Me Before You

The consultant came round, but I didn’t feel that I could follow him in while Will’s mother was in there. When he emerged, fifteen minutes later, Mrs Traynor came out behind him. I’m not sure if she told me simply because she had to talk to somebody, and I was the only person available, but she said in a voice thick with relief that the consultant was fairly confident that they had got the infection under control. It had been a particularly virulent bacterial strain. It was lucky that Will had gone to hospital when he had. Her ‘or … ’ hung in the silence between us.

‘So what do we do now?’ I said.

She shrugged. ‘We wait.’

‘Would you like me to get you some lunch? Or perhaps I could sit with Will while you go and get some?’

Just occasionally, something like understanding passed between me and Mrs Traynor. Her face softened briefly and – without that customary, rigid expression – I could see suddenly how desperately tired she looked. I think she had aged ten years in the time that I had been with them.

‘Thank you, Louisa,’ she said. ‘I would very much like to nip home and change my clothes, if you wouldn’t mind staying with him. I don’t really want Will to be left alone right now.’

After she’d gone I went in, closing the door behind me, and sat down beside him. He seemed curiously absent, as if the Will I knew had gone on a brief trip somewhere else and left only a shell. I wondered, briefly, if that was how it was when people died. Then I told myself to stop thinking about death.

I sat and watched the clock tick and heard the occasional murmuring voices outside and the soft squeak of shoes on the linoleum. Twice a nurse came in and checked various levels, pressed a couple of buttons, took his temperature, but still Will didn’t stir.

‘He is … okay, isn’t he?’ I asked her.

‘He’s asleep,’ she said, reassuringly. ‘It’s probably the best thing for him right now. Try not to worry.’

It’s an easy thing to say. But I had a lot of time to think, in that hospital room. I thought about Will and the frightening speed with which he had become dangerously ill. I thought about Patrick, and the fact that even as I had collected my things from his flat, unpeeled and rolled up my wall calendar, folded and packed the clothes I had laid so carefully in his chest of drawers, my sadness was never the crippling thing I should have expected. I didn’t feel desolate, or overwhelmed, or any of the things you should feel when you split apart a love of several years. I felt quite calm, and a bit sad and perhaps a little guilty – both at my part in the split, and the fact that I didn’t feel the things I probably should. I had sent him two text messages, to say I was really, really sorry, and that I hoped he would do really well in the Xtreme Viking. But he hadn’t replied.

After an hour, I leant over, lifted the blanket from Will’s arm, and there, pale brown against the white sheet, lay his hand. A cannula was taped to the back of it with surgical tape. When I turned it over, the scars were still livid on his wrists. I wondered, briefly, if they would ever fade, or if he would be permanently reminded of what he had tried to do.

I took his fingers gently in mine and closed my own around them. They were warm, the fingers of someone very much living. I was so oddly reassured by how they felt in my own that I kept them there, gazing at them, at the calluses that told of a life not entirely lived behind a desk, at the pink seashell nails that would always have to be trimmed by somebody else.

Will’s were good man’s hands – attractive and even, with squared-off fingers. It was hard to look at them and believe that they held no strength, that they would never again pick something up from a table, stroke an arm or make a fist.

I traced his knuckles with my finger. Some small part of me wondered whether I should be embarrassed if Will opened his eyes at this point, but I couldn’t feel it. I felt with some certainty that it was good for him to have his hand in mine. Hoping that in some way, through the barrier of his drugged sleep, he knew this too, I closed my eyes and waited.

Will finally woke up shortly after four. I was outside in the corridor, lying across the chairs, reading a discarded newspaper, and I jumped when Mrs Traynor came out to tell me. She looked a little lighter when she mentioned he was talking, and that he wanted to see me. She said she was going to go downstairs and ring Mr Traynor.

And then, as if she couldn’t quite help herself, she added, ‘Please don’t tire him.’

‘Of course not,’ I said.

My smile was charming.

‘Hey,’ I said, peeping my head round the door.

He turned his face slowly towards me. ‘Hey, yourself.’

His voice was hoarse, as if he had spent the past thirty-six hours not sleeping but shouting. I sat down and looked at him. His eyes flickered downwards.

‘You want me to lift the mask for a minute?’

He nodded. I took it and carefully slid it up over his head. There was a fine film of moisture where it had met his skin, and I took a tissue and wiped gently around his face.

‘So how are you feeling?’

‘Been better.’

A great lump had risen, unbidden, to my throat, and I tried to swallow it. ‘I don’t know. You’ll do anything for attention, Will Traynor. I bet this was all just a –’

He closed his eyes, cutting me off in mid-sentence. When he opened them again, they held a hint of an apology. ‘Sorry, Clark. I don’t think I can do witty today.’

We sat. And I talked, letting my voice rattle away in the little pale-green room, telling him about getting my things back from Patrick’s – how much easier it had been getting my CDs out of his collection, given his insistence on a proper cataloguing system.

‘You okay?’ he said, when I had finished. His eyes were sympathetic, like he expected it to hurt more than it actually did.

‘Yeah. Sure.’ I shrugged. ‘It’s really not so bad. I’ve got other things to think about anyway.’

