The Enemy of the Good (26 page)

Next morning, Edwin’s headache was so severe that Marta suspected her ‘better to be ill at home’ should be amended to ‘better to be admitted to the local hospital’. His complaints about the grey patches encroaching on his vision filled her with a new fear of his going blind. The hotel manager did all in his power to smooth their departure, even sending one of his porters to load their luggage on to the train. Much to her relief, Edward dozed through most of the journey, only to be roused outside Reading by a steward intent on serving him his complimentary coffee. They were met at Oxford by Mr Shepherd, who could barely conceal his distress at the changes four days had wrought on his employer. Edwin’s silence in the face of his questions forced her to speak for him, although she insisted that he would be his old self as soon as they reached Beckley. ‘Too much excitement,’ she said, feigning a laugh at a phrase with disturbing intimations of second childhood. At least his splitting head gave her the perfect excuse to urge caution on a driver, whose reckless way with bumps and bends looked set to increase the agony.

Each familiar landmark brought further reassurance. They drove through the blazoned gateway, past a weather-worn trio of naiads, to the walled garden where Charlie Heapstone was battling with a serpentine creeper, a stray branch dangling over his brawny back. They drew up beside the ancient
laburnum
, decked with sun-flecked flowers, and shuffled into the hall, where Ajax leapt joyfully at them and Mrs Shepherd offered an equally warm, if more sedate, welcome. Pausing to greet them, she led Edwin upstairs and, after seeing him into bed, made her way down to the kitchen to brief her
housekeeper
. No sooner had she sat down than she was accosted by Karen who, according to Mrs Shepherd, had come up from her cottage in readiness for her return. With a self-obsession which could no longer be excused by youth, she made no mention of Edwin but flung herself on to a chair and declared that she wanted to die.

The cause, as soon became clear, was Frank, who had left her for the high priestess of a rival coven.

‘I really miss him, Aunt Marta.’

‘Of course you do, darling.’

‘I really miss him looking after me.’

Grabbing some orange juice from the fridge, Marta escaped to check on Edwin. She made her way up the stairs, hiding the naked carton from the gimlet gaze of her mother-in-law, whose portrait hung ever-vigilant on the landing. She had reason to regret her impropriety when Edwin, determined to show that he was not incapable, insisted on opening the carton himself and pouring the juice into his glass.

‘It won’t come out properly,’ he said.

‘That’s because you’ve opened the wrong end. You should have held it the other way up.’ She watched aghast as he flipped it over, flooding the sheets with juice. ‘It doesn’t matter,’ she assured him, contradicting herself by promptly bursting into tears.

The accident spurred her to action. Resolved to face up to her fears, she helped Edwin out of bed and, leaving him to dress, went down to her study to ring an old friend, the newly retired professor of cognitive neuroscience, Jacob Murr. While loath to offer a diagnosis over the phone, he listened as she listed Edwin’s symptoms, before advising her to bypass their GP and head straight for the on-call neurologist in the Accident and Emergency unit of the Radcliffe. Returning upstairs to find Edwin grappling with his shoelace as though it were a knotty theological conundrum, she relayed Jacob’s advice, expecting to encounter the usual resistance. His instant agreement filled her with both relief and dread.

Refusing to risk Mr Shepherd’s driving, she called a minicab, spending the journey rubbing Edwin’s cold hands and keeping up a constant flow of chatter in a bid to raise his spirits. As they turned into the hospital forecourt, she recalled her recent visit to a former colleague, Clive Gannon, in the urology ward. The elderly men were all sitting by their beds, their genitals laid out on their laps like hymn-books, with Clive at the centre, blithely unconcerned at exposing the object of pity that had once been an organ of delight.

