Precious Lives Read online

  His grandchildren thought these kinds of absurd, illogical statements hysterically funny, but they weren’t, they were perverse and bitter and sour. My father had cast himself long ago as the disadvantaged working man, endlessly exploited, never able to beat the injustice of the way life had dealt with him in material terms, always having to bow his head and put up with things. He was putting up by then with a life whose quality had been seriously eroded and which, it was beginning to occur to him, might go on too long. His urge to live was still incredibly strong – life was still precious to him – but so was his growing despair that he wouldn’t be able to go on organising it as he had always done.

  II

  THERE ARE SEVERAL entries in my father’s minimalist diaries which record outings with my sister-in-law Marion, my husband’s sister. Marion had left Carlisle at the end of the seventies, to go to London to live and work there, but she came back regularly. Whenever she did so she always managed to fit in a visit to my father and often took him for a drive and even treated him to lunch. He accepted her generosity and thought-fulness as he accepted it from his own family – with occasional gruff thanks but no real appreciation of the time and effort involved. Anyone who had a car had it easy and should, according to him, take the car-less often and wherever they wanted to go: it was as simple as that. He’d tell me where Marion had taken him and I’d exclaim at the number of miles covered and he’d say, ‘She wasn’t pedalling.’ No, indeed.

  Marion was always amused by my father though she knew very well that he disapproved of her. She allowed him endless latitude, as she did all elderly people. She understood his attitude and shrugged it off – he was a victim of his generation, his class, and it was too late to re-educate him. She knew that, in his inflexible opinion, married women should stay at home and look after their husbands and there was no excuse for not doing so. They’d made their bed and must lie on it. Any suggestion that if this bed turned out to be uncomfortable it would be a good idea to change it for another was unacceptable. So for Marion to become a mature student at thirty-five and go off first to Ruskin College, Oxford, and then later, after a year back in Carlisle working, to leave for good to go to London, as a social worker, leaving her husband Jeff in Carlisle, was outrageous. My father never said so to Marion directly, but he didn’t need to. ‘Jeff managing all right, is he?’ he would say to her, thinking he was being subtle, and Marion would say that yes, he was, and play him at his own game by pretending she didn’t know what he really meant. She told him nothing about her life in London and neither did I. He had dark suspicions of her ‘carrying on’ but since he never directly voiced them it was easy to ignore his clumsy attempts at fishing for information. Marion would have been quite happy to tell him the truth, but she believed it would be more than he could handle and she thought the elderly should be protected from things they couldn’t understand and which would upset them.

  She even admired my father in a funny sort of way, admired his awfulness, his brutal outspokenness on all manner of subjects. She admired most of all his attitude to life, the way he got on with it and never moaned or groaned, the way he had no self-pity. She saw, by 1994, how he was declining and how hard it was proving for him to acknowledge his waning strength, and she admired his determination to maintain his independence. She dealt with a great many old people in her work and she thought my father’s continuing interest in others remarkable. After a day out with him in the summer of 1994, she spent half an hour regaling me with accounts of things he’d said with such withering scorn that she’d burst out laughing, and when I’d protested that his remarks hadn’t been in the least funny, she wouldn’t have it. So Marion and my father had some sort of relationship, some kind of real connection with each other beyond the fact that she was his son-in-law’s sister. She bothered about him, when even he had to admit that there was no blood connection, and therefore no positive duty.

  Two years previously, Marion had thought she felt ‘something’ in her nose. Her GP could find nothing there, but referred her to a local hospital, where the nose specialist could find nothing either (and wrote to the GP saying so). But still Marion went on having the impression that there was ‘something’ there, high up on the right-hand side. After another year of worrying about it, she asked her GP to refer her to a specialist hospital. They found a small polyp, removed it, did a biopsy and pronounced it benign. But then, six months later, a visible lump had appeared in her neck and she had gone back to the hospital. When, in September 1994, I heard the shocking and completely unexpected news that Marion had cancer and I was forced to pass this horrible news on to my father – because it could not be concealed if I was to pack up early and return to London immediately – I expected him to show at least some concern. But he stayed true to form. ‘She looked all right to me last time I saw her,’ he remarked. It was said in an irritated tone, in an aggrieved fashion, as though Marion was trying to trick us all. Probably she would have laughed at this reaction, but I didn’t. I wanted him to be sympathetic, and eventually he did manage: ‘Pity. It’s a pity. But there you are, nothing can be done.’ And then he didn’t want it mentioned again. He didn’t want to hear anything about Marion’s condition. He wanted me to shut up about it. I was being as bad as my dead mother, ‘getting upset’ when this did no good. The very mention of leaving Loweswater a month before we were due to enraged him. ‘What for?’ he asked. ‘You can’t do anything. She’s got plenty of folk to look after her’ (though he knew nothing about Marion’s circumstances).

