Sidney picked up a digestive and walked over.
‘This is Susan, and Susan’s daughter Polly, and Bill. Are you two married?’ she asked, looking questioningly at Bill and me.
‘God no!’ I replied. ‘I mean, sorry, no, we’re not. Just friends.’
‘How long have you been coming here, Sidney?’ said Mum, turning her attention to him.
‘Oh, a couple of years I’d say. Is that about right, Vicar?’ Sidney, wearing an old Barbour with the paper tucked under his arm, had biscuit crumbs on his chin.
‘Yes, I’d say that’s about right. About the time that I arrived. One of our regulars, aren’t you?’
Sidney smiled. ‘I suppose I am by now. Very good sermons because she doesn’t go on for hours.’
‘So we can all get home for lunch in time?’
‘Exactly, Susan,’ said the vicar. ‘That’s what Sundays are for. Small bit of praying, big bit of lunch.’
My kind of vicar.
Naturally Lala wasn’t at her desk on Monday morning when I arrived, but that gave me more rehearsal time. ‘La, I have a confession…’ No, that makes me sound guilty. ‘La, I need to tell you something…’ Bit dramatic. ‘La, the most hilarious thing happened this weekend. Jasper took me out for supper on Friday night and I slept with him on Saturday night. Three times. And yesterday morning actually.’
Tricky one.
Lala arrived in a cloud of cigarette smoke half an hour later. ‘Morning, Pols, how are you? I…’ Cough, cough, cough. ‘God, I’ve caught the most horrendous cold, I shouldn’t really be in.’
‘La…’
‘I know it was standing outside all day on Saturday racing. It was bloody freezing in Gloucestershire, I honestly thought I might die several times.’
‘La…’
‘And that desperate girl Sophia Custard-Hardy was there. God, she’s appalling. All over the boys and she got incredibly drunk and…’
‘LaLa.’
She frowned. ‘What?’
‘It’s nothing really, I just wanted to let you know that Jasper and I had dinner on Friday and…’
‘You and Jaz?’ Lala stood up and put her hands in her coat pockets. ‘Where are all my tissues?’
‘Yup.’
‘To talk about the piece?’ She was still burrowing in her pockets, not looking at me. ‘Honestly, what do I do with them all? Why do they always vanish?’
‘Well, kind of.’
‘I thought you’d written it? Ah look, here’s one.’ She retrieved a sodden piece of tissue from the bottom of her handbag.
‘Well, yes, I had.’
‘So why have dinner with him?’
‘It was a kind of date.’
‘A date? You? With Jaz?’ Lala looked up at me, hands frozen in front of her face, damp tissue between her fingers.
‘Kind of.’
She blew her nose and frowned again. ‘Did anything happen?’
‘We sort of kissed on the pavement outside but then I got in a taxi and went home. So not really. But then on Saturday night I saw him again…’
‘Jasper?’
‘Yes.’
‘Again?’
‘Yes.’
‘Why?’
‘Well, he texted me. And asked was I free. And I sort of was… So, he came over to mine and, erm, well, he stayed with me.’
Her damp tissue was still hovering in mid-air. ‘Did you sleep with him?’
‘Um, well, kind of. I mean yes. I mean, there wasn’t actually much sleep.’ I smiled at her nervously. ‘But, yes. Do you mind? Please don’t mind. It sort of just happened.’
She blinked. ‘No, I don’t mind. I can’t mind, can I? Jasper and I happened ages ago. It’s just a bit… weird that’s all.’
‘Good weird?’
‘I guess so. Just… how did it all start? At Castle Montgomery?’
‘Kind of. But honestly, La, I’m not sure it’s going to be a huge deal. You know what he’s like.’
‘Yeah. Be careful, Pols. Do you like him?’
‘I don’t know really. I like him as a person way more than I thought I would. But I don’t think we’re going to get married, don’t panic.’
I mean, that’s what I said to her, but obviously there was a small part of me – the tiny psycho part that lurks in all of us – which had wondered whether it would be better to get married at Castle Montgomery in the summer or the winter and whether there had ever been a duchess called Polly before. But then the more sensible part of my brain kicked in and told me to stop being absurd and that middle-class girls from Surrey didn’t marry future dukes apart from in silly romantic novels.
