The Infidelity Chain Page 2

  ‘I know there’s something rude I could do with Kansas and Mississippi,’ I mused, ‘but these Hurricanes are stronger than they look.’

  His skin smelled of leather and soap and pine trees just after it’s rained. There was a quiver in the region of my knickers.

  He took the unlit cigarette out of my fingers and guided me towards the door. ‘I think we need to discuss the state of this union somewhere else.’

  It was obviously never going to be more than a brief holiday fling, since Lucy and I were only down from North Carolina for the weekend. We planned to experience the ‘Come as you are, leave different’ philosophy of the Big Easy before we graduated from Duke and – her words – went home to London and stuck our heads back up our uptight British arses.

  So while Lucy generously waved me on, I went back to his apartment and slept with him (oh, the brazen shame of me!) the first night, with none of that tedious game-playing, no-touching-below-the-waist-till-the-fifth-date routine.

  Over breakfast the next morning – Creole beignets, fresh fruit fritters and cinnamon sopaipillas; dear Lord, the man could cook! – we exchanged some of the personal details we’d neglected in favour of energetic sex the night before, such as our names. Jackson was a fundraiser at New Orleans’ Tulane University. When I told him I was studying medicine at Duke, he nearly spat out his (strong, black) coffee.

  ‘I’ll be damned. I just got a job at Duke, I’m movin’ there in a couple weeks.’

  Still aching pleasurably from the night’s exertions, I decided Jackson was the perfect rebound lover (there’d been a brief and unhappy dalliance with a married history professor, recently ended and best not dwelt upon): the casual, restorative relationship that helps mend a broken heart after a romantic near-miss, or at least someone to play hooky with while you wait to meet The One. He was not, as he warned me at the time, supposed to be the man I married.

  All relationships are intrinsically unequal; I’d learned that lesson as a small child. Whoever loves the least has the most power.

  Growing up, I’d often wondered why my mother always seemed to be waiting for something that never came. I’d vowed into my pillow, as I listened night after night to my mother sobbing on the other side of the wall into hers, that I would not end up like she had. I would not wait seventeen years for a charismatic, faithless man who had no intention of ever leaving his wife for me, who would get me pregnant and not give our child so much as his name, who would die and leave me, at forty-six, not-quite-a-widow in a still-strange land with a nine-year-old daughter to support and no earthly means to do it.

  Thrown unceremoniously on to the streets after the untimely death of mon père, my mother and I had slept in the back of her ancient green Peugeot for three weeks, living on day’s-end baguettes and over-ripe cheese, before she’d admitted defeat and summoned the courage to go back home, beret in hand, to Northamptonshire. Her own father had died without ever forgiving her. Her mother referred to me as ‘the French bastard’. It had seemed reasonable to me at the time.

  For the next nine years, I’d watched my mother scrabble for scraps of approval from the old witch, struggling hopelessly to atone for her one doomed act of defiance (how she’d ever found the courage to escape to Paris in the first place, I’d never yet worked out). I’d stared into the speckle-backed mirror at my homely reflection, with its unattractive mass of red curls and eyes the colour of weak tea, so different from hers and therefore so clearly his, and wondered what she had seen in my father that could possibly make him worth this misery.

  As soon as I turned eighteen I fled to Oxford, determined that, whatever happened, I would never depend on a man for anything: love or money.

  Jackson had all the hallmarks of a toxic bachelor; charming, sexy and footloose, he should have broken my heart. But right from the start, and against all reason (even with a streaming cold he was a definite 91⁄2; on my wedding day, with a flotilla of Vogue make-up artists, I’d be lucky to scrape a 7), somehow I always knew I was the one in control.

  It was no single thing, but a thousand tiny kindnesses. He filled our bedroom with Confederate jasmine because I mentioned that I liked its scent. He stayed up all night testing me before my exams, never taking offence when I yelled at him out of nerves or sheer bloody-mindedness. When I wanted to ski in Colorado, he was happy to take me, even though he hated the cold with all the fervour of a Southern boy who’s never experienced a morning frost. Not just keep-the-peace happy. Child-on-Christmas-morning happy. Being with me was enough for him. No matter what I proposed, he smiled his easy smile which scrunched the corners of his blue blue eyes, and said that if it worked for me, it worked for him too.

