A Moment of Grace Read online

  Nicola walked steadily alongside me. I talked to comfort her. We kept step in our instinct to be calm, but around us the clouds were melting, the trees withering. We didn’t look at them. More dreadful by far was the fissure that had opened between us, a hairline crack. For nearly thirty years we had done everything together: lived, loved, raised children. Now a summons had come. One of us had been called away. It was in Nicola’s blood that the rogue cells were surging and darkly multiplying, even as we walked past the heavy summer trees, laden with leaves, past the gardeners’ shed with a mower parked outside it. It was Nicola, not I, who would lie on an operating couch, an hour later, while a young doctor in a blue plastic apron pecked at her spine with a needle, trying to dredge up some of those rogue cells for analysis.

  We were scared together; we faced cancer together. But the cancer was poisoning her blood, not mine. It was Nicola who would die, thirteen months later, with a tube in her throat and her lips weakly fluttering as she tried to smile at me.

  ‘The surgery called ahead,’ we told the nurse on reception at A&E.

  ‘Have you been here before, dear?’

  The kindliness of the NHS; its dowdy efficiency. The nurse tapped at a keyboard held together with tape. Around us sat the clients of St Thomas’s A&E: a Sudanese family in robes, grandfather leaning his hands on a stick, two girls swinging their legs; a drunk slumped across plastic chairs; a burly, bandaged man in a high-vis. Rubber tyres squeaked on the lino. An old man was pushed past on a gurney, naked shoulders as brown as leather and a drip swinging above his head. I watched Nicola’s eyes following him, and knew what she was thinking: this was the company she had joined, her new family of the sick. How, in a moment, could so much status be lost? Nicola was a leading figure in the arts. She wasn’t a proud or arrogant person – the very opposite. But we saw the world from the modest heights we had scaled together, living among rooftops and terraces, not in luxury but above the city’s gutters. Now we were jostling along in the crowd of suffering, coughing, sickening humanity. Blood cells respect no class or salary, thank God. We were just ordinary patients, a sick woman and a frightened husband.

  We confirmed our GP’s address. Someone got Nicola a wheelchair, though she didn’t feel ill, just scared. And we both knew, without saying it, that this was where we needed to be, among other people who faced what we faced. Since we had no entitlement to health, nor should we expect any other special treatment.

  ‘The doctor will be a few minutes.’

  The doctor had tousled hair and looked barely older than our son. His natural expression was a friendly grin, although he tried his best to look concerned. They wheeled Nicola into a ward at the back of A&E, half-darkened. They needed white cells from her bone marrow.

  I sat hunched on a chair and watched, from a distance, as her torment began. My wife’s smooth and lovely body transformed, suddenly, into something for medics to examine and analyse, a broken thing that needed to be fixed. I couldn’t see her, just the doctor’s back, and the shape made by her legs. The lights were dimmed. I clutched her grey coat on my knees, the coat she had put on that morning in a different world – breakfast snatched, a coat flung on the shoulders. Twenty minutes, they had said. I read anxiety in the hunch of the young doctor’s shoulders. He’d already been half an hour. I realised that I needed to cry. I went out along corridors past parked gurneys, out through swing doors into the hospital’s labyrinth. In an old marble hall my footsteps echoed oddly behind me, as if their tuning or timing had been subtly changed. Memorial boards listed the dead. The marble heads of doctors stared past me. An old woman in a dressing gown shuffled along on a zimmer frame. I found a glass door opening onto a dark garden. I hadn’t realised night had fallen – we must have been in A&E for hours already. A passing cleaner glanced at me, then went back to pushing his mop across the floor. I wasn’t sure if I was supposed to be there, but opened the door and went out.

  The silhouette of a chapel loomed above me. I was in one of the courtyards between the blocks of old St Thomas’s. In front of me was a terrace with the river slipping beyond. The clouds overhead were orange.

