Me Before You

‘George … ’

‘Don’t look at me like that. I do care about him, Mummy. I do. He’s my brother and I love him. But I can’t bear it. I can’t bear even the thought of it. He’s wrong to ask, and you’re wrong to consider it. And it’s not just his own life he will destroy if you go ahead with this.’

I took a step back from the window. The blood thumped so loudly in my ears that I almost didn’t hear Mrs Traynor’s response.

‘Six months, George. He promised to give me six months. Now. I don’t want you to mention this again, and certainly not in front of anyone else. And we must … ’ She took a deep breath. ‘We must just pray very hard that something happens in that time to change his mind.’

8

Camilla

I never set out to help kill my son.

Even reading the words seems odd – like something you might see in a tabloid newspaper, or one of those awful magazines that the cleaner always has poking out of her handbag, full of women whose daughters ran off with their cheating partners, tales of amazing weight loss and two-headed babies.

I was not the kind of person this happened to. Or at least, I thought I wasn’t. My life was a fairly structured one – an ordinary one, by modern standards. I had been married for almost thirty-seven years, I raised two children, I kept my career, helped out at the school, the PTA, and joined the bench once the children didn’t need me any more.

I had been a magistrate for almost eleven years now. I watched the whole of human life come through my court: the hopeless waifs who couldn’t get themselves together sufficiently even to make a court appointment on time; the repeat offenders; the angry, hard-faced young men and exhausted, debt-ridden mothers. It’s quite hard to stay calm and understanding when you see the same faces, the same mistakes made again and again. I could sometimes hear the impatience in my tone. It could be oddly dispiriting, the blank refusal of humankind to even attempt to function responsibly.

And our little town, despite the beauty of the castle, our many Grade II listed buildings, our picturesque country lanes, was far from immune to it. Our Regency squares held cider-drinking teenagers, our thatched cottages muffled the sounds of husbands beating their wives and children. Sometimes I felt like King Canute, making vain pronouncements in the face of a tide of chaos and creeping devastation. But I loved my job. I did it because I believe in order, in a moral code. I believe that there is a right and a wrong, unfashionable as that view might be.

I got through the tougher days because of my garden. As the children grew it had become a bit of an obsession of mine. I could give you the Latin name of almost any plant you cared to point at. The funny thing was, I didn’t even do Latin at school – mine was a rather minor public school for girls where the focus was on cooking and embroidery, things that would help us become good wives – but the thing about those plant names is that they do stick in your head. I only ever needed to hear one once to remember it forever: Helleborus niger,Eremurus stenophyllus,Athyrium niponicum. I can repeat those with a fluency I never had at school.

They say you only really appreciate a garden once you reach a certain age, and I suppose there is a truth in that. It’s probably something to do with the great circle of life. There seems to be something miraculous about seeing the relentless optimism of new growth after the bleakness of winter, a kind of joy in the difference every year, the way nature chooses to show off different parts of the garden to its full advantage. There have been times – the times when my marriage proved to be somewhat more populated than I had anticipated – when it has been a refuge, times when it has been a joy.

There have even been times when it was, frankly, a pain. There is nothing more disappointing than creating a new border only to see it fail to flourish, or to watch a row of beautiful alliums destroyed overnight by some slimy culprit. But even when I complained about the time, the effort involved in caring for it, the way my joints protested at an afternoon spent weeding, or my fingernails never looked quite clean, I loved it. I loved the sensual pleasures of being outside, the smell of it, the feel of the earth under my fingers, the satisfaction of seeing things living, glowing, captivated by their own temporary beauty.

After Will’s accident I didn’t garden for a year. It wasn’t just the time, although the endless hours spent at hospital, the time spent toing and froing in the car, the meetings – oh God, the meetings – took up so much of it. I took six months’ compassionate leave from work and there was still not enough of it.

It was that I could suddenly see no point. I paid a gardener to come and keep the garden tidy, and I don’t think I gave it anything but the most cursory of looks for the best part of a year.

It was only when we brought Will back home, once the annexe was adapted and ready, that I could see a point in making it beautiful again. I needed to give my son something to look at. I needed to tell him, silently, that things might change, grow or fail, but that life did go on. That we were all part of some great cycle, some pattern that it was only God’s purpose to understand. I couldn’t say that to him, of course – Will and I have never been able to say much to each other – but I wanted to show him. A silent promise, if you like, that there was a bigger picture, a brighter future.

Steven was poking at the log fire. He manoeuvred the remaining half-burnt logs expertly with a poker, sending glowing sparks up the chimney, then dropped a new log on to the middle. He stood back, as he always did, watching with quiet satisfaction as the flames took hold, and dusted his hands on his corduroy trousers. He turned as I entered the room. I held out a glass.

‘Thank you. Is George coming down?’

‘Apparently not.’

‘What’s she doing?

‘Watching television upstairs. She doesn’t want company. I did ask.’

‘She’ll come round. She’s probably jet-lagged.’

‘I hope so, Steven. She’s not very happy with us at the moment.’

We stood in silence, watching the fire. Around us the room was dark and still, the windowpanes rattling gently as they were buffeted by the wind and rain.

‘Filthy night.’

‘Yes.’

The dog padded into the room and, with a sigh, flopped down in front of the fire, gazing up adoringly at us both from her prone position.

