She told me she was very sorry but she’d given me the wrong number. She hoped she hadn’t caused any trouble. After giving me that number she’d circled in the Yellow Pages, she’d wandered off and found a business card on her hall table. It belonged to another firm of tree surgeons altogether, and this lot were definitely the ones who’d been round and done the work. She remembered them leaving the card on the hall table, she remembered them pointing it out to her. She’d tried to ring me back about it right away, but I’d been engaged.
Since that business with the tree, she’s been on the blower to me about every little thing. She’s totally lost confidence in her own judgement. She rings me at the office, and also at home, which she never used to do. Martine is fast losing patience. She rings me up to ask my advice over every tiny detail. A man has offered to clean her windows for ten pounds – is that too much? Every little thing. It’s driving me mad.
If I’m Spared
‘What are you wearing,’ he muttered into his mobile, non-committal.
She told him, in detail, and while he listened he drew down deep draughts of nicotine and narrowed his eyes. She had a small hard waist, Fiona, and was proud of what in Pilates-speak was described as her inner corset.
‘Are you coming in?’ called Barbara, plaintive, from the back door. ‘It’s gone ten.’
‘In a minute,’ he replied.
‘Tom . . .’
‘I said, in a minute.’
The row of tall terraced houses in which he lived backed on to the little gardens of another row of tall terraced houses. Many of the windows within his view were lit, displaying rectangular yellow interiors, noiseless genre scenes of pasta pots, embracing or retreating couples, cats, squabbles, and, three houses down, a solitary smoker sitting in the dark by an open window, cigarette end glowing scarlet.
He wrapped up the stirring conversation with Fiona then took a drag on his own cigarette and tipped his head back to exhale, looking up at a jewelled aeroplane in the sky, following its trajectory hungrily with his eyes even though he had only two days ago returned from Belarus and would be off again in two days if not sooner to Haiti.
Adrenalin junkies was what they called themselves, he and his fellow foreign correspondents. It was undeniably addictive, the lure of being away, of being witness to the unfolding of important events, and also of being in some heady way exempt. At the end of the day, with any luck at all they went back to their foreign correspondents’ hotel and had a drink together.
He was exempt at home too. He could not be expected to latch straight back into the mundane daily round after what he had seen. So when Barbara in a crass moment asked him to do something like take out the rubbish, as she had tonight, it jarred.
‘Sorry, I was miles away,’ he’d said. ‘Can’t get that child out of my mind, the one I was telling you about who lost both her legs in the bombing. What did you say?’
‘Nothing,’ Barbara had mumbled, tying up the black plastic sack.
Anyway, she’d left him alone to take care of Daisy for fifty minutes this afternoon while she went off to do some shopping or whatever. ‘Bond with your daughter!’ she’d ordered, heavily waggish, before disappearing off to do whatever it was she wanted to do. She was crap at jokes.
There was no guilt. Feelings are after all involuntary. The holiness of the heart’s affections, and so on. As Fiona said, it was ridiculous to talk about someone else breaking up a marriage; a marriage would have to be in trouble already for the husband to want to sleep with someone else. Or the wife, she’d added, scrupulously fair.
Not that any boats had yet been burned. Or launched, for that matter; Fiona was a tad too cut and dried to get romantic about. Thing was, he wanted his cake and eat it. Barbara could be a wet blanket all right, nothing to talk about except the child and the dripping tap. On the other hand he wouldn’t actually like to live with one of the Fionas. As that guy from Reuters had said one night when they were getting out of it on the local champagne, what you wanted when you were fresh back from a war zone was a vase of flowers and your dinner on the table, not some ambitious female cutting you up at the lights – ‘Oh yeah, I’m off to Tashkent tomorrow’, that sort of thing.
Even so, it was only his second night back and already they were reduced to penne with pesto and frozen peas. ‘I could have stayed in Belarus for that,’ he’d joked. She blamed it on the traffic and Daisy teething; and then she sat gnawing her cuticles while he drank his coffee. When he asked her not to, she proceeded to play with her hair instead, using a strand to floss her teeth when she thought he wasn’t looking. She couldn’t keep her hands still, it was probably her most infuriating habit, they were always up near her face, her mouth, her hair; if he snapped at her to keep them below shoulder level she would sit with them in her lap and twist her wedding ring round and round.
