Letters to Iris

by Elizabeth Noble

  She’d known what that meant. She’d seen obstetricians do it. Sonographers. Concentrating hard, not able to make small talk. Because they knew something was wrong.

  No one ever knew how quickly complete panic and sheer terror could descend on a person, unless it had happened to them. It was true, what they said. The world of prom dresses and food and everything else literally emergency stopped. And your disobedient, frightened mind leapt way ahead. And it was all bad – a kaleidoscope of what you’d say, when you told them. How you’d look bald. Whether you were a brave person, or a cry baby. Your funeral. How they’d cope without you. The things you would miss. You simply could not stop your brain. No Mindfulness technique or meditation could help you, in those minutes while you stood, vulnerable, and waited for the radiographer to bring the doctor in. Maybe there’d be room for all the good thoughts – optimism, hope, positivity. But not at the very start. Not for Gigi at least. It had been all dark.

  And after they’d said they’d seen something they didn’t like the look of, and showed her a grey cloud on the picture, and offered to biopsy her there and then, and asked her if she wanted to call somebody, the thoughts kept coming, even as she said no, thank you, she was fine. Even as she texted Meg, and told her she was staying a while longer with a mother she didn’t want to leave, knowing that Meg would accept it, albeit grudgingly, because Gigi was often with a mother she didn’t want to leave … As they gave her the local anaesthetic, on her side, near her armpit, and it hurt more than she’d thought it would, and sudden hot tears had sprung into her eyes, and she’d apologized to the nurse for crying because she couldn’t help it … As the doctor dug around inside her with a thick needle, because the lump was buried deep in an F-cup breast, and that was why she hadn’t felt it yet … And as she sat in the waiting area drinking a sugary tea they made for her, not letting her leave for thirty minutes, with a small dressing taped to her incision. The thoughts kept coming, and they were all dark.

  There’d been a full waiting room when she’d arrived. By the time she had finished her tea, everyone else had gone home, and there were just two of them. Her, and a much younger girl she hadn’t noticed earlier. Reflecting her pale, worried face back at her, sipping tea from a plastic cup and smiling weakly. When she had a frightened mother, Gigi always told her it would be all right. She’d smile determinedly. And it was all right. She couldn’t think of a single thing to say to the frightened girl opposite.

  A week, she’d waited for the results. A long, long week. She hadn’t told a soul. How could she? Meg was in the middle of her exams. When the thirty minutes were up, she’d gone to her car, sat there and cried for what felt like ages. Then she’d blown her nose, wiped the mascara from under her eyes, turned the radio up very loud and driven home to her family. For seven days she kept her secret, kept it by concentrating on them. The third prom dress was bought; the two rejects were returned. Appointments for hair and nails and tan and makeup were made. Meg’s flashcards were read and tested and read out loud again. Meals were cooked and cleaned up; babies were delivered at work.

  She might have told Richard if she’d thought he’d help her. But she knew he wouldn’t. It was enough to carry herself for this week. She couldn’t carry him too. He’d fall apart. Be sadder than her, more scared than her, see things more darkly. That wouldn’t help. That would come if it was bad news, and she already dreaded the weight of him on her, but then there’d be no choice.

  She was at home, doing the ironing and watching doubles tennis at Wimbledon on Day 7, when the doctor who’d taken the biopsy telephoned her herself and told her she was sorry, but the lump was a malignancy, and she needed to come back in and discuss her options. It was the day of Meg’s last exam. French. They’d been laughing the night before – she’d instigated a ban on English at dinner, and they’d spoken French. Meg had done that laughter-that-turns-into-tears thing a stressed teenager can do so easily, and laughed and cried that they’d probably made it worse and she’d be lucky to get a C. But Gigi had waved her off with a bonne chance nonetheless, and Meg had smiled and stuck her tongue out. Richard had the afternoon off to play eighteen holes of golf with a friend. It was the hottest day of the year so far, so she was ironing with the French doors wide open, though there was precious little breeze.

  A funny thing happened. Knowing was appreciably less bad than not knowing. Now there had to be a plan. Now there was something to do. There was peculiar relief in knowing. Now positivity and optimism flooded into the cracks.

  And when she did have to tell them, it was okay. By then she’d gone back to the clinic. Understood everything for herself. And she was ready to help them deal with it.

  In the end, it wasn’t nearly as bad as it could have been. They’d caught it really early. Her prognosis was very good. The treatment plan was minimally invasive breast-sparing surgery – a lumpectomy that would leave her breast looking much the same (still too big, she’d joked with the surgeon – she’d been hoping a great new pair of knockers would be the reward). If the doctors were able to get clear margins on the tumour, and they believed they would be able to, no chemotherapy. No sickness. No baldness. No getting half poisoned to death. Six weeks of radiation treatment. With side effects that should be limited to fatigue, or skin irritations. It was okay. Not nearly as bad as it could have been. And that was what she told them. No fuss, she’d said. Carrying on as normally as possible.

