The Kindest Thing

Chapter Fifteen

When Neil got his diagnosis in 2007, the neurologist told him about the local MNDA branch and offered to put him in touch with them. Not long afterwards he had a phone call from someone there. They talked for quite a while and then she sent him a folder full of leaflets and information on different aspects of the disease. She also invited him along to the next branch meeting. Neil procrastinated. He told her he would think about it. When I raised it with him, he said he didn’t feel like going. ‘I need a bit more time to get my head round it.’

Now I wonder whether even then he had made the decision about his death and therefore thought joining the Association wasn’t an option for him. Meeting other people with the disease, getting advice and support and a sense of solidarity might compromise his position. If he made friendships there, gave or received succour and then arranged an early demise, how would those other people and their families feel?

So we never really got involved. Should I have pushed him more, early on, when his resolve hadn’t hardened? Then he might have found some hope, another way of looking at things, won more time with us and taken advantage of hospice care. But now that I knew his days, his hours, were already cut so short, there was no way I could pressure him into spending time on anything he wasn’t eager to do.

We did take charge of one of the breathing space packs and followed the advice in the Association’s leaflets to help us talk about the situation with Adam and Sophie.

On my own behalf I rang the MNDA helpline several times. Sometimes I needed space to be angry, to vent the why us, why him, why me questions with someone who understood. Sometimes I needed to clarify the information in the leaflets, about Neil’s symptoms or the care he was getting. Other times I wanted a place to be miserable, someone to know how sick I was about the whole bloody mess. Allow myself to weep on the phone to one of those anonymous volunteers. Open my Pandora’s box and pull on a cloak of bleak despair, wrap scarves of fear tight about my throat, veil my face with sheets of white-hot grief and weep for my loss. Unlike Pandora, my demons went back into the box and I did what anyone in that position has to do: I soldiered on with a brave face. Ms Practicality.

I’m sorry for myself. Then and now. Sorry for all of us but, yes, sorry for myself. That the Fates dealt me this hand. I imagine them prowling on the sidelines, outraged that I have interfered, that I cut the thread of life before Neil had lived his allotted span. Three blind women sniffing out my treachery and preparing to cut me down. When Asclepius dared to interfere with their hold on life and death they persuaded Zeus to kill him with a thunderbolt.

Tomorrow in court I face Veronica. I see us like two hyenas, tearing at Neil as if he were a fresh kill, so much dead meat, competing first for his love and then for his corpse. Time and again, I remind myself that as a mother she feels the same about Neil as I do about Adam. She is not the wicked witch of the north. She is not Medea slaying her children to get back at her erring spouse. She is a seventy-four-year-old woman, a former nurse with all the bossy practicality that denotes. Happily married, a marvellous cook. She likes to drink martinis and can still jive. In the 1950s she left her family in Ireland to come here to work and never looked back. When Sophie was four, she saved her from choking with the Heimlich manoeuvre. She babysat for us at the drop of a hat. She had a breast cancer scare in her sixties. When I was depressed, after my own mother’s death, Veronica helped a great deal, cleaning the house when I could barely get out of bed. Popping in with home-made fruit pies and chicken casseroles. Taking Adam out for treats and giving me space.

Why was I always so prickly around her? Why does she still make me feel like a stroppy adolescent? I’m a fifty-year-old woman. Would it have been any different if my own mother had been warmer, more nourishing?

Veronica’s unwavering faith, her religion, has always unnerved me. In the heady days of university, when Neil told me about his upbringing and some of the rules and regulations, I found it hard to credit.

‘They’d soon have me burned at the stake,’ was Jackie, the Cleopatra look-alike’s comment when a few of us were sitting around one night in our university days, playing Risk, drinking cider and sharing a spliff. ‘Unnatural practices.’ She inhaled from the joint she held, grinned and let the smoke curl out of her mouth.

‘You can’t go on the pill because that’s interfering with God’s will,’ I declaimed, pretty drunk by then. ‘Then if you do get pregnant you can’t have an abortion. It’s condemning women to be baby machines.’

‘Don’t look at me.’ Neil laughed. ‘I didn’t invent it.’

‘Does your family know you don’t go to church any more, that you’re an unbeliever?’ I asked him.

‘A heathen,’ said Jane.

