Of course, she had seen that he was upset when she went to collect the results of her tests. The way he met her at the door and led her to the chair by his desk, then sort of perched on the corner, leaning towards her. She had said something like, it’s not good news, is it, and he said no, he was afraid not. The tumours in her chest had come back, and there were mets, secondaries in the brain. The brain, not hers. Not your brain, Alice. The brain. He asked her whether she wanted to see the images but she said she would take his word for it. After all, there was nothing very surprising. She had known perfectly well that something was wrong, something serious. Headaches that lasted two or three days. Squiggly lights at the edge of vision. And she had read the literature, she could practically recite it. Small-cell cancer was ‘aggressive’. It did not rest. She was lucky to have had the last two years.
The books all recommended that the patient have a list of questions to ask, a written list so that you didn’t get in a muddle, but she didn’t have one, and all she could think to ask was what everyone asks. How long? Such a silly question because doctors are not fortune-tellers and cancer doesn’t run to a timetable, but Brando had nodded and paused as though doing calculations in his head, some sort of algebra, and then said she should enjoy the summer as fully as she could. Get out in the sun, he said. I know you have a lovely garden. It took her a moment to work out what he was saying, to realize that he meant there wouldn’t be any autumn, yet alone a winter. She went deaf for a minute and had the curious sensation that it was the words and not the tumours that would kill her. When she could hear again he was explaining the treatment she could have. Surgery was not an option, but they could start her on another course of chemo in combination with radiation therapy, retard the spread of the disease a little, reduce the swellings. Think it over, he said. No need to make up your mind today. He said he was very sorry and she knew that he meant it. She asked about his son and he asked about her boys. He knew all about Larry and the show, and how there had been artistic differences. She told him that Alec was outside in the carpark waiting for her in the car, his old Renault, and did he know the type with the gear-shift on the dashboard, a great hook of a thing, and she couldn’t imagine why they had it there when in every other car in the world the shift was on the floor, which was the obvious place, and how typically French it was, always wanting to be a little different. She was still talking, babbling on, when the tears started. She was powerless to stop them because no one can be ready for such a moment and there was a violence to it that took her unawares. What else do you have but your life? Where else can you go? And then to find yourself in someone’s office with the sun squinting through the blinds and everything theatrically normal and twenty things to get done that day, and it’s all over. Finished. Ground out. And so she had wept, intemperately, cried so that she felt the seams of her face would break open, and Brando had reached for her and hugged her. No awkwardness in it. Just pressing her face gently against the cloth of his suit as though he were taking into himself some portion of her grief. Playfair would rather have eaten his stethoscope. He would not have been physically capable of hugging. Plenty of people weren’t and that was the pity of the world. Larry could, Alec couldn’t. Samuel, but not Stephen.
There was a box of tissues on the desk. She blew her nose and dabbed at her eyes, carefully, so as not to smudge her eyeliner. She was quite in control of herself by the time she reached the carpark. That’s that, she thought. She told Alec on the way home. Gave him the gist of it, very calmly, as though talking about someone they both vaguely knew, a neighbour. It was almost comical. He stalled the car three times at the traffic lights at the end of Commercial Road, and for a moment she was afraid he was going to have some sort of collapse, a ‘wobble’, like the one he had before, when the police found him wandering along the beach at Brighton in a perfect daze. But they got home somehow, teatime, six o’clock perhaps, and she went into the garden to find that the first of the lilac was out, and she had cried again, sitting on the bench by the summerhouse, fronds of honeysuckle round her head, crying for joy at so much beauty and wanting to float up over the potato fields like the heroine in one of those South American novels, Alec waving to her with a white handkerchief from an upstairs window. It hadn’t lasted, of course. A week later she was so low they started her on the Paroxetine.
At least the will was done, though she had wondered recently whether she might leave something to Una. She hadn’t been sure at first about Una O’Connell. A dreamy, rather self-contained sort of character. And it was hard not to resent the young. Their rude health. The feeling that one was being condescended to. But the girl had qualities. Good hands. A sweet, rather melancholy smile. And in her way she knew as much about the wretched cancer as Brando did. Alec could give the lawyers a call tomorrow (you had to be careful; she couldn’t stand the thought of disputes). Then when Larry came she must speak to them both about the funeral, which they wouldn’t have a clue about. Stephen’s had cost the best part of two thousand pounds, and that was twenty years ago. There were cardboard coffins now, biodegradable. She had even read that you could be composted, which might be amusing. Four parts vegetable waste to one part human. The boys would decide about the house. And what would they do with her clothes? Give them away? Burn them?
Last of all there were the goodbyes (numberless, they seemed, though that couldn’t be right). Goodbyes to the living and goodbyes to the dead – for the dead would go too, those she had been sheltering in her head, in memories. What made it so trying was not knowing how she would be from one day to the next, not being able to rely on herself, this slender stricken thing between the sheets, this body that Samuel Pinedo had once thought so lovely. Yet somehow she must do it, and as she slid back towards sleep she envisaged all those last thoughts and last acts like a line of delicate sun machines, those glass bulbs like the one Alec had had as a child with sails of light-sensitive paper on a pin which whirled beneath the glass when the sun shone on them.
‘Je te sauverai,’ they said. ‘Je te sauverai, maman.’ And she let herself be comforted.
9
Alec dimmed the light of the lantern, then went inside to call America. The telephone in the kitchen was the farthest from Alice’s room – the least likely to disturb her – and the ten-digit number he needed was written on the cracked paint of the wall beside the telephone. His own number was just below it, and at the top of the list were the hospital number and Una’s home number. For a few seconds the receiver hissed like a conch shell, then began to ring. He counted fifteen rings and was about to hang up when he heard Kirsty’s breathless ‘Hello?’
‘Hi,’ said Alec.
‘Larry?’
‘Alec.’
‘Alec! Is everything OK?’
‘Fine.’
‘I was in the shower,’ she said. ‘I just got back from the centre. Wow, what a day!’
‘Zen?’ asked Alec.
‘Yeah. We’ve got this roshi over from Kyoto. Mr Endo.’ She laughed. ‘I think I’m in love.’
‘Congratulations,’ said Alec, laughing too, though quietly. He imagined her, with her wet hair pushed behind her ears, the colour of it darkened a little by the water.
‘He gave us our koans,’ she said.
‘Koans?’
‘The riddles.’
‘Ah,’ said Alec. ‘The sound of one hand clapping.’