Without Her

by Rosalind Brackenbury

  “It’s not easy. But she’s determined.”

  “Have you told the children?”

  “She didn’t want to. But yes, of course. I told her it was essential.”

  I hear a new firmness to his tone; he has had to assume responsibility, even contradict her. I look at his profile as he drives, and see the bone structure, the nose, the lifted chin, the proud—or is it shortsighted?—stare ahead down the road we are on. Trees on both sides of us, then the land opens and empties as we drive towards the coast. A pheasant scoots across the road with its whirring croak, vanishes into low undergrowth.

  “I can’t wait to see her.”

  “I’m afraid you’ll see a difference. She’s weaker. Physically, I mean. We have a nurse coming in.”

  “So, it’s to be soon, you think?”

  “Not sure. She hasn’t fixed the date yet. She wants to be here for her birthday, in April. Maybe after that.”

  “I’m sorry I can only stay for such a short time. Still have to work—but after next spring I’ll be free.”

  “It’ll make a difference, Claude, that’s the point. She is so looking forward to seeing you.”

  The white road going east narrows and we come into the village, past low houses with the lights coming on under the blotted silhouettes of big trees, sycamore and ash. His house is the last one. I remember the walnut tree at the gate. As he turns the car into the drive, I think: I am connected to these people as I am to no one else. They are my family. And yes, there she is in the lighted kitchen, sitting at the table, her face bright with pleasure at seeing me, and as I bend to hug her, we are both in tears.

  “Oh, Claude. Coming all this way to find me.”

  “It’s only a hop across the pond.”

  “Still. You’re working.”

  “Only a few weeks more, after this. I’ve a light load, until April. Half the work and half the pay. Then, I’m free!”

  “I can’t tell you—oh, it’s good to see you.”

  Her voice is deeper, then whispery at times, and her words come more slowly, as if she’s searching for them. I see her left arm limp at her side. A stick, propped against the table edge. Her blonde hair is short and closer to white.

  “Go on, Phil, take her to her room. You must be flaked out, Claude, aren’t you? Then come down and we’ll have a drink and talk, until whoever’s energy gives out first.”

  I follow Phil, who carries my small bag upstairs, the creaking stairs I remember, the turn on the landing, the carpeted corridor, yes, I remember, the bathroom, and at the end of the passage, the guest bedroom. It’s a cottage, their house, built in flint and brick with low ceilings, uneven floors. I’m home, I think. This is as close to home as I’ll ever get, after my years of exile. Yet I had to leave to discover it, as I had to leave her.

  When I come downstairs, I notice the photographs on the landing and windowsills: the twins as children, laughing. The wedding. The two of them, their best man—Who was he? Someone from Cambridge?—and myself in my Biba dress and hat, bought hastily in London for the occasion as in California at that time I had no real clothes. A lineup, facing the future with such insouciance, raising our glasses to it all.

  She sips from a cup, using a straw. “Maybe this makes it more alcoholic, who knows?”

  She has her food pureed. “Kind of boring, but babies seem to like it.” I think of her pleasure in the ham sandwiches we made, only a few months ago.

  Phil helps her to bed, in what used to be the TV room, where she has her favorite painting, a seascape, above her bed, and her books around her.

  We hug, long and heartfelt. She says, “I’m hoping for next spring, see. Thought I’d see in one more birthday. Will you come?”

  “Of course, if I can get away.” I remember, of course I do, her April birthday, as she remembers mine, in September. She will be sixty-nine.

  Alone in my room that evening, I look out towards the east, towards what seems like the permanent pale glow over the sea, to where the land ends, to where we saw it when we were children, just along this same coast where the drowned villages are deep underwater and people used to say they heard the bells of churches long sunk beneath the sea. Then I draw the curtains, undress and fall on the bed, and stretch my limbs out to its corners. I curl and uncurl my toes, feel all my extremities, am aware of the warmth between my legs, in my stomach. I can feel pleasure in my whole body, just in its existence—in spite of the fatigue of travel, maybe because of it. It’s mine, all mine. A vast quiet darkness gathers at the back of my eyes as they close.

