From Higher Places Read online

  ‘It’s how I would have arranged them – the photos – on your desk.’ She turned to look at him with a smile sweet and open.

  ‘My dear Sarah, this will involve us in much time, much pleasure and much pain. But it’s for a rainy day, not now.’ He looked at his watch. ‘We have to go, or the youngsters will beat us to it.’

  ‘Before we do, tell me one thing.’

  ‘Ask.’

  Sarah’s mind raced, then she said, ‘It had better be later.’

  Brian and Alice were ahead of them in the queue for the function rooms at Cutlers’ Hall.

  ‘You can almost feel the tension between them,’ Edwin said, squeezing Sarah’s arm.

  ‘That’s cruel!’

  ‘Cruel, but true. He was – indeed still is – my most brilliant student, you know. Single minded, intent on one goal and skilled. A perfectionist but – unusual for that class of person – quite capable of achieving perfection.’

  ‘And innovative?’

  ‘Ah, we’ll have to wait and see, won’t we? That’s the real test, to go where no man has been before. And in surgery that’s quite something. Nothing like surgery for putting your career on the line – results are so bloody obvious.’ He rolled his eyes, then looked into her face. ‘You respect him, don’t you?’

  ‘And I’m grateful to him. He’s helped me.’

  ‘The ultimate accolade.’

  ‘And Alice?’

  ‘Nothing to say about Alice Pardoe. My God, did you see that!’

  From out of nowhere Alan Murphy had materialised behind Alice and pinched her bottom, then leapt to Brian’s other side as if he had joined them from that direction.

  ‘What did you do to her?’ he said to Brian, in response to Alice’s scream.

  Sarah’s attention was caught, not by Brian’s protestations of innocence, but by the scowl of Alan’s neglected partner, still standing in the doorway where he had left her.

  ‘Poor little soul,’ Edwin said.

  But she’s pretty, Sarah thought.

  In the hall the decorations were more reminiscent of a children’s Christmas party than an adult gathering at thirty pounds a ticket. The place reeked of cigarette smoke because, it was said, no-one had bothered to open the windows since the night before. Gradually the thickness of the atmosphere was augmented by the smell of cabbage from the kitchens, a peculiarly academic smell, Edwin said, that took him back to his student days at Cambridge. Sarah puckered her nose and was rebuked with a frown of disapproval.

  Surgical Unit had a round table for twenty. There was a vast confection in the middle with representations of the abdominal viscera, distended, as if they were about to explode. The liver, its red lobes drooping, bore an uncanny resemblance to Edwin’s pink jowls.

  To Sarah’s surprise, Edwin began the evening by ignoring her; but he was the first to ask her to dance. He held her close and whispered into her ear, ‘The others would have sat there all night, not daring to lay a hand on you until I fired the starting pistol. Now just watch the fight for succession.’

  ‘Surely you won’t abandon me to them, Edwin?’

  ‘Ultimately no. But it would be fun to let them think that. Let’s let the evening take its course, shall we?’

  There was something different about him and it took Sarah a while to decide what it was. A faint mustiness about his person. Not perspiration or an odour, rather an envelope of air one associates with a falling barometer before a storm. And the hand she remembered so clearly as dry was now perceptibly damp. He was weakening.

  Edwin was wrong about his protégés. They were beaten by a final year student called Tim, whose presence there no-one could quite explain and who seemed blissfully unaware of the hierarchy. His eyes hardly ceased to wander between Sarah and Alan’s new girl. They had four dances in succession, finishing with a waltz and a parting just short of a kiss. Tim returned to his table in a crab-like sideways shuffle which drew more, rather than less, attention to what he was seeking desperately to hide.

  If nothing else, Alan had a sharp eye for an opportunity. There were tables still to be turned.

  Alan said, ‘Guess what happened on the ward today.’

  Alice rounded on him. ‘No, Alan, you’re not to tell her,’ she hissed, hoping that Sarah had not overheard.

  ‘Tell me what?’ said Sarah.

  ‘She’s a brave wee gel. She can take it.’

