John Gapper - A Fatal Debt

“Is he conscious now?”

“Yes, he came round in the hospital. They’re doing tests. Is Rebecca there? I thought she would know what to do.”

My girlfriend-or former girlfriend, as I was coming to accept-had removed her stuff a couple of weekends before, taking her bewilderment and hurt out on the apartment wall. In the living room, I’d found her desk and shelves gone, leaving a dozen holes in the wall for the resident-in this case me-to stitch up. I’d peered at the wounded plaster in places where she’d clearly lost her composure and ripped out screws, and I’d thought how unusual it was. She was noted for her calm precision as a surgeon.

“She’s away. What did they say about his condition?” I said, feeling the sting of being judged not a real enough doctor to contribute.

“Just that he’d had a heart episode.”

“Are they planning to operate?” I knew enough about cardiac illness to know it was good news that they had not wheeled him straight to the catheter laboratory to open a blocked artery. They still had to be assessing the damage.

“I don’t know. I should have found out more, but I couldn’t grasp half of what the doctor said.”

“No, it’s not your fault,” I said insincerely. I knew there was no point in quizzing her further. She’d told me all she could.

I’d always been baffled by what my father saw in Jane, beyond her youth, a fine pair of breasts, and her hero worship of him. They had met when he was forty-two and Jane was a thirty-year-old pupil at his chambers, and soon afterward he’d left my mother, a woman of much greater taste, kindness, and sensitivity than her usurper. Maybe a son is just a terrible witness, but it used to infuriate me that she’d accepted the betrayal so passively.

“Don’t be too hard on your father, Ben,” she’d admonished me one day.

“ Hard on him? How can you say that after what he did?” I had shouted back, and rushed out of the room, blinded by anger and guilt for my own role in the affair, which I hadn’t confessed to her.

“Where’s Guy?” I asked Jane. My brother was a branding consultant who was highly in demand in exotic countries around the world.

“I think he’s on business somewhere. Malaysia, or perhaps it was Vietnam. Roger asked me to find him, but I haven’t managed yet.”

“Does he want me there?” I asked, irritated that I was so clearly at the bottom of the list, below even my ex-girlfriend.

“Oh … Yes. Of course,” she said.

“I’m coming. I’ll try to find a flight this evening,” I said.

I lay back and slapped the duvet in frustration. Even in hospital, four thousand miles away, my father had an unrivaled ability to rile me. But I wasn’t going to let that prevent me from getting involved: it sounded as if he might actually need me. I was already hauling a suitcase across my room when I remembered Harry.

My father was lying on a bed in a surprisingly pleasant private room in the West Middlesex Hospital, wearing a short gown over his pajamas and reading the Daily Telegraph . Some of the cash that had flooded into London since I’d left had found its way into the National Health Service, and he was being treated in a clean, light building that squatted amid the other Victorian buildings like a spaceship.

“Hello, mate. Come in,” he said as I tapped on the door and put my head round.

He’d picked up this mockney use of “mate” for his friends and colleagues in the past year or two, as if to compensate with demotic familiarity for his wealth and success. In his late career, he was paid outrageous amounts by companies that wanted to curb their tax bills and needed his slippery yet watertight legal advice on how to launder money through small Caribbean islands. He reached across with a pale hand and shook mine as I sat down by him, the plastic tag on his wrist shaking with the movement. I cast a professional eye over him. His face was wan and his thinning gray hair was askew, but he didn’t seem to be in pain.

“Hold on, I want to see your chart,” I said, reaching to the end of the bed where it sat in a frame. My instinct had been right. He’d had a mild myocardial infarction, and they’d run blood tests before putting a catheter into an artery in his groin and clearing a blockage near his heart with a stent. He was on Plavix, aspirin, and a beta-blocker. They would release him soon.

“You’re going to live,” I said.

“I reckon so, if I’ve got any blood left. They kept taking more of it. Bunch of vampires, I reckon.”

“They have to do serial blood tests to check for enzymes. It shows whether the heart muscle is damaged.” I could feel myself straining to prove my medical expertise, but it didn’t impress him.

“They seem to know what they’re doing. I like my doctor, I’ve got to say. She knows her stuff, put the fear of God into me about exercise and what I have to eat. Very capable. Reminds me of your Rebecca.”

“Well, you should listen to her,” I said, ignoring the mention of Rebecca. Both he and Jane appeared to regard her as some kind of savior, but what business was it of theirs? I’d thought my mother was a good wife, but my father hadn’t agreed with that. “It was a close call. I was worried about you, Dad.”

He looked at me as if unsure of how to treat my expression of emotion, so used was he to our avoidance of intimacy, and cleared his throat. “All’s well that ends well, eh? You got here fast.”

“I was lucky with the flight,” I said, avoiding his eyes. “Where’s Jane?”

“She was here this morning and then she took Lizzie to school. She usually goes by bus these days. Quite the young woman.”

Lizzie was my stepsister, a sixteen-year-old who seemed au fait when I had taken her to Madame Tussauds on my last visit, with an impressive array of C-list celebrities.

“They grow up fast, don’t they?” I said.

“They sure do.”

The immediate crisis over, we had relapsed into talking to each other like strangers in a pub. I was starting to feel duped that I’d overreacted by flying in so quickly when he could clearly do without me. It was an old feeling-that I was naive to care for him.

It’s easy to lie, and it’s simple to betray the person you most love. I found that out when I was twelve years old, and the man who taught me was Roger Cowper.

He must have started his affair with Jane when I was eleven, I once calculated. Perhaps it was at my birthday party, to which she came one afternoon to drop off some files from the office. There was a clown performing in our garden, and my mother made Jane tea. Then they came out and stood by the kitchen together, looking along the garden and smiling at the clown’s antics and at each other.

A few months later, I came home from school early one afternoon with a cold that had worsened during the day. It was a windy fall, and the horse chestnut trees had strewn half-open spiky green capsules across the pavement, a field of conkers waiting to be found by children coming home. That afternoon there was only me, running between trees and stamping on the harvest to prize loose the glossy brown seeds.

When I came into the house, letting myself in with the key my parents had given me, I banged the door shut and went through to the kitchen to scavenge for some cake. I came out again into the living room and heard a noise on the landing, then my father’s footsteps and another set of feet behind his. Jane’s face was flushed, I remember, but I wasn’t old enough to appreciate what I’d stumbled upon.

It was strange to find my father home at that time: he told me that he’d had a case in west London. I remember her being awkward, not knowing how to talk to a child in the way that most adults I knew-my parents and my friends’ parents-did. She had an alien quality about her, which I know only with hindsight was sexual.