Me Before You: a novel

We are at county hospital. Will has pneumonia. Ward C12.
Once I arrived at the hospital, Nathan left, and I sat outside Will’s
room for a further hour. I flipped through the magazines that
somebody had apparently left on the table in 1982, and then pulled a
paperback from my bag and tried to read that, but it was impossible
to concentrate.
The consultant came around, but I didn’t feel that I could follow
him into the room while Will’s mother was there. When he emerged,
fifteen minutes later, Mrs. Traynor came out behind him. I’m not sure
if she told me simply because she had to talk to somebody and I was
the only person available, but she said in a voice thick with relief that
the consultant was fairly confident that they had got the infection
under control. It had been a particularly virulent bacterial strain. It
was lucky that Will had gone to the hospital when he had, or…
That “or…” hung in the silence between us.
“So what do we do now?” I said.
She shrugged. “We wait.”
“Would you like me to get you some lunch? Or perhaps I could sit
with Will while you go and get some?”
Just occasionally, something like understanding passed between
me and Mrs. Traynor. Her face softened briefly and—without that

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customary, rigid expression—I could see suddenly how desperately
tired she looked. I think she had aged ten years in the time that I had
been with them.
“Thank you, Louisa,” she said. “I would very much like to nip
home and change my clothes, if you wouldn’t mind staying with him.
I don’t really want Will to be left alone right now.”
After she’d gone I went in, closing the door behind me, and sat
down beside him. He seemed curiously absent, as if the Will I knew
had gone on a brief trip somewhere else and left only a shell. I
wondered, briefly, if that was how it was when people died. Then I
told myself to stop thinking about death.
I sat and watched the clock tick and heard the occasional
murmuring voices outside and the soft squeak of shoes on the
linoleum. Twice a nurse came in and checked various levels,
pressed a couple of buttons, took his temperature, but still Will didn’t
stir.
“He is…okay, isn’t he?” I asked her.
“He’s asleep,” she said reassuringly. “It’s probably the best thing
for him right now. Try not to worry.”
It’s an easy thing to say. But I had a lot of time to think in that
hospital room. I thought about Will and the frightening speed with
which he had become dangerously ill. I thought about Patrick, and
the fact that even as I had collected my things from his flat, unpeeled
and rolled up my wall calendar, folded and packed the clothes I had
laid so carefully in his chest of drawers, my sadness was never the
crippling thing I should have expected. I didn’t feel desolate, or
overwhelmed, or any of the things you should feel when you split
apart a love of several years. I felt quite calm, and a bit sad, and
perhaps a little guilty—both at my part in the split and at the fact that
I didn’t feel the things I probably should. I had sent him two text
messages, to say I was really, really sorry, and that I hoped he would
do really well in the Xtreme Viking. But he hadn’t replied.
After an hour, I leaned over, lifted the blanket from Will’s arm, and
there, pale brown against the white sheet, lay his hand. A cannula
was taped to the back of it with surgical tape. When I turned it over,
the scars were still livid on his wrists. I wondered, briefly, if they

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would ever fade, or if he would be permanently reminded of what he
had tried to do.
I took his fingers gently in mine and closed my own around them.
They were warm, the fingers of someone very much living. I was so
oddly reassured by how they felt in my own that I kept them there,
gazing at them, at the calluses that told of a life not entirely lived
behind a desk, at the pink seashell nails that would always have to
be trimmed by somebody else.
Will’s were good man’s hands—attractive and even, with
squared-off fingers. It was hard to look at them and believe that they
held no strength, that they would never again pick something up
from a table, stroke an arm, or make a fist.
I traced his knuckles with my finger. Some small part of me
wondered whether I should be embarrassed if Will opened his eyes
at this point, but I couldn’t feel it. I felt with some certainty that it was
good for him to have his hand in mine. Hoping that in some way,
through the barrier of his drugged sleep, he knew this too, I closed
my eyes and waited.
Will finally woke up shortly after four. I was outside in the corridor,
lying across the chairs, reading a discarded newspaper, and I
jumped when Mrs. Traynor came out to tell me. She looked a little
lighter when she mentioned he was talking, and that he wanted to
see me. She said she was going to go downstairs and ring Mr.
Traynor.
And then, as if she couldn’t quite help herself, she added,
“Please don’t tire him.”
“Of course not,” I said.
My smile was charming.
“Hey,” I said, peeping my head around the door.
He turned his face slowly toward me. “Hey, yourself.”
His voice was hoarse, as if he had spent the past thirty-six hours
not sleeping but shouting. I sat down and looked at him. His eyes
flickered downward.
“You want me to lift the mask for a minute?”