  In the morning, breakfast is laid out for me at the kitchen table and Phil is already busy in his office, with his secretary who comes in the mornings. The press is expanding, just when he had thought of retiring, he has told me. He’s taking on some essays and fiction, as well as the environmental writing that’s popular now. There’s a young Scottish writer, he says, who walks about Scotland and has written a marvelous book, doing very well.

  He comes in, perches at the table beside me, a half-drunk cup of coffee in one hand. “Sleep well?”

  “I hardly moved.”

  “I’m glad to have a minute. Stephanie will answer the phone. Hannah’s still asleep after all the excitement of your arrival. The nurse will be here at ten.” Like this he describes his household, how he has organized it around this changing, transforming being that is Hannah.

  I say, “I did want to ask you. How it’s been. You seem to be managing magnificently, Phil, but it must have been hard.”

  He pushes the toast rack towards me. “Boiled egg? I’ve put the coffee on.” Then, “Well, it’s not been easy, I can tell you. She doesn’t want me to tell anyone, so I’ve had to tell a few lies, gloss things over, you know, hint that it might be Parkinson’s, but we aren’t sure. No firm diagnosis yet. Luckily, out here we don’t see that many people. The kids come, but they’re busy, and it’s a trek to get here. She wants to stay at home until it’s the moment to go.”

  “But you. When did she tell you?”

  “When we both got home, in the summer. What a different time. I can’t believe it’s only been months. I was furious and very upset, and at first I couldn’t accept it. Even the way she’d treated us all by disappearing seemed almost trivial beside her making that decision alone. I felt excluded, yes, and as if she didn’t trust me or even particularly care how I felt. It seemed as if our marriage counted for nothing. Then I did begin to understand, that it is the sort of thing you have to decide alone. Yes, she was right, I would have tried to dissuade her. Part of me still wants to. Part of me still wants to save her. But I can’t.”

  The coffeepot starts to hiss and he gets up to fetch it. The room is quiet, otherwise, and everything feels very normal.

  “Claude, you know, it’s against everything I believe in, as far as I believe, but it’s also her life. She isn’t me. And I’ve been hers, as you know, from the very beginning, when we first met in Cambridge. I’ve had to accept that all I can do is support her as best I can.”

  I see his hand tremble above my coffee cup. “I think that’s admirable.”

  “Admirable or not, I haven’t any other choice.”

  “And, the kids? I mean, they aren’t kids, of course, but how did they take it?”

  “Disbelief, shock, anger. You can imagine. Piers was the worst, oddly enough. I think Melissa took her mother’s side almost at once, she just cried a lot. But Piers—he wanted me to prevent her, he kept looking up more possible cures on the Internet, and going on about Stephen Hawking. I shut him up by just telling him it is her life, and he must grow up and accept it. He went away in a huff, but he got it. Since then—well, they’ve both been good, they call often to talk, but they aren’t here. Actually, it’s a relief that they aren’t here.”

  “Really? You don’t feel too alone?”

  “I’m with her.” He smiles. “How co
uld I feel alone? The kids came later. We two were there from the beginning. Just us. It’s how I like it.”

  “It’s gone faster than we’d thought, hasn’t it?”

  “Yes. Time seems to be rushing, suddenly. It’s why I have to treasure every minute.”

  I sip my coffee and accept the egg he hands me, damp patches drying on it fast, and set it in my eggcup. Everything has to seem as normal as possible, he has decided. He’s right, I think; this framework both soothes and protects us, and allows us the space we need in which to assimilate the rapid changes taking place.

  Yet I have to ask him. “Phil, you know she asked Alexandre Dutot to come with us?”

  “Yes, of course.”

  “And you’re okay with that?”

  He faces me: I’ve punctured the normality, the calm. But he looks serene—only a slight tic, a vein at his temple. “Yes, I’m okay with it. It’s what she wants. We’re just doing what she wants now.” Then he adds, not looking at me, “He’s been in her life too. As of course have you. I’ve always known she was not entirely mine.”

