He said, ‘It is one of the worst of many. Perhaps the worst.’
He riffled through the papers once more. Then turned to his computer. Typed briefly. Wrote on a sheet of paper and handed it to her in an envelope.
‘You take this with you to the clinic. They now have the medication approval. You know what is to happen next?’
‘I go to the clinic?’
‘Return to your hotel and wait for the taxi which will call. It will ask for you by name and you go in that. They will check your details first, then take you. I am not sure exactly when.’ He stood up and put out his hand.
She felt as if she were in a television play. The receptionist came in and ushered her back to the waiting room. It was a play. Penny stared at her, looking into her face for some sign, some answer, some relief.
‘We go back to the hotel and wait,’ Jocelyn said.
How long would it take? They were in the city centre and the clinic would be in the country somewhere. She had expected everything to take longer but was glad that it had not. She asked Penny if she wanted to have lunch in the hotel bar. An open sandwich. A salad. More coffee and cake.
‘You should have a drink,’ she said.
Penny did not answer. In the end, they sat in the room and waited. It seemed wrong to go among people in a busy bar. Jocelyn felt it would be wrong. She would be a bad omen. A death’s head.
They waited for three hours and twenty minutes. In the end she dozed. Penny simply sat. The twin beds had pale yellow coverlets. Sunny. The room faced a side street. Jocelyn got up and stumbled. Her left leg was numb.
In the street, a man got out of a car. Lit a cigarette at once. Walked away. A woman with a suitcase on wheels went towards a house. Rang a bell on the side of the door.
‘We didn’t decide … how stupid. We should decide.’
‘I can’t stand this.’
‘I brought so little but I do have … bits and pieces.’
Toothbrush and paste. Face cream. Lipstick. Foundation. Clothes. Underclothes. Nightdress. Diary. Purse. Phone. Bits and pieces.
‘Are you going to take them back with you? Home, I mean. Or … you can ask them to … downstairs. Ask reception for a bag and … leave them. Rubbish. There must be a bin. Or just take them home.’
Home.
‘It was a disgrace,’ Penny said. ‘How could that man tell anything from a few minutes?’
‘It was more than a few. And he had notes. A file on me.’
‘Did he read through them – every word?’
‘Of course not, he would have done all that ages ago.’
‘You think so?’
Penny stood up. Walked across to the bed and picked up her jacket and scarf. Bag.
‘It isn’t here yet.’
‘You said if I wanted to go … if I couldn’t do it … you said that.’
‘Yes. I did. So you should go. Go to the airport. Just get there, look up a flight, you’ll get one, surely. They’ll change your ticket. You may have to wait a few hours. Still, at an airport – you can buy a book … have a meal … coffee … there are worse places to wait.’
‘Yes.’
‘So, go now. I should never have expected you to do this for me. It was quite wrong. I know what you said but I should never have agreed.’
‘I thought I was … that I could cope with anything. See anything through. It seems I was wrong.’
‘You’re not wrong. You could see anything through.’
‘Not the one thing. Do you know what it is?’
‘Yes, of course. Fear. That’s all. Are you surprised?’
‘No. Not fear at all.’
‘What then?’
The room phone rang.
‘The taxi,’ Penny said.
Of course she went with her. There was never any question. She got into the waiting cab before Jocelyn.
‘Sorry,’ she said. ‘I’m sorry.’
Jocelyn touched her hand.
She did not know how long the journey would be but the taxi was comfortable. It wouldn’t matter if it took an hour, which she supposed it could. This was a big city. They had to get out of it, through the suburbs, before they were anywhere near open country. She wondered if they would go as far as the mountains, though it would not be like the postcard, she knew that perfectly well; this was not winter.
But Swiss mountains were not only wonderful in snow.
It was not even half an hour.
They had driven through the beginnings of suburban estates, block after block of flats, business parks, industrial units. The taxi slowed and swung left off the main road beside a long row of concrete garages. At the end, two more low blocks of flats, sharing a short approach. Green rubbish bins stood to the right. A Portakabin was parked.
