Prodigal by Charles Lambert

Author:Charles Lambert
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781910709504
Publisher: Gallic Books
Published: 2018-12-15T00:00:00+00:00

22

JEREMY

She is in the last ward off a long, bare, airless corridor. Jeremy follows Andreas past a series of half-open doors into a room with white-painted beds along both sides and a window on the far wall. It’s another hot day and the window faces south-east so that, entering the room, Jeremy is momentarily blinded by mid-morning sunlight. Rachel must be behind him, but he doesn’t turn round to check; he’s given up on Rachel after last night. He’s never understood her inflexibility, her odd little moods, her rudeness with people she doesn’t recognise as part of her tribe, as one of us. For all the good she’ll do their mother she might as well have stayed in the car or, even better, at home, with her horses and husband.

On the way to the hospital, she didn’t speak a word to Andreas, other than to mutter complaints whenever he overtook anyone or drove in a way that wouldn’t suit a vicar’s wife in rural Sussex, while Andreas glanced over his shoulder to see what her problem was, his face concerned, his driving more erratic than ever. Jeremy asked her how she was feeling as they left the hotel, for which he paid, and she told him to worry about himself not her, which neither answered his question nor, given her tone, expressed concern for him or for how he might be feeling.

The truth, although he doesn’t share it, is that he has a headache and shooting pains in his neck because he drank too much retsina last night, and is feeling nauseous, only partly because of the wine. He’s inclined to blame the sun, which is too strong for him this morning. He blinks and turns his head from the bare hard light of the window towards the beds. Andreas, out of tact, he imagines, is hanging back by the door. Jeremy looks at the old women, ranged along both sides of the room, four beds to each white wall, as the women, or some of them, look back at him, while others stare up at the ceiling, and others have their eyes closed. But he can’t see his mother.

He’s about to ask Andreas if he’s sure this is the right ward when Rachel lets out a little gasp, and pushes past him.

‘Oh, Mummy,’ she says. ‘Oh my God, Mummy.’

Later, when he is back in Paris, alone or with Jean-Paul, he will think about this moment over and over again and find no peace. He will run his mind’s eye round the ward, from bed to bed, as if along a series of photographs scattered on a desk or along an identity parade of similar, almost familiar, but finally unknown faces, and still he will fail to see her among the other old women in their metal-framed hospital cots, white sheets pulled up to the chin, or pushed back because of the heat, pushed away by bare arms burnt brown with the sun or blue-white with the lack of it

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