Presence of Mind Read online

  PRESENCE

  OF MIND

  Anthea Fraser

  CHIVERS

  British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data available

  This eBook published by AudioGO Ltd, Bath, 2012.

  Published by arrangement with the Author

  Epub ISBN 9781471311932

  Copyright © 1978, 1994 by Anthea Fraser

  The Author asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

  All rights reserved

  This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental

  Jacket illustration © iStockphoto.com

  Contents

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Prologue

  There was a burning sensation behind his eyes and he gripped the steering wheel whitely in an attempt to still the trembling which threatened to disintegrate him. It just wasn’t possible. Not now, after all that had happened. Don’t let her die! He had no idea to whom he addressed this plea, but it was more command than supplication. Just don’t let her die, that’s all! And then, as an agonised, superstitious afterthought – Please!

  His brain shuddered away from the mere possibility. Appendicitis wasn’t serious anyway, he told himself defiantly. It was just like having a tooth out these days. But apparently there were complications – peritonitis, a persistent temperature, and increasing lassitude. There had been no mistaking the unspoken fear in Mrs Cameron’s quiet voice over the telephone.

  ‘It’s a fine time for you to be ringing,’ she’d said bitterly, and the rider ‘when it’s too late’ leapt over the wire between them, piercing his eardrum with a vicious jab.

  ‘I’ll go at once – I must see her!’ he had stammered, and she’d answered with weary hopelessness, ‘They won’t let you.’

  But they would, if he had to force his way to her bedside.

  A lorry swooshed past with a warning blare of its horn and he realised he was weaving erratically about the road. Gritting his teeth, he fought the wheel to straighten the car again. This was the stretch of road along which he had taught her to drive. Another throbbing memory: there was no escaping them.

  It had all been such a ghastly mistake. Somehow he had to make her understand that. Not only the mix-up over the picture, but allowing her to leave the way she did. It was only after she’d gone that he realised how much he loved her, and by that time pride and a niggling sense of shame had prevented him from contacting her. Impatiently he waited for the traffic lights to change. The first thing, of course, was to tell her about the prize. Then they’d have to decide the best way of explaining the mistake, that it wasn’t his work at all. It would be embarrassing, but it would have to be done as soon as possible, before there was much publicity. The ridiculous thing was that he hadn’t even seen the painting until that very morning. If he had, he’d have known straight away that it would have to win. It was the most wonderful painting he’d ever seen. He had never dreamt Ailsa could achieve something like that. The most ironical thing of all was that she’d done it for him, for his birthday, and made him promise not to look at it.

  ‘It’s far and away the best thing I’ve done, Jamie,’ she’d remarked once.

  ‘Then why don’t you enter it for the competition?’ he’d demanded truculently, glaring at the empty canvas in front of him.

  ‘You know quite well why! Firstly it’s your picture, and secondly I submitted my entry weeks ago.’

  His picture. That had been the root of the misunderstanding. They’d always called it that. ‘How’s my picture coming along?’ He could see her now in the studio they shared, head tilted critically on one side, her red-gold hair blazing like some exotic chrysanthemum above the pale stem of her neck. Oh God, why did he ever let her go?’

  It had all been Anderson’s fault. ‘We’re getting concerned, laddie. The competition closes next week. It’s not like you to leave it to the last minute.’

  ‘I tell you it’s no good,’ he’d answered furiously. ‘Nothing will come. Don’t you think I’ve tried? For months now I’ve been starting on one canvas after another. Nothing will come.’ The keen eyes had regarded him under bushy brows. ‘Then how about some of your older work? Hell’s teeth, man, it’s almost a foregone conclusion that you’d win the thing! You can’t just throw it away! Let me come and have a root round. We’re bound to come up with something.’

  ‘I’ve a lecture this evening, but you can look if you like,’ he’d said carelessly, tossing him the key to the studio. If only he’d realised, then, what he was throwing away.

  The hospital loomed up, grey and forbidding, on his right and he swung across the road without a signal, not even hearing the screech of tyres as the bus immediately behind swung desperately to avoid him. Robert Burns Ward, Mrs Cameron had said. Even that seemed an act of spiteful fate. With a spasm of pain he closed his mind to the memory of her soft singing. The stomach-sinking smell of the hospital, compounded of disinfectant and a recently finished meal, filled his nostrils as his eyes raked the direction board. First floor. He didn’t wait for the lift but went up the stairs two at a time.

  ‘Miss Cameron?’ he demanded of the first nurse he saw.

  She turned her stiffly starched head. ‘No visitors, I’m afraid. Only parents. I’ll tell her you called.’

  ‘But I have to see her!’

  Something of his desperation communicated itself to the woman and she hesitated. ‘Would your name be Jamie?’

  The name leapt at him over the intervening months. It seemed an eternity since he had heard it, had held her close and felt her calm, loving confidence flowing into him. He said past the obstruction in his throat, ‘That’s what she calls me, yes.’

  ‘Aye. Well, she’s been speaking of you. Two minutes, then. Her bed’s in the far corner, behind yon screen.’