‘Thank you. Apartment second.’ The driver was pointing. ‘Ring top bell.’
He leaned over and opened the door without getting out, then faced forward again, as if he did not want to register either of their faces. As Penny closed the cab door the wheels were already turning.
‘Now … that bell? Yes. That bell.’
But Jocelyn did not move.
‘This is a terrible place,’ Penny said.
‘We can’t judge the clinic by the surroundings.’
‘Can’t we? I can.’
‘Inside it will be –’ She hesitated. Nothing here was as she had expected. Imagined. Remembered from the watercolour postcard, even while she had told herself that was irrelevant, that of course she had not expected to be up in the snow-covered Alps. Of course not.
The apartment block was grey. Functional. Three storeys. Metal window frames.
‘Mother …’
Jocelyn put up her hand. She saw that it was shaking. Why was that? It shook so hard she could not touch the bell. She turned to Penny.
‘No.’
She reached her hand up again and this time managed to press the metal disc. There was an intercom on the wall.
‘Bitte?’
‘Yes … hello …’ Her own voice sounded husky. Not like her own voice.
‘Name please?’
‘Mrs Jocelyn Forbes.’ She cleared her throat.
‘Ja.’
The intercom buzzed and the door moved a few inches.
‘No,’ Penny said again. ‘This is a terrible place. You can’t go in.’
Jocelyn went in. The hallway was not well lit. To the right was a lift. From above a voice called, ‘Press for first floor.’ A door slammed. Penny’s face was ashen. They did not meet one another’s eye.
On the first floor, the lift doors opened onto a landing. Two doors, both with chipped blue paint. Marks on the doorpost, as if someone had been chiselling.
A dog barked somewhere above.
The door immediately opposite them opened.
‘Ah, yes. Come in please.’
The girl had short blonde hair. A pale green tabard like those worn by dental nurses. Jeans. She held the door open for them.
‘Wait for a moment here.’ She indicated a bench set against the narrow corridor wall, then went away.
Jocelyn did not look around. Not at the walls or the light or the floor or the ceiling. She looked at her own hands. Her own hands. In an hour, several hours, minutes – she did not know how long – they would be dead hands. She would not be able to lift them, move them. The blood would lie flat and motionless inside her veins. Her hands would change colour. How long would it take …?
Penny sat as if she herself were already dead, barely breathing.
Someone coughed. A tap was turned on. Off.
Silence.
‘Mrs Forbes.’
A man stood in a doorway. Older. White-haired. His shirtsleeves were rolled up.
‘Come this way please.’ His accent was barely noticeable.
Now, she thought, now is the moment when we leave this place and go to the clinic itself. They should have a better – what? Reception area? Shop front? More like the private doctor’s. Flowers on a desk
. Pale painted walls. Pictures. Magazines. The clinic would lead off here. The clinic with the pale walls, pale furniture, the crucifix, the tranquil white pillows, the soft music, the rug beneath your feet, the air of calm. Of reverence even.
It was a small bare room. There was a high couch covered in a plastic sheet. A sink. A wooden chair. A draining board with a cupboard beneath it. Kitchen cupboard. She thought, is that where they keep the tea, the coffee, the mugs. Or …
‘You have your identity paper, please, your passport?’ He held out his hand.
She fumbled at the front pocket of her bag but her fingers would not grasp the zip.
Penny sat, still motionless. Still barely breathing.
It took a lifetime. He did not offer to help her, simply stood, waiting. In the end, she got the pocket open, her passport, her identity papers that had come in the post.
He took them. Read every word. Turned the pages of the passport. Looked at her face. Then her photograph. Her face again. The photograph. He nodded. Put the papers and passport on the draining board.
‘Mrs Forbes, yes. Now. I will tell you what will happen. I will go through this step by step and you must indicate at every point that you understand me.
