An Education (16 page)

When he stopped being demented, he became sentimental, often tearful. He talked about Richard's death and how much he missed him. I knew he was thinking about his own death, and wanting to talk about it. But for some reason I always blocked him, and became very brisk. One day a Cypriot haematologist came to see him (many of the top haematologists are Cypriots because Cyprus has an endemic blood disease, thalassaemia), and David asked where she was from and she said Famagusta and he started reminiscing about his happy childhood holidays on the beach at Famagusta, with tears in his eyes. And again I froze, as always annoyed by talk of that idyll, his childhood, which I always resented. I hated the idea that the beach at Famagusta still represented – more than half a century later – the happiest days of his life. I wanted to wail, ‘But you
were
happy, I
know
you were happy, at least twice more than that, when Rosie and Theo were born.’ Another time, he tried to tell me – again with tears in his eyes – that he was very grateful and touched by my ‘loyalty’ and I winced that he used the word loyalty rather than love. But maybe loyalty was the best I could do. I remember my father once angrily saying that I only came to visit him and my mother out of a sense of duty, and I snapped, ‘Well, what else do you want?’ and he said ‘Love.’ So simple really. But it was my father (‘Fine words butter no parsnips’) who had taught me to equate duty with love.

From then on, David got visibly better and stronger every day. I took him for little walks, first just to the end of the ward, but then down to the hospital garden – I had to buy him a sunhat because it was still boiling hot. The papers were saying the temperature would soon be over 100; right across Europe, people were dying from the heat. I bought a rocker sprinkler for the garden and my big treat, every evening, was sitting outside with a glass of wine, listening to the swish, swish of water pattering on leaves. The dog fox had gone.

David was declared no longer neutropenic so it was safe to have visitors and I became his social secretary again, arranging a busy rota of friends to keep him company. He said he wanted to get dressed and go outside, in the street, and the doctors said fine, so I brought his clothes from home. He was upset to find his feet were too swollen to fit into his shoes, and I had to buy him some horrible Velcro hiking sandals. On Friday, 8 August, he announced that we would go for a proper walk to see the Butterfield church, All Saints Margaret Street, that he loved. So we tottered along – him in his floppy sunhat and hideous sandals, me moaning as usual at having to walk so far, and to a church of all places. Of course I found All Saints repulsive – High Victorian, smells and bells – but David had expected that and teased me for my disdain. Then we went for coffee in an Italian café in Charlotte Street. I was nervous the whole time but he was confident and talking eagerly about his plans for the future – he wanted to paint bigger abstracts, have an exhibition. We saw the consultant when we got back, and asked what to expect – he said probably another week or two in the renal unit and then maybe a few days back in UCH, but David would certainly be out by the end of the month. I began to feel slightly panicky at the thought of having to nurse him at home but David said don't worry, if he needed proper nursing we'd hire someone – he knew I'd never make a Florence Nightingale. He was so happy and confident, it was as if he was now in a position to comfort me, to laugh at my failings.

On Saturday, 9 August, we'd arranged that Rosie would visit him in the morning, then our good friend Lesley Hoskins would take him lunch. Theo would drop by in the afternoon and I would visit him in the evening, when he had finished dialysis. So for me it was a whole free day and I went swimming at Highgate Ponds and planted Nicotiana plants and generally felt more relaxed than I had for weeks. In the evening I sat in the garden with the sprinklers on – it was the hottest day of the year – waiting for David to phone to say his dialysis was over. When the phone rang about seven I expected to hear David's voice. Instead I heard the ward sister saying that David was ‘not responding’.

I drove to the hospital in half my usual time, scything through traffic, and found a team of medics jammed into David's room. He was lying on his side, twitching, his hands oddly clenched. He made no response when I held his hand and called his name. The medics said they thought he'd had a haematoma – a bleed to the brain – and was paralysed down his left side. They said the scanners at UCH were out of action because of the heat and they would take him to Queen Square Hospital for a scan. They said they would have to put him on a ventilator to move him. Meanwhile I rang Theo, who by chance was meeting friends nearby, and she came clicketing up to the ward in her kitten heels and lovely party frock and burst into tears when she saw David.

We said we would drive to Queen Square, rather than go in the ambulance, and went out into the pea-soup night, getting lost. Arriving at this vast, completely deserted hospital, with no sign of life apart from two security guards, we wondered if we'd come to the wrong place. But no, the guards said they were expecting an ambulance, but it would come to the back of the building not the front, so one of them led us through miles of empty corridors – the lights were on, computers whirring, but no people anywhere – and we waited in what seemed to be a children's playground (we found out afterwards it was the back of Great Ormond Street hospital) for the ambulance to arrive. At last it came – and we saw David bound to a stretcher, completely motionless, with a huge elephant tube over his face.

