Without Her

by Rosalind Brackenbury

  “To Zurich?”

  “Yes. I’ve just come from there. I went to book myself in, at the clinic there. I’m very ill, Claude, and I won’t get any better.”

  The light is moving across the walls opposite, as cars pass in the street, and I long for something to happen, some interruption, a telephone ringing, someone knocking, a rendezvous one of us has to keep; but this is it, this is the rendezvous, and nothing is going to interrupt it.

  “You mean, the place where you—where people end their lives?”

  “Yes. I’m all signed up.”

  “Hannah, why?”

  “And when I do—go there when it’s time, I mean—I want you to come with me. Will you? Will you do that? I want both of you. You and Alexandre.”

  “What?” I think—Alexandre? Why Alexandre? I have to walk about the room, a luxurious room with good furniture and curtains and a bed that looks inviting, with its white cover and pillows. A four-star hotel room. There’s a small refrigerator, unusual in a Paris hotel; I wonder if there’s anything in it. Whisky, or even wine would help. I only ask her the simplest question as it seems to me. “Have you told him? He didn’t say.”

  “Yes.”

  “And?”

  “He said I must ask you first.”

  She sits down, her hands on the chair arms. She dips her head, shining in the low sun. She says, “I’m sorry, I didn’t want to shock you, but there really wasn’t any other way to do it.”

  I look at her. She looks fine, in her black T-shirt and narrow pants, thinner in the face perhaps, paler, the lines deeper than a year ago—a lot can happen in a year; people can change utterly, get sick, even die. Her hair is cut to shape her face, a feathery cut, no more long hair for her either, and is an ash-blonde, close to the color she must have had as a small child, before I met her. The plaits were always more honey-colored and her hair when we traveled together, streaked light with sun. She used to throw her head forward as she bent from the waist, catching her bright fall of hair in her fist to pull it all up into a ponytail. When she brushed it, it used to hang forward over her face like a zombie, and she’d giggle behind it.

  “I have ALS. You know what that is? It doesn’t give you much time.”

  Of course I know what ALS is. I can’t believe it. Apparently I have to believe it.

  “Give me time, I just have to take all this in for a moment.” I think of people who say, if you are not with me you are against me. Like this you carve the world in two, friend or foe. Has it always been like this with us? She is asking more of me than I’ve ever imagined anyone would. Is it for this reason that I’ve avoided marriage, children, the ultimate commitments of a shared life? So that nobody can say to me, when it comes to it, I need you to be there?

  “How much time do you have?”

  She sits perfectly still, watching me. “Maybe a year at most.”

  “You’re asking me to help you kill yourself, right? That’s it, that’s the question?” Shock has made me angry; but I don’t want to be angry. I want to be on her side, now and forever. She is looking at me steadily, from where she sits in a low chair, her feet in rather ugly strappy black shoes, planted one beside the other.

  “No, I’m not asking you that, I’m asking you to come with me when I go back to Zurich. It’s all arranged, I just don’t want to do it all alone. I’ve paid the deposit, and I just want you to be with me when the time comes. Please. Will you?”

  “So you’ve been organizing the end of your life while we’ve all been going out of our minds wondering what had happened to you.”

  “I had no other choice, Claude. It’s not just Phil who’d try and stop me, it’s Piers and Melissa, too. None of them would be able to accept this sort of thing. They’d have kidnapped me and tried to convince me not to.”

  I think, Zurich. I walked through the airport a week ago and bought a watch and got on a plane and thought nothing of it. I could have walked right past her. I could have stopped her, distracted her, taken her off for coffee, made her change her mind. It could have been the turning point. She on one escalator, I on another, our amazed eyes meeting, our signals to each other, meet you up there, or down below.

  “You know, sometimes it’s simply safer not to tell anyone.”

  I can’t help thinking of her escapades at school. You don’t tell, or you swear your friend to secrecy. Are we back there again? “Are you sure it’s not curable? Or may become curable in the future?”