  In fact, we didn’t return to London just then. Marion was going back hospital for an operation (to remove the visible new tumours in her neck and investigate for any spread of the cancer cells to the lymph glands in the face) and then she would convalesce before starting radiotherapy treatment. It would make more sense for us to return just a little earlier than usual so that we would be there to help during the next stage. In a way, my father had been right: she did have enough folk to look after her and support her at the moment – a partner, Frances; a twin sister, Annabel, who rushed to her side (even though it was difficult because her husband has MS and needs constant care), and Jeff, who was ready to go at once. My father was pleased I was ‘showing some sense and not getting carried away’. He asked occasionally how Marion was doing but hardly listened to the replies. It was easy enough to understand: if you’re ninety-three and struggling yourself, the last thing you want to hear is depressing news about someone younger. ‘It’s cancer, is it?’ he asked once, and I said yes. I’d told him it was. He drew a line under his throat and made a funny noise. ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’ I said coldly. ‘What do you think?’ he said, scornfully. ‘No hope, that’s what.’

  But there was hope, and we all had it, except for my father. The surgeon who was going to operate had described in great detail what he was going to do and had stressed there was no need to be pessimistic. This was relayed to me in one of the many telephone calls reporting Marion’s treatment, and I wondered at the significance of ‘no need to be pessimistic’ as opposed, perhaps, to ‘every reason to be optimistic’. But most of all I wondered about Marion’s own attitude. The mental and emotional attitude of cancer patients is supposed to influence how they progress, or so I’d read (not that I believe it). I had worrying memories of that evening in our garden when Marion had professed indifference to death even if she didn’t actually want to die. She might not turn out to be like my father, determined at all costs to hang on to his precious life, even now at ninety-three. Would she, in effect, give up, be resigned to her fate, and if she did would it make a vital difference? Or, in the face of imminent death, would she suddenly value life and fight tenaciously to hold on to it, just as my father was doing, if in very different conditions? Does everyone do that when life is threatened?

  The operation duly went ahead and was, within its own terms, thought to have been successful. At any rate, it was over and Marion was recuperating, though finding it hard to be in a ward where other
patients had parts of their face missing. It was impossible to look away all the time when eating meals at a communal table, and she was far too compassionate to do that, but being brave while confronted by such disfigurement was a strain. It made her wonder for the first time how disfigured she was going to turn out to be herself. Nobody had mentioned this. Nothing had been said about how she would actually look. She was annoyed with herself for caring – how could she care about her appearance when her life had been at stake? Was her face so precious to her? She wasn’t particularly vain, but it was mortifying to realise how much she cared very much about not looking hideous. Surely being alive was enough without fretting about looks.

  After the operation, when she was still bandaged, the surgeon had come to see her to enthuse about his own handiwork. It seemed he had had to negotiate a set of facial nerves which, if severed, would have left one half of her face permanently paralysed, but he hadn’t severed any at all, hurrah. Marion thanked him and said she was pleased not to have a half-paralysed face. It was a while before she actually saw what she did look like. She knew she had to allow for the swelling and bruising, normal after such an operation, to subside, but even so she was dismayed at her battered appearance and the lopsidedness of her smile. Her mouth looked weird, she knew it did. But the state of her neck bothered her more. It was stiff, so stiff she had to hold her head oddly and could hardly turn it. It had never occurred to her that the removal of the tumours would affect the mobility of her neck. She was told her neck would loosen up in time and she would get used to the stiffness.

  There was a great deal to get used to. All those who saw her – Frances, Annabel, Jeff – didn’t care in the least how she looked. They stressed how little her appearance had changed, but then she’d known they would say that. Her own opinion was more important to her, but the other things she had to get used to soon overwhelmed her far more than her appearance. The awful dryness in her mouth was a torment. She claimed (rightly or wrongly) nobody had told her she was likely to lose most of her saliva glands. And she could taste nothing even when, with great difficulty, she managed to swallow any food. It seemed her taste buds, or most of them, had been further casualties. With her throat and the inside of her mouth in such a state telephone conversations were obviously out of the question, but I knew from everything Frances, Annabel and Jeff relayed to me that there was no indication whatsoever that Marion was going to be anything but the strong, brave person she had always been. There would be no giving up, no turning of her face to the wall. She wanted to live and would do anything and everything in her power to help herself do so. Whether she could be cured she couldn’t possibly know, but if she could not be it would not be through lack of effort.

  She’d had a lot of practice at making an effort and not giving in, which was why her earlier professed lack of concern about death had always seemed to me so out of character. She had never let illness of any kind get her down, though she’d never adopted my father’s attitude of pretending it didn’t exist. This would have been difficult because she’d suffered from acute psoriasis since she was seventeen. Eventually, steroid creams were prescribed to keep it under control, but once, while she was at Ruskin, she’d had an outbreak so severe she was hospitalised. When I visited her, she looked like a mummy, entirely bandaged except for her eyes, nose and mouth. So she knew about having to endure a disease which, though not life-threatening, was a permanent affliction and she bore it stoically. No one ever heard her moaning about her psoriasis, nor about the arthritis in her knees which started in her thirties. Like my father, she believed ailments were something which might go away if they were not talked about. She ignored stomach pains to such an extent in 1987 that by the time she was admitted into the Samaritan Hospital she was an emergency case, in urgent need of a hysterectomy, including the removal of both ovaries and her appendix.

