Chapter Eight
December 2015
Lydia’s interview went well despite everything she had on her mind, and she began her new job almost straight away. She chose not to say anything about Theo to her new boss, or any of her colleagues. It was easier that way. It wasn’t that she was trying to pretend it wasn’t happening, but when she was within the walls of the new office in the city centre situated above a clothing shop, she could be Lydia Walters, a normal thirty-year-old career girl who lived in a house in Bath, whose favourite colour was lilac, who hated coffee but loved tea or hot chocolate, and a girl who just didn’t really have much of a love life to tell anyone about.
The latter had come up in conversation on her fourth day with these new people, when they’d had their Christmas lunch at a quaint Italian restaurant. Vivian, a girl in her early twenties with a name that was way older than her behaviour, had recently got hitched and extolled the virtues of marital bliss, and when Lydia was asked if she was with anyone, she had simply told Vivian her love life was non-existent at the moment. She’d had visions of Anita rising up in the middle of the table from the wax-dripped candles lined up down the centre, yelling at her that Theo was still here, her boy wasn’t dead yet.
And he wasn’t. And Lydia was still very much attached. But work for her was an escape that had come at the perfect time, a way for her to carry on with her life in spite of the vagaries she’d been hit with head on, not to mention the financial help she needed. Her savings hadn’t begun to dwindle yet but she knew if she wasn’t careful, the money would run out, and then what would she do?
Lydia had settled in to the small team at the office, and worked hard, relishing the feeling of finally doing something without the smell of disinfectant, the medical terms chucked around constantly, the faces that were becoming frighteningly familiar. In here it was talk of locations, exotic or simply different, the thought of something better coming along. Holidays that people lived for, that were booked to escape an ordinary banal day, a brutal winter, to travel to far-flung destinations and absorb an entirely new culture. There was talk of competition for the online magazine, strategies for growing and heading towards print one day. Her boss was full of energy, an enthusiasm Lydia hadn’t seen since her days in the London newspaper office, and it was exciting to be a part of.
‘Lydia, I’ve got an assignment for you.’ Her new boss, Ian, was at her desk. In his twenties, he was pragmatic as well as driven. ‘Do you think you could tackle something a bit different?’
‘I’m up for that.’ So far she’d done a lot of research for another writer who had been with Ian since the start of this venture and she’d also helped come up with captions and headlines, liaised with photographers and edited copy. ‘What do you have in mind?’
‘There are two assignments. The first is straightforward. It involves using the research on Cornwall, amalgamating that with Joanna’s write-up on the hotels she visited and putting together the article along with photos.’
‘I’d love to.’
‘The second assignment is a bit more in-depth. What are you doing tomorrow from lunchtime onwards?’
Seeing Theo.The words were on the tip of her tongue, but tomorrow was Saturday. She could make this work. So far she and Anita had kept their visits separate. Ever since their conversation about what Theo would’ve wanted and the ‘pulling the plug’ episode, as Lydia thought of it – Theo’s own description was a welcome injection of humour in an otherwise impossible situation – they’d barely been able to tolerate one another. It wasn’t that Lydia wanted him to die, of course it wasn’t. But Anita didn’t see that. She just saw her son and the woman he lived with wanting to do away with him.
‘What do you have in mind?’ Lydia usually visited Theo straight after work until visiting hours were almost over, when she knew Anita would come back to say goodnight to her son, by which time Lydia would’ve taken off to grab some dinner. Tomorrow being Saturday she could visit early on and then she’d be free as a bird. And she had no problems running in to Graham, a stoic man who was visiting his son as much as possible, each time a look of hope on his face that today would be the day Theo would wake up and everything would return to normal.
‘A charity ski event,’ Ian explained. ‘It’s in Hertfordshire, you’d have use of the company car, and you’d need to watch the event, do an interview, and liaise with the photographer.’
‘Why us and not a Hertfordshire magazine?’ she asked as she logged off her PC, ready to leave the office.
‘The man organising it is Jonathan Maynard.’
She looked up at his expectant expression. ‘Should I know him?’
He rolled his eyes. ‘Lydia, Lydia…you’ll get to know many names in your time here and Jonathan Maynard is one of them. He skied in Austria last year raising money for kids with cerebral palsy. The year before it was in France raising money for a hospice in his home town. I expect local journalists will be there too, but he’s offered us exclusivity. We want this scoop, it’s a good one.’
‘I’d love to do it.’ Lydia felt a stab of disloyalty swanning off when Theo was still lying in a coma in hospital, but closing her eyes and taking a deep breath she knew what he’d say: ‘Do this or you’ll regret it.’ And with that thought in mind, plus knowing she needed to earn a steady income now she faced so much uncertainty, she asked for all the details.
Lydia caught the bus to the hospital and when she arrived she greeted the usual people – the receptionist who was on evening shift this week, the cafeteria staff at the cafe where she sometimes came and grabbed a Cornish pasty if she couldn’t be bothered to rustle anything up when she got home, the orderly wheeling a bed through the corridor as she made her way to the ICU.
