Fruiting Bodies Read online

  ‘Who told you that?’ Willow had an unpleasant sensation of people whispering about her behind her back and reporting on her to other people who had no right to know anything about her at all. She glared at Ros, who did not seem to notice her antagonism.

  ‘Just someone I was having lunch with. May I sit down? We ate such a lot that I’m feeling quite exhausted.’

  ‘But who was it? Not Doctor Kimmeridge, surely? He at least would keep his patients’affairs confidential.’

  ‘Of course it wasn’t him. None of the doctors here talk to us; they loathe us.’

  ‘So do the managers,’ said Willow, watching Ros closely. Her eyes were sparkling but her lips were tightly closed. ‘Was it one of the nurses? Surely not. You seem much too glamorously done up for lunch with a nurse.’

  Besides, Willow thought, could any of the nurses be powerful enough to risk being seen in a local restaurant with an anti-hospital demonstrator who had had to be forcibly removed from hospital property during the riot?

  ‘Not all the managers hate us,’ said Ros slyly. ‘Some of them have better taste than that.’

  ‘Oh, I see. You’ve got one of them to fall at your feet in adoration, have you? How very useful!’

  Ros laughed, shaking her head. Willow decided to believe the laugh rather than the gesture, but she was puzzled.

  ‘And it was a manager, was it, who told you I was back? I wonder why any of them should have been interested enough to remember my name.’

  Ros shrugged and went through her familiar hair-tossing performance. Willow tried to think of Ros as though she were writing her into a novel, working out her motives and her weak points as well as the inconsistencies in her story. Thinking that she had found one that might be fruitful, Willow said casually: ‘You know, ever since we last talked I’ve been wondering how you heard about that unfortunate brain-damaged baby, given that even his parents didn’t know exactly what had happened to him until your lawyer told them. Did the news come from this same manager?’

  Ros began to look a little less sly and pleased with herself. She even stopped playing with her magnificent hair.

  ‘Besotted as he is, he’s been feeding you information, hasn’t he?’ said Willow, staring at her. ‘Does he know what he’s doing or are you extracting it so subtly that he hasn’t twigged yet?’

  Ros’s face began to flush, but she said nothing.

  ‘Do you think you’re being quite fair to him?’ Willow went on, trying to needle her into saying something useful. ‘Dressing up to the nines like that and letting the poor sap think he’s going to get somewhere with you? Do campaigning feminists really behave like fictional sirens these days? They didn’t when I was young. Eheu fugaces!’

  Ros, who was beginning to look positively sulky as well as red-faced, shrugged.

  ‘So what? If he’s prepared to be exploited, why shouldn’t I use him? There’s nothing unfeminist about that. After all, men have been using us for years. It may not be fair to flirt with him to get information, but whoever said life was supposed to be fair? At least it’s in a good cause.’

  ‘And the ends justify the means, do they?’ Willow heard herself sounding derisive and was glad of it. She was coming to dislike Ros. ‘Well, I suppose the means are useful too. At least you get a jolly good lunch and plenty of compliments. I should think those are more than welcome after the boredom of hanging about out there handing out leaflets and shouting slogans. Did he fall in love with you by chance or did the others send you in to seduce him because you’re the only pretty one?’

  Ros got to her feet. Willow saw that her hands were clenched into fists. But she was not quite as manipulable as Willow had begun to assume.

  ‘Any tactic is fair when you’re fighting a war as serious as the one we’ve got on our hands,’ said Ros, refusing to swallow the bait.

  ‘You may be right.’ Offensiveness not having produced what she wanted, Willow let herself sound more placatory, privately admitting that she was using some pretty dirty weapons herself. ‘Which of them is he, Ros? Come on. Tell me that much at least.’

  ‘His name isn’t important. But your condition is. I can’t think why you’re so calm about it. Aren’t you furious with the doctors for having left a bit of the placenta inside you? Don’t you want some kind of compensation?’

