Jeremy Clarke
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‘Anything else?’ Not really, I said. She quickly examined me with her stethoscope and made me show her my tongue. Then she went away and a nurse came in and connected me to a tube leading upwards to a suspended bag of jollop.
While she was fiddling with the connections, she said with emotion: ‘I adore your accent. As a child my dream was to marry a man with a strong regional accent who wore glasses.’ ‘And did you?’ I said. ‘No. I married a Burgundian with no regional accent and perfect eyesight.’ I said that I was sorry to hear it. ‘And you? Did you have a childhood dream?’ she said as she opened the little tap. ‘No,’ I said.
Then the doctor returned and made a portentous speech larded with French medical terms. The tone and manner suggested that she was telling me something significant about the progress of my cancer. But she gabbled it and I couldn’t understand a word or even whether it was good news or bad. ‘Look,’ I said. ‘My French is not great. Can you put it in simpler terms and speak more slowly?’ But she was taking no prisoners and rattled off her statement as uncompromisingly as before. ‘Understand?’ she said peevishly. I did not. And I had had quite enough of French conversation for the moment so I gave her my well-honed ambiguous nod. She regarded me sceptically. But she was far too busy to repeat herself a third time, thank the Lord, and she departed.
You learn eventually to sit lightly on the question of how much longer you have to go, and I reached with relief for my book, an anthology of prose and poetry chosen by John Bayley. I can’t read Dickens’s novels; I just can’t. But occasionally I come across an anthologised short comic extract — Bayley’s was taken from David Copperfield, where the boy is made to drink a sherry toast to Brooks of Sheffield — which makes me feel so joyful that I resolve to try one again. After my laughing out loud had subsided, it occurred to me that, although I don’t look forward to these chemotherapy sessions, I do on the whole rather enjoy them.
Afterwards Virginie was waiting outside in the taxi. ‘There’s been a bad motorway accident,’ she said. ‘We’ll have to return by the back roads.’ About halfway along the route of this tediously long diversion, I was surprised when she stopped outside a secondary school to pick up her youngest daughter. The little minx slid in beside me on the back seat and immediately commenced a diatribe against her mother using wonderfully expressive French hand gestures for emphases. The accusations continued without ceasing for the rest of the journey. Very glad I had brought them, I restored my noise-cancelling headphones, and the blues, and greatly enjoyed the chiaroscuro effect of the orange evening sunlight on the folds and crevices of the slowly passing Mont Sainte-Victoire
Because you read about cancer
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