After this, anyway, came the most important part of the ritual. We would get back to the house, make two cups of instant coffee, lay out a plate of digestive or Rich Tea biscuits and then, for half an hour, settle down in front of the television to watch a quiz show: a show of awesome frivolity and tameness which we none the less followed with idolatrous concentration, as though to miss even a few seconds of it were to render the whole experience meaningless.
There were two simple elements to this programme: a game involving numbers, where the contestants had to perform some basic mental arithmetic (I was quite good at this one, whereas my mother invariably got into a muddle and found herself beaten by the clock); and a lexical game, in which they vied with each other to see who could make the longer word out of nine randomly selected letters of the alphabet. My mother took it more seriously than I did, always making sure that she had pencil and paper to hand before sitting down to watch, and every so often she would actually beat the contestants: I can well remember her flush of triumph at making an eight-letter word, ‘wardrobe’, out of the letters R,E,B,G,A,R,W,O,D, when the best that the winner could manage was ‘badger’, for six points. She was euphoric for hours afterwards: it was the only time during those weeks that I saw the lines of care wiped smooth from her face. And I can only think it was for this reason that we used to make such strenuous efforts to get back to the television every day at four-thirty, even sometimes, when our shopping expedition had taken longer than expected, driving at fifty or sixty miles an hour through the suburban streets, fearful of missing the early stages of the game or the host’s foolish introduction, peppered with terrible puns and delivered with the beseeching smiles of an overgrown puppy. There was another reason, though, why my mother watched every afternoon, her eyes aglow with the faith of the true believer, and this was that she clung to the possibility that one day she might be granted a vision, a revelation of the Holy Grail after which all of the programme’s followers quested: a perfect nine-letter word to be formed out of those randomly selected letters. It would have made her the happiest woman in the world, I think, if only for a few instants; and the ironic thing is that it did happen once and she never knew it. The letters were O,Y,R,L,T,T,I,M and A, and I could see it straight away, but neither of the contestants got it and my mother was struggling, too – all that she found, in the end, was a feeble five-letter word, ‘trail’. At least, that’s what she said at the time, and it’s only now that I wonder if she saw it as well, the word ‘mortality’ spelled out by those nine random letters, but couldn’t bring herself to write down the truth of it on the back of her scribbled afternoon shopping list.
In any case, Fiona and I had more serious matters to occupy us, because the dramatic change which her illness wrought on our viewing habits happened to coincide with a period of political upheaval in both the domestic and the international spheres. Late in November, just a few days after she had been to see her doctor for the second time, the Tory party leadership crisis came to a head and Mrs Thatcher was forced to resign. It was a week of intense, if transient, media excitement, and we were able to gorge ourselves on a diet of end-to-end news programmes, special late-night panel discussions and extended bulletins. And then on the day she went for her outpatients’ appointment, we heard that Saddam Hussein had rejected Security Council Resolution 678, an ultimatum authorizing the use of ‘all necessary means’ if Iraq had failed to withdraw from Kuwait by January 15th, and soon he was on French television saying that he thought there was a 50–50 chance of armed conflict; and even though he now started releasing the hostages, so that they were all home a week or so before Christmas, it still felt as if the politicians and the army leaders were hell bent on dragging us into war. But the strange thing is that Fiona, who Was a peace-loving person and not very interested in politics, took a kind of comfort from all of this, and I began to suspect that, like my mother with her quiz show, she had chosen to use it as a way of shielding herself from the fear which was otherwise liable to swamp her.
This time the doctor had listened more carefully. He examined her neck when she told him about the growth, which was bigger than it used to be, she said, almost two inches across, and he wrote down everything she told him about it but still said there was probably nothing to worry about, that the fevers and night sweats might well derive from something else entirely, some aggressive but treatable infection. But there was no point in taking unnecessary risks, and she was booked in for this outpatients’ appointment in the last week of November. They took some blood tests and X-rays, apparently, and she was supposed to go back in three weeks’ time to get the results. Meanwhile she had a temperature chart to fill in, and so our evenings together would always conclude with me fetching the thermometer, and faithfully entering the relevant figure before putting out the light and returning to my flat with the tray and the dirty plates or soup bowls.
As I mentioned, there was a good deal of silence between us: on Fiona’s part because talking made her throat burn, on mine because I could never think of anything to say. But I do remember one conversation which took place in the dead half hour between the Nine O’Clock News and the News at Ten, and which began with her making an unexpected remark.
She said: ‘You don’t have to do this every evening, you know.’
‘I know.’
‘I mean, if there are other places you want to be, other people you want to be seeing …’
‘Yes, I know.’
‘It can’t be much fun for you, being stuck here with me all the time. It’s not as if –’
‘You’re good company. Really. I’ve told you that before.’ (And it was true.)
‘I know, but – When I’m better, when I’ve got this thing licked, I’ll be … a lot more fun. And then – you know, then we’ll really start something, will we? Really try to make a go of it.’
I nodded. ‘Yes. Of course.’
‘I’m impressed, in a way,’ she continued hesitantly. ‘I mean, it’s not every man – There aren’t many men I’d feel comfortable with, having them around here all the time and seeing me in bed and everything. I suppose I’m impressed that … you haven’t tried anything on.’
‘Well I’m not going to take advantage of you, am I? Not while you’re feeling like this.’
‘No, but we’ve known each other a couple of months now, and most people, in that time, would have … I mean circumstances don’t permit, in our case, but – you know. You must have given it some thought.’
And of course I had given it thought, sitting night after night on Fiona’s bed, sometimes with her wearing a jumper, sometimes just her nightgown; touching her bare arms, brushing crumbs from her body, feeling her neck for signs of swelling, taking the thermometer in and out of her mouth, giving her consoling hugs and good-night kisses on the cheek. How could all of that attention be innocent, how could it not contain its quota of furtive glances and suppressed excitement? Of course I had given it thought. There was, and we both knew this, a strong undercurrent of feeling between us which it was both difficult to ignore and folly not to acknowledge.
But I merely smiled. ‘Don’t worry,’ I said, making for the kitchen to get two cups of cocoa. ‘Sex has never been further from my mind.’
∗
suspenders
black
bullwhip
stockings
bra
unhook
orgy
grope
panties