‘I love this restaurant,’ said Olivia, leaning gently against Francis, ‘but I thought you said Hunter’s flat was in St James’s.’
‘It is,’ said Lucy, ‘but I had to go to the Neurology Hospital in Queen Square.’
‘Oh, no, are you okay?’ said Olivia.
‘It’s probably just stress, but I’ve been having these muscle spasms. I had a particularly strong one last night, so I called Ash – remember him? – and he arranged for me to see a neurologist this morning, Dr Hammond. We marvelled at the body’s capacity to somatise psychological states. “Those poor men who came back with shell shock from the First World War: truly astonishing cases. Neurologically speaking, it made no sense,” he said. Still, he arranged to fit in an MRI for me “just to tick that box”. That’s why I booked a table here because they gave me the last slot at the scanning centre around the corner.’
‘When do you get the results?’ asked Olivia.
‘Next Tuesday, after my very long weekend with Hunter, The Boss Who Never Sleeps. That starts on Thursday when my alarm goes off at five in the morning.’
‘It sounds like you’ve got enough alarms going off already,’ said Olivia.
‘If it isn’t stress, it might be nerve damage from that accident I had when we went cycling in Ireland.’
‘Oh god, that was terrible,’ Olivia explained to Francis. ‘I was behind Lucy and half-saw her flip over a gate further down the lane. At first it looked like a perfect somersault, and I almost expected to find her standing in the field, like a gymnast, with her feet together and her arms stretched out. Then I heard a scream and it was all ambulances and X-rays and crutches.’
‘Oh dear,’ said Francis, ‘that might well be it. How was the MRI? I’ve never had one.’
‘They were all very friendly and upbeat,’ said Lucy, ‘dressed as if they were about to go running, in sportswear and trainers, even though they spend most of their day filling in forms and pressing buttons. I felt rather calm and cosy in the scanner. When you work for Hunter it’s quite a treat to be able to lie down and do nothing. So, I just closed my eyes and lay in corpse pose.’
‘You make it sound like a spa treatment,’ said Olivia.
‘It was a bit on the high-tech side, but I was taking a spa approach to the earplugs, and the juddering and the squawking that sounds like an evacuation alarm but signals that you have to lie absolutely still. After a while I could just make out, over the muffled racket, a female voice saying, “We’re just going to pop you out of the scanner for a moment.” She told me they wanted to inject me with some contrast fluid. It felt cold, spreading all around my body as they “popped” me back in for another fifteen minutes.’
‘Do they always give people contrast fluid?’ asked Olivia.
‘That’s exactly what I asked the Australian nurse who took the cannula out. She said, “Oh yeah, we do it all the time. It’s just so we can see certain structures more clearly.” “What kind of structures?” I asked her. “Well, structures,” she said, and I got the impression that I wasn’t going to get anything else out of her. She stayed very cheerful, taped on a bandage and said, “Okey-dokey, you have a good evening now.” It was late and I felt they were all keen to get to their spinning classes, or to have a drink in the Queen’s Pantry, the pub on the corner of the square, named after the building where Queen Charlotte kept special provisions for George III when he was mad with porphyria.’
Olivia could tell that Lucy was shaken. She was talking rapidly and seemed to be overflowing with impressions.
‘Talking of pubs, let’s have a drink,’ she said.
‘I looked at the wine list when I arrived,’ said Francis, ‘and you can order small glasses of lots of different wines. It gives an educational atmosphere to getting incrementally drunk.’
‘That’s right,’ said Lucy, ‘“compare and contrast”. Let’s do some of that.’
As the three of them worked their way down the list of red wines, vacillating between Portugal and the Rhone, Australia and the Veneto, Burgundy and Bordeaux, Lucy seemed to relax and put her taxing day behind her, and Olivia also relaxed, realising that Francis and Lucy liked each other both for her sake and independently. As Francis had predicted, the number of glasses was beginning to outweigh the size of the samples and they all agreed that they should have just one more. Lucy decided that such an important choice required her to google the comparative merits of the Californian and Chilean wines that they hadn’t yet tried. When she looked at her phone, Francis and Olivia expected her to embark on reading the hilarious list of random objects: blackcurrant leaves, saddles, long notes, cigars and ripe cherries that make wine prose into a cryptic branch of literature that can only be deciphered by drinking the wine it fails to describe, but instead they saw Lucy’s face contract into a frown.
