‘I missed you,’ Rose said to Leo the next morning. ‘I’m so glad you came back.’
‘I missed you too, Rose.’ He ever so gently lifted the hand that didn’t have the cannula carved into it and kissed her wrist right where her pulse must have once beat out a frantic rhythm. It was faint and thready now. She smelt of something slightly over-ripe, like flowers a day away from drooping decay. ‘I wanted us to be friends again.’
She smiled. Awkwardly patted his cheek. ‘I missed you so much. Promise that you won’t go away again.’
‘I won’t.’ Guilt gnawed at him. That was why he was doing penance now at her bedside, had done the entire nightshift, because yesterday he’d been a no-show. Yesterday had been terrible. Probably not as terrible as it had been for Jane, left to sit with Rose for hours and who’d left Rose’s bedroom looking as if she’d narrowly avoided a collision with a ten-ton truck, but still pretty bad.
Rose was in the weeds now. Weeks had become days and the days were shrinking down to hours. Hours that he’d wasted going to Leytonstone and back with George on a day when Leyton Orient were playing at home. They’d sat on the Tube and George had suddenly said, ‘We agreed that when she got to the end, she wouldn’t see me. Said it would be too cruel for both of us. But the end has come too soon and I haven’t had a chance to say goodbye to her.’
Then George had cried again and even though the train was stuffed full of men, testosterone thick around them, Leo had taken George’s hand and dared any of them to call him out.
But when they’d got to the art storage facility, the woman on the desk had refused to let Leo in without two forms of ID and signed permission. She didn’t care that Leo was on a clock.
He’d shouted at her. He’d sworn at her. Then he’d wept as George gently pushed him to one side and said, ‘My dear boy, stop causing such a commotion. I can sign us both in,’ because if Leo had stopped to think about it, then of course George was Rose’s designated curator.
The painting was propped up against the bedroom wall but now, no matter that it symbolised the gulf between them closing up, Leo couldn’t give it back to Rose. The cliff-edge, the dark sea – it was too prescient. He wanted to cry again.
Maybe it was being off the booze and pills. He wasn’t numb any more, but having to feel everything.
There was a gentle tap at the door. Agnieska, about to finish the night shift, and Neta, about to start the day shift, were here to reload the pump, check Rose’s blood pressure and temperature, change the bed linen and ‘make Ms Beaumont a little more comfortable’.
It was a hackneyed old cliché but there was a certain truth to ‘live fast, die young, leave a beautiful corpse’, thought Leo as he left the room, though he wasn’t sure he qualified. Apart from the living fast. God, he’d done that.
‘Morning, darling.’ Jane was slowly negotiating the stairs with a laden tray. ‘I thought you’d be ready for breakfast.’
She reached him and set the tray down on the occasional table that had been placed outside Rose’s suite along with two armchairs and they breakfasted together. There was a tense moment when Jane told him off for leaving crumbs in the butter, but he found comfort in the mundane. ‘God, now I feel bad about enjoying a piece of toast and marmalade and a pot of tea that’s been left to stew for just long enough.’
Jane paused with her knife in the raspberry jam. ‘I don’t know how I feel any more,’ she said, holding up a piece of Lydia’s sourdough toast as evidence. ‘I’m eating my feelings instead.’
‘Morning.’ They both turned to greet Dr Howard, who opened the door to Rose’s suite just wide enough that he could slide through, then shut it behind him. As if there were all sorts of arcane rituals going on inside.
‘Was she awake?’ Jane’s voice dropped to a whisper as if anything louder might penetrate the walls.
‘Not for long, but she said she’d missed me and she was glad I was back.’ God, he was on the verge of tears again . ‘I can’t even tell you what that means.’ He let his voice drop even lower. ‘Even if she goes today, I had that moment.’
Jane took his hand, her fingers smeared with jam, and Leo lifted it to his lips, as he’d done with Rose, and kissed Jane’s knuckles. Jane’s skin was tea-warmed and pulsing with life. ‘She talked a lot yesterday,’ she said. ‘About the past, mostly, but she said that when she was ready, she wanted us both there. Said she was so pleased that you’d come home then too.’
Jane was a consummate liar. Leo was sure that you could hook her up to all sorts of devices and she’d never give herself away. But Rose had told him the exact same thing, so they couldn’t both be lying. ‘Look, this thing between us, I know it’s complicated, but I’m glad you stuck around. Not sure how I’d have coped if you weren’t here.’
