* * *
It was as though a dam had burst. I could not remember the last time I had seen her cry. Maybe the day her mother had slapped her across the face, and she had arrived on my step with a livid mark on her cheek and tears waiting to fall. Even then, it had only been a few angry tears, not this. A flood tide of anxiety and regret tumbled out of her. For the first time, we really spoke.
The cancer was not new. She had been in remission, but instead of the all clear she had expected, she had found on her last check-up that it had returned, and now it was starting to spread. She had agreed to chemo, although the prognosis was poor. She had even started the course. Then her husband had suddenly died. He had had a heart attack as he was leaving to collect her from hospital. Her children had seemed sad but unsurprised by this. It turned out that he had been hiding his heart condition from her for nearly three years, fearing that she would not cope with his illness on top of her own. She had been devastated. I knew as well as she did that it was not the deceit that she had been hurt by. After all that time, after years and years of what she had thought of as a near-perfect marriage, it turned out that her husband did not know her at all. Had she seemed so frail to him that she needed protecting from the truth? Had she become so self-absorbed that he had thought she would not care? She had begun to question everything. What else had he not told her?
She impressed on me that she did not mean that she suspected him of infidelity or large scale deceit of any other nature. It was the little things. What else had he dealt with alone rather than burden her with? It was a loving gesture, to shield a loved one from unpleasantness. I tried to defend a man I had never met, but I knew I would not win. It was not an action I would have taken, and my protestation lacked conviction. She had strength beyond belief, and even at her weakest I would have not dared to conceal anything from her. She would sooner be wounded by truth than swaddled by lies. She had not even been eighteen when she had shouted that at me, and I knew she had not changed.
I did eventually put my arms around her, standing awkwardly by her chair. She clung to me in a way that I had not expected. I just let her. I didn’t know what else to do. When she had cried herself into a gasping, shivering stupor, I let her go and led her without resistance to the sofa. She seemed somewhat abashed that she had let me see her outburst and sat subdued next to me whilst I tried painfully to move the evening forward.
It was nearly an hour before she spoke. I had given up long before on conversation; instead, I lit the fire and flicked the stereo on. I can’t even remember what was playing, but it was better than that viscous, cloying silence. I had finally dared to leave the room to open another bottle; lack of conversation was making me drink faster than normal. As I reappeared with a bottle and a cork screw, she fixed me with an incredibly assured gaze and said:
“Help me.” It wasn’t a question or a request; it was an instruction.
It would be a lie to say that I liked her plan, but I couldn’t deny her. It was flawless logic. Almost poetic. I drank half the bottle while she explained. It was her all over, raw and real, life to the bare-boned truth of it. Not swaddled in lies and platitudes, left to dwindle in a soft perfumed hell. As she spoke, I remembered. In fact, I think I even saw her as she had been, her dark hair whipping about her face as she ran through the pounding rain, her chest heaving and her pale cheeks tinted with the vaguest hint of pink. When she had finished, I looked at the clock. We had three and a half hours.
The details of our conversation are lost in the grief for now. One day, I hope I will look out at the sea and recall what we said. It was an odd night, an echo of a night forty years before, the last time we had waited for dawn. We talked about heaven and reincarnation. We talked about God and what we thought about life. We talked about the transient nature of beauty and the passing of time, the melancholy of middle age. And we talked about love, choices and regrets. I didn’t want her to say that she wished she had stayed, not really. I would have been saddened to hear her say that after all this time she had made the wrong choice. She didn’t bother to pretend; it would have been a lie. In spite of everything, her husband sounded like a kind man. I almost wished I’d known him. I asked her if she had ever told him about me. She didn’t answer.
Lying on the sofa, my head in her lap, I could see the black of the island night turning grey as light started to creep in. I tried to ignore it. It was strange to think that for a few hours I had experienced the future I had dreamed of at twenty. Grown old, we could still make each other laugh .We could still argue without malice. We could still lose hours to animated discussion and drink the night dry. There was still warmth and affection there, unchanged by age. At last we ran out of conversation, but even the companionable silence was delicious to me.
For ten minutes, we hadn’t spoken. She just sat there looking at the clock and the fire, holding my hand and stroking my hair. I didn’t want her to go. I hadn’t wanted her to go when we had last sat here watching the clock, the first time we had lived through this night. Now in a strange mimicry of the past she said softly, “It’s nearly time.” I didn’t move. She squeezed my hand and I felt a cold tear fall on it. Last time she hadn’t cried. For a moment, I hoped she would change her mind. I don’t know what I thought we would do if she did. Did I think she would stay here and make up for all the years we had lost? A childish hope. She squeezed my hand again and said, still echoing the last, “Please don’t make this harder for us.”
Grudgingly, I sat up. Her face glowed in the soft orange light of the guttering embers. A wistful smile curled up to her eyes. I kissed her cheek; the saline on my lips told me that she had cried more than one tear in the last few minutes. I stood up and stretched, then offered her a hand. To my faint surprise she took it. As she heaved herself to standing, I became aware for the first time of the pain she was in. I must have had a pleading look in my eyes, because she put her hand on my shoulder and said the same words she had said before:
“I love you, but I have to leave.” Then, she leant forwards and kissed my forehead with uncharacteristic sweetness.