As others were; I have not seen.
Richard was having a nightmare. He knew it was a dream and yet it would not end. His face was buried into the damp pillow and his hands were grasping at the sheets around him. He could see Felix, his face was dirty and he was crying. He was wearing a grubby Hearts football shirt and Richard could feel the nylon snag on the dry pads of his fingers once more. An 'uncle' had bought him that shirt, one of Abigail's less psychotic boyfriends, he could not remember his name, only that he had died of a heroin overdose in the eighties. Felix was sitting in Richard's old place, in the corner of the settee, knees tucked up under his chin. The room was beige, everything was grey and heavy and he couldn't move, he couldn't go to his son. Abigail was there then, drifting into the room, her head thrown back so her thin white neck bent like the bough of a tree. Her eyes were closed and a smile stretched grotesquely across her mouth.
The perspective shifted and Richard felt his own hands clenching his knees together, his own face crumpled in a sob as hunger churned inside his stomach. She did not see him, she never saw him, not when she was like this. Abigail sank down onto the floor, leaning against the settee and throwing her head back so he could see her face upside down, her eyes open and rolled back into her skull. Still she smiled and Richard wanted to hit her face. He wanted to make a fist and bring it down onto her smiling mouth. He wanted to see her implode, his hand disappearing into putty. She would bounce back into shape; she always did, more disfigured than before, more wretched than ever.
I hate you.
He was in the kitchen and using a plastic fork to delve into the open dustbin. He wasn't stupid; he didn't want to get stabbed by a needle. He could see one winking at him, it's orange collar warning him not to get too close. He flicked it away with the fork and underneath a beer can he found a pizza crust. It tasted so wonderful that his mouth filled with saliva and he could barely contain himself as he devoured it in two bites. When he turned, his bare feet sticky on the linoleum he saw Felix in the corner and he was smaller now, a baby and he was hungry and Richard had nothing to feed him. You are a bad brother. The noise was loud and the baby was gone and there were people pushing past him, knocking him over, they span and lurched around him. He was in the center of the living room, standing there, removed and alone whilst around him flames burnt, foil glittered and spoons grew white hot.
"Richard!"
He took a breath as if he had been held under water. Mary was shaking him, her hand wrenching his shoulder back and forth. He bolted upright and he felt her fingers close around his bicep as he gasped for air.
"You were having a nightmare," she soothed, her hand reaching to caress the side of his face. "You were moaning."
"I'm sorry," Richard said, sinking back against the headboard.
Mary shuffled up next to him and rested her head against his chest; she laid her hand over his heart.
"Your heart is racing. Was it a very awful dream?"
"I wish it had been a dream."
"Darling?" Mary frowned, moving back and looking at him through the dark blur of the room.
"I'm going to get a glass of water."
He slipped away from her and disappeared into the bathroom, shutting the door behind him, the orange glow of a streetlight shimmering through the frosted glass. His face was dark in the mirror and he ran the tap, using his cupped hand to scoop the tepid liquid into his mouth. He rarely had nightmares, in fact he hardly ever had dreams at all, at least none he could recall. The last time he had dreamt about his childhood, been cast back to that hungry, empty little boy, had been after Felix was born. The gut wrenching fear and soaring elation he had experienced making him vulnerable to the pervasive power of repressed memory. He allowed himself to recall that day now as he looked at the shadows dancing on his face in the mirror.
"Is that painful?" he asks.
The nurse gives him a kind smile. "It is over very quickly."
She is holding the tiny red foot curled inside her hand, a little heel protruding, into which she presses the lancet. A prick of blood. Richard winces and the baby cries. He can only see the infant's eyes screw up and his mouth open to emit a high wail. The rest of his face is obscured by the apparatus attached to his nose, the tubes threaded back through the hat pulled over his head, the ties pulled tight across chubby cheeks. Richard can see every rib as the baby breathes.
"Can he have a dummy?" the nurse asks.
I don't know? You tell me. Why not?
"Some parents don't like to use dummies," she adds helpfully as he returns her gaze blankly. "You know, a pacifier?" She indicates the large baby in the neighboring cot who is sucking ferociously on a plastic teat.