‘You’d have coped just fine,’ Jane said. Now that was a lie and they both knew it. ‘Darling, any chance of having my hand back so I can drink my tea and eat my toast at the same time?’
‘So you’d rather eat breakfast than hold my hand?’ he asked Jane, because that little thrum between them had started to vibrate again. ‘God, you’re a heartless wretch.’
She pouted. ‘I’m not, darling. I’m just very hungry.’
He dropped her hand. ‘There. You can have it back, then.’
‘Let me finish my toast and then you can hold it again,’ she promised, like she wasn’t his wife but a beautiful girl he was flirting with in a bar.
If they stayed married for fifty years, had breakfast together every morning, would he inevitably take Jane for granted or would he always flirt with her like she was a beautiful girl he’d just met in a bar? It was worth thinking about.
‘As long as you wipe the jam and butter off your fingers first,’ he told her with a grin. ‘You’re kind of sticky.’
‘So I am,’ Jane agreed and she sucked the offending fingers into her mouth, smiled round them when he raised his eyebrows and —
‘God! Stop it! Stop it! Stop it!’
The frightened, mewling voice was loud enough to breach the walls.
Leo froze in an agony of indecision. Should they go in? Would they see something they shouldn’t see? Would it be compromising Rose’s dignity? So many reasons to sit there and do nothing…
Then a reedy, high-pitched wail that had both of them bolting into the room where Rose was propped up between Neta and Agnieska, stalled on her journey to the bathroom. Static white hair fell into a face that was distorted in pain, hands clutching at nothing, while even the good Dr Howard looked on helplessly.
It took all five of them to get Rose back into bed when every movement, every touch, even the displacement of air against her skin, made her moan.
When Rose had regained some kind of control over her own treacherous body and wasn’t making those awful sounds any more, Jane steeled herself to approach the bed and take Rose’s hands. ‘Darling, you’re all right. Everything’s going to be all right.’
‘I’m not,’ Rose insisted. ‘Do something. Make it go away. Stop it! Stop it! Stop it!’
She had to be ready now. So why was she struggling so hard?
‘Give her something,’ Jane barked at the doctor. ‘She shouldn’t be in this much pain.’
Leo came in on the chorus. ‘Yeah. Do it.’
Dr Howard nodded. ‘If you’re sure?’
He was looking straight at Leo, who held his gaze and nodded back. ‘Absolutely sure.’ Then he turned to look at Rose, though her head was lowered and she was chanting, ‘Stop it! Stop it! Stop it!’ under her breath, like a mantra.
Jane watched as the doctor directed Neta to inject something straight into the cannula in the back of Rose’s hand. It seemed to take a long, long time before Rose quietened, then dozed and Neta could rearrange her pillows and pull the covers up around Rose as she slept.
Jane still had this horrid fear that Rose could feel all the pain and torment but was trapped behind a drug-induced haze and couldn’t tell them.
But still they all pretended that Rose was simply sleeping, though Dr Howard said that her kidneys were shutting down now. ‘If there’s any change, call me,’ he murmured before he left. ‘It could be hours, it could be days.’
He’d been saying that for what felt like weeks. Death didn’t keep to a schedule. As soon as he’d padded down the stairs, Leo turned to Jane and she held out her arms so he could fall into them. ‘We will get through this, Leo,’ she told him sharply. ‘Because Rose needs us and we don’t want to let her down.’
‘Don’t go all tough love on me,’ he groused, but he kissed her cheek and at least he was still up to making jokes, even if they weren’t good jokes.
The vigil continued. Neta was banished to the kitchen but came up every hour, along with Lydia who brought tea and sandwiches, or tea and cake, or simply just tea, to check on Rose.
Rose slept on, mouth open as her body tried to release the toxins that her kidneys couldn’t. Her wheezing added to the ambient noise from the bed, the pump and the beeps from the game on Leo’s phone, which was annoying, but Jane couldn’t summon up the energy to tell him that it was annoying. It was exhausting watching someone die.
Eventually, she went downstairs for dinner, then stood shivering outside the kitchen door as she and Lydia shared a glass of wine and Lydia smoked a cigarette, blowing the smoke out of one side of her mouth like a wisecracking heroine from a black and white movie.
