“Promise me,” she continued, laying her sewing down, “that when the time comes—” (Teddy flinched at the phrase) “when the time comes you will help me.”
“Help you what?” He abandoned the gas bill he had been checking.
He knew perfectly well what. “Help me to go, when it starts to get bad, if I can’t help myself. And it will get bad, Teddy.”
“It might not.”
She could scream with frustration at the avoidance, the ducking and diving. She was dying of brain cancer, it was going to be brutal, savage (completely bad). Unless she was outrageously fortunate, she was not going to fade away in serene sleep. “But if it does start to get bad,” she said patiently, “then I want to go before I become a drooling imbecile.” (I want to die as myself, she thought.) “You wouldn’t let a dog suffer, so please don’t let me.”
“You want me to put you down? Like a dog?” he said testily.
“That’s not what I said. You know it isn’t.”
“But you want me to kill you?”
“No. To help me kill myself.”
“And that’s better in what way?”
Nancy pushed on. “Only if it’s difficult for me to do because I become incapacitated. Morphine or tablets, something like that, I’m not sure.” Or just stick a pillow over my face, for heaven’s sake, and be done with it, she thought. But of course that would never do. “It must clearly be by my own hand,” she said. “Otherwise you’ll be tried for murder.” (Now there was a barbarous word to lay before him.)
“But it’s as good as,” he said. “I don’t really see the difference.”
His hands were clasped together and he stared at them as if assessing whether or not they could do the deed. After a considerable silence he said, “I’m not sure I can.” Not looking at her, looking anywhere but at her, anguish on his face. You made the fatal promise, Nancy thought, you promised anything. You made another promise too, she thought. For better or worse. And now we’ve come to worse. The worst. And a mean thought—how many had he killed during the war?
“Never mind,” she said, reaching across the table and putting forgiving hands on top of his, clenched now in a kind of rigor. “It might not get bad after all, we’ll just have to see.” He nodded gratefully as if she’d given him benediction.
He was a terrible coward. He had rained down destruction on thousands, on women and children—no different from his wife, his child, his mother, his sister. He had killed people from twenty thousand feet up in the sky, but to kill one person, one person who was asking to die? He had watched as the life went out of Keith, he didn’t know if he could do that again. Even for Nancy. He had known her since he was three years old (childhood sweethearts), all of his conscious remembering life, and he was to be her executioner?
He had imagined them settling into an unchallenging old age. He couldn’t picture himself but he could see Nancy growing thick in the waist, acquiring comfortable chins and grey hair. A little like Mrs. Shawcross. She would strain her eyes to knit and to do the Telegraph crossword. He would dig up potatoes, she would pull up weeds. She was not a gardener but she couldn’t be idle. They would be good companions and they would fade quietly away together and now she was just going to leave early. He remembered Sylvie’s displeasure at Hugh’s sudden easy death. He just slipped away without a word. “To cease upon the midnight with no pain,” Teddy thought. Didn’t Nancy deserve that?
She would have to seek her own solace, she realized. She was lying on Viola’s bed, Viola asleep in the crook of her arm. Nancy was uncomfortable, it was still a small child’s bed, Viola would need a bigger one soon but it wouldn’t be Nancy who bought it. She had been reading Anne of Green Gables to Viola. Anne, too, had had to acquire iron in her soul. Sometimes, if she wasn’t too sleepy at bedtime, Viola read to Nancy instead. Viola was a good reader, a bookworm—a phrase she hated. “How can a worm be a nice thing to be?” Viola said. I would be a worm, Nancy thought, if that was the only existence on offer, and then laughed at herself for having reached such a pass. “Without worms we wouldn’t be able to grow food and everyone would starve,” Nancy said reasonably.