That really got to him. She’d been doing it tonight.
He decided on one last cigarette before going in. It was the sovereign cure. Not only did it make his irritation melt away, but it dropped his shoulders and sharpened his mind so that he started to concentrate on the Belarus piece, even scribbled a few words onto the back of his Marlboro packet.
That done, he inhaled luxuriously and toyed with certain useful clichés. ‘I need some space’ was so obviously code for something else, like ‘I need some time alone’, that its use these days was the lazy man’s insult. ‘Life is not a dress rehearsal’ was more interesting because, while widely used as a get-out clause, what it really meant was, ‘I’m about to do something incredibly rash and ill-advised.’ No, the loftiest current euphemism had to be, ‘Time to move on.’ That would do if it came to it. Dignified, non-specific, fabulously exculpatory. Time to move on. There was no answer to that.
He shivered. It had been a moody day, typical April in England, half-hours of hot sun then quick banks of cool storm cloud draining the light. It was cold now. Grinding his cigarette stub into the grass, he groaned inwardly and went indoors.
‘The only appointment they have is at eight twenty,’ said Barbara, appearing beside him with a cup of tea.
‘What time is it?’ he murmured, keeping his eyes shut against her.
‘Seven thirty-five. I’ve been up since five with Daisy, it’s her teeth again. But I really think you should go, Tom, he said you should go back within two weeks if it didn’t clear up but you’ve been away so much it’s more like two months . . .’
‘Yeah yeah yeah,’ said Tom, hauling himself up against the pillows.
The trouble with Barbara was that she made such a production out of being a misery. She huffed, she sighed, her face drooped with reproach whenever she saw him. Or, mute appeal was how she would probably put it. It was a habit she couldn’t kick and, as he told her, every bit as bad as his smoking, which she went on about incessantly.
Right on cue he broke into a brief harsh fit of coughing.
‘You see? I worry about you, flying all the time and the superbugs in the air conditioning.’
‘But eight twenty. Christ.’
‘I’m sorry, darling, it’s the only one they had, I had to make it a same-day appointment, they keep a few open every morning and you have to wait in the phone queue at seven thirty to get one,’ she intoned, drawing the curtains.
‘OK, OK,’ he said.
She had a bloody nice life, part-time and all the rest of it, yet she was ravenous for pity, addicted to it. He even had to commiserate with her, for fuck’s sake, he actually had to join in with her moaning on about what a hard row she had to hoe before she’d let him get his leg over.
‘And I couldn’t make you an ordinary appointment because they’re booking three weeks ahead, and we never know what you’ll be doing in three weeks’ time. Couldn’t you have a word at work about that? Little Daisy never knows when she’ll be seeing you . . .’
‘Shut UP,’ said Tom softly, eyes closed, sucking in his first draught of tea.
‘It’s only you I’m thinking of.’
&n
bsp; She was hurt now; but then, when wasn’t she.
‘Reach me my fags,’ he demanded, silently daring her to deliver them with a health lecture. He kept his eyes shut. There was a long pause.
‘Fuck’s sake, I’ll go to the quack at eight twenty. Now give me my cigarettes,’ he said, opening one eye to menace her with.
With a gusty sigh she brought them to him.
‘You promise?’ she said.
‘Yes,’ he said, lighting up.
There came a yell from Daisy in her cot.
‘Smoking can cause a slow and painful death,’ she quoted, scurrying from the bedroom.
‘Careful, darling, don’t go giving me ideas,’ he muttered.
I arrive on time, they’re late, he thought, tapping his foot, looking round with distaste at the waiting room full of sore-eyed sneezers and losers. He was down to see a Dr Cooling and didn’t know whether this would be a man or a woman. It had been a man when he came six weeks ago. A viral infection of the respiratory tract, he’d announced. Brilliant.
