Basil Street Blues (36 page)

She had telephoned me one morning after her bath to say there was a lump on her breast. What did I think? I heard my voice, confident, clear, categorical, telling her I thought this the most normal thing in the world, and certainly nothing to lose sleep over. These lumps and bumps were, on the whole, quite harmless and perfectly natural. Indeed, it would be curious, almost worrying in itself, if she’d
not
had one or two lumps by her early sixties – though of course, as a precaution, it must be examined. But the tests showed it to be malignant. Again I spoke with authority. Thank God, I exclaimed, she had not suffered such a thing earlier when they could do little about it. Now, I assured her, everything had advanced, everything was different. It was a well-known fact that most women with this trouble came out of hospital in a few days and went on to live the rest of their lives in excellent health. Modern medicine, I reminded her, was amazing. Of course she would have to endure regular checkups and that was a bore. But it was no worse than that.

Before her operation, my mother made one more quick journey to Stockholm. Kaja had become almost blind and my mother was trying to persuade her to live in a Swedish convalescent home in London where, because it was technically on Swedish territory, her pension would still be paid to her. But like Yolande at Norhurst, Kaja wanted to spend her last years at her apartment in Artillerigatan, even if this meant never seeing her daughter again. She could barely see anything as it was and would be lost in unfamiliar surroundings. These few days were to be their last together.

My mother went into the Royal Marsden Hospital as soon as she returned from Sweden. This was only a few hundred yards from her flat at Daver Court. Seeing her in the ward, I told her what a good nurse she would have been. She made friends with all the patients, and seemed naturally popular with everyone. Her operation to remove one of her breasts was a success and when she went for a check-up a few months later there was no cancer in her body. But she had great difficulty with an infected sinus in the pit of her arm. She could never again get comfortable whether standing, sitting or lying down. The arm was fastened with bandages and they treated it in various ways. But it got worse and she was soon having to take pain killers.

Nevertheless, for some months, there was an interval in the descent of both my parents’ health, as if they had landed on a ledge. I was at that time giving a platform performance at the Lyttleton Theatre before a production of Shaw’s play,
The Philanderer
, and I decided to invite them both. This took considerable planning, but I got them there and, as I walked on to the stage, I saw them sitting together in the audience. My mother had her arm fixed at an acute angle like a child in a classroom asking to be excused. My father battled furiously with his hearing aid from which high-pitched bleats were being signalled. After my talk, we saw the play; and after the play I took them to the National Theatre Restaurant. My father frowned a little at the architecture, but not excessively; my mother looked round the tables and inquired if they played music there. It was difficult sustaining a conversation. Over the coffee my father braced himself, clearing his throat, moving uncomfortably in his chair, looking miserable. I knew the signs. He was searching for something pleasant to say about my lecture. I had reassured them both that I could not speak for long as I would be engulfed by the play itself, like a Stoppardian or Pirandello character. ‘Yes,’ my father said eventually taking his cue from this remark, ‘coming to an end must have been tricky. I thought your ending very timely.’

This was the last time the three of us were together – indeed the only time I can remember us together since my childhood.

Not long afterwards my mother’s cancer reappeared. So began a long sequence of treatments and operations that are a blur in my memory now, as if everything happened together and went on happening all the time. This dark period began with the suicide of her closest friend, Irene Heyman, and, a year or so later, the death of her ballet-dancing daughter who, with a final
entrechat
, threw herself in front of an underground train at Sloane Square. Poor Larry Heyman, his hand trembling violently round his whisky glass, moved to the top of a tower block in Fulham, and my mother never saw him again.

But other friends came back. Shirley Morton, from the ‘Wilmslow Wheelers’, reappeared and insisted on getting a second opinion from her own doctor. And Gay, Edy Fainstain’s daughter and my one-time stepsister, returned, bringing flowers, bringing comfort, hugging my mother in a way I had never learnt to do. There were women, too, with whom my mother had worked as an interpreter at business fairs and conferences; and, from further back, women with whom she had modelled in Basil Street; as well as a good drinking friend in Daver Court. Arriving at her bedside in the hospital, or at her flat, I would sometimes find a gang of these friends who had gathered to raise her morale. Griffy, too, suddenly turned up from Wales with his Swedish wife Ingrid, filling the place with children and talking of the old days beside the lake at Velden and above the sea near La Turbie. Outside in the street, as he was leaving, he asked: ‘Why are we so gloomy when our mothers are so jolly?’ Then, after a moment, he raised his voice in answer: ‘Stand up, Purple Parr, and be recognised!’

