Chapter Twenty-Three
10 December 2011
There is a reason why people have a phobia about hospitals, thought Kate as she accompanied her father to the local general on the morning of her mother’s lumpectomy. Elaine had been on the ward since the previous night. Kate had dreaded having to wake early enough to see her mother again before she went into theatre. She thought she might sleep through and had set three separate alarms to ensure she didn’t. In the event, Kate got hardly any sleep at all. She could hear her father pacing around the house throughout the wee small hours. She knew that he had hated having to leave Elaine alone overnight and he was determined, even if it meant sleeping outside the hospital doors, to be there well before she went into surgery the next morning.
Well, there was no way he was going to be sleeping outside the hospital doors. The country was shivering through the coldest December for seventeen years. Scotland and the north of England had just had another dose of snow. The weather forecast had warned that the south would soon be getting its share.
Fortunately, when Kate dared look that morning, the ground outside was still snow-free. The gods were with them. When she dragged herself into the kitchen, she found her father had already made breakfast: three rounds of toast that were so cold and hard Kate guessed he’d made them at least half an hour before she woke up. He hadn’t touched anything himself.
‘Have a piece of toast, Dad, please.’
‘I can’t eat anything this morning, love. Not while I’m thinking of your mother in that place on her own. Not while she can’t eat anything herself.’
Of course. Elaine had been on nil by mouth since midnight in readiness for the operation ahead.
‘She’s going to be OK, Dad. They do operations like hers every day of the week.’
‘I don’t care about all the other people they’ve operated on. Your mother’s the only one I’d miss.’
They were on the road to the hospital at seven. John insisted on driving and Kate let him, even though she wasn’t sure it was the best idea. She had never seen her father quite so distracted as he was right then and the motorway was surprisingly busy, even at that time in the morning. Kate received a text from Tess, who said she had already been up for hours. That wasn’t unusual for her. Lily was still a horribly early riser. Tess said she couldn’t wait for Lily to become a lazy-arsed teen. Helen and Anne likewise had sent their best wishes for the day ahead. There was nothing from Ian. He was probably still asleep.
At the hospital, the working day was already well underway. The daytime nurses had long since started their shifts. The consultants were making their rounds. Elaine was sitting up in bed. She was staring into space with a blank expression on her face as John and Kate walked onto the ward. Catching sight of them, she plastered on a smile and flicked through the pages of a magazine as though she wanted them to think that she had been happily amusing herself with the antics of the X Factor contestants.
Kate noticed at once that the magazine her mother held was upside down.
John placed a kiss on the top of his wife’s head. Kate gave her mother a squeeze.
‘All set?’ John asked.
‘Oh, yes,’ said Elaine, as though they were discussing a hairdressing appointment. ‘They should have me in by half past nine. Have you spoken to Tess this morning? Is Lily going in to school, do you know?’
Tess had mentioned that she thought Lily might be coming down with a cold.
‘Lily’s fine, I think,’ said Kate.
‘And how’s Ian? It’s a shame he can’t come down to keep you company this weekend. He works very hard.’
‘Yes,’ said Kate, through slightly gritted teeth. ‘So hard that he’s going into the office on Saturday.’
‘Oh, he is a good man. You are lucky to have him to look after you.’
It wasn’t the right time for Kate to express her annoyance. She just nodded.
The ward sister came to tell Elaine that the orderlies would be along to fetch her in the next ten minutes.
‘I’ll leave you two to it,’ Kate said. ‘Dad, I’ll wait for you by the nurses’ station.’
Kate felt that it was important that her parents had this moment together. Elaine may have been Kate’s mother, but she was John’s world. She was his wife, his lover, his best friend. They had vowed to be each other’s everything. If, in the very worst-case scenario, this was the last time they held each other, then they deserved to be alone.