‘You will take off your coat and shoes, and lie down. We will make sure you are comfortable. You will be propped up on the backrest. The pillows. I will then mix the medication in front of you, so that you see everything I do. Your witness … your companion sees. It will be a glass of mixture. And I will unwrap a square of good sweet chocolate. I will hand you the glass and then I will say to you this. “Mrs Forbes, you have indicated your wish to commit suicide. If you drink this, you will die.” You will tell me that you understand. Then you will hold the glass in your own hand and your own hand only. I cannot help you. Then you will drink it all and as it is bitter to taste you will eat the chocolate square. You will then lie down and after a moment you will feel drowsy and you will go unconscious. After some more moments, which you will not know anything of, you will die. You will be dead. I will not have killed you. You will have committed suicide with the medication prescribed for you. That is all. Do you understand all of this?’
Jocelyn nodded.
‘Say yes, please – the tape is to record this.’
Like the police then. The arrested person interviewed. ‘For the benefit of the tape please state your name.’
‘Yes. I understand.’
‘Thank you.’
She realised how cold the room was.
The man had his back to them and was opening the cupboard, checking her paperwork again.
The young woman came in and spoke to him quietly. He nodded. She too looked at the papers. Picked up Jocelyn’s passport and turned a couple of pages. Put it down.
That was not a check, Jocelyn thought, that was nosiness. How dare she flip through personal items like that.
Yet in a few moments, twenty, thirty, personal items would not matter. They did not matter now. Her passport would be obsolete. The passport of a dead woman. Dead.
The man had a glass vial in his hand and read out something in German to the girl. She took the vial. Read the label.
‘Ja.’
A second vial.
‘Ja.’
The two vials were on the worktop together.
The girl bent and opened the cupboard beneath the sink. Stood up again with a pack of small plastic beakers and slit the wrapping. Took one out.
Beside her, Penny seemed to be frozen. Her hands did not move, but were folded on her bag, white. Her face was stiff and without expression, but when Jocelyn glanced, she saw that her daughter’s eyes had sunk inwards, and the hollows beneath them were deep.
For a second time stopped. Everything in the room stopped. There was a streak of sunlight on the far wall, like a patch of child’s paint. The air was dense and thick so that she could hardly force it into her lungs. There was no sound. The two figures at the worktop were waxen and neither moved nor breathed.
Time stopped.
‘Mrs Forbes.’
The young woman. Short hair. Fair hair. Pale green tabard. It shone faintly. Polyester then. Not crisp cotton. Jeans. And plastic clogs. Terrible acid-pink plastic clogs.
‘If you will stand now please?’ She held out a hand. Long fingers. Bony fingers. One ring. ‘And take off your coat.’
Penny was still frozen.
For a second, Jocelyn had an image in her mind again, of the quiet room. The sunlight filtering through half-drawn curtains. A candle flickering, sending a slightly moving shadow onto the wall. The blonde-wood table. Cross. Bed. White pillows. White sheet. White coverlet. Music perhaps. Tranquil music. She had thought of bringing a CD of her own. It had been mentioned in the literature.
Music to die to.
The image flickered too and before it faded completely she had a surge of longing for it, longing to lie down on the white sheets and rest her head on the soft pillows. Look at the cross. Look at the candle. Look at the light sifting through the cotton curtains. Look at Penny, sitting quietly beside her. Penny holding her hand. Penny smiling.
‘Mrs Forbes.’
The light went out and the room in her head was in darkness.
Jocelyn stood. The girl was still holding out her hand. The thin hand. Pale skin. One ring.
Jocelyn took a step back from the hand. The edge of the chair pressed against her. She looked round. The man had come to life. He had a bar of Swiss chocolate in his hand and was breaking off a section. Snap.
Hands.
‘No,’ Jocelyn said.
