A Moment of Grace Read online

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Book

  About the Author

  Title Page

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgements

  Copyright

  About the Book

  How do you learn to live in the wake of death?

  Patrick Dillon and Nicola Thorold were together for twenty-eight years. Patrick was an award-winning architect and writer and Nicola a leading figure in theatre, awarded an OBE for her contribution to the arts at London’s Roundhouse. Their two children were almost grown-up. Life was good.

  And then, in May 2015, Nicola was diagnosed with leukaemia. After several rounds of treatment, a bone marrow transplant and many waves of recovery and decline, she died thirteen months after her diagnosis. Six months later, at Christmas, Patrick started to write.

  A Moment of Grace is the searing, tender account of Patrick’s life with Nicola and her illness, and his life after her loss. But it is more than a story of illness and unbearable grief: it is a book of memory, of home, of family. It is a tale of the transfiguring power of love. Heartbreaking, life-affirming and truly unforgettable, A Moment of Grace is one man’s journey to find life after his wife’s death.

  About the Author

  Patrick Dillon is a writer and architect. He is the author of acclaimed histories of the eighteenth-century gin craze and the Revolution of 1688, as well as the children’s books The Story of Britain and The Story of Buildings. As a theatre architect he led the regeneration of the National Theatre.

  His wife, Nicola Thorold, was producer at London’s Roundhouse, and co-founded the international theatre festival World Stages London, and the pioneering arts movement, What Next?. She was diagnosed with Acute Myeloid Leukemia in 2015 and died in June 2016.

  NICOLA THOROLD

  1965 – 2016

  1

  This is the story of my wife’s death from leukaemia. It isn’t a sad book. In our last year together we were more happy, in some ways, than we’ve ever been. She was fifty-one. Our two children were adults by the time Nicola died.

  Nicola worked at the Roundhouse in London’s Chalk Farm. She produced shows there – theatre, circus and dance. A few months before she fell ill, she put on Monteverdi’s L’Orfeo in partnership with the Royal Opera House. On the opening night we stood talking in the foyer as the audience flowed up the stairs. Nicola wasn’t most people’s idea of a theatre producer: she wasn’t flamboyant or extrovert, she was genuine, natural and unaffected. Her parents, Anne and Peter, were there. We talked to friends we’d known for years; to people from the production team; to the designer who’d worked on the show. Talk rose up between the old brick walls of the Roundhouse, filled the bar, diffused above us; next door we could hear the orchestra tuning up. Nicola glowed. She was doing what she cared for most, surrounded by the people she loved. She was in her world.

  Inside the auditorium, lights winked on the roof of the Roundhouse, high above us, and the row of iron columns at our backs. I could tell Nicola was nervous and squeezed her hand in encouragement. How many shows had we been to together? I’d never thought of counting. We’d be going to them, I imagined, for as long as we both lived – until we were old together, still doing the things we most loved.

  The lights dimmed. We heard the familiar rustle of the audience hushing as attention focused on the stage. The music began. They’d cast young singers in the leading roles. I’d seen the opera before, so I knew the story of the poet who goes to hell to retrieve his dead wife, Eurydice, and persuades Hades to let him return her to the light – so long as he doesn’t look back. I didn’t feel any premonition. Four months later, Nicola would be diagnosed with leukaemia, and a year after that she would be dead; but I didn’t know, then, that I would have to set out on my own journey to recover her – that I, too, would find myself in a dark place, the road lost, searching for the gates of hell.

  There was a wonderful party afterwards. We took the tube home. L’Orfeo wasn’t the last show we went to. We spent Easter in France, and had a weekend in Madrid to celebrate Nicola’s fiftieth birthday. We had no warning of what was to come when our GP rang me at home, one Friday afternoon at the end of May.

  ‘Mr Dillon?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘We’re trying to get hold of your wife, Nicola Thorold.’