  ‘No, Alan. It’ll spoil the evening,’ Alice was pleading in earnest.

  ‘You have to tell me now,’ Sarah demanded. But she could hear the wariness in her voice.

  ‘Your friend with the cricket ball in his mouth. He died this afternoon.’ Alan reached across the table for the wine bottle.

  ‘Oh, no!’ Sarah thought for a moment. ‘That surprises me. He seemed so stable.’

  ‘But in pain, great pain,’ Alan said, lowering his voice to a whisper. ‘So I exercised my clinical judgement.’

  ‘You did what?’

  ‘Took him off medication, apart from upping the morphine. What’s a day more or less? Probably made no difference. That’s between us, mind.’

  ‘Between us nothing,’ Sarah cried. ‘You’re a bloody murderer! Did you know what he was waiting for?’

  She felt an intense pain in her forearm as Edwin lifted her abruptly to her feet and led her like an errant schoolgirl to a space on the dance-floor, his face red and contorted. ‘You will never again, ever, question a colleague’s judgement in public. Do you hear me?’ She could tell he was itching to shake her violently.

  ‘If you knew…’

  ‘I heard the whole conversation and know precisely what the score is. You must learn to control yourself.’

  Faces throughout the hall turned. A lover’s tiff, and involving Sir Edwin. That was worth watching.

  The band started up again. Edwin put his arm around Sarah’s waist and with the other pushed her backwards into the quickstep. It took half a dozen paces before they were in step. A ripple of laughter spread across the tables, then died almost as quickly as interest waned.

  But the Dean was still clapping as they sped past his table. ‘Not as subtle as last year, Edwin.’

  Eventually the music stopped. ‘I have to go to the loo,’ Sarah whispered, walking briskly away. Edwin marched back to his seat with the bearing of a field-marshal returning empty-handed from the battlefield.

  Alice found her leaning into a mirror with her body pressed hard against the basin edge. Black streaks ran down her cheeks.

  ‘I’m not cut out for this game, Alice.’

  ‘What Alan did was inexcusable.’

  ‘To Mr Gordon or to me.’

  ‘To both.’

  ‘Ah well.’

  ‘Are you coming back?’

  ‘Pour me a glass of something strong and have it ready. I’ll be a few moments longer. To tidy myself up. Tell them I’m okay now.’

  The contingent at the table had regrouped. Edwin had changed places with Alan, who patted her vacant seat in invitation. If it had been Edwin’s crude attempt at reconciliation it failed miserably. Alan was still intent on exploitation, and Sarah ignored him. For two hours he studiously topped up her glass each time she was dragged onto the dance floor or whenever she wasn’t looking. But unwisely and against his better judgement he kept pace. As he would tell Alice later, it softened the pain of witnessing her favours to all but himself; and Alice half-believed him. Towards the end of the evening the pain surfaced.

  ‘I’ve been meaning to ask you, Sarah, what was the subject of your anatomy prize?’

  ‘The innervation of the human penis,’ she replied. ‘What else could enthuse a pubescent teenage fresher?’

  ‘And your conclusions? Were they… innovative?’ So Alan had overheard her conversation with Edwin.
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  ‘Very. They marked the beginning of the new science of psycho-anatomy. Clever, don’t you think?’

  ‘Too bloody clever by half.’ Alan’s speech was slurred and threatening. ‘It’s sickening to see women so bloody cocksure of themselves.’ He looked round for approbation, but none came. ‘Sometimes they need to be taken down a peg or two. Let the error of their ways be their downfall.’

  ‘Hoisted with their own petard,’ remarked Alice.

  Alan looked at her with approval. ‘Hoisted with…’ he repeated slowly, rummaging in his pocket. ‘Now’s the time, now’s the place. Voilà!’

  Sarah recognised her panties, unaccountably missing after a celebration in the Travellers Bar months before had got out of hand. She lunged wildly towards them. Alan, waving them high above his head, stepped backwards and tripped. The pair fell sprawling under the table. Disinclined as she was to get up, Sarah was just aware that Edwin had turned his attention to the girl Alan had brought. ‘What did you say your name was?’ she heard him say.

