A Moment of Grace

by Patrick Dillon

  I watched Nicola talk to her mother, tears running down her cheeks. Of course, Dr Anand had been realistic with us: a third of patients relapsed; the test sample was small. If leukaemia returned, it could be harder to eradicate, second time around, and it would have to be cleared out before a bone marrow transplant would take. But that was the only drawback; otherwise this was a no-brainer. Walk free now, and, if cancer returned, Nicola could have the transplant anyway. We’d lose nothing. All the doctors were agreed.

  I’d asked, simply to explore the question, whether there was any merit in having the transplant anyway, as a double precaution, but Dr Anand had shaken her head straightaway.

  ‘You don’t want a transplant unless you have to,’ she’d said. ‘They’re dangerous. The truth is, only 55 per cent of patients make it through.’

  Proportions. Statistics. Neither of us had any training in them, nor how to base decisions on them. Once, when Nicola was pregnant with Joe, a test had shown a small risk of birth defects, but the test to eliminate it had carried some risk in itself. A doctor had explained how risks could be multiplied or added. We followed – just – but what we really wanted was this expert, this person who understood the science and had read the research papers, to tell us what he would have done if it was his baby. If he turned out wrong, so be it. Risk is life’s essence, its base matter in a world where the future can’t be known. We float on an ocean of risk, sailors in a leaking wooden boat staring at horizons clouded by fog banks. Certainty is never ours to demand. We knew experts could judge wrong, but they still judged better than us. And Dr Anand had made it perfectly clear what she thought. She knew what transplants were like.

  We walked home slowly. The air dragged around us, thick as honey and sweetly viscous. Cars rolled past, making no sound. I remember a bus stop where we paused to rest. We’d shared so much. Nicola’s hand was warm as we climbed the steps home. Her bag echoed when she dropped it on the floor, as if everything around us, the whole sky, had become somehow reverberant, a sounding board for our relief. We held each other. She seemed so small, so warm, alive.

  An endless day stretched in front of us, a day we wanted to go on forever, preserving this moment in which everything had stopped. We had lunch at a favourite restaurant in Soho. Nicola sipped her wine. We used, as a game, to plan our ideal day in London. This was our perfect day. But we were too dazed to look at pictures or go to a film, so we texted family, and sent friends an email:

  This is to share some rather astonishing news we got this morning. As most of you know, N was due to go in for a bone marrow transplant next week. But her consultant has just got the results of a new, very cutting-edge test they did a few weeks back, and it shows that her risk of relapse is so much lower than previously thought that she no longer needs the transplant, or any further treatment at present.

  There is still some risk, of course, so they will monitor her for the next two years; and a transplant can always be done if anything recurs. But as things stand she has no residual leukaemia, and they’re telling us she can go back to normal and we can get on with our lives.

  We’re off to France tomorrow for a few days quiet walking & readjusting to this. But it feels like a good moment to thank all of you for so much support & love since Nicola was diagnosed. More than anything else, that has got us through the past few months. We feel very lucky.

  I remember a childhood game: press your hands hard against a weight, and when the weight is removed, your hands float upwards. Runners wade through water to make their legs feel light when the race comes. It felt as if we had put down a bag of stones and could climb a mountain unburdened; as if mist had cleared and we could see valleys, ridges, forests where before there had been fog.

  We’d already booked another week in France. We’d planned it as a moment of peace before Nicola went in for the transplant. Instead, we found ourselves contemplating a new life.

  Every photo I took, while we were there, shows Nicola grinning. We weren’t simply returning to normality; neither of us wanted things to be the same. We faced the future enriched by the knowledge illness had given us: a knowledge of the future’s preciousness, its weight and value. We no longer saw time as life’s small change. It was treasure to be guarded jealously. We knew where our centre lay.

