The Enemy of the Good

by Michael Arditti

  ‘I’d thought I was going mad,’ Edwin said, sounding almost relieved. ‘But I’m not, you see!’

  ‘Of course you’re not, darling,’ Marta said, struggling to stop the walls closing in. Her throat was parched and her palms and forehead broke out in sweat. To the dismay of her rational mind, she began to wonder if there might be such a thing as a benign tumour. With the consultant proposing to perform a cerebral biopsy the next morning, there was no alternative to Edwin’s admission and she accompanied him to a small neurological ward, where his anxieties were heightened by a hearty anaesthetist who coaxed him into signing the consent form as though he were selling him a used car. He rallied when the man left and he was introduced to his fellow patients, who seemed strangely comforted by having a former bishop in their midst.

  After seeing him settled, she returned home to be greeted by Karen. ‘It’s not good to sit and brood,’ she said, ‘so I’ve come to take you out of yourself.’ Her well-meaning impulse misfired since, whether from a deliberate attempt to make light of anything medical or a nervous attraction to the very topic she wished to avoid, her conversation revolved around bogus surgeons who wormed their way into operating theatres and the extensive bric-a-brac a nurse in her coven had extracted from patients’ bottoms in A & E.

  The strain of Edwin’s twenty-four hours in hospital was nothing to that of the week in which they waited for the results. Having urged him to hope for the best while preparing herself for the worst, she was doubly appalled when the consultant announced that the biopsy was inconclusive since they had succeeded only in taking tissue from the oedema and not from the actual tumour. Far from apologising for the failure, he made it sound as though it were a trial run for the second operation, scheduled for the following day. Edwin was readmitted to the ward to a cool reception from his former companions, whose faith in his talismanic presence had been shaken by his rapid return. The procedure would be much as before, except that the incision was to be made on the side of his skull, requiring a nurse to shave him. Marta upbraided herself for the mawkishness which, in the face of a mortal illness, led her to mourn the loss of his few remaining strands of hair.

  Time was of the essence and the consultant promised to expedite the results, making an appointment to see them in two days. They arrived at the allotted hour, and Marta’s heart sank when, no sooner had he ushered them into his office, than the consultant asked his secretary to make some tea, as ominous a sign as if he had called for a catalogue of coffins. Her suspicions were confirmed when, stroking his tie and staring at the photograph of his children, he announced that Edwin had a tumour the size of an orange in the centre of his brain and that it had spread to both lobes. Carefully positioning himself in the realm of science and out of range of messy emotions, he added that the tumour was a Gliobastoma multiformae Grade 4, and its location meant that there was no hope of surgery. With low-grade tumours, there might be a chance to ‘debulk’ them but, with one so virulent, the only available treatments were chemo and radiotherapy, which he urged them to try at once.

  ‘So, how would you rate my prognosis?’ Edwin’s question smashed through the consolatory plural, showing that, no matter what support she gave him, in the final analysis he was alone.

  ‘It’s impossible, as I’m sure you’ll appreciate, to give a precise answer but, on current form, I’d say three months if you do nothing and nine months to a year if you have treatment. Since there’s no surgical option, this is the last time you’ll see me. From now on you’ll be under oncology.’ With a broad smile, as though from relief that his part in the affair was over, he steered them out of the office.

  Edwin suggested that, rather than going straight home, they take a stroll down the High. Scared of betraying her fears by acceding to his every whim, she made a show of checking that he was well wrapped up and extracted his promise to tell her the instant he was tired, before asking Mr Shepherd to drive them to All Souls. As they walked down the street that had formed the backdrop to their lives for over fifty years, she was racked by the thought that she would soon have to walk down it alone. Buildings now glowing with history would merely be greying with age. Seeming to read her mind or, more probably, sensing her quickening pulse, he assured her that he was neither shocked by the news nor frightened of death.

  ‘All in all, I’ve had a decent innings, hit the odd six, been lucky not to get caught in the slips more than once.’

  ‘Used far too many extended metaphors.’

  ‘What do you expect? I spent a lifetime in the pulpit.’

