‘Kate?’
‘Christmas movies,’ I admit.
‘In August?’
‘Well, it is winter. It’s the log cabin,’ I explain. ‘The fire . . .’
You.
Hugh’s kindness to me right from the start had been rolled into my all-encompassing nightmare. People were good to us, practically everyone we came across, with just a few exceptions. It was an avalanche of support that snowballed out of the hospital and into our world, from the moment everything fell apart. But this was a long haul. It required the kind of persistent help that outlived most people’s practical capacity.
Hugh’s compassion, like Grace’s, had stayed the distance. It’s often colleagues who have the front-row seats when life flies off the rails. They can’t avoid you.
‘Did I ever properly thank you for all your support around the time Cam was diagnosed?’ I ask him, out of nowhere.
He stops poking the fire, closes the glass door and walks back to the kitchen. ‘You did. It wasn’t anything over and above what any reasonable workplace would provide.’ He thinks I mean the way he rearranged my role to fit my circumstances and tweaked that as time went on.
‘I don’t mean the flexibility at work. I mean . . . everything else.’ The lifts in his car. The unexpected cleaner he paid for. The way work obstacles evaporated, and still do. ‘The way you befriended Cam,’ I remind him, trying to keep my voice even.
‘That wasn’t a favour,’ he says. ‘Cam and I would have been friends even if you hadn’t been in the picture. I still grieve for him, you know. Nothing like you do. But I loved him.’
When Cam’s health really declined, it became harder for me to take him places. Physically harder, lugging around the wheelchair and getting him in and out of the car. But he also became emotionally difficult, sometimes. Hugh carried on with him as if nothing was wrong, even after Cam became more confused about who Hugh was and what his role was in our lives.
‘He thought you were his brother,’ I tell him. ‘Did I ever mention that?’
Hugh smiles. ‘I used to call him that. Brother.’
I didn’t know that. And I love it.
Of course he misses Cam, too. Genuinely so. I dearly want to raise that matter of their secret again, but he protects it like it’s under lock and key in a safe, inside his head.
I remember something else Cam said, which had been shelved by me at the time. Hugh had dropped him off, and he’d been confused about all the inter-relationships. We’d waved Hugh off and Cam had turned to me and said, ‘He likes you, Red. If you weren’t married to his brother, he’d want you himself.’
I’d dismissed it at the time, assumed it was the dementia talking. Tried to explain I wasn’t Hugh’s sister-in-law but his colleague, and that he and Hugh were friends. It had been too hard and there was no point anyway, because by that stage he was permanently confused and would have forgotten all the details the next second. He was confused about everything. Who he was. Who I was. What he had to do in any given moment of the day. And I’d become one of those jaded carers unable to paint a rosy picture for newbies in the carers’ forum.
‘What are these?’ he’d said one morning, about a year before he died. He was standing in front of a wall of books he’d previously conservatively estimated to number a thousand. Books he’d collected all his life, since he was a boy, all through school and university and through his academic career. Classics. Poetry. Shakespeare. History. Music. Biography.
‘What do you mean, Cam? They’re yours,’ I’d explained, standing beside him and trailing my fingers across the spines.
‘What are they?’ he’d asked again.
My eyes had filled with tears. ‘Cam! They’re books!’
Books! His life.
‘And here are the ones you wrote,’ I’d said, showing him a series of academic titles with his name on the spines, along with those of his various publishers, including the esteemed presses from Oxford and Cambridge Universities. I took out a copy of Chaucer’s Social Criticism – originally his PhD thesis, later published as a book, flicked it open, showed him the pages. All those whip-smart words. I even showed him the black and white author photo on the dust jacket. Nothing.
I think that was my moment of acceptance. The man I knew was gone. He had been replaced by an increasingly unrecognisable ghost of a person, lost in his own body.
Hugh passes me a huge mug of piping hot chocolate. Very much alive.
‘You know, Cam remembered me at the very end,’ I tell him. ‘He’d been confused for months, but there was this one, final spark of lucidity and remembrance. Just as he was dying.’
Hugh smiles warmly. ‘Of course he did. He adored you.’
I’ve never shared that extraordinary moment of Cam’s passing with anyone. ‘They usually forget everyone. Even their families. I’m afraid nobody will ever love me that much again, and that I won’t have the capacity – or maybe the courage – to love anyone that much again either.’
Hugh is in an armchair opposite, firelight playing across his face as he sips his hot chocolate. Invisible wall up, like always. Someone like him will never know what this is like. To let yourself go and fall so deeply into the life of another person that their loss almost breaks you. That it renders you simultaneously as terrified of loving again as you are of not loving again.
‘You’re like Patrick Dempsey in Made of Honor,’ I challenge him, which of course goes right over his head. ‘He never lets a woman stay over, because God forbid he becomes attached. Do you ever wonder what you might be missing out on with this chronic habit of pushing women away all the time?’
‘Yes,’ he says unexpectedly. Nothing else. Just ‘yes’。 This is the problem with Hugh. You inch a tiny bit closer to him and he clams up. Grace and I had spent way too much time trying to determine why it never worked out between the two of them, despite their being perfectly each other’s type in theory. She said they just didn’t have the chemistry. But I think he’s scared of love. Being around me so much when I lost Cam would have driven home the risk. It’s too dangerous. You might break into a million pieces, like Kate did, and never fully re-emerge . . .
‘Why didn’t it ever work out with Grace?’ I ask. I want his perspective now I have hers. I’m not picking for a midnight fight. It was all just so awkward, my having introduced them in the first place. Her being my best friend. Him being my boss.
‘Just didn’t work out,’ he says. ‘She’s a lovely person.’ Exactly how she’d described him.
‘Yes, and she’s all the things you want. She’s funny, she’s unpretentious, what you see is what you get . . .’
‘She’s all those things, yes. I don’t know what you want me to say.’
‘Do you know how maddening it is that you’re such a closed book?’
He sighs. He’s staring at me like he’s trying to figure out whether or not to proceed. ‘It wasn’t Grace,’ he says reluctantly.
‘That’s obvious.’
‘There was someone else.’
WHAT?