‘She wouldn’t tell me,’ Ginny whispered.
‘Maybe it’s time we found out.’ Fergus put Ginny at arm’s length, and held her gaze. ‘Love, there are people coming to help search. Ben’s here. I think the most important thing I can do is to go and talk to Oscar.’
Wrong, his heart was saying. The most important thing he could do was to hold on to Ginny, for ever and ever and ever.
But if he was to rebuild a family for them all then he had to gather the family members together. Madison was part of his family. He knew that in his heart. Maybe he’d always known it.
‘I’ll be back as soon as I can,’ he told Ginny. ‘But I need to go.’
Oscar was sleeping the sleep of the pure of heart. His asthma had receded. The last few weeks of regular meals and limited alcohol had improved his health. He was sleeping in a single room with a view over the valley toward the farm he’d neglected for years, and where half his stock had needed to be put down. Yet no conscience kept him awake. He’s a patient, Fergus told himself, and somehow he refrained from shaking the man awake and shouting. Instead, he switched on the night-light behind the bed, touched him lightly on the shoulder and sat down in the visitor’s chair, waiting for him to wake gently.
He was doing very well, he thought in some abstract part of him that was able to be dispassionate. The doctor part of him congratulated the part of him that wasn’t anything to do with his medicine. The non-abstract part.
The part of him that loved Ginny.
And…Madison?
But Oscar was waking up. ‘What do you want?’ The big man’s voice was slurred with sleep and the after- effects of the alcohol he’d drunk the previous afternoon. ‘You wake a man up in the middle of the night to do your bloody tests-’
‘I’m not here for tests, Mr Bentley,’ Fergus said, still in that strange voice that was all professional and not personal in the least. ‘I need to know what you said to Madison at the funeral today.’
‘Madison?’
‘Richard Viental’s little girl.’
‘The kid,’ he said, his face clearing. ‘The Viental kid.’
‘That’s right.’ Still that detached tone. Good, he told himself. Very good. No anger. No shouting. ‘When she tried to put the flowers round your neck…what did you say to her?’
His face darkened. ‘She spilled my drink.’
‘She did,’ Fergus agreed. ‘I’d be guessing that made you pretty angry. A man’s got to have a drink.’
‘He bloody does,’ Oscar said. ‘Bloody nurses…’
‘It was good of Ginny to put on free beer for the men today,’ Fergus said thoughtfully, and he watched Oscar’s face change.
‘Her. I shouldn’t have drunk her beer.’
‘Why not?’
‘She’s a Viental. They should all be dead by now.’
‘Why?’ Still the conversational tone. Somehow.
‘They’ve got this bloody disease. That woman… I asked her to marry me, you know. This bloody woman’s mother. My farm’s four times as big as bloody Dave Viental’s and she chose him. Made me a laughing stock. I used to see ’em every time I walked up to the ridge, playing happy families, poor as blasted church mice and being…’ He sucked in his breath on an angry hiss. ‘Anyway, when the first kid died I thought, Great, this is how it ought to be. She chose misery over me. She could suffer the consequences. Then the next kid died and Dave took off.
‘You know what I did then? I went over there, cap in hand, and said, “You know what, Mary, I’m a big man. I can let bygones be bygones. We’ll ship the girl off to school in the city and the other boy’ll soon be dead. We can start over the way it’s supposed to be.” And you know what? She stood there, staring at me like I was a lunatic, and then she started laughing. She laughed and laughed and laughed, like it was so hysterical she couldn’t stop, and then that bloody girl came out and grabbed her arm and said, “Come on, Mum, you need to rest.” And that was that. I went home and I vowed I’d never go to that side of the ridge again until every last one of them was dead. Every last one…’
Somehow Fergus stayed silent. Somehow the medical side of him-the part of him that could suggest a diagnosis of obsessive paranoia, of a solitary man stuck in the groove of hate for over thirty years-could force the other part of him to shut up.
‘And now Richard’s dead,’ he said conversationally, and Oscar nodded.
‘Good riddance.’
‘But Ginny…and Madison?’
‘They’ll have it,’ he said, and his hatred sounded awful in the stillness of the night. ‘They’ll both have this cystic thing. Her brothers are all dead, she will be soon, and this last one…Richard…will have passed it on to the kid.’
‘I’m sorry to have to disappoint you.’ Fergus was amazing himself. His voice was almost gentle. ‘Neither Ginny or Madison have cystic fibrosis.’
‘Yeah, but they will.’
‘No,’ he said, and his voice was suddenly harsher than he’d intended. ‘You need two cystic fibrosis genes to be ill. Ginny has one cystic fibrosis gene. That means if she marries someone with a matching gene then she might have an ill child but she herself won’t get ill. Madison’s clear. She’s totally free. A normal little girl with a life expectancy of eighty or more.’
‘But her mother-’
‘Her mother died of cardiomyopathy. It’s an infection of the heart. Like the flu. Madison’s no more likely to die of it that you are.’
There was a moment’s silence. Then Oscar’s breath whistled in through his lips in an angry gasp as he accepted Fergus’s words for fact.
‘Then they’ll live.’
‘Yes.’ With me, Fergus thought, and the thought was a good one. It was reassuring in the awfulness of what he was listening to. Please, he thought. I just need to get him to tell me…
‘So what happened at the funeral to make you angry at Madison?’ he asked, and Oscar’s fingers clenched into fists on the coverlet.
‘Made me sick.’
‘What made you sick?’
‘All that crap about the Vientals. Everywhere…people saying what a shame it was how all the kids had died, and how she’s coming back here now and the kid’s staying with her and won’t it be great? And then that stuff about shells. “She thinks my mummy and daddy might have found a new shell together,”’ he said, mimicking Madison’s tone and words from the funeral, and Fergus winced. ‘That was what I told her. I told her it was crap.’
‘What did you tell her?’ Fergus demanded, and if he forgot to keep his voice even it wasn’t for want of trying. He thought back to that fragment of time-a little girl slipping a garland of flowers over this man’s head, the spilled drink, the fury, the grabbing, hauling her up, spitting the words at her. There’d have been time for so little before onlookers intervened. What could he have said in that short interval?
‘Just…’ Oscar said, and paused.
‘Just?’ Fergus was holding his breath. He was trying so hard to contain himself that he felt sick. ‘Just what, Oscar?’
“‘Your mother hasn’t found a shell,’” he spat, lying back on the bed and repeating his words with relish. “‘Your mother died in the car. She’ll be rotting in the ground or, if there is anything afterwards, she’ll be stuck on the road outside the football ground, whinging about her lost lover for ever.’”
He didn’t hit him.
Somehow Fergus backed out of the ward and closed the door, then leaned against the wall of the hospital corridor, feeling ill.
Such hate. In the middle of tragedy, to hold such hate to yourself when there was room to move on…
He thought suddenly of Molly, his precious little girl, beaming up to him at bedtime, winding her arms around his neck and kissing him goodnight.
There was room to move on. You should move on, because not to…
