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The door to the waiting room opened, the sight of the consultant, summoned from his own bed, sending Amber a surge of mingled hope and fear, the sensation reminding her of a long-ago visit to Disneyland and the ride she had gone on there with her grandchildren. Then her terror had been limited to the duration of the ride and the knowledge that it would soon be over.
‘How is he?’
She had, Amber discovered, risen from her chair and was now clutching the ba
ck of it for support. How many times must the consultant have heard those anxiety-and dread-filled words and seen fear and grief in a relative’s face?
‘His condition is stable.’
The calm tone, the soothing smile meant nothing really.
‘Is he going to…will he live?’
Such simple words but ones so heavily weighted with her love and her fear.
The consultant’s smile was professional and meant to soothe but Amber could see behind it to the pity and the reality it tried to mask.
‘He has had a major heart attack, which he has survived. His condition, as I have already said, is now stable. The next forty-eight hours are crucially important. That is when patients are most vulnerable to further attacks.’
Further and fatal attacks was what the consultant meant, Amber knew. Her hand tightened on the back of the chair, her knuckles showing white through her skin.
‘I want to be with him.’ Somehow she managed to make her voice steady and calm.
The consultant was frowning. ‘Your husband is in intensive care.’
Amber knew all about the hospital’s intensive care ward. After all, she and Jay had done a great deal to help to raise the money to ensure that the hospital had such a facility.
‘I shan’t be a nuisance. Jay would want me to be with him. He would expect it.’
Now her voice was firm with conviction. Jay would want her to be there, and if they were not to be lucky and he was to be taken from her, then she wanted to be the one who was there with him, to surround him with her love in those last moments between life and death.
‘Very well,’ the consultant agreed. ‘Sister will arrange for you to be gowned up, but first I expect you’ll want to get in touch with your family.’
She should do that, of course, but Amber was more anxious to get to Jay. If these were to be Jay’s last hours on earth then selfishly she wanted them for herself; she wanted the luxury of concentrating on him alone, of communing with him in the silence of the dark hours; she wanted, she acknowledged, to be only Jay’s instead of having to be a mother and a grandmother, instead of having to juggle the complex needs of their family when all she wanted was to hold to her these precious last hours with the man she loved. But as always her duty to others commanded her. They too loved Jay and would never forgive her if a delay on her part meant that they were denied the opportunity to share his last hours.
She dipped her head in acquiescence, her ‘Very well’ reminding her of the youthful Amber she had once been, obeying the grandmother she had half feared. Jay would have recognised that tone and that dipped head because Jay had shared those years with her. Now her fear had a stranglehold on her emotions and her thoughts, panic–a child’s panic, almost–of losing all her emotional security clawing at her. Jay was her life, her whole reason for being; she couldn’t lose him. She was trembling as she followed the nurse to the small room from where she could telephone the news.
Chapter Fifty-Six
Janey couldn’t sleep and she knew, although he was lying silently beside her in their big comfortable marital bed, that John wasn’t sleeping either. How could they after what had happened? Her heart started to race with a familiar mixture of fear, panic and disbelief.
In the ten years they had been married Janey had never once given any thought to their financial security. John was a careful and a prudent man, not the kind of man who would ever take any kind of financial risk, especially not with the estate that had been handed down to him which had passed through so many generations of his family and which he in turn would hand down to their own son.
He had believed his investment was safe, he had told her with tears in his eyes. He would never have made it if he had thought otherwise. Investing money with several other local landowners, people he had known all his life, had seemed, under the aegis of one of their number, such a good decision. And so it had been–at first–making enough profit to buy back some of the land that had been sold during his father’s time, but then something had gone dreadfully wrong, and now all the money was lost. According to John they were virtually penniless.
John hadn’t told Janey at first, not wanting to worry her, but then he had come to her white-faced, his voice low with shame and despair, to tell her what had happened.
They had done their best. It was too late now to regret the money spent on the purchase of more land; on the expensive cattle-breeding programme inspired by the success the Duke of Westminster was having with his own prize herd; on the new roof for Fitton Hall–so very costly because the whole building was listed; on the modernisation inside. But like so many landowners they were land rich and cash poor. The estate barely covered its own running costs, never mind paid them an income, which was why John had wanted to try to generate more money in the first place. Over the years they had had to dip into Janey’s inheritance and now what was left was next to nothing, barely enough to pay the children’s school fees. Fitton Hall itself was mortgaged, the money raised used to modernise the estate, which had been so badly neglected by John’s father and his stepmother.
Lying awake in the darkness filled with fear and panic, Janey thought enviously of Emerald, whose own personal fortune ran into millions, never mind Drogo’s vast wealth. Emerald would never need to lie awake in her bed at night with her heart pounding with sick fear because there was no money.
It was so unfair that this had happened to John, who had only wanted to do his best for them all and for Fitton. Her own father would understand that, and he would want to help them, Janey comforted herself. He and John had always got on well. They could go to Denham and talk to him. She would have to manage things discreetly, of course, so as not to humiliate poor John. Her panic began to recede.
Yes, her father would know what to do…
She was just drifting off to sleep when she heard the telephone ring.
Emerald lay beneath the smooth weight of her expensive Egyptian cotton sheets, her body completely still as she looked up through the darkness. The London house’s master bedroom had only just been refurbished using Designers Guild ‘Geranium’ fabric to create a luscious four-poster bed effect. Emerald had invited her mother round to see it, watching the faint shadow darken Amber’s eyes as she studied the fabric that had become so very desirable and praised.