Will was silent. ‘The thing is,’ he said, eventually, ‘I’m not sure I’m going to be bungee jumping any time soon.’

I knew it. I had half expected this ever since I had first received Nathan’s text. But hearing the words fall from his mouth felt like a blow.

‘Don’t worry,’ I said, trying to keep my voice even. ‘It’s fine. We’ll go some other time.’

‘I’m sorry. I know you were really looking forward to it.’

I placed a hand on his forehead, and smoothed his hair back. ‘Shh. Really. It’s not important. Just get well.’

He closed his eyes with a faint wince. I knew what they said – those lines around his eyes, that resigned expression. They said there wasn’t necessarily going to be another time. They said he thought he would never be well again.

I stopped off at Granta House on the way back from the hospital. Will’s father let me in, looking almost as tired as Mrs Traynor. He was carrying a battered wax jacket, as if he were just on his way out. I told him Mrs Traynor was with Will again, and that the antibiotics were considered to be working well, but that she had asked me to let him know that she would be spending the night at the hospital again. Why she couldn’t tell him herself, I don’t know. Perhaps she just had too much to think about.

‘How does he look?’

‘Bit better than this morning,’ I said. ‘He had a drink while I was there. Oh, and he said something rude about one of the nurses.’

‘Still his impossible self.’

‘Yeah, still his impossible self.’

Just for a moment I saw Mr Traynor’s mouth compress and his eyes glisten. He looked away at the window and then back at me. I didn’t know whether he would have preferred it if I’d looked away.

‘Third bout. In two years.’

It took me a minute to catch up. ‘Of pneumonia?’

He nodded. ‘Wretched thing. He’s pretty brave, you know. Under all that bluster.’ He swallowed and nodded, as if to himself. ‘It’s good you can see it, Louisa.’

I didn’t know what to do. I reached out a hand and touched his arm. ‘I do see it.’

He gave me a faint nod, then took his panama hat from the coat hooks in the hall. Muttering something that might have been a thank you or a goodbye, Mr Traynor moved past me and out of the front door.

The annexe felt oddly silent without Will in it. I realized how much I had become used to the distant sound of his motorized chair moving backwards and forwards, his murmured conversations with Nathan in the next room, the low hum of the radio. Now the annexe was still, the air like a vacuum around me.

I packed an overnight bag of all the things he might want the next day, including clean clothes, his toothbrush, hairbrush and medication, plus earphones in case he was well enough to listen to music. As I did so I had to fight a peculiar and rising feeling of panic. A subversive little voice kept rising up inside me, saying, This is how it would feel if he were dead. To drown it out, I turned on the radio, trying to bring the annexe back to life. I did some cleaning, made Will’s bed with fresh sheets and picked some flowers from the garden, which I put in the living room. And then, when I had got everything ready, I glanced over and saw the holiday folder on the table.

I would spend the following day going through all the paperwork and cancelling every trip, every excursion I had booked. There was no saying when Will would be well enough to do any of them. The consultant had stressed that he had to rest, to complete his course of antibiotics, to stay warm and dry. White-water rafting and scuba diving were not part of his plan for convalescence.

I stared at my folders, at all the effort and work and imagination that had gone into compiling them. I stared at the passport that I had queued to collect, remembering my mounting sense of excitement even as I sat on the train heading into the city, and for the first time since I had embarked upon my plan, I felt properly despondent. There were just over three weeks to go, and I had failed. My contract was due to end, and I had done nothing to noticeably change Will’s mind. I was afraid to even ask Mrs Traynor where on earth we went from here. I felt suddenly overwhelmed. I dropped my head into my hands and, in the silent little house, I left it there.

‘Evening.’

My head shot up. Nathan was standing there, filling the little kitchen with his bulk. He had his backpack over his shoulder.

‘I just came to drop off some prescription meds for when he gets back. You … okay?’

I wiped briskly at my eyes. ‘Sure. Sorry. Just … just a little daunted about cancelling this lot.’

Nathan swung his backpack off his shoulder and sat down opposite me. ‘It’s a pisser, that’s for sure.’ He picked up the folder, and began flicking through. ‘You want a hand tomorrow? They don’t want me at the hospital, so I could stop by for an hour in the morning. Help you put in the calls.’

‘That’s kind of you. But no. I’ll be fine. Probably simpler if I do it all.’

Nathan made tea, and we sat opposite each other and drank it. I think it was the first time Nathan and I had really talked to each other – at least, without Will between us. He told me about a previous client of his, C3/4 quadriplegic with a ventilator, who had been ill at least once a month for the whole time he worked there. He told me about Will’s previous bouts of pneumonia, the first of which had nearly killed him, and from which it had taken him weeks to recover.

‘He gets this look in his eye … ’ he said. ‘When he’s really sick. It’s pretty scary. Like he just … retreats. Like he’s almost not even there.’

‘I know. I hate that look.’

‘He’s a –’ he began. And then, abruptly, his eyes slid away from me and he closed his mouth.

We sat holding our mugs. From the corner of my eye I studied Nathan, looking at his friendly open face that seemed briefly to have closed off. And I realized I was about to ask a question to which I already knew the answer.