Constance

She beamed back at him, suddenly full of confidence.

‘I am safe here with the men downstairs who play rugby. You told me. All I will do is lie in your bed and go to sleep.’

Noah swallowed hard. ‘Good. I’ll see you later, then.’

After he had gone, Roxana put her clothes neatly aside. Noah’s room was tidy, she liked that. She curled up under the crisp bedcover and fell asleep.

The garden looked to be at its summer peak, to Noah’s uncritical eyes. There were the roses, and tall pale-blue spikes of flowers, some other round shaggy pink ones, and metallic clumps of silvery leaves spilling on the mown grass. But Jeanette was shaking her head as they made a slow circuit after lunch.

He told her, ‘Mum. It looks beautiful. Don’t sweat it.’

– There is so much to do.

‘Like pruning the effing roses?’

Her hand touched his arm. The skin on the back of her hand looked thin, and as finely crinkled as an old leaf. Noah thought that she was ageing and fading before his eyes. He wanted to reach inside her and tear out the black tumour and crush it in his fists, and the fierceness of the impulse balled up in his chest like terrible anger.

She signed again – You don’t prune this time of year.

‘Whatever.’

– It’s dead-heading. Chopping off dead blooms. Like me.

‘Is that what you are thinking?’

– I’m still getting used to no next year. But there will be for you and Dad. I think of that. I love you both very much. Do you know?

They had turned back towards the house. Bill was sitting on a patio chair reading the Sunday newspapers and Jeanette’s eyes rested on him. Noah had always been aware that Jeanette loved his father unequivocally and possessively. His friends’ mothers didn’t do the ironing and suddenly press their faces blindly against a shirt or a pair of gardening trousers, the way he had seen his mother do, for example. His childish suspicion was that Bill didn’t know she did things like that.

For himself, Noah knew that Jeanette loved him and he accepted it without question. Mothers always did love their children, didn’t they?

‘I do know,’ he said.

– Good. Will you remember?

‘I promise. But I don’t want to talk like this. We’re still here, the three of us. Now is what matters, here, today, this sunshine, not next year or next month.’

Jeanette nodded.

– You are right. But I can’t pretend not to have cancer.

‘I didn’t mean that.’

– I know. Tell me about your week?

‘Let’s think. Work’s okay. Andy’s in Barcelona. Oh, and I met a girl.’

– Did you?

Her face flowered in an eager smile. But Noah was wondering what possibility there was of any conversation about anything that wouldn’t bring them straight up against a blank wall that had six months painted on it in letters higher than a house.

Jeanette wouldn’t live to see his wedding. She wasn’t going to know her own grandchildren.

Her head was cocked towards him, her eyes on his.

‘Her name’s Roxana.’

– Unusual.

He talked, and they made another slow circuit of the lawn. There were wood pigeons calling in the coppice trees. He told her about Roxana being robbed, and how she was staying with him while she looked for another place. He kept any mention of her job to a minimum, and then said that her brother had been killed in Andijan. He only vaguely remembered the news stories of the time about the brief popular uprising against a virtual dictatorship.

Jeanette nodded. She was interested now and she signed rapidly, occasionally adding a word that came out of her mouth like a bubble bursting.

– Yes. A massacre. Their government claimed it was only a few. The international human rights organisations accepted that in the end. President Karimov was supported by the West, until he turned the Americans off their bases out there. Bush needs his allies in Central Asia.

Noah was impressed, but not surprised that his mother knew so much. Jeanette always read everything that came her way, storing up news and comment, fiction and history like bulwarks against her deafness. She had been an early adopter of the internet as a source of yet more information, and her email connections and correspondences were more numerous than his own.

– Your Roxana’s brother was one of the rebels?

‘I think so. She’s not “mine”. Not yet, anyway, although I’m working on it. Her parents are both dead, she told me. Her brother was all she had. How sad is that, to lose your only sibling? The person you grew up with. It must mean Roxana hasn’t got any reference left to the little girl she was.’

Jeanette waited.

– Go on?

Noah faltered. ‘I wasn’t trying to say anything else, Mum. Not consciously. It must be in my mind, though. You and Connie.’

– Yes. I know. Me and Connie.

Here we are again, he thought. Six months.

He faced her. It meant she could lip-read more easily.

‘Dad and I were thinking, Connie would want to know that you’re ill.’

– You and Dad?

‘Well, yes.’

– Please. Don’t.

‘I’m sorry. It was only a brief mention.’

Jeanette looked towards Bill. Some instinct had made him lower his newspaper and he was watching them over the top of it. She moved close to Noah’s side again and they resumed their slow walk. Jeanette’s face was suffused with sadness.

– She is my sister.

‘Yes.’