Marguerite, page 21
‘Any time of day or night,’ he said.
‘Thank you. Please don’t feel you have to stay,’ she said. ‘I’ll be here for a while. I’ll call a taxi when we need to go home.’
He frowned. ‘No.’ Non-negotiable. ‘I’ll wait until we know what’s happening.’
One of the nurses came out of Jérôme’s room and gestured to her. ‘You can go in.’
She saw immediately that the pain had gone. But he looked smaller than ever in the hospital bed, sheets pulled up to his distended trunk, bare chest patterned with electrodes. His shoulders were hunched, bird-like. He was afraid; she could see it in his eyes.
‘Marguerite,’ he said, and she flushed at the warmth and relief in his voice. ‘I kept asking where you were. I was worried you’d gone away.’
‘Of course not,’ she said. ‘I was right outside.’
‘Are we going to be all right?’
‘Absolutely. Everyone’s going to bring your blood pressure right down to normal and manage this increase in pain, and then you and I can go home.’
‘Good. I kept telling them, I wasn’t there when it happened. They’ll have to ask someone else how it all happened.’
‘No,’ she said. ‘But nothing happened. We had to get you here to make sure you were completely safe. And you are. Surrounded by lots of very helpful people and good equipment.’
‘But we won’t be leaving for home any time soon.’
‘We’ll go back home. We’re just here for now.’
‘So I’m not—’ He smiled, weakly. ‘About to pop my clogs.’
‘No,’ she said, and it was a relief to her that he was making some sense. ‘You are absolutely not going to pop any clogs at all. We’re just making sure you’re as safe as can be.’
‘What’s the time?’
‘Eight thirty.’
‘In the morning?’
‘At night.’
‘Do you need to go back with Céline now?’
She paused. ‘No.’
‘So you’ll stay here.’
‘So I’ll stay here.’
And she did, sitting by his bed, watching his heart rate on the screen above him while he closed his eyes and dozed. And then they came to take him away for a chest X-ray, and she followed him out of the room and saw Henri sitting there waiting, two Styrofoam cups on the floor by his feet.
‘I think it might be cold,’ he said as she sat down, handing one to her.
‘It’ll still do the job. Thank you.’
She downed the cold coffee, blackly thin and bitter, and tried not to wince.
‘I admire what you do,’ he said after a while. ‘I can’t think of many scarier jobs.’
‘Really?’
‘Yes, terrifying. You’re there the whole time, responsible for your patient at every moment.’ He shook his head. ‘I’d be terrible at it. I’m no good with sickness.’
‘I never really questioned it,’ she said. ‘I had a lot of informal experience nursing, when I was growing up.’ She stopped, surprised that she’d given that away. He nodded, waiting, and she liked and appreciated that there was no question on his lips. ‘It just seemed natural to go on and train properly.’
She, who had never been much of a successful student, had excelled at nursing college. The work came naturally because she already knew intimately the rhythms, the subtle language of care. She knew how to position a body to prevent sores, and how to suction someone who couldn’t cough of their own accord. She knew how to feed someone via the PEG in their stomach, how slowly to flush the tube with water afterwards so they wouldn’t get gas and cramp. She knew where to position scopolamine patches to slow down excess saliva production. She’d cleaned up shit, vomit, drool, mucus, blood. The rest came easily.
‘So this is a normal environment for you.’
‘Yes. But I still hate hospitals.’
He grinned. ‘You hate hospitals?’
‘Yes.’ Long corridors, too much activity, and death as a sudden cessation: violent and undue. She had chosen to work with a different kind of death: a slow, timely snuffing-out. ‘I hate them. I couldn’t wait to start my community training so I could leave hospitals behind.’
‘That makes me feel better. I don’t feel like such a wimp any more.’
She smiled. ‘I’d probably be terrible at what you do, too.’ Then she realised she didn’t know the first thing about what he did. She vaguely envisaged tractors, hay bales, the lowing of cows. A flat cap and a pitchfork. Tediously large, loud, muddy machinery. Repetition and discomfort.
‘Yes,’ he said, looking out at the waiting room. ‘Probably.’
She liked that. It was true, he was right, and she liked that he hadn’t bothered to decorate the truth. It caught her by surprise.
* * *
• • •
It wasn’t until they were sent home that he saw the nurse flounder. Until then, he’d watched with interest how calmly she’d dealt with everything: leaving Rossignol, liaising with the hospital staff. Whenever she could be with Jérôme, she was. He liked the way she channelled her fear into efficiency.
But later, when Jérôme had been sedated and they’d been sent away, he saw her composure crack. Her reluctance to leave the hospital had met with a firm response from the nurse in charge of Jérôme: he would be out cold, they didn’t like relatives to stay overnight, she would be needed tomorrow. He’d driven her back in silence, and now, turning into the driveway at Rossignol, he saw clearly her fear, noticed how like a tense rabbit she peered out into the dark. She didn’t want to go into the house alone, and he realised that there was no way he would want to either.
‘Will you be able to sleep?’ he asked, cutting the engine.
She exhaled, made a ‘pffff’ with her lips. ‘Probably not.’ She had her hand on the door handle, but she wasn’t pulling it.
