4)Me, quite cross at having had to abandon the blueberry muffin on my desk.
‘Achtung, everyone,’ said Peregrine, as we settled into our chairs. ‘We’ve got to put our heads together and come up for an idea to shoot the Honourable Celestia Smythe.’
‘Who ees she?’ said Legs.
‘She’s the daughter of Lord Smythe,’ said Peregrine, to blank faces. ‘Oh, come on you lot. You know. Former banker turned adviser to the Prime Minister. Polly, come on, you’ve got half a brain cell. You must know who I mean?’
I nodded. I vaguely remembered his name from some scandal a few years back. He’d left one of the big banks with an enormous payout after a management disaster, yet somehow ended up as a senior member of the Tory Party.
‘Anyway,’ Peregrine went on, ‘she’s eighteen and she’s got an avocado cookery book coming out so I said she could have the June cover. Which means we need to come up with a brilliant idea.’
Legs snorted in disgust.
Peregrine swivelled his Mac around so we could see a picture of her. She looked much as you might expect someone who wrote an avocado cookery book to look. Pretty, I grudgingly accepted, and shiny with health. Long brown hair, huge green eyes and lashes like a dairy cow.
‘If we want to shoot ’er for June we need to dress ’er in Chanel,’ said Legs. ‘We ’ave promised them that cover.’
‘Fine,’ said Peregrine, ‘but we need to come up with a clever idea. With a concept. I don’t want to run another picture of a Sloaney stick-insect grimacing at the camera. We need to try harder than that. Jeffrey, any thoughts on photographers?’
‘Well, there’s a young Japanese photographer I’d love to try before she gets snapped up by Vogue,’ he said. ‘Big on flowers. Does shoots with flowers sort of scattered everywhere.’
Jeffrey waved his arm in front of him as if to demonstrate the scattering, and then he shrieked. ‘Oh! I tell you what, why don’t we use avocados instead of flowers?’
Peregrine frowned. ‘What?’
‘Or, what about a bath of avocados?’ Jeffrey continued, excitedly. ‘Like in American Beauty. You know, where she’s lying on the bed with petals? Except, instead of petals, we use avocados?’
‘But, Jeffrey, she has to be wearing couture. Chanel couture,’ stressed Legs.
‘I know,’ said Jeffrey, nodding, ‘but we can still have her in couture lying on a bed of avocados. Or,’ he carried on, his voice getting even higher, ‘what about shooting her in couture with an avocado face mask on? That could be frightfully jolly.’
‘I like it,’ said Peregrine. ‘It’s bold. It’s different.’
‘Why not go the whole hog and put her in one of those avocado fancy dress costumes?’ I joked.
‘Polly,’ said Peregrine. ‘That’s brilliant! I can see it now, dressed as an avocado but in a pair of heels and some Chanel jewellery.’
Oh crap, he’d taken it seriously.
‘And I want you to do the interview too, please,’ he said, looking at me.
‘About avocados, I’m guessing?’
‘Yes please. It’s pegged to the book but cover everything else too. Family life, love life. The usual.’
‘No problem,’ I said, wondering whether George Orwell had ever interviewed anyone about avocados.
‘It’s going to be tremendous, I can feel it,’ he said, rubbing his hands together. ‘Let’s make Celestia the new Cara.’
Legs snorted again.
‘Right, thanks, everyone. Let’s crack on with the day then, shall we?’
It was Peregrine’s signal for everyone to leave, but as we all stood he said: ‘Polly, can you stay behind for one tick?’
‘Sure.’
Everyone else filed out while I remained in my seat.
‘I just wanted to say, Polly, that I liked your Sheikh Khaled interview very much. You’ve got a real eye for detail, keep it up. I liked the line about the gold lavatory especially.’
‘Oh,’ I replied, surprised. ‘Thanks.’
‘And I was also wondering how are things with Jasper?’ he continued.
‘I’m going to have to give you, my boss, a blow-by-blow account of this relationship, am I?’
‘Not at all,’ he said, hunting around in his right nostril with an index finger. ‘You know me, Polly, I merely take a keen interest in the well-being of my team.’
‘Well, I’m very touched by your interest and it’s all going fine. Great, even. Happy with that?’
