Cat found Elaine Dacre on a reclining chair in the garden. The chair had a canvas canopy so that her head was out of the sun and she had a small table beside her with a jug of iced lemon tea, medicines, her Kindle, a radio and phone, a notepad and pen, tissues …
‘Jack thinks of everything and Lou is at home revising for her exams so if I need anything I’ve got her on speed dial.’ She smiled at Cat. ‘It’s lovely to see you again, Doctor. You are good.’
‘I finished surgery early – amazing how people find they’re not feeling so unwell after all when the sun’s shining. And please call me Cat.’
‘Would you like some of this lemon tea? I’m afraid you’d have to get a glass from the kitchen …’
Cat went. The sun shone onto gleaming work surfaces and floor, and there was a faint smell of pine. The glasses in the cupboard sparkled.
‘Your kitchen is out of a showroom,’ she said, unfolding a deckchair and sitting down next to Elaine.
‘That’s Jack. It used to worry me when he was a boy. His room was always immaculate. His drawers were laid out like the ones in the outfitters, his books and toys had to be just so. It seemed a bit obsessive to me but now I think he just likes neatness and order.’
‘Nothing wrong with that.’ Cat sat back and sipped her tea. It was a quiet garden, but she could hear a small child chattering next door and the whine of a hedge trimmer further down.
Elaine’s face had become thinner, even in the few days since Cat had seen her last, and there was a parchment dryness to her skin. The bones of her hands showed through.
‘How have you been?’
Elaine shook her head. ‘Tired. Just so tired. But it’s odd … I feel as if I know something. I can’t explain exactly.’ She frowned in concentration. ‘A lot of your life, you wonder how it will end, don’t you? And you pray it won’t be in terrible pain or when you’re a long way from home. It’s – well – it’s one of the unknowns. But now, I know. I know how. Not when and not every detail but all the other avenues are closed off. I’m not going to die in a plane crash or driving my car or in childbirth … does this sound crazy?’
‘Not at all.’
‘And because I know now … I feel something very important is settled and I don’t have to worry about it any more.’
‘Not knowing is often the worst … I’ve been thinking a lot about what you said to me last time I came … I don’t mean physical things, pain or whatever, I mean spiritual experiences – it doesn’t necessarily have to do with religion but I think “spiritual” is the right word. Like your experience when your grandmother died. These things are quite common. I had a patient a couple of years ago who came out of a coma, sat up in bed and held her arms out to someone she could see in the doorway … and her face just shone with surprise and joy. The nurse saw it, I saw it, her son saw it … but when that nurse asked some of her colleagues about it and if they’d had the same sort of experience, they shut her up, or discovered an urgent job they had to do, they were embarrassed. One even said, “If you’re going all spooky, you’d be better off on a different ward.”’
Elaine leaned forward, trying to reach the jug, but took a deep breath and sat back. Cat jumped up.
‘So silly. I can’t even do a little thing like that sometimes. Is this how it’s going to be from now on?’
‘Not necessarily.’ Cat handed her a glass. ‘You’ll have better days and worse days … but you will get more tired, yes.’
‘We have good pain and symptom control now and you’ll get it, I’ll make sure, but there’s not a lot to be done about tiredness. It’s natural. It’s part of the process.’
‘Well, it’s annoying but I can just sleep can’t I? I thought there was so much I wanted to do, but you know, I’m not sure there is now. I don’t mean things like wanting to watch Lou grow up and so on, I’m sad that I won’t be here for that, won’t know what career she goes for and who she marries and if there’ll be any great-grandchildren. But I find I’m not really interested in climbing Mount Kilimanjaro or going to Disney World.’
‘I think it helps being able to accept.’
‘Is there any alternative?’
‘Some people never can. They fight, they struggle, they go down every medical byway and every alternative one, they don’t hear what you tell them, they won’t believe they’re mortal at all … and I can understand that, I really can. But it makes it harder and it means even if there were someone who would talk with them, they can’t do it because they’re in full denial. I’ve been asked for referral to specialists in Australia and how many more courses of chemo before it starts to work and they’ll be cured, when they’ve had the maximum already and it’s ravaged them – but if they were told they could have a terrible treatment that would make them live another day, they’d go for it.’
‘Do you believe in anything, Doctor – sorry, Cat?’
‘Yes. It’s often very hard but I do think my Christian faith has sustained me through an awful lot and it still does.’
‘What if it isn’t true?’
‘I’ve got to this position, Elaine – I got to it a year or so after my husband died – that if you try to follow the essential teaching then that’s got to be a good way to live, and besides, I love the Church of England. I love the services and the language and the music and the prayers. I love the traditions, I love our cathedral … that sustains me as much as anything. And I decided to go on loving them and believing because of the way I’m sustained by it all – and if I’m wrong, well, I shan’t know anyway. None of us will. But meanwhile, it’s given a point and a purpose to life and made it better. It’s religion twisted by men to back up their own desires which has caused so much harm, don’t you think? I haven’t much to say in support of the Crusades.’
‘There’s something else I wanted to tell you … it was years ago but it was so strange and I still think about it. It’s come back to me vividly these last few weeks. When I was a young wife and Jack was a toddler, our next-door neighbours had a daughter of fifteen, and a younger son. He was a monkey but Sally took the biscuit for being naughty – not bad, just full of it. I never knew a child so full of life and high spirits and – she was up for anything, scared of nothing and so full of bubbliness. Jack adored her, absolutely adored her, and one year, he was three I think, Sally came round and started to talk to him about how it was going to be Mothering Sunday and he had to pick some flowers for me and make a card. It was sweet – they sat at my kitchen table and made this card, and I wasn’t supposed to see it … and then on the Sunday, Sally came round and took Jack into the hall and shut the door. When they came back in he’d got the card in his hand and a little bunch of freesias … when I say “bunch” – there were three. I think she’d taken them out of the ones her mother had been given but I didn’t say anything, obviously. I put them in a vase, and they smelled so strong – even just three of them. Such a sweet smell … it was a real joy. I propped Jack’s card next to them on the windowsill.’
Elaine had closed her eyes.
Time and memory, Cat thought. Death throws them up in the air and they fall in a different order. Ageing does it more gradually. It occurred to her that she and Chris had avoided conversations about his dying. He had shut himself off and dealt with it alone, she had thought stoically. But perhaps not. She had been afraid, wanting precious time with him not to be stained by death talk, and for Chris, that had always seemed pointless except in the purely medical sense. How would he have felt if Elaine had wanted to have this sort of debate with him? Did it matter whether they had talked enough about those things not just towards the end but all through their married life? She knew now that it did. It mattered to her.