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. Ofcourse. 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.
