Take Nothing With You

by Patrick Gale

  ‘So. Great,’ she said. ‘What next?’

  ‘Well . . . I thought I’d invest the profits for once and sit back for a while.’

  ‘You’re far too young to retire.’

  ‘I’ve been living like a retired person for years.’

  She flapped this remark aside. It troubled her when he spoke of his age and retirement as it gave her a glimpse of the end of her own conveyor belt.

  ‘When my time comes,’ she had told him on his previous visit, troubled by a neighbour who had made a bad death , ‘I’d like you to shoot me, very quickly, in the temple, with one of those bolt guns they use on cattle.’ Speed, violence and momentary pain didn’t seem to bother her; loss of dignity was her great horror. And, just possibly, a not quite shaken fear of something beyond. Judgement. Punishment, even.

  ‘The thing is,’ he told her now, ‘I’m not very well. I’ve got cancer.’

  She set down her coffee cup with great care but it rattled against the saucer and redundant spoon.

  ‘Really? You look fine,’ she said. ‘Where is it? The usual? Most men die with that, not of it, you know.’

  ‘No, not prostate,’ he said. ‘Thyroid.’

  She looked blank.

  ‘In my throat. They already cut it out. Look,’ he raised his head and pointed to the scar he was sure was clearly visible still.

  ‘Can’t see a thing,’ she said, not really looking.

  ‘She was a very good surgeon, I think. Anyway, with no thyroid it means I’m on a daily dose of thyroxine for life, and have to have regular blood tests, but I have those anyway. But tomorrow I go in for radiotherapy.’

  ‘Will you lose your hair? I’ve always liked your hair.’

  ‘Apparently not. It’s just a pill. They deliver it in a lead casket and pass it to me with a long tube or something, it’s so radioactive. Then we see. But. You know. It’s still cancer. This one can come back in the lungs or bones, and neither one’s a good prognosis.’

  ‘But you’re not coughing or anything?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You’ll be fine, then. It’s amazing how good the treatments are these days. Now. You need to think about lunch as it’s gone twelve. Shall we eat in here or go to the dining room?’

  And that was an end of the subject.

  He chose the dining room because walking there and back took time and provided subjects and people they could safely discuss, and because he had found the room-service food was never terribly hot.

  He had hardly looked for expressions of emotion or compassion, that would have been out of character, but some concern, even along the selfish lines of who will visit me once a week if you die would have been reassuring.

  As they made their way slowly along the jasmine-scented corridor pausing, as they always did, so she could comment on the enormous flower arrangements or blatantly assess her unsmiling reflection in one of the full-length looking-glasses, he consulted his own feelings to see if he felt anger or disappointment and found he felt relief, if anything, that his small, offstage drama left her placid self-regard untroubled.

  They arrived in time to secure her preferred table, facing the rose garden and affording minimal eye contact with other residents.

  ‘It’s not that I’m not sociable,’ she said, as she always did, as they took their seats there. ‘I’m always very happy to chat over cocktails or if one of them joins me on a bench in the garden, but some of them are such messy eaters now that I feel embarrassed for them and it’s depressing.’

  After she had checked that he was not on a medicine that forbade it, they ordered large glasses of a delicious pinot noir with their boneless guinea fowl.

  ‘I’m always meaning to ask you,’ he said, ‘if you ever run into Carla Gold these days.’

  ‘Carla Gold.’ She said the name slowly, placing it, tasting it almost. ‘Oh. Her. Your . . . Well why ever should I?’

  ‘She lived near here.’

  ‘Yes, but surely she moved far away a long time ago. Even if I did, not that I ever go out really, I doubt I’d recognize her. It was all so long ago. What on earth made you bring her up suddenly?’

  ‘Oh. I dunno. Clifton, I suppose. They had such a lovely house: she and the Boys.’

  She dropped her head to stare hard at a piece of pancetta-wrapped bird before skewering it on her fork. She had wet macular degeneration but was in denial, unsurprisingly. She chewed thoughtfully. He considered a second glass of wine instead of pudding.

  ‘Do you still go to church?’ he asked her.