  Megan cried. She was exhausted herself, by ten GCSEs, and the pressure of her own future bearing down on her, overwrought already. She asked a dozen or so questions, wanted a long cuddle on the sofa, chose to listen to her mother and believe her when she told her it would be all right, and then moved on, relatively quickly. She was young, with all the self-absorption and short-sightedness that comes with youth, and a childlike faith in the truthfulness of her parent. There was a prom, and a week in a villa on the Algarve with a friend’s family …

  Her boys were appropriately concerned, each different in their approach. Christopher immediately read up on every aspect of her planned surgery, googled every doctor at the hospital who might possibly carry it out and made a recommendation based on their star ratings. Olly sent flowers – a ridiculously large and over-the-top, artfully artless bouquet of exactly the sort he knew she loved, which came with a box of champagne truffles – and joked with her on the phone about wigs. He’d shave her head for her, he said, when the time came, and his too for solidarity. He’d professed disappointment when she’d said she wasn’t going to lose her hair. They had laughed raucously. There had never been a situation in her life when Olly hadn’t been able to make her laugh, and this one had turned out, wonderfully, to be no exception.

  Friends were faultless too, filling the freezer with lasagnes and planning small treats. At work, her shifts were unobtrusively covered and shortened and rearranged so that she could stay at work, where she wanted to be, but do a little less. She took a week off after the lumpectomy, and then needed odd days after the radiation treatments, when she felt more tired than she could ever have imagined, and needed to roll over and sleep. But they helped lend her life the illusion of carrying on as normal, and for that she was very grateful. None of the women she attended for the whole time she was getting treatment knew or even suspected there was anything different about her at all: that was a matter of huge pride to her.

  She spent more time at the home with James. He knew nothing about any of it, of course, and she told no one else there, and there was freedom in that. It was peaceful, sitting beside him. Sometimes he was up to a crossword, or a Sudoku. More often they just sat. It was a habit she’d never really broken. Some people had yoga. She had James.

  It was just Richard who let her down. She had hoped he wouldn’t, but somehow wasn’t surprised when he did. He had always needed her to be the stronger one – the manager, the coper.

  She remembered the moment she’d realized that her marriage was going to be this way. It had been different times – they didn’t
think to live together before they got married. You’d describe their courtship as whirlwind, but it was just how it was in those days. Across a two- or three-year period almost every girl in her class at the nursing school met and married someone. As if life was one big game of musical chairs, or marriage a sort of contagion. The advent of Facebook had reunited her with most of them in recent years, and you could hardly be surprised that more than half of them were divorced. She knew she didn’t want to marry a doctor – though some of her classmates viewed them as the Holy Grail of husbands – so when the nice-looking junior accountant she met in the pub expressed an interest, she let him take her out on a date. And another. He’d proposed after nine months, and they married five months after that, on a bright May day. She longed for a home of her own, and a double bed rather than the cramped back seat of his beaten-up Morris Marina. They’d been married less than a year when she’d fallen quickly and easily pregnant with their first child. They’d been very happy – it was sooner than was sensible, probably, but they both wanted the baby very much. She’d miscarried at eleven weeks. She vividly recalled the sharp pain that doubled her over suddenly that afternoon, the crushing sadness and disappointment she’d felt, the sense of failure she knew was wrong but couldn’t shake, the wretchedness of the D&C that followed. Things weren’t as good then as they were now. People didn’t talk about it so much. You weren’t supposed to mourn as though you’d lost a baby, and that was hard, because you had. And she vividly recalled that Richard couldn’t cope. Didn’t help. It forced her to swallow her own grief to help him through his own, and she registered even through the fog of sadness that this was a failure in him she couldn’t have seen before.

  They got past it, because you did. You glossed over what was missing, and made yourself focus on what was there, what was good. And life was good, in so many ways. Doctors gave them no reason to suppose this would happen again, and it didn’t. She fell pregnant again the same year, and, although she held herself taut with fear until she was well through the pregnancy, and didn’t, couldn’t, enjoy it the way she knew other mothers who hadn’t miscarried were able to, when Christopher was born, healthy and straightforward, it was good, and she was profoundly grateful for a long time. Richard found it easier to cope, and she was too happy to find fault.

  But the pattern was set. Several years later, when Christopher broke his leg – a nasty compound fracture – it was Gigi who coped. When Olly suffered from asthma in his early years, it was Gigi who coped …

  The balance had inevitably tipped more over time, with habit. When she needed to lean, he suddenly needed it more, and he sometimes threatened to push her right over in the process. So, of course, she learnt not to lean, but, little by little, almost by stealth, it eroded something at the very core of how she felt about him.

  When she was ill, he should have been the person she could talk to, late at night in the silent house, about her deepest fears. He should have held her when she was exhausted. He should have made everything okay. He should have carried her across that period. And he didn’t. And afterwards, she found she could never completely forgive him for it.

