Cancer treatment is brutal and toxic. Louise would normally be treated with steroids, massive doses to induce remission. When her spleen started to enlarge she might have splenic irridation or even a splenectomy. By then she would be badly anaemic, suffering from deep bruising and bleeding, tired and in pain most of the time. She would be constipated. She would be vomiting and nauseous. Eventually chemotherapy would contribute to failure of her bone marrow. She would be very thin, my beautiful girl, thin and weary and lost. There is no cure for chronic lymphocytic leukaemia.

Louise came home her face shining with frost. There was a deep glow in her cheeks, her lips were icy when she kissed me. She pushed her frozen hands under my shirt and held them against my back like two branding irons. She was chattering about the cold and the stars and how clear the sky was and the moon hung in an icicle from the roof of the world.

I didn’t want to cry, I wanted to talk to her calmly and gently. But I did cry, fast hot tears falling on to her cold skin, scalding her with my misery. Unhappiness is selfish, grief is selfish. For whom are the tears? Perhaps it can be no other way.

‘Elgin’s been here,’ I said. ‘He told me you have cancer of the blood.’

‘It’s not serious.’ She said this quickly. What did she expect me to do?

‘Cancer’s not serious?’

‘I’m asymptomatic.’

‘Why didn’t you tell me? Couldn’t you have told me?’

‘It’s not serious.’

There is a silence between us for the first time. I want to be angry with her now. I was pent-up with rage.

‘I was waiting for the results. I’ve had some more tests done. I haven’t got the results yet.’

‘Elgin has, he says you don’t want to know.’

‘I don’t trust Elgin. I’m having a second opinion.’

I was staring at her, my fists clenched so that I could dig my nails into my palms. When I looked at her I saw Elgin’s square spectacled face. Not Louise’s curved lips but his triumphant mouth.

‘Shall I tell you about it?’ she said.

In the hours of the night until the sky turned blue-black, then pearl grey, until the weak winter sun broke on us, we lay in one another’s arms wrapped in a travel rug and she told me what she feared and I told her my fears. She would not go back to Elgin, of that she was adamant. She knew a great deal about the disease and I would learn. We would face it together. Brave words and comfort to us both who needed comfort in the small cold room that compassed our life that night. We were setting out with nothing and Louise was ill. She was confident that any costs could be met from her settlement. I was not so sure but too tired and too relieved to go further that night. To reach one another again had been far enough.