‘Smashing. We’ll make a duchess of you yet.’ He retrieved his finger from his nostril and wiped it on his mouse mat. ‘Remind me to give you a raise at your next evaluation.’
‘Really?’
‘No, not really. There’s no money obviously. But well done anyway. And for the avocado idea. Terrific stuff. Inspired.’
‘You’re… welcome,’ I said. ‘And, in that case, do you mind if I leave a bit early today?’
‘Why?’
‘It’s Mum’s first chemo appointment, so I’m taking her to St Thomas’.’
‘My dear girl, of course. You don’t have to ask for that kind of thing, Polly, go whenever you like. Take as much time as you need. And send your mother my best.’
‘Will do.’
I caught the Tube to the hospital that afternoon feeling, if I was honest, a bit sorry for myself. I was wallowing in an Eighties ballad Spotify playlist which wasn’t helping. I glanced around the carriage at everyone else. Probably, all these people knew others who’d had cancer. Maybe they’d had it themselves. And they all looked all right, didn’t they? Life carried on for them. I caught the eye of a man sitting across from me wearing a t-shirt that said ‘This isn’t a bald patch, it’s a solar panel for a sex machine’. So, nearly everyone on here looked all right.
I found Mum sitting in the reception area of St Thomas’. ‘How are we feeling?’ I asked.
‘I’m a bit tired. I didn’t sleep terribly well last night.’
‘Oh, Mum, sorry.’
‘It wasn’t me. It was Sidney. Up all night. Trouble with his prostate.’
‘Right.’ I wasn’t sure I knew Sidney well enough to be discussing his prostate. ‘Now, where are we going?’
Mum opened her handbag. ‘The oncology ward,’ she said. ‘It’s got a name, hang on… the Farber Ward.’
‘Right, let’s go. It’s going to be in, out and you’ll be home on the sofa with a cup of tea before you know it.’
‘Good afternoon, my darlings,’ trilled the nurse at the reception desk of the ward.
‘Er, hello,’ said Mum. ‘I’m Susan Spencer.’
‘Susan, you are very welcome. And is this your sister with you?’ The receptionist beamed at me.
‘I’m her daughter,’ I replied. I couldn’t tell if the receptionist was joking or not.
The nurse laughed and her bosoms shook. ‘I know, my darling, I guessed that. Now, Susan, what time are you booked in for?’
‘Three o’clock,’ said Mum.
‘So there will be a nurse along to collect you any… Ah, here she comes. This is Beatriz.’
‘Hello,’ said Beatriz, a small woman in a dark blue nurse’s dress. ‘Which one of you is Susan?’
‘I am,’ said Mum.
‘But can I stay with her?’ I asked.
‘’Course you can,’ said Beatriz, ‘if you both follow me. Susan, we’ll get you started.’ She ushered Mum to a big chair in one corner. ‘Now, you had your blood taken on Friday, I see. And that was all fine.’
‘Yes,’ said Mum, ‘Dr Ross said the levels were quite all right.’
‘That’s what we like,’ said Beatriz. ‘So what I’m going to do now is take your blood pressure and temperature. And then if that’s all fine, we’ll get you started.’
Mum nodded and started rolling a sleeve up. I looked around at the rest of the ward. A dozen or so patients sitting in uniform green armchairs, all hooked up to drips. An elderly lady, her face as wrinkled as a raisin, sat in one chair with a pillow across
her lap, a newspaper on top of the pillow. In another green chair there was a younger, middle-aged woman wearing a pink headscarf, watching an iPad. Close to Mum’s chair was an old man in slippers asleep. Or, at least, I hoped he was asleep. Maybe he’d died? What if he had died? Did people die in this ward? I looked at his chest to see if he was still breathing.
‘He’s all right,’ said Beatriz, seeing my face. ‘Just dozing. He’s been here since ten, poor Martin.’
‘Has he got anyone with him?’
‘No,’ said Beatriz, ‘gets the bus on his own from Norwood. Bless him.’
I looked at my hands, trying not to think of Martin finishing his treatment and going home on his own again.
‘That all looks all right,’ she said to Mum a few minutes later. ‘So I think we’ll get you started.’ She looped a tourniquet over Mum’s arm and tightened it. Then she picked up a little plastic packet from her trolley and opened it. It was a needle. I gritted my teeth and looked towards the woman in the pink headscarf. I’d loved nothing more than a good knee scab to pick when I was little, but these days the sight of a needle made my stomach lurch.
