Chapter 7
SEVEN
LAUREL
After we’d been to the hospital, the morning after Valentine’s Day, I drove Gray back to the hotel where he’d parked his car the previous night.
How different it felt today, I thought, although the wheels of my car made exactly the same crunching sound on the gravel drive as they had the evening before.
It was daylight now, mid-morning, and I could see the golden stone and elegant proportions of the country house, which had been obscured by darkness last night.
There were terraced gardens stretching away down into a valley where presumably a river flowed.
There were yew trees pruned to look like peacocks and chess pieces.
For all I knew there were actual peacocks.
I’d never find out now. If things had been different, we could have taken a walk in the grounds after stuffing ourselves at breakfast. We could have returned to our room and had a final, hasty, giggling shag before getting dressed and saying goodbye.
But the goodbye would have felt different. It would have been sad, of course, because our Valentine’s, our first night together, our special secret treat, was over. But we’d have been able to promise each other that we’d do it again before too long, that this was the first of many times.
We couldn’t do that now. We didn’t speak at all, from when we got in the car outside the A&E department to when I pulled up in the hotel car park, the crunch of the gravel beneath the wheels audible and familiar over the music on the car radio – ‘Same Old Thing’ by The Streets, which had me tapping my fingers on the steering wheel without really thinking about it.
‘Dvo?ák’s Symphony Number Nine,’ Gray said, speaking for the first time.
‘What? Is that a request?’
He half-laughed. ‘No. That’s a sample from the first movement of the New World Symphony.’
‘How do you—?’ I began, then I stopped and said, ‘Cool. I like it.’
I thought, I used to like it, but I won’t like it ever again. I’ll never be able to hear it without thinking of this moment.
I pulled my handbrake up. Gray unclipped his seatbelt.
‘Well,’ he said. ‘Thanks for driving me, Laurel.’
‘You were in no state to drive yourself. You probably still aren’t. I could take you back to London. We could get someone to pick up your car.’
He shook his head. ‘You know that’s not possible.’
I knew. The excuse of filming in Liverpool had seemed flimsy when he came up with it, but it wasn’t for me to question. It had become an unspoken deal between us: I never asked about his wife, his children, his other life, and he rarely told.
Don’t ask, don’t tell. We all know how that one worked out.
If he left his car here, he’d have to come up with a whole new cover story: a breakdown on the motorway. A prang that had led him to have to go to A&E (What do you mean, there’s no bump on my head?). Whatever he did, it would just have complicated things even more.
And we both knew they were about to get quite complicated enough.
‘Gray,’ I said gently, ‘you’re going to have to tell Anna.’
‘I know. But maybe not yet.’
‘When, then? Shit, Gray, she needs to know.’
‘About you, or about – the other thing?’
‘Both, I guess. But mainly the other thing. You’re going to have to have loads more tests. You’re not well. You’ll need support and she – it’s not fair not to tell her.’
‘I could wait until I know for sure.’
Frustrated, I unfastened my own seatbelt so I could turn towards him. I stretched out my hands and put them on his knees, feeling the hard muscles of his quadriceps beneath the worn denim.
‘Come on. I mean, it’s none of my business, but how would that be better?’
‘It might turn out to be a false alarm,’ he argued. ‘Then I’d have worried her for nothing.’
It’s not going to turn out to be a false alarm.
‘Gray,’ I said. ‘We could stop seeing each other. We could end this right now, today. Then at least you’d have only one thing to tell her. Or one and a half, if you decided to say you’d been seeing me but you weren’t any more.’
‘Like hell will I stop seeing you.’ He grasped my hands, almost roughly. ‘Not through choice, anyway. If you want to tell me to get the fuck out of your car and never contact you again, I’ll do it. But that’s what it would take.’
I tried. ‘Get the fuck out of my car and…’
But I couldn’t.
‘Contact you when I get back to London?’ he suggested.
I nodded.
‘Laurel.’ He released my hands and, tenderly now, placed his on either side of my face, drawing me towards him. ‘You’re the best thing that’s happened to me in the longest time.’
I felt tears prickling my eyes behind my sunglasses. ‘Same.’
‘I’m a selfish bastard,’ he said, but his smile was tender. ‘But no matter what happens after this, I’m glad we had last night. I love you.’
‘I love you too,’ I said. ‘Even though you’re a selfish bastard.’