  I sat down on a bench, barely able to breathe. The noise I made was thin and unnatural. I wasn’t good at crying – I wasn’t used to it, I’d had so little to cry about. I had cried after my father’s stroke, and Nicola had held me in bed, comforting me. I cried again when he died, conventional tears dampening my wife’s soft neck. The tears I wept now were ugly and harsh, dredged up from inside me, as painful as bile. I tried to grab hold of what was happening, of what I needed to do. I couldn’t. It felt as if time was burning through my fingers, searing them when I tried to slow it. Nicola’s illness in Madrid – the bruises on her leg – more than one type of leukaemia. There was no abacus on which to compute this data. She lay inside with a doctor stabbing needles into her bone. Buildings after an earthquake stay crazily upright, stairs climbing to nothing and bathrooms exposed. Our life felt like that – shaken once, viciously, but still standing; insecure.

  I looked at the roofs of Parliament, lit up orange. If I were to walk up to the parapet I would see Big Ben, its face hanging in the sky like a second moon. Our children had been born in this hospital. The seventh floor – or was it Room Seven on some other floor? A corner room with big windows staring at Big Ben, so that we could read the time of their birth from its ivory face. The midwife’s name was Myrtle. She delivered both of our children, two years apart. With our first, Martha, we had no idea how we would feel as parents. I could remember Nicola coming down to the pool at her parents’ house in France, on a summer holiday, holding the plastic pregnancy kit and crying. We had made something together, a living embodiment of love, and as logical in its sequence as our first kiss, or the first time we slept together. Nicola had never quite trusted her body. She was too fat in girlhood, she thought. She was no sportswoman. But in pregnancy she was graceful. Her walk slowed to an unhurried amble. Her face glowed. She gave birth to Martha kneeling, fingers gripping mine as I smoothed her damp hair. Her cry of pain came from somewhere deep and unsophisticated, from the more ancient woman within her polished self. Her chest heaved under the hospital gown. Her shoulders were slick with sweat.

  ‘Well done, Nicola. Give me another push.’

  Pain that gave life. ‘A girl, a little girl.’

  Shrivelled in the midwife’s hands, fists clenched, eyes tightly shut. Outside, in a different world, the hands on Big Ben pointed to seven-twenty and people walked past on Westminster Bridge. It was the start of the most wonderful adventure of our lives together. Parenthood slowed and deepened Nicola. We both felt a contentment we had never dreamed possible, in each other and in our lives. It was slower than first love and more deep-rooted, binding us together under the soil. Two years later, Joe was born in the same room at six in the morning. Myrtle drove me home. Our new son kicked in a crib while Nicola tried to sleep – she had been torn. I found her holding him, a few hours later, with a furious love that would have made me jealous if I hadn’t shared it myself.

  ‘Was it awful?’

  ‘It was fine.’ A reassuring squeeze of my hand.

  The doctor looked exhausted. ‘We couldn’t get a sample, unfortunately. The white cells are packed so tight I couldn’t get the needle in. It sometimes happens like that.’

  A consultant came. His face was deep-lined and his manner learned. He nodded and smiled as Nicola described symptoms, not listening. He explained, without explaining anything. Nicola sat up against the pillows, bright-eyed, smiling and lucid, her courage fuelled by adrenaline.

  ‘Our son starts his A-levels on Tuesday week,’ she said. ‘I think I ought to delay treatment until after the exams.’

  The consultant shook his head straightaway. His answer was carefully phrased. ‘I have to tell you,’ he said, ‘that you are in a life-threatening situation.’

  They put her on a darkened ward, awaiting transport to the blood cancer unit at Guy’s. I sat on a chair outside, hoping she�
�d sleep. The hospital’s small dramas went on around us as we waited. Most of the beds were empty, but on one an old man, drunk, lay moaning. The nurses seemed to know him. Little by little the story emerged. He was homeless. He checked into different A&Es each night to get a bed, using a false name.

  ‘You were here last night, Harry.’

  He moaned, drunk, or pretending to be. The dimmed light washed over one side of his face, an unshaven cheek. Silence, then a sudden yell, unguarded as a child’s.

  ‘It hurts … it hu-urts.’

  Outside, in the glaring overhead lights, they loaded Nicola onto an ambulance to drive her to Guy’s. The office blocks stood tall around the hospital; the street was quiet. Dead night. Only the bright cavern of the ambulance hollowed out the tarmac darkness, a hole of bright light illuminating oxygen bottles and masks, scuffed lino, a red blanket folded on the gurney. A single whoop on the siren, and we hung in a queue, blocked by the vehicle in front.

