Learning Curve Read online

  Learning Curve

  CATHERINE AIRD

  For

  Andrew, Alex, Angelina and Sebastiano with love

  Contents

  TITLE PAGE

  DEDICATION

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  BY CATHERINE AIRD

  COPYRIGHT

  CHAPTER ONE

  ‘Is it all right to come in, Mum?’ called out the girl anxiously as she hurried up the flight of stairs towards her parents’ bedroom. She pushed open the door without waiting for an answer, asking through lips unusually dry, ‘How is he?’

  ‘Much the same, dear,’ answered Marion Tridgell, her mother, quietly. This wasn’t strictly true – the man in the bed was clearly sinking – but his wife didn’t want to put the fact into words. That would have meant recognising the reality of his impending death, and this was something Marion Tridgell wasn’t quite ready to do.

  Not just yet.

  ‘Is he still talking as much as he was?’ enquired Jane Tridgell, reluctantly making her gaze travel in the direction of the familiar figure of her father. He was propped up against the pillows in his bed, his face an unhealthy shade of grey tinged with bright yellow, his skin stretched tautly over the bone structure of his face, and his breathing laboured.

  ‘He is,’ sighed the man’s wife.

  ‘Poor old Dad,’ murmured Jane. Until now her conception of dying had been based on Sir Anthony van Dyck’s highly stylised painting, all white lace and jewellery, entitled Venetia, Lady Digby, on her Deathbed. Not any more. Now it was Nicolas Poussin’s painting Extreme Unction that flooded into her memory, the distraught wife and daughter at a bedside as the priest anoints the eyes of the dying man in the centre of the picture. She had begun to study art at college and had already started to see the world through its prism. Only now she was beginning to discover that art wasn’t quite the same as life.

  ‘Ninety to the dozen,’ sighed Marion Tridgell, her own face like her husband’s, quite pale and drawn, too. ‘But I still can’t make out what about.’ She was sitting on a chair placed by his bedside, stroking his face from time to time with the lightest of touches.

  As deathbeds went, this one had appeared ordinary enough to everyone around it, everyone, that is, except the patient’s daughter, Jane. She hadn’t encountered death before and everything about it was very new and strange to her and quite unlike what she had read in fiction. There was, though, one feature about it that seemed different to all the dying man’s family, although it was one thing that nobody else seemed to find at all out of the ordinary.

  Derek Tridgell just wouldn’t stop talking.

  ‘But what exactly is he saying?’ asked Jane – and not for the first time. Her father had been gabbling away for days now.

  ‘And,’ said Marion, herself quite mystified, ‘who on earth is he talking to? That’s what I would like to know. Not me, anyway. That’s for sure.’ There was a quaver in her voice when she added, ‘He doesn’t even know who I am any more.’

  ‘He’s talking to someone neither of us know anyway,’ said Jane decisively, moving to put her arms round her mother. ‘I’m sure about that, unless, Mum, you know someone called the remainderman.’

  Her mother shook her head. ‘I’ve never heard the word before.’

  ‘Me neither,’ said Jane.

  Marion Tridgell, markedly anxious, said in a choked voice, ‘I keep telling Dr Browne about your father’s talking so much but he just says not to worry about it. Some patients do at this stage, he says. It’s the drugs.’

  Jane moved swiftly round the room to the other side of her father’s bed and put her ear close to his mouth; today she could only catch – but not understand – the odd word. She was the person to whom this death – any death – didn’t seem ordinary simply because she hadn’t seen any human being so near to the end of his or her life before.

  ‘I do wish, though, that I knew what he was talking about, let alone who he was talking to,’ said Marion in a strained voice. ‘You listen again, Jane, and see if you can tell me what’s weighing so much on his poor, sick mind. Nobody else seems able to.’

