Faith Page 7

  Ross fiddled with one of the studs in his dress-shirt. 'What's causing it?'

  'No one knows yet. Could be pollution causing some new viral

  strain to breed. Could be susceptibility resulting from our own

  weakening resistance — antibiotics are slowly destroying our immunity

  to some diseases.'

  Ross nodded; he knew about this theory.

  Ritterman took a sip of his drink then watched Ross levelly. 'Ross, I'm afraid the survival rate is not good.'

  'Survival?' Ross stood up, unable to sit still any more. 'This Lendt's disease is terminal?'

  'In a large number of cases.'

  Ross walked over to the window and stared down at the rush-hour traffic streaming along Wellington Road. Brake-lights, indicator-lights, headlights daubed in erratic streaks across the wet tarmac. Londoners were heading home to normality. He felt as if his whole world was collapsing in on him. Faith, terminally ill. Faith, whom he loved more than he had ever thought it possible to love someone, and with whom he had never questioned that he would spend the rest of his life.

  Terminally ill.

  He turned to look at Ritterman, feeling sudden blind panic. 'Tell me I'm not hearing this, Jules.'

  The doctor said, quietly, 'I'm sorry, Ross.'

  'And you're absolutely certain of your diagnosis?'

  'All the evidence points to it — and you have just come back from Thailand. I've sent the tests to three different labs as a precaution, and all their findings tally. But I'd be happy for you to get your own second opinion.'

  Ross felt drained. A terrible dark dread swirled inside him. Night terrors… Hallucinations… Gradual loss of motor control functions … Terminal.

  It couldn't be possible that these things were going to happen to his darling Faith.

  No, God, you bastard, don't do this to her — to us. Not to her, she doesn't deserve any of this.

  He felt so helpless. 'I want to understand this disease, Jules. I want to know everything that you know about it. I want you to let me have all your research sources. I want every bit of information that exists in the world on this bitch. Faith is a great girl, she's strong, a fighter.'

  Ritterman nodded, without conviction.

  'What did you tell her when you saw her?'

  'I told her the truth,' Ritterman said. 'That I thought it was probably some bacterial infection she'd picked up — just a tummy bug.'

  'So she knows nothing about the Lendt's disease diagnosis?'

  'Not yet.'

  Ross was silent for some moments, thinking. Then he said, 'Who's doing the trials?'

  'Moliou-Orelan.'

  Moliou-Orelan was a US pharmaceutical giant with an impressive record for fast-tracking drugs on to the market. 'They're a good outfit, Jules. How can we get Faith on to a trials programme?'

  'I've been in touch with them already,' the GP said. 'They're being very secretive but I understand they've had positive results with their phase-two trials.'

  Ross's eyes widened. 'And?'

  'I don't know specifics, Ross.'

  'You haven't heard anything?'

  'No. But —'

  'It's going to be months before they start phase three,' Ross interrupted.

  'No, they're already down the road.'

  'Can you get her on them?'

  'I have a good contact who's working on someone in Research and Development there —'

  Interrupting again, Ross said, 'I don't want her taking a placebo, I want her taking the real thing.'

  Ritterman smiled wistfully. 'I think I can get her on to the trial, but I cannot guarantee what she'll be taking, you know that. No one can.'

  All phase-three drug trials involved two groups of people, one who took the drug itself, the other who took a placebo. The trials were either single or double blind. In a single blind the doctor knew who was taking the drug and who the placebo. But in a double-blind trial — and all phase-three trials were double-blind — neither the doctors nor their patients knew which were which. Only a handful of employees at the pharmaceutical company running the trials held the keys to the codes.

  'Jules, I want you to get the real thing. Do whatever you have to. There must be a way of getting the genuine thing from the phase-three trials. Surely you can swing it to get her on a named patient basis?'

  'I'll do my best.'

  Ross walked away from the window slowly. 'Look, do me a favour — I'd rather you didn't say anything to her, Jules, OK? About how serious this is. Let me break it to her in my own time.'

  'Of course. What would you like me to say to her?'

