Precious Lives Read online

  I never, of course, mentioned Marion to him now, and I didn’t mention my father being in hospital to Marion, just then. Both of them had quite enough to do in focusing on hanging on to their own lives without being called upon to have sympathy for each other. But if things were stable with my father once he was safely in the infirmary, they were very bad with Marion. The effects of the final stages of radiotherapy grew worse and worse. Driving over to Hampstead to collect her from the hospice and take her to the Middlesex Hospital, I’d feel more and more apprehensive knowing the state she’d be in. The driving itself was, for me, fearsome enough. I’d only just passed my driving test that summer, at the mighty age of fifty-six, and all the learning had been done on quiet Cumbrian roads. Nobody suggested I should share the daily driving of Marion to the hospital but I was determined to do it. I’d gone out very early on a Sunday morning, practising the route, until I felt I could cope, having memorised every one-way street, noted every set of traffic lights. But it was fairly nerve-racking for Marion, who had been driving expertly for thirty-odd years, though she kindly professed complete faith in me. I made her sit in the back at first, under some illusion that it was safer if I crashed, but soon I’d demonstrated how careful I was and she moved into the front, so we could talk as I made my slow and stately way through the traffic.

  What we talked about was never anything very much. It felt cosy in the car, sealed off from all the noise outside and from the December rain battering the windows. We chatted lazily about this and that, just as we had always done, and because I looked rigidly ahead, never daring to take my eyes off the road for a single moment, there was an impression that everything was as it always had been. I couldn’t see Marion’s bandaged neck, nor observe the misery in her eyes. She sounded as she always had done. But when I drew up outside the radiotherapy department, able to pause for only a minute or two because it was such a busy street, and watched her walk into the hospital I’d be overwhelmed by the pathos of her little wave and cheery smile, the smile off-centre because her mouth at one side was not quite so mobile, and I could hardly bear to see how her head suddenly bowed, as she disappeared. I drove home numb, imagining her putting on the cruel mask and lying under the huge machine. It was dreadful to think about and I thought about nothing else.

  On the last day that I took her for treatment, I saw she’d been crying. She was ready for me, standing just inside the glass doors, muffled up in coat and scarf. She came out smiling as ever but her eyes were red-rimmed. I noticed her neck was more heavily bandaged than usual, and she said it was painful. The radiotherapy had begun to strip the skin off earlier in the week and at the hospice they were coating it with some special unguent, though around the wound left by the previous surgery it was still raw and bleeding. But she hadn’t been shedding tears over her neck. ‘It was just that I was thinking,’ she said, as we drove off, ‘how lovely it would be if tomorrow really was the end of it all, you know, of the treatment, and now I just get better and it’s all been worth it. That was what I was thinking, and then I thought no, it isn’t the end, it goes on, and nobody knows if it will have worked. And it just made me sad.’ I knew, without needing to look at her, even if I hadn’t been concentrating on the turn into Haverstock Hill, that she was crying quietly again. It was one of those terrible moments when to say nothing is despicable and to say anything is so hard. The natural reaction is to cry too, but that helps no one, it’s an indulgence on the part of the listener which makes the sufferer feel worse. I wanted to stress that of course the treatment would have worked, and she mustn’t think it might not have, but such unfounded optimism was offensive. Marion might need, and bring herself to accept, a small measure of reassurance but she would know that even this was given in ignorance. All I could think of to say was that at least this radiotherapy was over for ever: she would certainly never, ever, have to endure this again. ‘Oh, I wouldn’t,’ she said. ‘I’d rather be dead.’

