∗
The staff had insisted that I went home and got some rest, but I was only able to carry out the first half of this instruction. Physically I was exhausted, not least because I walked all the way back from the hospital, reaching the flat some time after four o’clock. But I’d never felt less like sleep, knowing as I did that in a darkened ward three or four miles away Fiona too was lying awake, her gaze fixed blankly on the ceiling. How could it have taken them so long to get her there? After I’d found her kneeling in front of the wardrobe, it had been more than five hours before she was put safely in that bed – hours in which her condition had clearly worsened. And yet nobody had been negligent, as far as I could see: the atmosphere had been one of frantic, resolute efficiency under pressure. So how could it have taken them so long?
I lay fully clothed on my bed, with the curtains open. A bed was a simple thing, or so I’d always thought. As far as I could remember there could hardly have been more than a dozen nights in my whole life when I hadn’t slept in a bed somewhere or other. And hospitals were full of beds. That was the whole point about hospitals: they were just rooms full of beds. It was true that my faith in medical science had always been limited. I knew there were many ailments which it was powerless to treat, but it would never have occurred to me that a bunch of highly qualified doctors and nurses could have such difficulty simply transferring a patient from one place to another: from a cubicle to a bed. I wondered who was responsible for this state of affairs (yes, Fiona, I still believed in conspiracies), what vested interest they might have in making these people’s lives even harder than they already were.
I’d been told to phone the hospital at about ten o’clock in the morning. Was there anyone else I should contact in the meantime? I got up and went into Fiona’s flat to fetch her address book. It was full of names she’d never mentioned to me, and there was a letter folded inside the back cover, dated March 1984. Probably most of the people in this book hadn’t heard from her in about six or seven years. One of them, presumably, was her ex-husband, the born-again Christian. As far as I knew they hadn’t spoken to each other since the divorce, so there was no point involving him. She always spoke quite fondly of her colleagues at work: perhaps I should give them a call. But of course they wouldn’t be in for another day or two.
She was alone: very much alone. We both were.
The table in my sitting room was still laid for our candlelit dinner, so I cleared everything away and then watched the first day of the New Year dawn feebly over Battersea. When it was light I considered taking a shower but settled for two cups of strong coffee instead. The prospect of waiting another three hours appalled me. I thought of my mother, and how she had done her best to fill out the empty days while my father lay in hospital. There were plenty of old newspapers in the flat so I gathered them together and started doing the crossword puzzles. I did half a dozen of the quick crosswords in no time at all and then got stuck into a jumbo-sized cryptic puzzle which required the use of dictionaries and reference books and a thesaurus. It didn’t actually take my mind off anything, but it was better than just sitting around. It kept me going until twenty to ten, when I phoned the hospital.
I was put through to a nurse who told me that Fiona was still looking ‘pretty poorly’, and said that I could come in and see her now if I wanted to. Rudely, I put the receiver down without even thanking her, and almost broke a leg running down the staircase.
∗
The ward was full but quiet: most of the patients looked bored rather than seriously ill. Fiona was in a bed near the nurses’ room. I didn’t recognize her at first, because she had an oxygen mask over her nose and mouth. There was a drip attached to her arm. I had to tap her on the shoulder before she realized I was there.
‘Hello,’ I said. ‘I didn’t know what to get you, so I brought some grapes. Not very original.’
She took the mask off and smiled. Her lips were turning slightly blue.
‘They’re seedless,’ I added.
‘I’ll have some later.’
I held her hand, which was icy, and waited while she took some more breaths from the mask.
Fiona said: ‘They’re going to move me. To another ward.’
I said: ‘How come?’
She said: ‘Intensive care.’
I tried not to let the panic show in my face.
She said: ‘They did all these things to me this morning. It took about an hour. It was awful.’
I said: ‘What sort of things?’
She said: ‘First of all, I saw Dr Gillam. The registrar. She was very nice, but she seemed a bit angry about something. She made them do an X-ray here. Right away. I had to sit up in bed and they put this plate behind my back. Then I had to keep breathing in. That was quite bad. Then they wanted to do a blood gases test, so they got this needle and had to find an artery. Here.’ She showed me her wrist, which had several puncture marks. ‘I think it must be difficult to get it right first time.’
I said: ‘When are they moving you?’
She said: ‘Soon, I think. I don’t know what the delay is.’
I said: ‘Have they told you what’s wrong?’
She shook her head.
Dr Gillam took me aside into a private room. First of all she asked me if I was next of kin, and I said no, I was just a friend. She asked me how long I’d known Fiona and I said about four months, and she asked me if Fiona had any family and I said no, not unless there were uncles or cousins that I didn’t know about. Then I asked her why Fiona was suddenly so ill and she told me everything, starting with the pneumonia. She’d picked up a severe pneumonia from somewhere and her body wasn’t fighting it properly. The explanation for that lay in the X-rays (and, of course, in the consultant’s notes, locked up somewhere in a filing cabinet), which revealed large growths in the centre of her chest: a lymphoma, in fact. The word meant nothing to me so Dr Gillam explained that it was a form of cancer, and seemed, in this case, to be quite advanced.
‘How advanced?’ I said. ‘I mean, it’s not too late to do anything about this, is it?’
Dr Gillam was a tall woman whose jet-black hair was cut in a bob and whose small, gold-rimmed glasses framed a pair of striking and combative brown eyes. She thought carefully before answering.
‘If we could have got at this a bit earlier, we may have had a better chance.’ She gave the impression of holding something back, at this point. Like Fiona, I could sense a closely guarded anger. ‘As it is,’ she continued, ‘her blood oxygen level’s been allowed to get very low. The only thing we can do is move her to intensive care and keep a close eye on her.’
‘So what are you waiting for?’
‘Well, it’s not quite that simple. You see, first of all –’
I knew what was coming.
‘– we’ve got to find her a bed.’
∗
I stayed at the hospital until the bed was found. This time it only took about another half hour. It involved several telephone calls and appeared to depend, finally, on finding a patient two or three beds down the chain, throwing him off his ward and making him wait in the day room until he could be officially discharged. Then Fiona was taken away from me again and there was nothing I could do. I went home.
I didn’t have any medical books but the dictionaries I’d used for the crossword were still lying on the table, so I looked up ‘lymphoma’. All it said was ‘a tumour having the structure of a lymphatic gland’. Put like that it didn’t sound very frightening but apparently this was the cause of all those months of sore throats and fevers, and this was the reason her immune system had all but closed down and surrendered to the first infection that came its way. I stared at the word again, stared at it for so long that it stopped making any kind of sense and began to look like nothing but a meaningless jumble of letters. How could anything so small, so random as this silly little word possibly do so much damage? How could it (but this wasn’t going to happen) destroy a person?