‘Thank God for that. Now I should go and get my bag from inside and settle up. I’m feeling okay. I’ll be fine to drive, so don’t worry.’
I nodded.
‘You drive safely now.’
‘You too.’
He kissed me. I felt the roughness of his stubble against my cheeks, the fine fuzz of his hair under my fingertips, the scratchy tweed of his coat against my neck. I felt love more intense and terrifying than anything I could have guessed it was possible to feel.
Then he pulled away and opened the door, a blast of raw winter air replacing the warmth of his body as he swung his legs out and stood up.
We didn’t see each other for more than two weeks after that.
We kept in touch by WhatsApp, of course, as we always had.
But Gray’s text messages had always been brief and factual – I’d never been quite sure whether that was just his way of communicating or whether he wanted to keep the content of our messages neutral enough so that, if his phone fell into the wrong hands, they could be explained away as innocent.
Fell into the wrong hands. For God’s sake, Laurel. If his wife snooped, she wouldn’t immediately think he was fucking someone else.
There, that’s better.
Anyway, he sent me messages saying he was feeling not so great, but not awful either. I told him I’d got back okay and was looking forward to seeing him again.
I didn’t say, I miss you. I’m worried about you. Tell me what’s happening. I love you. I’m frightened.
I had to keep all of those things to myself, save them for when I saw him again, except I knew that when I did happiness would blow them all away, apart from the love bit. I had to wait, as patiently as I could, because that was what I’d signed up for when I started seeing someone who wasn’t mine.
The text I’d been longing for came late on a Tuesday evening, the first week of March.
I’ve got an appointment at the hospital tomorrow afternoon. Meet there for coffee?
Why wasn’t Anna going to his appointment with him, I wondered briefly. Probably something to do with the kids.
Of course, I messaged back. He told me which hospital and I replied, See you there.
When I arrived at the hospital coffee shop, he was already there, sat on a plastic chair with an empty red paper cup in front of him.
‘Hi,’ I said.
‘Hi.’ He didn’t stand up. He looked awful, pale and drawn and tired, and, I was sure, even thinner than when I’d last seen him.
‘I’ll grab a drink.’
I waited impatiently for my tea and then carried it back, sitting on the uncomfortable chair opposite his.
‘It’s lovely to see you, Laurel.’ He smiled, and the smile made him look almost normal again – made me feel almost as if this was normal, just another of our snatched, precious meetings.
Except it wasn’t. Things would never be normal again, and I didn’t know how many of these meetings we would have left.
‘You too. I’ve missed you. So…’ I began, taking a sip of my tea. ‘How did it go?’
‘They saw me quicker than I expected, so that’s good. But it was the gastro people again, and they went over pretty much the same stuff they did in Gloucester. But they’ve referred me for another thing – an ESU, or something.’
‘EUS,’ I said. ‘Endoscopic ultrasound.’
‘Where they stick a camera down my gullet? That’s the badger. And then we’ll know what we’re dealing with here.’
I nodded. ‘I guess depending what they find, they’ll take a biopsy and refer you straight to oncology.’
‘Correct.’ He picked up his cup and looked inside it, like a fortune teller reading tea leaves. But there were no tea leaves there, just a few spent coffee grounds and the scum left by frothed milk.
‘Did you speak to Anna?’ I asked.
‘Yup.’
‘And how’s she – is she okay?’
He shook his head. ‘About as okay as anyone would be if they found out their husband’s maybe terminally ill and definitely cheating on them. But she’s bearing up. She’s gone all positive. She’s decided that whatever it is, I’m going to get better.’
I’d seen that before, in the partners of patients with frightening diagnoses. It was better, in many ways, than the alternative.
‘She’s been googling like crazy,’ he said. ‘She keeps going on about something called a Whipple procedure’ – I nodded – ‘and chemoradiotherapy and all kinds of other stuff.’
‘She probably knows more than me already,’ I joked feebly. ‘It’s not my area. But there are lots of treatment options, Gray, if the diagnosis is – what we think it might be. It’s not all doom and gloom.’
He went on almost as if I hadn’t spoken. ‘So I went and did some googling myself. And Dr Google tells me that before you start chemotherapy, you’ve got to have a kidney function test.’
‘That’s standard, I believe,’ I said, feeling a cold trickle of dread creep down my spine.
He knows, and he knows I know.
‘And that could prove problematic in my case,’ he said.
I reached across the table and took his hand. ‘Yes. Because you’ve only got the one kidney.’