Millie let out an awful sob and her hand flew to her mouth as if she could stop the sound escaping, but too late. Bea grabbed her other hand and they clung to each other. They looked as if they were facing shipwreck. “Is there nothing to be done?” Ursula asked. “Surely—”
“No,” Nancy said, cutting her short. They would all want to be hopeful, to see possibilities, and she had moved beyond possibilities. “He said that if perhaps it had been detected at an earlier stage there might have been something. And he won’t operate,” she said, holding up a hand to silence Bea, who was about to protest. “They can’t operate because of where it is, and now it’s become tangled with blood vessels”—“Oh God,” Millie said. She looked green, she was always the most squeamish of all of them—“which makes it impossible. An operation would, at best, be the end of me.”
“And if death is the best, what is the worst?” Ursula puzzled. Millie gave a little gasp at the word “death,” as if uttering it was somehow blasphemous.
“I would probably be left almost completely incapacitated, mentally and physically—”
“Probably?” Bea said, still clinging to hope amongst the storm-tossed wreckage.
“Almost certainly,” Nancy said. “Which would be the end of me too, in a different way. But even that would be no good as, because of its position, they wouldn’t be able to cut it all out.” Millie looked as if she was going to retch. “It would carry on growing. Really,” Nancy said, perhaps less kindly than she had intended, “it would be better, better for me, if you accept this.”
She had divined in her heart that this was coming, ever since that first visit to Harley Street, when she was supposedly helping Gertie to move house. The consultant Bea had found, Dr. Morton-Fraser, was a sensible sort of Scot. “Comes highly recommended,” Bea had said. “Reputation for being scrupulous. No stone unturned and so on.” There had been perhaps a little hope then, less so when she returned the following month (Wordsworth’s cottage and so on) and he showed her the X-rays and she could see how much it had already grown in a short time. “Perhaps if you had come to me a year ago,” he said, “but even then who knows…” Very rapid, incurable—poor Barbara Thoms’s diagnosis.
“I can’t bear it,” Millie murmured as Bea went round topping up their glasses. Nancy felt a sudden flash of resentment. She was the one who had to bear it, not them.
She wanted to be left alone in peace, to disappear into her own quiet world and meditate upon death. Death. Yes, she could form that blunt, obscene word too. But instead she was the one who was going to have to be kind and strong and say that everything was going to be all right (which it clearly was not) and that she had “come to terms with it.”
“It’s going to be all right,” she said to Millie. “I’m all right. I’ve come to terms with it and now you must.”
“And Teddy?” Ursula said, her voice breaking. “He phoned me this morning, Nancy. He suspects you of having an affair, for heaven’s sake. You must put him out of his misery.”
Nancy laughed bitterly and said, “And put him in a worse misery?”
“Tell him as soon as possible, it’s unfair keeping him in the dark this long.” (Ursula, Nancy thought rather irritably, always Teddy’s greatest champion and protector.) “Although I suppose not Viola—”
Oh, God. Viola, Nancy thought. She was quietly convulsed with despair.
“No, not Viola,” Bea said quickly. “She’s far too young to understand.”
“We’ll be there for her,” Millie said wildly. “We’ll care for her—”
“But first you have to tell Teddy,” Ursula said insistently. “You have to go home now and tell him.”
“Yes,” Nancy sighed. “Yes, I will.”
They all accompanied her to King’s Cross and saw her on the train. Bea kissed her tenderly, as if she had suddenly turned to thinnest glass and might shatter at any moment. “Courage,” she said. Ursula seemed to have no fear of Nancy breaking and held her tight. “You’re going to have to help Teddy,” she said urgently. “Help him to cope with it.” Oh, Lord, Nancy thought wearily, would none of them just let her be weak and irredeemably selfish?
They stood on the platform waving as the train pulled out of the station, all of them in tears, Millie in floods. You would think I was going off to war, Nancy thought. The battle, however, was already fought and lost.
Plodding?” she queried.
“I know what you’ve been up to,” he said. In all these years she had never really seen Teddy angry, not like this, certainly. Not with her.
She went into the kitchen, walked over to the sink, turned the tap on and filled a glass with water. She had rehearsed this moment on the train (an awful journey, stuck in a carriage full of beery smokers, leering at her), but when it came to it she didn’t seem to have the words. She drank the water slowly to give herself more time.
“I know,” Teddy said, his voice tight with this new animosity.