Free Constance by Rosie Thomas Page B

it that they couldn’t remove?What does that mean? Is she going to die ? Is that what you’re trying to say?’ Noah’s voice rose.
    With an effort, Bill kept his steady.
    ‘They think it’s likely to be about six months.’
    Noah had a bottle of beer. He rotated it on the arm of his chair, staring as if he hoped each time the label came into sight it might read differently.
    ‘I don’t understand. Wait a minute. Are they sure? They can’t be certain, can they? I mean, you hear of people who’ve been given a certain amount of time to live and who get better against all the odds?’
    The surgeon had been quite precise. Bill did not think he would ever forget the way the man’s hands had rested on the buff folder of Jeanette’s notes, the neutral odour of the room that seemed to have had all the air sucked out of it, and Jeanette sitting upright in her chair intently lip-reading as the doctor delivered his news. She had turned only once or twice to Bill for confirmation.
    Bill said, ‘You do hear of that. I don’t want to give you false grounds for optimism, but if you can believe that she will get better, maybe that’s how it will turn out. I don’t know. All I do know is what the specialist told us today. He didn’t leave any room for doubt in my mind. I wish he had done. I wish I could say something different to you.’
    There was no rejecting this, after all. Noah was beginning to take in what his father’s words really meant.
    He said at length, ‘It doesn’t seem right. Poor Mum.’
    The weather man materialised in front of his bands of cloud and clear sunny intervals. They watched the sweep of his arm as he indicated the movement of a front. Weather seemed just as irrelevant as politics or football. Bill drank some of his whisky and the rim of his glass slipped and clinked against his teeth.
    ‘I can’t get my head round it,’ Noah muttered. ‘It’s not fair, is it?’
    Life had a tendency not to be strictly fair, Bill reflected, although Noah was still too young to appreciate precisely how unfair, how meticulously and even poetically unjust it could be.
    Noah said after a while, ‘Dad? I’m glad you didn’t decide, you know, that you were going to try and keep it from me. Thanks for telling me straight away. I’d much rather hear than have to guess.’
    ‘It was your mother who asked me to tell you tonight,’ Bill scrupulously pointed out. He didn’t believe he should take the credit for courageous honesty when most of his instincts had been to keep the truth from his child for as long as possible.
    He was used to being the speaking intermediary between Jeanette and Noah, but he had long been aware that he was only valuable on the median level. The simple exchanges, relating to mealtimes or rooms to be tidied or homework to be completed before television was to be watched, those they had easily and naturally dealt with between themselves through a mixture of sign language and lip-reading and a range of facial expressions. It had fallen to Bill to put into words for Noah the more mundane but complex facts – timetables, instructions and information connected with day-to-day living. This responsibility had occasionally, he thought, made him appear duller and more pedestrian in his son’s eyes than he really was. On the deepest level, for those communications that involved the most intense emotions, any intervention from him would have been superfluous. Mother and son had always understood each other and conveyed their responses to one another with a level of fluency that Bill didn’t feel he possessed.
    And now, cruelly, there was this. The relaying of moreinformation, tactfully delivered by a concerned doctor, that was nonetheless savage.
    Noah didn’t ask about how Jeanette had taken the news, or what her state of mind now appeared to be. This he would find out directly from his mother: Bill understood that.
    There was one more piece of information he felt he should convey.
    ‘Mum’s