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– For being ill. Leaving you and Noah.
‘You haven’t left us,’ he said. His hands cupped her knees.
The first time he saw Jeanette Thorne was at a student union party. She was with someone else, a mathematician he knew only slightly. The room was crowded and there was barely enough space for leaping up and down to the punk band. Through a thicket of legs he caught a flicker of her red shoes, platform-soled with a strap across the instep. Then she jumped in the air and the hem of her skirt flipped up to reveal the tender pallor of her bare thighs. He had elbowed his way through the sweaty crowd so he could stand behind her to watch, and ever since that moment he had loved the long blade of her shins and the bluish hollow behind her knees.
That was when they were both twenty-one.
Later that evening he had found himself next to her, packed in a wedge of people between the wall and an angle of the bar. He had studied her pale, abstracted profile against the surging crowd. She looked as if she was deep in thought and he had longed to talk to her. In the end he had positioned himself at her shoulder and had murmured something into the bell of blonde hair that swung to her shoulders, some banal question about what she thought of the band. She ignored him, and he had been about to creep away, abashed. Then a girl he knew pressed her elbow into his ribs.
‘That’s Jeanette Thorne. She’s in Biological Sciences. She’s completely deaf, you know. She does everything, just the same. Amazing, really.’
At that moment Jeanette turned her head and for the first time looked straight into his eyes. It was as if she could see into his head, and read the sexual stirring in him before he had even registered it properly himself. Words would have been entirely superfluous. Jeanette’s mouth merely curved in a smile that transformed the dingy bar into some antechamber to Paradise.
‘I am Bill,’ he said.
She placed the flat of her right hand over her breastbone and gently inclined her head. A lock of hair fell forwards and revealed the thick plastic aid that curved behind her ear. Bill wanted nothing more than to lean forward and kiss that faulty ear and tuck her hair back into place.
It was only when he came to know Jeanette much better that he understood that her voluptuous body and her mass of blonde hair were at odds with her personality. Jeanette looked wanton, but she was not. She was too determined to be more than just a deaf girl to let even sex distract her for long.
He fell in love with that contradiction.
– When’s Noah coming?
‘He’ll be here for dinner.’
– Will you tell him?
‘I don’t exactly know yet.’
Noah would have to be told that his mother’s cancer was terminal.
It was a terrible word, that.
They sat with the overturned bowl and the hurled paperweight on the rug beside them, holding on to each other and looking out into the garden as the sun drifted behind the trees. Permanence had turned into fragility. What had been certain was now a series of questions, neither spoken nor answered.
Later, after Jeanette had gone to bed, Bill and Noah sat in the small, cluttered downstairs room that Bill used as his study. They had eaten dinner together, or rather the two men had eaten and Jeanette had made a flattened mound of her food and then placed her knife and fork on top of it.
– I’m tired, she had confessed. Noah made the slow journey upstairs with her, and then came down again to join his father.
Bill poured himself a whisky. ‘The news about Mum isn’t good,’ he began tentatively.
‘What? What do you mean?’ The aggressive edge to Noah’s voice suggested that on some level he had feared this and was now intending to contest the information.
‘The surgeon who did the operation told us this morning. They found when they reached the tumour site that there was only a part of it they could remove.’
The television in the corner was on with the sound muted. Familiar newscaster faces floated between footage of soldiers in Afghanistan and the highlights of a football match. Bill kept his eyes on the screen as he talked because he was as yet unable to look at Noah without the risk of weeping.
‘So there was another part of it that they couldn’t remove? What does that mean? Is she going to die? Is that what you’re trying to say?’ Noah’s voice rose.
With an effort, Bill kept his steady.
‘They think it’s likely to be about six months.’
Noah had a bottle of beer. He rotated it on the arm of his chair, staring as if he hoped each time the label came into sight it might read differently.
‘I don’t understand. Wait a minute. Are they sure? They can’t be certain, can they? I mean, you hear of people who’ve been given a certain amount of time to live and who get better against all the odds?’
The surgeon had been quite precise. Bill did not think he would ever forget the way the man’s hands had rested on the buff folder of Jeanette’s notes, the neutral odour 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
