Serial Monogamy (11 page)

“It is a beautiful house. The gas may require a few improvements, but the plumbing is new and the garden is very pleasant. What I propose is this…” said Charles, tracing lines on the tablecloth with his dinner knife like a general laying out his battle plans. Nelly associated this business-like voice mainly with the ordering of carriages or meals in restaurants. Indeed, he had begun that day's lunch at Verrey's, an establishment that he compared favourably with restaurants in Paris, by ordering the fish and the veal for all three of them in a rather similar tone, but it was not one she heard from him often. Mainly, their conversations tended to take a bantering note with a good deal of idle flattery on both sides. He indulged her opinions on art and even asked her to read his manuscripts—she remembered the thrill she had felt when he had first said to her, almost shyly, “Perhaps you could look this over?”—but they never discussed politics, and
after the disasters of the previous year, he kept her well clear of both his professional engagements and his domestic affairs. He organized outings and meals with efficiency and discretion, but she had certainly never heard him unfold a scheme as complex as this one.

“Nelly cannot hold the property until she is twenty-one, so I would buy it in Maria's and Fanny's names, on the understanding her sisters would then sign it over to her next year,” he continued. “The lease would be hers and hers alone, with no conditions attached. It has eighty years to run: she would be housed for life, or she could dispose of it at any time if she so chose.”

“A very generous idea, Mr. Dickens,” Mrs. Ternan murmured over her coffee cup.

Charles had found a house just off Mornington Crescent, a large house by his description, three storeys with room for all of them, and he was proposing to buy it for them. He addressed his remarks primarily to Mrs. Ternan but he kept looking over at Nelly to gauge her reaction. She said nothing.

“The house”—and here his tone faltered as he turned to her directly—“I ask nothing in return, Nelly. It would be yours no matter what happened, no matter what happened to me or to you.”

She met his eyes but still said nothing. He pressed on, more desperate and now simply ignoring her mother's presence, and said, “I am not your equal…”

She raised a half-mocking eyebrow at him.

“I mean, I cannot offer you my hand, the way I would wish, but I offer you my heart…”

His heart—and a house in Mornington Crescent. Was it what she wanted? Was it enough?

She was thinking it over later that evening when her mother put their tea on the table. Maria and Fanny were appearing together in a revue at the Haymarket that night, and after lunch in the best restaurant in Regent Street, Nelly and her mother were eating tinned sprats on toast. They ate in silence for a while, but the food was soon finished, and as Mrs. Ternan pushed aside her plate, she spoke her mind.

“The time has come to make a decision, Nelly. This friendship cannot continue in this manner forever. If you ever wish to marry and have children of your own, you must refuse him and we will make our own way. I have always provided for you and your sisters. Fanny and Maria have good opportunities ahead; so do you.”

Nelly made a small moue. None of them were playing leading roles. Fanny, once renowned as a child prodigy, had been unable to establish much of an adult stage career. Her Italian music lessons had fuelled her love of grand opera without providing her much opportunity to sing it and she hated the sentimental songs of the kind she was performing that night. She talked about taking in students instead. Nelly and Maria, meanwhile, were
always being asked to play minor roles in the most grotesque farces. Maria had spent the previous month learning how to land on her back in such a way that her crinoline would fly up over her head, affording the gentlemen in the audience a nice view of her bloomers.

“We will always find work,” her mother insisted. “We have always managed somehow and we will continue to do so. If, on the other hand, you want his company and you want this house…well, I think you know what goes with the house.”

Yes, the time had come. Some might say she had played him very nicely; she suspected that was what a few of his friends thought, his male friends, of course. The ladies did not know her. It had been almost two years now, two years since her appearance alongside him on stage in Manchester; two years since their misunderstanding in Doncaster, and theirs remained, whatever the gossips might say, an innocent friendship. She thought back with amusement on her own naïveté; she had thought him a lovely new family friend bringing wonderful opportunities to herself perhaps, but mainly to Fanny and Maria. And he had proven such a friend: taking them on walks and picnics, putting in a word with theatre managers for all three of them, paying for Fanny's music lessons in Italy and keeping a fatherly eye out for her and Maria when her mother and Fanny left for the continent. But he was neither a father nor a brother, and if she had been naive in those first months, she could no longer pretend that she
did not know what she had read in his face that day at Conisbrough Castle. Perhaps they were right; perhaps she had played him these past two years.

