by Lucy Dillon
Knitting helped stop the thinking. On nights when she gave up on sleep, Lorna got up and sat in the kitchen with her needles and a pattern, and created a poppy or a broad leaf. Sometimes Joyce slipped in and joined her. Lorna didn’t ask why she couldn’t sleep, and Joyce never mentioned her own reasons for wakefulness. Sometimes they talked in snippets about Ronan or Lorna’s mum, and a long silence would fall, but it was a companionable silence.
One very late night, or early morning, in the second week of September, Lorna was in the kitchen with Rudy snoring on her lap while she added stitched details to some daisies she’d knitted the previous day. Joyce drifted in, wrapped in her vivid Liberty print dressing gown, and sat down at the table.
After a few minutes, she said in her brisk voice, ‘Lorna, could I ask a favour of you?’
‘Of course.’ Lorna tied off the end of the flower petal. This was her best daisy yet, with delicate pink tips she’d embroidered on with cotton. The daisy chains were going to be woven through the fences around the municipal gardens: sunshine yellow and cloud white against the ironwork.
‘Could you run me into the hospital tomorrow, please?’
Lorna glanced up. Joyce’s face didn’t have its usual small-hours blurriness; she seemed focused. ‘Sure, what time? Has Shirley Wheels had her car clamped? One double yellow too many?’
‘No, Shirley Wheels is very much still on the road but I’d rather … If you don’t mind, I’d like you to come into the appointment with me.’
It wasn’t their usual way, asking direct questions, but Lorna instinctively broke the rule. ‘Is something wrong?’
‘Everything is fine, but I’m afraid it’s one of those appointments at which the well-meaning social team encourage you to “have someone with you”.’ Joyce didn’t need to mime the inverted commas; Lorna could hear them. ‘There’ll be some medical details, for which I apologise, but I’d very much appreciate it if you’d be there. Keir is unable to attend, which I must say is rather a relief. He does fuss.’
Keir was on holiday, a ‘wellbeing break’ in Italy. Tiffany had had a postcard, outlining all the problems he’d encountered since the plane took off. She’d become something of a shoulder for Keir to moan on.
‘I’d be happy to take you.’ Lorna tried to gauge how concerned Joyce wanted her to be. ‘But if there are things I ought to know in advance please do tell me. So I can be helpful.’
They looked at each other. There was an honesty here that was easier than Lorna had imagined. Joyce wasn’t her mother, she wasn’t her responsibility. She wasn’t Joyce’s carer. She was her friend, though. The heart of her artistic inspiration. Lorna felt something sliding in the flat, something sliding away, out of her control.
‘The only help I need,’ said Joyce, ‘is to be treated like a woman who knows her own mind.’
‘Well, I can do that,’ said Lorna, although her heart sank.
Joyce insisted that Lorna didn’t need to do anything other than turn up and listen – ‘so they don’t make a big fuss about my geriatric brain not getting it’ – but from the moment she and Joyce sat down in the airy consulting room she sensed there was something ominous about the meeting.
The room in the new wing of Longhampton Hospital was too nice, with comfy chairs and a view of the car park outside, and a bright pink gerbera in a silver pot on the table. The giveaway, however, was the box of tissues next to it.
Mr Khan the consultant – he didn’t say what he was a consultant in, assuming Lorna knew – was friendly, as was Ali, a social worker colleague of Keir’s who’d been drafted into the meeting in his place. Like Keir, Ali had bundles of papers and files, and a phone that never stopped buzzing. There was another pleasant middle-aged woman too, who introduced herself as Tina as if Lorna should know her.
Lorna noticed that they all referred to Joyce as Mrs Rothery, right from the off. How long had Joyce been coming here? How much had she kept to herself?
‘Well, Mrs Rothery, it’s good to see you walking in here so easily!’ said Mr Khan, checking and then closing his notes. ‘The physio says you’re almost back to normal.’
‘We’ll have you running the marathon in no time!’ chirped Tina, but then seemed to think better of it.
‘So that’s great news. However …’ Mr Khan’s tone changed, a shade of solemnity over the jovial warmth. Elephant grey, thought Lorna. ‘I’m afraid we’re going to have to talk about these results.’ He pulled a file across his desk and opened it. ‘You remember at your last appointment, we decided to do a scan and run some blood tests, just to confirm a few niggling concerns we had.’
