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9

I had a gap of ten days before my consultations with Professor Robert and the all-important anaesthetist, on the afternoon before surgery.

John left for a short visit to his mother in Scotland. I was tired, and elected to stay in Nantes. The holiday season was under way. The sun was out, the streets were crowded and the canopied restaurants and brasseries beckoned. I wanted to linger over a sidewalk pain au raisin and café, the mild breeze ruffling my hair, swirling the steam from my cup, but I didn't feel brave enough to stand alone at a table. I walked to the castle—site of the signing of the Edict of Nantes—only to find the bridge across the moat blocked because maintenance was in progress. On the way back to the hotel, I lit a candle in the cool, neo-Gothic Basilica of St Nicholas and read Cardinal Newman's 'Ce que tu voudras', which I selected from the pile of coincidentally coloured Minor Green, Medium Yellow and Severe Pink leaflets.

My cousin in Toulouse phoned. 'When John returns, come down,' he said. 'We'll take you to the country and escape the heat.'

I lay on the bed reading Robert Hass's translation of The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke. In 'O Lacrimosa', Rilke had written:

Ah, but the winters! The earth's mysterious
turning-within …
Where imagination occurs
beneath what is rigid; where all the green
worn thin by the vast summers
again turns into a new
insight and the mirror of intuition

From time to time I stood in my strappy sandals and updated my diary on the laptop which I'd positioned on the dressing table on top of the shoebox; where I also ate takeaway pastries and tartines— watching myself in the mirror.

The only television channel in English endlessly repeated news stories about the armed theft, from an Oslo museum, of Munch's The Scream; and the tallest living man who plucks the sweetest apples from page 23the highest trees, struggles to live life at ground level and said from Ukraine, 'I must adapt to the world rather than the world to me.'

On the weather front, the east coast of Scotland was covered by a haar, and southwest Europe was having a heat wave.

The French channels carried footage of the Pope's visit to Lourdes. Jean Paul II was shown nearing the ivy-covered Grotto of Apparitions on his mobile throne. Pilgrims applauded and reached forward to absorb divine radiance. A nun spoke directly to camera about his courageous example, and a former nurse with a back injury said with conviction that she had 'a lot of faith in a cure'.

'If the Pope remains afflicted,' I said to the screen, 'how can I expect any improvement?'

I watched the long lines of pain. More than three decades earlier I had trained as a nurse. Although steroids and anti-inflammatory drugs were slowly making inroads into the treatment of debilitating inflammatory conditions, including the various forms of arthritis, derivatives and permutations of the ancient poppy had not been superseded in the management of terminal and other great physical pain. Advances had, however, been made in the delivery of relief: the constancy of Patient Controlled Analgesia units, for example, had replaced four-hourly injections for surgical and terminally ill patients; and epidural anaesthesia, which had revolutionised childbirth, could be substituted for general anaesthetics in abdominal and lower limb surgery and continued in the ward, or commenced during general anaesthesia, numbing the area even as the operation took place.

I remembered a woman I had nursed through the final stages of breast cancer: her name, her darkened room; her fragility and bone thin body as I sponged her, and held her against me when, unable to use a bed pan, she had made her way to the toilets. During visiting hours her husband had sat beside her bed, his head bent, asking, 'Is it time for her next injection?' When he wasn't there she had called for it as I went to and fro past her room, also longing for the regulated moment when I could unlock the Dangerous Drugs cupboard, draw up the morphine, administer the harsh intramuscular needle.

I called up my own foretaste of pain at fifteen when, following major abdominal surgery, I had learnt that empathy and a lightness of touch are not inherent in nurses; and later, perusing my medical page 24record, that the injections that had not diffused their customary soothing warmth had contained sterile water, lest I become addicted to pethidine.

I thought about my brother, four years on, aged eighteen, dying of motorcycle injuries and rare, undiagnosed gas gangrene, asking me, as a student nurse, why the injections for the escalating pain in the stump of his amputated leg were not working.

My mother had passed away in a hospice, in the twilight sleep of a continuous morphine pump. But all may not have been as it seemed. Earlier in the course of the cancer, an idiosyncratic response to morphine had seen her hallucinate in an unbreakable nightmare. When the medication was stopped and the world returned to normal, she had preferred pain to the side effects of relief. She had asked me to watch her closely when she needed the morphine pump again, at the end. She had seemed peaceful, but what, I had agonised, of her state of mind and hidden dreams?

The next evening I couldn't find the peaches I'd bought at the supermarket. The following morning two glass tumblers were missing. In the wake of the testing, and alone in the hotel, pain, the opportunist, no longer needed, was trying to run away with me.