  The deathbed had seemed ordinary enough, pedestrian even, to all those professionals visiting the dying man’s bedroom at Legate Lodge in the Calleshire village of Friar’s Flensant who had had some previous acquaintance with death or, rather, with the process of dying. This naturally included the visiting doctor who had tried to convey to the family the difference between postponing death and prolonging the act of dying. Dr Angus Browne had chosen his words to the relatives with a skill honed from long practice.

  ‘Your husband shouldn’t be in any discomfort now, Mrs Tridgell,’ the doctor had said on his latest visit as he had begun to repack his bag, after noting the patient’s advanced cachexia and giving him a particularly large injection of painkiller, ‘but let me know if he seems to be in any way really distressed.’

  If asked – but only if asked – the general practitioner could have gone on to explain the so-called double effect of the drugs he was administering – in that they killed the pain all right but at the risk of killing the patient, too – but he saw no good would come of doing so at this particular stage.

  And, more importantly, the family hadn’t asked him.

  At the time Marion Tridgell had nodded her total understanding of what he had been telling her. She was one of those coming and going in the bedroom mature enough and experienced enough to have seen death before and importantly knew what to say and what to leave unsaid. She had glanced towards her husband in the bed and said to Dr Browne, ‘Derek’s still talking nonsense, though, Doctor. We can’t understand it at all. He keeps going on about someone called the remainderman. The wrong remainderman, whoever that is.’

  ‘It happens sometimes,’ said the doctor sagely. ‘The mind’s a funny thing as death approaches and we have no means of knowing what any patient is thinking at this stage. Nobody has.’

  ‘He keeps on saying the same thing over and over again, though, as if there’s something worrying him,’ persisted Mrs Tridgell.

  ‘And is there anything you know of that he was particularly worried about?’ asked the doctor, unconsciously using the past tense.

  She shook her head. ‘No, Doctor. We can’t imagine what on earth he’s talking about because no one can quite catch his words. It’s only now and then there’s one that makes sense.’

  ‘It’s probably not too important – I shouldn’t let it worry you,’ said the doctor kindly, snapping his bag closed and taking his leave. ‘Do try to get some sleep yourself if you can.’ The words ‘While you can’, he left unsaid.

  The patient’s daughter, Jane, had sniffed when she had been told what the doctor had said. ‘That’s all very well for him to say that but I think whatever it is about, it’s worrying Dad. He sounds to me very upset about something.’

  ‘But we don’t know what,’ seconded her mother. ‘I have no idea who or what the wrong rema
inderman is but Dad’s certainly talking to someone.’

  ‘Someone who isn’t here,’ pointed out Jane astringently.

  ‘Paul, you mean?’ said Marion, adjusting her husband’s oxygen mask a little as she spoke. Paul was Jane’s brother, and the son of the increasingly breathless man on the bed.

  ‘Yes.’

  Marion shook her head. ‘No, I’m sure it’s not Paul he’s talking to.’

  ‘So where exactly has my dear brother got to now?’ Jane asked impatiently.

  ‘All I know is that he’s well on his way to the airport. He rang about an hour ago.’

  ‘Where from this time?’

  ‘He’s still in Brazil,’ replied Marion, defensively. Her son, a dropout from university and two jobs, was something of a nomad, always moving to one country after another in search of a better life, which he still hadn’t yet found.

  ‘He couldn’t be much further away when he’s wanted, could he?’

  ‘I’ve told you, dear, that he’s been keeping in touch on his mobile whenever he could get a signal,’ said Marion. ‘You know what he’s like.’

  ‘And how,’ said Paul’s younger sister unsympathetically.

  ‘He says he’s not far from the nearest airport now, wherever that is. Rio de Janeiro, I think. He’s promised he’ll get there as soon as he possibly can and catch the first plane out.’

  Jane was tempted to ask if Paul had been stuck up a creek without a paddle again since this had literally once happened to him on a tributary of the River Amazon but she didn’t. Instead she murmured something about hoping that he would get here in time. What she was actually thinking was that a banshee would have come in handy. A female Irish spirit giving a shriek just before a death in the family would have been very useful at this point.

