Page 16 of The Lie
Romy, now hearing the buzzing too, dug for the mobile in her bag by her feet.
‘Mum, it’s Leo.’ Her son’s voice wobbled alarmingly, as if he was about to cry. Before Romy had time to ask what was wrong, he went on, ‘Where are you? I’ve called you a million times.’
‘Why? What’s happened?’ Anxiety stabbed in the pit of her stomach.
‘It’s Dad. He’s had a stroke.’
12
Romy stared at her screen. While she and Finch had been unbuttoning each other’s clothes on the sofa, her husband had been ill and alone, knowing he was in trouble and crying out for her to rescue him. The thought brought her out in a cold sweat and her breath caught in her throat.Where was Anezka?she wondered, yet she knew from Rex that, although Anezka had been with Michael for the best part of a year, she didn’t actually live with him yet.
‘What?’ Romy had gasped when she heard her son’s words. ‘Oh, my God …’
Leo gave a shaky breath. ‘It’s really bad, Mum. Theresa found him when she arrived at nine. Thank God she had a key. The doctor says she thinks it happened early last night and he was lying there for hours. He was really cold and weak.’
‘Is he all right? I mean … how bad is he?’ What her son was saying just didn’t seem possible.Suppose it hadn’t been the day Theresa came in to clean?
‘They say he’s critical, Mum.’
Romy’s heart was racing. ‘Where is he? Which hospital?’
‘Chelsea and Westminster. I’m here now, in the ICU …’
She looked over at Finch and saw his concerned frown, his eyebrows raised in question. ‘Have you told Rex?’
‘I left messages, but it’s the middle of the night in Sydney.’ He paused. ‘Please come, Mum. He might die and I don’t know what to do.’
‘I’ll jump in the car right now.’
‘OK. But hurry …’
She’d taken a steadying breath. ‘Listen, Leo, I’m sure he’ll be fine. He’s in the right place and he’s tough, your dad. Don’t panic, I’ll text you when I get close.’ Her bullish assertion was very far from the image in her mind. She knew that the longer a stroke is left untreated, the worse the outcome. And if he’d been lying there all night …
When she’d clicked off, she saw that there were six text messages, three voicemails. Three of the texts were sent last night, each from Michael. They all contained a version of random letters:Dddgi poiif. As if he’d bashed his finger across the keypad in panic. The time stamp said they were all sent within a few minutes of each other, from 11.03 p.m.
Now she turned the phone to Finch, who squinted at it in the sun as she explained what had happened. ‘He texted me,’ she said. ‘Three times.’
‘Last night? When we were …’ He winced. ‘God …’
She got up, the metal chair legs screeching on the stone terrace. ‘I need to go.’
‘You can’t drive when you’re in shock, Romy. I’ll take you.’
‘No … No, I’ll be fine,’ she said, although she didn’t feel fine at all: her heart was thumping and she was slightly dizzy. It somehow didn’t seem right, though, to drag Finch into a drama concerning Michael.
Finch had already risen from his chair, a determined look on his face. ‘I’ll fetch the car. Meet you at yours in fifteen,’ he said. ‘I can drop you off. It won’t be easy to park near the hospital.’
Romy knew he was right and, after a brief hesitation, nodded. ‘If you’re sure.’
As she randomly threw clothes into an overnight bag and shut up the cottage, seeing reminders of those wonderful hours last night in the scattered cushions on the sitting-room floor, the rumpled bed, his jacket still on the peg by the front door, she felt the whole thing had happened a million years ago, in a totally different universe.
Romy stared down at the face on the pillow in the high hospital bed and heard her breath catch with distress. It was a face once as familiar to her as her own, but now it seemed like that of a stranger. Michael lay sunken, diminished, his normally animated features flat and pallid, like a clay mask. She placed her hand on his, as it lay on the sheet, gently squeezing it.
‘Michael?’
She hadn’t expected him to open his eyes, but he did, his gaze unfocused. Then they slowly closed again. She had seen him asleep a million times over the years – it was the only time his spirited, intelligent face seemed to find any peace. But now she wanted to shake him awake, jolt him out of this horrible stillness.
Romy turned to Leo. ‘Has he said anything?’ Her son, tall like her, dark like his father, but with her wide brown-gold eyes and mutinous curls, which he kept very short, looked haggard, blinking back tears that she rarely sawfrom her self-possessed boy. She took his arm and brought him close, but his body was rigid with tension and he did not respond, his eyes fixed on the figure on the bed.
