The long, broad river swept calmly past us, a silver ribbon beyond the leaves. Boats drifted on the current. There was just enough wind to stir the water’s surface into short, enamelled ripples. Next to the log was a pile of earth where something, a badger or dog, had been digging. We looked out through a fringe of leaves, as if we were in a bower.
‘I think I need to go back now.’
‘Tomorrow we’ll go further.’
From the corner of the path we could see all the way downriver to the cloud of masts at Levington, where we kept our boat; and beyond, to the Felixstowe cranes which stalked the marsh like steel herons pecking for food. I cooked risotto and tossed salad. Music played on the sitting-room floor.
Martha came down for the weekend. We’d warned her Nicola had little energy, and that we were in the mood only for gentle talk. She got that straightaway, and slipped into a quiet mood alongside us. From the very beginning, with her mother’s grace, she seemed to have discovered an instinct for what to do, what to say. Like Joe, she could hold fear in check. Love mattered more.
Her presence strengthened us. We walked further each day. At the end of the week, with Martha beside us, we came out on the lawn of the yacht club at Woolverstone. Two boys in wetsuits were rigging a dinghy on a trolley. An old couple sat on a bench, watching boats put off from the slipway. They must have wondered why we looked so pleased with ourselves: a woman in a headscarf and a tired-looking man and girl grinning as they emerged from the trees, as if walking along a river was the finest thing one could ever do.
We found the smugglers’ house where a cat was put in the window to signal the coast was clear. The story went that one day the cat ran away and the customs men caught the gang red-handed, and hanged them. Pausing on the way back, sitting on our log, we talked again about how cancer had made us stronger, and happier. Of course we hated it, of course we longed to get past it; but this dreadful year would never be one we locked away and forgot. It had changed us, we knew, for the better. We loved each other more, valued our children more, trusted our friends more. A tide had turned. We felt a contentment in each other, and in the world, that health and good fortune had always hidden from us.
We got a message from Italy. A friend’s husband, who’d been diagnosed with terminal cancer, had died.
Summer should have been over, but the hot weather held, the year’s final gift to us. I signed out the next week and we went back to Pin Mill. This time we walked east through the woods along the riverbank. The fields had been harvested and we followed a track to the water, clambering over a fallen oak. Under willow trees, at the bottom of a garden, we found a square creek, a secret harbour. Two dinghies floated on it, tethered by sagging ropes. A kingfisher flashed blue across the reedbeds. Lost in weeds, someone had built a cabin there. Peering through the windows we could see sofas, a formica table, a crooked stove: someone’s haven.
Another day we went to Shotley, where my father had trained in the war. The old naval base was ringed with barbed wire. Through padlocked gates we could see a parade ground with weeds growing through cracks, and beyond, the fallen roofs of the barracks. The old ship’s mast which cadets had been forced to climb looked sad, yards lopsided and ropes rotting. A notice at the bottom warned DANGER. My father, terrified of heights, had forced himself to the top through sheer willpower, and gazed out over Harwich harbour to the North Sea.
We drove down to the marina, where my mother used to take him, during his last illness, for a glimpse of the sea; and followed a path along the north bank of the Stour. Out in the stream the river was a vivid, sapphire blue. The glassy water lapping the path’s edge was so clear we might have been in Greece or Turkey. We could see pebbles lying at the bottom, a patch of mud, an anchor rope trailing out into deep water. Gardens rose above us. We could hear someone’s radio playing. Beyond the village we came out on a field with the silver river stretching beyond it, into a distance where water met sky. We stopped at Erwarton, the little dusty-smelling church where Anne Boleyn’s heart is buried, and watched old ladies sweep up flowers from a wedding the day before.
When I look back now, this is the month I want to return to; this limbo while we waited for tests and results, more treatment. It floats like a bubble on a stream, desultory yet purposeful, fragile, complete.
In London, Joe did the Guy’s Challenge, a fund-raising drive that had him run three times round the hospital grounds, cycle 10K on an exercise bike, then race up Guy’s tower. Sweaty but proud, he hugged Nicola at the end. We sent friends a video. The weather cooled.
