You Left Early

by Louisa Young

  Mishi puts a tube up Robert’s nose, and Robert ‘poorly tolerates a fibre-optic laryngoscopy’, it says in the notes. Someone else peers round the door. Mishi says, ‘Take a look. He says: ‘There’s something there.’

  Robert looks at me, I at him. Genuinely, in that moment, we both know. We know what it is, and we know what we will do about it: an eye-joining moment of perfect understanding. The rising to the occasion.

  Am I going to rise to the occasion? Is he? Ha – as usual, he is the occasion.

  It is first names all round. Everyone is incredibly nice to us. I sense a rising of levels, shoulders going back, pores tightening, the soft swish of everything irrelevant sloughing away. Adrenaline, low-level, controlled, to be paced because we’re going to need it. Fight or flight. Fight.

  Robert’s only direct experience of cancer is his mother dying of it when he was twenty-four; and then John, and then Kath.

  Back home he says would I please not look at him.

  He goes to bed early; I sit beside him hiding the webpages as I look up all the things it might be.

  The next morning after taking Lola to school I just get back into bed beside him and read. He sleeps till about one. We go for lunch at an Italian restaurant near my sister’s, where the guys know us. A comfort place. I take some photos of him. He looks lean, tough and terribly handsome. We flirt like billy-oh and are quite in love. He eats tortelli in tomato sauce. Soft.

  I go to my mother’s to make her dinner. We get on worse than usual. Three of my sisters call by while I’m there, which I resent, unreasonably, thinking, ‘If you were coming over anyway why do I have to be here, when I am needed at home?’ As I leave, my mother’s carer, coming in, says: ‘Are you all right? You look tired.’

  ‘I am tired,’ I say, after a tiny pause. I am both sad and relieved that no member of my family saw it and asked. I haven’t said anything to anyone. I don’t want any reactions.

  He has been referred to UCLH, Rosenheim Building (now demolished), a Victorian redbrick hospital wing of the most formerly prosperous sort, with a view out the back of the spot where I was born. I am standing in the street in the rain looking for the entrance, and there is Robert in a minicab, also looking for it. The magnetic pull between us is back, very very strong. I feel us conjoining across the tarmac.

  Joyce the clinic receptionist has wide-apart eyes, a long neck and straight carriage. Robert dubs her the Pulchritudinous Gazelle. A man in the waiting room has what Swift calls the Hendon Rasp: the hoarse voice of old-fashioned London cabbies. Another has a voice-box voice. ‘Maybe I’ll get one of those,’ says Robert.

  The registrar is about twenty-five. He looks like a prince from a miniature, with smooth, beautiful hands. Robert thinks his trousers (pale, mottled wool) are too tight, and with his weakness for doe-eyed Asian beauty rather fancies him. He is very kind and gentle. The fibre-optic laryngoscopy is again poorly tolerated.

  ‘The septum is twisted,’ the Princeling says. ‘That’s why it’s difficult to get it up there.’

  I recall the bloodied face at the door, the broken noses. I look out of the window at the backlot graffiti. There is something almost unnoticeable in the Princeling’s tone of voice when he pulls the tube back out, and he says ‘OK’.

  We are to be saved by heroes from Mughal miniatures. I shall buy them all white silk pyjamas embroidered with lotuses. The Princeling says, ‘Well, there’s something going on in the right tonsil area.’

  Robert says, ‘Is that a euphemism for cancer?’

  The Princeling says, ‘Yes.’

  Robert says, ‘Be brutally honest.’

  The Princeling says, ‘I will be, as soon as I know anything.’

  At the end he says, ‘Don’t worry, we can do something about this. There is treatment.’

  Robert says, ‘Ah, so you’re not just going to put me in the incinerator?’

  The Princeling, very at home with gallows humour, arranges for triple scanning.