  “Oh, Phil.”

  “Well, none of us belongs entirely to anyone, isn’t that so?”

  “You probably know too—he and I have been lovers for many years.”

  “Claude, I don’t have to be protected anymore. Do you understand? You and he—whatever you do, it’s your affair. Hannah—she’s all I’ve got, and I soon won’t have her. Nothing else matters any more. You see? I’ve got to the end of all that. Really. You don’t have to look after me. Now, eat your breakfast.”

  Then his secretary, Stephanie, looks round the door to ask about an order, and he goes back to work. Life goes on, this is what he is showing me; his house is in order; he is not the panicked man of last summer, when he did not know where she was, but calm and even purposeful now that she is with him till the end.

  I finish my breakfast and slip into Hannah’s room, to be there when she wakes, before the nurse comes.

  “Hannah? Han?”

  “Oh, darling, it’s you. How lovely. I thought I was dreaming. But you’re really here.”

  “Yes, I’m really here.”

  “Now tell me.” She reaches out a warm arm to pull me closer. “Have you heard from Alexandre? Is he still onboard?”

  “We emailed a few times. Yes, I think so.” I don’t tell her that the emails have been short, even curt, and that I have not had one from him for at least a month.

  “How are you, the two of you? You and Alexandre?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t know that we are a two anymore.”

  “Not because of what I told you?”

  “No. Because of—oh, the passage of time. Things change, they have to.”

  “Do they? I suppose so. It’s sad, though. You’ve loved him for so long.”

  “Well, it seems that we’re all on to a new stage.”

  She says, “Well, that’s certainly true for me. Phil has been marvelous, all round. You can’t imagine. What a brick.”

  I smile at her old-fashioned slang. “He’s certainly that. Han, he’s just told me he’s okay about Alexandre coming.”

  “I told him the truth about everything. I had to. All the lies and inventions. He simply said, it’s the past, it’s over, we have to pay attention to now. Water under the bridge. Isn’t it funny how that image has stuck around? I mean, water always looks as if it’s not going anywhere, when it goes under bridges, it always looks the same.”

  “That was it?”

  “Yes. He didn’t want to know who it was. He was quite clear about that. Then when we talked recently, he said, nothing like that matters anymore. What we did when we were younger. He’s remarkable, in his way, I really see that now.”

  “He’s a good man.”

  She says, almost casually, “By the way. The twins. They are not Alexandre’s, in case you wondered. But he somehow made it easier for me to go back to Phil that time. It’s strange, isn’t it, how things work out? He made me feel better, and I went home and got pregnant.”

  She has decided on her version. Phil has decided what matters for him. So has Alexandre. It’s only me who is still thinking about that long-ago time when she slept with my lover. When she knew what he smelled like, when they were naked together for a first time. When she—but I can decide too, perhaps, that that one event, that small series of events that was Hannah and Alexandre, their nakedness, their closeness excluding me, holds no danger now.

  “Isn’t it strange, so much seems to depend on whether we think we’re still the same person we were? We are still us, don’t you think?” We look at each other. “The eyes don’t change, anyway.”

  “No. But what they see does.”

  “I see you, Claude, I’d know you anywhere.”

  “And you. Coming here, I can see it. Yet you’ve changed so much.”

  “Not just for the worse?”

  “You are more you. More complete.”

  “Shame, just as I’m about to fall apart.” Then she says, shifting a little in the bed, holding out a hand to me, so that I take it, “But look, we have to talk about everything now, because next time maybe I won’t be able to. Apparently this disease comes in two forms, one called bulbar, affecting speech, the other affecting limbs first. I seem to have got the limbs one. But in the end—well, it all goes pear-shaped. So we must make the most of the time.”

  “That’s what Phil said. He seems so calm and serene compared with last summer.”

  “I told him about my plan,” she says, “As soon as I got home from Paris. He was shocked, at first. Then he cried like a kid, and when he was done, he said, I want to be with you in whatever you’re doing more than I want to make you stay. And then I cried like a kid too, and there we were. I’d really underestimated him, Claude. I thought he’d try to hold on to me, or make me feel bad about the children or something, that it would be too complicated, you know. But I was wrong. Oh, I’ve had to learn so much in the last little while. You wouldn’t believe it.”

