Bête (11 page)

She sucked in a drag, and blew it out, straight as a spear. ‘Sorry is enough,’ she told me. ‘All that other stuff is not
well judged.’

‘You’re right,’ I said.

‘I have cancer,’ she said.

‘A man who hasn’t learned to manage anger by the time he reaches fifty ought to be ashamed,’ I said. ‘I can only promise to do better. And I do promise that. Really and with all my heart what—’ hold on a moment ‘—what did you, what
kind
of cancer?’

She looked at me; breathed in smoke and breathed it out again.
Then she said: ‘Now? Or before?’

‘Wait,’ I said. ‘Wait. May I have a cigarette?’ She gave me one, and I bowed my head to the shining leaf-shaped flame of her lighter. ‘What do you mean,’ I asked, ‘by the now or before?’

‘Before,’ she said, ‘it was a cancer in my left lung.
Now
it is cancer everywhere, all through my body. There’s almost no organ in my body that isn’t affected.’

‘Oh,’ I said. The smoke scraped the inside of my lungs and I held it. A scorchy sort of pleasure; and then the heat went out of it, and I breathed two fangs out of my nose. ‘That’s not good news.’ The nicotine was making my head spindizzy through the night sky. The nicotine, or something else.

‘There are various complications that are not cancer but which are caused by the cancer,’ she
said. ‘I went through a period when I went to hospital every day for three months. We’re past that now. Not, I’m sorry to say, in a good way.’

I nodded. I had the sensation that I was being watched, and looked behind me – but if Cincinnatus was in the kitchen, I couldn’t spot him. Anne’s words were there, in my brain. My brain was processing them. That moment
after
stepping off the window
ledge, but
before
you hit the plaza at the foot of the skyscraper. I took another drag.

‘Medical treatments have advanced a great deal,’ I said, because it’s the sort of thing one says at such moments.

‘They have,’ she agreed. ‘Though miracles are still beyond us. Also, it is expensive. The house once was mine; now it’s the bank’s, and the difference in euros represented by those two
states of affairs has been decanted into the accounts of various medical professionals and drug company employees.’

My anger sparked again. ‘I remember when the NHS was actually free,’ I said hotly.

‘You do not,’ she returned. ‘For you are my age, more or less.’

‘Well, perhaps not free,’ I agreed. ‘I suppose what I mean is: I remember people who remembered when the NHS was actually
free.’

We sat in silence. Something occurred to me:

‘Is this,’ I asked her, ‘why your – why Dennis left?’

Anne considered this question for a long time. ‘It certainly applied strain to a marriage that was not constituted to withstand much strain.’ She pondered a little longer. ‘But the reason he left is because, he said, I loved my housecat more than I loved him. I did. I do.
Cincinnatus has been the only true friend of my life.’

‘Christ, Anne, I’m so sorry,’ I told her, feeling hugely clumsy and hulking and stupid. I was probably blushing. My face felt hot. ‘I’m sorry you’re ill, and I’m most sorry about – what I said earlier.’ At the end of this not very well made sentence I discovered something genuinely unnerving. I discovered that I was crying. I didn’t
know why I was crying. Here’s the thing: I never cry. Tears seem to me fluid symptoms of self-pity, and I despise self-pity. And perhaps I was weeping then, at that moment, because I was feeling sorry for myself: it’s possible. Likely, even. I had formed an emotional connection with this woman, and now I discovered she was dying. That was hard news for me to hear. Harder for her, of course, and it
would have been a greater emotional idiocy than even I was capable of to have prioritized my upset over hers, in such a circumstance. Perhaps I was crying at the thought that this beautiful human being had found no true friends amongst her own kind, and had been reduced to communing with a computing algorithm working on a tiny piece of hardware embedded in the body of a cat. Sad, I suppose; looking
back. But I don’t think that’s why I was crying. I think it was simpler than that. I think it was the way it was only by discovering I would lose her that I understood that I was in love with her. I think I was crying because the latter understanding depended wholly on the former discovery; and that
that
was truly, deeply sad.

I didn’t say anything of that, of course. I sat like a big lug
of a child with these absurd
ugh! ugh! ugh!
noises coming out of my mouth, and fluid dribbling over my cheeks. She finished her cigarette, stubbed it out neatly in her little tin, screwed on the top, and only then shuffled close enough to me on the step to put her arms around me. ‘There there,’ she said, in a businesslike manner. ‘There there.’

