22

It was ten o’clock in the morning when Catherine found him.

John was sitting in a corridor outside the cardiac care unit, his cell phone in his lap. In the process of dialing a number, he suddenly stopped when he saw her walking toward him.

She halted in front of him. Her expression was one of frustrated fury. “Peter Luckham told me,” she said. “He rang and asked how much longer he should look after Frith.”

John switched off the phone.

“You weren’t going to tell me?” she said. “Nothing? Nothing?”

He looked up at her. She was flushed and out of breath from running. “I have to wait to hear from somebody else,” she said. “I have to have Peter ring me! How could you!”

“I’m sorry,” he said. “The last time I saw you—”

“You’ve been in the hospital two days, and Peter Luckham gets to tell me.” She spread her hands in appeal. Almost to herself she muttered, “God, God.” And to him, “You really thought that I wouldn’t want to know this?”

“Catherine,” he told her, “you said you would ring me. When you didn’t ring …”

“I know what I said,” she whispered. “I know what I said.” She was beginning to catch her breath; she looked up and down the corridor. “What are you doing sitting out here?” she asked abruptly.

“I’m about to leave.”

“They’re letting you go? Have they finished?” she asked. “What tests have they done? What did they say?”

“Catherine,” he said. “This is something and nothing.”

“Peter said you rang an ambulance two nights ago!”

“Yes, I did.”

“When, exactly?”

“About three in the morning.”

“After you came to see me, that same night?”

“Yes.”

“Oh, God,” she repeated, more softly now. “And that’s something and nothing, I suppose?” She shook her head and passed a hand over her eyes. “You could have just picked up the phone to me. You think I’d not try to help you? What, that when I finally heard”—there was a flash of sarcasm—“I wouldn’t give a damn?”

“I didn’t know if you’d want to hear from me.”

She gave a gasp, and tears came to her eyes. “You fool,” she said. “You bloody, bloody idiot.” He stood up, still unsure of her. She looked away from him, collecting herself. “Look, if nothing else, tell me. What have they said? What have they told you?”

He looked away up the hall.

“Aren’t you going to say?” she asked. “What is this, a state secret or something? Tell me!”

“It’s angina,” he replied.

“Angina,” she repeated. “Like … what, stress?”

“Not really.”

“What then?” He didn’t reply. She saw the small valise at his feet.

“Is this yours?”

“Peter brought it.”

She sat down next to him, two seats away, and twisted in the chair so that she faced him. “John,” she said. “Please tell me what they said.”

He was trying not to give in to the relief and fear that had dominated the past forty-eight hours. He always felt so horribly vulnerable in a hospital ward. He just wanted to go home—had made himself very popular this morning, in fact, demanding to be discharged. In the end he had signed a form to say that he was discharging himself. They had put him here to wait for the refilled medication.

He tried not to look into Catherine’s face directly.

“Intractable angina,” he told her.

She shook her head, repeating and whispering the words to herself. “I don’t know what that means.”

“It’s …” he paused, looking down at his hands, massaging the fingers of his left hand with his right. “I’ve had it some time.”

“You have?” she said, aghast. “Since getting back to England?”

“Before that.”

“But for how long?”

“Several years.”

She was scanning his face closely. “Is that why you came back?”

“Mostly.”

She looked down at his hands, following the persistent movement. “All the time since I met you?” she asked. “All the time I’ve known you?”

“Yes.”

She stared at him, horrified, trying to take it in. “But you could have an operation, surely?” she said. “Something to help. There’s loads that they do, isn’t there?”

“I had an angioplasty in Spain,” he told her. “But the condition’s called refractory angina.”

“A bypass,” she said. “You could have one of those? Somebody I used to work with knew someone who had a bypass. He had diabetes, but it worked like magic.”

John still hadn’t looked at her. “You can’t operate on this kind,” he said. “Some people called it stubborn angina, and that’s what it is. Fucked-up angina. You put a stent in one place to open up the flow, and it closes down somewhere else.”

She tried to take it in. “I’ve never even seen you take a single tablet.”

“I have beta blockers, calcium blockers. I used to take statins. Sotalol. I still take nitrates.”

There was a long silence. She looked him up and down, baffled at his offhand attitude. She had heard of beta blockers. Not statins. Not Sotalol. She couldn’t even guess what they might be. Over John’s head, a luridly colored poster on the wall extolled the virtues of exercise and healthy eating. It wasn’t as if he were overweight, she thought. He didn’t smoke. It didn’t make any sense.

A volunteer passed with a trolley of drinks and turned into a side ward. They listened to her talking to the patients, a good-humored banter passing back and forth.

“What did you think I would do?” Catherine asked him. “Why didn’t you tell me all this? Did you think that I would run off, leave you, what? Did you think I couldn’t grasp it or something? That I wouldn’t understand?”

“I don’t think about it,” he said. “I hate these places. I hate the whole subject. That’s why I didn’t tell you. I just don’t think about it.”

“It’s not a good enough explanation,” she said. “It’s rubbish.”

“It’s my problem,” he said.

“Well, thanks,” she replied. “For that vote of confidence.”

She looked up the corridor. The ward sister was walking toward them, holding a pharmacy package. She gave Catherine a little nod of acknowledgment and handed the parcel to John. “I don’t suppose that I need to tell you about these,” she said.

