of the room that seemed to have had all the air sucked out of it, and Jeanette sitting upright in her chair intently lip-reading as the doctor delivered his news. She had turned only once or twice to Bill for confirmation.
Bill said, ‘You do hear of that. I don’t want to give you false grounds for optimism, but if you can believe that she will get better, maybe that’s how it will turn out. I don’t know. All I do know is what the specialist told us today. He didn’t leave any room for doubt in my mind. I wish he had done. I wish I could say something different to you.’
There was no rejecting this, after all. Noah was beginning to take in what his father’s words really meant.
He said at length, ‘It doesn’t seem right. Poor Mum.’
The weather man materialised in front of his bands of cloud and clear sunny intervals. They watched the sweep of his arm as he indicated the movement of a front. Weather seemed just as irrelevant as politics or football. Bill drank some of his whisky and the rim of his glass slipped and clinked against his teeth.
‘I can’t get my head round it,’ Noah muttered. ‘It’s not fair, is it?’
Life had a tendency not to be strictly fair, Bill reflected, although Noah was still too young to appreciate precisely how unfair, how meticulously and even poetically unjust it could be.
Noah said after a while, ‘Dad? I’m glad you didn’t decide, you know, that you were going to try and keep it from me. Thanks for telling me straight away. I’d much rather hear than have to guess.’
‘It was your mother who asked me to tell you tonight,’ Bill scrupulously pointed out. He didn’t believe he should take the credit for courageous honesty when most of his instincts had been to keep the truth from his child for as long as possible.
He was used to being the speaking intermediary between Jeanette and Noah, but he had long been aware that he was only valuable on the median level. The simple exchanges, relating to mealtimes or rooms to be tidied or homework to be completed before television was to be watched, those they had easily and naturally dealt with between themselves through a mixture of sign language and lip-reading and a range of facial expressions. It had fallen to Bill to put into words for Noah the more mundane but complex facts – timetables, instructions and information connected with day-to-day living. This responsibility had occasionally, he thought, made him appear duller and more pedestrian in his son’s eyes than he really was. On the deepest level, for those communications that involved the most intense emotions, any intervention from him would have been superfluous. Mother and son had always understood each other and conveyed their responses to one another with a level of fluency that Bill didn’t feel he possessed.
And now, cruelly, there was this. The relaying of more information, tactfully delivered by a concerned doctor, that was nonetheless savage.
Noah didn’t ask about how Jeanette had taken the news, or what her state of mind now appeared to be. This he would find out directly from his mother: Bill understood that.
There was one more piece of information he felt he should convey.
‘Mum’s afraid that she’s letting you down.’
‘Me? How come?’
‘By dying before you are grown up. Before her job’s done, is the way she put it.’
‘But I am grown up,’ Noah said quietly.
At last, Bill’s gaze slid from the television screen to his son’s profile. Noah’s chin was tipped to his chest. Through the mask of adulthood Bill could quite clearly see the child’s underlying features, even the soft curves of babyhood. Was the job ever done? he wondered. Probably not. Jeanette wasn’t quite fifty. No wonder she felt that she was leaving too much undone.
‘What happens now?’ Noah asked.
‘Once she recovers from the hospital and the operation, she won’t be too bad for a while. She may feel almost herself. I was thinking, perhaps we could go on a holiday. Somewhere we’ve never been, so there aren’t comparisons and memories waiting round every corner. Jeanette will have to decide about that, though.’
A holiday? It would be hard to plan a trip to the Loire Valley or Turkey, Noah thought, with the prospect of death so close at hand. But he had no real idea; he had hardly ever thought about death.
‘That sounds like a good idea. And what about you, Dad?’
Bill hadn’t yet had time to put the question to himself. Or perhaps had chosen to evade it.
‘I want to try to make it as easy as I can for her. Whatever’s coming.’
Noah only nodded.
‘I need to ask your advice,’ Bill continued.
‘Go ahead.’
‘Should I tell Constance?’
As soon as he uttered her name it seemed to take on a weight of its own, as if it occupied a physical space between them. Noah shifted a little sideways, away from his father, to make room for it. He rocked the beer bottle on the arm of his chair, still studying it with apparent attention.
‘Tell her that Mum’s ill, you mean? Doesn’t she know?’
‘I haven’t told her.’
And Jeanette certainly would not have done.
Noah considered further. ‘It’s going to be a shock for Connie, if she doesn’t even know that much. I mean, it’s bad enough for us, and we’ve kind of been in on it all along.’
‘The later it’s left, then the worse it will be.’
‘But it’s for Mum to decide. It’s their relationship, isn’t it?’
‘Exactly. It’s Connie’s as well as Mum’s. Don’t you think we should – I should – let her know? Jeanette, you and I, we’re her only family.’
Noah shrugged. Here at last, in this raw new dimension, was a place where he could direct a jet of anger. ‘I don’t care. I only care about Mum. If she doesn’t want Auntie Connie around her, then she doesn’t. Simple as.’ He grabbed the bottle by the neck and tipped it to his mouth.
‘Maybe you’re right,’ Bill said. Half-truths and evasions and unspoken confessions crowded out of history and squeezed into the room with them. Their shadows cut him off from Noah at the moment when he wanted to feel closest to him. Neither of them spoke until Noah sighed and pushed himself to the edge of his chair.
‘Dad, I think I’ll go up. Unless you want me to stay with you? I could make a cup of tea, if you like.’
‘No. Go on up to bed. Get some sleep, if you can. Do you need anything?’
‘No, thanks. I’ll see you in the morning.’
They both stood up. They hesitated, up until now not having had the kind of adult relationship that involved conspicuous hugging or shedding of tears. Noah rested his arm awkwardly round his father’s shoulders and Bill put his hand to the back of the boy’s neck. Noah was the taller by an inch. He inclined his head until their foreheads touched and they shuffled together, a rough two-step of grief. It was Noah who broke away first.
‘We’ll manage, Dad,’ he said.
‘Of course we will.’
Noah hugged him briefly then dashed out of the room.
Bill stood for a moment, then took the empty beer bottle off the arm of the chair and looked round for somewhere to put it. In the end he replaced it on the tray of drinks. He picked up his own glass, sloshed whisky into it and drank it down in one.
In his room, his childhood bedroom, Noah took his mobile phone out of his pocket and studied the display for a moment. Then he laid it on the table next to his bed. He unlaced his trainers and placed them side by side on the floor beneath the table, undid his belt and took off his jeans.