|
Five
"How's the pain?" Rosemary asked.
"Foul."
"Did the hot water bottle help last night?
"It made it worse."
The day before, Victor had massaged Jane, rubbing
ointment
into her shoulders, and she said it helped her rheumatism. But
now nothing was any use. When Victor touched her back, she
screamed: "Don't touch me! Let's go to the hospital. There must<
be something they can do about rheumatism."
An appointment was made for the next afternoon, but
the pain
was suddenly so intense that Jane felt she couldn't wait that long
"No, not tomorrow. Now! Now!"
When Victor finally got through to the hospital again,
the
doctor Jane was to see the next day was away.
"But Jane can't wait," he spluttered. "She's got
to see someone
Today."
"It's too late. She'll have to come in tomorrow for
her appoint
ment."
"No, no, please."' Victor knew he couldn't go back
to Jan
with this news. He said desperately, "She's talking of doing away"
with herself."
There was a brief silence at the other end. Then:
"Bring he
in now, but straight away. Hurry, before the clinic ends. Can
you make it in an hour?"
They just made it, but then they had to wait another
hour
before the nurse called Jane's name. She had hardly spoken during
the drive, except to grunt with exasperation when Victor braked
sharply and made her wince with pain. She didn't say anything in
the waiting room.
She was soon back from the examination, bursting
in, furious,
on the point of crying not with pain, but with anger.
"You go and see him! You talk to him and tell him
what they
said!" she almost shouted at Victor, heedless of the other patients.
"What happened? Tell him what who said?"
"Goon! Go!"
A doctor was waiting inside. Distressed, he told
Victor, "She's
very touchy. It's only to be expected. Something I said must ob-
viously have upset her. Do you know what it was?"
"What did you say to her?"
"I told her there's nothing we could do about her
pain. It's
something she must expect in a case like this. She knows what
she's got. If she can learn to accept it, it'll be easier for her."
Victor looked at him, shocked. "You told her that?"
"That's all I could say to her, based on her case
history, on
my own experience."
"But they said it might be something else," Victor
protested.
" 'Rheumatism,' they said. 'Give it a little time, it might go
away.' "
The doctor picked up the folder with Jane's name
on it, ex-
amined the last page, then looked at Victor.
"There's nothing about rheumatism here."
"Maybe it's in another file? We were definitely told
that. No
wonder she was upset."
"I see." The doctor paused. "Well, she'd better see
her own
doctor, who'll be back in a day or two. I can only tell you what
I know."
When Victor returned to Jane, she still wouldn't
talk to him.
She heard what he had to say—that the doctor had based his
remarks on the contents of her file, which seemed incomplete-
but made no comment. Her anger had subsided; she appeared to
have lost interest. When she got home, she pushed silently past
Rosemary, who was anxious for news. Rosemary followed her
upstairs and helped her into bed. What had the doctor said?
"Oh, I lost patience with him. He didn't know anything
about
my case . . ."
The next day they were ready for her. She was whisked
into a
large consulting room, where two or three other patients were
already being examined. A nurse who had been offhand the day
before was now very attentive, almost tender, helping her to lie
down. The doctors were equally caring. Jane submitted passively
to their exhaustive examination. The anger of the day before
seemed spent. For once, she hadn't prepared her usual list of
questions and none seemed to occur to her while she was being
examined.
Victor asked about the rheumatism when Jane was out
of ear-
shot, but he was given no direct answer. "We ought to get some
specialists to see her," said one of the doctors vaguely. "More tests
will be necessary to track down the cause of the pain." It would
be better if she came back into the hospital. She'd been very upset
at home, hadn't she? That kind of pain could be disturbing,
unnerving, and could affect people in odd ways . . .
When Victor told Jane that the doctors wanted her
back, it
was obvious she knew already, that she had heard everything.
Victor felt that the doctors should have been more judicious.
Jane didn't seem to care. A mask of indifference hid her feelings,
even when one of the doctors said she should be admitted imme-
diately.
She lay on the bench in the waiting room for well
over an hour
while the bed was being prepared, saying nothing, hardly stirring.
When they finally came, she rose with a great effort, supported
by Victor and a nurse. That morning she had needed no support.
Now she was dependent on other people, ready to collapse with-
out them. She had become an invalid again.
Her bed was in a nearby ward occupied mostly by old
women.
They eyed Jane curiously as she tried to get undressed. But soon
a nurse pulled the curtain round the bed and helped her into it.
When the curtain was pulled back, Jane was lying down, seem-
ingly lifeless, her eyes shut.
