The Love of My Life(10)
I don’t think it’s any exaggeration to say he saved my life.
When I was pregnant with Ruby, friends warned that parenthood would erode our grand love affair. I understood what they meant, once our daughter arrived: the chaos and sleep deprivation, the sensation of being on the back foot – always, and with everything – the loss of adult conversation or intimacy; but I came out of that first year more certain than ever that Leo was the best man I’d ever known. We’d survived a cancer diagnosis, a pregnancy, postnatal depression, and yet there we still were, quietly walking in step. When we weren’t razed by exhaustion, we still belly-laughed in bed before going to sleep. We still kissed each other as if we were falling in love.
I was desperate to come clean with him; to tell him about the kind of woman he was married to.
But the reason I couldn’t was the same then as it had always been. Leo would never, could never, come to terms with it. There are a small handful of men who perhaps could, but my husband is not one of them.
And even if he were a different person, with a less complicated past – the sort who might be able to forgive what I’d done – he would never forgive my attempts to conceal it. Leo was lied to from the day he was born, and he can’t tolerate dishonesty in any form now. Last year he fired our nanny because she told us she’d taken Ruby to the park, when in fact they’d gone to her boyfriend’s house. By the time I got back that evening he’d paid an HR consultant to check that the nanny’s deception constituted gross misconduct, and had removed her from our house.
It was the right thing to do: we couldn’t give Ruby to someone we couldn’t trust. But the intensity of his anger extinguished any hope that I could one day tell him the truth.
Dr Moru tells us before we make it through the door.
‘It’s good news!’ he beams, and, without any professional hesitation, hugs me.
‘I’m OK? I’m OK?’
‘You’re OK. For now.’
Leo whispers, ‘Oh thank God,’ and removes Dr Moru, pulling me tightly to him.
‘The PET scan is clear and the restaging biopsy looks good. So do your bloods,’ Dr Moru says, sitting back calmly at his desk, as if he hadn’t just thrown his arms around a patient. He starts talking about the next few months but eventually stops because Leo is pulling tissues from the box on his desk and jamming them into his eyes.
I hold my husband’s hand while he recovers. I know he’s been afraid, of course, but the sheer expanse of his anxiety, revealed now in plain sight, is painful. ‘I’m sorry,’ he says, in his normal voice, as if there aren’t tears pouring down his cheeks. ‘Please just ignore me.’
They will continue to monitor me at six-monthly intervals, Dr Moru says, but for now we can allow ourselves to be optimistic about my future.
‘You should write about your experience on your page,’ he says, merrily. He’s openly admitted to having looked me up on Facebook. ‘Those fans of yours would love it!’
I’ve read endless cancer memoirs in the years following my diagnosis; some written from the warm shore of survival, others cut short by an end note from a bereaved relative. Some talk of healing and growth, others of grief and suffering, but every account, every single one, has talked about love. About how, as we approach the end of our life, we find ourselves turning towards the things and people that are most meaningful to us so that we may face death with equanimity and courage.
My cancer journey, by shameful contrast, started four years ago with the rekindling of an obsession that could end my marriage. It’s been about fear of discovery and deep regret. It is something I could never commit to paper, or Facebook, or anywhere else.
We don’t go immediately to Ruby’s nursery. We stop instead to drink wine at a pub on South End Green. I order a cheese-board and we lay into it with a single-mindedness that is probably unsettling to onlookers.
I can’t stop smiling, imagining the little smear of myself stored on a histology slide somewhere, free of invading cells, entered into a database and now forgotten. Even in the beautiful cellular imaging we have access to today, B-cell lymphoma cells look evil.
‘What are you going to do?’ Leo asks, smiling at me. He’s so happy. I’m so happy.
I ask what he means.
‘You said you had all these plans, if you beat the bastard cancer. All these things you wanted to do.’
I think about it for a while. Really, I just want to focus on loving him and Ruby. I tell him that.
He kisses me, and then kisses me again. I notice a much older woman at a corner table, smiling at us. I smile back. He’s my husband, I want to tell her. Older women are always smiling at Leo. I think it’s those outlandishly long eyelashes of his. Perhaps the way his mouth turns up naturally at the corners, as if he’s trying not to laugh at something.
‘I like your plan,’ he says. ‘But what about your crabs? Didn’t you want to nail them down?’
I smile. ‘Sure! I’ll just go up to Northumberland and find the colony, now I’m not tied to the hospital. Should be easy.’
‘Oh, behave,’ he says. He waves at the barman, gesturing for another two glasses of wine.
Nearly twenty years ago, when I was an undergraduate, I found a dead crab on a beach in Northumberland. I photographed it, sensing how unusual it was, but the beach walk took an unexpected turn and I finished the day in hospital. Several years passed before I found and developed the film.