She removes her hands from the incubator and places the thin tube of blood on a cardboard tray.
The crying continues and Richard feels the back of his neck grow hot, his fist closing tightly around the theatre cap in his hand.
"Why don't you put your hands in, let him hear your voice."
He wishes she would stay and do something but she smiles again and walks away with the tray, leaving him standing impotently beside the incubator. The crying stops and the kicking limbs relax. As it now appears he will not make things worse Richard gains the courage to slide his hand through the porthole. He decides the safest thing to do would be to touch the fist closest to him and gingerly he takes it between his thumb and index finger; it looks comically like a handshake.
"Hello, Felix," he says self-consciously.
The fist opens and Richard rests his finger into that perfect open palm so the little hand closes to hold on to his own fingertip. This is a primitive reflex, he knows that much but he will take it as a reply. Five weeks early and Richard is not ready, he was never going to be ready, and he feels flung into this surreal world of which he has no experience, where he has no control.
A machine alarms, a number is flashing on the screen above the bed space and a smiling nurse pushes a button to silence it – nothing to worry about. Richard can only believe her; what does he know? He knows nothing about any of this and he certainly doesn't know how to be a father. He can't even imagine holding the baby and a creeping anxiety clenches his jaw each time one of the nurses glances in his direction – don't suggest I hold him. He is too precious too hold. Emotion threatens to overwhelm him and he swallows the lump in his throat.
He obeyed silently – stand here, don't touch anything, sit down incase you feel queasy. Richard had never felt 'queasy' in his life and at any other moment he would have scoffed but he sat without protest on the stool provided and held Mary's hand and wiped her tears whilst studiously ignoring the busy activity of the surgeons moving behind the drapes. A grey floppy little body was held up briefly before being whisked away and Richard thought that 'queasy' came nowhere near to describing how he felt, his heart had dropped through the floor. Mary cried harder and he kissed her hand before standing shakily and hovering beside the heated platform where they were rubbing the baby with towels, putting a tube into his nose and mouth and then a round mask over a tiny face. Those minutes, for it could have been no longer than minutes, stretched and shuddered through him until finally finally the infant's blue tinge deepened to pink and a wet little cry was heard.
It was more than relief; it was an explosion through his chest as he burst to the surface into a glorious warmth.
He bobs his finger gently and the baby's skinny arm moves and tenses. The little red lips purse for a moment and then Felix's eyes open and they are the most beautiful Richard has ever seen and they seem to melt through him.
He cannot contain his smile as he ducks his head to look through the porthole, feeling the heat on his face and a surge of life through his chest. He has never been responsible for anything pure or perfect before and it is wonderful and terrifying.
"Would you like to hold him?" The nurse has returned, she holds up a slip of paper. "The blood gas is good."
"Oh, I…"
Richard wants to say no, no I can't, I can't be trusted. But the nurse is watching him expectantly and pulling a chair into position and he finds himself nodding in agreement. He steps out of the way as deft hands replace his, loosening the grey straps and removing the prongs from the baby's nose, easing the cap back from his head so a shock of dark hair stands on end. There are red indents along his cheeks and on the underneath of his nose. Dark lashes flicker as his eyes close.
"What we usually suggest," she says, her back to him, "is that you try skin to skin contact. So I'll pop him inside your shirt, okay?" She acknowledges Richard's skeptical expression as she turns around. "It'll stop him getting cold."
You're the expert, Richard thinks as he sits down stiffly and watches the nurse open the side of the incubator and set to work collecting the wires and tubes into one hand, murmuring soothingly – hello, sweetheart – as she picks up the baby with one easy movement. And Richard is trapped; she is standing in front of him, holding the sleeping baby up, wires hanging from his chest and feet. She tells him to hold open the front of the scrub top they made him wear in the theatre and he obeys, holding his breath as she effortlessly slips the baby inside whilst instructing him to support the tiny body against his chest. He looks down and a little head is poking out from his collar and he can feel the baby's warm skin against his, the little arms and legs folding and curling into a ball.
He is not ready and he is engulfed, enraptured by the part of him nestled against his heart.