  She laughed and, for a moment, it was almost possible to believe that they were walking back from the Magdalen Commem Ball fifty-five years earlier. Whatever might have changed around them – and inside them (she tightened her grip on his hand) – their love had endured. Knowledge of that would help to sustain her through all the pain and indignity of the next few months. It would enable her to respect his wish to make light of his illness: to accept death as the simple fact of life it had been for both of them since their separate losses in the War and their joint loss of Mark.

  ‘Three months,’ he said.

  ‘A year if you have treatment.’

  ‘You’re not going to give me the choice, are you?’

  ‘Not on this one,’ she replied, her eyes glistening.

  ‘It can be a lifetime. Remember The Mikado, when Yum Yum and Nanki Poo expect to have only a month together before his execution, so they decide to call each second a minute, each minute an hour and each day a year?’

  ‘I remember,’ she replied with a grimace. Gilbert and Sullivan were the point at which her affection for her adopted country came to an end. She remembered too how, with no trace of self-mockery, he had tried to persuade her that Gilbert was not only a supreme wordsmith but a ground-breaking philosopher who, in Yum Yum and Nanki Poo’s pledge, had anticipated Einstein’s theory by twenty years. She laughed so loudly that, when Mr Shepherd came to pick them up, he assumed that Edwin had been given the all-clear. It broke her heart to disabuse him.

  Pitting his desire for honesty against his horror of provoking pity, Edwin asked her to confine the news to the children. Hinting at enough to ensure their attendance but stopping short of actual disclosure, she invited them down for Sunday lunch. Aware of its being Clement and Shoana’s first encounter since before the wedding, she trusted them to pull together for the sake of their father. Despite her championing of tribe over family, she felt threatened by any suggestion that they were at odds.

  Shoana and Zvi arrived first. Marta kissed Shoana and smiled at Zvi, maintaining a distance that served to muddy the mother- and son-in-law relationship still further. It was plain from their private jokes and covert glances that the first three weeks of married life had treated them kindly. So she was confused to find that they had not only brought their own lunch but packed it in separate bags, issuing strict instructions that they were on no account to be mixed. Her confusion grew when she handed Shoana a cup of coffee for Zvi, which she deliberately ignored, leaving him to pick it up for himself. She waited until he went to the loo before asking if they were having problems.

  ‘No, of course not,’ Shoana said as if to a child. ‘I’m deliriously happy. I’m just niddah.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I’ve got my period, so we’re forbidden to pass anything to each other.’

  Zvi returned, commending a set of hunting prints whose only merit to Marta was age. Her relief at the arrival of Clement, Mike and Carla faded when Clement walked straight up to Shoana and asked if he were permitted to kiss her.

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous!’ she replied, kissing him lightly on both cheeks.

  ‘What about me?’ Mike asked. ‘Do I still have snogging privileges?’ Shoana said nothing but, with a quick look at Zvi, gave Mike a perfunctory kiss. Marta breathed again as they cleared the first hurdle. She watched while Shoana and Carla hugged and then, after checking that everyone was settled, prompted Edwin to break the news.

 
‘As you know, I’ve not been feeling myself of late. Blinding headaches… lapses of memory… loss of vision. I thought it was just tempus fugiting. But it wasn’t. At least not entirely. I’ve spent much of the last few weeks in hospital – ’

  ‘What?’ Clement said.

  ‘Why didn’t you say anything?’ Shoana turned to Marta.

  ‘We didn’t want to worry you,’ Edwin said. ‘We wanted to be sure of the diagnosis.’

  ‘Which is what?’ Clement asked.

  ‘A brain tumour.’

  ‘That’s not true!’ Shoana yelled.

  ‘It’s in both lobes,’ Edwin continued resolutely. ‘There’s no possibility of surgery.’

  ‘There must be something,’ Carla said. ‘Some experimental… unorthodox treatment.’

  ‘Nothing but chemo and radiotherapy,’ Marta interjected. ‘They might reduce the tumour for a while.’

  ‘Quite,’ Edwin said. ‘There are some short-term expedients but nothing more lasting. I have to prepare myself – we all do – for the inevitable.’

  Marta was moved by the children’s response, the shocked silence interrupted by Shoana’s sobs. She longed for Zvi to take her in his arms, to acknowledge that there were more important things in life than law, but he stood helplessly by her side, the clenched fists and swollen vein on his forehead attesting to his inner conflict.