‘God yeah,’ said Lala, interrupting me from my reverie. ‘You’d have Eleanor as your mother-in-law.’
‘Yeah. Can you imagine?’ I said quickly.
‘I did imagine it once. But lucky, probably, that I escaped it. Right, I’m going to go have a fag and get a coffee. Want one?’
‘No. No, I’m good, thanks.’
Phew, I thought, as Lala disappeared to Pret. At least I’ve told her. And she seemed to be OK. So, that was that.
There was less good news that afternoon when Mum rang. I picked my phone up with one hand, clutched it between my ear and my shoulder and carried on scrolling through Twitter.
‘Hi, Mums. How you doing?’
‘Hello, darling, I just thought I should ring you…’ Her voice was wobbly.
‘Mums, what’s up?’ I stopped scrolling.
‘It’s only that I’ve got the letter from the doctor.’
‘What does it say?’
‘Well, they think it’s… or they seem to think it is something. That it’s a tumour.’ She started crying.
‘Oh God, Mums. Shit. Am so sorry. OK… hang on… what else does it say in the letter?’
‘Just that…’ Sob. ‘Just that…’ Sob. ‘Just that it’s stage two, whatever that is. I don’t know what stage two is, how am I supposed to understand that?’ Mum let out a cry and I heard Bertie bark in the background.
‘OK.’ I couldn’t bear my own mother crying on the phone to me. What could I say that was comforting? My brain went into practical mode. ‘Do they say anything about what the plan is?’
‘Yes.’ She sobbed again, Bertie barked harder. ‘They say that they’ll be in touch about operation dates. And then maybe chemo. Chemo! Polly, I’m going to lose all my hair.’
‘Oh, Mums, I’m sorry. But… it’ll grow back. And listen, there’s a plan. So that’s something. A plan to sort all this out.’ I was clutching at straws, but I didn’t know what else to say. What should you say when your mum calls you crying to say she’s been diagnosed with cancer?
‘I’m here, Mum,’ I said gently.
‘I’m sorry to call you at work, darling,’ she sobbed back.
‘Don’t be so ridiculous, I’m here whenever you need. So, OK, let’s think, is the next step to wait and hear about operation dates?’
She sniffed. ‘Yes, I think so.’
‘Right, well let me know the second that happens and I’ll book some time off work.’
‘You don’t have to do that.’
‘’Course I will. And Joe will be thrilled to come and look after you too. He loves nothing more than sitting on the sofa watching telly. So really, don’t worry, Mums. We’ve got this covered. We’re all here. It’s all going to be fine.’
It was going to be fine. It had to be fine. But I felt helpless. I didn’t know what to say and I didn’t know anything about cancer. It’s a disease that’s all around us, in films, on telly, talked about in Tube adverts, on marathon t-shirts, but I’d never known anyone close to me with it. It was a sick feeling, knowing that a tumour – what a grotesque word – had found its way into my mum’s body. But some cancers were worse than others, weren’t they? You heard people saying that. ‘Oh, liver cancer, poor man, that’s a bad one.’ As if another form of cancer might be a ‘good’ one. But where did breast cancer fall on this good/bad continuum? Wh
at did stage two even mean? Stage two comes after stage one so it couldn’t be that bad, right? But how many stages were there?
‘Thank you, darling,’ said Mum. ‘You get back to work.’
‘OK, but I love you. And I’ll see you for supper later. Why don’t I bring it for once?’
‘No, no. There’s a bit of salmon that’s starting to smell, so we’d better have that.’
Now was not the moment to raise Mum’s fridge habits. ‘OK. I’ll bring a bottle of wine. And probably quite a big bar of chocolate.’
‘Wonderful, thank you, darling.’ She stopped and blew her nose. ‘And then I can tell you all about that nice man at church yesterday.’
‘What?’
‘You know, Sidney, the one with the paper. We had lunch afterwards in a pub around the corner. He’s ever so sweet. Lost his wife a few years ago.’
‘Like a date?’
‘Well, not really, I wasn’t dressed properly for a date. But it was a nice lunch all the same.’
‘Wow. But OK, right, we will discuss this tonight.’
A lot to discuss tonight, all of a sudden.
‘OK, darling, see you seven-ish.’