‘Sorry, there’s a message I should respond to,’ she said.
Olivia assumed that Hunter was making some further ludicrous demand on Lucy’s time.
‘Dr Hammond wants me to come in first thing tomorrow,’ said Lucy.
‘I’ll come with you,’ said Olivia immediately.
‘Thanks,’ said Lucy. ‘Jesus.’
‘It’s probably the nerves that got torn in that cycling accident,’ said Francis.
‘Or “structures”,’ said Lucy. ‘Structures.’
6
In the consulting room, Olivia reached out and put an arm around Lucy’s shoulders.
‘I feel like someone dropped a car battery in the bath,’ said Lucy. ‘I’ve never felt like this before: these waves of terror coursing through me. Can I have some Xanax?’
‘I don’t think that’s a good idea,’ said Dr Hammond.
‘If this diagnosis isn’t a good reason to prescribe tranquillisers, what is?’ said Olivia.
‘All right,’ said Dr Hammond, ‘but don’t take too many at once.’
‘If I wanted to die, I’d be asking you for a bottle of champagne,’ said Lucy.
Dr Hammond’s face remained solemn.
‘I’ll give you a prescription for fourteen Xanax; that should tide you over until you see Mr McEwan, the surgeon. I am also prescribing a drug called Keppra, which will stop the seizures.’
‘When will I be able to see Mr McEwan?’
‘Early next week, when you were supposed to see me.’
‘Oh god, I can’t wait that long, I really can’t; I’ll go mad. Sorry, but my brain – I recognise that this may be about to change radically – has always been my main asset, my only asset really, and the more knowledge I have, the better. My new boss is flying in from America tomorrow and he absolutely cannot know what is going on, but that means that I absolutely must know what is happening to me – as well as stifling it with Xanax – by the way, can I have some right now?’
‘I’m afraid you’ll have to go and collect the prescription,’ said Dr Hammond.
‘Shall I ask Francis to get it?’ asked Olivia. ‘My boyfriend,’ she explained to Dr Hammond, ‘he’s in the waiting room.’
‘That’s fine,’ said Dr Hammond, handing it to her. ‘I’ll try to have a word with Mr McEwan to see if he can fit you in any earlier.’
Francis was trying to relax as best he could in the strange circumstances, fixing his gaze on a mid-point between a heap of wrinkled magazines and the silent, subtitled television news. Although Olivia told him nothing, which made him like her even more, she looked too distraught, when she asked him to collect the prescription, to disguise the serious nature of the diagnosis.
He went outside into the pale radiance of the morning. The fading leaves in the gardens and the fluorescent ambulances parked around the square both pointed to mortality in their more or less strident ways. He saw staff hurrying in to work and neurological patients with complicated walks making their way towards the central hospital. On a bench in the gardens a man repeatedly tried to eat a croissant but more often than not missed his mouth, his overcoat scattered with the debris of his failed attempts. Francis
tried to irradiate him with strength and calm, but only realised how little he had of either.
After leaving Noble Rot, they had all known, more or less, that it was probably bad news, while hoping they were wrong. Olivia invited Lucy to stay at Belsize Park, in Charlie’s old room, which Lucy knew well from the years when they’d gone out together in their twenties.
‘You won’t find it changed much,’ she said, ‘as you know, my parents aren’t really into interior decoration. They’re too busy moving the furniture around in people’s psyches.’
‘God, I could do with some of that,’ said Lucy, switching off the intercom in the taxi.