  Now she gives me that disappointed look, eyebrows raised, eyes wide open: the old Hannah. “You can do your own research. But I’ve been into it from every angle, believe me. From everything I’ve read, the prognosis is not nice. I will gradually become unable to move or speak or even swallow and then I will be trapped in my own body. I don’t want it. I decided as soon as I got the diagnosis. I’m not going there. You of all people must understand that.”

  I remember my friend Joanie’s mother in New York, years ago. The illness announced itself one evening in a restaurant in the Village when I happened to be there with Joanie. Her mother had trouble swallowing a piece of beef and nearly choked. The diagnosis followed, and there was only decline after that. I saw her again, only months later. She’d lost a great deal of weight and could hardly breathe without assistance. It was painful to see, and it was agonizing for Joanie. I’d resolved then never to allow myself to be in such a position, if I could help it. So how can I disagree with what Hannah has decided?

  “Life on my terms, Claude, it’s always been my way, remember?” Hannah bites the knuckle on her right hand then, and the gesture is the one from our schooldays, when things got hard, when she didn’t want to give some bullying prefect the satisfaction of seeing her show emotion. An elderly woman, my friend Hannah, with the girl she was still inside her; a fierce frown, a bitten knuckle; as if I saw two images superimposed, one briefly blocking the other. She looks up at me, those same clear gray eyes now in their little nests of wrinkles, eyeliner pulling them into focus. We don’t change. We change utterly. It’s life that changes, around us. We still have to feel our way.

  I say, “Yes, of course I’ll be with you. If that’s what you want.”

  “Thank you.”

  “But, Alexandre? Why do you want him too?”

  “I thought it might be hard for you to come away from there on your own, afterwards. But there’s more to it than that, actually. I want to bring our threesome together again, the way it was in Paris, remember, the way it was when we met on that train, when everything was just beginning?”

  Ah, so she has it all planned; we just have to play our parts.

  I take her cue. “And someone pulled the communication cord? You know, it was the only time in my life that ever happened.”

  “Me too. Remember, there was a fight of some sort in the next compartment?”

  “And Alexandre had wine, and a sandwich.”

  “A ham sandwich.”

  “No, it was sausage. The skins got stuck in my teeth. His mother had made it.”

  “His mother made a sausage?” She explodes with laughter, and we’re over the edge, both giggling at the absurdity.

  “No, stupid, the sandwich. I remember thinking, here’s a boy who loves his mother.”

  “And whose mother loves him. Terribly traditional.”

  “He still is. Have you seen him?”

  “We talked on the phone, first.” Then she adds, as if an afterthought, “He did come over, yes.”

  “And you told him? You asked him, after not seeing him for fifty years, to come on this little suicide party you’ve planned?”

  “He’s put on weight, hasn’t he? But he still looks the same. I mean, we all have wrinkles and gray hair and all that, but we look the same, don’t we, Claude, don’t you think?”

  “Well, we can all remember how we looked when we were young, and sometimes, I don’
t know, that young person comes to the surface. Or, we expect to see them, so we do.”

  “He still has those thin fingers. What people call pianist’s hands.”

  “You remembered his fingers?”

  “Well, yes. We all spent so much time examining each other then, didn’t we, we looked for signs, all the time, the way we were. I can remember girls at school, exactly the way they wore their hair, how their socks fell down, the kind of shoes they had, their handwriting. And boys, we examined them even more thoroughly, didn’t we? I certainly did.”

  She looks at me now, examining—what, the girl I was, hidden inside the aging woman? All time is present, I think. Everything that happens, happens simultaneously. There is a popular theory that suggests this, but I have never been able to take it in; perhaps nobody really can. Perhaps its truth only appears at moments like this: there and then gone. And I realize: it’s Hannah and me again, it’s us, it’s the way we have always been. It’s a relief, because it’s so familiar; it’s as if we’re chatting on the grass at college, or outside the library at school, or late at night after she’d climbed in through some ground-floor window, or in a bar somewhere: it’s the substance of our friendship, which was made long, long ago. But, Alexandre? Surely that was where it all began to get peculiar, where we stopped trusting each other, where things were not said?