  ‘What? Oh. Well they lay on a little shuttle service to Christchurch, and the Catholic place, but it’s always Family Communion .’ She pronounced the words as though they tasted bad. ‘So it never feels very special, with ghastly, uncontrolled children rushing everywhere and, well, it’s such a palaver. There’s a priest who comes here, though, once a week, C of E, offering takeaway, as it were. But really that’s a bit embarrassing and she’s a woman so it’s really not the same.’

  ‘Ah.’

  He ordered them each a second glass.

  ‘Naughty,’ she said. ‘You’ll have me on my back,’ and she produced a dry laugh. ‘That woman. No. Not her. The one in the rather loud violet top. I hear her crying sometimes. At night.’

  ‘But that’s awful.’

  ‘It gets so hot so I have my windows open and so does she, and I hear her crying. I actually went out on the terrace once, in the moonlight, and shuffled along in my dressing gown and slippers in the dew to check, and it was definitely her. Crying like a lost child. You’d never know to look at her. Nothing one can do, of course.’ She sipped her wine, gazed out at the roses. ‘I realized the other day that I don’t believe in Hell any more,’ she added. ‘Not really.’

  ‘How reassuring.’

  She glanced sharply at him, well aware of his irony, but chose not to rise to it.

  ‘Yes. Thank you. Delicious,’ she said and let the waitress take away their dishes. ‘It’s just that, well, it takes away the rulebook somehow. Makes you wonder how differently things might have turned out. Coffee here? Or in the library, do you think?’

  He had been given a relatively large dose, he gathered. For twenty-four hours or so after they gave him the pill, he was in total isolation in the lead-lined room. His meals were placed in a sort of airlock from which he could collect them only when a red light turned to green to show him the orderly delivering his tray had safely gone back out into the corridor and unlocked the inner door. He could see people down in the street, of course and, had he wanted to, could watch them on television, but he contented himself with music and thoughts.

  He continued to think about Theo a lot, worried about him, worried that someone with so much yet to offer was so keen to attach himself to someone whose store might be about to empty. But then he remembered his younger self with Gilbert, who he had adored, and who had transformed his life, and made an effort not to worry.

  He was enjoying Naomi’s music. She seemed to have recorded hours and hours of it, though of course transferring sound files was now the work of seconds and hardly the labour of carefully curated love a mix tape had been around the time he met Gilbert. Half-way through her performance of one of the strange, stream of consciousness Britten cello suites, the telephone rang. He had not noticed there was one, so used had he become to telephones being something you carried in your pocket. It was the radiologist checking he was happy for her and a nurse to come in.

  Rustling in their protective suits, they greeted him politely. The nurse took his temperature and pulse and made a few notes. The radiologist then actually ran a Geiger counter over him.

  ‘A little while to go yet,’ she told him. ‘Drink plenty of water, even when you’re not thirsty,’ and she poured and handed Eustace a glass of water, which Eustace obediently drank.

  Once again the heavy door sealed him in, kerthunk . He replaced the ear buds and clicked to return to the beginning of the movement, because Britten’s neurotic cello line
s, thoughts-made-music, made no sense if you came to them half-way through.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  His mother didn’t die. The nurses kept saying she was a fighter, though Eustace failed to see how they could know this when she simply lay there and breathed. He visited every day. It was the nearest he ever came to religious observance. Every afternoon he caught the train and a bus to the hospital to sit by her bed and watch her for a while. He managed to persuade his father to come as well and drive him just twice, but the one great dramatic act of driving overnight to Scotland to fetch him seemed to have sapped his father’s reserves of energy and altruism. He was sliding deeper and deeper into a near-wordless passivity; cared for by Mrs Fowler and the staff in the home, he had effectively become a resident.

  It emerged that Mrs Fowler was a formidable organizer. Sighing that his father could not be expected to continue under the circumstances with all he usually did , she discreetly assumed the reins of the house, receiving deliveries of all the goods he used to drive to fetch and occasionally asking Eustace to play the man by changing a lightbulb or putting out the rubbish, even though he suspected she only left such tasks undone to humour him.