  ‘Christine.’

  ‘Well then, Christine, it seems you are going to need a lift home. I’m sure it’s safe to leave the others to clear up the mess. Come child.’

  Brian was trying desperately to persuade Sarah to get up. ‘I’ll have to take Sarah home,’ he said.

  ‘We’ll take Sarah home,’ Alice said grimly.

  What was the expression Elizabeth had once used, lying on the bed in Sarah’s room that first Sunday morning after the world had somehow turned grey? Inner fear, that was it. You sometimes show it, Sarah, without realising. Just occasionally it seeps through that tough hide of yours and I can tell. That was when, without explanation, Elizabeth had stretched out her closed fist and dropped the squirrel pendant into her waiting palm.

  Why had she not questioned her sister? Then, when the opportunity was there and they were so close? Was Elizabeth, through her silence, shielding her from something? Inwardly she had known that whatever the confidence might have yielded, the truth would be hard to contemplate. When Elizabeth was killed on her bicycle two summers later Sarah regretted with an indescribable intensity that she had never brought herself to ask. Her own sister! Had she not cared enough, for God’s sake?

  In periods of despondency it always came to occupy her mind before she was fully awake. There it was, like a face at the window, rain or shine. There were times when it seemed malevolent, and it had taken her years to realise that there was a pattern: that the sharpest bite of pain was when the autumn chill touched the last of the summer mornings – for that was when Elizabeth’s demeanour had changed.

  The exuberance and abandon of a Saturday night never seemed to translate into the satisfaction that was promised. On such mornings even the telephone, a normally steadfast lifeline to a less troubled world, held no promise of relief. So she would return to bed and turn her face to the wall, as she had done as a child, so as not to see who it was the owl held in its talons.

  But that afternoon, the day after the ball, the telephone did ring. The encounter with Jazreel in Brixton was still vivid in her memory.

  ‘It’s Ali.’

  ‘Hello Ali. What do you want?’

  ‘To talk. Can we meet?’

  ‘I suppose. Why?’

  He seemed to be groping for words.

  ‘We lost the baby.’

  ‘Ali, that’s awful! Yes, of course we can meet, if that would help.’

  ‘Can I come round? Like now?’

  ‘Of course you may.’

  For once Sarah took her clothes from a drawer that had remained closed since she moved into the flat. She chose a black-buttoned grey cardigan to take the edge off her youthfulness, then stuffed a handkerchief into her sleeve, as if anticipating tears.

  ‘You look different,’ Ali said, ill at ease in the doorway.

  ‘For the better or worse?’

  ‘More beautiful still.’ His face became flushed. ‘I’m sorry, I should not have said that. But, well, you see, it’s really why I’m here.’

  She had not understood. ‘You’re here because I’m beautiful?’

  ‘It is because of your beauty that you are… vulnerable.’

  ‘Very enigmatic and I’m flattered. But you have something else to tell me surely? Tell me about the baby.’

  ‘It was an infection. Very sudden.’

  ‘Or not so sudden?’

  ‘Please, it is a book closed. There is a saying where I come from that evil must be absolute for no good to come of it. That is sometimes difficult to understand.’

  ‘You are older than your years, Ali. And Jazreel, how is she?’

  ‘She was nearly broken, but she will mend. She has gone home. For how long I do not know. I may join her.’

  ‘Then why…’

  ‘Jazreel, too, was a beautiful woman. Maybe her beauty will return, maybe not.’

  ‘You’ve come to warn me, haven’t you?’

  ‘To tell you to be careful.’ He searched in his pocket for a packet of cigarettes, then lit one, inhaling hard. ‘You will ask me what of. In truth I cannot tell you. Jazreel was so shamed she would not reveal it, even to me. It was before I knew her well, you see. I think then I would not have interested her.’ He pulled a wry smile. ‘You see, for me good may have come from evil.’

  ‘Go on.’

  Ali tapped his cigarette packet nervously on the table. Sarah watched the muscles of his mouth organise themselves into an utterance of contempt.