She shrugged off the memory as they walked into the waiting room, where a host of hostile glances betrayed the fear that their age would grant them precedence. After installing Edwin in a chair and outlining his symptoms to the receptionist, she waited for his preliminary examination, while her
neighbour
, a ragged man with a grimy face and tombstone teeth, described how, having slipped in the street with a bottle in his pocket, he had stood up to find that his thigh was soaked. ‘But thanks be to God,’ he said in a thick brogue, ‘it was blood, not whisky.’ He cackled, emitting a stench, half-dungheap,
half-brewery
. Edwin sat, oblivious to the rankness, while she searched for a way to escape without destroying what remained of the man’s self-esteem. She spotted a pair of empty chairs beside an elegantly dressed middle-aged woman but, just as she was plotting the move, the woman turned to the girl next to her. ‘Excuse me, miss,’ she shrieked. ‘If you don’t listen to me, I shall write to Interflora and have you arrested. I’ve written letters… I’ve lost my teeth and my eyes and my hair writing letters.’ Marta pondered which was more painful, what the woman was saying or the fact that no one, not the receptionist nor the nurses nor the security guard nor a single patient, paid it the slightest heed.

After a ninety-minute wait in which she diagnosed Edwin with every disease known to science, he was summoned to see the neurologist. Her nerves were so frayed that she almost asked the drunk if she could take a nip from his bottle. The
Interflora
woman left without seeing a doctor. Marta imagined her returning to a frowsty flat crammed with china figurines and stray cats, a mainstay of her local church until the mania finally took hold and she started to polish the brasses in the nude or desecrate the altar. Edwin had had to arbitrate in more such cases than she cared to remember. No sooner had she brought him to mind than an Indian doctor came out and called her name. She wanted to tell her about Mark, as though his sacrifice on behalf of her country would ensure his father the preferential treatment they had hitherto refused. In the event, she sat beside Edwin in silence while the doctor explained that, after testing his eyes and reflexes, she had run an emergency CT scan which revealed an abnormality.

‘Where?’ Marta asked.

‘The brain,’ the doctor replied, as casually as if it were the elbow. ‘We’ll put you on an immediate course of steroids,’ she told Edwin. ‘They should reduce the headaches. Plus some anti-ulcer pills for the side effects. In the meantime, I’d like to admit you, ready for an
MRI
scan tomorrow.’

Edwin’s look of horror led Marta to suggest the alternative of taking him home overnight and bringing him back first thing in the morning. His relief when the doctor agreed strengthened her resolve never to let anyone put administrative convenience before his comfort. She knew that there were a thousand questions she should be asking but she needed time to absorb the news, so she sat quietly holding Edwin’s hand while the doctor wrote a letter to their
GP
. As she saw them out with a friendly but not ingratiating smile, Marta wondered if it were fears for Edwin’s future or deference to his past that kept her from giving them the usual message of hope.

As soon as they returned home, Edwin went upstairs, rejecting her offer of help as though it were his last chance to demonstrate his independence before submitting to the medical machine. Marta went down to the kitchen and steamed open the doctor’s letter. Although her respect for other peoples’ privacy was such that Shoana had once accused her of showing an insulting indifference to the contents of her diary, the gravity of the case outweighed her scruples. The doctor wrote that he had a lesion on the corpus callosum, which a swift glance at the dictionary revealed to be the band of nerve fibres linking the two hemispheres of the brain. She was more exercised by
lesion
, a commonplace word that she now suspected of having a technical meaning. Looking it up, she found ‘a region in an organ or tissue which has suffered damage through injury or disease such as a wound, ulcer, abscess or tumour’. Dismissing the ulcer, abscess and, especially, the tumour, she focused on the wound and, by bedtime, had managed to convince herself that what they had found was a superficial swelling caused by the shattered glass.

Her stratagem was exposed the following day when, an hour after Edwin’s
MRI
scan, the consultant neurologist, a more conventional authority figure than his colleague, called them in to his office to explain that the scan had shown up the presence of a tumour.

‘I’d thought I was going mad,’ Edwin said, sounding almost relieved. ‘But I’m not, you see!’