That day we realized she was withdrawing from us.
When we
tried to talk, she would not respond. When we asked questions,
she would not answer. For the first time since her illness began,
she was concerned that we should keep to the visiting hours. We
should leave, she told us. It was past the time for visitors; it wasn't
fair to the other patients.
We left reluctantly, without any warm goodbye from
Jane.
Looking back, we traced the beginning of this new mood to that
morning she had slept late. From then on, she seemed to have
become sullen, almost hostile towards us. She protected herself
with a wall of silence. More sensitive to her daughter's signals
than Victor, Rosemary saw such behaviour as a need on Jane's
part to assert herself, to show that she hadn't relapsed into total
dependence again. Victor could accept this intellectually, but he
was nevertheless very hurt by the withdrawal.
Next morning he returned to the hospital, expecting
Jane to
have recovered from her gloom. But when he greeted her cheer-
fully, she barely responded. It was the same the following day.
She made it quite clear by her behaviour during the ensuing days
that she didn't want us there. We took turns sitting with her,
but she hardly acknowledged our presence. When we offered her
something—a drink, fruit, a magazine—she would curtly reject it.
But when the nurse came by, she would often ask for the very
thing she had just refused from us. We developed a guilt complex.
What had we done wrong? It was obvious to us that, in spite of
Jane's rejection, she needed us as much as she had in the other
crises of her life, even more so. There had been times in the past
when she was angry with us, but we'd stuck it out, and after the
storm blew over were glad we had done so. We would stick it
out this time, too.
We were back in the days of Jane's adolescence, when
her
moods, the alternating periods of depression and rebellion, made
her lapse into silence for days. "Jane is off," the family used to
say, and leave her alone until she gave some sign of being "on"
again.
Now Rosemary looked for similar signals that Jane's
depression
was lifting, but all she saw were the old, familiar "off" signs—the
eyes-turned-to-heaven, the what-fools-l-have-for-parents expres-
sion. Real communication was difficult in any event because we
didn't feel able to discuss Jane's chances realistically with her.
We
wanted to appear hopeful and encouraging, and this probably
further irritated Jane when she was struggling to face the truth.
She no longer mentioned rheumatism.
She was receiving no treatment at this time. Her
second dose
of chemotherapy had proved to be almost as bad as the first. The
third course was not due for more than a week. Her rare remarks
about these treatments made it possible to glimpse her deepest
feelings. Rosemary, trying to get her to talk about the future,
said: "If you do get another tumour, then you won't have to go
through chemotherapy again." Jane replied flatly: "I'd rather
go on with chemotherapy and not have cancer, thank you." Ap-
parently she assumed that if another tumour appeared, further
operations would be useless and only radiation and chemotherapy
might help her. She knew the difference between the two—radia-
tion would be directed at a particular tumour to shrink it and
thus lessen the pain. But if the pain still continued, she seemed to
conclude, this would prove that the treatment had failed, and
then she would have no hope.
Not all Jane's assumptions were correct. Continued
pain, for
instance, would not necessarily mean that these two treatments
had failed, for neither could succeed overnight. But to discuss this
with her was difficult without raising the spectre of death—and
that was a subject we carefully avoided at that time, though there
were signs it was much on her mind.
Jane sometimes had to fight off nightmares by staying awake;
but often the thoughts that came to her while she was awake were
worse than the dreams. Was that why she had retired behind her
wall of silence?
At home, when nightmares and pain tortured her in
the night,
one of us would get up to talk with her. But in the hospital
there was no one to stay with her during the night. She was al-
lowed to spend a weekend at home, yet now, in her withdrawn
state, she came out of the hospital reluctantly, retired upstairs,
and had little to say to us. But friends delighted her, and sounds
of
talking and laughter would come through the closed door. Then,
when the visitors left, silence would once more take over.
One night at home, seeing her light was on, Victor
brought her
a fresh lemon drink, and gradually they started talking. Rosemary
heard their voices and joined them. A conversation with Jane was
too rare to be missed these days. Jane talked of the pain, of how
they weren't able to do anything for her at the hospital, of how
unhappy she was.
This gave Victor the opening he wanted. "I know how
worry-
ing all this must be to you now, Jane, until they can establish
precisely what is causing the pain."
"Yes, I wish they could do something about it," she
answered,
as if to say that she, too, didn't think it was due to cancer.