‘You decided,’ said Joyce. ‘I was quite prepared to take my chances in blissful ignorance.’
‘Yes, you’re quite right: I decided.’ He smiled briefly. ‘Anyway, we … you had a CT scan, as well as some other diagnostic tests, and I’m very sorry to say that my suspicions proved correct. The scan has shown up some abnormalities in your pancreas.’ He pressed his lips together.
An invisible heavy hand grabbed Lorna by the back of the neck, temporarily shaking her centre of gravity. Abnormalities . That could only mean one thing.
She glanced at Ali and Tina. They must hear this all the time, she thought, struggling to keep her own expression straight when every nerve was straining not to grab Joyce’s hand in hers. What were the signs? How had she missed them?
‘I see,’ said Joyce, as if they were discussing the weather. ‘And how advanced is it?’
‘We would need to do a few more tests to pinpoint that.’
‘Has it spread?’ She looked impatient. ‘Doctor, I have had friends with … abnormalities, as you call them. I’m not frightened by the terminology.’
He seemed respectful of her vim. ‘There are indications of metastases, in the bone and liver. But, again, I’d prefer to do some further tests so we can be absolutely precise.’
Joyce raised her hand. ‘I know you’re duty-bound to offer me a series of treatments and solutions but I don’t want them. I’m beyond being poked and prodded, just to save a few months.’
The social worker, Ali, leaned forward. ‘Joyce … Mrs Rothery, you don’t have to make any decisions today. Why not just listen to the options? It’s not all aggressive surgery, you know. You might not even have to lose your hair!’
Joyce gave her a withering glance. ‘My dear, how do you know this isn’t a wig already?’
Ali shrank back, with an ‘I warned you’ glance from Tina, and Joyce returned her gaze to the consultant.
‘But there are treatment options?’ Lorna couldn’t hold it in any longer. ‘Aren’t there? Maybe not chemotherapy but perhaps radiotherapy?’ She was racking her brains for any scraps of anything she’d ever known about cancer. There had to be options, even at Joyce’s age. Doctors worked miracles these days.
‘Yes, um …’ He tried to check the notes for her name, without being obvious.
‘Lorna.’ Mr Khan was obviously assuming she was Joyce’s granddaughter, or great-niece, and she was about to explain before suddenly realising that might limit how much he’d tell her.
Joyce had no one apart from her. No sister, no child, no husband: she was alone at the edge of this cliff, looking down into nothing, not knowing when she might fall. It caught Lorna in the throat.
‘Lorna.’ He smiled. ‘Of course, there are quite a few things we can try.’
Joyce huffed. ‘As we’ve already established, I’m practically eighty so I don’t have much time left,’ she said. ‘Can we please cut to the chase? I want you to be honest with me, Mr Khan. You must know roughly how advanced my … condition is.’ The faintest trace of fear scudded across her pale blue eyes, to vanish instantly. Joyce raised her chin, facing it. ‘How long do I have?’
Finally, the doctor conceded he was in the presence of a stronger will than his own. ‘We’d need to do more staging tests. Pancreatic cancers are hard to detect so you may have had this for a while … It could be a year. It could be a few months.’
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A few months. Lorna stared in shock at Joyce. A few months wouldn’t even take them to Christmas!
Christmas. Who cared about Christmas? It wouldn’t even let Joyce finish her yarnbombing project.
Joyce turned her head and met Lorna’s anguished gaze. And she smiled, more sadly for Lorna’s shock than herself, then reached over and squeezed her hand.
They had been sitting in the car for ten minutes without speaking, and Lorna couldn’t bring herself to start the engine. Driving home to the gallery, to the piles of knitted petals, to a life that now had a stopwatch on it – it made everything real. She couldn’t bear it. That dark shadow at the back of her mind: she hadn’t been able to sit with Betty at the end, or her own mother. And now Joyce would be sitting in her room, knitting and patiently waiting for death to come, instead of barring the doors and fighting it away.
Finally, she made herself ask. ‘Did you know?’
