He returned with a plastic cup of coffee and handed it to her. “Difficult,” he said. “I know it’s difficult.”

Cat sipped. It was black and sweet.

They had not talked in the car: Richard had driven and Cat had sat in the back with Chris, who had grumbled for a short time that he had no reason to be going to hospital and had then fallen completely silent until they arrived. He had remained silent, not meeting her eye, responding curtly to the immediate questions, nodding agreement to the scan.

“He knows,” she said now. “He knows the score as well as we do.”

“He knows the options but it is always harder to make objective judgements about oneself.”

The door of the scanning suite opened. How could she have sent so many patients here and never had any real idea of what it was like for them to go inside, and for their families to wait out here, wait for the news, wait for someone in a white coat to start talking to them in language they did not know, give them news they could not interpret? Not yet. Not here.

She stood up. The registrar was a young woman.

“Shall we talk here or do you want to come into the office?”

“Is my husband c?”

“He’s going onto the ward. I need to admit him at least for the rest of tonight and Dr Ling will see him tomorrow, if you’re happy with that?”

Christina Ling. Consultant neurologist.

“May I see the scans?”

“Yes of course. Dr Serrailler?”

“I am not an experienced interpreter of MRI pictures,” Richard said.

“Come with me all the same,” Cat said. She did not need her father for emotional support, she would not ask for his shoulder, she needed to draw on his detachment, his professionalism, his ability to rationalise, even with his own family. It was a sort of strength.

The screen glowed neon blue, the strange, impersonal image like an illustration in a textbook.

Cat stared. The cross section—the slice, the layers of this image inside the bony cavity—was the inside of her husband’s brain, Chris, the father of her children, Dr Chris, the man she loved and had been with for fourteen years. Chris. Chris’s brain.

Dr Louise Parker, the badge read in black letters on pale blue plastic. Neurological Senior Registrar.

She was leaning forward, pointing at the screen with the cursor.

Richard Serrailler cleared his throat.

“Yes,” Cat said. “I see it.”

It was always the way. You knew, but you pretended you did not; you feared the worst, not because you were a pessimist but because you knew the medical facts. It was your job.

She had known.

“The lesion is here,” Dr Parker said, highlighting the shadowed area. “It’s already quite large. He must have had symptoms, but they can grow pretty rapidly as you know. The pressure just reached a point where it triggered off some electrical activity, causing him to fit. It would explain the mood changes—personality changes.”

“Yes,” Cat said.

“Has he complained of headaches?”

“He has, but he didn’t imply they were severe—I put it down to the stress of packing up and travelling. Jet lag. He’s been very tired—I should have realised. I should have known it wasn’t prolonged jet lag.”

“Easy to miss. He says he’s vomited a couple of times in the last few days.”

“He didn’t tell me. Why didn’t he say anything?” She looked at her father but could not read his expression because there was none. He might not have heard the conversation.

Chris’s brain. She looked at the shadowed portion, trying to assess exactly where the tumour lay in relation to the rest, to assess the prognosis, to behave as if she were a doctor and this were a patient’s scan. To behave like her father.

“It doesn’t look good,” she said at last.

“No. Dr Ling will look at it first thing tomorrow and talk to you about the options.”

“May I see Chris?” I am a helpless relative, she thought. Everything has changed.

“Of course. I’ll take you along. Dr Serrailler?”

“I’ll wait in the car. No point in crowding him.”

*

Chris was in a side ward. The lights were dimmed. Three other beds, one with a prone figure, one humped over. One with the curtains drawn. Murmured voices. Drip stands. Cat felt a swell of fear.

He was propped up on a pillow rest. Hospital gown.

“I’ll go and see if someone can find him pyjamas,” the registrar said.

Hospital pyjamas.

But he was Chris. He looked no different. Somehow she had expected him to have changed.

He looked at her. Looked away.

“Why didn’t you tell me?” She hadn’t meant to accuse. “You must have known it wasn’t just jet lag.”

“I used to have migraines—in my teens. I thought they’d come back.”

She put her hand on his.

“Seen the scan?”

“Yes. MRI diagnosis is for the experts. You’ll see the neurologist in the morning.”

“Where are the children?”

“With Judith.”

“Who’s Judith?”

“Dad’s friend. You’ve had a sedative, don’t worry.”

Chris was silent. Drowsing? Thinking?

She moved to get up but he turned his hand quickly, pinning her own down. Cat leaned over and stroked his forehead. “I’ll come in early.”

“If it’s a grade-four I want you to give me a morphine overdose. Promise me.”

“Don’t try and diagnose yourself.”

“ Promise me, Cat.”

She was silent. She could not promise. She could not begin to think of what it would mean if he was right. But he wasn’t right.

“A glioma. Anything above a grade two. Please.”

“Try to sleep. But you know there are plenty of other brain tumours. Don’t leap straight to the worst. Don’t think about it any more tonight.” For God’s sake, she thought, how stupid. How stupid, stupid, stupid. Don’t think about it any more. As if.

She leaned over to kiss him.

Chris turned his face away.

“Strange,” Richard said as they turned out of the hospital car park. “The symptoms are contradictory. The epileptic fit and the drowsiness indicate a brain stem tumour whereas the mood changes are consistent with one in the frontal lobe. Glioma, would you say? Has he had eye problems? There’s certainly no ataxia that I could see.”

Cat struggled to reply. The car seemed to be airborne, streaming ahead down the bypass. Her father had always been a careful, safe and very fast driver. Her mind was a swirling mass of images and nothing would stay still.

“What did Chris have to say?”

She meant to reply that he had been sedated and not very communicative. She said, “He made me promise that if it was a grade-four I would give him an overdose.”

“Ah. Interesting.”

“ Interesting?”

He did not reply.

“For heaven’s sake, there are dozens of possibilities, aren’t there? It could be benign, in which case it might be amenable to surgery and he’ll make a full recovery. It could be amenable to radiotherapy. It may not even be a tumour. An MRI is hard to read, you said so yourself.”

“Not that hard.”

“My God, you are a comforter. I’m struggling here, Dad. I need you to help me.”

“Of course I’ll help you. What on earth do you expect?”

“You sound so clinical.”

“I’m a clinician. So are you. Just because I’m talking like a medic doesn’t mean I am without any feeling. I’m extremely sorry for Chris. It is not a road I would wish anyone to have to travel.”

“How can someone ask his wife to kill him?”

“He spoke only of one particular circumstance.”

“In any circumstance.”

“Easily. I would do the same.”

“Never ask me.”

“Martha,” Richard said now, as they stopped for a set of red lights, “would have asked for it, if she’d been able to. I see that now.”

“Martha?”

“As it was, your mother had to take the burden on herself. At the time, I was horrified. I was blinded by grief to the truth, which was that it was the right thing to do. I was unable to think rationally—to see reason. Your mother had to see it for me.”