  Shakily, Ross took a Havana from the humidor on a side-table, and held it in his hand. Without answering the doctor's question, he said, 'Jules, she's not going to die. We are going to find a way. Right?'

  There was helplessness in the GP's expression.

  Ross perched on an arm of the chesterfield opposite Ritterman, tears trickling down his face. 'You've got to help me, Jules. I couldn't live without Faith. I don't even like being apart from her.'

  'Of course I'll do everything I can.'

  Ross pulled out a handkerchief and dabbed at his eyes. Then he said, 'You have to understand, Faith is a child, Jules. Emotionally, she has never grown up. She's very vulnerable, needs protection — that's what I give her.'

  'I think she's mature and sensible, Ross. You're mistaken.'

  Sniffing, Ross said, 'Maybe that's her act when she comes to you.'

  Ritterman smiled. 'I don't think so, Ross.'

  Ross began picking at the band on the cigar with his thumbnail. It was ten to seven, but he no longer cared about tonight's dinner. 'I know what's best for her, Jules. I don't think it would be good for her to know how serious this disease is, OK? Not now or at any time.'

  'You want me to lie to her?'

  'I didn't say lie, I just don't want you to tell her the truth. Jesus! If we can't do anything for her, at least we can give her the illusion of hope.'

  'You're putting me in a difficult position.'

  'Jules, you don't tell everyone who has terminal cancer that they're going to die, do you?'

  'If they ask me outright, I tell them the truth. I may try to dress it up as positively as I can, but I do tell them the truth.'

  Ross stared at him. 'We have a good relationship, don't we? We trust each other implicitly. I need you to trust my judgement on Faith.'

  Ritterman stared back at him. 'Faith is a very sick woman. What do you expect to achieve by keeping her in the dark?'

  'What would you achieve by telling her the truth? You're going to terrify her and you can't offer anything better than a twenty per cent chance.'

  'I believe that if patients know the truth, it gives them time to prepare…'

  'For death?'

  'Yes.'

  'Don't you think you're being defeatist?'

  'I'm being realistic'

  'What's the first rule of medicine?'

  Ritterman shrugged. 'Do no harm.'

  'Right. If you tell someone, particularly someone of Faith's mental fragility, that they are going to die, they will die. They put themselves into a state of panic — it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. She will have a far better chance of surviving if she doesn't know.'

  Ritterman looked at his friend, thinking, Maybe it's you, Ross, who can't cope with the reality, not Faith. 'I don't agree with you,' he said.

  This isn't real, we are not having this conversation, we can't be. Ross closed his eyes and shook his head for several seconds, as if somehow, when he opened them again, Ritterman would have vanished and none of this conversation would have taken place.

  But Ritterman was still there, and his calm was beginning to anger Ross. How the hell could he stay so damned calm? Because Faith was just one of hundreds — maybe thousands — of patients that Ritterman had. Faith Ransome. Just a name on a list.

  Registering Ritterman's faint look of disapproval, Ross lit the cigar and sent clouds of rich, heav
y smoke swirling to the ceiling. 'I'm her husband. Surely to God I'm qualified enough to be able to tell her?'

  'Of course you are, but I can't lie to her if she asks me outright.'

  'All you have to do is tell her she's picked up a virus and that you're giving her a course of treatment for it. End of story.'

  'Well,' Ritterman said, reluctantly, 'I'll go along with it — for the moment — but I don't like it.'

  Anger roiling inside him now, Ross stood, glowering, over the doctor. 'You don't like it? Me neither, Jules. And you know what I really fucking don't like? I don't like the idea that my wife has Lendt's disease. So it seems we're both stuck with things we don't like.'

  17

  On the television a sea of people, young women mostly, erupted into screams. It seemed to Ross, standing in front of it, that every girl in the whole world was there. And now, stepping out of the darkness of the Boeing, four adolescents, all in dark glasses, with limp hair and big grins, waved into a lightning storm of popping flash-bulbs.

  The newscaster said, 'Crowds of fans almost brought London's Heathrow airport to a standstill this morning when the Beatles arrived home from their latest American tour.'