  In France it had become too cold to eat outside. We wrapped up and walked through the forests. We sat in small, dank churches. We lay in bed and listened to the wind. It was five months since we’d dared imagine we would grow old together. That, for us, had always been the termination of a life lived well. Old age together would mean doing the things we loved: reading, travelling, seeing friends. It was the harbour we would enter in good time. For five months we’d been lost at sea. Now lights winked around us in the dark and we were at peace. Nicola’s sight would return in time; her shoulders would stop aching. There would be tests and monthly visits to the clinic, but none of that scared us. Risk hung in the air like low cloud, but we both had the strength to live under it. A two-thirds chance of life, after all, was better than the certainty of hospital wards and drips, treatment, fear.

  Nicola had been corresponding with a friend of a friend who’d just been through a bone marrow transplant. He wrote of the exhaustion that followed the procedure, of the constant terror of infection, of something going wrong. He was about to go back to work. He seemed like someone fragile in a clumsy world. Something had changed in him: he was afraid. We’d sensed the same from the patients we’d met at Guy’s: that transplant survivors were a class apart, grateful for life but at the same time fearful of it, like children with brittle bones. We would have seized that future and embraced it, if need be. Instead we found ourselves walking on thick grass, breath pluming the air, rattling the curtains shut when we returned home, throwing logs on the fire.

  Nicola called Marcus, her friend and boss, to give him the good news. He cried. They talked about her returning to work, in no hurry. There were other things she wanted to do. Plans filled the future like cells multiplying in a petri dish. We’d always loved the castle we could see from outside the house. As well as a massive keep, burned in the Hundred Years War, it had renaissance rooms and another wing, more elegant still, that towered over the landscape like a Loire château. Nicola wanted to research the castle and family. Perhaps we would write a book together.

  Back in London, she tapped her computer, ordering out-of-print memoirs from local history websites. Jiffy bags arrived from obscure booksellers in south-west France. She’d had no time for that in the months she was ill. All her force of will had been focused on keeping her back straight and her mind clear as the doctors scoured cancer from her blood. Now, revelling in returning energy, she invented a new routine for herself. Each day she went to an exhibition. Goya was showing at the National Gallery. We’d visited the Goyas in the Prado on our weekend in Madrid, just before Nicola was diagnosed. Now we saw them again. Her illness was bookended by Goya: slaughtered rebels, doomed Kings. She lunched with friends. I found her in the study with plans of the castle laid out around her.

  When I look back at the texts we sent each other in those weeks they return to the banality we longed for: Home in 15 minutes. Taking 59 bus from Euston. And normality closed its doors slowly upon us. With Christmas approaching, we planned our children’s presents. Usually we spent the holiday in France but this year, because of the transplant, we’d expected to be in London. We decided to keep it that way, bought tickets for a carol service, and went to Nine Elms to buy a tree. On Christmas Day we crossed the bridge to Westminster Abbey and sat among bemused-looking tourists. None of us was a believer, but we wanted something special: music, the vault soaring above us. Friends shared lunch. Afterwards we walked along the Thames.

  I wish, now, we’d made more of it, our last Christmas together.

  In Rome, twelve months later, Martha, Joe and I spend Christmas Day alone. We go to the market to buy food on Christmas Eve. As we unwrap presents, a plastic Christmas tree winks in the corner of
the sitting room, a present from our landlady. In the evening we go for a walk.

  I find I can’t look at Nicola’s death head-on. I can’t get her in focus, seen through the keyhole of her death. I need an artist to paint Nicola, or capture her in a story. I need a room where I can frame her face and go, locking the door behind me, to sit alone with her. Holbein would have painted her with a cat on her knee and a pile of books, a sparrow, a mask of comedy – not tragedy – a clavier. Hockney would have drawn her in Notting Hill Gate, with a poster of Aretha Franklin and the same cat. An artist would know what to leave out, where the essential lay.