  So he got into the habit of visiting his mother alone, taking the train to Bristol then the bus to the hospital, and asking his father for the money to do so. The nurses began to greet him like an old friend and he soon knew his path through the hospital without needing to consult the coloured signs.

  ‘Talk to her,’ they said. ‘Let her know you’re there!’

  And he did try, but he had never been an especially chatty boy and it felt artificial to become one now. He did touch the back of her hand however, and allowed himself to kiss her cheek and would simply say, ‘Hello again. It’s only me,’ assuming that was enough and that she could recognize his voice.

  The car was a write-off, apparently, so badly damaged the insurers said it was a miracle anyone had survived. If this could be called surviving. His father and Mrs Fowler took delivery of a brand-new version of the destroyed one. It sat gleaming and unused in the drive like a boldly stated lie asserting that nothing had changed.

  As his father took to sitting in the day room with the guests, occasionally playing silent games of patience, Granny began to talk loudly to him about that woman and Eustace, listening patiently to her, realized she had never liked his mother, not even slightly.

  ‘He should never have married that woman,’ she told him. ‘I knew she’d be trouble. A restless soul. Like trying to hold a cat when it doesn’t want to be held.’ And she mimed scratching his face.

  He didn’t pay this much attention as she was clearly beginning to go a bit peculiar, sometimes spending hours at a time flicking through her bible in search of a verse she could never find apparently, sometimes giving no sign of recognition for a few minutes after he entered her room.

  ‘You’ve grown so,’ she would say by way of apology, as though he was deliberately disguising himself.

  He had not seen Vernon since their last meeting before he went to Scotland and Vernon’s awkward departure had left behind it a worry about how the friendship would resume. Starting at Broadelm Comprehensive in September, their routines would be utterly disrupted and he feared Vernon would make new friends and leave him behind as a reminder of activities he would rather forget.

  So he was touched when Vernon showed up at the front door with a bunch of flowers one morning and said, ‘I’m sorry about your mother. Could I visit her with you?’

  For a silly moment, glancing through the front door window, Eustace had thought the flowers were for him, but he was still touched. The train ride into Bristol and the short bus journey gave them a chance to recover lost ground. He answered all Vernon’s questions, told him all about Ancrum and Jean Curwen. Or nearly all. He found he preferred not to tell him about Turlough.

  ‘How did you hear about my mother?’ he asked.

  ‘Oh . . .’ Vernon thought a moment, head slightly on one side in the attitude he sometimes adopted of a much older person. ‘Let me think. Of course, it was Mrs Cobb. She cleans for us as well. Twice a week.’

  Eustace was briefly bemused by this rare glimpse into Vernon’s home life. He pictured Vernon and his father solemnly lifting their slippered feet as Mrs Cobb ran the Hoover beneath them, whistling tunelessly between her teeth. Mrs Cobb also cleaned at the hotel that catered exclusively to the blind. She said it had left her always meticulous about replacing things in exactly the same positions after she had dusted, though she knew her predecessor at the place had taken to moving furniture around out of malice.

  Vernon surprised Eustace afresh when they reached the intensive care unit. He greeted Eustace’s mother with something approaching tenderness, touching the back of her hands, as Eustace always did, and holding his flowers beneath her nose for a few seconds so that she might breathe in their scent. Scents, he assured Eustace, especially of herbs and flowers, were tremendously stimulating to the brain.

  ‘Just think how readily you wake at the smell of toast,’ he reminded him.

  There was no change in his mother that day, but Eustace liked the thought that the scent of his friend’s flowers might be stirring her steadily as she slept on.

  Feeling their friendship had just reached another level, he dared to be bold as they walked back to Temple Meads from the bus stop.

  ‘Tell me about your mother,’ he said. ‘You never mention her.’

  ‘Because she died when I was very little,’ Vernon said. ‘People feel awkward when I mention her, so I tend not to.’ In the thoughtful silence that followed this, Eustace felt Vernon draw his cloak of tweedy privacy back about himself.

