Joseph Anton: A Memoir (89 page)

She was in Hammersmith Hospital and was getting rapidly worse. Tim said they had found that the cancer was in her lungs as well and
she had an oxygen face mask to help her breathe and she couldn’t eat solids. The speed of her decline was terrifying. The doctors at Hammersmith were at a loss because of her weakness.

They couldn’t operate or begin chemotherapy until they fixed the problem of the fluid filling her lungs, and she just kept getting weaker.

She really was dying, he understood. She was fading fast.

Zafar called Mr. Waxman, the senior consultant at Hammersmith, and Waxman told him it wasn’t appropriate to discuss the case on the phone but agreed to speak to Zafar if he came into the hospital. “That means nothing good,” Zafar said, and he was right. Then Zafar went to see Clarissa’s GP, who admitted to having made “two serious mistakes.” He had not taken her chest pains seriously when she first mentioned them, and he hadn’t rethought his position when she complained about the pains repeatedly. “Eighty-five percent of chest pains are caused by stress,” he said, “and I went with the statistics.” Also, she had had a mammogram less than two months earlier and it had been clear. But the cancer hadn’t come back in her breast. She had been complaining of pain since June or early July, Zafar said, and the doctor had done nothing. Now, this insensitive man crassly and cruelly said to the dying woman’s son, “She had a very serious cancer before, you know, and I’m not sure she ever accepted that. Now, her days are numbered.”

“I will get this bastard,” he wrote in his journal. “I will get him.”

He went with Zafar to Clarissa’s bedside on the afternoon of Tuesday, November 2, 1999. She was gaunt and yellow and so weak, so scared. She could hardly sign her name on the checks she said she had to send. She did not want to sign her will, but in the end she signed it. Waxman talked about starting the chemotherapy at once because it was her only chance and he said there was a 60 percent chance of success, but he didn’t sound convinced. Zafar’s face was heavy with despair and though his father tried to sound as positive as he could it didn’t do any good.

The next morning Waxman said that Clarissa had very few days to live. They had started the chemotherapy but she had had a negative reaction to it and they had had to stop. There was nothing else to be done. “There is,” said Zafar, who had spent the night scouring the
Internet and had come up with a wonder drug. Mr. Waxman told him, kindly, that it was too late for all that.

The “Internet.” That was a word they were learning to use. That was the year someone had first used the word “Google” in his presence. Now there were these new electronic horizons, this new “terra incognita that spreads out in every gaze,” in which Bellow’s Augie had once located the human adventure. If this “Google” had existed in 1989 the attack on him would have spread so much faster and wider that he would not have stood a chance. He had been lucky to be attacked just before the dawn of the information age. But today he was not the one who was dying
.

She had less than twenty-four hours, they told him, and he was sitting by her bedside holding her hand and Zafar’s, and Zafar held her other hand and his. Tim and his wife, Alison, and Clarissa’s close friends Rosanne and Avril were there. Then at one point she slid into something worse than sleep and Zafar drew him aside and asked, “You said that at the end it happens very fast—is this it? It looks like all the life has drained from her face.” He thought, yes, it might be, and he went to her to say goodbye. He leaned over her and kissed her three times on the side of the head—and
bang
, she sat up straight and opened her eyes.
Wow, that was quite a kiss
, he thought, and then she turned and looked him right in the face and asked with terror in her gaze, “I’m not dying, am I?” “No,” he lied, “you’re just resting,” and for the rest of his life he wondered if he had been right to lie. If he asked such a question on his deathbed he would hope to be told the truth but he had seen the terror in her and had not been able to say the words. After that for a time she seemed stronger and he made another appalling mistake. He took Zafar home to rest for a few hours. But while they were sleeping she faded again and went beyond the Orphic power of love to recall her. This time she did not return. At 12:50
A.M.
the phone rang and he heard Tim’s voice and understood his folly. Zafar, that great big young man, wept in his arms all the way to the hospital while the police drove them to Hammersmith like the wind.

Clarissa died. She died. Tim and Rosanne had been with her at the end. Her body lay curtained in a ward. Her mouth was slightly open, as if she were trying to speak. She was cool to the touch but not yet completely cold. Zafar couldn’t stay with her. “That’s not my mother,”
he said, and left the room, and didn’t look at her in death again. He himself couldn’t stay away from her. He sat beside her and talked to her through the night. He talked about their long love and his gratitude to her for their son. He thanked her again for mothering him through these hard times. It was as if the years of their separation had fallen away and he had full emotional access once again to an earlier self, an old love, at the very moment when those things had been lost forever. He was overcome by grief and sobbed uncontrollably and blamed himself for many things.

He had worried that Zafar would try to lock his grief away, as Clarissa herself might have done, but instead his son talked for days, remembering all the things she and he had done together, the bike rides, the yachting holidays, their time in Mexico. He was wonderfully mature and brave. “I am very proud of my boy,” his father wrote in his journal, “and will enfold him in my love.”