Twenty-eight
‘I DON’T HAVE good news,’ John Lowther said. ‘The director, the medical officer and I have gone through everything. We have tried to identify any hidden reserves we can free up. There are none. Savings? We’re still in the process of identifying any more we can possibly make but frankly it’s unlikely. Everything has been cut to the bone and beyond the bone. A couple of support staff have taken redundancy, one nurse is leaving and not being replaced. another is due to retire next month. We can’t lose any more without compromising patient care and even endangering patient safety, which obviously we would never do. We have no other option. We have to close C ward – that is eight beds – and mothball it for an indefinite time. If we do that we can keep going, just about, for another three or four months, without an absolute financial crisis. The bank is being relatively accommodating – which in these days is quite something, you’ll agree. The PCT is not. They have no more money for us and they cannot bring any forward. Indeed, they’ve told us informally that we’re likely to have our support from them cut by 40 to 50 per cent next year. Cat drew in her breath and John Lowther nodded. ‘I can’t argue with your reaction,’ he said. ‘Other than that, we’re cutting the opening hours of the day care centre. Looking at either two full or three half-days.’
‘That’s completely inadequate,’ Cat said. ‘Given the health and safety and staffing level limits on numbers already, we can’t cater for much more than half the patients who would benefit from day care, which in itself saves us money. Quite a few people we manage to treat by a combo of day care and home nursing would have to become inpatients. Oh, for heaven’s sake, what are we doing here? Limping along. This isn’t anywhere near a proper hospice facility.’
‘I know.’ John Lowther sighed.
‘I’m sorry, John.’
‘Please.’ He raised a hand. ‘Feel free to vent your feelings in here. I am as angry as you are. I hope none of us ever has to hold back what we really think and feel, around this table at least. But, let’s look at something a little more hopeful. Leo Fison has begun his task. I am not going to speak for him but I feel a bit more optimistic about our finances now he’s in charge of raising some emergency funds. Leo.’
Cat had had a patient with alopecia a few months earlier, a man in his thirties who had been desperate to have a wig rather than show himself to the world entirely bald. Cat had tried to persuade him that many men now cho
se to shave their heads, that it was fashionable.
‘Bouncers and criminals,’ he had said. ‘I don’t care what it costs. I’m not demeaning myself by being a bald man before my time.’
She had wanted to mention the number of women, young women, sometimes beautiful, who had become bald after chemotherapy and who had refused to hide behind wigs. But she had kept her mouth shut.
Now she looked at Leo Fison and wished she could have introduced him to her patient. He did not have a hair on his head and yet he was handsome, strikingly so. Some women would even find him sexy. She did not, but only because she had found no man sexually attractive since Chris, and doubted if she would ever do so again.
There were five of them round the table – several trustees had sent apologies this time. Meetings were not usually so frequent and they were busy people.
‘I have to begin by stating the obvious,’ Leo Fison said. He had a good voice, a clear, warm tone. He inspired immediate confidence, Cat thought, and if he was asking for money that was an invaluable asset. ‘At the moment there are far too many good causes chasing a shrinking amount of charitable money. Everyone has cut back and these are straitened times. You know that but it bears repeating because I don’t feel I can be as bold as I might have been a few years ago. But that isn’t going to deter me. One of the avenues which has closed up is the business one – corporate giving. Firms simply do not have the spare cash. Those local businesses which already support Imogen House very generously are looking at the amount they donate and finding they may have to reduce this. One firm which was a principal supporter – Jameson Studley Hines – has gone into receivership, another – Cole Brothers – has said it can’t give us anything for the next year though they are adamant that this is a temporary situation. I have approached a few businesses which for one reason or another have never given to us, so far without success. They already donate to other local causes and they can’t take on anything else. One spot of sunshine, however. A large, upmarket insurance firm, Hinchley, have relocated to this area. I had lunch with their CEO who is Mr Hinchley himself, Michael Hinchley – his father founded the company and he now heads it up. They are going to give us thirty thousand a year for the next five years, and he also said that he would make that fifty thousand for this year only, to help us out of our present crisis.’ He glanced across at Lowther. ‘I kept that one back from you, John. I thought I’d bring at least one nice surprise to the table.’