After Isabella

by Rosie Fiore

  ‘I’m sorry,’ said Esther.

  ‘It’s all right.’ Sally managed a weak smile. ‘Worse things happen at sea,’ she said, and made a small sweeping gesture with her hand, indicating her own body.

  ‘What…?’ said Esther ‘What’s happening with you?’

  Sally turned away from her then and looked out of the window. Her face, once plump and round, was skeletal, her top lip was drawn back, revealing her front teeth, and the flesh around her eyes had become sunken. Most worrying, though, was her colour. When Esther had seen Sally at the party, she’d thought the sallow tone of her skin was a faded fake tan, or bad make-up. But in the bright sunlight of Sally’s kitchen she could see it was in her skin. She was actually yellow. The whites of her eyes were also tinged.

  ‘Cancer, of course,’ said Sally finally, almost cheerfully. ‘Good old genetics, eh? I knew it would probably get me in the end. I just didn’t think it would be so soon.’

  ‘Cancer?’

  ‘Pancreatic. Difficult to spot – no symptoms, really. Which is why they usually only catch it when it’s too late. Like mine.’

  ‘Too late?’

  ‘Yup. Inoperable. I could do chemo and radiotherapy, but it’s not going to give me much time at all.’

  ‘Are you…?’

  ‘In pain? Loads. It was the back pain that eventually sent me to the doctor. That and the weight loss. I went on a diet to lose some on purpose, but when I started eating normally, it just kept coming off. It got a bit alarming after a while. I… don’t usually go to doctors. I’ve spent enough time dealing with medical things for other people. I tend to avoid them for myself, if I can. But the back pain got beyond a joke, so I went. He did an X-ray and couldn’t see anything, so he sent me for some blood tests and a scan, and well… there you are.’

  Esther sat and stared at her. This was a new Sally – blunt and plain-speaking; it was as if everything had been stripped away – her endless positivity, her sweet manner. She had neither the time nor the inclination to bother with niceties.

  Esther decided that the best way to respond to Sally’s frankness was to speak to her in the same way. ‘How long have you got?’

  ‘A couple of months, maybe less. The cancer’s blocking my bile duct, hence my lovely colour. The tumour is quite big, so it’s obstructing my stomach, which is why I can’t eat much, and I keep losing weight. Not much fun, really.’

  ‘And how do you feel?’

  ‘Pissed off, actually.’

  Her words came as quite a shock. Esther didn’t think she’d ever heard her swear before. She laughed, involuntarily. ‘You sounded just like Isabella then.’

  ‘I feel like her. She was furious. She had so much to do, she said. And I feel the same. I just got my life, and now I’m losing it. There are so many things I’ve never done.’

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘Oh, you know, everything – had a career, been in love, had kids. Do you know, I’ve only had sex seven times in my whole life, and never in this millennium?’ She managed a laugh. ‘And in a hilarious twist of fate, when, at forty-two, I finally managed to meet a man I thought I might like, it turns out he only pursued me because he’s obsessed with you.’

  ‘Phil,’ Esther said.

  ‘It all came out when he realized I was ill. He panicked. He clearly wasn’t going to go through being with a terminal cancer patient again… I suppose you knew about his wife.’

  ‘I did.’

  ‘He’s gone now. He said some truly horrible things about you before he left, though. What a peach. I told him if he ever came near me or you again, I would call the police.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘All the boys I used to bring home when I was a teenager were interested in me for about ten minutes until they saw Isabella. Then they were all in love with her. One or two still gave me a mercy shag, or at least I think that’s what they call it.’

  ‘I’m sure that’s not true.’

  ‘It is. It wasn’t her fault. She couldn’t help being what she was. She didn’t do it on purpose. She couldn’t help being fascinating and beautiful and charismatic. And anyway, she certainly wasn’t interested in the weedy individuals I managed to drag home.’

  Sally pulled the folder back towards her and looked at the letter in Isabella’s handwriting.

  ‘At the housewarming party, I said that she was more your sister than mine. I wasn’t being… I don’t know what you’d call it. I wasn’t saying it to be nice. She loved you. She hated me.’

  ‘Sally, of course she didn’t.’

  ‘No, you’re right. Not hate. She was… indifferent to me. She thought I was worthless.’

  ‘How can you say that? She asked you to care for her. You. She sent me away.’

  ‘She asked me because she didn’t care what I thought. Because if someone had to see her moaning in pain or lying in a pool of her own blood, it may as well be the one person whose opinion didn’t matter. She was vile to me. Always. Right up until the end.’

  Coming from anyone else, what Sally said might have sounded like self-pity, but she delivered the words with flat honesty and without drama. And looking into her eyes, Esther knew she was telling the truth. That Isabella would think like that. Do that.

  ‘That must have been difficult for you.’

  ‘Well, it was and it wasn’t. She was never difficult to love, as you know. She just wasn’t kind.’

  ‘No, she wasn’t.’

  Sally smiled weakly, ‘Well, it happens I suppose. Patterns get set when you’re children, and they never change. People decide who you are, and no amount of evidence will change that opinion. Once the annoying little sister, always the annoying little sister. Not just to Isabella, to you too.’