‘Yep. But they don’t like it much.’

Later, as I got to know Veronica, I was shocked at how abruptly her manner would change if there was any challenge to her religious beliefs. It was like throwing a switch and she’d be mouthing brisk homilies, steel in her tone.

I read in the papers about Catholics who had challenged the orthodoxy, those who campaigned to change the dogma, who wanted sexual emancipation, who made a connection between poverty and female oppression. At uni we even had a small group of revolutionary Catholics come on the abortion rights marches. Then there were all those who found their own compromises. Millions of Catholics used contraception, including the pill. In Veronica’s home country, Ireland, contraception was being smuggled in and secretly given to girls and women desperate not to have another baby.

Veronica had seen it all, the poverty back home, the ill-health of women coming into hospital worn out by bearing and raising children. She must have known and maybe treated those who had survived botched abortions and I couldn’t understand why that life experience didn’t lead her to question the diktats that gave women so little choice. I soon learned that there wasn’t any point in trying to talk to her about any of these issues. And I’m sure I came across as opinionated and self-righteous and wilfully provocative.

She came to see me when I was expecting Adam. She had known Neil would be teaching. It was an unusual situation, the two of us alone together. I made a cup of tea and we chatted about the baby.

‘I’ve brought you this,’ she said softly, and pulled a parcel wrapped in tissue paper from her plaid shopping bag. ‘Here, open it.’

Puzzled, pleased, I unfolded the tissue paper to find a long, cream satin christening robe with seed pearls around the neck and cuffs. It was beautiful.

‘I wore it,’ she said, ‘and Neil wore it.’

Words stuck in my throat and a flare of irritation shot through me. Veronica knew we had no intention of getting the baby christened. We weren’t going to raise the child in any religion. Neil was adamant. He was an atheist now and he’d no intention of being a hypocrite. He had already told her this; they had argued about it. Now here she was ambushing me in my own kitchen.

While I was searching for a response that wouldn’t completely destroy our fragile relationship (I didn’t think, ‘You sly old bat, if you think you can guilt trip me into this then you don’t have the measure of me yet’ set quite the right tone) she followed up with her coup de grâce. ‘It would make Michael and me so very happy to pay for the christening party – our present to the baby.’

‘We’re not having it christened,’ I said rudely, my cheeks aflame with embarrassment and irritation.

‘Well, who else will use it?’ she cried, a spark of temper from her and a swift nod at the gown. She took a quick fierce breath, the prelude to a scolding, but said nothing. She picked up her shopper, pausing at the door. ‘What harm can it do?’ she demanded.

She left the robe on the table, like an accusation.

Later Neil was sure she’d whipped the holy water out at some point and done a DIY baptism on the babies, protecting them from limbo if they died. She would have believed implacably that our selfish defiance, as she saw it, robbed both of our children of the prospect of ever entering heaven.

Jane was nonchalant about it when I told her the story. ‘If you both think it’s a load of old tosh,’ she said, ‘then does it really matter if the baby gets baptized or not? Isn’t it an irrelevance? And if it makes them happy…’

I stared at her. ‘Neil won’t do it in a million years. And I don’t like the idea. If she practised voodoo or was a Moonie or a Jehovah’s Witness and she wanted me to initiate my child in the one true path, then what would you say?’

Jane waggled her head, screwed up her mouth, allowing I had a point, maybe. ‘You could do your own thing – a naming ceremony or something.’

I groaned. ‘That would be like rubbing their noses in it. Besides, I don’t want to do anything. I want to have this baby and it to be all right and just leave it at that.’

Of course, we won. There was no way Neil was going to cave in to his mother’s pressure. He told her himself that he wasn’t going to change his mind. After that she never mentioned a christening. Neither did she make any suggestions about schooling when the time came to put Adam’s name down for a place. By then it was clear that we weren’t part of her community. As the children got older and stayed with her and Michael, she would take them along with her to mass. They were fascinated the first couple of times, coming home full of questions that we had to answer tactfully, qualifying many of our explanations with ‘Grandma and Grandpa think…’ or ‘Grandma and Grandpa believe…’ and often ending with ‘and other people don’t’.

Whatever our religious differences, the children brought us closer. The four of us shared the love and pleasure of Adam and then Sophie, and had so much in common there, a mutual sense of joy and privilege and a similar way of caring for the kids that, thankfully, overrode those divisions.