  ‘No. They didn’t exactly leave it; it got stuck.’ Willow had no intention of sharing her fear that the haemorrhages might have been the result of something Sister Chesil had done to her. Equally unsayable was the rather different thought that had been hovering at the edge of her mind ever since she had woken in the night bleeding. She had always expected disaster to follow the arrival of her baby. In comparison with the possible consequences, what had actually happened seemed trivial.

  As though the memory of the previous night had shocked her brain into working again, Willow realised at last who the mysterious escort must have been. The only manager likely to have heard anything about her reappearance in the hospital was the one who had been savaged by Tom that morning.

  ‘It was Mark Durdle who took you out to lunch, wasn’t it?’ she said abruptly, hoping to bounce Ros into an admission.

  Ros gave an infinitesimal nod and then shook her head much more vigorously. ‘It really isn’t any of your business who he is.’

  ‘I can’t think why you’re being so secretive. This place is such a gossip factory that it won’t take me very long to get his name. Someone must have seen you together and been surprised enough to remember it. But if you didn’t come up here to talk about him, tell me what it is you want.’

  ‘There’s no need to be so hostile. I told you: I came because I thought you might like to add your experience to our campaign and let us do something to try to get compensation – or at least an apology – for you.’ Ros sounded hurt. ‘After all, you had the senior consultant attending you for part of the birth, with all the interventionist machinery and drugs at his disposal, and yet here you are back in hospital with complications that might have been very dangerous. I’d have thought you’d want to make some kind of protest.’

  ‘I see. No thank you.’ Willow could hear the coldness in her voice but she did not care. ‘By the way, what is happening to the parents of the brain-damaged baby?’

  ‘Haven’t you heard about that? The father was arrested for the murder of Mr Ringstead, as though he hadn’t already suffered enough at the hands of the doctors here.’

  ‘Yes, I knew that. But he was released, wasn’t he? Lack of evidence or something.’

  ‘An unbreakable alibi,’ said Ros, looking pleased. ‘His wife didn’t have one at all, but at least they didn’t suspect her. Even the police could see that she’s far too small and fragile to have overpowered a man that size. They’re all right, or as near all right as they’ll ever be until their poor child dies. Look, are you going to join WOMB or not? Did you read the stuff I left you?’

  ‘Yes, I read it,’ said Willow, looking at Ros’s long, well-muscled arms, and her surprisingly badly bitten fingernails. ‘But I don’t think I am actually going to join you.’

  ‘Oh? Why not?’

  Willow considered fudging her response with trouble-saving politeness but then decided to be frank.

  ‘Mainly because of your ambulance-chasing tendencies. What happened to me is a known complication of pregnancy and no one’s fault, as you must know if you’re as well-informed about childbirth as you’ve claimed. Yet, in spite of its relative ordinariness, you came up here to do to me what your colleagues did to that unfortunate couple: whip up my anger against the hospital – or rather the doctors – to serve your own ends. I don’t admire that at all.’

  Willow suddenly remembered all the boxes in Durdle’s office and the flash of bright yellow she had seen in one of them, the same bright yellow of the WOMB leaflets. She also remembered the surprising professionalism of the design and printing of the leaflets. There was no evidence that Durdle had provided the design expertise or recommended his own print
er to WOMB, but Willow was beginning to think it quite likely. She wondered whether it had ever occurred to Ros that the exploitation in her relationship with Durdle might not be as straightforward or one-way as she had suggested.

  ‘That’s absurd.’ Ros stood up. ‘I heard you were back. I’d liked you the first time we met. You seemed to share our aims. I thought I’d come to see how you were and find out whether you wanted our help.’

  ‘Bollocks!’ said Willow, waking Lucinda, who started to whimper. For once Willow ignored her daughter’s appeal. ‘I’m not sure whether your organisation genuinely exists to promote the interests of women or whether it was set up by one or more of the managers of this hospital in their efforts to persuade the doctors to use cheaper techniques on their patients.’

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ said Ros. Her face hardened until it no longer looked at all beautiful. ‘It is, of course, your privilege to believe whatever nonsense you choose. But women will never get anywhere until they learn to trust each other.’