  ‘It wasn’t that you were annoying, Esther said, ‘we were just horrid girls. So wrapped up in ourselves. We kept pushing you away, torturing you, ignoring you…’ She trailed off. Sally wasn’t talking about their childhood. She was talking about their friendship now.

  ‘I tried so hard to be a good friend to you,’ Sally said, calmly and without recrimination, ‘but for some reason, you distrusted that. Distrusted me.’

  This wasn’t the time for fervent denial. ‘I did. I was suspicious,’ Esther said.

  ‘Of what?’

  ‘I found your ability to remember disconcerting. The past was so vivid to you, and that seemed strange to me. I couldn’t work out what you wanted from me, and I ended up suspecting you of the most dreadful things – of trying to monopolise my circle of friends, of trying to come between Lucie and me. I didn’t know what you wanted from me.’

  ‘I just wanted to be your friend. Through those years with my mum, when she was ill, remembering things became everything, really. I was alone with her so much of the time, and gradually she lost herself, and lost all memory of my dad, of Isabella, of who I was. All I had was what I recalled. I’m the last of my line, and the keeper of all the memories. But then you were there, and you remembered some of it too. And you were part of some of the stories. It meant a lot. You meant a lot. And I’m grateful to you, and to Lucie and Michael and Paul and Tim, for giving me a start, helping me make some new memories.’

  ‘That’s a much kinder interpretation of the past year or so than I deserve,’ said Esther. ‘I’m sorry.’ She got up from the table and walked to the window. ‘It seems that’s all I have to say to you. Sorry.’

  ‘You know…’ Sally began, and then stopped. ‘You know I’m going to need more from you than that.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘Will you?’

  ‘Of course. I am enormously grateful to be asked.’

  They didn’t hug, and they didn’t say much more after that. Esther stayed and finished her tea, and they made a few practical plans. Then she left and walked back home.

  When Michael came home that evening, she had her bags packed and ready in the hallway. She had prepared what she wanted to say, so she asked him to sit down in the living room.

  ‘M
ichael, I love you,’ she began, and he looked surprised. She realized what a very long time it had been since she had last said it aloud. ‘I love you,’ she said again. ‘You are the single best thing, after Lucie, ever to have happened to me, and I’ve treated you appallingly. I have failed you in every possible way. I do not deserve your kindness and loyalty, and I am all too aware that I could have lost it forever.’

  He opened his mouth to speak, but she touched his hand. ‘Don’t say anything yet,’ she said. ‘I need to tell you that Sally is dying. She has terminal, inoperable, pancreatic cancer.’

  He looked horrified. ‘I can’t believe it. When did she find out?’

  ‘Within the last few weeks. She’s in quite a bit of pain, and she doesn’t have a lot of time. I would like to go and live in her house and take care of her for as long as she has left.’

  Michael nodded. ‘If that’s what she wants, then of course you must.’

  ‘Thank you. And if you would be so kind as to stay here, to take care of our home…’ She leaned lightly on the word ‘our’. ‘I would be so grateful.’

  EPILOGUE

  She’d been restlessly asleep for hours, her fingers plucking irregularly at the covers, her eyelids fluttering, her breathing rattly and noisy. Esther sat and watched her. She’d been told that these were all signs that the end was near. It was quite possible that she wouldn’t wake again. Her breathing would slow and then stop, and that would be it. Esther leaned back in her chair. She hadn’t slept for a long time and she was weary. She shut her eyes for a second, just to rest them.

  The breathing stopped and her eyes flew open. The face on the pillow looked awake and alert, the eyes wide open and almost amused.

  ‘Caught you napping.’

  ‘Sorry,’ Esther said. ‘Can I get you anything?’

  ‘No thanks.’ She smiled, a genuinely warm, attentive and lovely smile. ‘You must be knackered, sorry.’

  ‘I’m fine,’ said Esther. ‘Honestly. How are you doing? Want more morphine?’

  ‘No pain right now. But I tell you what, my feet are bloody freezing.’

  ‘Your feet? Really?’ The room was warm, and the bed was covered with a heavy, fluffy duvet.

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Can I get you some socks?’

  ‘I don’t think that’ll work. I think my body’s storing all the heat around what’s left of my essential organs. I don’t think I’m able to generate my own heat for my extremities. Maybe a hot water bottle… only I don’t think I own one.’

  ‘I don’t think you do,’ said Esther. She paused for a second. ‘I read somewhere, although I suspect it’s completely spurious, that when D. H. Lawrence was dying, he complained his feet were cold, and his wife, Frieda, put them in her bosom to warm them.’

  ‘Her bosom?’

  ‘I haven’t got much of a bosom, but I do generate quite a bit of body heat.’

  The chuckle from the bed sounded lively, warm, not at all like the chuckle of someone dying. ‘Would you? Would you do that for me?’

  ‘For you, Millais, anything.’

  Esther folded back the duvet from the bottom of the bed and lay on her side. She lifted her shirt and drew Sally’s cold feet to her, pressing them against her stomach, then drawing her jumper and the duvet down over them. ‘Better?’

  ‘Better. Thank you. Your belly is so soft. Squidgy.’ A smile, silence, and eyes that closed slowly.

  Esther lay still, breathing softly and watching, until she too fell asleep for a time.