My father would sometimes telephone with obscure messages. ‘Your mother is being very brave,’ he said gruffly. Then, in a voice from the past: ‘Poor Sue.’ Kaja also called regularly from Sweden. She was blind now and many of these talks with her daughter ended tearfully.

My mother was a naturally good patient, but as her condition worsened she found it more difficult to cope with visitors, feeling anxious over entertaining them and guilty at the possibility of letting them go away empty-handed. She would make ashtrays from shells, napkin rings from odd pieces of fabric, cards and trinkets from all sorts of scraps and oddments to give them. Sometimes I would feel irritated by all this trivial and unnecessary work she gave herself. But perhaps it was not trivial or unnecessary. I was exasperated too by some of the things she asked me to do, such as negotiating the renewal of her insurance cover on a fur coat we both knew she would never wear again, and arranging for her to be excused the wearing of a seat belt in a car, though she did not own a car and was unlikely to be travelling in one. I was learning how little we can do to help the terminally ill: and how important that little sometimes is.

There were a few practical things I could do, such as buying her flat at Daver Court from the bank to save her financial on top of medical anxieties. Some days I would telephone the hospital on her behalf because ‘they take more notice of a man’. And I would occasionally accompany her to the Royal Marsden Hospital, always anxious over my own loss of working time. She might have an appointment at ten in the morning and actually see the doctor at four in the afternoon. She became exhausted by these hours of waiting and dispirited at times by the impersonal quality of the treatment. ‘So what seems to be the matter?’ asked one doctor resting his elbow on a huge file of my mother’s medical records. Each time, it seemed, there was a new doctor in charge of her; each time we started from the beginning; and every time, in case of legal repercussions, a matron or ward sister stood sentinel over us. ‘Whichever way I turn,’ my mother complained in her idiomatic English, ‘my bottom is still behind me.’ Occasionally the ambulance failed to arrive; most days it came at unexpected hours; one day, despite her protests, it took her to the Royal Marsden Hospital in Surrey and had to race back, its siren clanging and lights flashing, to the Fulham Road.

One evening when I was visiting her, I went by mistake into an adjacent ward and saw a surreal sight. I was apparently not in a hospital at all, but in a restaurant. A line of smart waiters stood at one end, and the first guests in their dinner jackets and long dresses stood drinking and chatting round a long table set for dinner, its wine glasses gleaming in the candle-light. I stared in disbelief and then, back in the corridor of the hospital, asked a nurse whether I had been dreaming. She laughed at my surprise. For this was one of the Royal Marsden Hospital’s fund-raising events, the success of which was marked by a giant financial barometer on the front of the building. As I sat next to my mother’s bed that evening, seeing her suffering, conscious of people close to death in other beds, I could not blot out the picture of that formal scene on the other side of the wall, the grotesque juxtaposition of those diners-out and these inpatients – or ‘clients’, ‘customers’ and ‘consumers of health’ as they were soon to be called in the new political circumlocution. I fantasised over wheeling this army of the old and ill next door and overwhelming that table of money-changers from the so-called ‘real world’ with actual reality and misrule. But of course I could do nothing, and whatever I can do I do now.

One day a nurse brought my mother the news that Kaja was dead, and she cried. Not long afterwards she had another operation during the course of which she regained consciousness. It was this shock, after enduring so much for so long, that broke her spirit. I saw the skull beneath the skin. I saw the skeleton of death. What upset me was that so soft a person had to be so mutilated. Still uncertain of the facts, I went to speak to the doctor in charge. It was again another doctor, with the matron in attendance. He told me that my mother had only three or four days to live – he would not have told me had I not asked directly. It was necessary, apparently, that she endure these extra days of torment. Was it possible, I inquired, for my mother to be given the strongest sleeping pills by night and the strongest pain killers by day? The matron seemed surprised by my request, but agreed.

So often over the years these doctors and nurses had given us bad news, and more often they had given us no news at all. My role was to be Dr Pangloss and give out a continual stream of glowing news. This was what my mother wanted to hear. I returned to her bed and looked her straight in the eyes, those sunken eyes. The worst, I told her, was mercifully over. She had come through. The pain would recede and she would sleep better. Then after a few bad days she would begin getting better. I can only hope she believed me.