If he had experienced as much pain as she had, over as long a
period, Victor said, he didn't know how he could have put up
with it. He spoke of her endurance, her courage. She listened im-
passively. He recalled her second operation, which took place
when he was in Washington, and told her how much he re-
gretted not being with her then.
"Mum told me how you talked then about the possibility
of
dying and how you were prepared to accept it," he went on.
"It helps sometimes to talk about things—shall we
talk now?"
"No, there's nothing more to say," she said sharply.
He tried again another way. "We know how hard it is for
you to speak to us these days. It's natural when things are so
difficult. We thought we'd ask Richard to come over."
"No, I don't want Richard now."
"You know, Jane," Rosemary put in, "how good Richard
is at
finding things out from the doctors? Dad says he's got no skill
at this game."
"It isn't information I need. I just want them to
do something.
If Richard comes over now, I'll know I'm dying. That'll be why
you've asked him to fly back. I don't want him here."
She couldn't have spoken more plainly. She wasn't
ready to
die, she didn't want to talk about it, and she didn't want to be
made to think that she might be dying. Her silences, her with-
drawal from us, began to look like a defence against being told
something she didn't want to hear. Our hospital visits were a
constant reminder of what Victor had blurted out—that she was
dying. By driving us away from her, she perhaps would avoid any
confirmation of her deepest suspicions that this might be true.
So far the new tests had revealed nothing. The doctors refused
to commit themselves. There was no evidence of a tumour, and
some of them, when asked, did not rule out rheumatism as a pos-
sibility. If we wanted to deceive ourselves, they were willing
to help. They urged us to distract her, to stop her brooding about
cancer. Take her shopping, said one doctor. Get her a lovely new
dress. Another suggested a trip to Paris. "There's a young man in
the next ward who did just that. He went on holiday to France to
enjoy himself, to forget everything—and it worked."
Their attitude came close to telling Jane that she
was making
a fuss over nothing, that her pain wasn't as bad as she claimed.
"You sit there with a long face all the time," said one doctor
to Victor. "It doesn't do anyone any good." There was a danger
that Jane would see in our patience with her bitchiness merely
pity—and confirmation that her time was up.
We knew something of her thoughts from what she told
other
visitors, but she was selective in what she said to them.
She
sensed that some thought she was dying, and to those she would
acknowledge in a matter-of-fact way that she, too, knew the
truth. But she would insist that she hadn't given up hope, that she
was determined to fight on, that there was chemotherapy, radia-
tion, and perhaps other treatments which might help.
To those who didn't want to know, she would talk
casually
about everyday things, about her surroundings, about what was
happening in their own lives. With them she was amiable, pleasant,
composed, almost lighthearted at times.
Sometimes these friends acted as go-betweens. To
James, a
writer and an old family friend who had done much to encourage
Jane's early ambitions as a poet, she spoke not only of her own
suffering but also of what it was doing to her parents. Tanva,
who had been seriously ill herself and still suffered considerable
pain, quickly established an understanding with Jane on the basis
of shared experience. But Tanya was also a mother, with a grown-
up daughter, and she was therefore able to convey to Jane some-
thing of our own feelings about her rejection of us. Jane's remarks
to these friends were reported back to us, as she knew they would
be. Sometimes her messages were conciliatory; sometimes they
were angry and bitter. When neither of us came one day, she
told James that we must both be "worn out." She knew she was
putting us under too much strain, she said, and she was con-
cerned about us.
"I do like to see them every day," she said, "but
I sometimes
behave so badly. There are times I feel angry and take it out on
them. I'm aware I'm doing it."
She blamed it on the drugs, which made her constipated
and
irritable. "They're the only people I can treat naturally, and
they'll still come back. If I'm ever going to get through this, it's
not by being goody-goody and accepting it all. I must fight it,
resist it . . . Being a bitch sometimes gives me the strength to
fight. It's the same as when someone says, 'Fuck you.' It's mean-
ingless, really, but . . . Well, there's a line in Shakespeare some-
where I remember from school. It 'screws your courage to the
sticking place' to get angry sometimes. Fuck you, cancer!"
To another visitor she acknowledged none of this, and expressed
mainly anger at her parents. If they had to visit her, they should
do so and then go, not hang around the hospital endlessly. Yes,
she did turn her head deliberately to the wall when they came,
because she didn't want them there. She was infuriated when they
wouldn't take the hint and leave. They were a drain on her
strength. Then, as if aware this might be hurtful, she sought to
soften her remarks. She wanted to see them, but she didn't want
to take up all their time. They had their own lives to live.
What were we to make of these conflicting messages?