  She seems to catch my thought. “It was where we stopped being kids, wasn’t it, when we met him. All of us. We had to be three instead of two. That was why I left him to you, because I didn’t know how it could be done, otherwise. You wanted him more than I did. Wasn’t that how it was?”

  It was how she said it was, at the time. Giving him to me, as if he were hers to give. When I was nineteen, I was puzzled but grateful. Now, I think of it as a doubtful ploy. It was what I’d wanted, yes, and I’d enjoyed it, and him, for the whole of my life. But, what had she been playing at? Why, if she is planning her own death, does she want Alexandre there too?

  She says now, “I do have to lie down, sorry. Give me a hand with my shoes? I have to wear these awful shoes, because my feet won’t hold them on. It was the first thing I noticed; my left foot sort of began to flap.” I kneel, and remove them. Her feet are still slim and straight. Her left foot lies in my palm.

  “What did he say?”

  “He said I must ask you first. But he was okay about it. I think he’ll come, if you will.”

  Alexandre, with his sense of propriety; who wouldn’t sleep with Hannah with me in the next room. Then, and now, a man of principle, whatever his life was like. A man who knows what may and may not be done in a civilized world; very French, it seems to me now, to be this clear about manners and procedure, while living in relative chaos.

  She drops back on to the bed, heaves her legs up onto the white bedcover, stretches out and sighs. I go to the fridge and discover a clutch of little bottles. “Whisky? Wine? Oh, and champagne too. I think we need something, don’t you?”

  “Let’s have the champagne,” she says, and I remember, just days ago, her husband with trembling hands pouring it to drink to her safe return. “I think we need to celebrate. It’s so good to see you.” She props pillows behind her head and grins at me, a little forced grin, as if to remind me who we are, or were. It works.

  We are back, we are together again; and if the topic of her planned death has come up between us like a whale surfacing, upheaving everything, it seems to have gone down underwater again, at least for now. The smell of whales, I remember, lingers after they have submerged; they have stinking breath. Perhaps it isn’t a good analogy. I remove the foil and twist the cork in the little bottle until it pops out slowly and she stretches out a hand for her glass—there were two in the bathroom—and we inhale the breath of the champagne. It’s nothing like whale breath. The prickle on our tongues makes us smile. I think, I love her; I always have, and it’s not just because she’s part of my life, out of my childhood, but because of the quality in her that won’t give up, or fade, or accept less than everything from life. We clink glasses belatedly and I feel the fizz on my tongue and the coldness go down inside and transform the moment, the way champagne does.

  “Hmm,” she says, “a new widow. Veuve Rochefort? I haven’t heard of this lady, have you? She sounds like a phony to me.”

  After a moment, in which we sip and grin at each other again and I see from her expression that she knows she has me now, I say, “But what about Phil? Where is he in all this? I know you say that he’d try and change your mind, but you’re asking us, not him?”

  It still feels unreal, as if what she has asked me is a joke, a challenge unconnected to any action—a what-if, a maybe. But I am sure, knowing her, that it is not.

  I think of the man in the house in the Lubéron, aged by worry, trying to keep his life together, to will her back into it by his simple belief in all being well. Nothing serious, she was seeing a doctor, I think she’s been feeling better recently. “You haven’t told him anything about it, have you? About what you have?”

  “What I have, let’s be clear about it, it’s fucking motor-neuron disease, a total entropy and collapse of me as me, ending with a tiny shrunken Hannah peering out of a completely paralyzed and useless body until she can’t do it anymore and can’t even breathe. No, I haven’t been able to tell him. Also, as I said, sometimes it’s better to act alone.” She crosses her legs, wiggles her toes. “Look, my left foot is hardly managing already. I’ve had a couple of falls; I pretended I tripped over something, people helped me up. Nothing too serious yet. But, one day it will be.”

  We look at her feet. I remember them brown, dusty in sandals.

  She continues, “Of course I know I’ll have to, in the end—tell him, I mean. But I just wanted to set it all up first. You see?”

