Two male nurses came running in, but Miles had already gone.
‘Are you OK?’ asked one of them.
‘Fine,’ said Sasha, the tears finally rolling down her face. ‘I’m just fine.’
Grace arrived at the hospital late. She had been in the air, flying back to Ibiza, when her mother had called her, leaving a message about the accident. She picked it up in the arrivals hall and headed straight for the booking desks to get a flight back to Heathrow.
‘This is stupid, Mum!’ whined Joseph. ‘We just got off the plane!’
‘Grandad Ashford isn’t well, honey,’ said Grace firmly, hastily writing fresh luggage labels for them all. ‘We have to go back.’
Joe remained irritated rather than alarmed the whole flight back and Grace felt a stab of guilt at how remote from her parents the twins had become. She knew that it was a choice she had made for them and suddenly it felt very wrong.
It was eleven o’clock by the time Grace had dropped the children with friends and raced to the hospital. The corridors were eerily quiet as her heels clacked along them. Her father was lying motionless in his room, ghostly and wan in the weak light of the single lamp above his bed. It was only then that Grace could see how serious it was. All the way over she had been telling herself that he’d come away with cuts and bruises, maybe a fracture or two, but now . . . now she could see her father was critical.
His mouth was covered by a plastic mask attached to a machine by a long rubber tube. A series of drips hung from a rack beside the bed. His arms, lying both sides of his body on the blue acrylic blanket, looked pale and old. Connie Ashford was sitting on a plastic chair by the bed. She looked tiny in the semi-darkness, her face in half-shadow. She stood up and gave Grace a sad embrace.
‘He’s going to be OK,’ said Grace. ‘He’s going to be fine.’
But Connie’s silence suggested otherwise.
‘Do we know any more about what happened?’
Her mother told her what they had managed to piece together: Robert’s Aston Martin had swerved off the road and ploughed into a tree. The crash alerted a farmer who called the ambulance and fire brigade, who had to cut both the passengers from the wreckage. Robert’s injuries were extensive: a punctured lung and ruptured spleen plus spinal damage, the severity of which was unknown; various specialists were being flown in to treat him.
‘Who was the passenger?’ asked Grace, sitting down.
‘That woman . . .’ said Connie, her voice cracking as she spoke. ‘It was Sasha Sinclair.’
‘Sasha?’ Grace whispered incredulously.
Connie could barely manage a nod.
‘I can’t believe he took me to her party last night,’ she said, her brow creased in confusion. ‘I knew he was having an affair, of course. I always did. But I never thought for one moment it would be with her. She was Miles’ girlfriend, for God’s sake!’
Grace was amazed. She had always known Sasha was an operator and had therefore been surprised when she had let Miles slip through her fingers, but maybe that was because she had her eye on the bigger prize. Could she have been seeing Robert for that long?
‘Is she here?’
‘Not any more. She was admitted for a few hours but she’s been discharged.’ Connie let out another sob.
‘Are you sure?’ asked Grace gently. ‘I mean are you sure that they were together? Dad had invested in her business, maybe they were going to a meeting . . . ?’
Connie shook her head sadly. ‘There was a diamond bracelet for her in his jacket pocket. A birthday present.’
Grace squeezed her mother’s hand sympathetically. ‘Well, none of that matters now. All that matters is that he gets better.’
Connie nodded slowly, looking at her husband with red-ringed eyes. ‘I need a walk,’ she said, standing. ‘I doubt the canteen is open but I’m sure there’s a vending machine somewhere.’
She closed the door behind her and Grace listened as her mother’s heels retreated down the corridor. She turned back to her father, so still and small. Robert had always been an imposing man, someone to look up to, someone to fear. She couldn’t actually remember ever doing normal father – daughter things with him like outings to the park or playing hide and seek. It was just accepted that Daddy had important work to do, that he was too busy to play and that birthdays and school prize days were difficult to schedule. In her early years at boarding school, Grace had kept a scrapbook of cuttings she had collected from the business and society pages of the newspapers: Daddy shaking hands with another man, Daddy going to a party, Daddy opening a new hotel. It was her version of a family photo album; Robert Ashford was never home long enough to have any photos with his children. In fact, now Grace thought about it, the only other time she could remember being alone with her father like this was when he had summoned her to his study to discuss her school report when it was anything other than a string of A’s.
‘I want the twins to know you, Dad,’ said Grace. ‘I don’t want them to be strangers to you, like I was.’
She brushed at her face and was surprised to find a tear running down her cheek.
‘It’s never too late to start making amends, that’s something I’ve only just learnt,’ she said. ‘If you can just stick around for a while longer, we can make a little time to be together, can’t we? Nothing’s more important than that.’
She reached out to touch his hand, lying there on top of the covers. It was so warm, so alive, but his face was so still and deathly.