  Perhaps she should have left him then. But that was too enormous a thing to have done. She was too frightened. Too bloody hopeful. Too damned grateful. And the children? How could she have taken them to the edge and back of that dark abyss, and then flung them headlong into another? She told herself anything and everything she needed to. That it wasn’t his fault. That she couldn’t expect him to change. To live with it. Just live, in fact. Nonetheless, as her belief that she would survive had grown, her resentment had grown alongside it. An insidious, insistent Japanese knotweed of a feeling.

  So check-ups were routine now. And, with each one, the wave of returning fear crashed on a beach further and further out to sea, never disappearing altogether, but becoming more distant, an echo of itself. They were six-monthly now, and there’d never been anything abnormal. After five years even those appointments would stop. She’d go back to being almost like everyone else, who’d never had to turn left at the desk and follow the sign to Oncology. Almost. It was an act of will not to imagine a brain tumour behind every headache, a melanoma in every mole, but she practised it hard.

  It was true too that it gave you a gift, being a survivor. A brush with your mortality – it made you bloody glad to be alive. It made wasting days seem criminal. It made you less prone to road rage and being impatient in long lines. Less likely to wait to book that holiday you read about in the magazine. Less bothered about the three stone you kept losing (Atkins, cabbage, Slimfast) that kept finding you (bread basket, cake, cherry brandy) through your forties. It made you want to change everything black and white about your life into colour. It woke you up.

  What did catch up with her at every check-up was the memory of how let down she’d felt by Richard at that time. She couldn’t think it away as easily as the other things. She made a point of never going straight home after an appointment. She always had a plan with a girlfriend. Dinner, a film, a show … She needed a moment, and probably a cocktail and a good giggle, before she went home to Richard. Otherwise she might just tell him.

  Today’s was clear. As with all the others, Gigi didn’t know how much she’d been dreading hearing something else until she heard the good news. You told yourself it was routine, but you didn’t believe it, not in your deepest self. You were always waiting for it to come back, and on those days – on check-up days – that fear crept very near the surface of you, and lurked malevolently. The oncologist beamed when she was called back into the room, and closed her file decisively for another six months. And relief broke over her like a warm bath, reaching to the edge of every muscle and sinew that had held itself clenched.

  Today’s buffer between the appointment with oncology and Richard was mojitos with Kate. Gigi opened her handbag and took out her lipstick.

  Tess

  ‘Right, then, I’ll see about getting us some teas, shall I?’

  Donna always did this the moment they arrived. It was as if she couldn’t bear just to be in the room with Iris. She had to be busy. Once the tea had been drunk, she’d collect up the cups and saucers, chattering about helping out the staff, them being so busy and all, and be off again. She’d tidy the drawers, smooth the counterpane, rearrange the photographs. Fidget and fuss until it was time to go. Which was ironic, since at home those small tasks never occurred to her, and went entirely undone. Tess knew she couldn’t help it, that it was her coping mechanism, but nonetheless she usually ended up wishing she’d come alone.

  The nurse who’d brought them in stood with her hand on the handle of the open door. Tess hadn’t met her before. Her badge said her name was Sandy. She looked kind. Iris’s thin white hair had been combed recently: she looked fresh and sweet. Tess felt the rush of gratitude she always felt for the tenderness of these carers for people they didn’t love.

  Tess sat down in the armchair next to Iris’s, taking her grandmother’s cool, powdery hand in her own. Iris gave it willingly without acknowledging Tess. The hand felt tiny and ineffectual in her own, the skin almost translucent, the veins prominent. Iris’s engagement ring was twisted so that the small stones were facing into her palm. Tess gently turned it on Iris’s finger. Iris looked from the ring to her face, and then back at the ring.

  ‘She’s been chatty this afternoon, haven’t you, Iris? We had a bath, a lovely clean-up. And she was chatting away the whole time.’

  Despite her gratitude, Tess bridled slightly at Sandy’s tone of voice – undoubtedly gentle but too childlike. The use of ‘we’. It seemed as inevitable as the smell in places like this.

  Iris ignored the question, still staring at the ring.

  ‘Yes, very chatty. Been talking about a Tom.’

  ‘Tom?’

  ‘Is that your grandad?’

  ‘No. My granddad was Wilf.’

  ‘Is he …’

  Tess shook her head quickly. ‘I never knew him. He died the yea
r before I was born.’

  ‘Well, it’s definitely Tom she’s been talking about today. Do you know who that is?’

  ‘I don’t think so.’

  ‘Not to worry. That happens.’

  I know, Tess thought. I know that happens. Someone like Iris – their brain can alight on any moment of their entire lives, real or imaginary, true or false. Their minds are kaleidoscopes. Their histories are tessellated. ‘What’s she been saying about Tom?’

  Iris, who had been sitting staring ahead, her expression vacant, broke into a broad smile at hearing the name again, not entirely kind somehow, and now looked directly at Tess. Her eyes were suddenly alive.

  ‘He didn’t mean it. He didn’t. He was trying to explain. That’s all. He loved me. He loved me so much. And I loved him …’

  She knew she shouldn’t, she knew there was no point, but Tess gently corrected her. ‘You mean, Wilf, Gran. You were married to Wilf. Not Tom. Remember?’