He stood up. “No.”

“You need to come back to see the consultant.”

“Yes, all right.”

“I rang his secretary,” the nurse continued. “She said you didn’t attend last week.”

Catherine looked accusingly at John.

“I will,” he said. “Thanks.”

They walked out, he holding the door open for her. It was a blustery day, clouds scudding across a patchy blue sky. On the hospital steps, John took a deep breath, stowing the medication in the pocket of his jacket.

“I’ll give you a lift,” Catherine said.

“I can get a taxi,” he said. “I was about to ring one when you arrived.”

“You bloody won’t,” she said.

He started to walk away. She watched him for only a moment in astonishment before hurrying after him. “What is it with you?” she demanded.

“Nothing,” he said.

“Look at me,” she told him. “Look me in the eye. You haven’t looked in my face since I got here.”

Reluctantly, he did so.

“What is it?” she said.

“I don’t want you involved in all this. I’m not such a good bet, Catherine. It’s not fair to you.”

He turned away and started down the slight slope toward town. He walked with a curious crooked gait, shoulders hunched, as if he were warding off a blow. At the very next junction, he waited while several cars negotiated the narrow entrance into the public parking lot; the last one was a private cab. He hailed it and bent down to talk to the driver.

She ran down the path, snatched his arm, and pulled him away.

“How you bloody dare,” she said, “to do this! You’re not getting away that easily. You wanted me to live with you, and you wanted me there every moment of the day …”

“I thought it was what you wanted,” he said.

“It was,” she told him. “So what did I do? What was so bad that you shut me out? You can’t tell me that you’re ill, you can’t tell me whatever it is, this thing with Helen, you just …” She cast about for the words. “Just cut me off.” And she gestured at the taxi driver to drive away.

“I’ve been alone a long time,” John said, as they watched the car go.

“And that’s a reason?” she replied angrily. “OK, that is a reason. It’s a reason to want someone with you, to want to be loved, to never be alone again, not to slam the door in my face.”

“I didn’t want to load you down with it all,” he said. “It’s my problem.”

She gazed at him, utterly frustrated and confused.

All round them the busy access road moved, awash with people, patients and visitors, delivery trucks. They stood on the corner, a small oasis.

He looked at her, thinking that if he had just one more year, or two years. A man his age might expect twenty-five. What would two years be? It hardly rated as a miracle. Not for a man of fifty. Two years with Catherine. Two years, eight seasons.

Eight seasons with Catherine.

He pressed his mouth tight shut; but it turned down despite him and all his efforts to control it. He could feel himself standing there with a face like a frightened little boy with this clown’s-bow grimace of shame. Fuck it, he thought. Don’t start crying in front of her. And he made himself laugh in the same second with the stupidity of it. “Jesus,” he muttered. He felt in his pocket for a handkerchief, realized he didn’t have one, and closed his fingers inadvertently on the packet of medication.

“So what are you going to do about it?” Catherine asked. “There must be something. Some operation.”

He opened his mouth to repeat the constant thread, arteriosclerosis, inoperable refractory angina. Then thought better of it. He hated the words. They were stuck inside his head. He wished that he could somehow climb inside there and get them out. Once heard, never forgotten.

He looked at Catherine and she saw the reply written in his expression. She lost color.

He had asked his GP for a prognosis two months ago.

“You need to rest,” he had been told.

“Is there any other treatment?”

“A form of gene therapy is being tried in the U.S. A growth factor injected into the heart.”

“Can I get it here?”

“I’ll look into it.”

They’d regarded each other, John trying to read between the lines of what he’d been told. “Can I walk any distance?” he’d asked.

“Yes, of course.”

“How far?”

“However far you feel is OK.”

“Play sport?”

“Perhaps not wise.”

Well, he wasn’t wise. Being wise was as good as being an invalid. It wasn’t what he wanted. It was a long, long way from what he wanted. And so he’d worked on the weir gates, hauled the timber into trailers. He had walked four miles one morning before he met Catherine, hoping that, on the frosty day in March, with the first sun through the trees, and the first thin green inches of the bluebells showing above the soil in Derry, while everything looked so promising, so good, the first bright day of the spring, that the nagging, exhausting ache would shut just his heart down there and then. He couldn’t be wise and sit and wait. He would rather put a gun to his head and be done with it.

And then Catherine came to the house. And it wasn’t an easy decision anymore. It wasn’t the same choice. It was no longer a matter of walking the pain down in Derry. He had started a little deal with himself. Take his medication, and not walk too far or do any heavy work anymore. He decided to restore the stairway in the Lodge; a small, intricate job, not too taxing. All the time lying to her by not telling her. He bartered being wise against loving her, and prayed to God that he wouldn’t die in bed.

He looked at her now. At her paleness. And felt a shitty, guilty regret.

“I’m a selfish man,” he told her. “I wanted you.”

She put her arms around his neck.

She didn’t cry at all, but her breath was a shallow flutter against his face. After a minute or so, she drew back from him and took her keys out of her bag. “I’ll take you home,” she murmured.

He took her hand. “Don’t take me,” he said. “You’d take a sick person. You’d help them. But I don’t want your help. I don’t want nursing. I just want you to come back to the house with me.”

She looked at him, and then nodded. “All right, John,” she said. “All right.”