  ‘I hope he does, too,’ said Paul’s mother sincerely, ‘for his sake as well as ours, but Dr Browne says we’ve just got to let nature take its course now.’

  ‘Perhaps Dad’s ramblings will mean something to Paul when he gets here,’ suggested Jane doubtfully.

  ‘I would like to hope so because they certainly don’t mean anything to me and it would help,’ said Marion, very near to tears now. She lifted her head. ‘Listen, Dad’s started talking again. You see if you can understand what he’s saying.’

  Jane bent down over the bed and put her ear to the patient’s mouth, listening intently. After a while she reported, ‘I think that what he keeps on saying is that he’s coming as soon as he can. And that someone’s got to wait for him.’

  ‘But coming where?’ asked the other woman.

  ‘Search me. I don’t know. All I can say is that it seems very odd to me,’ murmured Jane, who thought she could guess where it was her dying father meant he was coming to but she didn’t like to say.

  The next world.

  But where in the next world Jane did not know. Heaven and Hell were just abstract concepts in her philosophy – however imaginatively the artists she was studying depicted them. Her father, although something of an old-fashioned churchman, had never been one to talk about his beliefs to her. And, she thought ruefully, it was too late now to explore the subject.

  Suddenly the sick man became more audible and announced quite clearly again to some unknown person, ‘I’m coming. I’m nearly there now.’

  Before the mother and daughter could do more than exchange puzzled glances, two young carers came into the bedroom. The deathbed had seemed quite ordinary to them, practised as they were at attending them. They had come and gone to the house throughout the last few weeks but then they had treated everyone – including the patient – with a cheerful over-familiarity that the family found irksome and intrusive but were too polite and preoccupied to remonstrate about with them.

  That these girls were more sensitive than they were given credit for had become apparent as Derek Tridgell had inched his way towards his necessary end. Since then and as time went on, they had increasingly tempered their attempts to amuse the patient. Weeks had passed now since they had last gone in for the gallows humour of such remarks to him as ‘If you wake up dead, I’ll kill you.’ It had amused the patient greatly then – but that was then, not now. And today as swiftly as they had come, they were gone, leaving their patient comfortable and the bedclothes tidy.

  There had been other visitors, too, but only at the beginning of his illness. Preoccupied as she was, Marion had registered the different approaches they had made to the ill man. Jonathon Sharp, the head of the firm where the patient worked, Berebury Pharmaceuticals, had called more than once, delivered a bit of harmless shop talk and gone on his way. At that stage Derek Tridgell had been quite happy to talk.

  ‘Anything more on that ghastly accident at Luston Chemicals, Jonathon?’ he had asked on one of his visits.

  ‘Nothing definite,’ said his boss.

  Tridgell shuddered. ‘I’m sure that Michael Linane was the man behind all our troubles with Ameliorite, seeing as he is – was – their head of sales.’

  ‘So am I, although I don’t know that we could ever prove it.’ Sharp nodded in tacit agreement. ‘Difficult thing to try to do anyway now in view of what happened and his chairman isn’t going to help us one little bit.’

  ‘Ralph Iddon’s only interested in Luston Chemicals – I’ve said that all along.’ Tridgell waved a thin, wasted, hand. ‘It might just have saved our bacon, though, that man Linane dying when he did.’

  ‘I sure I hope that it has,’ said the chairman firmly, ‘although I wouldn’t wish dying like that on my worst enemy.’

  ‘I wonder what will happen now,’ mused Tridgell, who didn’t want to talk about modes of dying just then.

  ‘I think it’s too soon to say,’ the chairman hedged. ‘All the same, I wish we hadn’t gone over there that particular day. Apart from anything else, it was a complete waste of time.’ Like all businessmen, Jonathon Sharp cherished his time as if it was his working capital, which perhaps it was. ‘And,’ he snorted, ‘they weren’t going to play fair with their precious product Mendaner whatever we offered. I’m sure about that.’