Walking along the river at Pin Mill, we’d talked about the places that meant most to us. First came London, the city where we’d both been born and lived all our lives, the place we loved most. Then there was Pin Mill and the Suffolk coast; Rome, where I’d once spent a year before going out with Nicola, and where we’d sometimes returned together; and the south-west corner of Greece, Messenia, where we’d often holidayed. And then there was the south-west of France, where Nicola’s parents had bought a tumbledown farmhouse in 1974, and where she’d spent her childhood summers. A few years before, her parents had sold the farmhouse and moved to another, an old stone house on a hill. I’d been planning to go out there for the weekend to close it for the winter. Now we realised that, with all treatment on hold, Nicola could come with me.
We flew from Stansted to Bergerac. Driving south, Nicola sat excitedly in the passenger seat, counting landmarks: the church at Issigeac, the rise from where you first saw the castle near our home. She hadn’t expected to see it again for months; now it seemed more beautiful than ever. It was as if our world had been remade, in cancer’s wake, and offered to us anew. Weeds choked a tumbledown barn to the right of the road. In the little village supermarket we heard the familiar south-western accent. Nicola, fluent in French, had known the area since she was nine. Driving up the hill she gripped the dashboard, peering ahead through her blurred eyes for a first glimpse of home.
The house where she’d spent much of her childhood was a farmhouse among the fields. We’d started borrowing it from her parents the winter after we began going out. We could remember arriving with ice on the pond and hoar frost thickening the trees in the forest behind. There was no heating. We shivered next to calor gas stoves, and burned logs in the huge kitchen fireplace. In the years that followed we returned with friends. Martha and Joe spent their first summers there.
When development threatened the farmhouse, Nicola’s parents, Anne and Peter, sold up and bought the stone house on a hill nearby. The track to it wound through trees. Arriving for the first time, we’d glimpsed an old wall, mulberry trees, the edge of a rampart. The house had taken shape in the ruins of a fortified tower. Pigeon holes pierced the walls. Inside the bedrooms, you could hear the cooing of doves. In her years of retirement, Anne had replanted the garden with irises and Solomon’s Seal, trained roses up walls. There was a tumbledown shed in the garden where Peter wrote.
We went there more and more as Martha and Joe grew up. One winter we built a new kitchen, Martha sawing sheets of MDF while Joe and I drove to the local town to load the car with worktops and cupboards. We spent Christmas there, hanging paper chains from the beams and decorating a massive tree. In summer, friends lounged by the tiny, tree-shaded pool.
For Nicola, it was the most relaxing place on earth. Reading on the sofa, or in a deckchair on the terrace, her body slid down the cushions until it was almost horizontal, her thoughts lost in George Eliot or Proust. She kept a thick, moth-holed jumper in a chest of drawers upstairs. At night we listened to pine martens under the roof tiles. The view from the bedroom window, when I threw the shutters open each morning, showed a river marked by rows of poplars. To the left were forests. To the right, the rising sun lit up Monflanquin, the local town, as if it were an island village, floating on a sea of mist.
When we arrived that autumn the grass squelched underfoot; it had been raining. As I carried our bag from the car, leaves hung heavy on the trees. The key
stuck in the lock. Beyond it we found the house dark, damp-smelling and abandoned. Chairs were shrouded in dust sheets. The fridge came to life with a grumble as we switched on lights. The night we arrived, we ate quietly by the fire from chipped plates and glasses dulled by the dishwasher. Nicola should have been in treatment. Both shoulders ached – the right one had frozen as well while she was in Intensive Care. Her eyes were only recovering slowly. When she turned her head, the cobwebbed shadows of the living room were blurred. But she didn’t care. We were in the place she loved best in the world, her realm.