Clarissa was cremated on Saturday afternoon, November 13, 1999, at Golders Green crematorium. Following the hearse was unbearable. Her mother, Lavinia, seeing her daughter beginning her last journey, broke down completely and he put his arm around her while she cried. They made their way through Clarissa’s London, the London they had lived in together and apart—Highbury, Highgate, Hampstead. Oh, oh, he howled inwardly. There were over two hundred people waiting for her at the crematorium and the grief was on everyone’s face. He spoke by her coffin of their beginnings, how he first saw her bringing tea to Mama Cass Elliot onstage at a charity event, how their friends Connie Carter and Peter Hazell-Smith had arranged a dinner
à quatre
to introduce them, how he had waited for her for two years. “I fell in love quickly, she slowly,” he said. How their son was born, their greatest treasure, on a Sunday in June. After the birth the midwife had thrown him out while they cleaned and dressed the young mother and he wandered the empty Sunday streets looking for flowers and gave ten pounds to a news vendor for a copy of the
Sunday Express
just so he could say, “Keep the change, I’ve just had a son.”
We never disagreed about you, Zafar, and now she lives in you. I look into your face and see her eyes
.

The months that followed were perhaps Zafar’s lowest time because
as well as mourning his mother his home in Burma Road was sold and he had to look for a new place to live. Also, his reason for leaving Exeter, a music tour featuring a pair of DJs called Phats and Smalls that he was promoting, fell apart and his business partner Tony disappeared leaving him responsible for some large-ish debts and his father lost a sum of money bailing him out, so he felt, briefly, that he had lost everything, his mother, his work, his home, his confidence, his hope, and here was his father telling him that he was probably separating from Elizabeth and going to live in America, and, well, that was just great.

It was good to be able to say, from a dozen or so years in the future, that Zafar went on to prove that his chosen path had been the right one for him, that he worked astonishingly hard at making his way and developed a successful career in the entertainment, PR and event management world, that he was universally liked and respected, and that the time came when people stopped saying to him, “Oh, you’re Salman’s son,” and instead began saying to his father, “Oh, you’re Zafar’s dad.”

“We are the same person,” she said to him, “we want the same things.” He began to introduce her to his New York friends, and to meet hers,
when he was in New York with her he knew that a new life in the New World was what he wanted; a life with her. But there was a question that wouldn’t go away: How cruel was he prepared to be in the pursuit of his own happiness?

There was another question as well. Would people just be too damn afraid of the cloud over his head to sell him a place to live? In his own opinion the cloud was evaporating, but the opinion of others was another matter. There were apartments he liked, in TriBeCa and in Chelsea, which fell through because the buildings’ developers panicked and said that if he moved into the building nobody else would want to live there. Real estate brokers said they saw the developers’ point. He became grimly determined to defeat such objections.

He flew to Los Angeles to see Padma and on his first night there she provoked a bewildering quarrel. The world could not have told him more clearly that he was in the wrong place with the wrong woman in the wrong city on the wrong continent at the wrong time. He moved out of her apartment into the Bel-Air Hotel, booked an earlier flight back to London, and called Padma to say that the spell had been broken, he had come to his senses, and he was going back to his wife.

He called Elizabeth and told her that his plans had changed, but within hours Padma was at his hotel door begging for forgiveness. By the end of the week she had turned him around again.

It was clear to him at the time and afterward that these months of vacillation inflicted greater pain on Elizabeth than anything else. He tried to say goodbye and he choked. He tried to walk away and he stumbled. And as he swung back and forth he hurt her more and more. He went back to London and the Illusion sent him emails of blistering desire.
Just wait. I only want to please you. I’m just waiting until I can kill you with happiness
.

Meanwhile, a few days before Christmas, the Bishop’s Avenue house was burgled.

Beryl the housekeeper arrived to find the front door wide open and one of their suitcases and Zafar’s toolbox standing in the forecourt.
All the ground floor interior doors were open, which was unusual also. They were in the habit of locking them at night. She thought she heard movement upstairs, called out, got no reply, got scared, decided not to go inside and called Frank Bishop. Frank called him on his mobile but he was asleep and the call went to voice mail. Then Frank called the landline and woke Elizabeth, who snapped at him, “Get out of bed.” Upper-story windows had been opened too and blinds and curtains as well. He began to rush around the house. He woke Zafar, who had heard nothing. He found another wide-open window. In his study his French Ordre des Arts et des Lettres medal was gone, and a camera. His laptops, passport, video camera were all untouched. His watch and some U.S. currency had been taken but his American Express card, which had been right next to the cash, was still there. None of Elizabeth’s jewelry was missing; a diamond ring, in plain view, was still in its place. Zafar’s stereo was gone, and some living-room ornaments, a white-metal Ganesh, a carved ivory tusk bought in India in the early 1970s, a silver box, an antique magnifying glass, and a little octagonal illuminated Qur’an given to him by Clarissa’s grandmother May Jewell before their wedding. And in the dining room all their cutlery was gone in its wooden canteen. That was all.

The master bedroom window was wide open. This had been a skillful cat burglar. He came in through the bedroom window and left muddy footprints on the floor and woke nobody. It was a chilling thought. The man had crept right past them and none of the three of them had opened their eyes. Did the burglar know whose house he had entered, whose medal he had stolen? Did he recognize the sleeper in the bed? Did he know his own danger? If there had still been policemen in the house he would probably have been shot dead.

Everyone was all right. That was the main thing. But had the house been blown? Frank Bishop arrived, Beryl came inside, and officers came up from the Yard to assess the situation. If this was a Christmas sneak thief, as was most likely, it was extremely improbable that he would disclose the location to Islamic terrorists, or even go to the press, which would be self-incriminating. So, stay put, hope for the best. Yes. That was what they would do.