A Moment of Grace Read online

  I thought of wars, sometimes, in the first few weeks. Young men born in the 1890s found themselves destined for the trenches; born thirty years later, they fought in the Second World War. Neither chose to belong to generations that went to war, but it made no difference. Why me? Why us? were never helpful questions. Things happen; people, in the end, are small, and our own sense that we can govern our lives’ direction is an illusion borne of fifty years’ peace and prosperity.

  It seemed no more helpful, now, to ask Why us? Neither of us ever felt angry about cancer. At Nicola’s memorial celebration, in London’s Roundhouse, our friend Marcus wrote a beautiful panegyric of a woman whose colleagues and friends in the arts loved her as much as her family did. We talked beforehand and agreed we didn’t want anger in the room. Cancer was just something that happened to us.

  When I heard Joe going down to the kitchen, I got up and followed him. I don’t remember exactly what I said. He was eighteen, then, with A-levels looming in front of him. I didn’t hold off from using the C-word, Cancer. His face stayed calm. I knew I could rely on Joe’s strength – I’ve relied on it ever since.

  We’d had two years with our son after Martha went to university. He’d used them to mature, ducking out from under an older sister’s shadow, and growing closer to us. In those two years Joe had found a new assurance, something like Nicola’s comfort in her own skin. He and Nicola had always been close; she was Joe’s ally when we were together as a family. While Martha and I tended to be frenetic and driven, Nicola and Joe shared an inner calm. Now, Joe took the news of her illness in his stride. I said there were different types of leukaemia. He nodded and asked a few questions, not many. Like his mother, he had the natural grace to know when not to ask too much. Besides, he had a younger sibling’s instinct to take things back to his room, where he could contemplate them without interference. He would process this news in his own way, I knew.

  I texted Nicola: Just told Joe. He’s coming with me at 12.

  The nurse had said not to return before then. Doctors would need to visit, tests to be taken.

  I texted: Told him we were going to withhold scary words from M, and he’s OK with that.

  Martha faced exams the next day. Neither of us wanted to talk of cancer and leukaemia over the phone. Besides, we had no firm news; we hadn’t yet seen the consultants. Maybe it was nothing, like the friend at work who lived with leukaemia under control. The consultant in A&E had told us what they thought it was: Acute Myeloid Leukaemia (AML). It was the first time we’d heard the name. We still didn’t know what it meant.

  I told Martha something was wrong but they weren’t sure what. There was nothing to worry about.

  ‘They’re keeping her in,’ I said over the phone.

  ‘Why?’ My daughter’s voice sounded very small and far away. I wanted to hug her, as if she was still a little girl.

  ‘They’re doing tests,’ I added, not answering the question. ‘To see what’s going on.’

  Afterwards, Martha told me she knew straightaway it was something like cancer. Or at least some part of her knew – but she allowed herself to believe our fiction. I think that was the last time she let herself be treated as a child.

  It was different a year later, when Nicola was sinking in intensive care. Martha, Joe and I went into the consultant’s office together. Our children didn’t want to be shielded from what was happening; they were part of it. We held hands as the consultant told us there was nothing more they could do. He was Italian, a burly man trying not to cry. I could feel Martha and Joe on either side of me as I nodded, asked for some details, thanked him for explaining how she was. Joe asked how long she might have. Martha squeezed my hand.

  The consultant said, ‘We can leave her as she is and she will sink slowly. Perhaps it will take a few hours. Or we can switch off the machines and let her go now.’

  ‘There’s no doubt?’ I asked. My voice didn’t sound like my usual voice.

  He said, ‘No.’

  I looked at Martha, who nodded, then at Joe, who did the same. Then I said firmly, ‘We want to let her go now.’

  Both their childhoods were over by then. A month after Nicola’s death we went away to travel together, bound in grief, buoyed by her strength.

  2

  On the first morning of Nicola’s illness I texted, How r u feeling? Her response came cheerfully back: Feeling fine! By the time Joe and I reached Guy’s they’d moved her to a new ward: Samaritan.