Gay was often at her bed when I was not there and for longer periods than I was. She could do what I still could not do. She could kiss her, touch her, bring her moments of close physical comfort. I could not touch her in this way. I must write this again. I could not touch her.

Even with the drugs, even in her greatly weakened state, she was appallingly restless. This was her deathbed and she wanted to get off it. She twisted and gasped. Her hands, like spiders, crept around the blankets and explored the edge of the sheets. The nurses fixed iron railings to the sides of the bed as I sat there so that she would not fall out. I was so tense and my head throbbed so painfully that I asked the ward sister for an aspirin. She refused to give me an aspirin. I went out to a chemist down the street. When I came back my mother was draped across the iron bars of the bed. No one had yet noticed she was dead. A place of death awaits us all.

My father was too ill to come to the funeral. In 1982 he had made his Will appointing me his executor with the duty of looking after Yolande should he die first. But it was his dog Jonathan that died. He immediately bought a new dog, dog William, almost identical, and then added a codicil to his Will with details of dog William’s breeding and instructions as to his ‘upkeep if I pass out’.

His health was precariously stable. ‘I am finding life very tricky,’ he scribbled to me. ‘It’s like trying to walk on a tightrope & I have no doubt I’ll come crashing down one day.’ I was to take over power of attorney on behalf of my aunt and have a third-party mandate for my father, with both of which I tried to spread a safety net under their lives. After complaints from the landlord I arranged for my father’s flat to be decorated and, approaching eighty, he seized the opportunity to go into business with the decorator, leasing him his spare room as an office and, in the role of ‘consultant’, putting him in touch with people in the building trade with whom he had not quarrelled. I remember some architectural drawings lying on his desk. They looked intricate and palatial and he had obviously derived deep pleasure from preparing them, though he confessed they were merely changing rooms and lavatories for a golf club.

There were days when he recovered his embattled self. Though admitting ‘things are very very bad’, he drew comfort from the thought that they ‘can’t be worse than having to live day & night with that arrogant old gentleman Bernard Shaw’. He also enjoyed crossing swords with a writer I knew well who lived in Ewell, John Stewart Collis (‘You told me he’s a good writer. He must indeed be good at something’). But on the whole he appeared to be growing more vulnerable, shedding a skin, and the sensitivity he had concealed with such flourishes of antagonism and joviality all his life, began to declare itself. I took pains to spare him good news, at least to dilute it. I now drove and owned a car, but pretended I was merely borrowing it and pointed out that it was an inferior automatic rather than a properly-geared machine. With unaccustomed mildness my father remarked that some automatic cars were really quite good these days he had heard – though he himself would not like his gears to be changed in Tokyo or Detroit while travelling round Surrey.

I have written that he found it impossible to give praise or receive money, but that is not quite correct and I stand rebuked by two incidents from this late period of his life. In one of his last notes to me, after I had placed some money in his bank account, he wrote to thank me: ‘I never expected the sort of help you have given me and I can’t remember ever having received anything so welcome before.’ One afternoon I sat in the car with him, having to shout because of his deafness, telling him to spend his money on himself and go off at weekends to hotels with dog William (who was in the car at the time making communication more arduous). I tried to explain that it would be easier for me to help him financially if his capital fell still further, for then the State would assist me in helping him. I shouted that I had ensured in my Will that he would inherit enough money if I suddenly dropped dead. This was not charity, I yelled, but the natural dividend from a fatherly investment through childhood and adolescence, and in the allowance he had arranged for me in the nineteen-fifties. He sat staring out of the window and I could not tell whether he had taken it in. The dog leapt backwards and forwards between us. Then he said: ‘Your mother said we could not have had a better son’ – and he was fumbling desperately at the car door to get out. It was vicarious praise, of course, and very far from the truth, but it signalled a truce over all our animosities. Later I had a dream in which my father asked me if I’d like a smoke. He passed me a piece of iron piping with concrete knobs attached, bent like the starting handle of a car. It wasn’t easy to get going, but we managed eventually and I took a puff or two, remarking that it was surprisingly pleasant: after which he took it from me and began puffing himself. Then I woke, and lay wondering whether this had been the Holroyd pipe of peace.