‘Of course you’re not, darling,’ Marta said, struggling to stop the walls closing in. Her throat was parched and her palms and forehead broke out in sweat. To the dismay of her rational mind, she began to wonder if there might be such a thing as a benign tumour. With the consultant proposing to perform a cerebral biopsy the next morning, there was no alternative to Edwin’s
admission
and she accompanied him to a small neurological ward, where his
anxieties
were heightened by a hearty anaesthetist who coaxed him into signing the consent form as though he were selling him a used car. He rallied when the man left and he was introduced to his fellow patients, who seemed strangely comforted by having a former bishop in their midst.

After seeing him settled, she returned home to be greeted by Karen. ‘It’s not good to sit and brood,’ she said, ‘so I’ve come to take you out of yourself.’ Her well-meaning impulse misfired since, whether from a deliberate attempt to make light of anything medical or a nervous attraction to the very topic she wished to avoid, her conversation revolved around bogus surgeons who wormed their way into operating theatres and the extensive bric-a-brac a nurse in her coven had extracted from patients’ bottoms in
A
&
E
.

The strain of Edwin’s twenty-four hours in hospital was nothing to that of the week in which they waited for the results. Having urged him to hope for the best while preparing herself for the worst, she was doubly appalled when the consultant announced that the biopsy was inconclusive since they had succeeded only in taking tissue from the oedema and not from the actual tumour. Far from apologising for the failure, he made it sound as though it were a trial run for the second operation, scheduled for the following day. Edwin was readmitted to the ward to a cool reception from his former
companions
, whose faith in his talismanic presence had been shaken by his rapid return. The procedure would be much as before, except that the incision was to be made on the side of his skull, requiring a nurse to shave him. Marta upbraided herself for the mawkishness which, in the face of a mortal illness, led her to mourn the loss of his few remaining strands of hair.

Time was of the essence and the consultant promised to expedite the results, making an appointment to see them in two days. They arrived at the allotted hour, and Marta’s heart sank when, no sooner had he ushered them into his office, than the consultant asked his secretary to make some tea, as ominous a sign as if he had called for a catalogue of coffins. Her suspicions were confirmed when, stroking his tie and staring at the photograph of his children, he announced that Edwin had a tumour the size of an orange in the centre of his brain and that it had spread to both lobes. Carefully
positioning
himself in the realm of science and out of range of messy emotions, he added that the tumour was a
Gliobastoma multiformae
Grade 4, and its location meant that there was no hope of surgery. With low-grade tumours, there might be a chance to ‘debulk’ them but, with one so virulent, the only available treatments were chemo and radiotherapy, which he urged them to try at once.

‘So, how would you rate my prognosis?’ Edwin’s question smashed through the consolatory plural, showing that, no matter what support she gave him, in the final analysis he was alone.

‘It’s impossible, as I’m sure you’ll appreciate, to give a precise answer but, on current form, I’d say three months if you do nothing and nine months to a year if you have treatment. Since there’s no surgical option, this is the last time you’ll see me. From now on you’ll be under oncology.’ With a broad smile, as though from relief that his part in the affair was over, he steered them out of the office.

Edwin suggested that, rather than going straight home, they take a stroll down the High. Scared of betraying her fears by acceding to his every whim, she made a show of checking that he was well wrapped up and extracted his promise to tell her the instant he was tired, before asking Mr Shepherd to drive them to All Souls. As they walked down the street that had formed the backdrop to their lives for over fifty years, she was racked by the thought that she would soon have to walk down it alone. Buildings now glowing with history would merely be greying with age. Seeming to read her mind or, more probably, sensing her quickening pulse, he assured her that he was neither shocked by the news nor frightened of death.

‘All in all, I’ve had a decent innings, hit the odd six, been lucky not to get caught in the slips more than once.’

‘Used far too many extended metaphors.’

‘What do you expect? I spent a lifetime in the pulpit.’

She laughed and, for a moment, it was almost possible to believe that they were walking back from the Magdalen Commem Ball fifty-five years earlier. Whatever might have changed around them – and inside them (she tightened her grip on his hand) – their love had endured. Knowledge of that would help to sustain her through all the pain and indignity of the next few months. It would enable her to respect his wish to make light of his illness: to accept death as the simple fact of life it had been for both of them since their separate losses in the War and their joint loss of Mark.