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He nodded. I took it and carefully slid it up over his head. There
was a fine film of moisture where it had met his skin, and I took a
tissue and wiped gently around his face.
“So how are you feeling?”
“Been better.”
A great lump had risen, unbidden, to my throat, and I tried to
swallow it. “I don’t know. You’ll do anything for attention, Will Traynor.
I bet this was all just a—”
He closed his eyes, cutting me off in midsentence. When he
opened them again, they held a hint of an apology. “Sorry, Clark. I
don’t think I can do witty today.”
We sat. And I talked, letting my voice rattle away in the little pale-
green room, telling him about getting my things back from Patrick’s—
how much easier it had been getting my CDs out of his collection
given his insistence on a proper cataloging system.
“You okay?” he said, when I had finished. His eyes were
sympathetic, like he expected it to hurt more than it actually did.
“Yeah. Sure.” I shrugged. “It’s really not so bad. I’ve got other
things to think about anyway.”
Will was silent. “The thing is,” he said, eventually, “I’m not sure
I’m going to be bungee jumping anytime soon.”
I knew it. I had half expected this ever since I had first received
Nathan’s text. But hearing the words fall from his mouth felt like a
blow.
“Don’t worry,” I said, trying to keep my voice even. “It’s fine. We’ll
go some other time.”
“I’m sorry. I know you were really looking forward to it.”
I placed a hand on his forehead, and smoothed his hair back.
“Shh. Really. It’s not important. Just get well.”
He closed his eyes with a faint wince. I knew what they said—
those lines around his eyes, that resigned expression. They said
there wasn’t necessarily going to be another time. They said he
thought he would never be well again.

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I stopped off at Granta House on the way back from the hospital.
Will’s father let me in, looking almost as tired as Mrs. Traynor did. He
was carrying a battered wax jacket, as if he were just on his way out.
I told him Mrs. Traynor was with Will again, and that the antibiotics
were considered to be working well, but that she had asked me to let
him know that she would be spending the night at the hospital again.
Why she couldn’t tell him herself, I don’t know. Perhaps she just had
too much to think about.
“How does he look?”
“Bit better than this morning,” I said. “He had a drink while I was
there. Oh, and he said something rude about one of the nurses.”
“Still his impossible self.”
“Yeah, still his impossible self.”
Just for a moment I saw Mr. Traynor’s mouth compress and his
eyes glisten. He looked away at the window and then back at me. I
didn’t know whether he would have preferred it if I’d looked away.
“Third bout. In two years.”
It took me a minute to catch up. “Of pneumonia?”
He nodded. “Wretched thing. He’s pretty brave, you know. Under
all that bluster.” He swallowed and nodded, as if to himself. “It’s good
you can see it, Louisa.”
I didn’t know what to do. I reached out my hand and touched his
arm. “I do see it.”
He gave me a faint nod, then took his Panama hat from the coat
hooks in the hall. Muttering something that might have been a thank-
you or a good-bye, Mr. Traynor moved past me and out the front
door.
The annex felt oddly silent without Will in it. I realized how much I
had become used to the distant sound of his motorized chair moving
backward and forward, his murmured conversations with Nathan in
the next room, the low hum of the radio. Now the annex was still, the
air like a vacuum around me.
I packed an overnight bag with all the things he might want the
next day, including clean clothes, his toothbrush, hairbrush, and
medication, plus earphones in case he was well enough to listen to
music. As I did so I had to fight a peculiar sense of panic. A

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subversive little voice kept rising up inside me, saying, This is how it