One Day in May - Catherine Alliott [34]
‘Yes, no, I – I forgot. No – didn’t forget, of course I didn’t, but—’ I swung my legs over the bed, massaged my temple hard, willing myself to think. To be there for him. But it was all such a world away. Such a very long way away. I forced myself to stay with him, to keep up, but my mind was a blur.
‘Kit, I – don’t know what to say,’ I said eventually, hopelessly. I didn’t. And then a considerable silence elapsed. ‘Are you going to stay?’ I ventured at length. Like he was at a sleepover.
‘Of course I’m going to stay!’ he almost screamed, making me leap. ‘Haven’t you seen the pictures?’
I panicked. Pictures. Oh – yes, I had. Dimly. A while back. Shocking pictures of a camp. A couple of journalists had sent back photographs that looked as if they’d been taken in Auschwitz fifty years earlier.
‘Over four thousand people died in that place,’ Kit went on in a low, unsteady voice. ‘Tortured, beaten, whole villages wiped out. They just don’t exist any more, like – like Chipping Sodbury or somewhere, just disappearing.’
‘I’m so sorry, Kit. Forgive me. I am so very sorry.’
I heard him breathing heavily on the other end. Trying to collect himself. I apologized again. Inadequately. After a bit he calmed down. Muttered something. But I only caught, ‘OK, OK.’
I tried to talk to him then, help him. But he was distant, quiet. I made myself jabber away about the family, Mum’s new car – bright yellow, would you believe. Laura’s modelling, humdrums, anything. And after a bit, I heard him sobbing quietly on the other end. I was terrified, but I let him cry, realizing perhaps I was the outlet he needed. The only place he could go. In my mind I was frantically wondering how to get him back. Dad should go out, of that I was convinced. Mum and I had talked about it, Laura too. But my father was strangely reticent on the subject.
‘Shouldn’t we go and get him?’ Laura and I had pleaded. ‘Shouldn’t we get him back?’
‘Not if he doesn’t want to come back,’ had been Dad’s measured response.
Kit and I talked some more. I didn’t want him to go until I felt he was truly calm, but he couldn’t be calm, he said. Not really. Not any more. Never would be. Nothing would ever be the same again. And I couldn’t ease his pain.
*
If you’d told me an hour before that I’d go to bed that night thinking of anything other than myself, my own particular drama, I wouldn’t have believed you, but eventually I dozed off in some strange dusty country, a darkening land. Kit in khakis, in a tented encampment, similar to something I’d seen on M.A.S.H., was running with his hands on his head, past trucks emblazoned with red crosses, flinging himself to the ground as mortar shells dropped and exploded around him.
Amazing how the ego thieves back in, though. Stealthily. Quietly. The following morning, although Kit was still on my mind, my own problems loomed large. The morning papers had moved on too. The Balkans war was still just on the front page, bottom right, two columns, but a young man of thirty-four had been appointed Foreign Secretary. The Mail led with that. My heart thudded as I picked it up off the doormat. A huge colour picture of him and his wife, she, heavily pregnant in a black and white dress, a golden couple. You’d have to look very closely to spot the strain around her eyes.
I switched the answer machine on. Dominic rang about an hour later, and my whole body leaped at his voice, but stoically, I didn’t answer. Knew I mustn’t. Loved the fact that he’d rung, though. Played the tape over and over: ‘Hattie, it’s me, I’m worried about you. Will you ring?’
Laura had flown off early that morning for a shoot in Paris. The flat was full of flowers from Hughie for her birthday, white roses everywhere. I sat amongst them, hands pressed together. Dominic rang again at lunchtime. Again I didn’t answer. And anyway, I was out, I’d gone out to buy the Standard. Princess Diana had replaced Dominic on the front page, but inside was a profile of the young man who was to be Our Man Abroad, heading up the Foreign Office. More photos of