Did she
need Victor there as a whipping boy, as she seemed to imply to
James, or was our presence as burdensome as she had made out
to others? We knew that much of her attitude grew out of "dis-
placement anger," as it was called in the books about dying which
we had been reading for crumbs of comfort and advice. But it was
still hard to accept.
One afternoon Rosemary stood by Jane's bed, looking
out of
the window and wondering what on earth she could say to break
the long silence. Jane was reading a book—or more likely pre-
tending to. Suddenly she spoke without looking up. "Mum, I
think you'd better go, and stay away for a day or two."
It was the first time she had said it in so many words. Rosemary
answered in the same matter-of-fact flat voice, "Do you want
Dad to come?"
"No, you'd better both stay away."
Rosemary felt as if something had snapped inside her. The
rejection was out in the open. She kissed Jane's unresponsive
cheek, and told her to get someone to phone if she changed her
mind.
She walked fast, very fast, down the long corridor,
down the
endless staircases. She found a phone and called Victor.
He was aghast. "You haven't left her, have you? You can't.
You mustn't. She needs us. Remember that book we read? It says
that love and support must continue in the face of rejection. The
book says . . ."
"I don't care what the book says! If I'm told to
go, I go. How
can I possibly stay? "
She left the hospital and turned through the crowded
streets
to a nearby park. She walked about for an hour, crying silently
until she felt able to go home.
A message from the hospital awaited her there. A
friend who'd
been visiting Jane reported that she'd like to see Rosemary and
Victor the next day.
Yet when we arrived next morning, there was no smile,
no
apology. She was polite, that was all. Most of our attempts at
conversation were rebuffed. She asked Victor icily why he looked
so glum. When he tried to be cheerful, she told him to stop
pretending.
"Do you want me to leave?" he asked, irritated.
"Yes, and you'd better stay away."
He managed to restrain his anger, but on the way
home he
shot the traffic lights and almost collided with another car. So
that was how she was repaying everything they had done for her.
It was time they took a stand, made it clear they wouldn't put up
with her rudeness. She didn't want to see them? All right, she
wouldn't! That would teach her a quick, sharp lesson.
Eventually he cooled down. One of the books we were reading
was On Death and Dying by Elizabeth Kiibler-Ross, who summed
up our own situation when she spoke of patients who received
their families' visits with little cheerfulness and anticipation. This,
she commented, could make the encounter a very painful event.
The family would either respond with grief and tears, guilt or
shame, or avoid future visits, which would only increase the
patient's discomfort or anger.
We both understood and were prepared for this, but
when it
happened the knowledge didn't alleviate our distress.
Kubler-Ross had written: "The tragedy is perhaps that we do
not think of the reasons for the patient's anger and take it per-
sonally, when it has originally little or nothing to do with the
people who become the target of the anger. As the staff or family
react personally to this anger, however, they respond with increas-
ing anger on their part, only feeding into the patient's hostile
behaviour." Victor had read this passage several times, yet he had
still taken Jane's attitude personally. He felt angry not
at Jane
but at himself.
The book was useful, however. Kubler-Ross wrote of
the grief,
shame and guilt felt by the family of a dying patient. The process
of grief always included some qualities of anger. "And who, in
anger, had not at times wished someone would disappear, go
away, or even dared to say: 'Drop dead'?"
It helped us to know that our feelings were not unique,
even if
it didn't help us to contain our anger. It wasn't something we
could easily discuss with others. The doctors were mainly con-
cerned with the physical aspects of the disease, and even the most
sympathetic, helpful ones rarely had time for the kind of relaxed
conversation that would allow us to bring our feelings into the
open. Nor was it easy to tell friends how angry we sometimes felt.
The books which dealt with such problems were helpful to us,
but could also be misleading. Too great a reliance on the printed
word proved dangerous, although on balance we gained under-
standing, comfort and practical advice from such books.
At first we insisted on sitting with Jane and sharing
her silences,
thinking we were doing what was best for her. When the silences
turned into an angry rejection, we went back to Kiibler-Ross.
She wrote of patients who were depressed and morbidly uncom-
municative until spoken to frankly about the terminal stage of
their illness. "Their spirits were lightened, they began to eat again,
and a few were discharged once more. . . ." So we tried to speak
to Jane frankly, but she rebuffed our efforts to talk about dying.
Had we misread the signals or had we misread the book?
Both, probably. No two human beings respond in exactly the
same way. Kubler-Ross had not made it clear enough that the
various stages identified in the book need not follow in the strict
order in which she described them, and that the various aspects of
dying may be present in any of the stages. Each patient is an
individual who makes his or her own pattern of dying. We would
have been spared worry if we had known this at the start.