  After I’d dropped her off (no wave, no smile for once) I drove home thinking about what Marion had said, hearing her words about wishing this really was the end, over and over again. I backed the car down the mews lane to our garage, with difficulty, and then laboriously manoeuvred it inside. It took me three tries to get the car lined up so that the garage door could close, but finally I did it. Then I sat in the dark garage, unable to summon up the will to get out of the car. When finally I levered myself out I saw that I still hadn’t parked as well as I could have done. The bonnet was practically scraping the metal up-and-over garage door and there was a yard’s gap at the back. I could have left it, the garage was actually closed after all, but I wanted to have done the job properly. It had been repeatedly explained to me that parking cars neatly and well was all part of driving and I had to go on learning to do it until I could do it effortlessly. So I got back into the car, sighing to myself, thinking how I would always hate driving and everything to do with cars.

  God knows what I did then. All I thought I had done was to take off the handbrake, prior to putting the car into reverse. But it shot backwards. There was a terrifying crash and suddenly I was showered with glass. I thought a bomb had gone off. I was transfixed, unable to move at all, my left hand still on the brake, my right on the wheel, but through the driving mirror I could see the garden – the garden! – so the back wall of the garage had gone. The back wall was gone and so were two sections of the roof. These had crashed through the rear window of the Ford Granada and were now lying on the back seat. Slowly, I tried to open the door of the car but it wouldn’t open. I moved to try the passenger door, and at once more glass tinkled round me. The car seemed to shudder with every careful movement I made, but I inched across from behind the wheel and found I could, after all, open the other door. I got out and stared, appalled, at the wreckage. I climbed out of the garage through the massive hole in the wall – or what was left of the wall – and over the shards of the shattered terracotta pots once lined up along it. Behind me, there was the sound of splintering and I cringed as a big piece of wood, a strut running across the roof of the garage, gave way.

  But the most terrifying sight was the back seat, with those concrete slabs resting on it. Anyone sitting there would have been killed, or at the least dreadfully maimed. Silly, morbid thoughts filled my head as I stumbled through the now dark garden to the house. Marion had sat there. Marion could have been killed. A stupid way to think – Marion would have got out first, once I’d parked, and she would never have got back in while I readjusted the car. But I couldn’t stop those thoughts as I let myself into the house and slumped on a sofa. The irony of it paralysed me: what if Marion had been sitting on that back seat and had been killed on her way back from almost her last radiotherapy treatment. To have gone through all that, and then suffer death in two minutes. I couldn’t get this out of my head, ridiculous though such pointless speculation was. I stayed motionless in the dark, without switching on the lights, until gradually I got a grip on myself, and started to worry instead about the damage I’d done. In the scale of things, a wrecked car and garage surely didn’t really matter. I wasn’t hurt, nobody was hurt, and that was all that mattered, wasn’t it? It was merely an inconvenience and in no time at all would become a funny story. I could stand the jokes about my driving, couldn’t I? Of course I could. There was no need to start turning such a mundane calamity into an event of sinister significance, full of omens, sent to show me how fragile life was … ‘Don’t be daft,’ I could hear my father saying, and finally I listened to him.

  Christmas Day was grim. Annabel and her family came on Boxing Day, as usual, but Marion was too ill to join us. She was in bed most of the time, feeling worse than she had ever felt even though the radiotherapy had ended. New Year was no better, because for the Davies family, being Scottish, it was the big festival of the year and not to be able to celebrate it appropriately was miserable. ‘It might be my last, who knows?’ Marion said. And what did I reply? That of course it would not be – the same old instinctive r
eaction of denial, the same refusal to contemplate the possibility of death.

