Family Chorus

by Claire Rayner

  All the time she talked she tried not to let the most frightening part enter her mind; the fact that he didn’t argue with her, that he just obeyed her directions, let her lead him and push him and do as she chose with him. That wasn’t her Max; her Max would pooh pooh her fuss, tell her not to be so daft, would argue with her that he was fine, absolutely fine — but this Max just sat beside her, slumped in his seat, swallowing hard as nausea lifted in him again and again, and sometimes, despite his obvious attempts at self-control, retching dreadfully as he held a towel she had given him to his lips. But clearly there was no need for the towel, because the sound was dry and rasping in his chest and throat.

  She decided first to go to the Middlesex Hospital. There might be another one nearer, but it was the one she knew best, and as she drove at full tilt through the dimly lit roads with their scattering of early traffic she found herself remembering the other times she had been there: When Poppy Ganz had been ill, when Barbara — and she changed her mind suddenly, and when she reached Marylebone Road turned left instead of going straight on. St Mary’s. She’d go to St Mary’s, because taking him to the Middlesex would be like taking him to die.

  Praed Street was heavier with traffic as the morning bustle around Paddington Station began, and she swore aloud as a lumbering bus held her up and for the first time he spoke, in a voice husky with the effort. ‘It’s all right, Lexie. All right — I’m fine. I’ll be fine. Just need to get something to stop the pain —’

  ‘Pain?’ she said sharply, as at last the bus made way for her and she could squeeze past towards the hospital. ‘You didn’t say you had a pain —’

  ‘Didn’t want to worry you before. But it’s worse now — damned bug —’ He closed his eyes and began to take deep breaths through his nose again, and she knew the nausea had come back.

  Finding a sleepy hospital porter with a wheelchair to come and help Max out of the car and into the casualty department seemed to take an age, and she was white with tension by the time she managed it. She snapped at him loudly, her voice echoing in the big casualty department, and a nurse appeared, putting her head round a screen in the far corner.

  At last someone was there to help, for the nurse took one look at her frightened face and came bustling over to harry the porter with his wheelchair out to the car, and supervised Max’s transfer to a cubicle in the casualty department. Then there was a doctor, young and tousled in a white coat, sweeping importantly in to examine Max, and she could sit down on one of the benches and wait for — she didn’t know what. Her legs were shaking now, and she was cold. She shivered a little in her thin shirt but there was no one to notice or care. She sat and listened to the murmur of the doctor’s and nurse’s voices as they dealt with Max and felt very alone in the big dim waiting room filled with the smell of yesterday’s busyness, yesterday’s pain and yesterday’s fear.

  It seemed to get easier, then, for a while. The young doctor told her with an air of authority that he thought her husband should be admitted for observation, some special investigations. He would see he went up to the ward at once, and when she told him firmly that Max was to be a private patient in a room of his own rather than sent to a public ward his manner changed slightly, became a shade less lordly, and she felt a twinge at that. Had they treated Poppy or Barbara less well than they should have because they didn’t have Lexie there to take care of them, to make it clear they were persons of substance? Guilt and distress for them as well as her fear for Max sharpened her tone and made her speak to the young doctor more tartly than she meant to, but though he bridled he said nothing, and arranged for Max’s admission to the Lindo Wing for private patients.

  It was full morning by the time he was settled in the small green-painted room, and she sat there at his bedside looking at his face as he slept fitfully, relieved of his pain at last by a morphine injection. She listened to the distant sounds of the hospital and smelled its smells, the clatter of trolleys mixed with the scent of breakfast bacon, the clicking of footsteps in the corridors confused with the heavy redolence of carbolic, ether, floor polish, and the voices of nurses, high-pitched and busy, tangled with the smell of illness. It was not that there was an actual odour she could identify: just a mist of uncertainty and fear and doubt. She shivered again in her thin clothes and watched him sleep, trying not to let the fear grow bigger than she could contain.