"You see," the nurse smiles triumphantly. "He knows his daddy."
Richard could detect and feel every remaining twinge of that moment as if there were nerves running through a portion of the past to tug inside his heart. When he slipped back into bed beside Mary she had gone back to sleep, the crumpled sheets twisted across her. He kissed her and slid in next to her, resting his face on the pillow beside hers. He closed his eyes and thought of his children and the love that repaired every hungry fractured piece of the boy on the settee crying in Muirhouse.
"I thought I would come with you," Rosamund announced over breakfast. "It has been far too long since I've seen the children."
Mary raised a skeptical eyebrow. "So you choose to see them when we're in Yorkshire?"
"Why not? London is stifling at this time of year, I would enjoy the air."
Richard watched the stream of black coffee being poured into his cup, pausing with the knife hovering over the butter dish.
"By all means," he smiled and Mary shot him a surprised glance. "The nanny is on holiday after all."
Rosamund's smile faltered and her eyes sparkled. Yes, Richard was quite recovered from his ordeal this morning.
"The car will be here in half an hour," he added. "Although I trust you have already packed, Rosamund."
"Indeed I have."
"I'm going to telephone Mama to let her know when we'll be arriving," Mary announced, getting up from her chair and placing the napkin down on her half eaten toast with a last meaningful glance in her husband's direction – play nicely.
Richard and Rosamund continued their breakfast in silence until Mary was out of earshot.
"Did you sleep well?" Rosamund asked.
Richard felt her manner of asking this question was rather pointed and wondered if she'd heard him moaning in his sleep, if the noise had crept up through the house, his nightmare infiltrating every perfect infrequently entered room. Or had she heard what they had been doing before drifting into unconsciousness? He smirked at this notion. Rosamund was not a prude and if she had heard their respectfully restrained ardour then he couldn't help but think she had found it amusing.
"Quite well, thank you. The bed was very comfortable."
He was more than content to exchange inconsequential niceties, he had no desire to spar with Rosamund when he would no doubt require a great deal of forbearance to deal with his father-in-law's questions. Rosamund, however, was merely conducting a brief prelude and she dabbed her mouth, laying the spoon beside the hollowed grapefruit. She fixed him with a starkly bright gaze and he had the sensation he always did around her, that she would bite him as soon as look at him, a barbed comment always ready to flick out from her tongue.
"I had dinner with Lord Hepworth last week," she said, glancing briefly at a highly polished nail.
"Oh?" Richard brushed the crumbs from his fingers onto the plate and leant back in his seat – do your worst.
"He has been in the House," Rosamund said carefully.
"Indeed. Well he should make the most of it, who knows when the final reform will come."
"An eye to your own potential peerage, Richard?" Her eyebrows arched as she regarded him. "May I remind you that although his position is inherited, Lord Hepworth was elected by his peers."
Rosamund could imagine Richard in the House of Lords, quite easily, reformation from the inside. There had been whispers, talk that he might be made a life peer. Richard's friends were plenty and powerful and such an honour seemed almost inevitable, as unimpressed as her brother was by the notion, people would speculate. And Richard would listen, he listened very intently to everything and there was not a scrap of information that she doubted was stored away somewhere in his mind for future use. He must have known that the inquiries into phone hacking were coming. He had once told her - nothing that happens in this city escapes my ear. Whether information reached his ear by way of a tapped phone she was not entirely sure.
"Ah yes, the old boys club."
Rosamund did not rise to the bait; she would allow him that point, true as it was.
"The inquiries will begin and the mighty will fall," she replied, challenging him. "It seems Miles Lansdale already has."
"I cannot pretend to know what happened to Miles." Richard said and for the first time in the conversation he was uncomfortable. He thought of the dead man, the colleague who the police, however briefly, had thought he may have been involved in the death of.
"The specifics, no, but clearly he met with a violent end." She would not be cowed and as Richard's expression hardened, she forged on.
"I shall leave such an investigation to the police."
"And if his name were to come up during the phone hacking inquiry would you be surprised?" Rosamund asked.
"If it did I could claim no knowledge prior to the fact."