  On his way in one day, just after term had started, he met Carla Gold. It was unmistakably her, even from behind. She managed to look as though she had stepped briefly down from another, more stylish world but now was taking her gracious leave from this place where people waddled around in sports clothes or ugly uniforms. He even caught a faint whiff of her spicy scent as he walked over from the doors. She was standing with an overnight bag by her side, leaning on a crutch and, to his horror, with her right arm in a sling. She was waiting for someone.

  She was equally startled to see him and he was moved that she evidently knew all about everything from the way she cried out his name and hugged him, rocking him slightly.

  ‘I’m so sorry,’ she said. ‘So sorry. It was all so . . . And you had to cut short your course?’

  ‘Only by a day. Your leg,’ he said, ‘and . . .’ He gestured at her sling.

  ‘Oh,’ she glanced down. ‘I managed to break both my hip and my arm. Actually the arm was just a simple fracture, thank heavens, and it’s all fixed now and I can go home and lie on my own bed. It could have been so much worse . . . How is she?’

  ‘No change,’ he said. And her kindness and beautiful searching gaze made him melt inside in a way he simply couldn’t deal with just then, so he coughed. ‘Jean is everything you said she was.’

  ‘She is, isn’t she? You loved it?’

  ‘I really want to go back. She said if I go back at Easter, she’ll consider taking me full time.’

  ‘No! Really? That’s incredible!’ She was overdoing her reactions somehow, which was odd. ‘How’s the new school?’

  ‘Oh,’ he said. ‘It’s not so bad. But I’d like to start lessons again. Maybe . . .’ He glanced down at her crutch.

  ‘Oh. Yes,’ she said. ‘Of course. And we must. Everything’s a bit chaotic just now but, look, ring me at half-term. Maybe just after? And we can sort something out. If your father’s, well . . . Oh. Here’s Louis to fetch me. He had to leave the car miles away, I think.’

  Eustace carried her case through the doors for her to where Louis was getting out of the car. Louis gave him a gratifying bear hug and ruffled his hair as though he were a child, but because it was him, Eustace didn’t mind.

  ‘Can we give you a lift to the station?’ Louis asked.

  ‘Oh. No. It’s
fine. I’m on my way in actually,’ Eustace said and watched them drive off.

  One day a priest was at his mother’s bedside when he got to the hospital. Eustace stared at him from the far side of the room. He was strikingly handsome, with silver hair cut so short it was tempting to reach out and feel the buzz of it against his palm. He looked like a cross between Steve McQueen and Peter Graves, who played the silver-haired character in Mission Impossible . Or like some smooth hitman in a Hitchcock film. Vicars had no business being handsome, Granny said; it gave them an unfair advantage. They were supposed to look like Dick Emery or the owlish one in Dad’s Army . Something made this priest turn on his chair, so he saw Eustace and jumped up.

  ‘You must be the son,’ he said and held out his hand. ‘I’m the father. Haha.’

  Eustace came forward, reached out his hand and was disconcerted that the priest didn’t simply shake it but clapped his other one on the back of it, making a sort of hand sandwich. His eyes were the blue of a hot sky, made all the more intense by his silver hair and early autumn tan. ‘I’m Father Tony,’ he said.

  ‘I’m Eustace,’ Eustace told him. ‘Are you the hospital chaplain? Is she dying now?’

  ‘I’m sure she isn’t.’

  He steered Eustace towards his mother’s bed, where Eustace carefully placed a chair on the opposite side to Father Tony’s. Quickly, with a touch of possessiveness, he touched the warm back of his mother’s right hand and kissed her cheek, whispering,

  ‘Hello. It’s only me.’

  ‘I don’t work here,’ Father Tony went on. ‘I was just visiting a couple of friends who are in for operations. A friend who’s a nurse here always tells me if there’s someone who she thinks needs me or . . . who isn’t being visited much.’

  Eustace noted the waxy ridge on his mother’s ring finger where the nurses had taken off her wedding ring for his father to keep safely at home along with Grandpa’s special watch. It was a small reminder that hospitals were public places, almost the street, given the freedom with which complete strangers could come to one’s bedside.