Constance

– I’m tired, she had confessed. Noah made the slow journey upstairs with her, and then came down again to join his father.

Bill poured himself a whisky. ‘The news about Mum isn’t good,’ he began tentatively.

‘What? What do you mean?’ The aggressive edge to Noah’s voice suggested that on some level he had feared this and was now intending to contest the information.

‘The surgeon who did the operation told us this morning. They found when they reached the tumour site that there was only a part of it they could remove.’

The television in the corner was on with the sound muted. Familiar newscaster faces floated between footage of soldiers in Afghanistan and the highlights of a football match. Bill kept his eyes on the screen as he talked because he was as yet unable to look at Noah without the risk of weeping.

‘So there was another part of it that they couldn’t remove? What does that mean? Is she going to die? Is that what you’re trying to say?’ Noah’s voice rose.

With an effort, Bill kept his steady.

‘They think it’s likely to be about six months.’

Noah had a bottle of beer. He rotated it on the arm of his chair, staring as if he hoped each time the label came into sight it might read differently.

‘I don’t understand. Wait a minute. Are they sure? They can’t be certain, can they? I mean, you hear of people who’ve been given a certain amount of time to live and who get better against all the odds?’

The surgeon had been quite precise. Bill did not think he would ever forget the way the man’s hands had rested on the buff folder of Jeanette’s notes, the neutral odour of the room that seemed to have had all the air sucked out of it, and Jeanette sitting upright in her chair intently lip-reading as the doctor delivered his news. She had turned only once or twice to Bill for confirmation.

Bill said, ‘You do hear of that. I don’t want to give you false grounds for optimism, but if you can believe that she will get better, maybe that’s how it will turn out. I don’t know. All I do know is what the specialist told us today. He didn’t leave any room for doubt in my mind. I wish he had done. I wish I could say something different to you.’

There was no rejecting this, after all. Noah was beginning to take in what his father’s words really meant.

He said at length, ‘It doesn’t seem right. Poor Mum.’

The weather man materialised in front of his bands of cloud and clear sunny intervals. They watched the sweep of his arm as he indicated the movement of a front. Weather seemed just as irrelevant as politics or football. Bill drank some of his whisky and the rim of his glass slipped and clinked against his teeth.

‘I can’t get my head round it,’ Noah muttered. ‘It’s not fair, is it?’

Life had a tendency not to be strictly fair, Bill reflected, although Noah was still too young to appreciate precisely how unfair, how meticulously and even poetically unjust it could be.

Noah said after a while, ‘Dad? I’m glad you didn’t decide, you know, that you were going to try and keep it from me. Thanks for telling me straight away. I’d much rather hear than have to guess.’

‘It was your mother who asked me to tell you tonight,’ Bill scrupulously pointed out. He didn’t believe he should take the credit for courageous honesty when most of his instincts had been to keep the truth from his child for as long as possible.

He was used to being the speaking intermediary between Jeanette and Noah, but he had long been aware that he was only valuable on the median level. The simple exchanges, relating to mealtimes or rooms to be tidied or homework to be completed before television was to be watched, those they had easily and naturally dealt with between themselves through a mixture of sign language and lip-reading and a range of facial expressions. It had fallen to Bill to put into words for Noah the more mundane but complex facts – timetables, instructions and information connected with day-to-day living. This responsibility had occasionally, he thought, made him appear duller and more pedestrian in his son’s eyes than he really was. On the deepest level, for those communications that involved the most intense emotions, any intervention from him would have been superfluous. Mother and son had always understood each other and conveyed their responses to one another with a level of fluency that Bill didn’t feel he possessed.

And now, cruelly, there was this. The relaying of more information, tactfully delivered by a concerned doctor, that was nonetheless savage.

Noah didn’t ask about how Jeanette had taken the news, or what her state of mind now appeared to be. This he would find out directly from his mother: Bill understood that.

There was one more piece of information he felt he should convey.

‘Mum’s afraid that she’s letting you down.’

‘Me? How come?’

‘By dying before you are grown up. Before her job’s done, is the way she put it.’

‘But I am grown up,’ Noah said quietly.

At last, Bill’s gaze slid from the television screen to his son’s profile. Noah’s chin was tipped to his chest. Through the mask of adulthood Bill could quite clearly see the child’s underlying features, even the soft curves of babyhood. Was the job ever done? he wondered. Probably not. Jeanette wasn’t quite fifty. No wonder she felt that she was leaving too much undone.

‘What happens now?’ Noah asked.

‘Once she recovers from the hospital and the operation, she won’t be too bad for a while. She may feel almost herself. I was thinking, perhaps we could go on a holiday. Somewhere we’ve never been, so there aren’t comparisons and memories waiting round every corner. Jeanette will have to decide about that, though.’

A holiday? It would be hard to plan a trip to the Loire Valley or Turkey, Noah thought, with the prospect of death so close at hand. But he had no real idea; he had hardly ever thought about death.

‘That sounds like a good idea. And what about you, Dad?’

Bill hadn’t yet had time to put the question to himself. Or perhaps had chosen to evade it.

‘I want to try to make it as easy as I can for her. Whatever’s coming.’

Noah only nodded.

‘I need to ask your advice,’ Bill continued.

‘Go ahead.’

‘Should I tell Constance?’

As soon as he uttered her name it seemed to take on a weight of its own, as if it occupied a physical space between them. Noah shifted a little sideways, away from his father, to make room for it. He rocked the beer bottle on the arm of his chair, still studying it with apparent attention.

‘Tell her that Mum’s ill, you mean? Doesn’t she know?’

‘I haven’t told her.’

And Jeanette certainly would not have done.

Noah considered further. ‘It’s going to be a shock for Connie, if she doesn’t even know that much. I mean, it’s bad enough for us, and we’ve kind of been in on it all along.’

‘The later it’s left, then the worse it will be.’

‘But it’s for Mum to decide. It’s their relationship, isn’t it?’

‘Exactly. It’s Connie’s as well as Mum’s. Don’t you think we should – I should – let her know? Jeanette, you and I, we’re her only family.’

Noah shrugged. Here at last, in this raw new dimension, was a place where he could direct a jet of anger. ‘I don’t care. I only care about Mum. If she doesn’t want Auntie Connie around her, then she doesn’t. Simple as.’ He grabbed the bottle by the neck and tipped it to his mouth.

‘Maybe you’re right,’ Bill said. Half-truths and evasions and unspoken confessions crowded out of history and squeezed into the room with them. Their shadows cut him off from Noah at the moment when he wanted to feel closest to him. Neither of them spoke until Noah sighed and pushed himself to the edge of his chair.

‘Dad, I think I’ll go up. Unless you want me to stay with you? I could make a cup of tea, if you like.’

‘No. Go on up to bed. Get some sleep, if you can. Do you need anything?’