  That had been an enlightening episode. It revealed to me what a blessing it could be not to have much imagination. When I went to visit Marion in hospital she was astonished to find herself in post-operative pain. She said she’d never thought there would be any pain. In fact, she hadn’t thought what such an operation would entail at all. It was a complete surprise to her. So was the surgeon’s news that he was waiting for some test results to see if she needed further treatment. She thought that a funny thing to say, ‘considering I’ve just had the treatment’. Never for one moment did she imagine that the fibroids they’d found could be (and indeed were suspected to be) cancerous. When she was told the following week that they were not, and she could go home, she was hardly aware of what a relief this was to the rest of us. This lack of looking ahead and imagining the worst had stood her in good stead, but it made it harder now that the worst, or what might turn out to be the worst, was upon her. The shock was all the greater for never having been fantasised. Observing her trying to adjust to the shock was a painful business – always held to be so strong, it was hard for her to show how much in need of support she was. She was the one who, all her life, had given support.

  Marion had always seemed, to those who did not know her well (and to a few who did, or thought they did), quite self-sufficient, indeed almost tough, and certainly not a woman who had an awareness of an emptiness in herself, a hollow feeling, which she craved to understand and satisfy. To the world she presented a remarkably confident, even bold face, which was very convincing. I was convinced for quite a while. My first impression of her was of strength and also a touch of wildness – she looked as if she could say anything to anyone and I was wary (though I prided myself on doing exactly the same). She was seventeen then and I was eighteen. It was New Year’s Eve 1956. I’d been brought home by Hunter for the first time, although we’d been, in Carlisle parlance, ‘going out’ for nearly a year. The house was crammed full of his Scottish family, and friends and neighbours, all celebrating Hogmanay in traditional style, with tots of whisky and Highland reels playing on the radio. The twins, Annabel and Marion, were not there when we arrived. They came in together, just before midnight, Annabel all smiles, Marion less animated and with a (to me, a stranger) more challenging look. We sized each other up and reserved judgement.

  But it didn’t take me long to work out how crucial Marion was to her family. She was her mother’s chief support and her sick father’s favourite (he had multiple sclerosis and was by then confined mostly to bed). She was her twin sister’s protector and her younger brother’s champion. Only Hunter, the eldest of the children, did not depend on her, except in the sense that through her he was excused from being depended upon himself. He had escaped, he was at university, removed from the strain created by his father’s illness and his mother’s exhaustion. The remaining family were close and absolutely devoted, but life for them, all their lives, was a struggle. Not enough money, not enough help, not enough space. To me it seemed that Marion ran that household. She was the only one who could deal with her father, who, because of his illness, could be angry and difficult and fly into rages. ‘Marion stands no nonsense,’ Mrs Davies would say admiringly. When her husband threw his food on the floor, saying (ludicrously) that he deserved more than mince considering all the money he brought into this house, it was Marion who swept into his room and told him that until he apologised the food would stay where it was and he’d get nothing else. She did it firmly, without anger, and unknown to him stood smiling sympathetically outside his door, waiting for the meek ‘sorry’ to follow, which it quickly did. Her mother would have cleared the mess up and brought fresh food.

  It was Marion whom they all seemed to me to turn to, even though Annabel’s role was vital too, and both of them shared all the domestic tasks. Marion was their spokeswoman, the one who could be depended upon to say what they wanted to say. So when she announced she was emigrating to New Zealand there was more frank disbelief than consternation. How could she possibly leave them? What would their lives be like without their precious Marion? But she genuinely intended to. Still the outsider, it was, for me, the first indica
tion she gave that she wanted another kind of life and that she could only get it by tearing herself out of the heart of the family she loved so much and to whom she appeared indispensable. The plans went ahead. I listened to them, fascinated. She had the necessary medical and passed it. She filled in tons of forms and procured all the required references. Eventually, she heard that she had been accepted by all the various authorities for immigration into New Zealand. As her supposedly mad plan began to become reality, I watched her family and saw that still none of them thought for one moment that she would actually depart for the other side of the world. They couldn’t afford to. Life without Marion would be insupportable. They made jokes about her going and laughed to show how ridiculous was the very idea.

  Perhaps they always knew something I could not. Marion was emigrating with a friend – she hadn’t quite the nerve to go alone – and perhaps they all knew that this friend would let her down, which she did. The friend became engaged and dropped out. Marion was obliged to abandon her plans. If she was devastated, it didn’t show, but shortly after the collapse of this adventurous project she developed the psoriasis which was to plague her for the rest of her life. No connection was made at the time between its onset and the collapse of her hopes. Her break for freedom ended with a friend’s engagement and she never tried again with quite the same determination. She was tied more securely than ever to her family, and to the life she had, and though they were sorry for her disappointment they were also, inevitably, relieved and glad for themselves. They were indulgent when she turned to Christian Science next, in search of a life change, even though they thought its teaching absurd (as all good Scottish Presbyterians would be bound to). If Marion wanted to try to overcome her psoriasis, and find whatever it was she was looking for, by becoming an adherent of a system that combated disease without recourse to medical treatment, then that was fine by them. They teased her only gently, affectionately, but they were not surprised when after a couple of years she gave it up.