But her compliments, her laughter, her jokes—they came naturally to her. She had grown to like him, to enjoy his company. She could not deny, however, her secret fantasy that a handsome young man with a good income would show up some day soon.

“Do you hear me, Nelly? I would never force you one way or another. If you do not wish to live in his house, the house he will buy for you with certain expectations…”

“He said it would be mine no matter what…”

“That is generous of him. He is offering you the house no matter what happens in the future, but I think it would be silly of you to think that he offers you the house with no expectations for the present. If you don't want that life, we will refuse him and we will support ourselves, and I will hope that some day you and Fanny and Maria will all marry and that I will be a grandmother.”

“And if I do want it?”

“Do you love him, Nelly?”

How could one not love him? He was funny, he was generous, he was quick and smart, full of life and jokes and stories. He made her feel glorious, elevated above the grimy streets, the cramped cottage and the gas-lit theatres, as though all life were just a day at the races, a golden bracelet or cakes for tea. On stage she had but glimpses of her own power, she had never taken a lead
role and it was only on that odd occasion when the audience laughed at one of her lines or applauded her exit that she had the slightest whiff of that elation that comes from winning over a crowd. With him, she knew it every time they met; every time, he got that particular look in his eye and she knew that she, and only she, was the cause of it.

But still, that was how his love for her made her feel. What of her love for him? Yes, he was funny, generous, quick, smart, full of jokes and stories…and handsome too, she supposed, handsome for an old man. She liked the way the flesh crinkled around his eyes and yet, she knew that was not what she felt when she watched Mr. Birk play Romeo and she knew that when she imagined the young man with a good income his face looked more like Mr. Birk's than Mr. Dickens'. She sensed vaguely there was a difference between loving his love for her and loving him. But it was an abstract thing, hard to discern as long as he had no rival. It wasn't as though Mr. Birk had ever paid her the slightest attention; her imaginary young man was precisely that. She would turn twenty-one next spring; she couldn't afford to wait much longer and she saw that her power in this instance was unique. No audience seemed to believe she was so special; no other man had ever appeared so moved. This must be her destiny. She felt its pull.

“Tell him to buy the house in Mornington Crescent. Tell him that I understand.”

I
found the lump the way everyone does: in the shower. I was just raising one arm above my head to wash an armpit when the hand holding the soap brushed against something. I stopped, put down the soap and felt my left breast. There was something there, something hard buried deep down. I puzzled for a moment. I had once had a big cyst on my neck, but it was softer and closer to the surface than this. You could sort of push it around, but this thing resisted. What could it possibly be? It took me a few seconds before the reality dawned.

When I was younger, we were all told to examine our breasts every month, lie down on the bed and paw about a bit, right up into the armpit. I was always forgetting to do it and then one day the doctors all changed their minds and decided self-examination mainly produced false alarms and I gratefully abandoned my erratic practice of it. Breast cancer seemed a very distant and unlikely prospect. It was the proverbial something that happened
to somebody else. My mother's friends mainly: well-groomed post-menopausal women who had their mastectomies quickly and quietly and reappeared in a few months as though nothing had happened. “Shirley has breast cancer,” my mother would sigh into the phone one winter and then the next summer there Shirley would be, a gracious, grey-haired grandmother apparently unchanged by the disease. The younger women were unknown to me, those tragic bald figures for whose benefit someone was always organizing a run or a bike ride, that unlikely acquaintance of Becky's who had found the lump when she was breastfeeding and died before the child was three. As a healthy person, I gave them barely a second thought, they were outliers, the wildly unlucky ones. I am an active woman in her late thirties and the mother of twin girls whom I delivered in ten hours without a C-section. I have no family history of cancer; I drink lightly, a few glasses of wine here and there, and eat well. Not too much red meat. I've never smoked. I go to a cardio class twice a week and I do Pilates. This was not happening to me.