  Our light romance bridged the gap between Mardi Gras and real life with surprising success. We were very different people, and yet we understood each other. We both knew what it was like to suddenly lose a parent at a young age – in Jackson’s case, both: his parents had died in a hotel fire when he was eleven, leaving him to be brought up by his brother Cooper, six years his elder. We’d both had to grow up hard and fast, and if our reactions to this hot-housed awareness of the fragility of life were very different – he chose to live for today, I to control tomorrow – we had a shared knowledge of the chaos that lay beneath. We both loved jazz and blues, Gregory Peck and baroque architecture. Jackson adored peaceably walking in the mountains almost as much as I loved the challenge of climbing them; we both relished the thrills of white-water rafting, kayaking and canoeing. Admittedly I missed the bright lights of London, but in those early days we were truly both happiest when we were far from the madding crowd, holed up in a cabin somewhere with just the odd harmless black bear for company.

  Of course I loved him; it was impossible not to. He gave freely and asked nothing of me (the talk of babies came much later). He was always there for me, my confidant and companion, my dearest friend.

  And I needed him; for many reasons, but most of all to counterbalance the fatal pull I felt towards men I couldn’t handle, men who didn’t make me feel safe. Men like my father, men who would catch me in their riptide and drag me under.

  We all marry partly out of fear: of being alone, of dying unloved. Three months after we met I asked Jackson to marry me, knowing that whatever his reservations, he would be unable to say no, because I was afraid of what I might do if I didn’t.

  Lucy looks up from the nurses’ station, where she’s skimming a bulky manila folder. ‘Nice shoes.’

  I hesitate. She smiles ruefully and, relieved at the unexpected détente, I smile back.

  She hands me the folder. ‘Sorry I had to call you in. It’s Anna Shore.’

  Damn. Anna is one of Lucy’s heartsink obstetric patients: thirty-nine, six miscarriages in five years, two of them distressingly late, at nineteen and twenty weeks. This pregnancy is her last chance to have her own child; she and her husband, Dean, have already decided that they cannot bear to go through the shattering cycle of hope and despair again if this attempt fails.

  ‘Remind me. How far along?’

  ‘Twenty-two weeks and six days.’

  ‘Shit.’

  I scan the notes, trying to get a read on how developed we think this baby is. It’s hospital policy not to save babies of less than twenty-three weeks’ gestation; born at the very cusp of viability, their chances of survival, even with our intervention, are minimal. I’m relieved Lucy called me in; William will get over it. This sort of case isn’t something I’d want a senior house officer handling in my absence.

  ‘Look, Ella,’ Lucy says carefully, ‘I’m sorry about going off at you the other day. It was just a shock, running into the two of you like that. Tell William I’m really sorry about the carrot juice. I’ll pay for the dry-cleaning—’

  ‘Forget it. At least it wasn’t hot coffee.’

  ‘It’s just that you know how much I like Jackson, and what with – with Lawrence—’

  ‘Did he agree to counselling?’

  She seems to shrink inside her sk
in, so that suddenly it hangs loose and grey on her bones. ‘He’s asked for a divorce.’

  ‘Oh, Lucy. Oh, darling, I’m so sorry.’

  ‘Shit, Ella. Don’t be nice to me or I’ll lose it completely.’ She pulls herself together with a visible effort. ‘I know you don’t want to hear this, but I’m worried about you. Jackson is such a good man. You two could be really great together. I don’t want this thing with William to blow up in your face.’

  ‘It’s a bit of a mess, I know, but—’

  ‘Eight years, Ella!’

  ‘Look, all right. It kind of drifted. But it’s not like we see each other that often.’ I snap shut the file. ‘Lucy, you know the score. This is about you and Lawrence, not—’

  ‘Do you love him?’

  ‘Jackson? Or William?’

  ‘Either,’ she exclaims, exasperated.