  Nicola managed a smile. We’d lived in these streets for twenty-eight years; they were home. The year we married, we found a derelict house on Kennington Road. We moved between friends’ flats while the builders re-roofed and wired it, cut out rot. We held a decorating party: bowls of pasta and salad in return for paint daubed on skirtings and walls. Five years later we took Martha back there from this same hospital ramp, and it became a quieter place, filled with the chemical smells of washing and nappies. We got a short-legged antique nursing chair from somewhere, and I found Nicola on it at three in the morning, legs sprawled, nose in a book, while the tight bundle of blanket in her lap shifted as Martha suckled. Neither of us could believe the miracle of her body giving life. Our daughter peered at us through the slats of her cot. Her weight in the Moses basket, as I swung it to make her sleep, seemed like the weight of planets orbiting a sun. When Joe was born we had to go into hospital when complications threatened. Nicola had a contraction halfway to the car and leaned against the bus stop, fingers gripping concrete, until it had passed.

  Our streets. The driver nosed through them, blue light flashing on the white line ahead, parked cars, closed shops. Inside Nicola’s body now, the furious mystery of her approaching death. We didn’t know it. Every instinct we had yearned towards hope, but fog had descended, thick as the yellow fog of the streetlights. We knew nothing about leukaemia, or being ill. You are in a life-threatening situation. It was hard to understand how we’d travelled so far so quickly. When Nicola felt ill, three weeks before, the doctor had diagnosed a virus, reasonably enough, and prescribed antibiotics. She’d taken them in our hotel bedroom in Madrid, then strode out valiantly to see the Goyas in the Prado. On the way home our flight had been delayed, and we’d texted a photo home, the two of us grinning in the airport. Nicola was already dying, although we didn’t know it then, and couldn’t see it now; just felt the cold breath of it around us.

  Leukaemia.

  The entrance to Guy’s was cold and empty, awash with fluorescent light. ‘We’ve found a bed,’ the doctor said, as if all the beds had been hiding. A ward on an upper floor, hidden within labyrinthine corridors, masked by signs I would only learn later. It took time for the porter to find a nurse.

  ‘We’ll just keep you here one night, then move you onto the ward.’

  And suddenly we realised this was our new horizon: from now on we would live one day, one night at a time. This was our new perspective. Until six hours before, the months had receded into a tidy future, joys and petty challenges laid out for us like side chapels along the nave of a church. We’d had a weekend planned; I was due to start my new job on Monday; our daughter’s exams began on Tuesday, and our son’s the week after that. For June we’d booked a holiday in Greece, and in October we’d go to Nicola’s parents’ house in France. It all seemed so orderly, as if preordained. Suddenly that neat perspective was gone, and all certainty had vanished with it.

  I helped Nicola pull off her socks. Her back hurt from the needle earlier. She dropped her clothes on the floor: her skirt, her top, the necklace she’d put on that morning. It felt like watching a prisoner hand in wristwatch and wallet to the guards. She pulled on a blue hospital gown. The sheet was hard and dead, all softness boiled out of it along with the patients’ germs. She lay down on her side, tired out.

  ‘I want to stay with her.’

  ‘Of course.’

  I pulled up a chair next to the bed. My wife’s hip lifted the blanket in front of me. Beyond her an anglepoise lamp stood guard over rows of electrical sockets and the spigot for an oxygen line. Light slatted through the blind. We held hands. Around us, outside the thin pleated curtain that traced our new home, we could hear nurses moving between beds, the squeak of a trolley wheel on the rubber floor, and a bleating of instruments like the chirrup of birds in a marsh. We didn’t talk; Nicola had to sleep. And we both needed time, in any case, to find words for what was happening.

  I thought of the television news we’d watched the night before, about Syrian refugees arriving on a Greek island. Houses blasted and homes gone, they reached the beach carrying exhausted children and bundles of clothes and valuables, the rescued debris of once-happy lives. In the camps they found homes wherever they could, staking out a gap between two tents, or a few metres of tarmac. One can invent a home anywhere. The eye draws its own boundaries; a scrap of sheet on a clothes line can become the wall of an imagined house.