Theo was stable for now and the decision had been made to put in something called a PEG feeding-tube so food, fluids and medication could go directly into his stomach through a thin tube. Of course Anita saw this as confirmation that there was every chance Theo would make a full and meaningful recovery; Lydia saw it as just another reminder of how they were prolonging Theo’s life when perhaps this was how he’d be forever. She wondered how much of her recent pessimism had to do with simply being a voice for the man who couldn’t speak up himself and may disagree with the course of action they’d followed up until now.
Over the weeks Lydia had begun to talk more to Theo. She’d always loved research when it came to her job and although when trawling the internet she’d done her best to avoid searching for coma recoveries and the likelihood of waking up, or miracle cases, she’d still researched some aspects, including the behaviours of families with a loved one in this situation. One aspect had cropped up over and over again, in piece after piece, and that was that family could help. With their love and attention, it was not impossible that a loved one could react, and at this stage Lydia knew anything was worth a try. Because each time she looked at Theo hooked up to those machines she was reminded that he’d categorically told her this wasn’t what he wanted. And by bowing to any pressure from Anita, she’d neglected his one wish, the very promise she’d made him that night.
At Theo’s bedside Lydia waited for the nurse to finish – recording details on a chart, checking machines, jotting things down, checking the IV drip, looking at Theo’s eyes – and then she told her boyfriend all about her day at work, everything from the mundane: filing, replying to emails, washing up cups in the kitchen; to wading through photograph libraries to select appropriate images for pieces about to be published. She’d already told him about the Christmas meal and she elaborated on how Vivian was annoying everyone by still rambling on about her husband and how he was the best thing ever.
‘I mean, I know she loves him,’ Lydia told Theo, ‘and is besotted, but she doesn’t need to go on about it so much. If he ever comes into the office, he’s got a lot to live up to. We’re all thinking he’s some kind of god.’ She grinned and whispered. ‘It’d be funny if he was really ugly and had terrible hygiene.’
She held Theo’s hand as she rambled on. ‘I’ve got a new assignment and it involves some travel. Only Hertfordshire, but it’s something different. And I’ll be in a hotel for the night but I’ll be in to see you the following day.’
She was running out of things to say. ‘It’s freezing outside, you know. I think we might even see some decent snow this year. Remember when it snowed and Victoria Park was knee-deep in the white stuff?’ She smiled and reached out to stroke his hair. ‘We built a snowman and that nasty kid came and pushed it over. You were so angry you chased after him and I thought you were going to demand to see his parents until he ran so fast you lost him.’ Lydia had distracted Theo from how much he wanted to give that kid a piece of his mind by throwing herself on the remains of the snowman and pummelling it to the ground, and Theo had thrown snowballs at her for ruining what was left of their creation.
‘Oh, and just so you know…’ She moved closer and whispered in his ear, ‘I haven’t had a single chocolate from the tree. And I won’t, not until the big day.’
The big day. Even saying it sent a shiver down her spine, because for months she’d been picturing it: her and Theo wiping the sleep from their eyes as they tiptoed around the kitchen waiting for the heating to kick in, both of them laughing as they prepared the turkey for its visit to the oven, her nagging him about how the place settings had to be just so and him asking when it would be time to have a glass of champagne. It was going to be just the two of them this year. Most years previously, they’d either travelled to Suffolk to stay with Anita and Grace, or they’d gone to see Lydia’s parents in Yorkshire. But this year they had been looking forward to having nobody else to think about other than each other. They planned to binge-watch Christmas movies, snuggle up in front of the open fire, rip open their presents, and eat the Christmas dinner and talk about plans for the future.
In their final year at university, Lydia and Theo had stayed in Lydia’s student house for Christmas. It had been Sally’s suggestion because after that year nobody knew where they’d be, so eleven of them had pitched in to buy the dinner, cook what resembled a festive roast and even did Secret Santa presents of ten quid or less. On Christmas night, when the rest of the house were asleep, Theo and Lydia began talking about plans for New Year’s and whether they’d ever made any resolutions, and claiming it was all bollocks anyway, they decided promising themselves one thing was a better focus to have. Already both of them had been knuckling down rather than going on so many pound-a-pint nights – final year was serious stuff unless you wanted to waste your degree – and Lydia set her goal to be losing her uni-baggage, the term she’d given to the excess weight she’d gained. A love of beer and too many doner kebabs had seen her curves expand considerably and she was unhappy with her weight. So as well as putting in the hard yards with her studies, she began to dance more, she walked up to five miles most mornings, and within four months, before her first final exam, she’d reached her target weight and kept it off ever since.
Theo’s goal for the following year had been to get a job as a company accountant for a major corporation within six months of graduating, and he’d definitely done that. Since then there’d been a mixture of goals they’d aimed for: live in London was one to tick off the list for both of them; ski in New Zealand; travel to at least one European destination (the precise location was flexible); and their last goal, a joint one as it happened, was to get out from under the clutches of a landlord.