  ‘It’s not that simple. Life isn’t black and white, you know that—’

  ‘Actually, Ella, some things are.’ She looks at me sharply. ‘It was one thing playing with fire when we were at college, but it’s different now. This is real life. I thought when you met Jackson you’d finally got whatever was eating you out of your system. Obviously I was wrong.’

  I shift uncomfortably. How to explain in a way that makes any kind of sense? At twenty-five, when I married Jackson, I truly intended to be faithful to him for ever. I thought wanting to be in love with him was enough. But within a year, I discovered that getting what you wish for isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. Beautiful and careless, Jackson never, ever said no to me. But I soon realized he let me have my way less out of love than a desire to slough off responsibility for anything at all. I hadn’t married an equal, but an emotional child; and why would I want to have a baby – already an enterprise I felt deeply ambivalent about, given my own parents’ staggering incompetence – when I was already parenting my husband?

  I’d hoped that moving back to London for my residency would help, that the buzz of the city would somehow jump-start things between us. But then, just a week shy of our third wedding anniversary, I met William.

  He wasn’t anywhere near as good-looking or charming as Jackson. Twelve years older, tough, cynical, sexist and controlling, he was everything my gentlemanly, easygoing husband was not. And unlike my husband, he just had it; in spades.

  It was like being hit by a train. The sexual chemistry was tangible, but it was more than that. Meeting him made me realize how much I’d short-changed not just Jackson but myself when I took the safe way out and married him. I morphed into a different person when I was with William, the person I’d always wanted to be: confident, desirable, exciting. He challenged me; being with him was like walking a tightrope – terrifying and exhilarating at the same time. One slip and I could lose him; or, even worse, fall in love.

  I never considered leaving Jackson. I married him to protect myself from men like William Ashfield. And I was very fond of my husband. None of this was his fault. But I couldn’t face the thought of spending the rest of my life never experiencing anything stronger than fond.

  William wanted the same as I did: an escape. A chance to play what-might-have-been, without jeopardizing what was.

  To my astonishment, tears threaten. I blink furiously, surprised and shocked. I never bring my personal life into work.

  ‘Ella, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to upset you—’

  ‘You didn’t. It’s my problem, not yours.’

  ‘I’m sure you know what you’re doing,’ Lucy says uncertainly.

  ‘You’d think, after eight years.’

  She folds her arms. ‘Ella, you’re the most self-controlled person I’ve ever met, but even you can’t expect to lead two separate lives and not have them collide now and again, if only in your head. Feelings have a way of coming to the surface, whether you like it or not.’

  Lucy is my dearest friend, but she doesn’t know what she’s talking about. Things are absolutely fine. My life is perfectly organized. It’s all beautifully balanced. William and I have the perfect arrangement. Jackson isn’t going to find out; nothing’s going to go wrong. I’m totally in control.

  I jump at the asthmatic sound of the Victorian lift. Instantly, thankfully, my focus is on my patient. You escape into work and call it altruism, Jackson said once, in a rare moment of anger. I call it the coward’s way out.

  A flurry of medical personnel wheels a hospital bed from the lift. Anna Shore’s frantic husband struggles to keep hold of her hand as the cavalcade steps up its pace. Behind them, Richard Angel, the hospital’s chief number cruncher – known, without a trace of irony, as the Angel of Death – strides down the corridor. His fine blond hair is so badly cut it borders on rude. He snaps his fingers constantly at his sides, an irritating nervous tic.

  ‘Shit,’ Lucy mutters, ‘I meant to warn you.’

  ‘If I might have a word . . .’ Angel starts.

  Lucy disappears to a private room to examine Anna, while Angel and I glare at each other across the nurses’ station. I’m acutely conscious of the fact that I’m not wearing any knickers.

  The prognosis is written on her face when she returns. ‘The drugs aren’t working, Ella. She’s in full-blown labour. I said you’d talk to her, and explain what happens next.’

  Of course. I’m always the one who has to break bad news. Lucy’s far too beautiful for anyone to believe in her as the bearer of grim tidings. Clearly, awash with freckles and gifted with hideous ginger ringlets and my father’s Depardieu nose, I have the right looks for tragedy.