  That was the sort of haven we’d reached now. As the night passed, the wooden arm of my chair started to feel familiar, almost reassuring. I took comfort in a jagged shadow on the curtain. So long as the shadow didn’t move, then time stood still; we were alive.

  Nicola and I had always been good at making homes. We made our first the first night we slept together, twenty-eight years before. Afterwards we lay rigid, full of joy but horribly uncomfortable on the narrow futon. The room’s only window was a rooflight, uncurtained. Lying together we could see the sky over London. Nicola’s jeans dangled from the chair; there was a pile of books on the desk, and a scatter of make-up: all the intimacies of another person’s life. My work bag lay in one corner, an intruder. Time hung still. One night together, and already we’d built our first home from a room of tousled clothes.

  Later Nicola moved in with me. Giving her the keys to my flat in Battersea was the first ritual of our marriage. Then we found the derelict in Kennington; and moved again, seven years later, into another across the road. It was uninhabitable. There were no floorboards in the living room, and an old man had made his home on the ground floor, in the room we would turn into a kitchen. He kept a pet pigeon whose droppings covered the floor. A family with a newborn baby and a cat, we camped in the only finished rooms, up in the attic. For a week we had no kitchen and barbecued in the huge, weed-choked garden, where a mulberry tree threw shade over a patch of rubble, stacks of copper piping, the builders’ iron lock-up. I fitted the kitchen the weekend Princess Diana died. The cat, terrified, hid under the floorboards for three days.

  Now, sitting behind a curtain in the hospital ward, it was as if our life had returned to its starting point: abandoned clothes, light on the ceiling. Nicola cleared her throat, halfway in or out of sleep. Once, that sound had been new, strange and exciting; now it was as familiar to me as my own breath. The curve of her body was imprinted on my hand. The shape of her lips when she smiled was the sight I knew best in the world. For twenty-eight years it was Nicola who had really been my home.

  At dawn I walked home to fetch pyjamas, books and a toothbrush. I leant against the wall in Tabard Alley, the narrow lane between Guy’s and Borough High Street, and cried again. I noticed a plaque on the wall: it was the place from where Chaucer’s pilgrims had set out on their journey in The Canterbury Tales. Out of doors, my crying sounded thin, like the mew of a gull. Taxis sighed past on Borough High Street. It was still half-dark.

  I’d meant to walk, but flagged a cab down. The driver could see I didn’t want to talk. We drove past the office where I was due to start my new job
after the weekend. Craning round, I could see Guy’s tower in the rear window. London echoed around me. It wasn’t even a full day since Nicola had been diagnosed. When I looked at my hand, it was tremulous and white, without strength. The scrape of my key in the door almost made me cry again. That would be the hardest part of all, after I lost her, coming home from work to an empty house that had once been filled with life and noise. The hall was empty now – Joe was asleep upstairs.

  The thought of telling our children filled me with dread. I put on the kettle, showered. Thought of Nicola among strangers, with the blue hospital lights around her and the terror of uncertainty that fills all patients, everywhere: What is happening to me? What will happen next? I needed to be with her, but I also needed sleep.

  I didn’t sleep, of course. The bed was half-empty, the chest of drawers silent and reproachful. Her shirt lay on the chair as if it had been washed up after a storm. A hurricane passing through the house, through our lives, overturning chairs, ripping pictures from walls and returning it to dereliction.

  I went into the bathroom and leaned on the cold white china handbasin. Nicola’s make-up, her hairbrush, a spongebag lying open to reveal lipstick and eyeliner. Over the next year, our bedroom and bathroom would fill with the strange paraphernalia of sickness: boxes of paracetamol, a thermometer, the scarves she used when her hair went. We tried to treat them as honoured guests. It was part of our quest to make what was happening seem ordinary. At the time, we imagined that would make it easier to bear, so we welcomed the stacks of pills, and the hospital publications – Eating with Neutropenia – just as we refused to be scared by the new language that colonised our life of words together: platelets and counts, neutrophils, remission. Like an aeroplane suddenly shifting course in mid-air, its white trail kinked to track a new direction across the sky, we treated illness as no more than a change in direction. We accepted it in our lives, built it into our home like bricklayers mortaring stones into a wall. A survivable cancer, we told ourselves, can be part of being normal. Now I know death is normal too.