‘It still hasn’t cleared up,’ he said to Dr Cooling, who turned out to be an uncharming young female with little glasses like arrow-slits.
‘Smoker?’
‘Yes, but I think it’s a bug I’ve picked up abroad.’
‘How long?’
‘How long what?’
‘How long have you been a smoker?’
‘What’s that got to do with it? Since I was fifteen. Fourteen.’
She tapped something into the computer, then gave him a cursory examination with a stethoscope.
‘Any blood in the sputum?’
‘There has been a bit, probably just broken capillaries because it’s a really hacking cough, this one.’
‘Night sweats?’
‘Look, I’ve been in a war zone for the last week. I simply wouldn’t notice something like that,’ he said. You tended to be more concerned about landmines and snipers than your nicotine intake, was what he wanted to convey. She was remarkably unresponsive. He had, actually, been waking drenched in sweat in the small hours for a while now.
‘Weight loss?’
‘Some,’ he said grudgingly, ‘But that goes with the job. Pot Noodles and cold baked beans can take the edge off your appetite.’
She glanced at her watch.
‘I’d like you to go along for an X-ray,’ she said, scribbling something on a pad. ‘You don’t need to book, just turn up at the hospital and wave this form. We’ll let you know when we get the results if you need to see us again.’
She wouldn’t give him any drugs, told him to take paracetamol if his chest hurt. Great. ‘Waste of time,’ he told Barbara when he got home.
A week later, when he got back from Haiti, there was a letter asking him to come in and discuss the X-ray results. Barbara once again arranged a same-day appointment for him.
‘So what does a shadow on the lung actually mean?’ he asked Dr Minton, a middle-aged man this time, breezy and positive. ‘It sounds like something out of a Victorian novel.’
‘It may mean nothing very much,’ twinkled Dr Minton, indicating the darker claw-shaped area spread over the upper lobes of the lung X-ray. ‘But just to be on the safe side I’d like you to go for a few more tests.’
‘I’m off to Malawi on Wednesday,’ said Tom. ‘Can’t it wait?’
‘I really do think it would be a good idea to get the tests done as soon as possible,’ Dr Minton said, looking hard at the backs of his hands. ‘By all means let’s see if we can’t fast-track it. Does your work provide health insurance?’
And so, within forty-eight hours, Tom was sitting opposite Mr Orlando Horton, one of London’s leading respiratory physicians. Between them was Mr Horton’s immense desk. Mr Horton was himself immense, a great gloomy tree of a man. When Tom had first entered the room, the tree had advanced towards him with outstretched hand, and Tom, who was over six feet tall, had found himself looking up at him like a child. He must be six six, thought Tom now, stupidly; six seven.
‘So what do you think this shadow thing is?’ he had asked him, cheerfully enough.
‘I think it is lung cancer,’ Mr Horton had said in a grave voice, lacing his long white surgeon’s fingers together on his blotter.
‘Cancer?’ Tom had yelped.
‘Of course I cannot give a cast-iron diagnosis until the results of your bronchoscopy and sputum tests are on my desk. But that is what it looks like to me.’
‘Cancer?’ Tom had repeated, in more of a bleat this time.
‘I’m sorry if this has come as a shock to you,’ said Mr Horton. ‘But I believe in telling the truth.’
‘Oh so do I,’ Tom had agreed, nodding his head vigorously. ‘The truth is very, yes, absolutely.’
Mr Horton had gone on talking but Tom somehow hadn’t heard what he was saying. The man was huge. There was something of Belgium about him, the lack of life in the streets, the uncurtained windows. He saw him lurking in some airless Victorian interior crammed with greedy aspidistra plants, more outside in the garden, gluttonous evergreens, fat rank graveyard swathes of ivy and laurel and yew. An arboretum, murmured Tom, a pinetum.
‘Sorry?’
‘No, no,’ said Tom. ‘Carry on.’
He was interested to see how Mr Horton was pushing himself further and further back from his desk during this consultation. He was almost backing out of the window by the end. You could imagine him as a child waiting for punishment, enormous in shorts, lugubrious, at Eton or one of those places where they made you line up outside the door then show your bottom. But he was up again with his hand stuck out to be shaken, and it seemed it was time to be off.