  I’m close to her on the bed, holding her hand that feels very thin, small bones knit frailly under skin. I feel its slight pressure on mine, as she squeezes back. After a moment I get up to pull back the curtains so that we can both see beyond the big walnut tree at the gate, the pure line of the land where it meets the sky. Just beyond that line, where the sun has risen and the sky is eggshell blue, the North Sea pounds and pounds at the shingle, cracking open stones, taking centuries to do it, grinding everything at last into fine sand.

  She pulls me back. “I’ve something else I want to say.”

  “Oh?” I can’t help the immediate feeling of alarm.

  “No, nothing drastic. Silly. It’s just, you must make your next film.”

  “What? But I’ve stopped.”

  “No, you mustn’t. Retire; make another film. You know what it is, Claude.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Think about it,” she says, “us, of course. When we were young.”

  “Really?”

  “Don’t say you haven’t thought about it.”

  “Okay. I’ll think about it. But it’s hard to get funding, especially when you haven’t done anything for years.”

  “Forget funding. I’ve left you some.”

  “Hannah, you mustn’t. I don’t want your money. What about Phil? The kids?”

  “This was in a trust, from my grandmother. I had to use some of it for Zurich, but I’ve never touched the rest, I didn’t have to. It should be enough to make at least a small film. What do you have to do, get a crew, find a studio? Well, do it. Don’t you dare say no.”

  I sit on her bed and look straight at her: those gray eyes fiercely looking back into mine. “Thank you. It will be dedicated to you.” Then tears fill my own eyes, and spill, and she pokes me, “You sentimental old thing, you,” and we
begin to laugh, because she wills it so.

  22.

  It’s a cold early summer, hardly emerged from the chill of Northern European spring. Hannah and Phil have flown from England, I from the US. We find each other, as arranged, in a coffee shop in the arrivals lounge where they serve Illy coffee and tiny madeleines, as if Proust might drop by on his way to somewhere. I sip my good coffee and look at my two companions, who are sitting with me at a round table in this quiet, glossy version of an Italian coffee shop. It seems amazing that we have arrived and met. I glance at the people at the next table, the man in the wheelchair, with a woman who is helping him to sip from a straw, and the way his Adam’s apple moves up and down, and a younger man, perhaps a son, who leans across towards the other two to speak in a low voice, almost a whisper. I don’t catch the language, but wonder, are they going to the same place, for the same reason? Is every wheelchair traveler in this airport immediately suspected of being about to end his or her journey in death? You can’t tell. And I think, nobody could tell about us, either. Hannah is not in a wheelchair as we sit here, although she used one to cross the miles of Heathrow to the waiting plane and was met with another at this end. She has slid on to the red-cushioned banquette, in order to be on a level with us. She has a stick, sometimes two. Her stick is an expensive-looking hardwood with a rubber tip, almost an accessory. (“Well, I’m not waiting till I’m too decrepit to get there on my own two feet.”)

  “Good coffee,” she says, lifting her lidded cup with a shaking right hand, to drink it. (“I have to be able to drink the stuff myself, no good spilling it all down my front.”) She’s wearing a trouser suit of pale linen, a black sweater and a necklace of small gold links. Pink lipstick and some eyeliner and a pale foundation. She has bought some Chanel 19 at the Duty Free—“I want to go out smelling good”—and a small bottle of Laphroaig, her favorite whisky. Phil is wearing a dark jacket over pale trousers, a blue shirt, and a flowery tie, as if, packing, he decided that flowery was right after all for the occasion; who wants to look at navy blue, or gray with a thin stripe and be reminded of offices or, worse, funerals? His hair, what’s left of it, is brushed back and so far has not started to fly around his head in strands and wisps, and his expression is of a man forbidden to think a single dark thought, and having a hard time with it. And, where is Alexandre?