We Had It So Good (39 page)

And some clerical drudge in the university had assigned her the room next to Grace's in college and forty years later they still knew each other. How to account for this? She didn't know. She had been tormented by friends, colleagues, patients telling her to go some nonmedical route: homeopathy, crystals, the power of positive thinking, herbalism, meditation, a visit from a shaman who would exorcise the cancer demon. Seeing Andrea sitting on a bench in Highbury Fields with her postchemo bald head, wisps of white hair, a woman actually approached her, sat down and said, “Cancer comes from repressed anger, if you could let out your feelings, the cancer would be driven away.”

When she told Grace this when she came home, Grace
offered to go out into the park and find her, so she would see what unrepressed feelings really looked like.

“The stupid, stupid cunt.”

Grace was prepared to bathe her, to lift her in and out of bed, to inflict medicines on her that she did not want to take. She did it dry-faced. Stephen could be in the middle of a simple task like preparing a light meal and would begin to sob and run from the room. His heart was already broken while his wife was still alive. Andrea couldn't stand this. Grace carried on as normal. She behaved as if she was merely doing her duty, as if she had been asked to load the dishwasher or take the rubbish out. Nothing had changed in her except that she was healthier and Andrea was dying. She never acknowledged that Andrea was on her last legs, she seemed to think that the sun rose and set as normal and tomorrow would be another day.

Stephen spent hours on the internet researching cervical cancer, sending emails to medical centers in the U.S. and Canada. He was certain that there was some new treatment that could cure his wife or delay her imminent death. He opened window after window trying to see through to light. You could not absolve yourself, he thought, of the duty to look for a medical miracle, because medicine was always advancing, it was pushing away at disease. He believed that Andrea could be cured if only he spent enough time online, and he preferred the internet to carrying her to the bathroom and holding her upright as she urinated. He disliked the smell of her diseased body, the sight of her bald scalp repelled him. These thoughts thrashed around in his mind like bloody fish taking a pounding against the rocks.

Grace's creed was to
always say what I think and if other people can't handle it, it's their problem
. She remembered when she had worked on the movie and the director had disagreed with her
ideas. She barged into his hotel room to argue with him and found him in the bath. She had started laughing. What are you laughing about? he screamed. She crooked her little finger. And went around bending that small finger to everyone she met, “Like that.”

But why would you
do
that? Andrea had asked her. You must have known you'd be fired. Grace said she couldn't help herself, and why not, it was true.

So now she said to Stephen, “I don't know why you spend so much time with that machine, she's dying, face up to it.”

Maybe because she had grown up on the edge of a wood and seen dead animals out there, shrews mutilated by foxes, badgers with bloody claws, life wasn't a sanitary thing for her. Her mother had probably drowned the three cats' kittens in a bucket of water when she wasn't looking. Out in Latin America, babies died of hideous diseases, in New York ghosts with canes shuffled along the pavement to the AIDS clinic. One of the women who had made a temporary garden had a tremendous goiter on her neck, it looked like a second head. If Andrea had to wear nappies at some point, she'd change them. Stephen was a sap, a baby, he always had been. He was to her exactly the same now as when she had first met him: one of those Americans who believe that there are problems with solutions, rather than situations which have their own internal life and momentum. His relentless optimism made her laugh out loud. Didn't he know how ridiculous he was? She fed Andrea a soft-boiled egg with a spoon and Andrea opened her mouth like a baby bird.

Grace rebuffed Andrea's attempts to thank her, let alone give her a weak hug, or take her leave before it was too late, before she sank into a coma.

When she tried to remember Andrea standing outside her room, frozen, intimidated, having turned the handle of the wrong door, and Grace had seen her in her terrible clothes and dreadful carroty hair, she could clearly recall her initial sensation of withering
contempt, even disgust. At home in Sevenoaks, Grace had usually designed and made her own clothes and had arrived at Oxford with a trunk full of them. She knew she didn't look like anyone else. No one had hair as short as hers, they all wore it parted in the center, curtains falling to either side of the face, while her own was cropped like a man's. Grace had style, the girl in the hallway was not ever a slave to fashion. She had never seen anyone so appallingly dressed.

