A Traitor to Memory

JILL STAGGERED TO her bedroom. Her movements were clumsy. She was hampered by her size. She flung open the cupboard that held her clothes, thinking only, Richard, oh my God, Richard, and coming round to wonder wildly what she was doing standing incoherently in front of a rack of garments. All she could think was her lover's name. All she could feel was a mixture of terror and a profound self-hatred at the doubts she'd had, doubts that she'd been harbouring and nursing at the very moment that … that what? What had happened to him?

“Is he alive?” she'd cried into the telephone when the voice asked if she was Miss Foster, Miss Jill Foster, the woman whose name Richard carried in his wallet in the event that something …

“My God, what's happened?” Jill had continued.

“Miss Foster, if you'll come to the hospital,” the Voice had said. “Do you need a taxi? Shall I phone one for you? If you'll give me an address, I can ring a minicab.”

The idea of waiting five minutes—or ten or fifteen—for a cab was inconceivable. Jill dropped the telephone and stumbled for her coat.

Her coat. That was it. She'd come into her bedroom in search of her coat. She shoved through the hanging garments in the cupboard till her hands came into contact with cashmere. She jerked this from its hanger and struggled into it. She fumbled with the horn buttons, miscalculated where they went, and didn't bother to refasten them more precisely when the hem of the coat hung like a lopsided curtain upon her. From her chest of drawers she took a scarf—the first one that came to hand, it didn't matter—and she wrapped this round her throat. She slammed a black wool cap on her head and snatched up her shoulder bag. She went for the door.

In the lift, she punched for the underground car park, and she willed the little cubicle downwards without stopping at any other floors. She told herself that it was a good sign the hospital had rung her and asked her to come. If the news was bad, if the situation was—could she risk the word?—fatal, they wouldn't have rung her at all, would they? Wouldn't they instead have sent a constable round to fetch her or to speak with her? So what it meant that they had phoned was that he was alive. He was alive.

She found herself making bargains with God as she pushed through the doors to the car park. If Richard would live, if his heart or whatever it was would mend, then she would compromise on the baby's name. They would christen her Cara Catherine. Richard could call her Cara at home behind closed doors, among the family, and Jill herself would call her the same. Then outside, in the world at large, both of them could refer to her as Catherine. They'd register her at school as Catherine. Her friends would call her Catherine. And Cara would be even more special because it would be what only her parents called her. That was fair, wasn't it, God? If only Richard would live.

The car was parked seven bays along. She unlocked it, praying that it would start, and for the first time seeing the wisdom in having something modern and reliable. But the Humber loomed large in her past—her granddad had been its single owner—and when he'd left the vehicle to her in his will, she'd kept it out of love for him and in memory of the countryside drives they'd taken together. Her friends had laughed at it in earlier years, and Richard had lectured her about its dangers—no airbags, no headrests, inadequate restraints—but Jill had stubbornly continued to drive it and had no intention of giving it up.

“It's safer than what's on the streets these days,” she'd declared loyally whenever Richard had attempted to wrestle from her a promise not to drive it. “It's like a tank.”

“Just stay out of it till you've had the baby, and promise me you won't let Cara anywhere near it,” he had replied.

Catherine, she had thought. Her name is Catherine. But that was before. That was when she thought nothing could happen in an instant the way things happened: things like this that changed everything, making what had seemed so important yesterday less than a bagatelle today.

Still, she'd made the promise not to drive the Humber, and she'd kept that promise for the last two months. So she had added reason to wonder if it would start.

It did. Like a dream. But the increase in Jill's size required her to make an adjustment to the heavy front seat. She reached forward and beneath it for the metal lever. She flipped it up and shifted her weight. The seat wouldn't budge.

She said, “Damn it. Come on,” and tried again. But either the device itself had corroded over the years or something was blocking the track on which the enormous seat ran.