A Moment of Grace Read online

  3

  Our children were partying, that summer. Martha sent photos of Cambridge balls. She hated the dressing up and formality, she told us on the phone, but photos showed her radiant. Joe joined a party on the Thames, texting Nicola as they drifted past Guy’s, with music blaring and lights shining on the oily surface of the river. Nicola was back in for her second course of treatment. We watched the summer from her window. When the hot weather began in earnest, the roof terraces below us filled up with office parties, sunshades, people drinking Pimm’s and cold beer: tiny, distant figures going through routines that had once belonged to us. She sketched St Paul’s. Back in Guy’s garden, we ate sandwiches perched on the wall next to beds of poppies. We walked around the hospital, waiting for her counts to fall again.

  There was a chapel in the outer courtyard. Neither of us had ever been religious, but we both liked visiting churches. Inside was a lofty eighteenth-century room whose floor and wooden gallery smelled of wax. Tall windows cast a limpid, clear light across the rows of pews. Had either of us needed faith, it would have been of this sort: rational, suffused with light.

  There was a church we often visited in Suffolk, on the River Deben, that had become one of our favourite places. Its round tower was said to have been used as a lookout against Vikings. Inside were box pews and a high pulpit. The altar was a simple table, and the glass in the windows so old you could see nothing through them; they just admitted light, bathing the worn stone floor, the whitewashed walls that bloomed mould, and the single bellrope looped up in one corner of the tower. There were no statues or saints. Outside, unseen, were the endless sky, and the sea’s horizon. The air drifting in through the door smelled of nettles and salt.

  We went there on our boat. We’d started sailing when Martha was six and Joe four. I’d grown up with the sea. My father’s family had been in the Navy, and my childhood was full of sea stories. As a child I sailed on the Norfolk Broads, and later, out into the North Sea. After my father had a stroke, my mother used to drive him to Shotley Point, so he could look at the sea. The last time I saw him, lying in the hospital at Ipswich, I held his hand and described us sailing down the river, as if I were telling him a story. He couldn’t answer, but after a moment he turned his head towards me and tried to smile.

  When Martha was six and Joe four, we bought an old boat, Kismet, and a larger, even shabbier one, Zylippe, when their legs grew too long for its bunks. We sailed to Holland. Halfway across the North Sea, lights shone all around us: stars; the shipping lanes marked out by navigation lights; the dim green glow on our instruments. Black waves lifted and fell about us, unseen. While Martha and I kept watch, Nicola and Joe slept below, wrapped in orange blankets. Everything I cared for and loved was held in that tiny boat rocking on the vast sea, as in a cupped hand. I think it was the happiest moment of my life.

  We sailed to be alone together; to make the world shrink; to shut out its din and see further. On our boat there was no telephone or email. We had nothing but each other, books, a basket of food. Sails could take us anywhere; we were cocooned.

  Cancer was the same, our cocoon. Or maybe cancer was the dark sea around us.

  Nicola went back into Samaritan for her second round of chemo on 13 July. Call when you can, she texted. Am doctor’d, prodded, obsv’d and had a shower.

  The doctors started chemo the same day. This visit shouldn’t be so long, they said. They would allow Nicola home when the chemo was done, and we could manage the recovery by ourselves. She had no sign of cancer, the consultant told us; things were going well. The battle now was to make sure leukaemia never came back.

  That conflict was waged inside Nicola’s body, in her blood: a foreign war, known only through the news reports that arrived on the registrar’s laptop. As the drugs took hold again she combed out wisps of hair. The flesh shrank back around the bones of her face and her trousers hung slack about her hips. The hospital food was inedible, she said. Her fingers, stitching away at her tapestry, seemed longer than before; her wedding and engagement rings twisted easily over the joint. When I pressed my cheek against her forehead, at night, I could smell chemicals.