  ‘Trust,’ said Willow in a sadder voice. ‘Now there’s a dangerous concept. You need to know a lot before you start trusting anyone. Tell me, when exactly was WOMB set up?’

  ‘If you’re not going to join us you can have no more interest in the organisation. If you ever change your mind, you’ll know where to find us. Goodbye.’

  ‘Was it before or after the dry-rot was found in the basement here?’

  ‘What is all this?’

  ‘Just curiosity,’ said Willow, deciding that there was little point in asking Ros anything else. ‘But I mustn’t detain you from your next noisy demonstration or whatever else you’re planning to entertain us with this evening.’

  Willow watched Ros walking away with strides much too long for her tight skirt and wished that she could believe in WOMB. Its aims were so admirable that it was horrible to think that it might have been no more than a front for Mark Durdle’s war against Alex Ringstead. She was sad to think of the women outside being used so cynically. At least some of them must have been sincere.

  Trying to decide whether the conspiracy between WOMB and Mark Durdle was a sideshow or part of the main circus she was trying to understand, Willow was distracted by renewed protests from Lucinda and got out of bed to soothe her. When the baby had eventually hiccupped into quiet again, Willow put her back to sleep, pulled on a clean yellow kimono and went to find out whether Susan Worbarrow was on duty.

  Willow found her trying to teach one very recently delivered mother about nappy-changing. The poor young mother was struggling to rationalise her terror of damaging the baby with the need to get the nappy tight enough around his minute and wrinkled red body. Willow watched in sympathy and waited until the fretful woman and her equally fretful baby were settled back in bed.

  Nurse Worbarrow smiled at them both, said something encouraging to the mother, and turned to leave the ward, sweeping Willow up with her.

  ‘I was sorry to hear that you’d had to come back in. How are you feeling?’ she asked as the doors swung behind them.

  ‘I’m fine now. Pining to get back home. But listen, I’ve got just one more question I need to ask you.’

  ‘Fire away.’

  ‘When was the meeting when Mr Ringstead made a mockery of Mark Durdle’s demands that he cut the obstetrics budgets?’

  ‘I don’t understand.’

  ‘Come on, Susan. Don’t let me down. When was the meeting you told me about at which Mr Ringstead pretended to be offering to tell women to cross their legs and wait until the hospital could afford for them to have their babies and everyone laughed at Durdle?’

  ‘Oh that one! About two months ago, I think. Why?’

  ‘I just wondered. Thanks.’

  Wishing that she had made a timetable of everything she had heard about the war between Durdle and Ringstead, Willow decided that she would have to talk to the manager again. She had not been able to accept Emma’s suspicions of him when she first heard them, but they were beginning to seem rather more convincing.

  It was possible, as Willow herself had suggested to Ros, that Durdle was an unwilling dupe of the WOMB activists, but the more she thought about that the less likely it seemed. A much more credible explanation was that he himself had played a part in setting up the organisation, helped to arrange the printing of the leaflets, and provided information about mistakes made by the doctors in the obstetrics unit for WOMB to use as ammunition in their campaign. It was also possible that he had persuaded them to start a riot so that he would have cover for the noise of Alex Ringstead’s terrible death.

  At one time Willow had not thought Durdle capable of physically harming anyone, but that was before she had known of his relationship with Ros. He would not have been the first man to push himself to behave in a tougher, more aggressive way than usual in order to impress a beautiful woman. And Ros was very beautiful.

  Willow herself had seen Durdle, or so she believed, watching the demonstration just before Ringstead had come to examine her for the last time. Perhaps Durdle, satisfied that his dupes were making enough noise, had then slipped up to the obstetrics unit, summoned Ringstead to an impromptu meeting and tricked him into bending over the pool.

  Or perhaps, thought Willow, not all the rioters were dupes. Durdle and Ros could have plotted the murder together. They might have psyched each other up, exaggerating their loathing of Ringstead for each other until they had persuaded themselves that it would be better for everyone – even for the hospital and its patients – if he were to die.