  ‘Damn silly name for a drug,’ pronounced Derek Tridgell. ‘It sounds like one of those funny bicycles that they used to call a Neracar. Or was it a tricycle?’

  ‘I’m afraid time alone will tell what will happen in the end,’ said the chairman, some of whose skill lay in taking the long view and the rest in ignoring irrelevances.

  Derek had smiled weakly at that and said, ‘And I’ll never know, will I?’

  Or will I? He had asked himself when his boss had gone but, unsurprisingly, there came no answer.

  His old friend and caving companion, Simon Thornycroft, had come to see him too. ‘Amelia sent her best wishes,’ Simon said, ‘and if there’s anything either of us can do, you know you only have to say.’

  Derek Tridgell had nodded then, this action sometimes being easier than talking with a mouth made increasingly dry by analgesics.

  ‘The whole club’s thinking of you,’ Thornycroft went on.

  Tridgell tried to moisten his lips. ‘What did the lads try at the weekend?’

  ‘The Hawecroft Chimney.’

  ‘Get anywhere?’

  Simon Thornycroft grimaced. ‘Only about halfway up. It’s just a bit too wide for comfort and we haven’t any ladders long enough. Not yet, anyway.’

  The ill man raised an enfeebled hand and said in a weak voice, ‘You’ll get to the top one day, Simon. Not in my time, though.’

  His visitor, embarrassed, ignored this last remark and said instead, ‘The opening must be grassed over. I reckon we’ll only find it when a cow falls through the turf and lets in a bit of light.’

  ‘Good luck, anyway,’ Tridgell managed to say through his drug-dried lips.

  There was an awkward silence between the two men and then Simon Thornycroft coughed and said hesitantly, ‘The club is thinking of naming that new ghyll we’ve found after you, old man.’

  ‘Very kind of them,’ said Derek, �
��but any memorial ought to be to poor Edmund Leaton. You know that.’

  A shadow passed over the other man’s face. He winced as he said, ‘It’s Amelia who doesn’t want that. Not me. She can’t bear to think of his death. Not even now.’

  Just then the patient’s wife, Marion, appeared at the bedroom door, bringing the visit to an end. It was impossible to tell whether the patient was pleased or not about this. Marion thought her husband was now beyond caring about anything in this world but nevertheless she thanked Simon Thornycroft warmly as he went upon his way.

  The vicar’s approach had been tentative and tactful. ‘I thought I’d just look in and see how things were,’ said the Reverend Mr Derek Tompkinson. Friar’s Flensant was one of the half a dozen small parishes in his care in this rural part of the Calleshire diocese and he was a conscientious man.

  ‘Going south,’ said Derek. ‘And quite quickly now.’

  The vicar didn’t attempt to deny this. ‘But you’re not in pain, I hope.’

  ‘Not yet,’ said the patient grimly.

  ‘I shouldn’t worry too much about that if I were you. The doctors have a lot of shots their lockers these days.’

  ‘So they keep telling me,’ said the patient.

  The clergyman sat in companionable silence beside his parishioner until it was broken – as he had known it would be – by Derek Tridgell. ‘I want to be buried,’ he said suddenly. ‘Not cremated.’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘And I’d like a muffled peal of bells at the funeral.’

  ‘I won’t forget,’ the vicar promised.

  Derek stirred. ‘And proper hymns. No need for the choir, though.’

  The other man smiled. The church choir wasn’t what it had been. ‘I know exactly what you mean.’

  ‘What I really want, though, now, Vicar, between you and me and the gatepost is for someone to – what did that poet fellow say? “Let me go”.’

  ‘He will, I promise you.’ The vicar rose, and touching the man’s shoulder lightly in passing, said, ‘God bless you.’

  There had been no visitors admitted to the sickroom for several days now and Marion was glad. She didn’t have to be polite and welcoming any more. Or preternaturally self-controlled.