  Over the next year, Samaritan Ward would become a part of our lives. It was one of the kindest places I’ve ever known. Kind but shabby; the staff told us it was due for refurbishment. The vinyl flooring was cracked and the paint faded; notices blu-tacked untidily to the walls of its long, dim corridor warned of infection, untested appliances, and the hot water in the tea caddy. A board of staff mugshots surrounded ‘Nurse of the Month’ in a frame. To either side, doors led to single rooms. At the centre of the ward stood a desk where medical staff tapped at ageing laptops with anglepoise lamps bowed solicitously above them. Open wards, barely wider than corridors, stretched out in two directions. At mealtimes dinner ladies rolled trolleys slowly from bed to bed, wafting behind them a thick smell of hospital food.

  On that Saturday morning I found Nicola sitting up in bed on the open ward. I off-loaded pyjamas and clean knickers, a stack of books, a cotton bag containing play-texts she was judging for a competition. She grinned and kissed me.

  ‘I don’t feel ill at all,’ she complained.

  Doctors had been and more were coming. They’d move her into her own room, they said, as soon as the treatment started – they’d need to guard her against infection. That was our first lesson in cancer treatment: chemotherapy reduces immunity. The treatment could be almost as dangerous as the disease. Neutropenia, induced by the chemo, was the flattening of the body’s immune system. A city without walls, the body’s streets become prey to the infections that lurk in cellars and alleyways, that crawl up from gutters, that live among us, killers, unseen. That would one day kill Nicola, who sat on her bed listing books I should bring. In the first days of her illness, she still had energy, and a fierce will to make illness treat her with respect. She would manage this, she decided, the way she managed the shows she produced: cheerfully and without giving in to stress. So she wanted comfort-reading; she wanted pictures to look at; she wanted her tapestry. I took notes: the hand cream in the bathroom; the grey top without sleeves.

  We met the consultant that evening, a lean man ten years older than us. He wrapped his hands around his legs and spoke breezily, comfortingly, of tried-and-tested courses of treatment. His tone was bracing and faintly gung-ho. ‘We can deal with this’ was one phrase we seized on, the lifting of a death sentence neither of us had acknowledged to be there.

  The treatment would start straightaway, Dr Clay said. As he unwrapped himself and stood up, he added, ‘We’ll give those cancer cells something to think about.’

  ‘It’s going to be all right,’ we repeated to each other. It wasn’t mere bravado, or forlorn hope. We were each letting the other know we weren’t giving in to despair, or panic, or gloom. Hope would be our Marseillaise, stirring us to rise each morning, strengthening us through good tests and bad, through setbacks and disappointments. We never knew Nicola was dying. I have friends who’ve nursed partners through terminal illness where they knew the end was coming. It was worse for them, I think. We never knew there was an end until the very last days of Nicola’s life.

  And with cancer and the risk of death would grow the deepest love we had ever known. Welded to each other like lovers on a hillside, we had eyes, lips, only for one another. Cancer was a storm raging furiously around us. Love was the hut in which we found shelter. Shabby enough, but on a bed laid in one corner we had never held each other so tightly nor felt so intensely each other’s warmth. I can’t feel anger, writing this six months after Nicola died. Much later, I spoke to a friend who had nursed his wife through terminal illness. He
said, ‘Caring for someone you love when they’re dying is the biggest thing you can give them.’ There seems no more point regretting illness than regretting a war or an earthquake. We loved each other perfectly while Nicola was alive.

  On Sunday morning I pulled knickers from her drawer and worked out what she meant by the grey top without sleeves. I loaded the washing machine and sent her a Snapchat of heaped pyjamas to boast how much I’d done. After twenty-eight years and two children, we thought our intimacy was complete. Sickness deepened it.