  ‘Don’t cry, Shoana,’ he pleaded. ‘I can’t bear it.’

  With Zvi keeping his distance, it was left to Clement to reach out and hold his sister’s hand. He himself said nothing, as though struggling to reconcile such malignancy with his faith in a benign universe. Mike and Carla sat grim-faced and even Zvi, who had known them for only a few months, seemed to share in the pervading grief.

  ‘It’s no tragedy,’ Edwin insisted, with an acceptance too heartfelt to count as courage. ‘I’m eighty-three years old. I’ve had more than my biblical span.’

  ‘That must be the first time in years you’ve drawn comfort from the Bible,’ Clement said, forcing even Shoana to smile.

  They ate a surprisingly convivial lunch. Edwin regaled them with tales of the more bizarre figures he had encountered in the Lords, before reminding Clement of his fury when Mark invoked his ninety-minute seniority to sit in the Eldest Sons’ Box at the State Opening of Parliament. She was struck by the irony that, with the steroids relieving the pressure on his brain, he was more relaxed and lucid than he had been for months. Her determination to enjoy the lull, however short-lived, faltered only when Shoana’s question as to whether they should tell Helena set Clement wondering if their aunt had gone slightly senile.

  ‘She seemed perfectly normal at… when I last saw her,’ Shoana said.

  ‘Then explain this. About three weeks ago, out of the blue, she sent me one of those actors’ First Night cards. Some Shakespearian character on the front – ’

  ‘Hotspur,’ Mike interjected.

  ‘Hotspur, thanks. And the words Break a leg inside. Except that she’d drawn a neat line through Break and replaced it with Mend.’

  ‘You know Helena,’ Marta said uneasily, ‘she’s always been eccentric.’

  ‘Runs in the family,’ Mike said, and the three outsiders smiled.

  The show of unity collapsed at the end of the meal, once Edwin, at Marta’s insistence, had gone upstairs to rest.

  ‘How can we be sure the doctors have got it right?’ Shoana asked. ‘Did you demand a second opinion?’

  ‘Do you really think that’s necessary?’ Marta replied. ‘Your father’s changed so much these last few months. You mentioned yourself the way that he told the time. Mrs Shepherd noticed him counting the figures on his coins. And I’ve seen so many little things, or rather I’ve tried to blot them out. Suddenly they all make sense.’

  ‘So what do we know about his consultant? And the department? You have the money to go privately.’

  ‘It’s not a question of money, darling, but of principles. And a principle’s no less valid because it’s under pressure.’

  ‘You mean you’ll let Pa die for the sake of a principle?’ she asked.

  ‘Nanna, that’s a dreadful thing to say!’ Clement interjected.

  ‘It’s Shoana, Shoana! Will you please stop treating me like a child?’

  ‘I’m sorry. I wouldn’t want to offend your principles.’

  ‘Oh, ha ha! It’s your fault this has happened.’

  ‘Stop right there!’ Marta said. ‘I won’t listen to another word.’

  ‘When did Pa start going downhill? When he was hit by the glass!’

  ‘Bullshit!’ Mike said. ‘Tumours aren’t caused by trauma.’

  ‘It might have bled into it and made it worse.’

  ‘That’s simply not true,’ Marta said. ‘There’s no blame of any kind. End of story.’

  She succeeded in halting the argument but, as she gazed at Clement, she was less convinced of having dispelled the guilt.

  The next morning she took Edwin back to hospital for a preliminary meeting with the oncology and radiography teams, who outlined their plan to give him chemotherapy once a day for a week, followed by six weeks of radiotherapy. She listened in dismay while they explained, first, that they lacked clear evidence that the chemo was beneficial in such cases and, second, that it had to be given in particularly heavy doses to cross the blood-brain barrier. In spite of her resolve to view each new day as a bonus, she worried that it might be a treatment too far. Edwin felt no such misgivings, telling the doctors that he was ‘putting myself in your hands’, a statement confirmed all too literally in the afternoon, when he sat uncomplaining for four hours as they moulded a mask to his head. Two days later she brought him back to radiography, where he lay flat on his face all morning while they matched up the images from the MRI scan with the x-rays and drew an intricate web of guidelines on the mask.