‘Me neither.’ He paused. ‘You won’t want to fetch him tomorrow in your own car.’
She turned to him.
‘It’ll be much better if someone else drives, so you can sit with him again on the journey back here. And get some help carrying him in’
She nodded.
‘I’ll call a taxi.’
‘No, call me again.’
‘Okay.’
He watched her hand rest again on the door handle.
‘Unless.’ Her hand dropped. ‘They might call for you in the middle of the night.’
‘They might.’
‘If you’re happy with this,’ he said then, realising how much he wanted her to agree with the idea, ‘I’ll crash here, sleep on a sofa. Then I can take you the minute you’re needed.’
‘I can’t ask you to do that.’
‘You haven’t. But it makes the most sense.’
She hesitated, and he could see she wanted to say yes.
‘You could sleep in one of the spare rooms.’
‘Fine. Even better. But the priority is you getting to Jérôme whenever you need to. And back here with him.’
‘You’re sure?’
‘Of course.’
He was filled with a great lightness at the prospect: a bed that was all his own, no Brigitte, sleep broken only for good reasons: help, duty. And, yes, being able to spend the night once more at Rossignol.
* * *
• • •
He made the bed up with the sheets and blankets she’d given him, and then he undressed and turned off the light and lay in the dark in Marc’s old room. He could hear the creak of the floorboards on the landing, the bathroom door close. The thud of pipes, a distant hiss of water. When he heard her go back to her bedroom, Thibault’s bedroom, he imagined her putting away her things, moving around the room in her distinctive way: unhurried, precise.
He thought about himself at that age, and what it would have taken for him to be able to live entirely alone, so far from everything he knew. He was sure he wouldn’t have been able to do it, would have been scared by the prospect. Funny, because he’d thought of himself as so grown-up, so responsible and independent: qualifications under his belt, a wife, his head bursting with ideas as to how to streamline and then expand his father’s already successful farm. Around that time he’d temporarily stopped worrying so much about his private sexual feelings and urges, vaguely thinking that with children they would dissolve in a blazing heterosexual epiphany. Handsome Henri. He would have a son he could train up on the farm himself, as his father had trained him. A clever little daughter.
He thought of Marguerite getting into bed – the very same bed in which he’d topped and tailed with Thibault so many times as young boys, then as teenagers. Waking up with a foot in his face. Tussling for the duvet. Sleepless, surrounded by the sense of Thibault’s wild, animal warmth. He pictured her pulling the sheets up, switching off the light, and he felt a dart of sadness. She was very young. What a strange, deprived existence she’d chosen here.
‘A total nut job,’ he heard then, clearly, in Thibault’s stupidly inflected voice. What a load of crap, he thought. What a perverse, miserable way to view the world. And he felt again, as he had since their goodbye on the Saturday, a sense of dizziness, precariousness. He was disorientated. That space he had kept inside himself, filled to the edges by Thibault for as long as he could remember, was suddenly empty. Its contents had just dropped right out. He would have to work out how to re-align himself now, without its familiar weight.
* * *
• • •
The kitchen smelt of coffee already; the cafetière was steaming. The door to the garden was open and she saw Henri outside, standing in the lovely dawn. He turned at the sound of her, a cup in his hand.
‘Morning.’
‘Morning.’
‘I’m ready whenever you are.’
‘Thank you.’ She felt a little snap of irritation; this was her job, she didn’t want to be made to feel as if he’d been waiting for her to get going. But then she thought, he’s just being helpful. He doesn’t even need to be here. Still, she poured herself a coffee and sat down. She’d set the pace.
‘Did you manage to sleep?’ he asked, sitting down opposite her.
‘I did, strangely.’
‘Me too. It’s so quiet.’
‘Is it quiet where you live?’
‘By this time of day, things are already kicking off at the farm. And there are the animals. But yes, it’s very quiet there at night.’
Unbidden, an image came into her mind of him and Brigitte sleeping next to each other in the dark, curled on their sides, back to back. She stole a look at him now and tried to understand how they worked as a couple. He was almost embarrassingly handsome, almost a cliché. And Brigitte surely hadn’t just ‘let herself go’, as her mother would say: she could never have been attractive. But perhaps this was a shallow way to look at people; perhaps Henri saw something beautiful in Brigitte’s character, though admittedly – based on every encounter she’d had with Brigitte – she thought that, too, seemed wildly implausible. She remembered the conversation she’d overheard at the fête, when she’d hidden behind the tarpaulin screen. He’d stood up for her against Brigitte and Laure.
She drained her coffee, a few pithy grounds on her tongue. ‘We should go.’
‘Absolutely.’ He stood, took car keys from his pocket, and she noticed that he took both their empty cups and set them down in the sink. How strange it was, seeing someone do these little things.
* * *
• • •
Jérôme was still asleep when they arrived. He’d slept through the night, he was stable, his blood pressure was right down. No troponin in his blood, nothing abnormal on the X-ray. And yet Marguerite felt overcome with dread. She’d felt okay last night and this morning and on the way to the hospital. But now Jérôme was out of immediate danger, she could only wonder how long he’d stay out.