They arrived at the Carrs’ house, where both of Olivia’s parents had consulting rooms, Martin’s in the basement overlooking the garden, and Lizzie’s on the top floor. Olivia left Francis in her bedroom and went downstairs to give Lucy a chance to talk to her alone. He took in the impressive surroundings that his new girlfriend had been brought up in and couldn’t help wondering whether she thought of Willow Cottage as ‘cute’ or ‘cosy’. The solidity of her background, with two parents who were still happily married, was at odds with the disturbing adoption story she had told him over the weekend. It turned out that Olivia’s ultra-Catholic father, Henry, had threatened to kill Karen if she had an abortion. He called it ‘God’s justice’. When it turned out that Karen was pregnant with twins, he had put up no resistance to Olivia’s adoption, but had insisted on keeping her brother, Keith. The photograph that Olivia spotted on the bookshelf was of Karen holding Keith in her arms when he was an infant. Was Olivia’s adoption a crack in the foundations of the upbringing she had received in this substantial house, where he was now sitting on the edge of her bed, or was it almost entirely irrelevant, given that it barely constituted an experience? She had battled against genetic fundamentalism for years and felt that victory might have been secured by the ‘reliably fearful’ mice that she told him about over the weekend. And yet, if their inherited characteristics came neither from the standard model of genetic transmission nor from any contact, Francis wondered if Olivia had liberated herself from one kind of legacy by arguing for a more subtle transmission of intergenerational trauma. She seemed so well; perhaps she would only find out when she had a child of her own.
Early the following morning, they had accompanied Lucy to her appointment with Dr Hammond. Francis had hesitated to come along, but Olivia seemed to want his support as much as Lucy wanted Olivia’s.
‘The name of the patient,’ said the pharmacist suspiciously, seeing the supposedly enviable tranquilliser listed on the prescription.
‘Lucy Russell. She’s with Dr Hammond across the square and I’ve been asked to pick this up for her.’
‘And you are?’
‘A friend,’ said Francis.
‘A friend,’ the pharmacist repeated, as if this were the name of a famous terrorist organisation.
‘Listen, I think she’s just been given some bad news,’ said Francis impatiently, ‘can you please give me the fucking medicine?’ He immediately regretted swearing and realised how disoriented he was by the situation.
The pharmacist pointed at a notice saying that abuse of the staff would not be tolerated.
‘I’m sorry,’ said Francis, ‘I was abusing the news, not you. I know you were just showing due diligence.’
He had wanted to say ‘absurd pedantry’, but managed to swerve at the last moment. If only the pharmacist could appreciate how little he envied Lucy’s Xanax, let alone whatever reason she had for needing it. The offended party dawdled before returning with the half-empty box of Xanax and three full boxes of Keppra.
‘Thank you,’ said Francis, taking the blue and white paper bag and heading back towards Dr Hammond’s room.
On his way, Francis spotted a fig tree hanging over the railings of the garden square; he had to cross the road to have a closer look. It was his thirty-second holiday on his way back to Lucy’s panic. He was as bad as the pharmacist, dragging his feet, except that he wanted to bring something from the ripeness of autumn back into the consulting room, from a tree that was pushing nutrients into its fruit and not just retracting them from its leaves. He reached up and touched one of the fig leaves, itself like a splayed hand reaching into the air and the light. He ran his fingers over the veined underside of the leaf, imagining for a moment the particular niche of life occupied by the fig tree. The fleshy sacs, usually thought of as themselves the fruit, in fact contained the hidden flowers and the hidden single-seed fruit of the tree: he felt the infolded richness of the plant, its reserves of sweetness and fertility. He also felt how he longed to return to Howorth. Much as he was infatuated with Olivia, he was rather stunned by the pace at which things were moving and he needed some solitude to take it all in. He was at Lucy’s obviously harrowing consultation fourteen hours after meeting her, adding another kind of precipitous closeness to his ever-expanding weekend with Olivia.
When he got back, he knocked gently on Dr Hammond’s door.
‘Here are the meds,’ he said to Olivia.
‘Thanks,’ she said. ‘We might have to see another doctor. Hammond has gone to check.’