  He scarcely paused to thank her. Two minutes! As if he could say all that had to be said in two minutes! He strode between the rows of high iron beds, each with its chart at the foot, his eyes fixed on the screen at the far corner, yet when he reached it he had to brace himself to go round it and as he did so all the fears he had been so frantically suppressing rushed over him again in an icy deluge. The limp figure on the bed bore little resemblance to the Ailsa he had known. The almost transparent skin stretched tightly over the prominences of nose and cheekbones making an unfamiliar mask of her small, pointed face. Some obscene contraption was rigged up beside the bed and from it a tube led into her bandaged arm, pitifully thin and childlike on the coverlet. And her hair, her vibrant red-gold hair, spread across the heaped pillows in a dull, lacklustre mat.

  ‘Jamie?’ The voice was soft enough to have been in his own head, but it brought his attention swiftly back to her face, to the cavernous grey eyes which, now open, regarded him. With difficulty the white lips curved into a smile. ‘I knew fine you’d come.’

  ‘Ailsa!’ He pulled a nearby chair close to the bed and reached for her free hand, fragile and birdlike inside his, trying desperately to transmit some of his own pulsing life-force into her frail spent body. ‘Listen, sweetheart, the competition results are out. Have you heard? It won, Ailsa! Your painting!’

  A shadow crossed her face but she still smiled. ‘Your painting!’ she corrected in a whisper.

  He felt the blood suffuse his face. ‘You do understand that I didn’t realise what would happen? If I’d only seen it beforehand –’

  ‘Hush, Jamie, I know.’

  ‘But that’s why you left, isn’t it? You said it didn’t matter, but it did.’ She moved her head slightly in a negative motion, her eyes straining to his face as though she knew it was the last time she would see it. Helplessly he sat holding her hand and his mind slid back again. The phone had been ringing when they got back to the flat that night, and for a moment he hadn’t known what Anderson was talking about.

  ‘Laddie, it’s fantastic! I should have known you were bluffing, letting us get steamed up when all the time you had this up your sleeve!’

  ‘Just a minute,’ he’d broken in. ‘I don’t understand. What’s fantastic? There’s nothing –’

  ‘Eternal Spring, that’s what! Come on, boy, the game’s over! You must know how good it is.’

  ‘Eternal Spring?’ he’d repeated blankly. The name meant nothing to him, but at his side Ailsa’s attention had been caught. He’d raised his eyebrows at her interrogatively.

  ‘Of course! It is your painting, isn’t it?’

  ‘It’s mine, but I didn’t –’

  ‘Well then! No use prevaricating any more – I’ve already sent it in!’

  He had replaced the receiver irritably and turned to Ailsa. ‘Old Anderson came snooping round here this evening, convinced I wasn’t serious about not having anything. He seems to have landed on the birthday painting. We might as well let him have it; it’ll keep him quiet and you weren’t going to enter it yourself, were you?’

  Until his memory played back the scene h
e hadn’t realised how arrogant and hurtful the words must have sounded to her: his careless assumption that since obviously it stood no chance of winning the competition, its being entered under the wrong name didn’t matter too much. No wonder that from that day on the gulf between them had widened.

  ‘How you must have hated me!’ he said in a low voice. ‘It’s a fantastic picture, haunting somehow. Don’t worry, I’ll get things straightened out right away and then you’ll get all the credit you deserve.’

  Her eyes, which had closed wearily during his silence, flickered open. ‘No, Jamie, no. What’s the use?’

  ‘But of course I must! I can’t possibly –’

  ‘Whisht, of course you can! What good would it be to me?’ Appalled, he stared at her. ‘Ailsa, what do you mean? Don’t talk like that!’

  ‘Keep it, Jamie. Promise – not to say anything. It was always for you anyway. I can’t take back a present, can I?’

  He pressed her hand fiercely against his cheek, struggling to find the right word to negate her hopelessness, and into the throbbing silence a voice said suddenly, ‘Daddy, where am I? What’s happening?’

  His head jerked up. Ailsa hadn’t moved; her eyes were still closed. The voice must have come from the other side of the screen. Poor kid, he thought dispassionately, before his mind swung back to his own pain.

  He was still miserably clutching her hand when a gentle touch on his shoulder spun him round to see the nurse behind him.

  ‘Not yet!’ he pleaded, ‘Please!’

  ‘You’ve had longer than two minutes. Come along, now, you’ll only tire her. She must rest.’

  Reluctantly he stood up, releasing from his fingers the limp, flaccid hand. Awkwardly he bent and kissed her forehead. ‘I’ll come again tomorrow,’ he promised in a choked voice. It might have been an attempt at a smile or a mere muscular twitch which moved her lips, but she hadn’t the strength to open her eyes again. Perhaps she knew that for her there would be no tomorrow.

  In silence the nurse accompanied him as he stumbled back the interminable length of the ward. It crossed his mind that she was afraid he might fall. In any case he was grateful for her implied support. At the door he turned to her beseechingly.

  ‘There is – some hope, isn’t there?’

  Her eyes were full of compassion and gave the lie to her calm, professional reply. ‘There’s always hope, laddie. There’s always hope.’