  By now, Samaritan Ward had become a second home, a place where we felt at ease. It wasn’t faultless, of course. Sometimes prescriptions went astray. Coming to visit, I could find myself stranded outside the locked door for ten minutes – the entryphone was always out of order. But Samaritan was its own strange, kind, shabby universe, and we wouldn’t have wanted to be anywhere else. Its people made it special, despite the scuffed lino and the appalling food; despite the broken alarm bleating endlessly along the corridor. At mealtimes, old women pushed trolleys from door to door, talking in the same sweet, soft Jamaican we heard on the bus to Brixton. Many of the nurses were Filipino. We glimpsed how tough their lives were. Most lived far away and the shifts were punishing. It was easy to picture the long bus journeys home to children in crowded flats. On the ward, though, the nurses seemed endlessly happy. They worked without pause, and their commitment was awe-inspiring. One day, the matron discovered that Nicola’s nurse didn’t know how to give a certain kind of injection so she demonstrated on her own arm and found all the nurses later, in the staff room, practising on themselves.

  Many of the nurses became friends. They liked being assigned to Nicola. She talked about their families, gossiped, remembered to thank them for the cleaning, and the drugs and the endless rounds of ‘obvs’. Junior doctors lingered awkwardly at the door, hugging sheafs of notes. Nicola’s friendliness wasn’t polish or empty charm; she had been brought up to care more for people than anything else. She was always more acute about people than me – she saw their faults – but also more forgiving. She expected perfection in no one, found virtues in most. The NHS, that great expression of human kindliness, ground massively around us. We were in awe of it: that it could heal populations and yet cherish individuals, as it cared for her. Next door, cranes revolved over the building site for a new clinic. We told ourselves again and again how lucky we were to be ill at the heart of London, in one of the world’s greatest centres for cancer research.

  Around us, patients came and went. Old men lay in side rooms, biding time. Newcomers sat up on their beds, eyes shocked and visitors tearful, clutching their hands. We recognised the look on their faces – we’d experienced the same sudden overturning of our own world, seven weeks before. Nicola joked that she felt like an old prisoner when new convicts are brought in.

  Sitting dressed on her bed, Nicola emailed friends. We were lucky in our friends. We’d known from the start we could rely on them. Like circus artists trusting the strength of the wires that support them, the safety of the net, we’d been able to let go and fall softly into their arms. They sent books, music, suggestions for television shows. Piles of detective stories built up by Nicola’s bed. In the evening she sent me a photo of City lights, taken from her bedroom window. They looked like the lights of ships, floating on a vast black sea.

  Our friend Nettie was over from America with her daughters. I cooked a barbecue for her birthday and showed photos to Nicola. We slipped back into the routines of hospital.

  At weekends the ward was quiet. The entrance lobby would be deserted when I arrived on Saturday morning, the lifts empty and the corridors pleasantly silent. It felt like entering a kind of haven. We had no parties to go to, no shopping to do, or plays to attend. I would stop at the dingy supermarket for a paper. Sitting in Nicola’s visitor chair, unhurried, I would read aloud theatre reviews and foreign news. They sounded like reports from an exotic continent. We did the crossword together. We talked, often about the same things, picking endlessly over Joe’s A-levels, or how our children were coping with Nicola’s illness. The banalities of a husband’s and wife’s life together were suddenly precious, now they were under threat, pebbles revealed as gems. Each conversation had a dreadful weight. When I called each morning to ask how Nicola had slept, the answer mattered; it wasn’t just a routine question. To fill a bag with
socks or shirts was a gift to her more heartfelt than any jewellery or perfume.

  On weekdays I visited Nicola each lunchtime. Hurrying from the office, I stopped at a newsagent on Borough High Street to buy her a newspaper, and at Pret’s next door for my own sandwich. We met in Guy’s courtyard. The sun shone. It felt as if the summer would never end, as if – this year, for us – time had snagged on an underwater rock, and now hung still; as if there would be an endless succession of these meetings. At one o’clock Nicola would always be waiting for me with a blue headscarf and a cardigan against the cold, and would be with me for one hour – no more – like a princess bewitched, like a girl held captive by an ogre. For a week or two it felt as if time had stopped altogether.