  Nicola grew up with art. She remembered, as a child, crouching under the table at the gallery where her mother worked, during an opening for one of their artist friends. She grew up knowing that woven into the world was a vision stranger and more truthful than what we see around us. She found it in pictures, in books, in theatre and music: a code unweighted by the everyday; a nimbler way of seeing. Art makes life visible. Nicola knew it as a way of stepping outside the world and finding oneself at its heart. She knew it as sunlight illuminating the fissures in a wall; as a sound heard at night. She knew its failures and its obsolescence; she admired its practitioners for their oddness and courage, and the way they had of understanding defeat. She couldn’t imagine a life without it.

  But I have no portrait to reveal her. For now, I just glimpse her from one corner of my eye, gardening or reading a book. I remember a way she had of turning her head and repeat it endlessly in my mind, like a looped film. Sometimes at night I hear her voice, but I can never make out the words. Sometimes I think I can hear the shuffle of Nicola’s footsteps behind me. The light ahead seems so small it might just be a star, or a distant planet. I feel like Orpheus walking the road from hell.

  I try to think of her death but can’t. When I picture the past year, it’s the unimportant things that stand out. I can remember the blanket they put over her to control her temperature when she was sinking for the last time in Intensive Care. I remember the grassy slope in Ruskin Park where Martha and I sat, one day, while they turned her and changed her sheets. I remember phoning Joe from the hospital car park to tell him he needed to fly home. Our radio shoved onto a top shelf, the dirty table in the coffee shop, the stifling heat outside the Intensive Care Unit while we waited for someone to answer the buzzer. The pens she used for her whiteboard, whose tops got lost in the hospital blankets, the corridor we wheeled her down for yet another chest scan, and the waiting room outside the scanner where Nicola lay, her eyes closed, chest heaving, and a faint, glassy sheen on her cheeks. Domperidone, Fentanyl: the drug names on the syringes that pushed chemicals into her breast.

  But when I try to think of Nicola’s death – not the moment, but the fact of it – everything blurs. I have to cajole myself into understanding it: that I won’t see her again, won’t touch her again, won’t hear her voice. It’s like a lesson taught by rote that I’m unable to memorise.

  Yesterday morning, in Rome, I walked to the basilica of San Lorenzo. They were taking a coffin out of the church. The men wore suits while the women wept; two children laughed. Outside were rows of stonemasons, their windows full of patient angels. I feel as if the music that comforts me will soon die away; that the current washing me downstream will come to an end. Routine stretches in front of me like a wooden jetty leading into fog. Nicola is gone. I have to keep repeating it: she’s gone.

  It wasn’t long after we got back from New Year in France that I started feeling depressed. Everything seemed flat. The rising clamour of everyday life was deafening, dispiriting. It was hard to maintain the peaceful clearing we had cut for ourselves during Nicola’s illness. Weeds grew over it. I was stressed at work. At home, Nicola played cards. Exhaustion had caught up with her. We didn’t go out much, or see many friends. There was less to say to each other; it had all been said in those vivid, dizzying months of fear. I remember coming home from work, seeing lights on in the kitchen, and sensing an absence of the joy I expected. January’s dark evenings, sombre and cold. I locked my bicycle to the fence. Nicola turned cards. I cooked, swore when I burned the garlic. When I come home now the house is dark – I would give anything to have those evenings back. At the time, we felt stalled. We still had moments of euphoric joy, but a grey mist drifted across our days.

  I knew it was only temporary. I wondered, knowing nothing about it, if I had some kind of post-traumatic stress disorder – perhaps I ought to see someone. Time seemed a better option. Love doesn’t flow consistently. Throughout our years together we fell in love, then, when the current slackened, fell in love again. After cancer we needed time to let overstretched muscles relax, wounds heal, scars vanish beneath new skin. We made love again, cautiously, the first time in a while. We looked ahead, booked tickets to France for Easter, planned a holiday in Greece. We talked.