‘I just have to find a vein, Susan, then I’ll hook you up to the carboplatin.’
‘OK,’ said Mum, her voice wobbling. I took her other hand and squeezed it.
‘Come on,’ said Beatriz to herself, frowning at the needle, then, a few moments later, ‘Nope, that’s not going to work. Sorry, Susan, bear with me.’
‘Polly, my darling, it’s all right, you don’t have to grip my hand quite so hard,’ said Mum.
‘Sorry.’ I loosened my grip. My hands were all sweaty. ‘Not much of a Florence Nightingale, am I?’ I said.
‘Let’s have another go,’ said Beatriz.
I turned my head in the other direction again, feeling sick.
‘That’s better, all in,’ she said, having found a vein. ‘So what I’m going to do is link this up to the infusion bag, and then it’ll take ninety minutes. Then you need to stay sitting for half an hour, Susan, just to check it’s all right. You’ll be able to go home after that.’
‘Thank you,’ said Mum, her voice still wobbling.
I squinted at the bag of chemicals hanging on a drip above Mum’s head. It didn’t look very poisonous. It was clear, like a bag of water.
‘Watch the level of that,’ Beatriz said, nodding her head towards the bag as she linked Mum’s arm to a tube dangling from it. ‘It’ll slowly go down, so you can tell when your mum is halfway. Now then—’ she stood up ‘—you’re all set. There’s a timer that will go off when you’re finished.’
‘Thank you,’ said Mum again.
‘You’re very welcome. I’ll be pottering about the ward so let me know if there are any problems.’
There was a sudden beeping from Martin’s chair. ‘I’ll just see to him,’ said Beatriz, moving towards the chair.
‘Do you want your paper, Mum?’
‘No,’ said Mum. ‘I want to talk about Jasper.’
‘What? Now?’
‘Yes, now. We’ve got a whole hour and a half.’
‘You liked him, right?’
‘Of course I liked him. He was charming. His manners are ever so good. And he ate all his lunch,’ she said. ‘Lovely boy. I was pleasantly surprised, if I’m honest. He doesn’t seem too posh at all.’
I frowned. ‘What do you mean?’
‘Well, I just… I don’t know… I suppose I expected him to be all “How do you do?” and to talk like Prince Charles. But he seemed quite normal.’
I laughed. ‘Yeah. Kind of. For someone who grew up in a castle.’
‘And he helped clear the table and was ever so sweet with Bertie.’ She nodded to herself. ‘I liked him very much. More than I thought I would.’
‘Good,’ I replied. ‘Me too. That’s what I thought when I first met him.’
‘But I did think Bill was a bit quiet,’ she went on. ‘Or on edge. Is he all right? How’s his work going?’
‘Did you? I think he’s all right. Busy trying to get the app off the ground and trying to get investment for it, but I think he’s loving being his own boss, running his own thing.’ I paused. ‘What did you think of Willow?’
‘Oh, I thought she was nice too,’ said Mum, ‘and ever so pretty, isn’t she? Such lovely hair. I wish I had that hair.’
‘Mmm,’ I replied. I was hoping Mum would say she also found her the teeniest, tiniest bit annoying, then I’d feel less of a bitch about thinking the same. On the way home from lunch on Sunday, I’d made a joke to Joe about Willow organizing Bill’s surprise party and even he’d told me that I was being unfair. Maybe I just needed to stop being so protective.
Mum was much quieter a couple of hours later, when we were finally on our way home in an Uber.
‘You all right?’ I asked.
‘Fine, just tired. But that could be more to do with last night’s comings and goings than the medicine.’ She refused to use the word ‘chemo’ I’d noticed.
‘Nearly home. Then you can have a cup of tea. Or a drink even. If that’s allowed?’
‘No, no, I think tea and a bath. And then my bed,’ said Mum.
‘Is Sidney staying tonight?’
‘No. He’s got Bertie with him tonight. He wanted to stay but I said I wasn’t sure how I’d be feeling so best off him staying home.’
‘Oh. I don’t want you to be on your own tonight. Do you want me to stay?’
‘No, love. I’ll be fine. Tea and bed. I’m ever so sleepy.’
‘Do you feel sick?’
‘No, no. Just sleepy.’