Out in the corridor, Kate felt a lump rising in her throat. Had she just said goodbye to her mother for the last time? Almost certainly not. She knew that. A lumpectomy was a fairly routine procedure. Ian was certainly treating it as such, but what Ian didn’t seem to appreciate was that this was the first time anyone in her family had even had a general anaesthetic. What if Elaine turned out to be allergic to the sedatives they used on her? What if she just gave up? The Williamson family had been so lucky so far. Not so much as a broken toe. It was so disconcerting to see her strong mother look so weak. Was their luck about to run out? Kate dabbed at her eyes. She wished that Ian was there to tell her how silly she was being, but Ian still hadn’t so much as texted, ‘Good morning.’
At last, Kate’s father shuffled out into the corridor. He looked shockingly bent and old, as though the cancer were taking over his body too.
‘Everything OK?’ Kate asked uselessly.
‘They’ve taken her down to theatre.’
‘They know what they’re doing, Dad. They really do.’
Kate hated herself for using the matter-of-fact tone she might have used with a client.
Chapter Twenty-Four
Hospitals had come a long way since Kate last spent any time in one. She figured that must have been when her school friend Emma had her appendix taken out. The girls in their little gang had taken it in turns to visit Emma every evening of her hospital stay. Back then, in the mid-1980s, visiting hours were strict. There was no question of hanging around all day. And the distractions on offer for a bored friend or relative were limited to say the least. There was a single kiosk selling magazines, get-well cards and flowers for the unprepared, plus a hospital ‘friends’ stall providing homemade cakes and well-stewed tea. This much newer hospital had a concession of Costa and a proper branch of WHSmith.
‘I’ve got a feeling we’re going to get to know this branch of Costa rather well,’ said John as he carried two small lattes to a table.
John wouldn’t leave the hospital, not while Elaine was in the operating theatre, though he kept insisting that Kate should go into town and do some Christmas shopping if she wanted to. Shopping? How could she think of that now? Kate told her father that she wasn’t going anywhere. She was perfectly happy to sit at a table in the coffee shop. She had her laptop and the toggle that gave her an access code so she could log on when she was out of the office. She could do some work. Except, of course, there was no Wi-Fi to be had. Even the phone signal was terrible. Kate had to walk right out of the hospital lobby to pick up her messages. It wasn’t much fun. The hospital doors were ringed by smokers. A man puffed his way through two B&H while a drip fed something more useful into his arm.
God, the place was depressing. It was at moments like this that Kate realised that working at her law firm in London had kept her somewhat cushioned from real life. At Ludbrooks, the staff were uniformly young and fit, as though they were part of some future world where all disease and ageing had been wiped out, but this was true life. Everyone gets old. Everyone dies in the end. Kate thought of her mother on the operating table. She thought of her father, grey-faced under the artificial light of the Costa concession. She wanted to go back to London and get away from the horrifying spectacle of people filing in to the hospital to be cured or just to die comfortably. She felt guilty for even having that thought, and guilty with the knowledge that she could still walk away if she wanted to.
Kate asked the guy on a drip if he could spare her a cigarette.
He obliged at onc
e. ‘These things are killing me, anyway,’ he said.
Kate lit up. It was the first cigarette she had smoked since 1997, so in retrospect, perhaps it was fitting that, while Kate was squinting through the smoke, a vision from that terrible year should appear.
‘Kate? Kate Williamson?’
Kate waved the smoke away and swiftly crushed the cigarette beneath her heel.
‘Yes.’
A man in a white coat stood before her. Someone from the oncology department, she assumed. Why had he come to find her? It could only be bad news.
‘Is Mum out?’ she asked urgently. ‘Did everything go OK?’
‘Oh, no,’ said the doctor. ‘Your mum is in there? What happened?’
‘What do you mean?’ Kate was confused. ‘What have you come to tell me?’
‘God, you really don’t know who I am, do you?’ The man shook his head in disbelief. ‘Well, I know I’ve put on a bit of weight and I’ve lost some hair.’ He took off his glasses.
‘Matt Hogan?’
Kate recognised at last the man she had dated for six years through and right after university.