  Sweeping across the room now, his father, Joe Ransome, reached down, turned a dial, and the Beatles vanished. At school everyone was talking about the Beatles. One of Ross's friends, Thomas Norton, had brought in a copy of a magazine called New Musical Express, which was full of pictures of them and of the Rolling Stones. Several of his friends had posters of groups and singers up on their bedroom walls. Ross had nothing in his little bedroom in the small terraced house in Streatham in south London. He was not allowed anything. There were just two pictures in the entire house, a faded, framed print of Anne Hathaway's cottage half-way up the stairs, and another framed print, of The Haywain, above the electric log fire in this room.

  With the screen dark now, his father, dressed in his brown suit, shirt and tie, and brown leather shoes — polished by Ross every morning — sat down in his armchair with his newspaper, the Sporting Times, his pen and his pewter tankard of beer, coughed, then opened a fresh pack of ten Kensitas, filter-tipped. His muscular frame seemed to dwarf the room, which was crammed to capacity with a leatherette three-piece suite, an upright piano and a side-table, both covered in darts trophies.

  Ross stood beside the chair, watching the ritual, waiting to do his duty. First the Cellophane from the cigarette packet was carefully flattened, then folded, flattened once more, then folded again and again, until it was too small to fold any more and his father placed it carefully on the little table, which, when he had got home from school this afternoon, Ross had polished until it shone like a mirror, as every surface in this house shone.

  Even his father's shock of thick black hair shone, Brylcreemed back against his scalp. He could smell the hair cream, and the faint, sweet reek of the Old Spice he splashed on his face each morning.

  Now came the gold foil. Again, with the concentration of a man entrusted with the most important task the human race had yet devised, Joe Ransome carefully flattened it and began the folds. Then he put it carefully beside the Cellophane and began the third part of the ritual, the removal and inspection of the gift certificates.

  Now as his father took out and lit, with a Swan Vesta match, the first of the ten cigarettes he would smoke this evening — always exactly ten, never fewer never more — Ross carried the foil and the Cellophane out of the room and put them in the kitchen waste-bin. Then he returned for the certificates and, without disturbing his father who was now studying racing form, took them through to the kitchen and placed them in the white jar with the cork lid. On the notepad beside them he added, with the pencil kept there for the purpose, the new total: 437.

  A catalogue of gifts for which the certificates could be exchanged was kept on a pine shelf in the kitchen, just above the bread-bin where the recipe books his mother had used were kept. In the catalogue were exciting things like fishing-rods and bicycles, and boring stuff like electric Teasmaids and lawnmowers. Ross nurtured the secret hope that his father was saving up to buy him the new drop-handlebar Raleigh Blue Streak bicycle he so desperately wanted.

  But somehow he did not think it was likely.

  'Boyyyyyyy!'

  Ross ran back into the living room, frightened by the tone of his father's voice.

  He was pointing at the floor, his face white with anger. To his dismay, Ross saw the object, a Dinky car, lying on its side at the foot of the settee.

  'Why is that there?'

  Ross stared back in silence.

  ''Why is it there, boy?'

  Stammering with fear, Ross said, 'I — I — don't know, Daddy.'

  Holding his cigarette tightly between his forefinger and thumb, Joe Ransome brought it to his lips, inhaled deeply then, holding it like a dart, jigged it furiously at his son. 'You know that's why your mother left, don't you, boy? She couldn't stand the mess you made everywhere. She couldn't stand your untidy room, your toys always lying around everywhere. You drove your mother away, Ross. You understand that, boy?'

  Ross picked up the Riley saloon, then stood, his head drooping in shame, his eyes moist, shaking with fear.

  'Fetch me the cane, boy.'

  'Daddy, I —'

  'The cane.'

  Ross reached behind the piano, pulled out the thin bamboo cane and carried it over to his father.

  'Kneel, boy!'

  Ross stuffed the car into the pocket of his shorts, knelt in front of him and stretched out his hands, palms up.

  His father raised the cane, then brought it down, with all his considerable strength, six times on to each hand.

  'Now get up to your room and do your homework, boy.'

