Capital

struggle over whether or not he should factually correct a dying woman over a point of terminology, before giving in to the impulse to do so. ‘Brain tumour is not a form of cancer. But you do have a tumour and I am sorry to say there is evidence that it is growing.’
    Evidence – a heavy word.
    The doctor said that the tumour was too big to operate on but that they could treat it with chemotherapy. Or rather that they could ‘perhaps’ treat it with chemotherapy. Many years ago, after watching her friend Margerie Talbot – who had lived at 51, where the Younts now lived – suffer horribly with the treatment for cancer and then die anyway, Petunia had resolved never to have chemotherapy. Now, sitting in the doctor’s consulting office on the eighteenth floor of the hospital tower block, she was interested to notice that the practice was no different from the theory: she felt no temptation to accept the offer of treatment. Not that it was an especially tempting offer. It was something like six weeks’ treatment for six extra months of life – Petunia couldn’t now remember the exact details of the calculation but she could remember at the time thinking how strangely similar it was to the extended warranty offers, £5.99 a month for three years’ extra coverage, which had used to make Albert so reliably furious.
    ‘No,’ said Petunia. ‘Thank you, but no.’
    ‘You don’t have to decide here and now,’ the doctor had said.
    ‘Well, I have decided, and it’s no,’ said Petunia. The consultant looked, for the first and only time, a little taken aback. And that was the last time she had seen him.
    The doctor’s verdict was a shock. But at some level it was not a surprise. Things had suddenly got much worse in February. At the core of it was a feeling that this illness was different from any other she had ever had. Every other time she had been ill, there had always been a distance between her and what was wrong with her; she was over here, her illness was over there, and even when she had been deeply ill, delirious with flu and fever, say, she had known that the illness was not her. Her being and its being were separate. That was different this time. The symptoms were not spectacular, but Petunia knew that the sickness was very intimate, it was entwined with her thoughts and perceptions and deepest self. The shadow on her sight spread and grew darker, and then Petunia was dizzy and weak and at times couldn’t do anything much: walk, or even get out of bed. She was taken into hospital. At times she could barely see. For a short period there she had uncontrollable hiccups, so much so that the other patients on the ward complained.
    After two weeks things stabilised slightly and she was sent home to die. Her daughter Mary moved down from Maldon to look after her. The alternative would have been moving to Essex to stay with Mary and her family while she died, but there was something creepy about Mary’s house (though of course Petunia didn’t admit that this was the reason), something cold and sterile and unwelcoming and not-right. Mary spent most of her time cleaning and putting things away – she always had – and this habit was harder to bear on foreign territory. At Pepys Road, Mary spent most of the day doing things somewhere else in the house, but came when Petunia called her. That was shamefully often. She sometimes could manage to get to the loo in the night, but sometimes could not, and when that happened she had to call for Mary, who was sleeping in the single bed in an adjacent room which had once been Albert’s den and now was nothing much, except the room which had once been Albert’s den. But Mary was a deep sleeper and even though mother and daughter both left their doors open she often didn’t hear her mother call until Petunia was almost losing her voice with shouting for her. And then they had the trip to the bathroom to negotiate. Petunia hated this, and Mary hated it too.
    There was palliative care available, either at home or in a hospice, when Petunia was actually dying. But she wasn’t quite there yet. The rate at which she was dying seemed to have slowed down sharply since her daughter had come home.
    Petunia could hear a rattling from the kitchen downstairs. Mary had a very low tolerance for mess but a high one for noise, or at least a high one for the noise she generated herself. She banged and crashed, she left the radio on turned up loud wherever she went; even the