  After New Year’s Day, it was three weeks before I saw her again. We went on holiday to the Caribbean, leaving my father in hospital and Marion still barely able to lift her head from the pillow. I expected bad news all the time but none came. When I telephoned the Cumberland Infirmary the nurses were delighted to take messages from so far away and my father loved their excitement. I didn’t telephone to see how Marion was progressing, knowing there would be little to report and that it was enough strain for Frances to deal with the constant enquiries she already had. I lay on white, sandy, palm-fringed beaches and swam in turquoise waters and thought of the two of them all the time, my father and Marion, Marion and my father, ninety-four and fifty-five, both ill, both supposedly recovering, both obliged to wonder if they would survive another year. I should be in Ward 20. I should be in Marion’s flat. But if I were, what would I be doing? Uttering platitudes, evading the truth. I could be there, bearing witness, lending support by my mere physical presence, a contribution anyone can make and which is not negligible, but Pauline was there for my father and Frances for Marion. This didn’t excuse me, and in my mental ramblings I didn’t try to excuse myself, but it made me feel a little easier. For now, but only for now, for three weeks, I was the hedonist, thinking only of my own pleasure, but thinking, too, in endless clichés – life is short and sweet/ enjoy yourself while you can/ eat, drink and be merry, because tomorrow we die … It was my father’s death I waited for. It seemed to me that if that call came which I anticipated, the telephone call saying he’d died in Ward 20, while I sunned myself and drank rum punches on a beach, I would be relieved. I longed for the release of it, as soon as possible.

  But he hadn’t died while we were away. On the contrary, he had improved in health and was almost ready to return home. In spirits, my sister informed me, a trifle wearily, he was his old self. She was amused but exasperated to tell me that he was making a big fuss, because he did not have a calendar for 1995. He’d driven her mad – ‘Where is it? Margaret always gives me one, always. She won’t have forgotten. It’ll likely be in the house. You haven’t looked properly.’ Pauline, staying in our Loweswater house all this time, was obliged to say she had looked very thoroughly and there was no calendar to be found. I remembered buying it and wrapping it and leaving it for Pauline to take to him, but somehow it had vanished. Eventually, she had bought one herself, of the kind he liked – large, glossy, British Walks in lurid colour, the days clearly marked – and he’d grudgingly accepted it. He had to have a calendar so he would know where he was.

  The calendar now became his diary, though until he left hospital he merely crossed the days off and wrote nothing in the vacant oblong spaces beside each date. He returned home on 24 January, his various immediate ailments relieved, his knees back to normal and his kidney infection cleared up. He was grateful for all the attention and care he’d received, and fulsome (for him) with his compliments; but he was eager to be independent again and carry on with the true business of life – with managing. Pauline and her husband, who had been so magnificently supportive, saw him into his bungalow and then it was my turn. I dreaded it. There I was, with my flash Caribbean tan, rested and fit after my wonderful holiday hopping around islands, and yet I dreaded catching a train north to visit my poor aged father just out of hospital. I couldn’t use Marion’s greater need as an excuse any longer. I had to go, so I went.

  I walked from the railway station, as I always did, wanting fresh air and exercise after the train journey. It was bitterly cold, fine sleet driving into my face as I went over the viaduct bridge. I walked slowly to take longer to arrive. As I neared my father’s bungalow, I saw him sitting in the armchair next to the window. Normally, he would have been on the look-out, and on his feet to get to his front door while I was still fifty yards away, but he didn’t move. Maybe he was asleep. I hesitated about whether to use my own key (he’d always liked me to have his key even if I was hundreds of miles away) or ring the doorbell. I decided he’d prefer to open the door himself, so I rang the bell and waited. I heard him shuffling down the little hallway passage and fumbling with the door lock. There was a ‘Damn!’ I peeped through the letterbox and said, ‘Dad, it’s me, I’ll use my key.’ ‘No!’ came the command. ‘I can open my own front door. I’ll manage.’ And eventually he did. ‘You’re back, then,’ he said, by way of effusive greeting, and I replied in kind, as trained, with ‘Yes, and so are you. You don’t look too bad.’