  Scan one is ultrasound: the one you have when you’re pregnant. The cloudy billowing landscapes it displays could be a baby for all I can tell. Then a CT scan, and then an MRI. Each reveals, from its own point of view, what is going on inside Robert’s head. His lymph glands are apparently clear. The scan-meister, kind, with a brother-in-law who is also a film composer, tells us this with visible relief. Even we know that this is good. He takes a biopsy from each gland as well. His is a shoulder-clasping kind of kindness, and he is careful to include me. Lots of eye contact, and coming over to tell us what he’s doing now and that he’ll be back in a few minutes. We are to return next week for results, and a biopsy of the – thing.

  A redhead is kneeling at Robert’s feet, doing something necessary.

  The Princeling registrar is called Jagi. Francis Vaz, head and neck, is the consultant. We haven’t met him yet. Ring his secretary with any problems.

  Later, in the follow-up letter, it said ‘ulcerating mass’.

  I like the letters.

  ‘Why?’ asks Robert, who doesn’t read them.

  Because things written down are under control. I like that they say ‘Many thanks for referring this 51-year-old composer to the Head and Neck service at UCLH …’ and ‘I saw this pleasant gentleman in clinic today’. This pleasant gentleman.

  *

  Robert came up very late, bathed, shaved and fragrant. Around five the pain woke him. He went off down the stairs, and didn’t put the light on. He couldn’t find his spray. I got it, and made him a hot-water bottle, and he moaned a little at the relief as he had moaned with the pain. He cried. I lay chanting, even in my sleep, Please God, let it be small, let it be local, let them fix it. Please God, let it be small, let it be local, let them fix it. It was getting light by then. Spring mornings. Glorious, as they say.

  I was working out how I was going to be with it. For two days I was full of tears – jog me and they would have spilled over. Then I was marvellous – calm, gentle, kind, efficient. I was lovely. He said so, a lot, and thanked me, as if I might have done anything different. I had a tendency (unexpressed) to race straight to the very worst it could be – it’s already in his lungs, he has three months – while tripping on moments of ‘But it could be tiny, and benign!’ The AA training kicked in, the Serenity Prayer. We don’t know; be calm.

  He said, ‘I’m not going to fucking die.’ And that seemed reasonable. He looked terribly rock’n’roll in his hat, like a Fifties trombonist, or Ian Dury. I was falling in love with him again, despite already being in love with him. I hadn’t known that could happen. Why was it? Because he needed me? He always needed me. Because I thought I might lose him? I came over very Dusty Springfield: I only want to be with him.

  I was planning not to tell Lola until after her exams in June. I genuinely, madly, thought that was something I could do.

  Obviously, it was necessary to carry on. We knew that. So I went to a party for a book about a wife-murderer, where I saw Swift. I could not-tell anyone, except her. I had already not-told Lola (who had asked if I was all right, on Monday evening), and Charlotte (who enquired). But I knew Swift would ask, and I would tell.

  I told. Put my hand on her arm. She said, among other things, ‘You knew this was going to happen.’ But I didn’t know. Nobody knew at this stage.

  I went to the library and read John Diamond’s book about his cancer (C: Because Cowards Get Cancer Too) in one sitting, and surmised that Robert would die and I would marry Charles Saatchi. I was stepping into yet another new territory I never wanted to enter – led, again, by Robert. I was glad, in some ways, to have been in addictland, or rather recoveryland. It had taught me perspective, and how to recognise happiness. It had taught me to take as long to enjoy the relief of a problem’s being solved as I had taken to fret about the problem in the first place. But now I was returning to living with a very unclear future. I had minded that a lot the previous time. Now, though, it was different: we were on the same side. We had both known that things could go very wrong
again. We had not expected this kind of wrong. But still: an unclear future was something we were familiar with. I was fairly sure that what I was thinking then I would give a hollow laugh at later on.

  *

  They rang. He had an advanced cancer in his throat. He needed to go in for a biopsy to reveal what kind. His lungs and lymph nodes were confirmed clear. This was good. It was quite big but only in one place. Primary. This was good too. Amazing how many things were good!