Then Jane rushed back upstairs, terrified that Rose would have gone in her absence. That the gasps would have got fewer and fewer, then simply stopped. No deathbed confessions. No final words. That she would just go.
But she still wasn’t ready. Katya had replaced Neta. And Agnieska had replaced Katya. Jane had told Leo to go to bed and catch a few hours’ sleep but he was sprawled in the chair next to hers, breathing heavily, and occasionally he’d drop off long enough to snore so loudly that he woke himself up again with a startled cry of, ‘I wasn’t asleep.’
Each time it happened, Jane laughed. Leo laughed too when he told her that he didn’t want the last thing that Rose ever heard to be Jane crunching her way through a bag of kettle chips.
They took turns to moisten Rose’s lips with the foam lollipops dipped in iced water. They’d even played I-Spy at one point but now Agnieska had been in to do her checks and report that Rose’s blood pressure was low but her pulse was steady and Leo was asleep. Not even snoring now, but curled up as much as he could in the chair and it was only Jane left.
It was very lonely. Jane wondered why the Germans with their strange portmanteau words didn’t have a phrase to describe the bleak mood that settled around you between three and five a.m. when you and the dying were the only ones left awake.
‘Rose?’ she whispered, because Rose’s eyes were open and fixed on her. ‘Are you all right?’
‘I’m ready. Everyone is waiting for me but I can’t go…’
‘Why not?’ Jane wondered if this was a strange dream. She ran a series of checks, even pinched herself, but, no, it was just her luck to still be awake. ‘Darling, we’ve talked about this. You don’t need to stay if you’re ready, you can go.’
‘I can’t.’ It was only because the room was so still that Jane could make out the words. ‘I’m stuck.’
‘Can you see a light? Can you move towards it?’ For God’s sake, what was she talking about? There was no light. No heaven. No hell. Nothing.
‘Help me. I can not go on. No. Stop it! Stop it! Stop it!’
‘It’s all right, darling. I’m here.’
‘You said you’d help me when the times comes. Now. It’s now .’
Jane hadn’t realised that that was what she was agreeing to when she’d promised Rose she’d be there at the end. Or maybe she had, because Jane wasn’t agonising over what she should or should not do. She was already glancing around the lamp-lit room to see what she could use to speed Rose on her way. A cushion seemed the best option but what if Rose wasn’t truly ready? What if she struggled? Fought it? So it wouldn’t be helping. It would be something else, something that Jane wasn’t sure that she could do.
But this was what Rose wanted. What she’d planned. ‘The champagne and pills? Do you want that, Rose? Can you swallow?’
‘Stop it! Stop it! Stop it! Stop it! Oh please. Please. Stop it.’
If Rose was stuck then she wasn’t going anywhere and Jane could slip out of the room and creep silently through the house. She smoked one of Lydia’s cigarettes as she calmly selected a bottle of champagne from the huge wine fridge, a 2002 Dom Ruinart, not the most expensive, but probably the nicest. Then she went back to Rose’s room, to the bathroom where the nurses, even Dr Howard, had got sloppy, and took a packet of pills from the green drug safe, which had been left unlocked.
It was to her credit that she did think about fleeing into the night, thought about it again, then walked back into Rose’s room.
‘Where have you been?’ Leo asked hoarsely. He wasn’t meant to be awake. ‘Champagne? Really?’
‘It’s for Rose, isn’t it, darling?’
Rose’s eyes were open but she was muttering indistinctly and looked frightened. She was determined to make this as hard as possible.
‘It’s a nice gesture but if she can’t swallow water, then how is she going to sip champagne?’
Jane had been wondering that too. About how she was going to get three or four, even five or six temazepam into Rose without a struggle. It was the struggle that she was most worried about. But now that Leo was awake, that was something else to worry about too.
One thing at a time. She ignored Leo as she circled the bed, then perched on the other side to him and took Rose’s hand. ‘Darling, do you still want to go?’
There was nothing but muttering, which made no sense. Jane wondered why it was so hard to die, though she already knew the answer, when Rose said very clearly, ‘I want to go. I can’t bear it any more. Help me. Now.’
Leo sucked in a breath. ‘Just close your eyes and go to sleep.’ He was wobbling. Tears not far off. ‘You can go. It’s all right.’
‘Darling, she doesn’t need your permission, she needs help. My help. Rose and I talked about this. I promised her.’