  Tears sliding down his face, hands numb and stinging, Ross replaced the cane behind the piano and left the room.

  As he climbed the stairs, the pain hit him and his whole body twisted in agony. He raised his hands, lowered them, opened the fingers, clenched them against the pain, banged the knuckles together, trying to do anything, anything to stop this agony. They were burning as if they had been immersed in boiling water or concentrated acid. And above his whimpering, he heard his father bellowing in fury.

  'You drove her away, boy. Remember that. You remember that always.'

  18

  The building was an old church, Faith realised, as she stepped out of the cab. In a residential street, shoehorned into a gap between two Victorian terraces, it sat hunched but proud, an imposing edifice of raw red brick, gargoyles and smoked glass.

  Winchmore Hill was an area of London she barely knew. On the northern edge of London, it was a smart, leafy pocket, with a well-heeled air. She recalled that a couple of years back she'd been to a dinner party somewhere in this area, hosted by a particularly vulgar music promoter who kept telling her how Ross had improved his sex life. Then the man had insisted his wife bared her breasts half-way through the meal to demonstrate to the assembled company what a great surgeon Ross was. 'He's given her tits,' the man had said. 'She din' have no tits before, flat, like a little boy she was.'

  Now Faith stepped up to the massive oak door and read the brass plaque beside it: the cabot centre for complementary medicine.

  Nervous, she dug her hands deep into her pockets, hugging her long raincoat tightly around her against the cold, gusting wind. Her hair whipped her face.

  Come this far, no turning back now, girl.

  But she knew she could turn round, go back into the street, hail a taxi and head home.

  And then?

  She tested the door, which opened a few inches. Boldly now she pushed it wide open and stepped in, and was immediately surprised. In contrast to the stern exterior, the interior was airy, modern and visually stunning. It could have been an art gallery: split levels of pine floors, soft white walls hung with abstract paintings that reminded her of views through microscopes, plants and pieces of sculpture strategically arranged to break up empty spaces, massive white candles bu
rning in wall sconces and on free-standing holders. New Age relaxation music played from speakers, and Faith could smell the pleasant but intense aroma of a scented oil.

  There was a reception desk directly in front of her, manned by an attractive young woman with gelled ginger hair. She was wearing a navy blue polo shirt embroidered with the words 'The Cabot Centre', and glowed with such an aura of health and vitality that Faith instantly felt a wreck. Displaying teeth to die for, she gave Faith a welcoming smile.

  'I've come to see Dr Cabot,' Faith said, noting a box of advertising leaflets for the centre on the desktop.

  'Do you have an appointment?'

  'Yes.'

  The receptionist took her name, then pointed her to an encampment of high-tech-looking seats beyond a screen of potted plants, where several people were seated.

  'Is there a lavatory?'

  'Yes, just down to the right.'

  Faith could see it. She walked down a corridor and went into a spacious room, tiled in white, with massive white, candles burning. She went into a cubicle, sat down, and closed her eyes. The nausea, which had been coming and going all week, had returned with a vengeance. Dr Ritterman hadn't come back to her or, rather, to Ross with the results of the tests. Why not? Surely a week was long enough? She wondered whether to say anything to Oliver Cabot about how she was feeling. But Ross would be furious if he discovered that she was taking some kind of alternative medicine.

  And Ross would find out: he was constantly snooping, looking through the medicine cabinet, criticising any vitamins or health supplements she bought. He even went through her handbags.

  She knelt at the lavatory and threw up. Her head was swimming, and she stayed where she was, clutching the rim, close to passing out.

  It was several minutes before she felt better. She flushed the lavatory, then rinsed her mouth at a basin. She checked her face carefully in the mirror, put on some lipstick and adjusted her hair. At least all the time I'm feeling grotty, Ross isn't saying anything about more surgery, she thought.

  She turned her head to the right and looked closely into the mirror. The scar was almost invisible, but not quite. And there was a matching one on the opposite side of her face, just at the point where her jawbone met her ear-lobe, an inch and a half long either side. The legacy from the operation Ross had performed to heighten her cheekbones.