“No. Not yet.”
“Coffee, then? Kettle’s boiling. I can have it ready in a few minutes.”
Wanly, she smiled. “You know what I’d really like?”
“Tell me.”
“A bath. A nice, hot bath.”
Resnick smiled back, more a grin than a smile. “Wait here. Well, not here. I mean you don’t have to. Sit down. The front room. Over there. Anywhere. I’ll run the water now.”
Upstairs he checked the temperature from the taps, tipped in Radox and swirled it round, found a towel that was both dry and clean. Stepping out on to the landing, he heard music from below and, when he eased open the door to the living room, Lynn was sitting with her legs pulled up in one of the armchairs, Bud lying full length, belly up, along the crack between her chest and thigh, and the Mills Brothers were singing “Nevertheless.” He had left the CD on the machine.
This time, she woke up almost at once.
“Your bath’s running now. It won’t take very long.”
“Okay.” Lynn stretched and Bud moaned, and she rubbed her fingers along the length of his tummy and tickled his neck. His bones seemed impossibly fragile, impossibly close to the skin. “I just pressed play on the stereo, I hope you don’t mind?”
“Oh. No, of course not.” He nodded in the direction of the speakers. “Nevertheless” had become “I’ll Be Around.” “Funny old sound. Old-fashioned.”
“I like it.” Depositing Bud back on the chair, she headed for the door.
“You know where it is? It’s just along the first landing and …”
“I’ll find it, don’t worry.”
Resnick fidgeted around for a while, not knowing quite what to do. The Mills Brothers were starting to get on his nerves, too much of a good thing, and he replaced them with the Alex Welsh Band, changing them almost immediately-too bright and loud-for Spike Robinson playing Gershwin, nice melodic tenor sax.
He made coffee anyway, two cups, and carried one upstairs.
“Lynn?” He knocked softly on the bathroom door.
“Yes?”
She answered immediately. He’d thought the warm water might have lulled her back to sleep. “I’ve brought you up some coffee. I’ll leave it outside the door.”
“Okay. Thanks.”
From the hall, he heard the door open and then close. In the kitchen, he peeled and chopped first an onion, then a potato, the latter into pieces no bigger than the tip of his little finger. Butter and a splash of olive oil hissed in the pan and he dumped in both potato and onion, gave them a stir, and turned up the heat. From the fridge, he took a piece of chorizo and sliced it into rounds the thickness of a ten-pence piece. Eggs he broke into a basin and whisked, adding salt and pepper and the last inch from a pot of cream. By now, the potatoes were starting to stick, so he gave the pan an energetic shake. The bits he didn’t think the cats would eat from the floor, he shooed in the direction of the bin with last night’s paper.
“Something smells good.” Her hair was still wet and shone. Her gray top hung loose over her belt and her feet were bare.
“How was the bath?”
“Great. Perfect. If it hadn’t been for the thought of the water getting cold, I could have stayed there for hours. Soaked.”
“Then you’d have missed this.”
He added the sausage to the potato and onion, and cut an edge of butter into a second, smaller pan.
“Can I do anything?”
“Watch.”
When the surface was close to smoking, he gave the omelet mixture a final whisk, then poured it in. With a wooden spoon, he moved it around a little, let it settle, starting to pull it away from the edges when it threatened to set; a couple of good shakes and he added the contents of the first pan.
“You should be on television,” Lynn said.
Resnick grinned. “Radio, more like.”
She laughed. It was a good sound.
“There is something you can do,” he said. “Knives and forks, in that drawer over there.”
“Right. Plates?”
“That cupboard. About level with your head. You could put them just here.”
He divided the omelet into two and served it out.
“There’s bread,” he said, “in that bin. I forgot.”
“Butter?”
“On the side.”
They sat at the kitchen table, facing one another, Resnick’s face flushed from standing over the stove, Lynn’s from her bath.
“We should have some wine,” he said.
Lynn was already attacking her omelet with a fork. “Later. We don’t want this to spoil.”
“No, you’re right.”
There was a bottle of red in the cupboard, he thought, something Hannah had brought round and they’d never drunk. He didn’t know what it was, but guessed it would be okay.
Rarely, there was no music in the room. The curtains were still pulled back and though the light was starting to go, it was far from dark. They sat in the same easy chairs that Resnick and Elaine had bought, second-hand, at the start of their marriage, too comfortable to replace. The wine, indeed, was fine, though neither of them had so far gone beyond the first glass.
“I think,” Lynn said, “what I think now, although they never said, not outright, when they let him come home before, it was because there wasn’t anything more they could do for him. The cancer, it had spread too far.” She was sitting quite upright, legs tucked under her, running her fingers through the smallest cat’s fur as she talked. “But then-I don’t know-the pain got so much worse, suddenly, and they took him back in. His skin, it had become really yellow again, this kind of murky, bilious color; the thing they put in, inside him, to clear the obstruction to his liver, maybe it wasn’t working. Not properly.”
Reaching down, she took a sip of wine.
“When I got there, Mum was just sitting beside the bed, crying. Not making any sound, hardly, just crying. Dad was hooked up to all this stuff and he had a mask over his face. To help him breathe. One of those hard plastic masks.
“I don’t know how much anyone had said to Mum, if they’d said anything at all. She was so upset, confused, I doubt if she would have taken it in if they had. After a while, I went off and found a nurse and she told me as well as his liver, he was suffering from kidney failure. They’d made him as comfortable as they could. She didn’t think he was in too much pain. She said if I could stay a while longer the doctor would come and see me, explain.”
The clock across the room seemed unnaturally loud. Resnick moved the wineglass around in his hand, but didn’t drink.
“The doctor, when he came, he looked so young. Too young to be doing what he was doing. But he was nice, nice to Mum especially. There must be something you can do, she said, and he patted her hand. All we can do now, he said, is make sure he’s comfortable, not suffering any pain. I’m still not sure she understood what he was saying, what it meant. She kept on at him, you will do something, operate. He’d been sitting with her, on the edge of the bed, and got up and looked down at Dad, who’d been sleeping all the way through this. He’s lived a good life, he said, let him go in peace. No heroic measures. It wouldn’t be right, believe me. It wouldn’t do any good.”
“I’m sorry,” Resnick said.
Lynn sighed and rubbed a hand across her eyes as if to brush away tears, but for now there were none there.
“I sat with him, holding his hand. Talked, just a little, but I don’t know whether he heard. The sound of my voice, perhaps. Maybe he recognized that. Once or twice, he moved his head as if he wanted to try and say something and I leaned over and lifted away the mask, but all he could do was make these sounds, sort of low in his throat. His mouth, it was all dry; the skin flaking back from his lips.
“I do think he knew that we were there, Mum and me. The nurse said, why don’t you go? Go home for a while, get some sleep. But I couldn’t.” She sniffed and fumbled a tissue from inside her pocket. “Just before the end, he squeezed my hand, tried to. He …”
She stopped and looked, helpless, across the room. Resnick moved and, half-kneeling, held her till her face dropped forward on his shoulder and she cried. Sobbed.