  The sister in charge arrived on duty, and, recognizing Lexie as a television face, immediately made a fuss of her and her new patient, giving her breakfast she didn’t want but insisting she eat it, and bringing a comfortable chair into Max’s room so that Lexie too could rest. (‘You look worn out, my dear, and a little zizz will do you the world of good — I’m afraid Dr Jefferson Lockhart won’t be here till this afternoon, so you might just as well, mightn’t you?’) Lexie had relinquished herself to her care gratefully, and actually did doze off for a while as the morning wore on and Max seemed more comfortable.

  It was not until the sister had brought her lunch and Max had another injection of morphine and slipped again into a drugged sleep that she remembered. With a little clatter she put down her coffee cup as the thought came to her, and Max moved uneasily in the narrow white bed. But he didn’t wake, and after a moment she got quietly to her feet and went out to the corridor.

  Talking to Molly wasn’t easy, because sister, with eagerness to be helpful written all over her, had insisted she use her office phone, which meant that she had an audience. But she did her best to explain, standing with her back to sister who sat at her desk with her head bent over some paperwork, ostensibly ignoring the conversation but clearly agog.

  ‘I hope you weren’t worried when we weren’t there this morning —’

  ‘Not really,’ Molly said. ‘I thought you’d gone out some place. What’s up?’

  ‘Max is ill. In hospital —’. She felt an absurd twinge of triumph. That’ll show her — didn’t worry, indeed. That’ll show her —

  ‘Ill? What is it? He said he had a bug or something, but I didn’t think it was bad enough for him to go to the hospital. He was okay last night at supper — you said he was tired, but he seemed okay to me —’

  ‘He was taken ill in the night — we’re waiting to see a specialist. I hope Mrs Potter looked after you, made you food and so on — she’ll organize something for your supper if you ask her —’

  ‘I told her not to bother. I’ve checked into a hotel. I’ve just called a cab to take me. I was going to leave a note for you but you’ve called, so —’

  ‘You were going to leave without seeing us?’ Lexie said sharply.

  ‘I thought it might be better. You were one very angry lady last night, weren’t you? You even made Max mad at me so —’

  ‘I made Max — what are you talking about? You did it yourself — don’t try to suggest that I —’

  ‘Oh, it doesn’t matter. You hate me anyway, I know that. You always have. And now you hate me more because Max doesn’t. Well, if that’s the way it is, I guess that’s the way it is. I’ll talk to Max myself some other time. Which hospital is he in? Where is it?’

  ‘He’s in no condition to be visited,’ Lexie said, keeping her voice as steady as possible, although she could feel the anger boiling in her. ‘So there’s no point in —’

  ‘Hey, now, you tell me where he is!’ For the first time Molly sounded as though she cared. Every word she’d uttered so far had been cool, remote, totally controlled. But not now. ‘You have no right to keep me away from him —’

  ‘When he’s fit for visitors, I’ll let you know,’ Lexie said. ‘Which hotel will you be in?’

  ‘Where the hell is he?’ Molly shouted it so loudly that it seemed to Lexie she could be heard in the small room. She glanced swiftly at sister, who still sat with her head down over her work, apparently oblivious. But Lexie knew she hadn’t missed a word. ‘You have to tell me!’ Molly was still shouting. ‘I want to come and see him and —’

  ‘As soon as he’s a b
it better, Molly. If you’ll tell me which hotel you’ll be in. But really, he can’t cope right now —’

  She heard Molly take a deep breath before she spoke. ‘I’ll be at the Cumberland. But call me soon, you hear me? I have to go back to the States Wednesday, and I want to see Max before I go.’ There was a brief silence then she said, ‘Hell, Lexie, I’m sorry. I guess I was — look, call me, will you? Everything’s such a mess it’s making me stupid. Making me say things I don’t mean. I know you don’t hate me, not really. Do you?’

  ‘No,’ Lexie said after a moment and felt her face get hot as tears rose in her. Damn it, why did it always happen between them this way? Wanting to be close, always wrenching themselves apart, always tears with Molly, always tears — ‘No, I don’t. I —’ She became aware again of sister, and bit her lip. ‘Look, Molly, let me see how things are with Max. Then I’ll call you. I’ll come to the hotel, see you, and bring you here to see him. As soon as I know what’s happening. I promise.’ She hung up the phone and at once sister looked up with practised sympathy and said, ‘Are you all right, my dear? Is there anything I can do?’