The house on the hill existed outside time. In summer, cicadas shrilled in the grass. Winter hung the trees with hoar frost, and the woods hid castles. Forests ringed the house, impenetrably thick. We knew some paths through them, not all. On long walks I used to tell our children stories about the duke who lived in the castle nearby. When they were tiny we carried them in backpacks; later, they stumped along beside us, gripping our hands and asking what was going to happen next. The trees were chestnut, oak, pine. Sometimes we found mushrooms under the autumn leaves, though we rarely dared eat them. We heard the rustle of wild boar in the undergrowth. A hare lived in the field below the house; buzzards watched us from sagging telephone wires. Each morning I drove downhill to the baker. The midday bell from the local church could be heard distantly across the valley. Nicola’s father Peter, a historian, once found out that the commune’s population had peaked just before the Black Death. Since then, people had left it in peace. A little shrine by the roadside showed where a resistance martyr had been shot.
Our weekend in France that autumn could have lasted a month, a year. Nicola sat in a lone deckchair on the terrace, reading. It was warm enough not to wear a coat. She smiled when I took a photo. Downstairs, we went through old family albums. Their bindings had split with damp, and mildew speckled the pages. Old pictures slipped from their corners, as we turned each page, or dropped off yellowing sellotape: her mother, younger, beside a 1970s car, with a picnic spread on the verge; Nicola playing by an inflatable pool; or running, arms spread in glee, down the farm track. Time that could not be reclaimed. She’d been befriended by the farmers next door. As a child she’d helped with the harvest, sat on their small, underpowered tractor, fed rabbits. Married, we sat at their kitchen table being regaled with local gossip in an accent I barely understood, while two logs smoked in the farmhouse grate.
Both of the old people were dead now. Gabrielle had poisoning of the blood; his legs were amputated. Renée had died in the old people’s ward in Fumel. When we drove past, their house was locked up, no chickens pecking the yard, no small, battered car outside the front door. In twenty-eight years we’d sensed a generation pass. We no longer saw berets in the market, or heard old people speaking dialect. Things changed, even in this changeless place.
On Sunday, Nicola swept leaves on the terrace while I fixed a broken shutter. A year later, when she was in Intensive Care and nearing the end, Martha painted her a picture of the view from that terrace: the little town of Monflanquin on its hill. We taped it to the wall opposite her bed. Nicola lay against the pillows. The tube in her throat stopped her turning her head. I watched her eyes flicker over its patches of green and brown, trees, fields; over the pantiled roofs, the church on the hilltop; over clouds, forests, the cleft of the valley which we knew concealed a river. As she lay on her deathbed she couldn’t talk, but I could see her mind think, blurred by the drugs, of evenings we had spent watching the same view or conversations we’d had on that terrace; of the sweet perfume, at night, wafting through the car window as we drove past the green woods Martha had painted. The week she died, I had the picture framed. It hangs above my bed now.
That afternoon we drove back to Bergerac and flew home.
The blood cancer clinic was held on Monday mornings. Dr Clay’s nuclear cell test had never reported back and the doctors were inclined to give up on it. They thought Nicola was probably not allergic to the chemotherapy. She was ready for a bone marrow transplant.
Nicola had been to King’s for preparatory tests. Transplantation wiped the body’s immune system completely, they told us. The new system generated by donor cells was fragile, incomplete. It had to grow like a baby’s in an adult’s ageing and unfamiliar body. Any infection was dangerous so there were dental check-ups to make sure no abscess would appear, blood tests, scans. She needed chest X-rays to confirm her lung damage was repaired. There were visits to the Transplant Unit at King’s, where she met nurses and saw the isolated rooms in which transplant patients were held.
‘People stay in six to eight weeks,’ the nurse told her. ‘Normally. Everyone gets an infection, though. Everyone goes back in.’
At Guy’s we were introduced to successful transplant patients. They seemed shaky on their legs, with the grey faces of the ill, but spoke glowingly of the renewed life it had given them.
‘You can live a normal life after a transplant,’ one said. ‘You really can.’
He and his wife had just been on holiday to Spain, but he’d been hit by an infection and they’d hurried home. Hospital visits would be frequent, he warned us. Nicola shouldn’t expect to go back to work for another year.
A nurse read out to Nicola, officially, the list of risks and problems that could follow a transplant, a long list. Nicola signed her agreement to treatment. Next Monday the corridor outside the blood cancer clinic was crowded. We did the quick crossword. They took her ‘bloods’. Dr Anand called us in, eventually, to a small office at the far end.
