Constance (8 page)

He swung the car past the gateposts and stopped as close
as he could to the front door. Jeanette did turn her head now, staring past him and up at the house. It had a steep tiled roof with mansard windows that had always made him think of eyes under heavy lids. A purple-flowered clematis and a cream climbing rose grew beside the front door, the colours harmonising with the dusty red brick of the house. Bill didn’t know the names of the varieties, but Jeanette would. She was a passionate gardener.

He turned off the ignition and the silence enveloped them. He took his wife’s hand and held it. He wanted to crush it, to rub his mouth against the thin skin, somehow revitalising her with his own heat, but he didn’t. He just let her fingers rest in his.

Jeanette’s eyes were on him now.

‘Are you ready to go inside?’ he asked.

She nodded.

He helped her out of the car and she leaned on his arm as they made their way. Once they were in the hallway she indicated that she wanted to stop. The parquet floor was warmed by the late sun, the long-case barometer indicated
Fair
, there was a pile of unopened post on the oak table next to the big pot of African violets.

‘Good to be home?’ Bill asked.

–
Yes
, Jeanette said. –
Thank you.

But he could feel the rigidity of her arm, and her neck and her spine. Her fingers dug into his wrist. Gently he urged her forwards, thinking that he would establish her in her chair beside the French windows so that she could look out into the garden while he made her a cup of tea. She let him lead her but instead of sinking into her chair she stood and gazed at the room. It looked as it always did.

Her sudden movement startled him.

Jeanette broke away and snatched up a stone paperweight that stood on the glass-topped table. She raised her thin arm
above her head and brought it down. There was a crack like a rifle-shot as the glass shattered. She lifted the paperweight once more and smashed it down again, this time catching the rim of a porcelain bowl and sending it spinning to the floor. Jeanette swung the paperweight a third and a fourth time and the tabletop shivered into a crystalline sheet. She kept on and on, her arm pumping in a series of diminishing arcs until she had no strength left.

Appalled, and with a shaft of pain in his own chest that left him breathless, Bill tried to catch her wrists. She threw the paperweight away from her and it thudded and then rolled harmlessly on the rug. She clenched her fists instead and pounded them against Bill’s chest. Her mouth gaped and her head wagged and gusts of ragged sobbing shook her body.

Jeanette had been deaf since birth. The sounds she was making now were shapeless bellows of anguish.

He managed to catch her flailing arms and pin them to her sides.

‘I know,’ he crooned. ‘I know, I know.’

She was gasping for breath, tears pouring down her face and dripping from her chin. She was too weak to sustain the paroxysm of rage. It subsided as quickly as it had come, leaving her shuddering in his arms. Bill stood still and held her, smoothing the tufts of her pale hair. When he thought she could bear it he took out his handkerchief and dried her cheeks. At length he was able to steer her towards the chair and she sank down. He brought up the footstool and sat close against her knees.

Her wrists and fingers were limp now. It cost her a huge effort to speak.

– I don’t want to die.

Her words came as loose, blurted outbursts. Bill was the only person she trusted to decipher what she said. Even with
her son, she preferred to use sign language for almost everything.

‘I know,’ he told her. ‘You aren’t going to die yet.’

Jeanette gazed into his face, searching for the truth.

She had always told him, from when they first knew one another, that he was easy to lip-read because he had a generous face. Some people were costive, keeping their lips pinched in and biting their words in half as if they were coins they were unwilling to spend, but not Bill Bunting.

– No?

‘No, you are not,’ he said firmly.

The oncologist had told them that she might have six months. It could be rather less, just conceivably more, but six months was what he thought they should allow.

Her head drooped.

– I’m sorry
, she said.

‘It doesn’t matter. It’s a table.’ He smiled at her. If he could have changed places with her, he would have done it gladly.

– For being ill. Leaving you and Noah.

‘You haven’t left us,’ he said. His hands cupped her knees.

The first time he saw Jeanette Thorne was at a student union party. She was with someone else, a mathematician he knew only slightly. The room was crowded and there was barely enough space for leaping up and down to the punk band. Through a thicket of legs he caught a flicker of her red shoes, platform-soled with a strap across the instep. Then she jumped in the air and the hem of her skirt flipped up to reveal the tender pallor of her bare thighs. He had elbowed his way through the sweaty crowd so he could stand behind her to watch, and ever since that moment he had loved the long blade of her shins and the bluish hollow behind her knees.

That was when they were both twenty-one.

Later that evening he had found himself next to her, packed
in a wedge of people between the wall and an angle of the bar. He had studied her pale, abstracted profile against the surging crowd. She looked as if she was deep in thought and he had longed to talk to her. In the end he had positioned himself at her shoulder and had murmured something into the bell of blonde hair that swung to her shoulders, some banal question about what she thought of the band. She ignored him, and he had been about to creep away, abashed. Then a girl he knew pressed her elbow into his ribs.

‘That’s Jeanette Thorne. She’s in Biological Sciences. She’s completely deaf, you know. She does everything, just the same. Amazing, really.’

At that moment Jeanette turned her head and for the first time looked straight into his eyes. It was as if she could see into his head, and read the sexual stirring in him before he had even registered it properly himself. Words would have been entirely superfluous. Jeanette’s mouth merely curved in a smile that transformed the dingy bar into some antechamber to Paradise.

‘I am Bill,’ he said.

She placed the flat of her right hand over her breastbone and gently inclined her head. A lock of hair fell forwards and revealed the thick plastic aid that curved behind her ear. Bill wanted nothing more than to lean forward and kiss that faulty ear and tuck her hair back into place.

It was only when he came to know Jeanette much better that he understood that her voluptuous body and her mass of blonde hair were at odds with her personality. Jeanette looked wanton, but she was not. She was too determined to be more than just a deaf girl to let even sex distract her for long.

He fell in love with that contradiction.

– When’s Noah coming?

‘He’ll be here for dinner.’

– Will you tell him?

‘I don’t exactly know yet.’

Noah would have to be told that his mother’s cancer was terminal.

It was a terrible word, that.

They sat with the overturned bowl and the hurled paperweight on the rug beside them, holding on to each other and looking out into the garden as the sun drifted behind the trees. Permanence had turned into fragility. What had been certain was now a series of questions, neither spoken nor answered.

Later, after Jeanette had gone to bed, Bill and Noah sat in the small, cluttered downstairs room that Bill used as his study. They had eaten dinner together, or rather the two men had eaten and Jeanette had made a flattened mound of her food and then placed her knife and fork on top of it.

–
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.