La's Orchestra Saves the World by Alexander McCall Smith Page B

thought: Richard is dying. And then she spoke the words aloud, “Richard is dying.” Then, immediately, she told herself that this was not true. It was not something she could either believe or say. She had simply been mistaken. He was not dying.
    She sat in silence. She watched the hands of the kitchen clock, an old railway timepiece rescued from a demolished waiting room somewhere, the minute-hand advancing jerkily around the dial. She closed her eyes and saw Richard standing before her, smiling as she remembered him smiling, the palms of his hands facing outwards in an ambiguous gesture somewhere between greeting and apology. Here I am, he said, without speaking. Here I am. Remember?
    She went outside, intending to busy herself with some task that would take her mind off the wait for Gerald’s arrival. She had planted several rows of spinach in her newly cleared vegetable patch, and now she bent down and began to pluck the weeds from either side of the spinach plants. She felt the moisture of the soil against her knees; she was ruining a good skirt, which was not made for such tasks, but she did not want to go back into the house to change. She plucked at the weeds and flung them to the side; she wept, and she saw a tear fall on the dry soil, a tiny drop caught in a fragile meniscus. Why should she cry for a man who had let her down so badly? Who loved another woman rather than her? Because women did; they wept for the men who misused them and betrayed them; andbecause La had wanted him, and still did; she wanted him with her, and because not an hour of her day went past, not an hour, but that she thought of him.
    When Gerald arrived she was still in the garden.
    “I’m a mess,” she said. “Just look at me.”
    He seemed surprised, almost irritated, that she should say this. Perhaps he had imagined that this would be no time for small talk. He frowned at her remark. “There has been an accident,” he said. “He was in the
caves
and a structure holding a barrel collapsed. A large piece of wood …”
    She could not imagine the scene. How high was this structure? Was it a shelf? And where did the wood come from? It all seemed unlikely; an incomprehensible, foreign accident—unreal.
Caves
, barrels; these things did not
injure
people.
    He looked down, and as he did so she reached forward and took his hand.
    He swallowed. It was an effort to speak. “A large piece of wood struck him on the head … apparently. It was a bit of a fluke. Had he been standing a few inches to the side nobody would have been hurt.”
    She pressed his hand. This was a father talking about a son, his only son. “Oh, Gerald …”
    “They took him off to hospital, but apparently the injury to the head is terribly serious and he … he’s unconscious. The brain, you see. They don’t think there’s much hope of his pulling through. That’s what they said to me.”
    He looked up again and she saw the redness about his eyes. She moved forward and embraced him, feeling the large frame heave as he began to sob. She did not take in what he said; she had not heard the bit about not pulling through.
    “My son. He was my boy. Just my boy.”
    She hugged him. “Yes. Yes.”
    “I’m going to go first thing tomorrow. La Rochelle, I think. Winifred is with her sisters. They don’t want her to make the trip. They say she couldn’t take the strain, with her heart being what it is. I don’t know.”
    She hesitated, but only for a moment. “Well, I’ll come. I’ll come with you.”
    He said nothing, but she knew that this is what he wanted; this is why he had come to her.
    “We’ll go inside and I’ll make you some tea. Then I shall get my things ready. Perhaps we could even leave tonight and try to make it to Dover so that we can cross first thing.”
    He pulled away from her, gently, and took a handkerchief out of the top pocket of his jacket. He wiped at his eyes.
    “I shouldn’t,” he said. “It doesn’t make things any easier.