  CHAPTER ONE

  I had never liked the painting, but I’m not sure at what point I actually became afraid of it.

  It was this picture which, twenty years ago, had set Lance on the ladder to success, had in fact made his reputation overnight, and it had haunted us all the time we’d been together. It was reproduced on calendars, in glossy magazines, even on biscuit tins and chocolate boxes, and whenever Lance’s name was mentioned – in television interviews or the learned art columns of the more erudite Sunday newspapers, it was always with the corollary ‘the artist who as a student created such a stir with his brilliant allegorical painting Eternal Spring’. And all the time the original hung in pride of place over the sitting-room mantelpiece, beautiful, mystical and somehow full of menace.

  Part of my dislike was probably a frustrated jealousy because of the importance it obviously held for both Lance and Briony. Lance himself seemed to have a love-hate relationship with it. Once, he had even burst out uncharacteristically, ‘Good grief, you’d think I’d never painted anything else! Why can’t they let it rest in peace and refer to some of the later works?’ Often in the evenings I would notice his eyes on it and a look of brooding sadness on his face.

  Briony, on the other hand, seemed to regard it more as a private source of energy. Increasingly during the last year or so she had gone straight into the sitting-room on her return from school ‘to recharge my batteries from Daddy’s picture!’ (Lance had been ‘Daddy’ to her for sixteen of the eighteen years of her life, but to my continual surprise, despite his very obvious devotion to her, he still made a point of introducing her as his step-daughter.)

  On reflection now, it seems only too obvious that my emotions regarding the two people whom I loved more than life itself were in a considerable turmoil long before events started to move with the increased momentum which soon threatened to become a headlong rush to disaster. I didn’t, of course, admit, even to myself, that the strength of affection between my husband and daughter was another cause of disquiet. Briony had brought us together in the first place, and it seemed more and more obvious that but for her there would have been no question of our marriage. In the early days, blinded by the force of my own love, I had laughingly confessed that I wasn’t sure whether it was she or myself whom Lance had married, but for many years now, as our own relationship remained the formal, mildly affectionate one of comparative strangers, it had not seemed funny at all.

  It was not that his was an undemonstrative nature, but that all his spontaneous hugs and kisses were reserved solely for Briony. To myself he was unfailingly gentle, kind and considerate, keeping to the letter his original proposal of a marriage of convenience which was also virtually platonic, for the infrequent times he came to my bed he was almost apologetic about it. Sometimes, lying awake far into the night after he had left me, tears drying on my cheeks, I would think resentfully that he used me as he would a woman of the streets – only in moments of extreme need.

  In my own mind, I date that increased tempo of events from the May afternoon when I met Jan Staveley by chance in Rushyford and accepted her invitation to join her for a cup of tea. Jan was the mother of Briony’s current boyfriend, Mark, and I liked her the best of our large and rather superficial circle of friends. That afternoon, however, she was not meeting my eyes and I waited with sick expectancy for her to tell me what was troubling her. Perhaps I already guessed.

  We talked lightly of nothing in particular until the waitress had laid in front of us the chrome teapot and butter-soaked scones that Jan, with a rueful pat of her rather ample hips, had been unable to resist. Then, diffidently, she enquired, ‘How’s Briony? I haven’t seen her lately.’

  So my guess had been right. I felt my mouth go dry but my voice sounded normal enough as I replied steadily, ‘Working hard, of course. The A-levels are looming ever nearer.’

  ‘I hope she isn’t – overdoing it.’

  I forced myself to look across at her, but her eyes were fixed firmly on her plate. ‘What’s the matter, Jan?’

  She flashed me an apprehensive glance. ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘You want to tell me something. What is it? Something to do with Briony?’

  ‘It’s only that you said some time ago you were worried about those headaches she was having. Did you ever find out what was causing them?’

  I realised I’d been stirring my tea for some minutes and forced myself to lay the spoon down in the saucer. ‘Only in so far as there doesn’t seem to be any cause.’

  ‘The doctor couldn’t find anything wrong?’

  ‘No, and he was very thorough. He even arranged for her to go to the hospital for a series of tests and X-rays, but everything proved negative. Her eyesight is perfect and there’s no suggestion of any tumour, or epilepsy, or hardening of the arteries supplying the brain, or any of the other horrors I’d hardly dared to think about. All they came up with was “tension” – and I could have told them that myself. She probably is working too hard, as you said, but once the exams are over she’ll be all right.’

  It was what I had been telling myself for some months and I waited for her reassuring murmur of assent. When it didn’t come I persisted, ‘Why do you ask? Has Mark said anything?’

  Jan flushed guiltily. ‘Not really. I probably shouldn’t have –’

  ‘Jan, please! I have a right to know. What did he say?’

  ‘Well, it’s just that –’ She looked up at me, squared her shoulders and went on more firmly, ‘As a matter of fact he has been a bit worried about her, yes. He says she acts rather – strangely at times.’

  The blood began to beat in my head in an insistent rhythmic pounding. ‘How strangely?’

  ‘He calls it – “going away.” ’

  ‘Going away?’ My throat ached with the effort of forcing the words out.