‘The very same.’
He went to kiss her on the cheek just as Kate aimed in the wrong direction. They banged noses.
‘What are you doing here?’ Kate asked him.
‘I work here. What are you doing here?’
‘Mum. Lumpectomy. At least, we hope that’s all she’ll have to have. She’s got DCIS.’
‘Oh dear.’ Matt nodded his understanding. ‘I’m sorry to hear that.’
‘It should be straightforward, they said.’
‘She’s certainly at the best place.’
‘That’s what I said to Dad. I just came out to . . .’
‘Have a fag.’ Matt shook his finger.
‘Check my messages, actually. There’s no signal inside.’
‘Thank God. Can you imagine what it would be like if all the patients were on their phones in there?’
‘But it’s so depressing out here. I don’t know what possessed me. I had a sudden urge for a puff and I haven’t had a cigarette since 1997.’
Since the night Princess Diana died and I brought home my flatmate’s ex-fiancé and finally realised that my ‘work hard, play hard’ lifestyle was getting out of balance on the ‘play’ side, was what she didn’t say.
‘So . . .’ Kate peered at Matt’s face. He wasn’t joking about having put on some weight. His brown eyes peered out at her like raisins in a bun. ‘How long have you . . . ?’
‘Been here? We moved down here in 2004.’
We. Was he still with the intensive-care nurse?
‘It was Rosie’s idea. She wanted to be close to her parents.’
Rosie was the name of the nurse. Kate remembered having cursed it once. Or maybe a hundred times.
‘I wasn’t too keen. I liked being up in Scotland.’
So it was true that he’d moved back to Scotland too. That was where his family came from.
‘The agreement was that we would give it two years and if I still didn’t like it, we’d move back to Edinburgh. Two years later, I still didn’t like it, but by that time Rosie had left me for a dentist and now I’m stuck down here for ever if I want to see the kids.’
‘Oh, no,’ said Kate. She wished she had another fag so she had something she could fiddle with to hide her embarrassment.
‘Yep,’ said Matt, ‘that’s my life. The job’s all right, though.’
‘What did you specialise in in the end?’
‘Gynaecology.’
‘Just what you always wanted.’
‘And you?’
‘Still a lawyer. Can’t you see my horns?’
Matt grinned. They’d had many arguments back in the day about the relative moral values of their career choices. ‘You look well. Is there . . . ? Do you . . . ? Are there any children?’
‘Not that I know of,’ said Kate. ‘Though I am getting married, can you believe?’
Kate found herself stretching out her left hand to show off her ring as if to prove it.
‘Only now? I thought you would have been snapped up years ago.’
Kate raised her eyebrows. She didn’t remember Matt having expressed that kind of opinion before. In fact, when they were breaking up, he’d told her that no one would ever want a mad-eyed neurotic like her. Still, she accepted the compliment.
‘Working too hard on my career, I guess.’
Matt looked at his watch. ‘Talking of which . . . I’ve got to go. My eleven o’clock.’
‘Of course. Can’t keep her waiting.’
Matt hesitated. ‘Can I . . . can I have your number? I mean, it would be nice to catch up. If you’re down here for a few days because of your mum and you’re at a loose end, we should go for a drink. In any case, let me know how your mum gets on.’
Matt searched in his pocket for a card. Kate took it.
‘You look amazing, Kate Williamson.’ Matt winked at her as he left. ‘You look every bit as beautiful as I remember.’
Did she look amazing? Kate found herself checking out her own reflection as she walked back through the revolving doors. Then she checked herself. She wasn’t at the hospital to flirt. Her mum was on the operating table.
Kate found her father sitting in the exact same place she had left him, now nursing an empty coffee cup.
‘It’s eleven o’clock,’ said Kate. ‘We should go up and see how Mum’s doing.’
John followed her to the lifts. Kate wondered if she should tell him about Matt to fill the silence. She decided against it. John didn’t seem to be in the mood for small talk. It was as if he was in a daze.