Grace remembered that she had taken this at first as a sign of some kind of originality, not that Andrea came from the back of beyond—Grace's parameters included only the Home Counties, there was London and its commuter belt. But when she questioned her about where she was from and heard that she had grown up in a hotel (Grace's idea of pure freedom, having stayed in one or two in France), and learned that Andrea was, even better, effectively homeless, she felt for the first time jealousy.

“What will happen at Christmas?”

“I don't know. I expect something will turn up, I'm not worried. If I have to I could get a job as a chambermaid in a hotel, they always provide accommodation and it's bound to be busy at that time of year.”

Grace understood that she was dealing with someone who had an inner toughness that she herself had not, with all her exterior confidence, achieved. But why was the girl so intimidated by her?

“You look like a frightened rabbit, what's the matter with you?”

“I don't think I fit in.”

“Why would you
want
to fit in?”

Andrea considered this question in a new light. “Now you put it like that, I'm not sure. I just don't want to feel that everyone knows what to do and say and I don't.”

“I can teach you that stuff.”

“Thank you, I'd appreciate it.”

“You need to throw out your clothes.”

“I can't afford any new ones.”

“You can borrow mine.”

“I'm too fat.”

“Then I'll make them for you.”

Grace now sat on the edge of Andrea's bed, stiff, silent, rocking her body. What she wanted to say was too difficult. It might come out that she regarded herself as a parasite and Andrea as the host, it was a way of interpreting it that Juan, in Ibiza, had pointed out.

“I knew the first time I met you,” she said, “that someone like you would always be all right, that you'd get what you wanted, that you could take care of yourself. And if you could take care of yourself, then you could take care of me. You were that type.”

“But I was practically suicidal.”

“You always say that, but I don't think you were at all. You were tough. You always have been. You took what you wanted the minute you saw it.”

There had never been affection between them, they did not even kiss each other on the cheek after long absences. But Andrea knew that Grace had taught her to see, she had taught her to walk around with her eyes wide open. She taught her color, form, texture, light and shade, proportion. She was almost entirely her creature from that point of view. Grace had, she once told her, a profound understanding of surfaces. While Andrea was too busy looking past them to the secrets, the things people couldn't say, what made them tick, Grace didn't care about any of that.

Her life was like scaffolding, it held her up from the outside.

The pain became very difficult. The nurses came and administered injections but there was always too much time between them. Stephen was permanently on the internet now, looking up anesthesia.

Andrea's nose seemed very large in her face, it had taken it over. It seemed to Grace to be her biggest feature. The children had been
and gone, they were arriving every day to sit with their mother. Max performed little tricks for her on the covers of the bed, he could pull a billiard ball from behind her head. He could do things with the abandoned wigs in the wardrobe that made her feebly laugh. Marianne told her about Janek, she felt that this final unburdening would allow her mother to stop worrying about her.

“It's all over,” she said. “I hardly think about him anymore, and I'm happy now. We have adopted a new puppy and we thought you'd like to give it a name.”

I am back in a bedsit, Andrea thought. She lived in her bed and was helped to the toilet. Out of the windows the trees were losing their leaves and the sky had assumed a flat gray aspect. She disliked this median season between autumn and winter, Stephen always hated it. The house next door had sold for nearly three million pounds, he said, she had always been right about everything. She had made them rich.

But she could not pay attention.

The room is growing smaller until it's just her hands on the sheet and the square of pain around them.

“Grace,” she said, lifting a weak hand to the pillow her head rested on.

Grace's strength was that she had no reverence for life. After a moment, she lifted the pillow and did what Andrea had asked.

Stephen was walking up the stairs. He stopped to straighten a picture. This is how they killed Jesse James, he thought, shot in the back, straightening a picture. When all this is over I'm getting into drugs again, I don't care what they do to me. You need something for the kind of pain I have.

