‘I can’t have cancer, I’ve had my hair done’

When Genevieve Fox found a lump in her neck she didn’t take it seriously. Then she had to tell her young sons that she was ill

EACH TIME I IMAGINE MYSELF telling the boys I have cancer, Mother photobombs the scene. I picture them sitting either side of me on the big sofa in the kitchen and there she is, at the far end of it, looking just like she did the last time I saw her alive. Her brown hair is schoolgirl long and scratchy as a daddy-long-legs, some of it tied at the back with a ribbon. Her crisp kindling wrists are poking out of the sleeves of her floral cotton nightie, a plastic wristband on one of them. The only difference between now and the last time I saw her, in the nursing home in Brighton, is that back then she was propped up on pillows as puffy as her stomach, which bulged through the sheets, fat with victorious cancer cells. Now she’s perching on the arm of the sofa, unsupported but still in her nightie, waiting for me to speak.

I can’t speak. I don’t want to frighten the boys, and how can they not be frightened? Once I’ve told them, there will be no going back to a time when the world was steady. Once I’ve told them, they will think I am going to die. Mother was ill and she told me she was going to get better – and then she died just the same. Too bad. It is time for Richard and me to do our duty as parents and shatter their world. Also, if I do tell them sooner rather than later, I can say I am going to be all right which, though technically untrue in the absence of a prognosis, isn’t a blatant lie. After the prognosis, whatever it may be, I don’t want to lie to them. There’s a practical consideration, too. In four days’ time I am having exploratory surgery in my neck so the oncology team can check for cancer cells in my lymph nodes and decide on a treatment plan. The procedure will entail a day and a night in hospital, with the possibility of full-on surgery the following week. I can’t spring that shock on them. Besides, the strain of withholding the truth is making my skull ache. It is getting hard to talk to the boys about anything, knowing what I am holding back.

In the end, though, Richard and I decide to put off the announcement for a bit longer. Three more days pass and it gets to Friday, the day before the hospital stay, and we still don’t tell them. Instead I mention that I am going out with Julia, a univer-

sity friend and Reuben’s godmother, who is over from Madrid, and that I will be staying the night with her in Brixton. Why do you have to stay over, Bassy asks. It’s a fair point. We’re going dancing, I say, we’re hitting the town. Hitting the town. This isn’t a phrase I ever use; I sound like a suburban ’50s housewife let out for the night.

The needle for the general anaesthetic goes in and the next thing I know, I am in hospital, entombed in starched sheets. I sniff the pastel air and through the big windows to my right I can only see sky. A lilac antimicrobial privacy curtain forms a dividing wall to my left; a noise like a spluttering train is coming from the other side of it. The other half of the curtain is stacked back on the overhead rail, leaving me on display like a performance artist. The patient directly opposite is looking straight at me, waiting for me to do something, to make a noise myself, perhaps. Who knows how long she has been waiting for me to come round.

I call Richard and tell him all is well, then I sit and stare, sit and doze. I am shocked to find myself here, alone, in a hospital bed. During the night the spluttering train keeps spluttering, and in the morning I go to the bathroom and glance at where the noise came from and see a lady patient in the bed next to mine with a hole in her throat.

Julia arrives promptly at 8am with an almond croissant, which I wolf down. The consultant is impressed; most throats wouldn’t tolerate a croissant following the surgery, he says, and I purr. Instinctively, I want to be a good patient and do well at the small things, in the subconscious belief that it will bode well for the final outcome.

Some time between the consultant’s visit and being discharged, a Catholic priest floats past the beds. He is in costume – black suit, surplice, dog collar.

I sit up, to show how alive I am. ‘Morning, Father.’ He can keep his last rites to himself. ‘Oh. Morning.’ Father Whoever-he-is sounds caught out, as if he wasn’t expecting to find himself here. I know how he feels.

He is hovering by the window, his expression neither smiling nor grievous

– a study in openness. Julia, who stood up when he arrived, remains standing. We watch as he reaches for the hand sanitiser on the wall and rubs his hands together. Priests do that these days, before Communion, but I don’t think he should do it now, in front of the living and the perhaps-dying.