  The beginning of his treatment coincided with a further decline in his condition. The tumour took over their lives as relentlessly as a newborn child. Her initial gratitude on learning that he would be able to have the chemotherapy at home gave way to despair during two harrowing nights in which he gasped and shook and gulped and spewed, begging to be left to lie in his vomit rather than have to haul his aching body out of the sheets. Time no longer seemed such a worthwhile return for suffering, and she was relieved when the remaining four sessions were cancelled. After three days grace, they began the radiotherapy, for which they had to make a daily journey to the Radcliffe, where he was clipped into the mask and bombarded with rays. Her attempt to combine each trip with a treat, as though taking a child to the dentist, had to be abandoned when he grew progressively weaker. The steroids took a savage toll, his belly bloating while his legs and bottom wasted away. With his grey face, bull’s hump, puffed cheeks and waxy skin, he no longer looked like himself but a man with cancer or, rather, a character with cancer in a TV soap.

  For all their efforts at concealment, the news of his illness leaked out, exciting both genuine concern and morbid curiosity. Friends and colleagues made discreet enquiries, while journalists put more intrusive questions. The owner of their favourite Oxford restaurant sent a complete dinner for two – which was eaten by one, twice. A young man, fresh from publishing a history of royal pets, declared his intention of writing his biography and requested an interview ‘before it’s too late’. The children kept in regular contact; Shoana’s commitments at work and home restricted her visits to Sundays, but Clement’s empty diary left him free to come and go throughout the week. While grateful for his support, she was suspicious of his motives. After a lifetime of intellectual struggle, Edwin needed to conserve his strength for basic survival, yet, walking in on them one afternoon, she found them so locked in debate that they barely acknowledged her presence.

  ‘With due respect to Descartes,’ Edwin rasped, ‘the soul isn’t the breath in the machine, but the illusion that permits the machine to run in the face of imminent breakdown. So the question arises: at what point should the mach
ine be scrapped?’

  ‘I assure that you it arises for those of us who believe in the soul too.’

  ‘What do we do when the machine serves no purpose: when it’s clogged up and corroded but continues to guzzle fuel; worse, when its toxic waste contaminates its surroundings?’

  ‘What a depressing conversation!’ Marta interposed lightly.

  ‘But a vital one,’ Clement retorted.

  ‘Yes, my dear,’ Edwin added, ‘I’m afraid it is. If only identity death could be as clearly determined as brain death. People see Granny living – for want of a better word – with Alzheimer’s, gazing blankly at the wall, good for nothing but to open her bladder and bowels, and they think “Maybe she’s happy in her own world? Maybe she’s filling the wall with memories?” I very much doubt it, although I’m willing to grant the possibility. But what about someone who’s terminally ill, with a pain that gnaws away at their whole being?’

  ‘You won’t have pain, my darling,’ Marta said. ‘Just say the word and they’ll give you morphine.’

  ‘But what will I do to the rest of you? The longer I live, the more life I’ll suck out of you.’

  ‘You give me life! You always have.’

  ‘But that might change. Don’t I deserve as much consideration as a sick dog you’d take to the vet?’

  ‘You want us to help you die?’ she asked in horror.

  ‘When the time comes,’ he said, looking at Clement. ‘Who else can I trust? Not strangers. Not even myself. Only the people who love me, people who won’t be offended by my decline so much as outraged by it, who’ll leave me the dignity of being me.’

  Clement’s rapid agreement brought back memories of their conversation after Shoana’s wedding. It was as if he were using his father’s case as a dry run for his own. She herself was more guarded, insisting that her sole concern was for his comfort, but, as she witnessed his ever-increasing distress, she wondered if her true concern were to protect herself. The one thing she could promise him was that he would never be a burden. To be close to him even in his illness was a blessing. He slept a great deal, and she wanted nothing more than to watch over him, allowing her memory to range across more than four decades of married life. A bishop’s wife had never been an easy role for her. She had been a gift to the headline writers: Pot in the Palace, when she admitted smoking hemp with the Hadza; Wells Farrago, when she opened the palace to striking miners. Edwin’s wife, however, had been the role of a lifetime. A phrase from a letter he had written to her half a century ago came back as vividly as if she had read it that morning: ‘Love means that I’d rather be with you than be myself.’