  ‘Now, how are you feeling this evening?’ asked a man’s voice, making Willow jump.

  She tried to control her hammering heart as she looked up to see that Doctor Kimmeridge was talking to the woman in the next bed.

  ‘Curtains, Nurse,’ he said sharply. A moment later Willow saw Brigid O’Mara’s bright face before her view was blocked by the familiar blue-and-green checked curtains.

  She turned over in her mind everything she had heard and seen, but she could not retrieve any single piece of evidence that would prove anything about Durdle or Ros and what they might have done to Alex Ringstead. If they were guilty she would just have to trick one of them into admitting it.

  Kimmeridge finished with the woman in the next bed and came to stand at the foot of Willow’s in silence, reading the notes Sister Chesil had added to her chart. Then he looked up and his thin lips widened briefly into a smile.

  ‘Good evening, Mrs Worth.’

  ‘Hello. I’m sorry I was rubbernecking a minute ago. It was thoughtless staring rather than curiosity.’

  ‘I know. You were miles away, weren’t you?’ he said, smiling more naturally.

  She thought that he looked younger and more carefree than she had ever seen him. He gestured to Brigid, who pulled Willow’s curtains between them and the rest of the ward.

  ‘Now, let’s have another look at you.’

  Willow resigned herself, kicked off the bedclothes and pulled up her nightdress. Pollyanna-like, she told herself that at least Kimmeridge did not have a troop of gawping students with him for once.

  ‘That’s fine.’ He removed his gloves and went to drop them in the nearest bin before washing his hands in the basin beside the ward door.

  ‘Why is he looking so cheerful?’ Willow whispered to Brigid O’Mara as he elbowed on the gushing taps.

  ‘He’s been told he’s got a very good chance of getting the job.’

  ‘Mr Ringstead’s job?’

  ‘Not the clinical directorship, of course, but it does sound as though he may be a full-blown consultant here at last.’

  ‘But what about the Freemasonry? He hasn’t gone and joined them just to get the job, has he?’ Willow was surprised by the unmistakable sound of outrage in her own voice. She had not realised that she cared enough about Doctor Kimmeridge to mind what he did.

  ‘I don’t know anything about any Freemasons,’ Nurse O’Mara said repressively. ‘But Doctor Kimmeridge couldn’t possibly be one.
Not for any reason.’

  She blushed as he came back and smiled at him. He smiled back, looking both gentle and extraordinarily alive. After a second he turned to Willow again and looked perfectly ordinary as he said: ‘Now, Mrs Worth, we won’t need to trouble you much longer. Your husband may come and collect you any time he likes tomorrow morning.’

  ‘He’s a bit busy for errands like that,’ said Willow, not averse to showing herself as well as Tom that she was still capable of running her own life, ‘but, look, if I’m not at risk of any more bleeding, couldn’t I take Lucinda home again tonight? We could get a taxi and be out of here in no time at all.’

  ‘Better not. Have one more night with us just to be on the safe side.’

  Willow wanted to say that she no longer felt at all safe within the hospital, but her suspicions were still too nebulous and unfocused for that and she did not want to make a fool of herself. She tried to believe that her fears were no more than the irrational products of her fluctuating hormones.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Willow took one look at the food on the hospital’s supper tray and declined it, turning instead to Mrs Rusham’s typically lavish picnic basket. Later, she telephoned Tom to say that she and Lucinda would be home again the following morning and then went back to bed with the book she had borrowed from the hospital’s library trolley, trying to keep her mind off her anxieties.

  The knowledge that both Durdle and Sister Chesil must have left the hospital some hours earlier ought to have helped her to feel safe, but it did not seem to have changed anything. Eventually she found enough self-control to concentrate on the novel and pretend she was not frightened any longer. Whenever she stopped reading the anxiety came back and so she did not stop. The other inhabitants of the ward all got themselves ready to sleep and one by one turned off their reading-lights. Willow kept hers on.

  A nurse she did not know looked into the bay just after half-past eleven and, seeing that she was still awake, came quietly across the ward.