‘I might go for a walk.’
‘I’m sorry,’ said Olivia. ‘Maybe you want to go back to Howorth. You must have things to do.’
‘No, no, I’ll stay. Just text me when you’ve finished. I won’t go far.’
Olivia went back inside, gave the paper bag to Lucy and walked over to the basin to fetch some water. It had been a savage and bewildering morning. When they first arrived at Dr Hammond’s, Lucy had left no time for platitudes or courtesies; her anxiety made her sound impatient, almost angry.
‘Please just tell me what’s going on,’ she said, as she was sitting down. ‘I’ve been awake all night.’
‘Well,’ said Dr Hammond, speaking slowly and clearly, knowing that the information was itself impairing. ‘I’m afraid the news is not good. Your scan indicates that you have a tumour in the left hemisphere of your brain that is affecting the right side of your body. The spasms you’ve been having are what we call “focal motor seizures”. I know you must be in shock right now and I want to make sure that you’re taking in what I’m telling you.’
‘Yes,’ said Lucy, repeating verbatim what she had just been told. ‘Is it cancerous?’
‘Yes. I believe this is a low-grade tumour, so after a biopsy, we’ll discuss whether to follow up with chemotherapy and radiation.’
‘Can it be operated on?’ asked Olivia, seeing that Lucy was having trouble absorbing so much devastating news.
‘That’s for Mr McEwan to decide,’ he said. ‘Would you like me to turn the heating on? I can see that you’re shivering.’
‘No thanks,’ said Lucy and then, after a silence, ‘Does this mean I’m going to die young?’
‘It might shorten your life, yes.’
‘Holy shit,’ said Lucy.
And that’s when she had asked for the Xanax.
Olivia handed the water to Lucy in a frail plastic cup that dented at the slightest touch.
‘Why me?’ said Lucy, swallowing two Keppra and a Xanax. ‘Why not me? Both questions make as little sense as each other. Somebody has to get a brain tumour, or they wouldn’t exist. It’s just the intimacy of the shock.’
Olivia watched Lucy build a cerebral defence against her brain tumour, as if it were a puzzle that could be solved.
‘It’s like being raped while you’re in a coma and only finding out when you see the CCTV footage,’ she went on. ‘It’s in my brain, but I never knew about it. Is it my brain that now knows? Don’t get me wrong, even though I’m questioning the relationship between my brain and my mind, I’m not filing for a divorce.’
Dr Hammond came back into the room with a brief, serious smile.
‘I’ve spoken with Mr McEwan and he can squeeze you in as soon as he gets through his current consultation. Is there anything else you want to know from me before you see him?’
&n
bsp; ‘If you got this diagnosis,’ said Lucy, ‘and you had unlimited resources, what would you do?’
‘I would have any surgery done here. Mr McEwan is really the top in his field. I would let him operate on me, or any of my family, without hesitation.’
‘Okay, thanks,’ said Lucy, getting up and shaking Dr Hammond’s hand.
After letting the receptionist know, the two friends went outside for some air. They paced the pavement in silence, until a man appeared before them, with his head and face swathed in gauze, except for a gap around his eyes. He was wearing a T-shirt, underpants and some knee-high circulation socks, visible through his open dressing gown. He seemed to be in his thirties, but his legs were rigid, and he moved forward with great difficulty.
‘Jesus, that poor man,’ said Lucy, after asking to go back inside.
‘Don’t worry, we won’t let you out of the hospital looking like that,’ said Olivia.
‘Promise?’
‘Promise.’
‘At least do my dressing gown up.’
‘You got it,’ said Olivia.
They had barely sat down on one of the black, steel-framed sofas in the reception area, when they heard Lucy’s name being called and saw, across the hall, a smiling man in blue scrubs, leaning out of his office door.
Mr McEwan welcomed them into his room. He was in his fifties with buzz-cut hair and eyes that matched his scrubs. He sat at his desk and swivelled his computer screen so they could all see.
Double Blind Page 5