Case Histories

Victor had a massive stroke, the GP said on the phone. A month ago, a different GP had told them that there was nothing wrong with Victor except for old age and that he had "the heart of an ox." "The heart of an ox" had seemed a muddled axiom to Amelia: wasn't it "heart of a lion" and "strong as an ox"? What was an ox? Just a cow? There were so many facts that Amelia no longer felt certain about (or perhaps she had never known them). She would soon be nearer fifty than forty, and she was sure that every day she could feel more neural pathways disappearing – fusing and arcing and dying – leaving her unable to retrieve information. Right up until the end, Victor's mind had been as methodical as an efficient library, whereas Amelia felt that hers was more like the cupboard under the stair where ancient hockey sticks were shoved in beside broken Hoovers and boxes of old Christmas decorations, and the one thing you knew was in there – a five-amp fuse, a tin of tan shoe polish, a Phillips screwdriver – would almost certainly be the one thing you couldn't lay your hands on.

Victor's mind might have remained organized but his house hadn't. After they left home it had steadily deteriorated until it was now almost squalid, like one of those houses where environmental health officers had to be brought in to clean up after some unfortunate had lain dead and unnoticed for weeks, lying in a pool of their own putrefaction.

Everywhere you looked there were books, all of them mildewed and foxed, none of them inviting you to read them. Victor had long since given up maths, it was years since he had kept up with research or shown any interest in journals or publications. When they were children Rosemary had told them that Victor was a "great" mathematician (or perhaps it was Victor himself who had told them that), but whatever his reputation it had long since faded and he had been nothing more than a plodding member of the department. His speciality had been probability and risk, which Amelia didn't understand at all (he was always trying to demonstrate probability to her by tossing coins), but it struck her as ironic that a man who studied risk for a living had never taken one in his life.

"Milly? Are you alright?"

"What is an ox?"

"A cow. A bullock." Julia shrugged. "I don't know. Why?"

They had eaten ox heart as children. Rosemary, never having so much as boiled an egg before her marriage, had learned to cook the kind of stalwart, old-fashioned food that Victor favored as being both nutritious and cheap. Boarding-school food, the kind he was brought up on. The very thought of all those liver-and-bacon casseroles and steak-and-kidney puddings made Amelia feel sick. She could still see a bloody heart sitting on the kitchen counter, dark and glistening, and swagged with threads of fat, looking as if it had only just stopped beating, while her mother, huge knife in hand, contemplated it with an enigmatic expression on her face.

"Oxtail soup, I remember that," Julia said, making a disgusted face. "Was it really made from a tail?"

Rosemary had slipped out of her own life very easily. She had shown no tenacity for it at all when she discovered that the baby girl she was carrying when Olivia disappeared had a twin, not Victor's longed-for son, but a tumorous changeling that grew and swelled inside her unchallenged. By the time anyone realized it signaled a life ending rather than a life beginning, it was too late. Annabelle lived for only a few hours and her cancerous counterpart was removed, but Rosemary was dead within six months.

Victor seemed to be snoring – a deep, wheezing noise as if his windpipe were narrowing and collapsing. This was followed at regular intervals by a dreadful gasping when his reflexes kicked in and he found another breath. Amelia and Julia stared at each other in alarm. "Is that a death rattle?" Julia whispered, and Amelia said, "Shush," because it seemed impolite to talk about the mechanics of death in front of the dying. "He can't hear," Julia said, and Amelia said, "That's not the point."

This noise subsided after a while and Victor gave all the signs of being peacefully asleep. Amelia made them both tea, scrubbing out the stains from the mugs first, and they drank the tea standing by the window, looking down into the darkness of the garden.