‘So what do you think?’ he said. ‘This haircut business.’

‘I don’t know. I’d like to think it’s a good sign.’

‘This Louisa’s a bit of a character, isn’t she?’

I saw the way my husband smiled to himself. Not her too, I found myself thinking, and then squashed the thought.

‘Yes. Yes, I suppose she is.’

‘Do you think she’s the right one?’

I took a sip of my drink before answering. Two fingers of gin, a slice of lemon and a lot of tonic. ‘Who knows?’ I said. ‘I don’t think I have the faintest idea what is right and wrong any more.’

‘He likes her. I’m sure he likes her. We were talking while watching the news the other night, and he mentioned her twice. He hasn’t done that before.’

‘Yes. Well. I wouldn’t get your hopes up.’

‘Do you have to?’

Steven turned from the fire. I could see him studying me, perhaps conscious of the new lines around my eyes, the way my mouth seemed set these days into a thin line of anxiety. He looked at the little gold cross, now ever present around my neck. I didn’t like it when he looked at me like that. I could never escape the feeling that I was being compared to someone else.

‘I’m just being realistic.’

‘You sound … you sound like you’re already expecting it to happen.’

‘I know my son.’

‘Our son.’

‘Yes. Our son.’ More my son, I found myself thinking. You were never really there for him. Not emotionally. You were just the absence he was always striving to impress.

‘He’ll change his mind,’ Steven said. ‘There’s still a long way to go.’

We stood there. I took a long sip of my drink, the ice cold against the warmth given out by the fire.

‘I keep thinking … ’ I said, staring into the hearth. ‘I still keep thinking that I’m missing something.’

My husband was still watching me. I could feel his gaze on me, but I couldn’t meet it. Perhaps he might have reached out to me then. But I think we had probably gone too far for that.

He took a sip of his drink. ‘You can only do what you can do, darling.’

‘I’m well aware of that. But it’s not really enough, is it?’

He turned back to the fire, poking unnecessarily at a log until I turned and quietly left the room.

As he had known I would.

When Will first told me what he wanted, he had to tell me twice, as I was quite sure I could not have heard him correctly the first time. I stayed quite calm when I realized what it was he was proposing, and then I told him he was being ridiculous and I walked straight out of the room. It’s an unfair advantage, being able to walk away from a man in a wheelchair. There are two steps between the annexe and the main house, and without Nathan’s help he could not traverse them. I shut the door of the annexe and I stood in my own hallway with the calmly spoken words of my son still ringing in my ears.

I’m not sure I moved for half an hour.

He refused to let it go. Being Will, he always had to have the last word. He repeated his request every time I went in to see him until I almost had to persuade myself to go in each day. I don’t want to live like this, Mother. This is not the life I chose. There is no prospect of my recovery, hence it is a perfectly reasonable request to ask to end it in a manner I see fit. I heard him and could well imagine what he had been like in those business meetings, the career that had made him rich and arrogant. He was a man who was used to being heard, after all. He couldn’t bear it that in some way I had the power to dictate his future, that I had somehow become mother again.

It took his attempt to make me agree. It’s not that my religion forbade it – although the prospect of Will being consigned to hell through his own desperation was a terrible one. (I chose to believe that God, a benign God, would understand our sufferings and forgive us our trespasses.)

It’s just that the thing you never understand about being a mother, until you are one, is that it is not the grown man – the galumphing, unshaven, stinking, opinionated offspring – you see before you, with his parking tickets and unpolished shoes and complicated love life. You see all the people he has ever been all rolled up into one.

I looked at Will and I saw the baby I held in my arms, dewily besotted, unable to believe that I had created another human being. I saw the toddler, reaching for my hand, the schoolboy weeping tears of fury after being bullied by some other child. I saw the vulnerabilities, the love, the history. That’s what he was asking me to extinguish – the small child as well as the man – all that love, all that history.

And then on 22 January, a day when I was stuck in court with a relentless roll call of shoplifters and uninsured drivers, of weeping angry ex-partners, Steven walked into the annexe and found our son almost unconscious, his head lolling by his armrest, a sea of dark, sticky blood pooling around his wheels. He had located a rusty nail, barely half an inch emerging from some hurriedly finished woodwork in the back lobby, and, pressing his wrist against it, had reversed backwards and forwards until his flesh was sliced to ribbons. I cannot to this day imagine the determination that kept him going, even though he must have been half delirious from the pain. The doctors said he was less than twenty minutes from death.

It was not, they observed with exquisite understatement, a cry for help.

When they told me at the hospital that Will would live, I walked outside into my garden and I raged. I raged at God, at nature, at whatever fate had brought our family to such depths. Now I look back and I must have seemed quite mad. I stood in my garden that cold evening and I hurled my large brandy twenty feet into the Euonymus compactus and I screamed, so that my voice broke the air, bouncing off the castle walls and echoing into the distance. I was so furious, you see, that all around me were things that could move and bend and grow and reproduce, and my son – my vital, charismatic, beautiful boy – was just this thing. Immobile, wilted, bloodied, suffering. Their beauty seemed like an obscenity. I screamed and I screamed and I swore – words I didn’t know I knew – until Steven came out and stood, his hand resting on my shoulder, waiting until he could be sure that I would be silent again.