  Sometimes, since she died, I’ve been back to the courtyard to eat a sandwich, sitting on the wall around the grass where office workers chat in groups, and tired-looking nurses lie back and close their eyes to the sun. I imagine Nicola walking along the corridor towards me, head in a scarf, before I return to work. I want to feel time loosen, as it did then; as if it might become so malleable it could even let me back. I want to fall into an enchanted sleep and find myself back in that summer, with Nicola beside me.

  I visited again after work each night. On the way home, late, I stopped in the eighth-floor lift lobby and looked out at the City, lights shining in the summer dusk. I cycled home along Tabard Alley, dodging potholes and loose stones. Everyone was away on holiday. On the doormat I found postcards from Greece and Spain. The space in the bed beside me yawned like a grave’s mouth. One day I flew up to Edinburgh for work and, high above the Midlands, saw both coasts at once: the Severn to my left, and the curve of Suffolk when I looked eastwards. The plane’s engines roared in my ears. I hadn’t realised, until then, that it was possible to see everything at once.

  Suddenly, unexpectedly, midway through Nicola’s second treatment, we found that we were happy.

  We were alone together – close together – and at peace. Nothing disturbed us. In the clamorous routines of our lives before illness, we had hardly ever stopped. Our days were busy, full of work, of our family and friends, of people. All that had vanished now. Suddenly we found ourselves alone in fog. Eyes on one another, we took one step forward, and then another. We held hands. We pressed each footstep carefully into the grass, like travellers crossing a marsh, feeling for firm ground. Not once did we raise our heads to look ahead. Nothing mattered but the next step. Living in the moment was cancer’s gift to us, in our last year together.

  We found ourselves alone on a sea, bewitched. Never had we been able to see each other so clearly. Never had we so clearly registered our own happiness.

  Two weeks passed. The last slug of chemo was forced into Nicola’s chest line. She texted, Sleep beautifully my darling and dream about me. Nicola was young, for a leukaemia patient, and strong. The doctors allowed her home after barely more than a week. She wasn’t high-risk, they thought, she would recover by herself. I went to the hospital to pick up her medicines. A plastic bag of strong drugs tugged at my handlebars as I cycled home.

  With the chemo working through her system, Nicola’s counts ticked slowly down, recording approaching danger like the altimeter of a diving plane. Cavalier about infection, she went shopping, but nothing happened.

  Then, one morning when she checked her temperature, the figure in the digital window recorded 37.9. She called the duty doctor at Samaritan. She didn’t feel ill, she said, but the doctor told her to take no chances: she should go to A&E immediately.

  A&E was the only gateway to hospital admission. To us, it was one of the frustrations of the system: a neutropenic cancer patient, vulnerable to infection, had to wait alongside the urgently sick, and then be sent a mile across London to be treated. I got a text at work: Still waiting for transport. When Nicola finally reached Guy’s there was no free bed in Samaritan so they put her in the adjacent ward. She didn’t seem worried. She texted me to bring in her make-up bag and some soap. It was the last day of July.

  ‘Infections happen the whole time,’ said the doctor who came to check on her. ‘They might be something you catch in the street, they might be something you already had in you. We all have infections. Our immune systems keep them under control.’

  Nicola’s immune system was gone, for the moment, wiped out by chemotherapy. We went back to the newspapers and waited for the antibiotics to work. She didn’t like being in a strange ward; Samaritan had become home. To pass the time we planned our next weekend away, a treat to ourselves before the third round of treatment. Although they promised nothing, the doctors thought her counts should be back up by mid-August, and the infection ought to be gone by then. Nicola found a hotel and restaurant at Mistley, at the head of the River Stour. It was near where we kept our boat, so we hoped to get a day’s river sailing as well. Joe, his A-levels over, offered to come up from London to help.

  Days passed – wasted days, so far as we were concerned. Martha sent photos from Norway, where she’d gone for a summer holiday with her boyfriend. Stuck in Guy’s, Nicola waited for her temperature to drop, but it stayed stubbornly high. Hand cream, lip salve, radio lead, she texted. More socks, underwear and a dressing gown. And eventually: No temperature now. That night we watched Nashville on separate screens a mile away from each other, texting comments on the characters. She finished, Dozing off. Good night my most wonderful husband, love you so much xxxxx.