‘Very often people do not take in everything I have told them,’ the talking tree said mournfully. ‘Should you find this to be your own case, my secretary will give you written details of where to go and so on for the further tests I have advised.’
‘Thank you,’ said Tom, pumping his hand witlessly and grinning like a zany.
He found himself gasping for a cigarette, trembling all over with desire and need, but smoking was banned on the underground. There was this unattractive female waiting beside him on the bench, and she was eating a bean salad with brown rice and smelly vinaigrette. She was oblivious to the fact that the smell of her food was turning people away from her, that she was hogging the bench. She ate carefully and greedily, chasing the last recalcitrant beans round the plastic box with her metal fork. (More than twenty-five years of heavy smoking, Mr Treetrunk had said, shaking his head.) She must have cooked it and packed it the night before. No make-up, a bogbrush hairdo, but she knew what was good for her and she was looking after her health. Tom hated her with all his heart. He had to move away in case he took her fork off her and stabbed her with it.
He walked back home from the station, through the park, looking around him with peeled eyes. All about him were the cherry cheeks and Lycra of people out doing themselves good. He stopped to examine the criss-crossed cable-like flexibility of some late catkins. Plants! They were incredible. Look at the shape of that leaf ! The wasteful little knots and garlands of buds gave him pause, some like fat beads and others full but pointed, little pleated leaves still fresh, not quite unpacked. All winter these trees had stood bare-boned, and now this. It wasn’t fair.
Barbara was wonderful. When he got back to the house and told her, she went white then held him hard in her arms. It was gratifying, frankly.
He lay winded on the sofa while she sat on the floor beside him and clasped his hands, kissing them, her face concealed by the pale curtain of her hair.
‘I just didn’t take any of it in after he’d told me it was lung cancer,’ he said. ‘I don’t honestly remember anything. I think the secretary gave me some bits of paper about tests. Christ, I’d better look up my pension details. Work. What do I do about work? I’m supposed to be in Malawi in two days. How long have I got? I mean, here on the planet, as opposed to London or wherever.’
‘We should find ou
t what we can,’ said Barbara. ‘Some facts. Statistics. Then maybe we can work out what it is we have to face.’
He loved her sanity, her gravity, her sweet round face and long fair hair like an early Flemish Madonna. There was something a little disquieting about the way she was rising to the occasion, as though it was what she’d been waiting for all these years, but he brushed that thought aside and concentrated on the way she’d said we and not you.
Gingerly they surfed the net together. Carcinogens in cigarette smoke cause nearly nine in ten deaths from lung cancer. Abnormal cells dividing uncontrollably. Travelling in the blood and lymph. Secondary tumours. Metastasis. Chemotherapy. Palliative care. The five-year survival rate, so hopeful in testicular cancer at nine in ten, was here more like one in twenty.
‘Let’s turn off the computer,’ said Barbara.
‘Too much information,’ quipped Tom. Everything felt speeded up, as though he was in a cartoon.
‘Let’s wait until your next appointment with the consultant,’ said Barbara. ‘It’s not long, we can get our questions ready for him then.’
The cartoon quality stayed with him while she went to collect Daisy from the nursery. He was fascinated by this stroke of ill fortune, how to take it, how to absorb it, in what posture to meet it. He was used to catastrophes, but only to the catastrophes of others. Now he had one of his own. What was it you said in this situation, wasn’t there some phrase? I’ve had a good innings, that was it, to show you were a good sport. No, he couldn’t say that.
My number’s up. That was better. He saw himself in a paddle boat on a pond, as a megaphoned voice ordered, ‘Come in number seven, your time is up.’ Then he saw himself frantically paddling the boat away to the far shore, trying to escape the black-cowled park keeper.
They were back. Daisy ran to him and he stooped to pick her up and swing her in the air. The child, the poor child, he thought; they’re so defenceless, children. She laughed with surprise as he whirled her round the room, and he wondered why he hadn’t noticed before that emergent blue-white frill of tooth. She would soon be fatherless.
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