“Jane, Peter Wakelin. I wondered if you had a few minutes to spare?”

“Yes, of course.”

“I need to rearrange things for a couple of Sundays in November.”

“Shall I come along now?”

“Now would be good—or I’m free after dinner.”

The Dean’s rooms were on the east side of the court overlooking the Backs where they narrowed to flow under the Martyr’s Bridge. Orange and brown leaves floated on the current as they stood at the window looking down. A couple of weeks before when she had been here there had been not a soul about. Now, with the new term under way, it was busy with young people cycling, walking, hanging about in groups.

“I like it full of life,” Jane said, “but I like it when it’s deserted too.”

Peter Wakelin nodded.

Before she had met him, she had had an image of a dean which was based on the one in her own undergraduate time, a thin, beaky man with an acerbic manner concealing great kindness and sensitivity towards the young. He had died suddenly in Jane’s last year and she had been surprised that he had been only sixty-five. Peter Wakelin had also come as a surprise. He was in his early forties and a Yorkshireman by birth and education.

“I’ve been asked to go to the cathedral in Washington for ten days in November. It runs over two Sundays so we need to rearrange the preachers and I wondered if you could do the first? I know you’re taking evensong that day as well. Is that too much?”

“It’s fine. Nice to preach near All Saints’ Day.”

“I’m very aware that you have limited time. I don’t want to push you, Jane. You have the chaplaincy and your PhD—and then you’re doing things here c Have some fun as well.”

“I’m fine. I love balancing the three things actually. It works rather well, though I probably like the hospital work best.”

He frowned slightly. “I was there this morning,” he said, “with a dilemma. Can I ask your advice?”

“Mine?”

“Why not? You’ve worked in a hospice, I haven’t. Though I know them well enough of course.”

They sat on the window seat. But for some time Peter Wakelin said nothing, only looked out at the mist hanging low over the water. Jane waited. She knew little about him. Wondered what he had to say.

“I was called to an elderly woman,” he said. “She has Alzheimer’s and this morning she had a stroke. She was alive and conscious and they’d made her comfortable. No one had much idea of a prognosis but the quality of her life was certainly very low. Her family—sons, daughter-in-law, had asked if she could be—they said ‘put quietly to sleep.’ The doctors refused of course so the family called me. Wanted ‘my opinion.’ No, they wanted me to persuade the medics. I couldn’t, it wasn’t for me to do that, and even if I had they wouldn’t have listened. But they were so desperate and what they said hit home, Jane. They said it wasn’t that they wanted her to die, because she’d died to them long before, but that if she went quietly to sleep now, she’d finally be at peace and out of distress and pain—and they were right. They were right. No one knows how long she’ll last—maybe hours but it might drag on for weeks. They hope it won’t but c”

Two young men came running towards the college buildings through the gathering mist. They were wearing singlets and shorts, grim-faced.

“What do you think?”

“You mean what would I have said? The same as you because we have to.”

“In the hospice, were you asked this? To intervene? To plead with the doctors to end a life?”

“Yes. Only a couple of times, though I’m sure the medics are asked more often.”

“And?”

“Listen, I understand the request c but in a hospice the pain is so well controlled and they make the quality of life as good as they possibly can that it isn’t the same. And death is not usually very far away.”

He was silent.

“You think you should have said yes?”

He shook his head and again was silent and then Jane realised that he was crying.

“Peter?” she said gently.

He went on looking out of the window. “I did it myself, you see,” he said at last. “I asked them to—to give her something much stronger.” He looked at Jane. “My wife.”

“Oh, Peter, I didn’t know.”

“No reason you should. She had a melanoma.”

“When was this?”

“Oh, it’s a couple of years. One reason I came down to Cambridge. Only you never get away, do you? You can’t.”

“I’m so sorry. It doesn’t help when you have to deal with situations like this morning.”

“Different though.” He stood up. “Feel like a walk out there before it gets dark?”

*

They went, out of the back gate, over the Martyr’s Bridge and along the path in the direction of King’s and Peter talked. He talked about his childhood, on a York housing estate, his visit to York Minster, alone one evening during choral evensong, and how he had stood at the back, a boy of twelve, transfixed by the singing and had come sneaking back—sneaking away from everyone—to wander about the great building, looking and sometimes listening and thinking. He talked about his decision to become first a Christian and later a priest—not a conversion, he said, a gradual, inevitable decision. About Alice. About their ten years together, longing for and failing to have children. Her illness, swift and terrible, and her death, slow and also terrible. His first months here, when he had felt lost and out of place, bewildered and uncertain of anything.

“Did you lose your faith?”

“Never. I just became very, very angry.”

They walked back through the streets of the town, dodging posses of cyclists, in the gathering dusk. Jane felt she had begun the afternoon with a comparative stranger and ended it with someone she had come to know rather well. A friend.

They parted at the college entrance. She had to buy a couple of books. In Heffers, finding the shelves she needed, she stood in front of them unseeing, thinking about Peter Wakelin and about living and dying and keeping the dying alive.

They did not have the books she wanted in stock. At the counter, waiting to order, she picked up a new edition of T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartetsand opened them at random.

What might have been and what has been

Point to one end, which is always present.

She did not buy the book because she had her own copy but it reminded her of how much meaning she had always found in the Four Quartets, how much there was between the lines, how the poems had sometimes seemed to enrich her as the Bible and the Odysseyhad.

She came out into the street which was bright and busy with lights and packed with students and shoppers, so that she kept having to walk in the road. Cambridge delighted her. Everything was here and she felt an uprush of gratitude for her work, the college, the new intellectual stimulus, new friends. After a series of stumbles the way ahead seemed smooth.

She wished she had not left Simon Serrailler any message.

Sixty-one

“Daddy’s been sick in the bathroom and now he’s crying,” Hannah had said, running down the stairs into the study after ten o’clock. Cat was replying to a long email from the practice manager. The fact that she was now off work to look after Chris did not mean she was out of touch and she knew that if she did let go it would be harder than ever to pick up the reins later. Whenever “later” was.

She had resettled Hannah in bed, cleaned up and gone into the bedroom.

“Chris?”

His head was turned away.

“Oh my love.”

His shoulders shook occasionally. She put her arms round them and held him against her.

“I know.”

“You bloody don’t know.”

“No.”

It was true. Whatever it felt like to watch him, to nurse him, to see him in pain and distress, it was different, separate, it was happening to him and not to her. Then he had mumbled something.