  ‘Your friend, the surgeon. I think he was responsible.’

  ‘Edwin, you mean? But for what?’

  ‘For her pain. Beyond that I cannot say.’

  ‘Then why accuse him?’ Sarah’s frustration was mounting. ‘Stricker’s just a harmless old buffer.’

  ‘Because of the depth of her hatred for him. It was without parallel.’

  ‘I’ll go and make us some coffee.’

  When she returned Ali had gone.

  This time the concierge at Atherstone House waved her through with hardly a glance. She wondered to whom he reported and what instruction he received in the art of discretion. She tried to guess how he classified her. More to the point, what others had earned the same weary and sanctioning nod, devoid of interest and respect.

  And the residents, players all! One read it in the oils of hounds and huntsmen that lined the corridors, in the darkly framed notices of long dead cabaret artists and in small-group photos taken at garden parties at the palace. The opposite corridor on the tenth floor was devoted to falconry and camel racing in some Gulf state. For these people the science of taking pleasure was as serious, almost, as the art of generating wealth.

  Edwin’s door was already open. She saw him in the far corner of the room, framed in the window, gazing across the Thames and South Bank to an arbitrary point on the horizon. There was a long silence, as if he were receiving instruction from a presence far away. The clock of a church somewhere below struck six.

  ‘I was expecting you, Sarah.’

  ‘Then you know me better than I know myself, Edwin.’

  ‘How is that?’ His voice was bland and empty. ‘Ah, you mean you had considered not coming, is that it? I would have thought that an apology in person was the least I deserved.’

  Beyond his hostility she sensed a hurt pride that was quite capable of expressing itself to her disadvantage. She saw in him instruments to manipulate and cajole, nurture and torment, but which, for the moment, would be used to pacify. Only later, and prompted by others in different contexts, would she realise that behind his behaviour might have been a true element of affection. She gripped the hairy fist clenched over the chair-back. It drew no response, yet she was certain of the impact.

  ‘You do deserve one, Edwin, and you are right to reprimand me for my behaviour when I sho
uld have been contrite. Well I am and I apologise for spoiling last night. Alice rang to tell me I’d behaved rather badly. Tell me what I can do to put it right.’

  ‘You can show me the real Sarah, not an automaton engineered for sensuality that blows its fuse at the slightest provocation.’

  ‘Is that what you think?’ She had underestimated his capacity to retaliate.

  ‘A harsh judgement, I’ll admit – perhaps. I will give you some tea, young lady, and while we sip it we can contemplate our respective positions. See if there’s common ground. Mutual advantage even. That sort of thing.’

  ‘I would like it very much if we could begin again.’ She didn’t care if he saw she was being less than truthful.

  ‘That’s splendid.’ He led her by the shoulders to a door next to the fireplace which he opened with a flourish. Beyond was a smaller, more cosily furnished room with curtains drawn and a crackling coal fire. Before the fire a low table covered with an embroidered white cloth bore more cakes and delicacies than they could eat in a week. To each side were cavernous armchairs with rich oriental cushions, oblique to each other and to the fire.

  She sat and Edwin took his place opposite her. ‘We should each begin at an appropriate landmark in time. Choose one for me.’

  ‘The death of your wife, perhaps.’

  He looked at her sharply, as if a cut had been intended; but there was no premeditation or malice on her part.

  Then she asked softly, ‘And your daughter?’

  ‘In a car accident, both.’

  ‘The emptiness you must have felt.’

  ‘You speak with experience of such a thing?’

  ‘Once. My sister, on her bicycle.’

  But she could not bring herself to exchange remembrances of a common grief. She bit her lip, wondering what inner demon prevented her seeking the way of friendship instead of denial. ‘It’s still too painful to talk about.’

  ‘I understand.’ He reached across and patted her hand. ‘After it happened I could no longer live in the family home and wanted to sell. My son Alex would not hear of it – and I should have seen in him then the manorial tyrant he’s become – so I let him have it in exchange for this. What do I need with acres of grass to mow when I have my surgery?’