He opened the door of the bedroom and saw Grace kissing his wife's cheek and closing her eyes.

“Where has she gone?” he cried. “Where is she?”

W
hen Andrea had seen her last patient, had found new therapists for the ones who wanted to continue and severed those who were merely dependent on her, habituated to arriving every Friday morning merely to talk over their week, she asked Stephen to burn her notes.

She was at the stage of her illness when she had accepted that there would be no recovery. Her calmness astonished him. She was making meticulous preparations for her own death, while the thought of dying terrified him, of being summarily wiped out, reduced to zero. But she was what she always had been, competent and philosophical. She was exactly like this when they had moved to London, to the squat, and without telling anyone had navigated the complicated buses and gone to the Savoy and found herself a job. It was typical that she should approach death with pragmatism.

She told Grace that she did not want Stephen to be faced with the task of disposing of her clothes. “Please do it for me, the next day would be best,” she had said. “Don't let Stephen have to look at them in the wardrobe, and make sure you remove the shoes. They bear the imprint of the foot and are practically part of the body. And my makeup, don't leave anything. I don't want vestiges. I want to leave memories.”

She had died leaving behind order, in the moments that Stephen had lingered on the stair.

His job was to arrange the funeral, to get the death certificate, to mourn, to comfort his children and then be left struggling on alone, attempting to work out who he was now that he was a single man. This one task of cleanup, of destroying her files, seemed to him to be an odd request, why didn't one of her therapist friends take it on, but she had insisted that he must do it.

He had rarely entered her consulting room on the second floor. It was her space, painted in a shade of white which she said had the idea rather than the form of lilac in it (he hadn't understood a word of this). The patients did not talk lying down like in the movies, but sat in a low chair separated from Andrea by a coffee table with one object on it, a box of tissues to weep into. The whole place ran with a river of long-dried-up tears. It depressed him. She spent all day in here. All day. Wearing her expensive jeans and white T-shirts, my uniform, she said, and a cashmere cardigan in winter.

It was, to Stephen, a place of sobs and little joy. Had she ever cured anyone? he once asked her. I'm not a doctor, she replied, curtly. This made him wonder if the whole of her career was simply a long progression of partial failures. How did she measure success? What measurements could you use, where were the studies and experiments that analyzed whether a patient had recovered? But she refused to answer his dogged, pedantic queries. You don't understand, she said to him. And he didn't, and lost interest.

She was paid very well, she had no shortage of clients even though she didn't have a particular specialization, preferring to stay a generalist, dealing with whoever needed her and with whom she struck up an intimacy. She wasn't right for everyone, she told him; some patients required pushing and others coaxing. She was a coaxer. Some preferred a male therapist, others a woman. It was like starting a relationship that could progress into a temporary
marriage. Crazes came and went, eating disorders were a permanent source of income, then childhood sexual abuse and the brief fad for recovered memory. But as far as he understood, the women and fewer men who rang the bell of the house in Canonbury did so because they were merely unhappy.

Well, now
he
was unhappy. He had not burned the notes when she asked him to, she wasn't dead yet, why should he? In the back of his mind was a hope that somehow there could be a recovery, a reprieve. There were always new drugs, new clinical trials, the whole of his career had been focused on the notion of scientific progress.

“If you had lived a hundred years ago,” he once said, when she rashly expressed the view that nothing ever really changes, that we were primally the same people as our cave-dwelling ancestors, with all the same instincts, “your teeth would have rotted from your head by the time you were thirty. You might have died giving birth to Marianne. There was no penicillin when your own parents were kids, so you could have been killed by influenza. And think about the pain, in the past people put up with the most intolerable torture because they didn't have a simple aspirin, let alone ibuprofen. If you broke your arm, they'd amputate it because they didn't know how to set bones. Without anesthetic. The people in the past were fatalists, they believed that nothing could change, that God decided everything, they were powerless. We're
completely
different. Everything that goes on in our heads is hard-wired to understand that there is the option of change, and change is in our own hands, not some guy on a cloud.”