Ellen went back home today and I know that John’s missing her already. The way she is with him - I’m strangely envious. She lays a hand on his arm, so easily, so quietly, and he looks up and smiles. I’ve watched them sitting out on the deck as I clear the kitchen and they sit in a circle of easy companionship, which at the moment I feel with neither of them. Yet why should John feel that way with someone like Ellen — she’s a forty-one-year-old woman? He knows nothing about her. But that’s Ellen’s gift - she can absorb other people’s fear. She hasn’t absorbed all of mine but enough of it to enable me to live from day to day.

John asked me the other night, as I tucked him into bed and sat with him for a while (which I always do — let it not be said that I didn’t learn my lessons when my face disappeared), what is wrong with her. He knows there is something wrong, as if he has acquired a sixth sense, or in his case shall we say a different sense to replace the one that was lost? An acuity that others lack.

‘She has cancer. Breast cancer.’

‘Is that bad?’

‘Yes.’ I smoothed his candlewick bedspread so I didn’t have to look in his eyes. I may have learned many lessons but I’m still not sure when I should lie to my son.

‘Will she die?’ John’s blue-blue eyes were fixed on mine.

‘No — well, she will, we all will. But not right now.’

‘If we like her enough, maybe love her enough, will that stop it?’

‘It can’t hurt, can it?’ I heard myself and smiled. Love can’t hurt?

‘So what happened to her?’ John inched himself up and leaned back against the pillows.

‘She had to have one of her breasts removed because that’s where the disease was. That’s when I met her — when you were in hospital and she was there at the same time. But now it’s gone and she should be OK.’

John looked out of the window at scudding, pale-moon-lit clouds. ‘I like her.’

‘Good. So do I.’

He looked back to the clouds, watched them fleece the moon, and then turned back to me. ‘When I’m with her I don’t care. Y’know, about all this.’ He stroked the scars on his jaw. ‘It’s like she doesn’t see them.’

I smiled again. ‘I don’t think she does.’

John stared at his hands working, flexing, along the edge of the bedspread. ‘Does she see yours?’

‘No.’

‘Can I touch them?’ I nodded and he reached out and felt my face, his fingers cool.

There are places on my face where I cannot feel, where the dermis and hypodermis are too damaged to be sensitive, the nerves’ fine connection to my brain severed. When I was in London, visiting John in Tommy’s, I read as many medical journals and books as I could find, about deafness, about skin damage and repair. I wanted to know why my bones hurt where they mended, why I couldn’t feel my face, what had happened to John’s hearing, whether he would ever be able to walk without a limp. I asked doctors and specialists to explain to me what had happened to us and what we could expect. At first they brushed me aside, patronised me.