  ‘I’m fine,’ she said and managed to smile. ‘Fine. I — will the doctor be long now, do you think?’

  ‘Not long — two o’clock, he said, and he’ll be here on time. He always is. Er — is there anyone else you want me to call for you? Any friends or relations or —’

  Lexie shook her head and turned to go, then stopped at the office door and looked back at her, frowning a little. ‘Is there any reason why I should call anyone else? I mean — what do you think’s wrong with my husband?’

  Sister stood up, straightening her black belt and smoothing her apron over her hips, and it was as though the real woman had disappeared behind the starched image of the professional. She smiled gravely and shook her head at Lexie.

  ‘I really can’t say, my dear. That will be up to doctor. He is, of course, very ill —’

  ‘How ill?’

  ‘Well, he’s feverish, his blood pressure is not all it might be, and there’s clearly an abdominal problem.’ She ushered Lexie out of the office towards Max’s room again. ‘But until Dr Jefferson Lockhart has seen him and done his examination I really can’t say more. He won’t be long now, so really, my dear, all we can do is wait for him —’

  She knew then. She sat in the armchair looking at the door which sister had closed so gently behind her after bringing her back, and then at Max, asleep on the pillow with a fine line of white showing beneath his half-closed lids. She listened to his uneven breathing and she knew. Whatever the precise diagnosis was, Max had some dreadful illness. It wasn’t just a bug, something he’d picked up in Paris, something from which he’d recover and they could both forget. It was part of him now, and therefore part of her. But for how much longer it was impossible to know.

  48

  Late that night, they took him to the operating theatre so rigged with bottles of saline and blood that she felt he was lost somewhere beneath them on the trolley. She stood in the corridor and watched the gowned porter wheel him away, as the nurses behind her prepared the bed to receive him back, feeling certain he never would come back. That wasn’t her Max lying there on that narrow metal shelf on wheels; not that faintly yellow-faced creature with closed eyes and tired lines breaking up the parchment skin. He had gone somewhere else, and she wanted to run down the corridor after the trolley and pull him off it so that together they could go and search for the real Max.

  ‘My dear, you look exhausted.’ She started at the voice of the night sister behind her. ‘Don’t you think you should go home now? I dare say he’ll be in theatre a long time, you know, and then it will take some time for him to come round from the anaesthetic. Go home, get some sleep. Come back in the morning —’

  ‘No,’ Lexie said sharply, and the sister’s brows creased slightly.

  ‘Very well,’ she said. ‘If you want to stay — I’ll fix a chair for you in the waiting room and find a dressing gown. Then you can get out of your clothes for a while. That should help, I imagine.’

  ‘What operation are they doing? He told me, that doctor, but I didn’t understand. What operation?’

  ‘A laparotomy,’ the sister said. She was a small person, young and round and neat, and out of her uniform she would probably have been a pretty girl, but in it she seemed ageless, a sort of all knowing Vestal, and Lexie put out her hand to her, needing her reassurance. But all she did was shake her head. ‘I’m afraid it’s not very good, my dear. There’s a major obstruction, it seems. Probably the head of the pancreas —’

  ‘But what does that mean?’ Lexie said it almost despairingly. ‘I don’t understand —’

  ‘It’s a form of disease that’s very difficult to treat, I’m afraid. We can only hope an operation is possible. Now, please, my dear, do come and rest. Sit down and sleep a little.’ She insisted Lexie change into the dressing gown and settled her in the armchair in the waiting room, then went rustling away to leave her to her terror.

  It was easier after they brought him back because at least she was no longer alone. She could sit beside his bed and look at him, could watch every breath, study the nurses as they checked his pulse, took his blood pressure, examined his dressing, trying to find clues to his progress in each of their actions, in the expressions on their faces. But they were impassive, young, smooth-faced creatures doing a technical job. They avoided catching her eye, shutting her terror out of their minds because they couldn’t share it, and didn’t want to.