Rose lay there, eyes flickering between them. ‘Do it,’ she said. ‘Help me.’
‘You can’t. She can’t, Rose,’ Leo said pleadingly. ‘It’s wrong.’
‘But you heard what the doctor said the other day about…’ About terminally ill cancer patients being given enough of the good drugs that they didn’t have to suffer through the final ravages. How could she say that with Rose here?
Instead she grabbed Leo by the sleeve of his jumper and yanked him into the corner. ‘Shut up!’ she hissed at him. ‘If I don’t do this, then she’ll spend a day, maybe three or four days, even a week, in pain. In fucking agony, Leo. She’s going to die anyway.’
‘You don’t know that. She could go in the next hour and then you’d have her death on your conscience when it needn’t be.’ He tried to cup her face but Jane wrenched her head back.
She was all right as long as he didn’t touch her. ‘Darling, it’s not like I have that much of a conscience for it to be an issue.’ Jane made her words sound as sharp and as hard as she could. Like a diamond.
It was true, after all. It was why Rose had wanted her to stay. Maybe death dogging your heels gave you clarity, Jane wasn’t sure. All that she knew was that Rose could see beneath all the gloss, all the gilt-edging, all the bullshit , to the sordid truth of what she really was.
If Rose needed an executioner, then Jane was her girl.
‘It’s the right thing to do,’ she told Leo, who wasn’t trying to hold her any more, but looking at her with revulsion, which she deserved. She’d earned it. ‘Rose has lived her life exactly as she wanted to. She gets to choose how and when she’s done with it. You have to respect that.’
‘You don’t even know her!’ Leo said sullenly as he sat and watched her pop the tablets out of the blister pack.
‘But Rose knows me.’ Jane looked at the pills in her hand then at Rose, who was watching her. Not alert, but present. ‘Rose, darling, do you think you could swallow these pills?’
‘Of course she can’t!’ Leo sounded like he was close to exploding. ‘Fucking hell, I’m never going to forgive you for this.’
‘It’s not about you, Leo,’ Jane said distractedly. ‘Rose? Can you take one of the pills?’
She wanted Rose to reach out a hand, take the pills and pop them in her mouth. That way it would be entirely Rose’s doing. It would be her hand. Jane would be one step removed.
‘I can’t. Help me.’
She could mash the pills into powder, mix them with champagne, cradle the back of Rose’s hand and tip the mixture down her throat. Jane could do that. How many times had she done that when she was cajoling Rose into taking some water? ‘I’m going to dissolve them into the champagne and then you just need to have a little drink.’
Leo didn’t say anything, maybe because he was kissing Rose’s forehead, stroking back her limp strands of hair, while they watched Jane attempt to mash four pills between two teaspoons. She did a lousy job of it. Then she opened the champagne with a pop that sounded inappropriately jubilant and poured a little into the tumbler with the crushed pills and stirred it around. Soon the chalky debris soaked up the champagne and turned into a claggy white paste.
She could spoon that into Rose. There was a very thin line between helping someone with their last wish and killing them – even if you were killing them with your kindness.
She had promised Rose but lately Jane had stopped making promises that she couldn’t keep. ‘All right,’ she whispered. She picked up the tumbler and the spoon and took the four steps to the bed. ‘I’m going to put this in your mouth, darling, and then give you a little champagne to wash it down.’
Rose blinked, then nodded. At least, Jane thought it was a nod. Maybe she just wanted it to be. ‘Rose, darling? I have to be certain it’s what you want.’
‘Do it.’ Rose mouthed the words rather than said them out loud. ‘Now. Please.’
‘Are you sure?’ Leo asked. ‘You can’t let go by yourself?’
‘Do it.’
‘Go on, then.’ Leo said and this time, when Jane caught his eye, he nodded.
Jane glanced down at the contents of the tumbler, then scraped some of the paste onto the spoon. It was going to take about five spoonfuls before it was all gone. Five times she had to spoon the mixture into Rose’s mouth. Five times she had to tilt her head and make her drink. Five times. Five times was too many times. Five steps too far – even for Jane.
She turned away; let the spoon drop to the floor. ‘I’m so sorry, I can’t. I just can’t.’
‘It’s OK,’ Leo said. He pressed another kiss to Rose’s furrowed forehead. ‘I can. I’ll do it.’