  I’m sluiced by a wave of sadness as I go into Anna’s room and sit down on the edge of the bed. It’s not the fear in her eyes that disarms me; it’s the unremitting hope.

  ‘Anna,’ I say gently. ‘We’ve tried to stop the labour, but it’s not working. Your baby is going to be born in the next hour or so. We’ve given her steroids, to try to mature her lungs, but we haven’t really had much time. She’s very tiny, Anna. Not much more than a pound. Do you know how small that is?’

  ‘Half a bag of sugar,’ Anna whispers.

  ‘She’s so little, darling. Not quite twenty-three weeks. I need to talk to you about what that means, and you’re going to have to be very brave. Can you do that for me?’

  She glances up at her husband, then nods, her grip tightening on my fingers.

  ‘At this age, we lose two-thirds of these tiny babies during delivery. They just can’t cope, sweetheart, their little lungs aren’t strong enough. If they do make it, we have to help them with their breathing. We give them something called surfactant, which keeps their lungs from sticking together and makes their breathing easier—’

  ‘What about brain damage?’ Dean, her husband, asks fearfully.

  ‘When a baby is born this early, there is a risk she’ll have an intracranial haemorrhage – bleeding of the brain.’

  ‘How high a risk?’

  ‘If the baby is really small, about one in three.’

  Anna closes her eyes and turns her head away.

  God, this never gets any easier. ‘That doesn’t necessarily mean that the baby will be brain-damaged, Anna. There’s only a bad outcome in a small percentage of cases—’

  ‘Wait. Wait. What do you call a bad outcome?’ Dean interrupts. ‘What are we talking about here?’

  ‘Some type of limited motion, or intellectual trouble at school, that kind of thing.’

  ‘So how long before you know if she’s going to be – normal?’

  ‘We can’t tell with babies this small. I’m sorry, I know it’s hard.’ I pause, my heart aching as I search for the right words to help them. ‘Sometimes when the baby is this little, it can be better to just let her go. Intervention can be very traumatic, for you and your baby, and when the outlook is as uncertain as this—’

  ‘I don’t care if she’s not perfect!’ Anna cries. ‘I don’t care if we have to spend the rest of our lives looking after her!’

  Dean swallows. ‘And if she makes it? What then, Dr
Stuart?’

  ‘Call me Ella, please.’ I sigh. ‘Look, Dean, I’m not going to lie to you. There are lots of hurdles a baby this premature has to face, but there’s no point giving you nightmares by outlining every possibility. We really need to concentrate on the here and now, not on what might develop later down the line. I want you to clearly understand what’s going to happen once we start to deliver your baby, because I may not be able to explain everything at the time. I might need you to make some very difficult decisions very quickly.’

  He nods, jaw working as he fights to hold back tears. Jesus, why would anyone want to be a parent and risk going through this? Having a child must be like spending the rest of your life with your heart walking around outside your body.

  ‘If you want us to stop at any point during resuscitation, you just have to say so,’ I add gently. ‘No one is going to think badly of you.’

  Tears seep beneath Anna’s closed eyelids. ‘I don’t care what you have to do. Just don’t give up on her. Please.’

  I spend the next forty minutes prepping with the neonatal team, acutely aware that somewhere in this hospital another team of medical staff are preparing to abort a baby a week older than the infant we are trying to save. I know the chances are high that Anna’s infant will die. I have dealt with a thousand cases just as tragic as hers. Why has this one got under my skin?

  Richard Angel is lying in wait for me when Lucy pages me back to the obstetric suite. He glances at my scarlet heels, opens his mouth, then wisely thinks better of it.

  ‘What are you still doing here?’ I demand. ‘No funny Valentine waiting at home?’

  He scurries to keep pace with me, fingers clicking like a skeletal metronome. ‘New policy. I expect to be notified whenever there’s a borderline neonate.’

  ‘Borderline?’

  ‘You know hospital policy, Dr Stuart. It’s a perfectly reasonable—’

  ‘I’m sorry. Did I miss your graduation from medical school?’ I hiss. ‘Since when have you been qualified to determine viability, Richard? Is it just small babies you want to flush down the sluice, or do you plan to tour the geriatric ward pulling plugs, too?’