s chart, pen in hand. ‘He’s just about conscious but we’d like him to rest.’
‘I understand,’ breathed Diane, staring down at the bed
Gareth’s face was grotesquely swollen. Diane had difficulty recognising this purpling balloon-head as her husband. Every feature was puffed, distorted and discoloured beneath his incongruously normal thatch of iron-grey hair. His jaw was swollen shut, there was an enormous egg at the left side of his forehead and that, and the eye socket beneath, were flooded a dark angry red. He looked as if an elephant had pirouetted on his head.
But he was evidently sensible enough to recognise her and, un-Gareth-like, groggily search out her hand with his chilly fingers. His other hand, the right, was encased in plaster and plastic troughs.
The distortion of his features seemed appropriate, somehow, as everything Diane thought she’d known about this elusive, self-contained man had warped, too. He was inclined to guard what was his and she’d always known he wasn’t good at sharing. But finding his natural father two years ago and keeping it a secret ...
She glanced at her reflection in the huge window. Her hair hung long in its neat plait, her clothes were, admittedly, self-made, but then that was herjob. What was he so ashamed of?
It might’ve relieved her feelings to round on him with ferocious questions but she kept her anger to herself. Habit. Long habit. She never roused Gareth’s temper unnecessarily. She liked to have her challenge all worked out in her mind before she incurred his house-shaking rage or punishing silence. And she had been punished plenty, in recent years.
‘So,’ she observed. ‘You survived.’
‘Uh.’
She took the grunt for assent. ‘The doctors say you’ll recover.’
‘Uh.’
‘I expect you’re woozy.’