‘Hello. I’m Julia.’ She steps towards him and offers her hand. The handshake, she tells me later, is limp, which does not surprise me. His entire physique is concave and apologetic. Julia launches into sherry-before-sundaylunch mode, telling him how she is over from Madrid, that she is a teacher, that she’s home for Christmas and how the break has, fortuitously, coincided with her university friend’s hospital admission. Here she gestures towards me. I pick up the baton. I am in for a minor procedure, I say, keen that the Disciple of Death should know I am on the side of the living, at least for now. It is not as if he has asked.

‘Oh,’ he says. ‘Ah, yes. Right.’ Then he wishes me well and, after another squeeze of the sanitiser and rubbing of hands that marks the well from the unwell, he is off. Julia looks at me. I look at her.

‘That was a bit rubbish,’ she says. ‘Shall I get him back?’

The woman I thought had given up on God in her early 20s because the Anglican Church had an exclusion policy on gay love is running down the ward, calling out: ‘Father! Father! Excuse me, Father!’

She comes back seconds later with the man-in-black in tow.

‘I don’t like to impose,’ he says. ‘Usually the patient or their relative will give me clues. They’ll say which church they go to. That sort of thing. You said you were over from Madrid,’ he continues, turning to Julia. ‘I didn’t want to impose on your friendship and your time together.’

What he does not say is that, as with the travelling salesman of old, strangers are wont to shut the door in his face or, worse, report him to the authorities for spiritual interference. Either that or, as Julia later says, he is so careful not to offend that he has lost sight of the priest’s brief to reach out. I explain about the boys, how they don’t know I am in hospital because we can’t bring ourselves to break the bad news.

‘Honesty,’ he says, no trace of hesitancy in his soft voice now, ‘go for honesty. It is essential. Honesty. In everything. Especially with children.’

If I tell them I am ill, the past might repeat itself, I say, and I give him a snapshot of my childhood. I explain that I don’t even know how long I have to live. My eyes well up, which infuriates me. I am a grown-up; I am over my own childhood losses. Slowly, he draws out key facts, first establishing that I have a fully extant husband.

‘He’s a great father,’ I say, realising that he does not assume that the existence of a husband means he is a good thing. ‘He’s very loving.’

He nods, and then he asks about the boys, their personalities, how old they are, how they might respond to being told I am ill. I dodge the last question: I don’t know the answer.

‘Better to tell them. They sound like they will be able to cope. They will mature as a result, rise to the occasion. It won’t be easy for them, but it is better for them to know. They must be in on it from the very beginning,’ he continues, his voice insistent now, ‘and might feel betrayed if you conceal everything from them, even for a few more weeks.’

He asks about my treatments next. With chemotherapy and radiotherapy on the cards, he says, hiding such an obvious illness from them would be impossible, and too stressful for me. Then, with great wisdom, he suggests that it is vital that the whole family be with me on what he calls my journey, at every stage.

‘You are in it together,’ he says, ‘and it might bring you closer together. You will need their help.’

There’s a thought. The idea that the boys might help me is anathema: I protect them, I help them. I have never seen mothering as a two-way process. Over the years, and to this day, I mention my own mother and father just enough to stop them from asking questions or to make either parent remarkable by my own omissions. Bassy was eight when I first mentioned that my mother had died ‘when I was very young’, and I don’t even remember telling either of them that I was five when my American father died, or how I fared after they were both gone. Why would I?

I am home by Saturday lunchtime. As soon as we have time together, I tell Richard what the priest said. OK, soon, he says, we’ll tell them soon. In the meantime, we decide to enlist Caroline, our palliative-care friend; part of her job is to help parents break the news of a terminal illness to a child or, when parents find that impossible, to tell the child herself. Richard doesn’t want to use the word cancer. I do. For both of us it is still the C word; I feel sure Caroline can

Willing my voice to stay strong, I say: ‘Boys, I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but I’ve got this lump…’

Genevieve with sons Reuben, 19, and Sebastian, 16, at home in December 2017