A Traitor to Memory

“Jill …”

She swung round. He was leaning against a jamb whose door opened into what appeared to be some sort of treatment room just behind the guard's desk. Beyond him, she could see trolleys with people lying upon them, covered to their chins in thin pastel blankets, and beyond the trolleys she could see cubicles formed by curtains at the bottom of which the feet of those ministering to the injured, the critically ill, or the dying were only just visible.

Richard was from among the merely injured. Jill felt her knees grow weak at the sight of him. She cried, “Oh God, I thought you were … They said … When they phoned …” and she began to weep, which was utterly unlike her and told her just how terrified she'd been.

He stumbled to her and they held each other. He said, “I asked them not to phone you. I told them I'd ring you myself so that you'd know, but they insisted … It's their procedure … If I'd known how upset … Here, Jill, don't cry …”

He tried to fish out a handkerchief for her, which was how she first noticed that his right arm was in plaster. And then she noticed the rest of it: the walking cast on his right foot which she could now see beyond the ripped-open seam of his navy trousers, the ugly bruising on one side of his face, and the row of stitches beneath his right eye.

“What happened?” she cried.

He said, “Get me home, darling. They want me to spend the night—but I don't need … I can't think …” He gazed at her earnestly. “Jill, will you take me home?”

She said of course. Had he ever doubted that she'd be there, do what he asked of her, tend to him, nurse him?

He thanked her with a gratitude that she found touching. And when they gathered his things together, she was even more touched to see that he'd managed the shopping he'd gone out to do. He brought five mangled and soiled shopping bags out of the treatment room with him. “At least I found the intercom,” he said wryly.

They made their way to the car, ignoring the protest of the young doctor and even younger nurse who tried to stop them. Their progress was slow, Richard needing to stop to rest every four paces or so. As they went out of the ambulance entrance, he told her briefly what had happened.

He'd gone into more than one shop, he said, looking for what he had in mind. He ended up making more purchases than he'd expected, and the shopping bags were unwieldy in the crowds out on the pavement.

“I wasn't paying attention, and I should have been,” he told her. “There were so many people.”

He was making his way along Portman Street to where he'd left his Granada in the underground car park in Portman Square. The pavement was packed: shoppers running for one last purchase in Oxford Street before the shops closed, business people heading for home, streams of students jostling one another, the homeless eager to find doorways for the night and a handout of coins to keep them from hunger. “You know how it can be in that part of town,” he said. “It was madness to go there, but I just didn't want to put it off any longer.”

The shove, he said, came out of nowhere just as a Number 74 bus was pulling out from its stop. Before he knew what was happening, he was hurtling straight into the vehicle's path. One tyre drove over—

“Your arm,” Jill said. “Your arm. Oh Richard—”

“The police said how lucky I was,” Richard finished. “It could have been … You know what might have happened.” He'd paused again in their walk to the car.

Jill said angrily, “People don't take care any longer. They're in such a hurry all the time. They walk down the street with their mobiles fixed to their skulls and they don't even see anyone else.” She touched his bruised cheek. “Let me get you home, darling. Let me baby you a bit.” She smiled at him fondly. “I'll make you some soup and soldiers, and I'll pop you into bed.”

“I'll need to be at my own place tonight,” he said. “Forgive me, Jill, but I couldn't face sleeping on your sofa.”

“Of course you couldn't,” she said. “Let's get you home.” She repositioned the five shopping bags that she had taken from him in Casualty. They were heavy and awkward, she thought. It was no wonder he'd been distracted by them.

She said, “What did the police do with the person who pushed you?”

“They don't know who it was.”

“Don't know …? How is that possible, Richard?”

He shrugged. She knew him well enough to understand at once that he wasn't telling her everything.

She said, “Richard?”

“Whoever it was, he didn't come forward once I was hit. For all I know, he—or she—didn't even know I fell into the traffic. It happened so fast, and just as the bus was pulling away from the kerb. If they were in a rush …” He adjusted his jacket over his shoulder, where it hung cape-like because he could not fit it over the cast on his arm. “I just want to forget it happened.”