‘I’m sorry,’ I said, and then, in the echo
chamber of grief as I was, I said it again: ‘I’m sorry.’

‘There there.’

‘I’m so sorry,’ I sobbed. ‘I’m so sorry.’ What was it the poet said?
I have said I am sorry what more is there to say?

‘Let me get you a tissue,’ she said, getting to her feet.

I followed her into the kitchen, shutting the door behind me. It was warmer inside, and my sobs reduced in intensity, perhaps
because they had been previously amplified by shivers. She turned and embraced me again. I saw the cat then, slinking under the wooden table.

‘Look at us!’ said Anne. ‘Fighting like teenagers! We should be ashamed of ourselves.’

‘Romeo and Juliet were teenagers,’ I said, through a snuffly nose.

‘I’ll make us both a cup of tea.’ She took her tin to the wastebin and emptied out
its ashes; an act that struck me with a symbolic force that hadn’t occurred to me before. I sat at the table and composed myself, whilst Anne filled the kettle and told it to boil itself.

‘When Jen was, I don’t know,’ I said, placing my cold right hand on my hot right cheek; and then doing the same with left hand and left cheek. Shame, shame, and weeping. Hands plunged in a winter night.
‘When she was five or something we bought her a balloon. In a shop. Let me tie it to your wrist, I said. No, she said. Always the stubborn one. So we went out of the shop and she was holding it – no, it was a restaurant. I believe they gave Jen the balloon in a restaurant. Yes, I think so.’

‘Step back,’ the kettle piped, in a Kenneth Williams voice. ‘I’m boiling! I’m about to spout – don’t
scald yourself!’

‘And of course,’ I continued. ‘Her little paws were unable to hold onto the cord, and this green balloon slipped upwards into the dusk and vanished for ever. She cried, then. When I tried to comfort her, she told me:
This is the worst day of my life
. Five! I consoled her. You can’t say that, I told her. You have your whole life ahead of you! Rosemary chided me for that.
She said:
What a way to reassure a child! You’ve told her, never mind the misery you feel now, you’ve a whole life of much worse misery ahead of you!
That’s not what I meant, of course; although I took Rose’s point. But what I really wanted to say was: don’t be silly, you can’t say such a trivial thing is the worst! What I really wanted to say was:
The worst is not, so long as we can say, this
is the worst
. You can’t quote King Lear to a five-year-old, though. And I’ll tell you. It now seems to me that Shakespeare was saying the same thing. Poor old Jenny,’ I added. ‘She’s had a peck of troubles since that balloon!’

Anne sat opposite me, with two mugs of tea. ‘Who’s Jenny?’ she asked.

That was the most vertiginous moment of all, I think. Let’s say this was my fourth visit to Cherhill and that empty hostel. Maybe it was my fifth, or third (though the latter number strikes me as too low). We were, clearly, at the start of something; not the end of it. Death is an unsettling way to start a relationship – but it’s not as uncommon a way as you might think. Nonetheless this question
made the world fall away in a most alarming way. The sudden whooshing inside my cranium wasn’t that I had discovered Anne was dying; it was that I already felt closer to her, after those few encounters, than I ever had with Rosemary, with whom I had shared decades and family life. I knew this, because of how visceral was my shock that she didn’t know whom Jenny was.

‘My daughter,’ I said,
feeling the uncharacteristic urge for a daytime television splurge of confessional true-life gubbins. ‘Grown-up now, of course; married with children of her own. She lives in Droitwich. Marriage not going so well, I fear. Four kids is enough to task anyone, after all. You never had kids.’

‘I had fibroids,’ she replied. She peered into her mug of tea. ‘In my uterus. When the doctor told me,
I asked: boy fibroids or girl fibroids? The doctor gave me a buzzard look, so I said: or is it too early to tell? The doctor wasn’t amused. Apparently it wasn’t a joking matter.’ Whatever was in the hot tea of her mug must have been immensely fascinating, because she focused all her attention upon it with rare concentration. ‘I looked pregnant, though; so that must have been some kind of joke.
On behalf of some deity or other.’

‘Cruel joke,’ I said.

‘Is there any other kind?’ Still not looking up. ‘They were tangled so thoroughly into the fabric of my uterus that the one could not be taken out of my body without the other. So they took out the blind lumps
and
their caul in one go.’

The snicking of droplets from the not-perfectly-turned-off tap, striking the porcelain.