  Back at Guy’s I found Nicola had been moved into a room with a view of St Paul’s Cathedral. The room was small and square, too small for the fridge, which stood in one corner getting in everyone’s way, or the bedside table, which wandered to and fro on rebellious castors. In the centre was a bed, the room’s masterpiece, an engineering miracle able to roll, incline or hoist patients to any conceivable angle or position. It must have been designed for massive American private hospitals. Squeezed into Nicola’s tiny cell, its headboard struck the anglepoise when she sat up, and its foot caught on the fridge when the nurses tried to lift her. Visitors sitting on the chair hit the control pad with their knees, raising her head uncontrollably, or rolling her from left to right while she tried frantically to reach the remote.

  I stacked books on the window shelf. Peering down, we could see the roofs of cars, and doctors crossing the courtyard. It was the long view that captivated her, though. St Paul’s sailed majestically along the horizon, a liner heading for a foreign port. Later, I brought in pencil and paper and Nicola sketched it inexpertly. Each morning she sent me the same photograph of it, lit afresh by the sunrise, while at night I received blurry Snapchats of the illuminated dome, like an amateur astronomer’s pictures of the rings of Saturn.

  That Sunday morning we looked out of the window and counted the spires of Wren churches, mementoes of an older, sweeter London disappearing under tumorous office blocks. We could see cars, pedestrians, the corner of a street. A life from which we had suddenly withdrawn continued beyond glass, inaudible. Nicola had cried, she admitted, while I’d been away, collecting her things. She introduced me to the nurse who had comforted her, an older woman, a Londoner with a cackling laugh.

  ‘We had a good old weep,’ she said, ‘didn’t we, gel?’

  No one had ever called Nicola ‘gel’ before. We tried to laugh about that, along with the absurdities of the hospital timetable, the television which unaccountably switched itself on and off, and the notice on the fridge which warned against fruit.

  ‘But now I feel fine,’ Nicola insisted. ‘Really. Fine.’

  I had brought in volumes of paintings and drawings. We pinned photographs to the noticeboard. On the wall above the bed hung a picture of a sunset. I filled the fridge with lemonade and Coke bought in the shop downstairs. Our radio perched on her shelf, missing home. We spent Sunday afternoon playing cards. It was only two days since Nicola’s ordeal had begun, and already we were slipping into the routines of illness.

  On Monday I started my new job.

  I sought out one of the partners in the architectural practice I was joining, and told him, standing on the staircase, that my wife had just been diagnosed with cancer. People, strangers, shuffled past us on their way to their desks. His face creased with concern. From the outset, my new practice couldn’t have been more supportive. It was never going to feel normal, though, to sit in the training room being inducted in the email system and the office diary; or to email clients; or sketch over the concert hall I was working on in Edinburgh. Boy, am I inducted, I texted Nicola late Monday morning. She responded, Ha ha starting to feel the same way. Architectural models crowded the shelves. The office banter eddied around a new face. I didn’t tell anyone else that my wife was ill.

  Monday lunchtime, I walked up Southwark Street to the hospital, crossed the bustling reception full of relatives and hurrying doctors, stopped for the lift that went up to the cancer ward. While I waited for someone to answer the bell, I peered through the window at Samaritan, the strange island to which Nicola had been banished. A tea trolley stood askew between two open doors. A patient in a pink gown, bald, shuffled painfully along on a zimmer frame. The world of architecture seemed impossibly far away. It was like peering in on someone else’s dream.

  I found Nicola sitting cross-legged on her bed, stitching at a tapestry cushion cover with the newspaper spread around her. Her mother had been to see her, she told me. All weekend she’d been dreading it, but now she seemed relieved.

  Nicola was her mother’s only child, though her father had children from a previous marriage. She and Anne, her mother, were close. It wasn’t so much that they were alike in character – Nicola had more of her father’s calm than her mother’s boundless energy and willpower. But Anne and Peter had, between them, created the world in which Nicola grew up, and we both shared its values.