"I see. So your house is in order?" She continued as the air in the room seemed to grow stifling and she noticed, with an element of satisfaction, that there was a single bead of perspiration at Richard's temple.
"Leveson himself is welcome in my office," he smiled tightly. "Is this your circuitous way of expressing concern for my livelihood?"
"I trusted you with Mary and contrary to what you might think I have advocated for you on more than one occasion."
"I'm flattered."
"Don't be. Just don't prove my mother right."
Mary sat on the edge of the bed, passing her hands over her face. Her mother had been curiously vague on the telephone and Mary could sense something unsaid lurking on the periphery of the conversation. The children were fine; they were outside with their grandpapa walking Isis. She did not have the energy to push the point and allowed herself the luxury of delaying any further confrontation for a few hours. Because it would come, her father would not be able to contain himself, years of simmering mistrust burning to the surface.
Mary did not feel torn; it was painful to find herself between her family and Richard but the more they had tried to sever her from him, the harder she had held on. She still winced to recall the utter horror on her mother's face when she returned from the Bahamas with Richard, two weeks after she had been due to sit her finals. The message that she had gone had been passed through Sybil, who as gently as she had broken the news could find no way to cushion the blow. It had been an unfair burden to lay on a sixteen year old but there was no other option, and Sybil, naïve as she was, had been simultaneously horrified and captivated by Mary's rebellion. Her mother's words had not penetrated Mary's consciousness and they splashed from her, as inconsequential as raindrops on a lake, yet she found that now, so many years later, she could recall them all too clearly.
"You have thrown away three years of your life, Mary!" Cora says, tears of rage and disappointment shining on the surface of her eyes.
"Oh, Mama, I would have been lucky to get a third!" She replies, her throat tightening, throwing down the Prada handbag, a gift from Richard, onto the bed.
"It would have been something!"
"Don't pretend you wouldn't have been just as furious if I'd sat the exams and failed," Mary replies bitterly, walking away to look out of the window, her fists tense at her sides.
"It's the betrayal," Cora says and Mary rolls her eyes at the melodrama of the statement. "And this man! He is too old for you Mary and his reputation…!"
"You don't know him."
"Exactly! We know nothing of him except what we see on television! How on earth did you even meet him in the first place? How long has this been going on?" The questions are tumbling from Cora's mouth and her fingers strain around the handkerchief clutched in her hand.
"I'm not Sybil, Mama! I am an adult, you have no jurisdiction over my boyfriends anymore."
"So he is your boyfriend? Oh, Mary!"
Mary almost feels sorry for her mother, but not quite, because she appears to hear but she does not listen.
"Now what? What are your plans? Because once your father gets home that is the first thing he will ask you."
My disappointment and anger is nothing compared to his. Mary knows that all too well.
"I will do something, Mama, don't worry, I won't be cluttering up this house for long."
"What have we done to deserve this?" Cora asks and the edge to her tone causes her daughter to turn around to face her as she rises from where she has been perched tensely on the bed.
"Believe it or not, Mama, everything I do is not with the sole purpose of either punishing or rewarding you and Papa."
Mary rose from the bed, casting the memory from her mind. They had not been able to accept that she could not be the person they wanted her to be. She could not be enticed, persuaded, nudged into position, not truly. She had been immature; she had long recognized that, spinning out of control because she could, because it seemed the only way to grasp life, the only way to feel something. Mary had been protected and cossetted all her life. Boarding school had stifled her, muted any rebellion she had tried to make but when she arrived in London for university the world opened and it was as if everything had fallen away around her and there seemed to be nothing to lose.
She did not regret stepping onto that private plane with Richard, seeing the white and green of the islands spread out below her in a glittering ocean. He had not wanted to control her, to mould her; he wanted to set her free and he would not be shocked by anything she said or did. His acceptance arrested her and her plummet to the ground came to a halt as he caught her. He made her feel something. That holiday had changed her life, without it there would have been no Felix, and perhaps her parent's sustained attack would have worn away something of her passion for Richard but both those things had remained long after she had left him behind at Heathrow to face the onslaught. She would face it again, come up against another wall of criticism and bear it.