We were beginning to concede that there was no hope, and
that all we could do was to help Jane to accept her lot. But our
attempts were useless without real communication. Painful efforts
to reach her were usually less direct than Victor's invitation to get
her to talk about dying. The wall of silence was up. But behind
it, what was Jane thinking? Did
she believe Victor had now
given up hope while she was fighting on? Did she feel, What's
the point of talking to them?
But if Jane was growing further away from her parents,
to
others she was becoming closer. Kate, a friend from university
days, visited her regularly. Due to go on holiday to Paris, Kate
told us later of the day she came to say goodbye. She walked with
Jane to the corridor window. There they watched the movement
of people and traffic in the street below, comings and goings that
seemed to have no purpose at that distance. They were in real
harmony, and even smoked a cigarette together, puff for puff.
Kate thought this more the kind of thing that lovers did—an
action symbolic of closeness and understanding—a one-to-oneness,
a statement of intimacy. Kate and Jane had known these periods
before, but never had the feeling been so deep and emotional.
Jane reached out impulsively to kiss her friend goodbye—and
Jane had always been undemonstrative. Kate wondered if that
kiss had been merely a farewell on the eve of her holiday depar-
ture or whether it was intended as a final goodbye. She went
home with a deep unhappiness, a feeling she would never see
Jane again. When she reached Paris she spent a long time choos-
ing a postcard and then searching for words that, combined with
the picture, would convey something of what she felt. The card
never reached Jane. It was lost either in the post or in the net-
work of hospital mail.
Michael's visits were less successful. He brought
a friend, Ruth,
with him, and it seemed to Rosemary, watching one such en-
counter, that Jane minded very much. (She was not to reveal
her feelings about this until much later.)
The third dose of chemotherapy would be due soon,
and we
clung to the hope that this time it wouldn't be so bad. Other
patients didn't suffer so much, we were told. One woman came
for an injection, lay down for an hour, then went home to look
after her family. Another woman, who had felt as ill as Jane in
the beginning, was soon able to go back to work while still re-
ceiving treatment. Research was producing new drugs with less
toxic side effects. Only a few years ago, they told Jane, her reac-
tion would probably have been much worse.
She didn't ask us to leave again—at times we thought
we
could see something like pity in her eyes as she looked at us.
The tone of the messages that friends passed on was different now.
Yes, we did sometimes make her angry, because our presence
reminded her of everything she would lose if she didn't get better.
She was coming close to acknowledging that she might have to
give up. "If I do die," she told James with a laugh, "I'll miss my
rows with Dad."
It wasn't only her parents who were going to lose
her and
were mourning the loss in advance. Jane was now anticipating the
grief of parting, suffering her own loss of parents, because they
would be dead, to her, once she was gone. She worried about
what would happen to us—she had been prepared to nurse us
when we became ill, to look after us when we grew old. How
would we manage if she wasn't there? But these were thoughts
she shared with friends, not us.
This new tenderness—or an old tenderness become newly
ap-
parent-still alternated with the flashes of anger that had distressed
us so much when she first returned to the hospital. Why was she
like that, why, we kept asking our friends. The answer that moved
us most seemed at first too far-fetched to believe; but the more
we thought about it, the more sense it made. She knew how much
we loved her, how difficult we would find it to bear her loss. She
knew that the more loving she was now, the greater our heart-
ache would be later, the longer it would last. But if she could
cut herself off from us, act out fully the anger she was feeling,
make us bear the brunt of it, then perhaps we might see her as
she really was. And we would grieve less for her.
"What Jane is saying to you is, 'Look what a monster
I am,' "
James told us.
"She tried to make you feel you had failed her, so
you'd dislike
her," another friend said.
From the hints Jane dropped, we concluded that this
might well
be part of the explanation. Jane had been cruel in order to be
kind. Perhaps. But she had also been cruel with the selfishness of
one hopelessly ill, who cares nothing for the feelings of others.
If she knew she was dying, that explained everything and justified
everything.
And it seemed as if she finally did know. The knowledge
had
come to her gradually, even while she denied it. The most the
doctors said now was, "There is no reason to lose hope." What
it seemed to mean was that hope was on the way out—and Jane
was aware of it.
Yet the tests had disclosed no new outbreak of the
cancer. Jane
was still excreting cancer cells in her urine, but that was not
unusual after an operation, and the chemotherapy treatment was
designed to deal with it. But she felt the cancer was still in her.