  The next day, infection-free, she was so eager to escape they had to lock up her medicine to stop her leaving.

  We celebrated freedom with a walk in Greenwich Park. The long view from the hill was full of hurrying clouds. Grass surged over the ridges. We held hands. The wind, scouring Blackheath, smelled of leaves and traffic. We both felt free. Nicola was still tired, but illness seemed treatable. The sun shone as she gripped my elbow. At the end of an alleyway we found a Henry Moore bleached copper green in the bright, clear light. London’s horizon encircled us; we felt on top of the world. That was the moment, I think, when we began to talk about what sickness had given us. The solitude it had drawn around us, a close awareness of each other’s presence while the world grew more distant; a stilling of background noise; a sense of privacy, like a curtain drawn around our love for each other. Cancer was an eminence from which we could see farther than ever before to a horizon which curved around us in a sharp, distant line. However dangerous the sea, we knew where we were. However uncertain the future, we had clear sight of it. We were as happy together as we had ever been.

  The hotel at Mistley was comfortable. Our bed filled a small dark room on the first floor. We walked past a dock closed off by Heras fencing. Abandoned sheds surveyed a narrowing creek pinched between mudflats and a rotting harbour wall. Swans paddled past the buoys marking the channel. At night we could hear the hoot of the Harwich train.

  Next day, we went for our last sail together, although we didn’t know it then. Joe met us at Ipswich station. We cast off and sailed out through Harwich harbour, our sails filling fitfully in a gentle wind. We turned up the River Stour, heading for Wrabness. Nicola sat contentedly in one corner of the cockpit, reading a book. There wasn’t much wind, just enough to keep us gliding past the riverbanks with the tide behind us. We passed Erwarton Point, where once, when our children were young, we would paddle ashore for picnics. They christened the beach ‘Whalebone Sands’ because of the bleached tree trunks washed up on the shingle. We remembered our friends John and Caroline driving down from London to meet us there. We pitched a tent on the shore and retreated into it when the rain came. Caroline had breast cancer. She died a year later but we still have a photograph of her stooping in the tent, laughing.

  Halfway upriver a dredger was manoeuvring. At Parkstone Quays a huge cruise liner awaited passengers. Through binoculars we could see swimming pools and an atrium. Someone, perhaps a sailor, jogged doggedly around an upper deck. Sun gilded the water. Its surface sparkled towards the woods on the far bank, a yacht tacking, two ducks nos
ing at a buoy. At Wrabness we ate lunch in the cockpit. We couldn’t be bothered to pump up the inflatable dinghy and row ashore; we thought we’d be coming back. Our sailing holidays and weekends together had been some of our closest times as a family. We’d watched our children growing up in and out of boats. In the evenings we lit hurricane lamps and played cards in the cabin, while the night drew in around us and the sea breathed the cold salt smell of the marshes. We crossed the Thames Estuary, and out there, between the sandbanks, saw a porpoise leap clear of the water and plunge back into its element, leaving behind no more than an impression of a fin, a shape, a moment of grace.

  After lunch Joe and I sailed us home. The wind had strengthened. Zylippe heeled in a gust, accelerated; we heard the clop of water under her bows. We knew our children were about to leave home. It wasn’t just cancer that was changing us; life always moves on. We’d talked of selling our boat and travelling more. Things come to a natural end. On the reach up to the marina we went through the familiar ritual of furling sails and hanging out fenders, as we had so many times before.

  We turned into the harbour entrance, moored, locked up, and drove away. We didn’t know then that we’d never go back. When Nicola died, my brother sold the boat for me. My niece turned up on our doorstep one Sunday evening with a plastic box full of our books, charts, cushions, all that was left.

  4

  It’s Christmas now, six months since Nicola died. Martha, Joe and I didn’t want to spend Christmas at home. Instead, we’ve come to Rome. We found a flat on Airbnb. Friends are staying nearby.

  I used to know Rome well. Partly, of course, we want to avoid a Christmas that brings back too many memories, and we want to be together. But I also want to be somewhere that anchors me in the time before Nicola, to prove that I haven’t lost everything.