  *

  There is delay, in the waiting room. A humorous nurse comes in, wide hips, West African accent. She coughs, and says, loudly, ‘Good afternoon, everyone! The clinic is running late. We are very sorry. Mr [miss the name] is not here but everyone is working hard to catch up. We love you all and we care about you. Thank you for being patient.’ Two minutes later she appears with a box of chocolate seashells, and takes them around. I refuse, thinking there won’t be enough for everyone, for the people who really need one. At the end she brings them back, and says, with a steely look, ‘My friend, my darling, you didn’t take one. Take one.’ I take one. It is delicious. I become aware that I am one of the ones who really need one, and wonder how fat Robert’s illness is going to make me.

  I fill my bag with booklets and leaflets in pale green and mauve, about sex and money and work in relation to cancer. Robert doesn’t look at them. He says: ‘I’m not that interested.’

  There is a huge rabbi there; a youth in a wheelchair, with an eyepatch; a handsome man reading a book about Bowie in Berlin; some strange and interesting voices, a sunken, shattered chin. I think about Riley Purefoy, the hero of My Dear I Wanted to Tell You, and his jaw shot off at Passchendaele, and the irony. Robert says he’d quite like a voice-box. I imagine him smoking through a tracheostomy.

  Then in to see Mishi with his beautiful smile, and the angelic, dry-humoured clinical nurse specialist, Lynn.

  I write in my notebook: large. single. advanced. hasn’t spread. tongue palate neck tonsil ecg + bloods Monday: in 11 May for biopsy on 12th Clinic 19 May to decide treatment. The pain team is mentioned: codeine phosphate for the time being. Robert is worried because codeine-based painkillers can be risky for addicts. The drug and alcohol team is mentioned. I enquire whether Wernicke-Korsakoff Syndrome will make things difficult, and they don’t know. Perhaps for the anaesthetic. They need to check kidney function and be sure his liver is up to it anyway. We learn a new word: iatrogenesis. Damage caused by the cure.

  The tea and coffee, though the kind with thin petrol-coloured bubbles on the surface, is free.

  *

  In the corridor afterwards, Robert says: ‘Oi. You promised you’d dump me if I ever got cancer.’

  ‘So I did.’

  ‘Well then?’

  So I say, ‘OK, I’m leaving you.’

  He says, ‘Thank God, at last I’m rid of her.’

  Then I say, ‘Now you have to beg me to come back to you.’

  He says, ‘Darling, please come back to me. I love you. You’re adorable. Come back to me.’

  We have hysterics because yesterday he described David Hockney as an adorable man, and I just found that very funny.

  I am happy because nobody, let alone him, has ever begged me to come back to them before. I say: ‘Maybe. If you make it worth my while and stand up straight all the time.’

  When I say I love him he says: ‘Still? Amazing.’ Or: ‘A woman of taste …’

  Like last week, after the doctor, we go straight to bed. It seems right. His mouth smells different. He is still smoking. About four a day.

  I say, ‘Am I to ignore the fact that you’re still smoking?’

  He says: ‘I’m on it. I’m cutting right down.’ (He always says this.)

  I say, ‘Because it’s what I hate most about this whole thing.’

  He says: ‘I was going to not smoke in front of you, for that reason, but I decided against because I’m not going to deceive you again.’

  His breath smells burned, metallic, and of decay.

  *

  I wrote to Charlotte:

  I should tell you Robert has a cancer in his throat. It’s primary, i.e. it hasn’t spread, and is apparently unlikely to as his lymph system is clear. I’d decided as a protective measure that he had three months to live, so I am oddly enough terribly relieved, though it does seem unkind of fate to crown his past seven years’ experience with this.

  He’s sober and cheerful, and gets up early saying: ‘I’m going to work on my Four Last Songs …’ I find I love him beyond measure.

  So I may be a bit odd over the next however long it takes. At the moment I haven’t really told anyone, because though I feel I can deal with *it*, I’m not sure I can deal with people’s reactions.

  But you already know, don’t you? So I’m confirming it.

  It’s the anniversary of Dad’s death today.

  It was also the day that Messalina was put down. The irony of the beautiful giant dog, the black velvet dinosaur, having the same thing as Robert, at the same time, and getting iller and smellier, and being put down, does not escape us. But it’s too sad. It’s just too sad. That beautiful dog.