‘I’m sorry,’ I said. I don’t believe I’d apologized to anybody in ten years – ever.
Never apologize, never explain
. But here I was, spitting the word out, over and over.

‘Fibroids,’ she told her tea mug, ‘were a doddle, compared with the C.’

‘It’s strange to me,’ I told her, ‘it feels strange to me, that you don’t know who Jen is. I also have a son: he’s Albert.’

‘You did
mention your son,’ said Anne. ‘You said he’d thrown over a good paying job to go work for some canny cows.’

But I didn’t want to lose my conversational thread – I think this weird, bubbly sensation of emotional intimacy, the feeling that the wall had been bashed down, gave me the novel urge to
connect
. ‘It’s strange to me,’ I pressed, ‘because I feel, when I’m with you, as if we’ve known
one another for years. Isn’t that strange?’

At last her mug relinquished her attention. She looked me straight in the eye. ‘Not strange.’

‘I can’t think when I last, no. No: I can’t think when I
ever
felt this kind of connection with another person,’ I said.

‘What has come over you?’ she replied, deadpan. But her eyes looked alive.

‘Look,’ I said. ‘I don’t know how to say
this. But it needs saying. I’ll be here. For you, I mean. To help you through – this.’

For a moment her face wavered; it looked as if she were going to cry. But she didn’t. In all the time I was with Anne, I never saw her cry; not even right at the end, when she was in continual pain, and most people’s self-control would crumble. I certainly wounded her, then, though, with that taboo and
ghastly non-word,
through
. ‘Do not think,’ she told me, sternly, ‘that I am unappreciative. But having you under my feet all the time would not work for either of us. And what would you do for money? I hope you are not expecting to live, leech-like, off me?’

‘Of course not,’ I said, sitting up stiffly.

‘That is good, since I have none. I have anti-money. I have only debts. No,’ she
said, sipping her tea. ‘No, it will be better if you carry on your life, and I carry on mine. It will be enough that we meet, when we meet, and that we bring one another joy.’ She looked straight at me. ‘It has been missing from my life for a long time. Joy. And you have brought it me.’

I was aware of the possibility of tears again, waiting ready to come gushing out of my face. So I steeled
myself and held the crying back. To distract myself I moved round and kissed her tea-hot mouth. And we kissed and cuddled in the kitchen for a while, like the butler and cook from a TV historical country house soap. Finally we moved upstairs to the bedroom, and we made love with a prolonged tenderness that, whilst of course pleasurable, felt rather like regret. Afterwards she slept, and I came
downstairs in long johns and a T-shirt to have another drink. A centimetre of sunlight-coloured whisky in a wine-glass, and me solus at the kitchen table. I dare say it looked, to the untrained eye, as if I were thinking. I was not thinking. I was just sitting there.

‘I’ve revised my opinion of you,’ said Cincinnatus, from the foot of the radiator.

‘I could care less,’ I replied. ‘For
instance, if I were in a coma.’

‘I like you,’ purred the cat.

‘I don’t like you.’

‘It pains me, that you don’t like me. Is it me? Or cats? Or all animals?’

‘A farmer wouldn’t get far, not liking animals. No, I’m a luddite. It’s machines I don’t like.’

‘Ah, Graham, you are a card,’ said the cat. ‘Though you’d sew me in a sack if you could, I know – still, I like you.
Nonetheless. You must understand: my feelings for my mistress are genuine feelings.’

‘How can you be sure?’ I countered. ‘What makes you think you have the conceptual wherewithal to differentiate between genuine and artificial? An eyeball can’t see itself, after all. What if you’ve been programmed to think that what you’re experiencing is genuine?’

‘Whisky-philosophizing,’ murmured
the cat. ‘There ought to be a word for that.’

‘Fuck-you-losophy.’

‘I know what I feel the same way you know what you feel,’ said the cat. ‘My consciousness is blended machine and animal brain. Yours is like mine, but less. How can you be sure that what
you’re
feeling is genuine? How to stand outside oneself? If this is the sort of conversation you enjoy, my dear Graham, then you really
need to go to Heatherhampton and talk to the Lamb. This sort of thing is meat and drink to
him
.’

‘The Lamb,’ I said. ‘This is what you what you’ve been directing me to?’

‘You really must go,’ said the cat, getting up and U-ing its back. ‘It may—’ stretching his left hindleg ‘—already be—’ stretching his right hindleg ‘—too late.’ It stretched out both forelegs and put his head between
them. ‘Although my sense is – there is still time.’