So, I proceeded to my doctor's office and from there, a few days later, to the mammogram machine in a state of calm denial. This would all go away. I could not, as a newly single mother, be suffering from cancer. There had been far too much pain and drama in my life in the past year; it seemed statistically impossible there could be more. Al had been gone five months. We were just
starting to establish new routines. The girls had only recently stopped crying at night and accepted it was every other weekend at Daddy's new apartment and Wednesdays for pizza after school. We could not possibly be so unlucky as to add cancer treatment or, worse yet, unsuccessful cancer treatment to this mix. I would not indulge in disaster scenarios. I let the technician squeeze my breast between the glass plates of the mammogram machine the way I let the massage therapist work on the knots in my lower back, with a kind of gracious mental absence that suggests I am rather above mundane things like pain.

“Sorry. Is that okay?”

“No problem.”

“We usually try to go easy the first time but in your case we do need to make sure we have a good image.”

My case? Oh, I suppose she means because I am not here for a routine checkup.

“No problem. You have to do your job.”

“Okay. Deep breath and stay still.”

The technician stepped behind a screen; there was a whirring sound, and then she came back and started the whole process again from a different angle. She did both breasts. Might as well, I suppose.

Rather to my surprise, the doctor's office phoned within a few days with an appointment for a biopsy the following week. I was still doing my ladylike denial thing when I went to get the results a fortnight later. I felt I was
there under false pretenses: the good doctor should not have been wasting her time on me; there were sick people who needed her attention.

She had always been a motherly sort but there was no way to sugar-coat what she had to tell me: there was a significant cancerous tumour. A surgeon would need to remove the breast. An oncologist would tell me what came next, radiation possibly, chemotherapy for certain, probably a drug regimen after that. The treatment might force me into menopause several years early. She gave me a fistful of pamphlets and said her office would phone in the next few days with an appointment to meet the surgeon.

“We don't want to delay,” she said. “I know it's a lot to take in. You'll need help. You'll be off work for a while and you'll want to warn the girls that you won't be well. Is Al here with you today?”

I waited a week, then two; then, ten days before the surgery date, I finally phoned him and told him the truth.

He listened without interrupting but barely paused before he spoke.

“I'm coming home.”

He showed up a few hours later, walking through the front door with a gym bag and enfolding me in a hug. It was the first time he had touched me in almost nine months. We sat and had a cup of tea in the kitchen and I told him what I knew so far and cried and said I was
terrified for the girls. It was after about an hour of this, when I realized it was almost time to go and pick them up from school, that I told him he'd better go.

“I'll stay,” he said.

“You can't stay. I have to go get the girls.”

“I'll wait here.”

“It's not your night with them. What would we say to them?”

“That I've come home. I have a few things with me for tonight. I'll go get the rest tomorrow.” I stared at him. His decisiveness was insane. “We'll need to tell them about the surgery soon. Maybe not use the C-word, eh? Do kids know what that means?”

“Al, you can't just come home all of a sudden. You can't return for a bit and then go away again.” He loved his children so much but could be completely clueless as to their needs.

“You and the girls need me.”

“But what happens when the treatment is over? What happens when I get better?”

“I guess we'll just have to see.”

And there began several days of negotiation as to the terms of his return. I didn't let him stay that night but we agreed on a family meeting that weekend; it was like a repetition of the one six months before when we sat the girls down and told them he was leaving. But this time they cheered. I don't think they really heard the part about the cancer; all they knew was that Daddy was coming home.

He moved back in to the house that Sunday night, bringing a few suitcases of belongings. It seemed ridiculous to make him sleep in the basement so he moved back into our bedroom too. A week later, on the night before my mastectomy, we turned instinctively to each other in bed. It was the last time I ever felt a man's touch on my left breast.