Day three of my trial and the drizzle has cleared: a fierce wind has pushed all the clouds away and the sky is a piercing blue, bright enough to sting my eyes as I’m transferred from the prison to the van.

Travelling into the city centre, I look up out of the small rectangular window in my compartment at the buildings. I spy the light grey modern British Telecom building, at Castlefield near the Mancunian Way, and then the imposing brick bridges that carry the railways across the end of Deansgate. The railway arches have been converted into bars and clubs. Further along, there are old banks and warehouses, insurance companies and office blocks, most of them raised in the Victorian era during the cotton boom. They bear witness to the craft of stonemasons, with their fine carving and columns, finials and trims. The window is too small for me to see the top of the Hilton skyscraper. Halfway down Portland Street and way up high on one building, I notice words, cast in brick, bas-relief: ‘honesty’ and ‘perseverance’. Admonitions to the city’s workforce. I don’t know whether to laugh or to cry.

And then we are at Minshull Street and pull up alongside another prison van. The back entrance that we use is solid oak, studded and imperious. Either side of it frolic gargoyles and demons, legs splayed like lizards, faces contorted with sadistic glee.

Today I am in a different cell at the opposite end of the corridor. It is ten o’clock. The courts begin each day at ten thirty. There is a lot of waiting about. Between the paralysing tension of the courtroom there are interminable stretches of dead time when it’s hard to find anything to do. I should like to sketch but I am not permitted to carry a pen or pencil in case I use it as a weapon against myself or someone else.

Tension gathers in my back. I stand and stretch and roll my shoulders to try to release it. I am on my feet doing side stretches when the viewing panel in the door slides back and the guard tells me Ms Gleason is here to see me.

We sit on the bench.

‘How are you?’ she asks. ‘Did you get any sleep?’

‘Some,’ I answer.

‘We’re expecting Mrs Draper this morning and possibly Dolores Cabril. It’ll depend on when the judge decides to break for lunch.’

Dolores Cabril is the psychiatric expert for the prosecution. She is my greatest threat. If she convinces the jury that I was sane when I helped Neil die, they will have to return a guilty verdict. Dolores is aptly named as far as I’m concerned – Spanish for ‘sorrows’. She threatens to bring me grief. But at the moment I am more worried about facing Veronica.

‘And that’ll be the end of their witnesses?’ I check with Ms Gleason.

‘Yes.’ Her clothes are smart today. She’s made an effort, or perhaps just had a chance to do some ironing. There are a couple of short white hairs on her lapel. When did I get to be so fussy? What does it matter? Compared to Mr Latimer and his scuzzy wig, Ms Gleason is perfectly groomed. Should I point it out? I do.

‘God,’ she huffs. ‘My dog’s moulting. Black’s a nightmare.’ She picks the hairs off.

‘Does anyone ever wear anything else?’

‘At their peril.’ She releases the tips of her thumb and finger, lets the hairs float to the floor. ‘Tradition is all,’ she drawls, in her laconic, fruity Bolton accent.

When she has gone, the usher sends for me and a guard escorts me up to the courtroom. The barristers are already there, like so many crows pecking over their papers and dipping their heads together for a quick confab.

Glancing up to the public gallery as I make my way to the dock, I see Adam and Jane in their places. Then my eyes fix on the row behind. There is Sophie. Sophie and her grandpa, Michael. A pain burns in my heart and for a moment I lose my balance, stumble slightly by the steps. I think I might faint but the dizziness eases and I am left with nausea. The back of my neck and the back of my knees are damp.

It hadn’t occurred to me that after giving her evidence Sophie would attend the trial. And why shouldn’t she? She wants justice for Neil. I have no idea where Michael stands in all this, whether he agrees with Sophie and Veronica’s desire to see me prosecuted.

And my children? How are they faring? Sophie has her grandparents and Adam has Jane. Looking at him now, Adam’s face is like thunder. Is this because Sophie is there or because his grandma is due on the stand? Or is it nothing to do with the trial? Maybe he’s getting ill again. I feel so bloody helpless and make a mental note to ask Ms Gleason if she can find out how he is. While I am on trial I cannot have visits so I won’t be able to see him for myself.