  Once settled back in his armchair, with the gas fire on full blast, he couldn’t stop talking. Every detail of his stay in the infirmary was gone over, pouring out of him in a positive torrent of words, and all I needed to do was listen until it was time to make his tea. He said he didn’t want much, he was still full after all the marvellous infirmary food – and he was off again, going over each and every one of the meals he’d had. We watched television, the sound ridiculously, and unnecessarily, high, since there was nothing wrong with his hearing. He just liked it loud. He said, at nine o’clock, that he thought he’d go to bed and I could put his electric blanket on if I liked. I went to switch it on, and stayed to check that the heat was coming through. His bed was so old, bought when he got married in 1931 and the mattress never changed since. It was of the flock kind and rested on coiled metal springs. Bits of flock leaked out of it between the ridges formed by two bodies lying there for so many nights. When my mother was still alive I’d wanted to make her more comfortable by buying a new bed, or at the very least a new mattress – but there had been a violently hostile reaction, and cries of ‘This bed will see us out.’

  The heat had come through satisfactorily. I pulled the bedcovers straight, so many of them, umpteen woollen blankets and an eiderdown and a counterpane, all blue. The bed, with its dark stained wooden headboard and footboard, took up most of the small room. There were only a few inches between one side of the bed and a vast wardrobe (in which one solitary dress of my mother’s still hung, survivor of all the rest of her clothes which my father had systematically burned in his garden in his own version of a funeral pyre). On the other side, in front of the window, was a dressing table, its surface still covered with my mother’s crocheted mats on which rested her hairbrush and jewellery box (though she never had any jewels). A small wooden chest of drawers, squashed into the corner near the foot of the bed, completed the furniture. I shivered, not just with memories of my mother lying ill there, but with genuine cold. There was no heating in this claustrophobic room. There was what was derisively called ‘central heating’ in the bungalow but it was of the hot air variety, blown through grilles and inefficient as well as horribly noisy. I’d wanted to take it out and install efficient heating but, again, was opposed. The only improvement allowed had been the addition of a storage heater in the hall passage. My father loved it. He maintained that with his bedroom door left wide open the heat from this heater warmed the room grand.

  Not at 9.30 p.m. on a freezing January night, it didn’t. The famous storage heater was of course stone cold, timed as it was to start belting out its heat in the early hours of the morning. At night, the bedroom was like an igloo, and passing from the fierce heat of the living-room into it was like passing straight from the tropics to Antarctica. But my father stood the exchange without complaint. Bedrooms in his life had always been cold. He duly went to bed, telling me that if I heard him making any noise in the night to ignore him. But he made no noise that night. I didn’t sleep, so I knew. I lay and thought how awful this was, a ninety-four-year-old man dragging himself round each day, trying to keep his routines going, living by them, battling all the time with the constant erosion of his strength. What kind of life was it for him? How could he stand it? But at the same time I knew this was how I thought not how he saw it. He didn’t seem to look at his life as I did. All his remaining energies went into ‘managing’. He had no intention of giving up. The harder it became to manage, the harder he tried. And he was
as obsessed with time as ever, keeping a close eye on his two clocks and his wristwatch and writing up each day on his calendar. Time was never just going to pass him by, certainly not.

  I went out the next morning and bought a joint of best beef, sirloin, with plenty of fat round it – what else? There was no greater treat than the smell of beef roasting in his own oven, but I had grave doubts as to how I would cope with this ancient device. The oven practically exploded when I tried to light it and the roar of the gas was so furious it had brought him stumbling through to the kitchen to see what was going on. It seemed I’d been a fool. The way to light the oven was like this, not as I’d been doing, and Regulo 5 was obtained by turning the dial to Regulo 1. My mother, he said, had never had any problem and neither had he. He was clearly unsure whether he could safely leave me even when the gas had been properly regulated, but finally returned to his armchair after many instructions to baste the meat well. This was a daunting process. The oven door hung half off its hinges and the catch needed great pressure to seal the door. I dreaded opening and closing it, convinced I was going to wreck the oven, purchased in 1948 and still, in my father’s opinion, as good as new. I wondered how it was that in my own house I managed regularly to cook huge meals for large numbers of people and yet I was now in a panic about cooking one meal for one old man.