Theo and I followed the stretcher through the miles of corridors back to the front entrance, where a tetchy Australian woman said she was the ‘patient co-ordinator’ and she'd been looking for ‘you guys’ everywhere – it was exactly as if she was telling us off for being late at check-in. She took us down to a horrible tiny waiting room with freezing air conditioning and left us in the Arctic cold, while David was taken for his scan. After about an hour a kind Greek neurosurgeon came to explain that the scan showed extensive bleeding in the brain and that, while normally he would attempt to operate, it was obvious that any surgery would kill him. In retrospect I realise I was meant to say, ‘Well if there's nothing you can do, let him go’, but I was too confused, I didn't take the hint and said something like, ‘Well, do what you can.’ He said he would talk to David's other consultants from the bone-marrow and kidney departments who were on their way. Theo and I were so cold in the waiting room we went back up to the sweltering entrance hall and watched this procession of consultants arriving in their smart cars – a Porsche, an Aston Martin, a Mercedes – greeting each other with handshakes and slaps on the back. They disappeared down to the operating theatre and I kept walking past and peeping through the window till one of them saw me and drew down the blind. After another hour the neurosurgeon came and said they had decided there was no point in operating and they would return David to the Middlesex intensive care. At this point the Australian trolley dolly perkily told me that ‘You guys should go home and have a nice cup of tea and then tomorrow you can have a nice visit with the loved one.’ I still regret that I was too exhausted to slap her.

Officially David's death occurred at noon on Sunday, 10 August, though even death, I learned, is not so clear cut. Theo and I grabbed a few hours sleep – poor Rosie, in Brighton, was waiting for the first train to London. We agreed to meet in intensive care as soon as Rosie could get there. Meanwhile I rang Charles very early, asking him to break the news to Maurice and try to contact Luke, who was somewhere in Scotland. Theo and I went to see David in intensive care and both promptly turned away. He was quite obviously dead, but hooked up to this horrible machine that made his chest rise and fall like some creaky Victorian waxwork. A doctor explained that he was effectively brain-dead, but they could keep him alive by machine for a day if other members of the family wanted to ‘say their goodbyes’. I relayed all this to Charles, who relayed it to Maurice and eventually Luke, who raced back from Scotland to be with Maurice.

Theo and I had to go to the kidney unit to collect David's things – they were all piled in bags in a cupboard, another patient was already in his room, and there was no sign of Steve or the other nice nurses. The top kidney man came and explained what happened – the blood has to be thinned for dialysis so there was always a slight risk of bleeding to the brain. Back in intensive care, and now joined by Rosie, a team of doctors assembled to talk in euphemisms – basically it was just a case of deciding when to switch off the machine that was keeping David artificially alive. ‘Switch off now,’ we chorused. But, said the doctors, how did we feel about organ donation? Fine, we said, and they told us that an ‘organ co-ordinator’ would be in touch. But this meant, I realised later, that they had to keep David artificially alive in case any of his organs were needed. The organ co-ordinator rang in the afternoon with a weird questionnaire, asking among other things whether David had ever had sex with prostitutes, with animals, in Africa? ‘Not all at once,’ I joked – and heard her gasp of outrage at the other end. David would have laughed, but there was no David to hear. She told me, quite casually, that he had been declared dead at noon.

Postscript

When I was arranging David's funeral, the undertaker said that nowadays it was normal to have a photograph of ‘the loved one’ on the front of the Order of Service, and I said oh yes, good idea. I had hundreds of photos of David and, I thought, it would be easy to find a good one. But as I went through the family photo albums, I discovered with dismay that there were almost no photographs suitable for a funeral service, because most of them contained lobsters. Sometimes they were half lobsters surrounded by lettuce leaves on a plate, or sometimes they were live lobsters, just bought, kicking their legs at the camera, but either way the typical photograph consisted of a large lobster in the foreground with David pulling yum-yum faces in the background.

The reason lobsters featured so prominently in our family albums was because David loved eating them, and had taught the children to love them too, so we always had lobsters for our birthdays – Theo's on 5 March, Rosie's on 3 May, mine on 22 May, David's on 1 June – and I always took photos on these occasions. There was a similar succession of photos featuring David holding Christmas puddings with flaming brandy, but the lobster ones were definitely more appealing. In a way, I felt, a picture of David with a lobster would be ideal for his funeral card, a memory of countless happy family celebrations. And the vicar had told me at least three times that he wanted the funeral to reflect my wishes. I wished for a lobster! But no – David's father would be appalled, his brother Charles would be bewildered, even his younger brother Luke, keen lobsterphile though he was, might think it was a bit disrespectful. I must bow to convention in these matters and find a lobster-less picture.

I trawled on through the albums. There were plenty of pictures of David with the daughters on windy hilltops in the Lake District, or windy clifftops in Cornwall, but he was always wearing an anorak, with his hair blowing about. There were a few – very few – photographs of me and David together, usually dressed up for a party, both grinning cheesily and self-consciously at the camera. But they were invariably taken by the children and involved some camera-wobble. There were recent photographs of him painting in his studio but, because he was painting, he was turned away from the camera. In the end, I concluded that I possessed
no
straight portrait of David at all, and would have to forget the idea of a photograph on the funeral card.