I hung up and opened Google. ‘Stage two breast cancer,’ I typed. ‘In stage two, the cancer cells have spread beyond the original location and into the surrounding breast tissue,’ said the first site I clicked through to. I felt sick at this thing ‘spreading’ its way through Mum. How long had it been secretly advancing on her body, a malevolent little worm waiting to ambush? And how did you stop it?
7
MUM WENT INTO HOSPITAL within three weeks for her operation. You hear about waiting lists and people lying on gurneys in hospital corridors, but it was quite quick in the end. The procedure was called a lumpectomy – another grim medical term we’d both read up on – which meant removing the tumour and several infected lymph nodes in her chest.
Before the operation, lying in her hospital bed and shrouded in a white gown, her main concern seemed to be Bertie, who was having a little holiday with Joe and me while she was away. You’d think he was a newborn baby, as opposed to an incontinent 9-year-old terrier given the instructions he came with.
‘You will take him out for some fresh air, won’t you?’ she reminded me, as we waited for the nurses to wheel her down to theatre. ‘And remember to buy the right kind of Pedigree Chum, the chicken tins not the beef ones, they disagree with him. And a bit of carrot or some vegetables mixed with it. Not tomatoes though, he doesn’t like those. And remember to fill his water bowl.’
I nodded. ‘He’s absolutely fine. Joe’s taken him for a walk already today. Don’t panic.’ Joe had sent me a message earlier about this walk: Took Bertie to the park next to the conservatory. He did a dinosaur-sized dump. I am never having children. But I didn’t think Mum needed that level of detail right before surgery.
Two nurses in blue overalls came to collect her half an hour or so later. ‘I’ll see you in a bit,’ she said, reaching for my hand to squeeze it. And I nodded and clenched my jaw so she didn’t see me cry as she was wheeled off. I’d felt constant pangs of terror in the past three weeks. What if it didn’t work? What if the malevolent little worm in her body carried on marching? What if it couldn’t be stopped?
I sat in the family waiting room for two hours, trying to read my book but failing because I kept getting to the end of a sentence and found I’d forgotten the beginning of it. Then I tried to read a magazine but I didn’t much care about Kim Kardashian’s new knee-lift. I flicked through Instagram and felt annoyed at the pictures of dogs and eggs. Then Bill texted asking me to let him know when Mum was out. I sent him back a thumbs up emoji and wondered whether I’d see Jasper that week. We’d made a vague plan to do something on Saturday, but I’d said it would depend on Mum.
I’d seen him three times since the night of the twisted ankle. Each time he’d come over late to the flat, each time we’d fallen straight into bed and spent most of the night making the sort of shapes you normally see in Cirque du Soleil. I looked up at a poster on the wall opposite me. ‘HOW MUCH DO YOU KNOW ABOUT PROSTATE CANCER?’ it asked in shouty capitals. I probably shouldn’t be thinking about sexual positions in a hospital waiting room while my mother was being operated on.
It was about an hour later that she was wheeled back from the recovery room, pale and asleep. ‘She’s all right,’ said the nurse, ‘just dozy. She’ll be woozy for a few hours.’
I nodded and reached for Mum’s hand, squeezing it so she knew I was there.
I went back to hospital the following morning to find she was quite perky. Almost back to normal.
‘I’d like a cup of tea,’ she said, still lying in her hospital bed. The quiet droning of a morning talk show drifted across the ward from a TV in the corner.
‘I’m sure that’s doable,’ I said, looking over my shoulder for a nurse. ‘Hang on, let me go and find someone.’
The operation had been a success, according to Dr Ross, a Scottish doctor who had studied medicine at Edinburgh, which made Mum happy because she deemed it a ‘proper’ university.
‘Not like those made-up universities in places like Bournemouth,’ she said to him, when he did his rounds along the ward that morning.
She would spend one more night in the ward, Dr Ross said, but then she’d probably be allowed to go home, where she’d need to rest properly for two weeks for the stitches to heal.
I couldn’t find a nurse to ask for a cup of tea so I walked to the coffee shop downstairs, a coffee shop I was becoming quite familiar with.
‘Hiya, love,’ said the enormous woman who manned the till. She had, at some unfortunate juncture in her life, decided to tattoo her eyebrows.