  I first met them when I was nineteen and Nicola, a new friend, asked me round one evening. I’d never come across grown-ups who were so interested in others. Peter handed me the strongest gin and tonic I’d ever drunk. Anne came out of the kitchen, from which emerged fragrant smells of something cooking in wine, and introduced me to a group of people of all ages – some friends of Nicola’s and others of theirs. Modern art hung on the walls. A huge vase of flowers nodded white blooms above an antique sideboard. One thing became clear straightaway: that I was expected to talk. Dullness, laziness, self-indulgence, lack of humour – those were the great crimes around Anne’s and Peter’s dinner table. Later, I understood them better: they hated people who were false, dishonest or pretentious; they treasured kindness and good judgement. What was immediately apparent, though, was the value they placed on talking. It might have seemed contrived to our children’s generation. It wasn’t, in Clarendon Road, as glasses were filled and Anne brought course after course of delicious food from the tiny kitchen no one else was allowed to enter. Conversation was the common ground on which different people met; the place ideas could be turned over. It was food for the mind. The talk slipped easily into laughter – pretentiousness was as unwelcome as ignorance – but silence was never allowed to fall. That was the world in which Nicola had grown up, a world in which words were valued and beauty cherished, where ideas were welcome, rather than intimidating. She’d absorbed it without ever realising it, and friends like myself learned it in turn.

  On that first hospital visit, Nicola told me, her mother had brought books and food. She had talked about the practicalities of letting people know, worried about money, then stopped so as not to be seen worrying. I knew she would have taken in everything – the crow’s feet of tiredness by her daughter’s eyes, the determination in her voice. I imagine she wept outside.

  Throughout Nicola’s illness, Anne’s role was harder than mine. I, at least, could be by Nicola’s side, helping her through each day. Anne wouldn’t let herself intrude. When Nicola was in intensive care, a year later, I used to visit before work, then call Anne from the hospital steps.

  She tried to hold herself back from cross-examining me, but failed, of course.

  ‘So she’s better?’

  ‘She’s the same. She’s not worse, and that’s good news.’

  ‘But she’ll get better?’

  ‘The doctors hope so, but it’s going to be slow, Anne.’

  ‘So at least she’s steady?’

  Yearning for good news like water in a desert, for good news that I couldn’t always supply, she had to watch from aside as her only daughter sickened and died.

  On that first visit Anne had brought grapes, even though grapes were not allowed, banned flowers, and piles of books that would have daunted even someone in perfect health.

  ‘She was great,’ Nicola said. ‘She’s being really strong. Now I’m exhausted.’

  Nothing more tiring than worrying about people who are worrying about you. That evening, when I visited again after work, we sent an email to our friends:

  This is to let you all k
now that, although everything’s going to be fine, Nicola’s been diagnosed with a strain of leukaemia, and is in Guy’s at the moment, having treatment. Everyone is being fantastically positive, not least Nicola herself. The doctors are relaxed. There are many forms of leukaemia, and they’re confident of sorting this out. But it will be a rough six months, in and out of hospital.

  Sorry not to have called you individually. Very selfishly, we’d rather you managed any shock by yourselves, and then came out being as positive as the four of us all are. In due course Nicola, who’s fine at the moment, would love calls, texts and emails to help fight the boredom. But don’t be offended if she doesn’t pick up.

  Much love to you all. Nicola really wants me to stress that she’s okay – and indeed she’s looking very cheerful in bed at the moment, with piles of books and a view of St Paul’s.

  That night Nicola texted: Alison Balsom, sudoku, patience, and quite a large supper. I’d given her Alison Balsom’s trumpet recordings of Bach for Christmas. At home, tired from my first day at work, I cooked Joe spare ribs, and we drank beer and watched True Grit. Nicola texted, No reaction at all so far.

  The chemo had started straightaway. They’d put in a ‘Hickman line’. I’d seen it when I visited on Monday evening: three white plastic tubes trailing from Nicola’s chest. The nurses could take blood from them, and pump in chemicals to kill the cancerous cells that were multiplying in her bloodstream and bone marrow. Somehow the Hickman line had brought it home to us that we were in for a long haul.