Joyce was watching the people walking into the hospital. An older couple with a helium balloon of congratulations, rushing up the stairs as fast as they could behind a couple of a similar age; the man’s arm around the woman’s bowed shoulders told a different story. A toddler and his mum. A pair of teenagers, hugging in tears.
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I think I did.’
‘How? Did Keir take you for tests? Why didn’t he say something? I mean, I know there’s patient confidentiality but he knew you were moving in with me! He should have let us all know in case …’ She didn’t know in case what.
‘Keir doesn’t know.’ Joyce turned her gold wedding ring round on her finger. ‘I’ve spent my whole life tuning into impulses I don’t understand. I let my body respond to instincts I can’t rationalise. Hand moves, brain responds.’ She mimed painting, then let her hand fall. ‘I knew something wasn’t right. I just didn’t know what it was.’
‘So why didn’t you say something sooner?’
‘Because these doctors always want to treat things,’ Joyce replied impatiently. ‘You can’t treat life . They’d try to get me into some fast-track treatment programme, blast it out of me with chemicals and lasers – whatever it is they do. I didn’t want that. I didn’t want to leave my house in an ambulance, then be blasted and poisoned, and sent back a wreck. Or worse than that, never allowed back at all.’
‘But it’s not like that.’ Lorna couldn’t bear the finality of Joyce’s attitude; she couldn’t bear the thought that in months, weeks, this sharp mind would be gone. ‘Won’t you even consider the options?’
‘No, Lorna.’ The tone was more like the old Joyce. Quite snippy. ‘Please.’
They lapsed into silence again.
‘Is that why you wanted to move in with me? So I could look after you?’ Lorna’s chest tightened. ‘So you could die in my house and not in a hospital?’
‘No. That sounds … Oh dear. No.’ Joyce meshed her fingers in her lap. ‘I wanted to move into your flat first because I thought it would be good for us both.’ She turned, so Lorna could see the honesty in her eyes. ‘I’ve lived my life on my own terms, since I was a young woman. I paid my own art-school fees because my parents thought it was a waste of time. And I did all manner of jobs before my paintings sold, to put food on the table. I didn’t want matters taken out of my hands now I’m on my own. You’ve seen the social workers fussing around, telling me what’s best, as if I don’t know my own mind. You needed quality art for your gallery, and I needed a little room with civilised company, and Bernard would get …’ At the mention of his name, her composure wobbled. ‘Bernard would be somewhere he knew and trusted when I was no longer able to take care of him.’
‘I can do that , Joyce.’ Lorna tried not to think about Bernard, and how bewildered he’d be without his mistress. He knew exactly where Joyce was, even when he looked asleep. His nose twitched, following her.
‘I appreciate it’s a lot to ask.’ She tapped her hand on the gear stick, clicking her rings against the plastic. ‘But as the care nurse said, I should be fairly fit for a while. I haven’t had many symptoms up until now, and when it does … start to affect me more, there are nurses who can call in.’ She sensed the horror on Lorna’s face, and pulled back. ‘But we can take it as it comes. My room in Butterfields might come up at any moment.’
Lorna knew it wouldn’t. Butterfields required its residents to be ‘in independent health’; it would be the hospice, when that time came.
‘The main thing is,’ Joyce went on, ‘I am absolutely determined to finish our project.’
‘You came up with the idea, not me. It was your garden painting that inspired it.’ Lorna was close to tears. That beautiful garden, where she’d first met Joyce. It seemed so long ago that she’d broken into Rooks Hall with Keir, so long since she’d walked behind Rudy and Bernard, snuffling through the hedges, and found Sam again.
‘We both did.’ Joyce looked at her and there was a flash of understanding between them that stopped the tears in Lorna’s eyes. Joyce was focused, not wallowing in sentiment; she seemed clearer now than she had been on the way in. ‘I want to finish our project. I want to see Longhampton bedecked with glorious colour on New Year’s Day.’
Lorna threw caution to the wind. ‘So why won’t you even consider treatment that might give us more time?’
‘Because we all have to die sometime,’ said Joyce. Her tone was matter-of-fact, but not unkind. ‘I want to do it on my own terms. As an artist.’ She managed a sad, proud smile.
‘All right,’ said Lorna. She didn’t understand, but there didn’t seem much point arguing.