‘Hi,’ I said, smiling. ‘Back again. Could I just have a cup of tea?’
‘Nothing to eat? You look shattered, love. Here, why don’t I just give you one of these? Best before date’s today anyway,’ she said, picking up a brownie with a pair of tongs and sliding it into a paper bag.
‘Oh, go on then, thank you.’
‘Got to keep your strength up, a big girl like you,’ she said, handing over the bag.
Too kind, I thought to myself, taking the bag and smiling at her.
While waiting for the tea, I looked at my phone. Lex had messaged sending love to Mum and asking if I was around later that week to discuss my maid of honour dress. I felt annoyed that she was quacking on about her wedding while I was at the hospital with Mum so ignored her, slid my phone back into my jeans and walked back upstairs to find that my chair had been taken by a man in a grey suit with neatly brushed hair.
‘Polly, you remember Sidney, don’t you?’ said Mum, who had propped herself up in bed and fanned her hair out behind her on the pillows like a slightly ropey Botticelli figure. The curtain was now drawn around her bed.
‘Yes, ’course. Hi, Sidney,’ I said, putting the tea down on the bedside table, unsure of how to greet him. Handshake? Hug? I held out the bag with the brownie in it. ‘Want a bit of brownie? The lady downstairs gave it to me for free.’
‘Oh how kind,’ said Sidney standing up. ‘Here, Polly, you have this seat.’
‘No, no, Polly’s been here all morning,’ said Mum. ‘Sidney, you sit down.’
‘I can perch on the bed. No problem,’ I said. ‘Are you sure you don’t want a bit of brownie?’
‘No, no, I’m quite all right. Thank you, Polly. I don’t want to ruin my lunch.’ Sidney, in a tweed suit, shiny brown lace-up brogues and with a neat side parting, didn’t look like a man who ever dared do anything as outrageous as ruin his lunch.
I stuck my hand in the bag and started eating. ‘So, what do you do then, Sidney?’
‘He’s retired now,’ said Mum, as Sidney opened his mouth.
‘Oh, what did you do?’
‘He was a property solicitor,’ said Mum, whose energy was seemingly undiminished despite a major operation less than twenty-four hours ago.
‘Terribly boring, I’m a
fraid,’ said Sidney. ‘Not an exciting job like yours. Susan’s told me all about it.’
‘Oh, has she?’
‘Well, a bit,’ he said. ‘And of course all about going and staying with your young man.’
‘Ah.’
‘He sounds terribly exciting,’ said Sidney.
‘Ha. Maybe. We’ll see.’ I wondered for the eighty-sixth time whether I could text Jasper about Saturday evening, and, for the eighty-sixth time, decided I should wait for him to text me. I was trying to play it cooler than I ever had before. Never texting him first. Never being the last to send a message. But my phone was never more than three or four inches from me and the second my screen flashed I was on it like a greyhound after a rabbit. ‘We’ll see,’ I repeated vaguely to Sidney.
‘Polly is terribly cynical about men,’ said Mum.
‘Ah,’ said Sidney, looking down at his lap and fiddling with his shirt cuffs.
I scrunched up the paper bag and dusted the crumbs off my jeans. ‘Right, Mums, if you’re feeling all right I might peel off and go home, leave you two to it?’ I was suddenly desperate for some fresh air and the solitude of my flat.
‘Yes, yes, thank you, darling, of course. You will remember to walk Bertie, won’t you?’
‘Yes.’
‘And the thing about his food?’
‘Yes, I promise. He’s fine. He’s having a lovely time watching Eggheads with Joe.’ I kissed the top of her head and waved awkwardly at Sidney. ‘Good to see you again. See you soon.’
‘Absolutely,’ said Sidney, waving at me before he turned back to Mum. ‘I thought we might do the crossword, Susan, if you feel up to it?’
‘Oh yes,’ said Mum, beaming. I left Sidney fumbling in his Daunt Books bag for his copy of the Telegraph.
Bertie slept on my bed that night, which I’d forbidden the night before because of his snoring. But he whined and pawed at my door when I turned my bedside lamp off so I relented and let him in.
‘You are not sleeping under the duvet though. That is the absolute limit. Only on top of it,’ I said as Bertie jumped on to the bed. He lay down and sighed before – and I genuinely heard this – he did a little fart.
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