Be Near Me

I KNEW HE WAS ILL. To argue otherwise would be pointless.

He telephoned me one Sunday morning. The sun was out, the birds were singing, and the world was as fresh as lettuce on television. Someone was mowing their lawn. There would be many more lawn-mowing days.

I was in the kitchen, squeezing myself some orange juice. A glass of freshly squeezed juice, a croissant, the Times crossword, and the sun filtering through the dirty kitchen skylight. Oh, what a perfect morning!

And then the telephone.

With Hamish, even his ring could sound commanding. He’d just left a doctor’s office in London — a Harley Street doctor’s office, I was sure. I could hear the hush of expensive care in the background, and then Hamish’s voice booming in my ear.

“You finally awake, then? About time. I’ve been calling for hours.”

I muttered something untrue about a late meeting the night before.

“You are a liar,” he said sunnily. “It’s ok. I know you stay in bed till obscene hours on the weekend.”

“So . . .”

“Look,” Hamish said, “what I called to say is . . . Hey, can you be very brave?”

“Uh . . .”

“The thing is, I’m dying.”

So I cannot say I didn’t know.

Nevertheless it all happened much faster than I’d anticipated. He was hospitalized within weeks and lived for a month and a half. I visited him during the second week, bringing grapes and a bundle of National Geographic magazines. He was very thin but otherwise didn’t look too bad. The sort of cancer he had (pancreatic) wasn’t an ugly one — at least, it didn’t make him look ugly. Yet he was dying. I said I’d come to see him every day after that, but the next week turned out to be a hectic one, and also the week after.

Ten days later Inna phoned me. She was one of my few friends, this in spite of the fact that she had been Hamish’s girlfriend before me. But that had all been a long time ago. Hamish was now engaged to Karen, and we were — all three of us women — good friends. It was the only civilized way to behave, we often said.

“Hamish won’t last much longer,” Inna said on the telephone. “I think he’d quite like to see a bit more of you.”

We arranged to go to the hospital together that night. She’d pick me up at six. I spent the day marking students’ algebra tests, and by the time I’d finished, I was utterly exhausted. When Inna arrived, I walked with her to the car and then paused, hand on the passenger-door handle. “You know what?” I said. “I don’t think I’ll come with you tonight after all. I’m just so tired. Hamish won’t want to see me if I’m this tired.”

Inna gave me her look. How to explain this look? Her parents were Ukrainian Jews, and somewhere behind her softspoken exterior, her tan slacks and white cotton blouse and neatly polished shoes, are whispers of Kiev and Jerusalem; of one of the most tormented peoples on earth; of a country Stalin forced into starvation. You see all of that when Inna gives you her look.

“Suit yourself,” she said, and off she went.

When she showed up again the next day, I rushed out of the house to meet her.

“I’m going to see Hamish this morning!” I said giddily. “I’m just going now, if you want to come with me.”

“No point,” Inna said.

“What do you mean?”

“He’s dead. He died last night.”

In moments of stress the foolish question always comes first to mind. “Are you sure?” I asked.

Inna almost laughed. “There isn’t much doubt about it.”

“Oh, no,” I said. “I was going to see him again — and I didn’t.”

Inna smiled wanly. “Never mind.”

“I feel terrible,” I said, as though this were important.

A few minutes later we sat drinking coffee in my kitchen. “His mother was there, and Karen of course,” said Inna. “And Hamish mentioned you, like, a few hours before he died. Just before he went to sleep.”

“Mentioned me?”

“Yeah. Nothing special. He just asked where you were.”

“Where I was?”

Inna shrugged. “Like I told you: he kept talking about how he really wanted to see you.”

“What do you mean, ‘Like I told you’?” I felt the heat rising to my face. “When did you tell me that? You never . . . Why didn’t you? Why didn’t you tell me?”

Inna sighed like a woman who’d been waiting twenty years for a bus. “I did. I said he wanted to see you.”

“No, you didn’t. You said that you thought he’d quite like to see a bit more of me.”

“I don’t think that’s quite what I —”

“That’s exactly what you said.”

“Anyway it’s practically the same thing.”

“No, it isn’t. It’s nothing nearly as important as him actually saying he wanted to see me.”

Inna sipped her coffee daintily. Outside, the sun pierced the clouds and shone across the houses, and the sky became clean and blue. It was all irrelevant.

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