We were only expecting final confirmation that the transplant would proceed that week, but Dr Anand’s manner was odd. She seemed both nervous and excited.
‘Look,’ she said. ‘You’re going to think we’re crazy … I’ve got some news.’
Nicola sat down. Dr Anand took her hand. Good news? Bad news? They’d found a donor who seemed a good match. Had it fallen through?
‘Do you remember the nuclear test we did?’ Dr Anand said. ‘The one we gave up on? We got the results back – at last.’ She cleared her throat. ‘It shows there’s no cancer in your cells at all. The Professor says patients who show cancer-free don’t usually relapse. Sixty-five per cent stay healthy.’ While we sat there, still silent, Dr Anand called him on the phone to double-check. His sample was small but the results were clear: Nicola was free of cancer.
‘So what do we do?’ we asked.
Dr Anand smiled at us. ‘Nothing,’ she told us. ‘Stop thinking about it. We’ll check you every month, but there’s no more treatment.’
We still couldn’t take in the words. A weight gone; a cloud vanished.
‘You’re free,’ she said. ‘Go home.’
6
I’ve changed since Nicola fell ill. I understand sadness, which is the sky I live under. I’m not asking for sympathy; it’s the simplest of facts: I’m sad. Sometimes a friend complains how unfair Nicola’s death is. I don’t understand that. I don’t believe some conscious will controls the comings and goings of daily life – who falls ill, who gets well – any more than I believe a God decides, each day, to raise the sun or set the moon. People fall ill. The cancer cells multiplying in the darkness of a stranger’s bone marrow have no purpose. They neither single out the wicked, nor allow a cure to someone because she is beautiful, intelligent and good, and because her family loves her. They simply follow their own dizzying, voracious logic, like termites chewing roof beams or locusts shredding crops. The sorrow of Nicola’s death doesn’t make it unnatural. People die at all ages, and die young not because the Gods love them, nor because they deserve to, but because they fall ill.
I want to say to people: Nothing unusual happened here. Nicola’s loss is exceptional to me, Martha and Joe, only because we loved her. Talking to friends a month ago, I said that her death was ‘only death’. One of my friends, a doctor, understood: she’d seen children die. The unnatural thing, perhaps, is the horror with which we’ve surrounded death over the past millennia: the pyramids and
burial ships, the angels weeping on tombs; the open-coffin wakes and horses nodding black plumes; the choirs; the women covering their heads with ash and wailing; the Terracotta Army and the slow-marching regiment; the smoke rising from altars; ‘The Last Post’. Such terror manifested about an end that will come to all of us; that is no secret or mystery; and that we know in advance is ours. Such horror about the closure we all share. ‘She’s still here,’ we say – I’ve said it myself. Only in our memories. Nicola isn’t here to comment or talk back; to surprise me; to change as she gets older; to change me. Her voice talks in my head only because I knew her so well. She is gone. She isn’t in some other place. I will never be with her or see her again. The subject of this book could not be less mysterious: Nicola died.
The miracle to celebrate is that she almost lived. The miracle is in the work of medics who knew what was wrong with her; who knew how the cells multiplied; who knew, from opaque signals in her blood, what end was likely and what might be done to divert it. Who had a name for this malady, and isolated drugs that almost denied its purpose. Who could peer into the cells of Nicola’s blood to see their assault massing, and take steps that nearly, so nearly worked. The miracle lies in the generosity of nurses whose life is spent not making money but caring for people who need care; of the doctor whose face reflected our own pain, as we sat in the meeting room of the Intensive Care Unit the day Nicola died.
Reprieved, we left the day clinic in silence. Nicola looked stunned; I was grinning from ear to ear. Afterwards we joked what people must have made of us. What news could make a wife look so appalled and her husband so happy? We sat in a deserted hospital atrium while Nicola called her mother to tell her the nightmare was over. I have a photograph of her writing the note of thanks she wanted to drop in at Samaritan Ward. We had been freed as suddenly as we had been condemned on that awful Friday at the end of May. Perhaps that made it easier for us to believe in our reprieve. The moment of sentencing had seemed unbelievable, too. But it turned out real – and so would this.
A Moment of Grace Page 8