More people walked up the hospital steps, and she thought of her parents, dying on their own terms, alone and unnoticed, ready to go. That won’t happen to Joyce, she thought, she’ll go out loved and celebrating. Her heart lurched with sudden emotion.
I don’t want you to go yet, she thought. We’ve only just started to get to know one another.
They sat for another moment, then Lorna started the car. ‘Let’s get back,’ she said. ‘We have flowers to knit.’
Chapter Twenty-Six
‘So, when you’re not knitting, what do you do?’ Calum offered Lorna the bowl of sugar crystals. When she shook her head, he tipped two spoons into his espresso, letting it sit on the thick crema before it sank down. The sign of a decent coffee. She knew he’d be thinking that; they’d talked about coffee, as well as New York, and arts funding, and Japanese food, and cartoons. Calum was easy to talk to.
‘That’s all I do these days,’ she said, honestly. ‘I knit.’
He grinned. ‘Come on, we’re off the record now. You don’t have to convince me you’re working to timetable. I mean, what do you like doing? Are you a sculptor? A sketcher?’
She pushed a stray strand of hair behind her ear. ‘Seriously, I haven’t done anything apart from knit, dawn till dusk, ever since we started,’ she said. ‘I love it. We sit and chat, me and my flatmates. It feels very communal, actually.’
‘Then you’re a textile artist.’
‘Maybe I am.’ She smiled over her coffee cup, and liked the way Calum’s eyes smiled back.
They were in the wine bar on the corner of the high street, on an outside table, and Lorna wasn’t sure if she was on a date or not. Tiffany said she was; Calum had asked to meet her for a drink after work this time, and he’d made a casual reference to getting something to eat. That meant nothing in Lorna’s opinion. It was probably so he could expense it.
‘He’s asking you out for dinner, so go.’ Tiffany rolled her eyes. ‘Why wouldn’t you? Calum’s cute; he likes the same arty nonsense you do. And he’s been trying to ask you out for ages – give the guy a break.’
‘But what if it goes wrong and work gets …?’
I’m about to say, Don’t mix business with pleasure , she thought, and her teeth clenched.
‘Lorna.’ Tiffany looked incredulous. ‘How many dates are you currently getting? Just go, for God’s sake.’
And so here she was, in a black dress with
her hair wound in a bun, flirting pleasantly with the only other Longhamptonite who had an opinion on pointillism. She’d stuck to espresso so far, just in case, but the next drink, she decided, would be a glass of wine.
‘You mentioned something about a gallery in London?’ Calum waved his spoon at her. ‘Who were you working for there?’
‘Me. I started a pop-up.’
‘Wow. Who were you representing?’
She started to tell him, and instead of looking appalled at her naivety, he leaned closer, taking in every detail.
‘But no one bought anything and then Zak disappeared with what money was left,’ she finished, and waited for him to ask the usual questions: How much did you lose? Was it humiliating?
Calum didn’t ask any of them. He just shrugged. ‘It happens. If it had worked out, you’d be a millionaire and everyone would say you were a visionary. At least you tried. Someone’s got to go out and bat for the artists. Do you fancy something to eat?’ He checked his watch – they were well into ‘out for dinner’ time now. ‘I’ve found – don’t laugh – a good little tapas place behind the sports centre. What are your feelings about tapas?’
‘I’m willing to take a gambas on it.’
‘Ha!’ He pointed at her. ‘Funny girl.’
Something was growing in the space between them, Lorna sensed it, like wispy sweet peas sending out tendrils to wrap around common ground. She could feel herself going into date mode, sifting through her personality to present the bits she thought Calum would like.
Without warning, Calum reached across the table and laid his hand over hers. The contact made her tingle with surprise. ‘This is great,’ he said. ‘Best evening out I’ve had since I got here.’
Lorna didn’t know what to say. It … was great, actually. She smiled. ‘Yes, it is.’
Someone coughed behind her and she swivelled her head round. Sam was standing there, and he looked awkward.
‘Sorry to interrupt,’ he said, deliberately not looking at Calum. ‘I was on my way to the gallery but since you’re here – I need some more paintings for the cottages. Can you bring a selection over some time this week?’