  *

  A few days later, I was in Wiltshire for the setting of our father’s gravestone. I went alone, with no feelings at all. I didn’t go to the grave – I didn’t want to think of him being in there, in any sense, on any level. At lunch my siblings were discussing issues relating to our mother’s carer’s upcoming holiday and how it was to be covered. One needed to know why I was reluctant to take on a particular duty. I had to take her aside and tell her that I was going to be available for nothing, and why. I didn’t want to tell them – anyone – about Robert’s illness. I felt bullied, though not by them. By circumstance. My hand was forced but how could it not be? Any of us would happily never tell anyone this news. I actually was pretending it wasn’t happening, and it made perfect sense.

  I practised telling on my sister-in-law: she was affectionate, sympathetic, and not over the top. ‘It is always so tough,’ she said. ‘What are we meant to do? How to feel? Time seems so slippery slidey suddenly.’ And then I told my brother. He was cool, in the good way. Before I had left that morning I had told Lola. A-levels or no A-levels, I really wasn’t going to get away with not mentioning this. I acknowledged the strangeness of having a person you felt ambivalent about having a deadly illness in your house. When I got back she nearly didn’t tell me about her own odd day, which included calling an ambulance for a man who collapsed in the street in front of her.

  I said, ‘You know you were thinking of not telling me because I have enough on my plate already?’

  She smiled sheepishly, and I said, ‘Yes, well, NO. That’s not how it’s going to be.’

  I hadn’t yet told her about Messalina. The hierarchy of sad things is an odd one.

  Because I had told Lola, I told Louis. This is how I became an experienced teller.

  By the way, if you’re wondering what to say in response to news like this, I recommend the following:

  If you’re willing to help, say, ‘Is Tuesday a good day to bring soup?’

  If you’re not, say, ‘I am very sorry to hear this.’

  *

  I took to listing my fears in a blue notebook, alongside possible outcomes of the fear proving true. I had the blue notebook for questions and meetings and so on, and my normal notebook for feelings, and a white plastic folder into which pieces of paper went. Systems comfort me.

  Fear of the Day:

  That he will not be (a) physically fit for general anaesthetic. And thus (b) ditto for radiotherapy and chemotherapy

  But if he’s not, perhaps they could do something under local, or do something else I’ve never heard of.

  And we cannot know about fear 1) (b) till May 19th. So no point thinking about it. Though asking ahead calms me. And him?

  *

  Robert and I went to an oddly scruffy Japanese place on Camden Parkway, which smelt sweet and damp the particular way some o
ld places in Los Angeles do, as if things would peel off the walls, very unJapanese. It was cramped and comforting. Then I dropped him back at the hospital for his biopsy the next day. Mr Shah had said that in the process of the endoscopy they might possibly chip his teeth, because they have to get the jaw pretty far open to have a good look around. And he said the liver and kidneys are fine; fully up to the job of being anaesthetised, or irradiated, or chemoed.

  Robert was smoking. ‘It’s my last one,’ he said.

  ‘What, ever?’

  ‘Well I was thinking that.’

  *

  That evening I ran into an old friend, Joe, all upright and alive years after his throat cancer. I was so pleased to see him. He told me he had been in love almost with his surgeon. Besotted.

  When I got home I found Robert had created a person out of a triangular Mongolian fur hat, my bra and a belt, and left him (or her) on the bed, to keep me company.

  *

  The following day I went in at 6.30, taking ice cream. Robert was in good spirits, on a drip. The day after that I raced out of the British Library Reading Room to take his call. It was much bigger than they had foreseen. They will operate. They need to remove part of his jaw.

  I wept in the loos.

  I longed for Joe’s result; I feared John Diamond’s. I emailed my family:

  Some of you know that Robert has been ill:

  Well, he’s had a load of scans and a biopsy, and he has cancer in his throat.

  It hasn’t metastasised, and his lymph system is clear, so that’s good, and he’s in the care of splendid team at UCH, who will tell us in detail next week exactly what it is and what they are going to do about it. Surgery, radiotherapy, chemotherapy are all on the cards, with treatment starting in the next couple of weeks, and he’s living with me and Lola for the duration. I’ll keep you posted.

  Er – so that’s that. He’s tough, as we know. Wish us luck.