But then when I opened one of the letters of condolence (how quickly one acquires the ghastly terminology! Of course I mean letters from friends) a photograph fell out and it was a lovely picture of David smiling with a backdrop of foliage behind. The letter was from Eric Christiansen and said it was taken at Eric's 60th birthday party, by his wife Sukey. Anyway, it was a perfect portrait and the printers said they could take out the foliage and put just David's face on the funeral card. So that's what they did, and it looked fine – though still, as I stared dry-eyed at the card throughout the funeral service, I regretted the missing lobster.

Afterwards several friends asked if I had copies of the photograph that they could keep, so I got a dozen printed. I kept the original – with foliage – and put it in a silver frame. I knew I ought to have a photograph of David on the mantelpiece, so I had that one, and a windy anorak one of him with the daughters in Cornwall. And then, as a compromise, I also had a lobster one, not framed, stuck pseudo-casually in the corner of the overmantel mirror. I felt I was doing all the correct widow things.

Some weeks later David's ex-colleague Paddy Scannell sent me the University of Westminster newsletter with an obituary of David. This was an extended version of his
Guardian
obituary and far from thrilling. But what was sensational was the photograph they used. It was one I had never seen before and showed David beaming, happy, exuberant and, I could tell, a bit drunk. He was smiling with deep fondness into the camera, or, more accurately, at the person holding the camera. I wrote to Paddy thanking him for the obituary and asking, as casually as I could, where the photograph came from and whether there was any chance of my getting a print? I explained that most of my photographs of David entailed lobsters and that straight portraits of him were rare. I asked – again, I hoped, casually – who took the photograph and on what occasion.

Paddy wrote back that the photograph belonged to an ex-colleague who was currently in the States but that he would get a copy for me as soon as she came back. She! Of course it was confirmation of what I suspected. Because it seemed obvious to me when I first saw the photo that David was in love with whoever took it. It was not just the affection in his smile – it was more the
confidence
that seemed to say, ‘Okay, so I'm drunk, but I know you won't mind.’ I had never asked David if he had affairs but I could chart, over the years, certain periods when he seemed to stay late at work, or when he had mysterious extra lectures or conferences to attend at the weekends. And when he was extra nice to me. Of course he was always nice to me, but there was sometimes an extra niceness that I thought betokened guilt.

Anyway I was now sure that I had proof of his infidelity – I could see that it would not exactly stand up in court but it was clear-cut proof to me. And the feeling it aroused in me was… Actually all sorts of confused feelings, but predominantly relief. Relief from a great weight of guilt that had been sitting on me like a boulder since David died. Guilt that I hadn't spent enough time with him in hospital, guilt that I was in the garden at home when he had his haematoma; guilt that I hadn't listened to his worries sympathetically, that I had been so brisk – of course you won't die, I'd told him, the doctors know what they are doing. And guilt, before that, aeons and aeons of guilt stretching back over all the years of our marriage. I was never a good wife; he should never have married me; he deserved someone nicer. But if he was unfaithful, ah, that made everything so much easier.

Losing my guilt was just what I needed at the time. It enabled me to stop obsessing about what happened in hospital and start thinking about how I could get on with my life. I'd been almost paralysed since David's death, but now I felt this great surge of energy in the course of which I organised an exhibition of David's work, had the house redecorated, built a fence, replanted the front garden. Some months later another letter from Paddy arrived, containing a photo. It took me a minute to recognise it – there was David beaming at the camera, slightly drunk, but there was another man next to him, also beaming at the camera, also slightly drunk, leaning on David's shoulder. Paddy's letter explained that the printers had managed to delete the other man when they used the photo for David's obituary. His name was Frank H, he was an ex-colleague of David's and the photograph was taken at his leaving party by his wife.

Good God. Frank H's leaving party had actually engraved itself on my memory as one of the nights years ago when David mysteriously stayed out late, and I remember thinking at the time, ‘I have never even heard him mention a colleague called Frank H, so why does he need to attend his leaving party?’ In fact if you had asked me to list all the reasons why I ever suspected David of being unfaithful, Frank H's leaving party – this mysterious colleague I'd never heard of till he left – would probably have come top of the list. And now here was Frank H – a pleasant enough bloke by the look of him – with his hand affectionately on David's shoulder, beaming at the camera just like David. And when I studied it carefully, I could see what the photograph showed. David was somewhat drunk but Frank H was
very
drunk – he was leaning on David's shoulder probably to stop himself swaying. And David was smiling at Mrs H to reassure her, laughing about good old Frank, this dear old colleague who had got a bit squiffy. Thus, anyway, my reading of the picture, and why it now has pride of place on my mantelpiece. But, as I said before, I am a deep believer in the unknowability of other people – such was the lesson I learned from Simon all those years ago.