She went to bed as soon as I got her home and I made a mental note to google Mum’s chemo medicine. We knew her hair would fall out, Dr Ross had told her that. But I’d tried to avoid googling anything else about the cancer. About the stage of her cancer. About the treatment. About, dreaded phrase, ‘survival rates’. It all seemed too bleak. But here, taking my tired mum home from her first chemo appointment, I felt pretty bleak. Other people had big families. Big families who all gathered for Christmases at home. Or gathered at big tables in restaurants for birthdays and they’d all sing loudly when a cake appeared and then everyone around the table would clap for their mum or their dad. Or brother or sister. Or uncle or niece. Or cousin or brother-in-law. I always felt a twinge of jealousy when anybody ever grumbled about an ‘in-law’. Lucky you, I’d think. To have someone you could call an in-law. To have such a big family.
Because I had a little family. Mum. She was my family. My whole family. And I was hers. Bertie, I suppose, was a sort of honorary member. A more human dog than any other dog I’d come across. But even with Bertie we were a small unit. A small family. And I couldn’t fathom the idea that my family would disappear. That it would be just me left. And Bertie. One person and one dog doesn’t make a family, does it? You can’t sit in a restaurant on your birthday with your dog on a seat beside you. Bertie couldn’t sing my ‘Happy Birthday’ or pull a cracker at Christmas. So, the only alternative, I decided, sitting on the bus on the way home, was for Mum to get better again and our small family unit to stay intact. It just had to.
10
I MET LEX FOR drinks in the Windsor Castle pub, just behind Notting Hill Gate Tube station, later that week. She’d emailed a few days before saying we needed a ‘wed-min’ meeting. I’d replied saying I would come so long as she never used that word again.
‘I’ve got us a bottle of white,’ said Lex, when I found her in the pub garden. I sat down and tried to fold my legs underneath the wooden table. Why did they make these tables for gnomes?
‘Great, thank you. And crisps. I’m starving. I need about ten bags of crisps.’
Lex didn’t look up from a notepad in front of her. ‘Not for me. Wedding diet has started. Or “wed-shred”, as they call it.’
I did a quick calculation with my fingers. It was now April. The wedding was in July. That was in… three months’ time.
‘What are you doing?’ Lex ask
ed, as I tapped on my fingers, counting the months.
‘Nothing, just, er, checking they all still work.’
‘You’re getting weirder. But listen, I’ve made a list of everything we need to do.’ She waved the notepad at me. ‘Bride-to-be’ was written on the front of it. Puh-lease.
‘You and Hamish?’
‘No, no. Me and you.’
‘So exciting!’ I said, with all the enthusiasm of someone who’s just been told there’s a meteorite hurtling its way towards Earth and everyone will die in the morning.
‘So you’re on hen duty. Have you had any thoughts about that?’
‘Er…’
‘I don’t want you to go to too much trouble. Just a weekend somewhere, I was thinking Ibiza but that may not work in June. Too busy. Or Lake Como. Laura in my office says Lake Como is lovely in June.’
Laura was a tit, I decided swiftly.
‘And I’ve made a list of people,’ Lex went on, ‘and we’re ten altogether.’
‘Okey-dokes.’
‘There are just some that I can’t ignore. If I invite Rachel from work, I need to have Laura. It’s just going to be Sal from uni. And I can’t not have my cousin and I need to ask various school friends as well. Or at least I have asked them, they may not all come. So I’ll send you all their email addresses. And maybe set up a WhatsApp group, so everyone can get to know one another beforehand. What do you think?’
‘Mmm,’ I murmured. ‘What’s Hamish doing for his stag?’
‘Going to Prague. I don’t want to know the details. So I’ll do the WhatsApp group and then you’ll sort the hen. But I thought I could split some of the duties between you and Sal as she’s good at all this stuff.’
Phew, I thought. Sal was a party planner. I hadn’t seen her since Bill’s dinner party in January but I figured since she was also engaged she’d be into all this.
Lex carried on wittering as my phone lit up with a message from Jasper, who was driving down from Castle Montgomery for the night.
I’ll be with you by about 10 X
‘Sure, sure,’ I said vaguely to Lex, as I replied to Jasper.
Can’t wait to see you. If I live that long. Long wedding discussions with Lex here… Xxx
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