  I see her determination to be in control, to move people about at her will, yes. But I can understand why.

  “He loves me, I know that, but, you know, there are different kinds of love, and his kind wouldn’t be able to hear me out. He wouldn’t exactly lock me in the house, no, but he’d try to talk me out of it, he’d talk about the children and how it would damage them, and the grandchildren, and our life as a family. I really can’t have that conversation now. I certainly don’t want to listen to people going on about miracle cures and new-age stuff, or trying to cheer me up. My only choice is to try and go out of this as me as I am now, not as a fucking disaster that has to be nursed hand and foot and all the bits in between.” She looks at me, assessing. “This is what I’m asking. I don’t think it’s too much. I don’t think it’s unreasonable. And Phil, though he loves me, can’t love me in the way that leaves me free to do what I must. He can’t love that Hannah. The one you and Alexandre know. Now, do you understand?”

  “Of course. But couldn’t you give him the opportunity to accept your decision?”

  “Well, he’ll have to accept it. It’s done. I will tell him, in good time, and I think I’ll be able to count on him. in the end. And I hope I can count on you and Alexandre, because you’re my oldest friends.”

  “I’m with you, if that’s what you really want. But I can’t speak for Alexandre.” I’m thinking, when she ran away from school, I lied for her for two whole days, saying I hadn’t seen her, didn’t know where she was, however unlikely that seemed. I lied to her distraught would-be lovers at Cambridge, including Philip, once when she went out with that boy from the sailing club, or had a brief passion for a saxophone player in a modern jazz quartet. Here I am, late in life, summoned to cover for her once again.

  “Good. So that’s settled, at least.” She swallows the last of her champagne. “Cheer up, you look as if you’ve seen a ghost.”

  It all feels at once completely normal, and utterly strange. What do we do now? Does she want me to sign something, or swear allegiance to her plan? What now? What is the next step?

  “Look,” she says, again as if reading my
thoughts; and stretches out her hands, the left one with the rings and watch, the right with a bracelet. Her hands are thin and white. “My left hand will hardly go up on its own now, I have to sort of heave it up there. It’s like it’s lying in wait for me, this thing, it delivers some new horror every day. See? My right hand will begin soon. You must have noticed, I’m sort of dragging my left foot behind me. I’ve managed to keep it from Phil, but I won’t be able to for much longer. He thinks I’ve got rheumatism and that’s what makes me limp. And I get the most awful cramps, especially at night. It’s like being one big cramp. My muscles are giving up, you see. Eating themselves, as it were.”

  “And you really haven’t told him anything about what you’ve been going through?”

  “Well, he knows something is up, but I’ve left it kind of vague. And I’ll tell him what it is as soon as I’ve set up with you and Alexandre, when it’s a fait accompli, when there can’t be any discussion. It’s a death sentence, either way. I can choose a slow death with torture, you see, or a quick death without.”

  She pushes her glass towards me on the little table; we’re sitting close to the window, a round table between us. “Is there any more of that good stuff?”

  “One more of these tiny bottles.”

  A small detail has been waiting at the back of my mind. “How did you to Switzerland and back without your passport being checked? The police said they would check frontiers.”

  She grins at me. “Ah. So you thought of that too. On the train of course. Bought all my tickets in cash in England, got to the Gare du Nord, taxi to Gare de l’Est—it’s a stone’s throw—and on to the train to Berne. Change there and on to Zurich. Nobody looks at your passport, just the tickets. Or maybe I was just lucky.”

  “You still have the touch, don’t you?” I see her sly smile, the one I remember from her escape plans, decades ago.

  “Look, about Phil,” she says. “You need to understand something. My whole married life has been about keeping Phil from being upset by things that have happened to me or us, and I can’t go on doing it now. I don’t have the strength. I’ve kept everything calm and even and working for bloody years. I wanted to give him that, when we married, the household, the children, the whole setup; the book business, too. I wanted us to be partners in everything, I had a firm idea that was what marriage was about for me. No more dashing in and out and never seeing each other and sending children to boarding school, the way my parents did.”