  Then, one Sunday at the end of January, we went for a walk round the City. We wanted to visit Wren’s churches again. Pushing open the door of St Andrew by the Wardrobe, we were assailed by incense and low chanting. Faces turned. At the altar, a priest in robes raised his cross high; two servers swung censers. It was an Indian congregation, we learned, who used the church on Sundays, when the City workers were gone. The worshippers belonged to the Syrian Orthodox Church, whose history burrowed far back into the first Christian centuries.

  We stumbled on the same thing wherever we went. In St Mary-le-Bow we found Egyptian Copts; the Costa Coffee next door was full of murmuring Arabic. All over town, immigrant communities, landing like starlings in a tree, had nested in unused City churches, chanting in Arabic, Aramaic, Greek, prayers that pre-dated London. Gold robes packed in a suitcase, a cross brought from overseas, or a testament whose cracked binding had last been opened in the furious heat of Cairo or Asmara: these were their few belongings, designating home. Incense summoned the haze of Africa into plain white churches with limestone floors, where a brass plaque on the wall commemorated reconstruction after the Blitz, and wooden panels listed the Ten Commandments. The tombs around the congregation were not of their own ancestors but of eighteenth-century parsons or sturdy donors from the City guilds. We were ignored; no one asked us to go. A priest lifted the host. These congregations sought what was familiar in surroundings utterly alien. We felt the same: aliens in a city we thought we knew.

  We walked home cheerful: life could still surprise us. And the wonder we had learned to feel was still there, the wonder at every detail life offered: the curve of sunlight on St Paul’s dome; two nurses chatting about a boyfriend; a mother pushing a pram. Outside the Tate a street hawker threw bubbles into the winter sun. They drifted across the water and burst on the Thames. The Coptic chanting still filled our ears with strange harmonies. Life was never normal. We went into the Tate and wandered among sculptures and canvases, feeling renewed. Perhaps art’s greatest purpose is to be inexplicably strange. Since Nicola died, it’s been my greatest comfort. I go to exhibitions, look at pictures, not burying myself in highbrow, but seeking a world abnormal – saints martyred, graces summoning spring – where everything can be seen; where flesh hardens to stone, tears dry, and a woman in a painting can gaze at a sparrow forever.

  It was early in February, the eighth, that I got the call from Nicola at work. She was phoning from the clinic. Her monthly test showed something stirring in the nucleus of her blood cells. Her voice was calm, matter-of-fact; so was mine. They were running the test again – one result wasn’t enough to go on. But we both knew, we both knew, that cancer had returned; that the storm was rising; that the months of freedom we had enjoyed were just a painted backdrop hung in a theatre, a last wish, a moment of grace.

  7

  After turning off my phone I looked around the office at people quietly working. I texted, I love you xxxxxxxx.

  I see now, looking at my phone, that Nicola had sent her text, Please call when you can, at 09.51, a whole hour before. I must have been in a meeting. What did she think of, sitting there in t
he clinic alone? Sixty minutes waiting for my call. We lived through cancer together, but all the time there was a room I never entered, an inner sanctum of fear and despair which she had to brave alone. After her death I found Nicola had been through all her papers, put her will in a folder, closed bank accounts and listed passwords in a file. I don’t know when she did it, perhaps during the months when we both believed she was well; or maybe in the fortnight between her relapse and the start of treatment. We both knew how this story could end, but never spoke about it. Nicola entered that sanctuary, bravely, alone.

  It breaks my heart to think of it, now, her working at her desk. I wish I could go back and help her with it. I wonder if I was a coward for not insisting we speak more openly about the possibility she might die. But I know she didn’t want that. From me, from her family, she wanted a bulwark to her faith that she would be well. The rest she faced alone.

  We knew from the start that cancer had come back. The nurses knew, when we went back to the clinic together, two weeks later. No one met Nicola’s eye. It was a long time before Dr Anand called her in. Nicola had just gone back to work, three days a week. I had a photograph of her in her office, grinning, with the Roundhouse in the background. Her team was delighted. They’d managed well in her absence, but everyone had a problem to be sorted or a question answered. Things had piled up. They needed her calm, good-natured, gleeful presence.