Jérôme wouldn’t be discharged for a good few hours, if at all today. She told Henri he must go and that she’d call when they needed the lift back, and this time he didn’t demur. He’d left before she realised she hadn’t thanked him.
* * *
• • •
Brigitte didn’t like it; she just didn’t. How convenient, that the nurse should need Henri to stay over. Of course, she couldn’t simply have called again this morning, when she needed another lift; or, better yet, used her own car – which had, indeed, taken some time for Brigitte to find; or even, if it was really as urgent as she seemed to have made it out to be, have called an ambulance in the first place.
No, she didn’t like it. She took an emptied shelf out of the fridge, dipped a cloth in her bowl of vinegar and water. She wiped it over the shelf, working out the scum with the warm liquid. She shouldn’t have sent Henri over with the car in the first place, she should have taken it over there herself, only Henri had been so keen to see the Lanvier boys.
And she knew the girl’s type. The empty bottles and glasses, the casual clothes – jeans and scruffy trainers, in a medical career, when hygiene was surely supposed to be the number one priority – and then, of course, the standoffish manner. At first she’d thought the girl was just a bit dim, like the last one, and that was why she kept so quiet. But since then she’d grown to suspect there was more going on in that head than she’d first expected. She rinsed the shelf, left it on a dish towel to dry, took the next one out of the fridge.
Hanging around with Suki, too, Laure had said. A most interesting pair. And frankly, she wouldn’t have been surprised if Suki had set the girl up to go for Henri – out of spite, because – Brigitte was almost 100 per cent sure – Suki had never been able to get her own hands on him. Not for want of trying, certainly.
There were those nights he just took off after dinner, but that was different. Men were different from women like that. She’d never asked Laure outright about it, but she was pretty sure César must head off out on his own too. Sure, she might not like it, but she knew Henri of all people needed his time alone, whatever that involved. Without it, he got antsy. And she also knew there must have been times when he’d gone off and, well, ‘got off’. Men had their needs. Not that she didn’t have her own, admittedly – but it was different with men. Biologically.
If he’d gone off and got off in the past, she might hate the thought of it, it might make her feel sick, but it was simply best she didn’t think too much about it. The odd one-off, surely, was all it would ever have been. Scratching an itch, she thought. Only, let it never have been with a specific someone. Dear, gentle God: never let there be an actual something with a real, specific someone. She didn’t know what she would do.
* * *
• • •
Marguerite spent most of the day at the hospital, waiting for them to discharge him. As the afternoon stretched on, she began to dread that they might keep him in another night. If they did, she wouldn’t leave – she couldn’t go back to the house on her own, they couldn’t make her. She’d insist on sleeping in the chair in his room.
He was sleepy and placid. She thought he was rather enjoying the fuss made of him, until she crept out of the room to get a sandwich for her lunch and he opened his eyes, fixed them on her.
‘Don’t let’s stay any longer.’
She went to his bedside. ‘You want to leave?’
‘Oh, for God’s sake. Of course I want to leave.’
She smiled. Right now she liked his crossness. He was lucid again, his confusion and placidity dissolved.
‘I’m trying. They want to have had you here for twenty-four hours.’
‘For God’s sake.’
‘I know.’
‘You’re the one who knows best. Why don’t you just overrule them?’
‘I’m doing what I can.’
‘Well, try harder. I’m sure you can be assertive if you just put your mind to it a bit.’
But it wasn’t until the evening that they were able to go. She couldn’t call the Brochons, she thought, couldn’t ask them again to help. She asked the staff to call a taxi and they helped Jérôme into the car when it came, but she dreaded having to take him into the house when she got there. She wasn’t entirely sure she’d be able to do it, if he dragged and staggered now as much as he had yesterday.
She did manage. Slowly and painfully, so painfully that once she’d got him onto the bed she could feel the twang of a headache reverberating from her lower back right up to the base of her skull.
‘Just us again now,’ he said, leaning into her as she pulled on a pyjama shirt, buttoned it up one by one.
‘Much better, isn’t it.’
‘I hated that place.’
She took a breath, swivelled him around to lie back on the bed. She pulled his trousers down, shuffling them over his hips. He seemed to have lost a lot of weight just in the last few days, since his sons had left. His pelvis emerged enormous, like a riding saddle.
‘You hated it that much?’
‘I loathed it.’
‘Well, now we’re home. And if you don’t want to go back there,’ she said, pulling his pyjama bottoms up to his knees and over, ‘you need to eat more and concentrate on getting yourself calmer and better.’
‘For God’s sake. You sound like my mother.’
‘Well. Would you have done what she said?’
‘Depends. Depends on how sensible I thought she was being.’
‘And you know I’m being sensible.’
‘Yes, all right. All right.’ She shifted the seat of his trousers under his bottom. ‘But don’t you start gloating.’
‘So you’ll eat something now?’ she asked.
‘Anything to shut you up.’ She smiled and left the room, but she felt tense as she prepared a small bowl of stock for him, with pasta. She tried not to think about how bony he was, how fragile this all was, how dark it would be in another hour.
