But no — jealousy hasn’t receded: it has merely changed colour. The thought of Natalie having children with and growing old with another man — not with him, after all, despite everything they’ve been through together, but with someone else, someone who thinks different thoughts, feels different, smells different, stands an alien razor in the bathroom cabinet — this thought conjures no indignation now, but only a grey, fathomless sadness. The more firmly he resolves that she must one day find someone else, that she must be happy without him, the further he slides down into his private, jealous sorrow. But still, she must.
Last Friday they went to watch the Olympic swimming. Once in a lifetime, people say. A nine-hour round trip for eighty minutes of frenzied splashing and churning. Not much of a spectator sport, swimming, you’d think, but it was fun. Mike offered them tickets for Saturday’s athletics, but Dan declined — he wanted Nat to see her swimming, and consecutive days would have been too much. Instead, they watched what the papers are now calling Super Saturday on TV with Mark and Rachel. Dan felt an echo of his childhood fascination with records and results, a whisper of envy for all that flowing motion, and a resigned sense that in staging such spectacles, in relentlessly overdoing it, humanity is trying just a little too hard.
On the long drive round the M25 to Stratford, the topic of James cropped up a few times. Gritted teeth from Natalie, reluctance, even now. Memories that shine a light on life choices and life outcomes, perhaps. A loser James may be, but he can still take the bins out. Dan is slowly coming to accept that there will be no great opening of hearts. Their relationship is strong but also bounded.
They drove home in silence, weary and hoarse from cheering on the titans.
Natalie ducks under the shop’s porch and shakes herself down. As she stalks past the fruit and veg, her foot slips on the wet floor and she flails wildly to stay upright. ‘Oh, no you don’t,’ she whispers. No room for her to get injured these days — no slack in the system.
The item she needs is shelved meaningly between the condoms and the tampons, in the aisle reserved for accessories to adult life — razors, deodorant, multi-vits. But as she nears the tills, first her eye and then the rest of her is drawn up a different aisle, one she always skips on the weekly round. First, a preparatory run of dog and cat food, and then — babies. Faces like grinning, gap-toothed pumpkins, everywhere you look. Giant shrink-wrapped slabs, seventy-two nappies in each, are on offer: three for two. How much do babies crap? Baby-dry, baby-snug, baby-soft, huggie-snuggie-snot-nosed-cherub. Stacked crates of baby formula look like something you’d see at a builder’s merchant. Nappy bags. Breast pumps.
She couldn’t do all this, and look after Dan as well. Could she? Should she? No slack in the system. She retreats to the tills, tosses the test on the nearest conveyor belt and avoids eye contact.
The rain stops abruptly but Dan stays on for a moment, listening to the daytime traffic as it calmly, sedately shears the flooded streets. He should be working, but instead he’s been reading about the law. He already knows that euthanasia and assisted suicide are illegal in England, but it’s worth making sure. A patient can refuse treatment, and indeed can issue legally-binding instructions in advance. Yes — his leaflets told him that. In other words, the illness is allowed to kill you, to play God, but no one else is. What if the illness doesn’t play a decent god? What if it takes you far enough to make life utterly miserable, whimpering at the roadside of existence, and won’t finish you off with a spade? It’ll be alright, the illness whispers, with a malevolent wink — trust me.
The law is an ass, but Dan is not the person to fight it. He’s not prepared to spend his last days on earth making adversaries of principled, well-intentioned fellow men and women. Nor is he the person to ‘raise awareness’ by getting his face in the papers, or, for that matter, the person to raise hard cash for research. He leaves these worthy tasks to others.
Is he selfish? He hopes not. In the cause of science, not his own, he has signed up to all the trials he ticks the boxes for, although most have disappointingly modest ambitions — counselling therapies, a better way of tracking symptoms, an adjustable collar. Magic healing potions are conspicuously absent. Apart from the trials, rather than reinvent himself, Dan has decided to live his life according to the same principles he hazily espoused before his diagnosis, but to follow them more strictly: do what you’re good at; do what you love; do what you think is right.
If, thanks to Dan’s elaborate ranks of magnets, the synchrotron can deliver to its customer experiments shades and flavours of blinding light that it couldn’t when he began, and if those shades and flavours help to answer questions that couldn’t be answered before (the tuberculosis team did get their image; a grainy print-out is taped to the wall by his makeshift desk), and if just one of his sixteen published papers — or his work still in progress — ends up nudging human understanding in the right direction, he’ll have achieved something.
If he manages to find pleasure and wonder in the world, even as his means of engaging with it disappear one by one — yesterday he took a nostalgic mathematical tour through Maxwell’s equations and their many elegant implications — he’ll have achieved something else.
And if he somehow succeeds in bequeathing Natalie, and his family and friends, a legacy of good feelings, feelings that engender strength and self-belief rather than despair, he’ll have achieved something yet more. Success and failure are both assured; achievement comes in the shades and flavours.
Dan concentrates for a moment to execute a swallow, and again to effect a satisfyingly deep sigh. It is somehow reassuring to be reminded how lightly he has touched the world. This room, the moulding on this window frame, the tiny heart-shaped pock of rust on the fastening — they were here before him, and will be here long after he’s gone: quietly, effortlessly existing.
At first, Brenda Vickers finds herself to be quite an attraction at the sheep station. The shepherds and shearers see few enough women, it seems, fewer even than the dour Highland foresters, and fewer still who’ll fearlessly try their hand at manhandling a ram or herding a deafening woolly torrent through the chute. Any uncouth behaviour from the men is returned in kind.
She spends a few evenings at the bar with a gentle veterinary student from Argentina who’s finding the job less pleasant than he bargained for. He’s a mountaineer of sorts back home — Brenda forgives him some mild exaggeration — he has a good heart and his accent is gorgeous. They like each other — they have no particular reason not to. But it’s not the same. There’s a missing ingredient whose taste she can still remember. If this is an experiment, the results are clear.
Meanwhile, a few of the shearers realise that she’s not quite right, not quite normal. They remember her put-downs and turn mean. ‘Keep calm, boys,’ they murmur when she passes, hands shaking in mock fear, exchanging grins at the running joke. Austin, so contented when she arrived, finds out and reacts with fury.