  She’d been to the surgery that morning. In the last couple of weeks bruises had appeared on her legs, as if she’d knocked herself. Before that she’d had a virus, but she seemed to have shaken it off by the time we went to Madrid. Not quite herself, she managed the museums nonetheless: Goya and Velázquez. We found a blue-tiled restaurant, cool and high-ceilinged, and ate grilled shrimp and salad dressed with anchovies; she took rests in the afternoon. And then the bruises started to appear.

  She ignored them until I bullied her into visiting the doctor.

  ‘He took a blood test,’ Nicola said when I called her late morning. She didn’t sound worried. ‘He said they’d get the results quickly.’

  That haste was the only warning note, looking back. But we didn’t hear it. I’d just left my job. As we spoke I was standing outside my old office, exhilarated. I was due to start at a new architects’ practice on Monday. That evening we would celebrate freedom.

  But the evening didn’t arrive.

  ‘We need to speak to her urgently, Mr Dillon. Do you have any way to get hold of her?’

  ‘I can try her mobile.’

  ‘She isn’t answering.’

  ‘What’s it about?’

  ‘I can’t tell you that, Mr Dillon, but this is important. It’s essential we see her before the weekend.’

  ‘I’ll try to get hold of her.’

  My voice sounded unnaturally calm, even to myself. I was always good in a crisis, and this was already a crisis. As I put the phone down I knew this story had started. The GP’s call was the first banging of a shutter, heralding a storm; the water slicking back along the harbour wall; the ground’s tremor before an earthquake. Something was wrong.

  Nicola’s phone bleeped into a void, rhythmic and weak like the throb of a pulse, or a buoy flashing at sea to warn of danger. I tapped my finger on the desk to calm myself.

  ‘Hello?’ Her voice sounded normal.

  ‘Cara.’ My name for her. ‘The doctor telephoned …’

  ‘I know, I got their message. I’m on the way home.’

  ‘Did they say what it’s about?’

  ‘No.’

  We both sounded calm. This, it was already agreed between us, was how we were going to handle the crisis – whatever it was. We knew each other. We’d been together nearly thirty years. Whatever happened, we would be strong together.

  ‘Shall I meet you at the surgery?’

  ‘On the corner outside.’

  I have her texts still. Crossing Bridge at 16.45 that Friday afternoon; at 16.47, I’ll meet you at Wincott Street. I stood on the corner, waiting. Sometimes I feel as if I’m waiting there still – or as if, in that moment, life could have taken another turn. We could have met on the corner, happy, and gone to dinner to celebrate my new job; or met on the corner and gone home. I remember watching cars drone along Kennington Road. It was all so familiar: the newsagent, the parked cars and pelican crossing. But already everything was changing. Invisibly, our world was being packed away around me, like a funfair after the carnival. The places we loved, the habits we’d grown, were fading from sight, one by one. Our future was vanishing in fog.

  We’d always been so lucky, until that Friday afternoon. And we knew how lucky we were. No
landslides had carried us away; we’d suffered no catastrophes, bereavements or major illnesses. We came from happy, stable homes, loved our children, and earned enough to be comfortable. Time had rolled by in a dependable sequence, the years passing as solidly as stones in an ancient path, as if someone had gone that way before, to clear the track for us. Perhaps the only unusual thing about us was the depth of our love, a blissful, all-consuming love that had united us for twenty-eight years.

  That, too, had begun on a street corner. Saturday, 14 November 1987, Nicola and I met on the pavement outside the Whitechapel Gallery. We’d already known each other for five years. I’d once stood in as a date for Nicola’s high-school leaving dance – her boyfriend of the time was away. She wasn’t quite beautiful then – it was later she became lovely – but she danced wonderfully, as if her grace was internal, revealed by music, and she was just waiting for the years to complete her. Nicola’s eyes were a warm sea green. Her mouth was wide. When she smiled, her lips broke goofily along the line of her teeth; everyone loved her smile. Five years on, we were close friends. We’d both been in other relationships, but even so, there’d been moments along the way when we’d glimpsed what was to come. I stayed with her family in France one Easter. We were revising for exams, but escaped for a drive through woods to a castle nearby. Nicola had been going there since she was a child, when her parents bought the ramshackle old farmhouse in Aquitaine. It was her private place, revealed only to close friends. In driving me to the castle we both felt as if she was showing me something, pointing out a cleft in the horizon, a tower we would one day inhabit. Neither of us would have been surprised had someone predicted our future together, raising children, being happy.

