I’d take it as a compliment except I’m too busy trying to work out how the heat from his fingers has lingered on my skin like a phantom touch. I’ve clearly been reading too much vintage Danielle Steel.
Upstairs, I sift through the bag of clothes I bought from the op shop and find a deliciously soft, cream mohair jumper and a pair of black leggings, even though they trigger Mum’s ‘leggings aren’t pants’ speech in my mind. I throw my hair, which is even more untamed than usual in the humidity, into a high bun the way I used to do when I was a carefree teenager. Before The Unravelling . . .
That’s how Grace and I always describe the period immediately following Cam’s diagnosis. It’s become one of our labels, and we apply it every time things go badly in either of our lives.
As I come back downstairs, I’m greeted by a scene that wouldn’t be out of place in a Hallmark movie. Hugh stokes the fire as it roars to life. We could almost be stranded in a log cabin in the wilderness, holed up in the snow together for days. And if we follow the Hallmark formula . . .
‘What are you thinking about?’ he asks me.
‘Reinvention,’ I say.
I don’t know why that word pops into my head. Maybe it’s the wholesome scene before me. Maybe it’s the bad dreams and interrupted sleep. Maybe The Reinvention is an actual thing, the natural next step after The Unravelling. It never occurred to me that it could exist, and that one nice event could trigger an upward spiral of lovely and beautiful life changes leading towards a Happily Ever After, Mark II – whether or not a man is involved. But I’m getting ahead of myself, as usual.
‘Kate?’
‘Christmas movies,’ I admit.
‘In August?’
‘Well, it is winter. It’s the log cabin,’ I explain. ‘The fire . . .’
You.
Hugh’s kindness to me right from the start had been rolled into my all-encompassing nightmare. People were good to us, practically everyone we came across, with just a few exceptions. It was an avalanche of support that snowballed out of the hospital and into our world, from the moment everything fell apart. But this was a long haul. It required the kind of persistent help that outlived most people’s practical capacity.
Hugh’s compassion, like Grace’s, had stayed the distance. It’s often colleagues who have the front-row seats when life flies off the rails. They can’t avoid you.
‘Did I ever properly thank you for all your support around the time Cam was diagnosed?’ I ask him, out of nowhere.
He stops poking the fire, closes the glass door and walks back to the kitchen. ‘You did. It wasn’t anything over and above what any reasonable workplace would provide.’ He thinks I mean the way he rearranged my role to fit my circumstances and tweaked that as time went on.
‘I don’t mean the flexibility at work. I mean . . . everything else.’ The lifts in his car. The unexpected cleaner he paid for. The way work obstacles evaporated, and still do. ‘The way you befriended Cam,’ I remind him, trying to keep my voice even.
‘That wasn’t a favour,’ he says. ‘Cam and I would have been friends even if you hadn’t been in the picture. I still grieve for him, you know. Nothing like you do. But I loved him.’
When Cam’s health really declined, it became harder for me to take him places. Physically harder, lugging around the wheelchair and getting him in and out of the car. But he also became emotionally difficult, sometimes. Hugh carried on with him as if nothing was wrong, even after Cam became more confused about who Hugh was and what his role was in our lives.
‘He thought you were his brother,’ I tell him. ‘Did I ever mention that?’
Hugh smiles. ‘I used to call him that. Brother.’
I didn’t know that. And I love it.
Of course he misses Cam, too. Genuinely so. I dearly want to raise that matter of their secret again, but he protects it like it’s under lock and key in a safe, inside his head.
I remember something else Cam said, which had been shelved by me at the time. Hugh had dropped him off, and he’d been confused about all the inter-relationships. We’d waved Hugh off and Cam had turned to me and said, ‘He likes you, Red. If you weren’t married to his brother, he’d want you himself.’
I’d dismissed it at the time, assumed it was the dementia talking. Tried to explain I wasn’t Hugh’s sister-in-law but his colleague, and that he and Hugh were friends. It had been too hard and there was no point anyway, because by that stage he was permanently confused and would have forgotten all the details the next second. He was confused about everything. Who he was. Who I was. What he had to do in any given moment of the day. And I’d become one of those jaded carers unable to paint a rosy picture for newbies in the carers’ forum.
‘What are these?’ he’d said one morning, about a year before he died. He was standing in front of a wall of books he’d previously conservatively estimated to number a thousand. Books he’d collected all his life, since he was a boy, all through school and university and through his academic career. Classics. Poetry. Shakespeare. History. Music. Biography.
‘What do you mean, Cam? They’re yours,’ I’d explained, standing beside him and trailing my fingers across the spines.
‘What are they?’ he’d asked again.
My eyes had filled with tears. ‘Cam! They’re books!’
Books! His life.
‘And here are the ones you wrote,’ I’d said, showing him a series of academic titles with his name on the spines, along with those of his various publishers, including the esteemed presses from Oxford and Cambridge Universities. I took out a copy of Chaucer’s Social Criticism – originally his PhD thesis, later published as a book, flicked it open, showed him the pages. All those whip-smart words. I even showed him the black and white author photo on the dust jacket. Nothing.
I think that was my moment of acceptance. The man I knew was gone. He had been replaced by an increasingly unrecognisable ghost of a person, lost in his own body.
Hugh passes me a huge mug of piping hot chocolate. Very much alive.
‘You know, Cam remembered me at the very end,’ I tell him. ‘He’d been confused for months, but there was this one, final spark of lucidity and remembrance. Just as he was dying.’
Hugh smiles warmly. ‘Of course he did. He adored you.’
I’ve never shared that extraordinary moment of Cam’s passing with anyone. ‘They usually forget everyone. Even their families. I’m afraid nobody will ever love me that much again, and that I won’t have the capacity – or maybe the courage – to love anyone that much again either.’