When they got to the ward, they were greeted with the news that Elaine was in recovery. There was not much more information than that.
‘Did the operation go OK?’ Kate asked.
The nurse on duty shrugged. ‘They don’t tell us. All I know is that she’s in the recovery room. She’ll be back on the ward in an hour.’
‘That’s good,’ Kate assured her father. ‘I’m sure it is.’
Chapter Twenty-Five
That night, Kate stayed with her father again. He was a little less anxious than he had been the night before. The surgeon had come to check Elaine’s progress while Kate and John were still on the ward, keeping her company. He reassured them all that the operation had gone well. He was happy that he had removed 99.9 per cent of the malignant tissue, if not all of it. The radiotherapy would squash anything he’d left behind. He was pleased with the neat incision he’d made and was sure that, when the time was right, the reconstruction of Elaine’s left breast would also be simple.
‘This is as good as it gets,’ he explained.
When visiting hours finished at eight, Kate drove her father home. She insisted on taking the wheel, though she knew he hated the thought of his new car in anyone else’s hands. Kate wasn’t sure John would have got them back in one piece. He looked every bit as tired as his wife. Back at the house, he ate a couple of sandwiches and fell asleep in the chair. Kate chose that moment to catch up with Ian.
Their phone conversation was brief. Ian was monosyllabic on the subjects of work and weather and what he had eaten that day. Kate was reminded of conversations with Ian’s nephews, who could barely be persuaded to grunt if they were engaged with a DS or an Xbox. That night, she had a feeling that Ian was watching the television at the same time as trying to talk to her. She felt her annoyance bubble up again. Of all the days when she needed him to pay her a little bit of attention he could just about be bothered to mutter ‘Mm-hmm’ in response to her news. It was as though he was punishing her for something. Still sulking about her being away, as though she were on a spa break rather than looking after her dad.
‘Have you changed your mind about the weekend?’ she asked.
That seemed to capture Ian’s notice for a moment.
‘I’ve got a lot to do before the end of the year,’ he responded.
‘Li
ke watch West Ham?’ Kate asked.
‘Are they playing?’
Ian’s attempt to feign ignorance of his beloved team’s fixtures was unconvincing. Ian had a photographic memory for West Ham facts.
‘Like you don’t know. Goodnight,’ said Kate. ‘I’ve had a long day and I’m going to bed. I’ll call you tomorrow.’
Kate ended the call, but for a short while she remained sitting on the end of the bed, holding the phone in her hand as though she expected Ian to call back and ask what was up with her. He didn’t. When her phone next sprang to life, it was with a text from Helen, asking how the operation had gone.
Fine, Kate responded. And you’ll never guess who I bumped into at the hospital. Matt Hogan.
OMG, texted Helen.
He’s working down here. He’s looking fat and getting a divorce.
Karma, texted Helen.
Kate didn’t reply to that. She could use some good karma of her own, for Elaine. It didn’t seem right to be gossiping about Matt Hogan. She ignored Helen’s entreaties for more information and put her phone away.
Back in the living room, Kate placed a blanket over her father’s lap. He would probably have been more comfortable in bed, but she decided against waking him, in case his head filled with worries and he was unable to drop off again. Kate washed their two sad-looking plates in the kitchen sink. She drew the blinds for the night. She hung her coat, which had been draped across the back of a chair, in its proper place. Then, suddenly remembering that morning, she reached into her coat pocket and pulled out Matt’s card.
She looked at it closely. So many years had passed since their last fraught conversation, in 1997. She had thought she would never see him again. At least he hadn’t aged as well as George Clooney. That would have been too much to bear. Still, she was surprised to find that seeing Matt again had brought a little of the sting of rejection back. She couldn’t help thinking how much he must have loved Rosie to follow her down to Southampton. Kate would have followed Matt anywhere. Would she have felt differently if someone had been able to show her the currant-bun face and receding hairline he would have by the time he turned forty? Who knew?
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