  The surgeon came to see her, briefly, a tall thin man in a neat dark suit looking like any other businessman at the end of a day’s work, a little tired, abstracted even, and when he told her in quiet, conversational tones how sorry he was that Max’s cancer was so fast-growing that it was inoperable, how sorry that he was so ill, but glad that at least he had been spared a long drawn out period of pain and distress, she was not surprised. She had known since the afternoon that this was what it was and now she asked, in a voice so controlled that it surprised her, how long it would be before — and then her voice failed and she couldn’t get the question out.

  ‘I’m very much afraid it can’t be more than a short time,’ the surgeon said, more distant than ever now, no emotion in his voice to gild the words with any real humanity. ‘I am so sorry, Mrs Cramer. Indeed, for his own sake it would be better if he did not linger too long. A most malignant form of disease, I’m afraid, clearly very fast growing. I am truly sorry.’ He touched her hand briefly with fingers as dry as old twigs and went away, leaving her to the nurses and their blood pressure machines, their charts and their blank young faces. And Max’s barely breathing body lying in a narrow white bed in a green-painted room, but really long since gone from her. Long since gone.

  That day and the next slid past, and she would not move from the room, although the day sister tried to persuade her to go, but she just shook her head numbly. Sister shrugged and let her stay, bringing her tea and toast from time to time, which she tried to swallow just to please her, and found comforting, to her own surprise. She slept occasionally in the high-backed armchair they’d given her, and whenever she woke did so in a great wash of guilt, terrified that something had happened while she slept, that Max had woken, sat up, asked for her and been hurt at her defection into slumber. But he never did. He just lay there, breathing those shallow bubbling breaths, his eyes half closed in the coma into which he’d slipped from the anaesthetic.

  There had been one moment, deep in the night, when she thought he’d woken. She had been sleeping herself, deeply, and had woken suddenly in a panic, her heart thumping in her ears and her face wet with tears. She had stared at him and he had seemed to turn his head on the pillow to open his eyes and look at her with one of those familiar old quizzical glances of his, as though to say, ‘Isn’t this ridiculous? What are we doing here, Lexie, you and I? What has this to do with us?’

  And she had got to her feet, clumsy with fatigue, to hurry over t
o him. But he had lain there, silent, and she couldn’t be sure whether it had really happened. It didn’t matter, really, because there had been comfort in that moment. Her pulse had slowed, her panic had ebbed, and she had bent and kissed him and felt a moment of peace.

  ‘Please let me call someone for you,’ sister said next morning, almost pleading with her, clearly alarmed by the way she sat there so doggedly, so alone in her vigil. ‘A relation, a friend perhaps?’ And she did think for a while about that. Bessie? How could she call Bessie to sit with her, Bessie now so old and frail? She couldn’t, and not only for Bessie’s sake. To have her there would mean splitting her concentration; she would have to look after her, show concern for her, and she had none to spare. All her energy was to be used for Max and herself. She had none for anyone else, not even Bessie. So she shook her head.

  ‘A business colleague of your husband, then? Really, my dear, this could go on for several days yet, I’m afraid. A coma like this — it’s a blessing in disguise for the poor patient, of course, who feels no pain, and knows nothing of what’s happening, but for the relations it’s — do, please, try to think of someone we could bring here for you.’

  Again she considered that carefully. Peter, Max’s partner? Someone else from the office? But they too would need attention, time that belonged to Max and herself, and again she shook her head.

  So when he died she was alone still. Four in the morning it was. The window of the small green-painted room showed a thinner blackness than it had all through the night, and in the street below she could hear the footsteps and shouts of late-night roisterers and she thought — it’s Saturday, fun night, party night, people-out-late night — and Max is dead. They’ve pulled the sheet over his face and what a stupid thing to do, as if it made any difference when he’s not been here these past two days, when he’s been dead ever since I brought him here, and I was afraid to go to the Middlesex Hospital because I thought he’d die there, and I brought him here and now he’s dead, dead, dead — and the word rang in her ears and she shook her head, almost pettishly, to clear it.