  So love had hovered around us, not quite landing, but then we found ourselves, in autumn 1987, with long-term relationships over. Nothing was said. Nicola came to spend a weekend in Suffolk, where I’d borrowed my sister’s cottage on the river at Pin Mill. Perhaps I was showing her, in my turn, the places that I loved. Maybe we were displaying the treasures each could bring to our union, in a ritual as old and solemn as the meeting of families for an arranged marriage. Perhaps we were touring, in advance, the places where we would later build our life together.

  The weekend after, the Whitechapel Gallery began a Cy Twombly retrospective. We wandered past the huge, textured canvases. They looked ancient, as if they had been rescued from pyramids or excavated from a rock face. There was writing on them: snatched words and phrases – Apollo, Venus – and looping figures, white on grey, that were almost writing. Our love and marriage would be an affair of words. I think I might be falling in love with you were the words Nicola spoke later, leaning back against my legs in the flat she shared with an old college friend. And in the years after that came endless conversations, lying in bed, walking home from the theatre, tramping through woods in France. Twenty-eight years of words scrawled on the walls of our lives. Birthdays and Christmases; the first words spoken in the morning and the last at night. And then, when she was in hospital and couldn’t speak anymore, the texts we sent each other before sleeping: Good night my darling husband. Good night my most perfect wife.

  I took her hand, as we sat on the floor of our friend’s flat. Nicola never lacked for courage, and never lacked it later. If she wanted something, she wasn’t scared to say so. She loved me, so she told me so. I remember the warmth of her lips when we kissed, the warmth of her fingers as they clutched mine. That night we slept in her tiny bedroom with a sloping ceiling and collapsible futon, and felt time surging into a future that felt inevitable: a future spent together.

  And now, on a street corner in Kennington, time was collapsing in on us with a rush. We could almost feel it, like a cold breath on our faces. Normal life flowed by, but we were marooned within it; stuck fast, like a ship caught on a mudbank with the tide pouring out around it. People walked past, tired from the day, eyes intent on planning dinner, or the evening’s phone calls; a bus hissed along the kerb; a dog tested its lead, snuffling the base of a wheelie bin. We were different: our future was gone.

  We had nothing to go on except the doctor’s call, but it was enough, already, to draw a curtain across the horizon. We’d booked a holiday in Greece in June, three weeks off. We need to see her before the weekend. Did that sound like the sort of thing that might be over in three weeks? Probably not. The grand recalibration of our lives was already under way. This book is the story of a star imploding in space, collapsing in on itself under forces too massive, too natural to resist; making no noise; an implosion so embedded in time as to be neither quick nor slow, because it makes its own time around it; because its rush is the thrum of time draining away, and the sudden darkness – the ensuing black hole – is time’s end.

  ‘Did they say anything on the phone?’

  ‘No, just urgent.’

  Nicola’s face looked pointed and sharp. She was afraid, I knew, but determined not to show it. She was still wearing her work clothes. They’d be balled up, later, in a bag by her hospital bed and I’d take them home. She looked beautiful, two weeks before her hair went and the chemicals seared her flesh back to the bone. She looked beautiful afterwards.

  We had one thing on our side, although we didn’t know it then. It was magic of the most potent sort: we’d never taken one another for granted. That knowledge would strengthen us in the thirteen months we had left. It would strengthen us as Nicola’s physical strength failed and her horizons narrowed. It would strengthen us even when she lay in intensive care in her last weeks, with machines winking in rows around her – blood pressure, temperature – and an oxygen tube whistling in her throat; as Chris or Anne-Marie, one of the nurses we got to know so well, deftly snapped another syringe of Fentanyl into the rack by her bed; as I held her hand under the sheet. We were never complacent about happiness. It was our blessing, not something to which we felt entitled.

  Neither of us knew the GP, a locum, perhaps, or someone new. I’ve never seen him since, the man who pronounced my wife’s death sentence.

