Haydn

Tuesday 5 June morning

Did you want to hear some soft music? I ask her as she is sitting across the table for breakfast, her head resting in both hands, elbows on the table. Her complexion is pale, her eyes tired and half closed. I made her a latte this morning and she drank about half of it, with pleasure, along with two bites of yoghurt with apple. "I am trying to keep everything in balance right now."

True, as soon as she woke up this morning she started coughing, sounding encombree for the first time, congested. Queaziness followed, although there was nothing in her stomach yet. I am feeling weaker again, she said, so let's do this morning whatever we still have to do. We will, I said. The nurses (the regular one plus a trainee) had come and gone, and slipped her into a black skirt and a purple top. The garde-malades arrived half-way through the routine.

Put me on some Haydn, she said, staring into her breakfast bowl. Not a surprise. As long as I have known her, she has had this predilection for the Austrian composer. So I put on symphonies 101 and 102 by Harnoncourt. I know she likes them and soon the music floats tenderly across the room to her bed. I need to lie down for a moment now, she says. Within a few minutes she drifts into a snooze, recovering from this morning's exercise.

Barely are we into the second movement, when a different nurse arrives - one who is responsible for the morphine and tranquilizer pumps (also accompanied by a trainee). So between 8:30 and 10:30AM already five people have been to her bedside. Plus her dumb husband. That company alone is enough to be a strain on her. I walk over to the bed and give her a kiss. Music all right like this? Just fine, she says.

At the nurses' suggestion I carry a humidifier into the room and put it up close to the bed. perhaps the dryness of the air, and the fact that she breathes through her mouth a lot, keeps provoking the cough. I know these are rearguard skirmishes, but I fight every last one of them. Some of them I lose: Lara wants to forget about transfusions at home.