"I don't think of it as Big C," she told James. "I think of it as
lots of little Cs, nibbling away inside like rats in a sack of grain.
Or like life growing the wrong way—inward instead of outward."
James wondered if the time might be right to try to bring her
closer to her parents. He suspected that he knew just how bad
things were, and he thought they should reach a better under-
standing before the end, which might come fast. So he told her
she had been very bitchy, especially with Victor.
"I know," she said. "But that's what I am. There's
a bitch in
me. I don't want Dad, or Mum, or anyone I'm really close to, to
think that I'm better than I am. I believe you have to fight, literally
fight, for a close understanding with another person. It's a struggle
for the truth, really. I want people to tell me the truth, to respect
me that much. Of course, when you're feeling bad, the people
close to you are the only ones you really trust with telling how
awful you feel, and that's hard on them. When I act like a bitch
towards people, it's instead of screaming. I'm not hiding any-
thing. I'm not pretending. If I'm going to die, I want to know."
When James told us about this conversation, we found
it
easier to live with Jane's rejection. It was also more difficult to
keep the truth from her; but what was the truth? Yes, we thought
she was going to die, she might even be dying now, but the doc-
tors insisted there was some hope of remission that could give her
at least a few more years. "There is no reason to lose hope," they
kept repeating, as they recalled some of the remissions they had
known. There was the man, said one doctor, who had been oper-
ated upon but still had a pain afterwards, and continued to excrete
cancer cells, and then had a successful course of chemotherapy.
He was able to go back to his job driving a London double-decker
bus. He came in for checkups, and it wasn't until eight years later
that he had to have another operation. "When we opened him up,
he was all black with cancer inside, but he'd had eight years of
useful life." No, they insisted again, so long as they had not found
something definite, there was no reason to lose hope. We had
been ready to accept that all was over, and then fresh promise
seemed to appear, like a mirage.
Jane shared something of the same attitude. At one
moment
she was telling James that she wanted the whole truth; at another
she was saying that she didn't want to give up—having made it
clear that even to talk of the possibility of death was to surrender.
So James supported her in a feeling of hope. He talked of the
fallibility of doctors, of his own recent illness in New York when
the doctor hadn't been able to spot his simple hepatitis though his
face was yellow. "A doctor's knowledge is still very sketchy,"
he told her. "The human body is half a mystery."
"That's how I feel," said Jane. "It's very important
to think
positively and not give up. The mind's control over the body's
functions can be so strong. I don't want my body to be cut up.
I don't want to be drugged out of my mind. I want my body to
have every chance to cope with what's wrong. A plant that's
hurt sometimes successfully grows over the wound. So do some
animals, like cockroaches. Their bodies can go on with all kinds
of growth when they escape from a human attack. I want to give
my body a chance."
But she also talked about how her body had failed
her mind,
and James felt she might be willing herself to accept that she was
going to die soon.
Rosemary still groped for an opening to tell her
the truth she
seemed to demand.
"How can you bear to go on with so much suffering
all the
time?" she asked her once. But instead of admitting that she'd
given up hope, Jane said: "Mum, I can remember what it was like
before." There was no answer to this, and Jane showed no desire
to talk about it further.
She had always been fastidious. When she hadn't been
able to
keep herself clean, either the nurses or Rosemary helped her to
do so. But now there was nothing visibly wrong with her body,
and as far as the nurses could tell, she was able to get up to go
to the washroom. They knew about her pain—she'd complained
often enough—but it wasn't incapacitating, and they wanted to
encourage her to do as much for herself as she could. So they
didn't offer to help her wash, and she didn't ask them. When
Rosemary offered to do so, Jane curtly declined. When Victor
urged her to wash Jane, Rosemary retorted that this wasn't the
time to infringe her liberties. She had so few.
So Jane lay there unwashed. She didn't even brush
her teeth..
The smell embarrassed Victor. One day he apologised to a doctor
who had just been examining Jane. "She's so weak," he said, "she
hardly opens her mouth to eat, let alone do her teeth."
"We're used to smell," the doctor reassured him cheerfully.
But he didn't tell the nurses to clean Jane up.
When she made some particularly wounding remark to Victor,
he wanted to tell her, "Jane, your breath smells, do something
about it," but he stopped himself. She always managed to have
the last word. When he finally did remark, "Jane, you're behaving
like a bitch," she smiled at him for the first time in days—a sweet,
almost coquettish smile—and said, "But I am a bitch!"
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