  ‘What exactly is wrong?’

  ‘The consultants will want to talk to you about it.’

  ‘It would be helpful to have some idea. Of course we’re worrying.’

  There were some books on his desk and a tired computer keyboard. It was the end of his day. Nicola sat up very straight, chin high. There was a focused look in her eyes. She was always so brave and matter-of-fact; a stoic, never one to sink her head in her hands.

  The doctor didn’t know which of us to look at, so he told me: ‘They think … they’re fairly certain … it’s a leukaemia.’

  We’d reached that moment from the movies; or from one of those wakeful nights when life veers off its tracks into imagined narratives of tragedy and disaster. But fiction and nightmare provide a kind of insulation; this was real.

  I took it in. I didn’t take it in. I looked at Nicola, who nodded at the doctor, absorbed not in herself, but in the conversation we were having with him. And something odd happened. In my own mind, like a shrill tinnitus behind the sound of their voices, came the thought, This is just as one imagined. It would be with me for the next thirteen months, that voice, until she died. The inner commentator; the detached part of oneself – detached even as one’s ship ran onto the rocks, as the house burned – who watched and processed, recording the deterioration of our lives even as thermometer and oxygen probe tracked the decline of Nicola’s body. Just as one imagined – and then, like the pad of a foot on the path behind us, fell the louder, nearer sound of what was actually happening: Nicola had cancer.

  Our remaining time together would always carry that reverberation: our story, and the telling of our story a split-second behind it, like the echo in a church. Later on the ICU doctors would measure the slow failure of Nicola’s body in the green-figured screens over which they pored so intently, concern and intelligence plaited on faces that gauged death’s approach. And we too, in the next thirteen months, would learn to sense and measure each quive
ring emotion, to parse out the finest nuances of love and fear. The air was already rushing out through our lives, like a balloon deflating. I could feel its vibration under my fingertips. Perhaps capturing it felt like a way of slowing the rush. I was trying to tame shock through narrative, perhaps trying to turn what was happening to us into something that others might understand – which, I suppose, is why I’m writing this book.

  The doctor was apologetic. Bad news on a Friday afternoon. To him, foot soldier in the NHS ranks, the duties of the firing line.

  ‘I need to go home and get some things,’ Nicola said. Only I could hear the nervousness in her voice.

  And it was then we realised how close death was. ‘No,’ the doctor said. ‘You really have to go to A&E straightaway.’ His voice quivered. ‘Right now, please. Now.’

  He rang them. His phone call was the leper’s bell, clearing the way ahead. One imagined alarms ringing down hospital corridors, beds made, nurses washing their fingers under a silver thread of water, as if Nicola’s death was a ritual already begun. We were marked out, different even now from the old women dozing in the GP’s waiting room as we went out, from the two receptionists gossiping behind the counter, from the commuter cycling home down Lambeth Bridge Road.

  We walked side by side, not talking. We carried a burden no one else could see, a knowledge no one shared.

  ‘Someone at work was diagnosed with leukaemia,’ I said, filling the silence. ‘There are different kinds of leukaemia, he said. His isn’t terminal, it’s just something he lives with. It’s fine.’

  ‘Of course it’s going to be fine.’

  Our instinct was to make this feel normal – whatever it was. The world had been knocked off its pole; we needed to put it back. Bad news need not be so bad. There was always a way ahead. Normality was our greatest wealth, and we fought for it until the very end. A leukaemia, the doctor had said, first lesson in the medical language we were shortly to learn. So: more than one type of leukaemia; so: perhaps we had the better type. The scene sketched itself in both our heads as we walked across Archbishop’s Park, past the deserted football pitches, and the playground where we’d once watched our children cling to the roundabout. ‘Yes, you’ll need regular check-ups,’ we could imagine a doctor saying, ‘but this is really very common.’ It didn’t seem impossible. In our imaginations, regular check-ups – or whatever this crisis demanded – felt like a concession to what had happened, a down payment to show our fantasy wasn’t too childish. That was how we balanced reality with hope, in the hours ahead.