The Enemy of the Good (27 page)

‘Three months,’ he said.

‘A year if you have treatment.’

‘You’re not going to give me the choice, are you?’

‘Not on this one,’ she replied, her eyes glistening.

‘It can be a lifetime. Remember
The Mikado
, when Yum Yum and Nanki Poo expect to have only a month together before his execution, so they decide to call each second a minute, each minute an hour and each day a year?’

‘I remember,’ she replied with a grimace. Gilbert and Sullivan were the point at which her affection for her adopted country came to an end. She remembered too how, with no trace of self-mockery, he had tried to persuade her that Gilbert was not only a supreme wordsmith but a ground-breaking philosopher who, in Yum Yum and Nanki Poo’s pledge, had anticipated
Einstein’s
theory by twenty years. She laughed so loudly that, when Mr Shepherd came to pick them up, he assumed that Edwin had been given the all-clear. It broke her heart to disabuse him.

Pitting his desire for honesty against his horror of provoking pity, Edwin asked her to confine the news to the children. Hinting at enough to ensure their attendance but stopping short of actual disclosure, she invited them down for Sunday lunch. Aware of its being Clement and Shoana’s first
encounter
since before the wedding, she trusted them to pull together for the sake of their father. Despite her championing of tribe over family, she felt threatened by any suggestion that they were at odds.

Shoana and Zvi arrived first. Marta kissed Shoana and smiled at Zvi,
maintaining
a distance that served to muddy the mother- and son-in-law
relationship
still further. It was plain from their private jokes and covert glances that the first three weeks of married life had treated them kindly. So she was
confused
to find that they had not only brought their own lunch but packed it in separate bags, issuing strict instructions that they were on no account to be mixed. Her confusion grew when she handed Shoana a cup of coffee for Zvi, which she deliberately ignored, leaving him to pick it up for himself. She waited until he went to the loo before asking if they were having problems.

‘No, of course not,’ Shoana said as if to a child. ‘I’m deliriously happy. I’m just
niddah
.’

‘What?’

‘I’ve got my period, so we’re forbidden to pass anything to each other.’

Zvi returned, commending a set of hunting prints whose only merit to Marta was age. Her relief at the arrival of Clement, Mike and Carla faded when Clement walked straight up to Shoana and asked if he were permitted to kiss her.

‘Don’t be ridiculous!’ she replied, kissing him lightly on both cheeks.

‘What about me?’ Mike asked. ‘Do I still have snogging privileges?’ Shoana said nothing but, with a quick look at Zvi, gave Mike a perfunctory kiss. Marta breathed again as they cleared the first hurdle. She watched while Shoana and Carla hugged and then, after checking that everyone was settled, prompted Edwin to break the news.

‘As you know, I’ve not been feeling myself of late. Blinding headaches… lapses of memory… loss of vision. I thought it was just tempus fugiting. But it wasn’t. At least not entirely. I’ve spent much of the last few weeks in hospital – ’

‘What?’ Clement said.

‘Why didn’t you say anything?’ Shoana turned to Marta.

‘We didn’t want to worry you,’ Edwin said. ‘We wanted to be sure of the diagnosis.’

‘Which is what?’ Clement asked.

‘A brain tumour.’

‘That’s not true!’ Shoana yelled.

‘It’s in both lobes,’ Edwin continued resolutely. ‘There’s no possibility of surgery.’

‘There must be something,’ Carla said. ‘Some experimental… unorthodox treatment.’

‘Nothing but chemo and radiotherapy,’ Marta interjected. ‘They might reduce the tumour for a while.’

‘Quite,’ Edwin said. ‘There are some short-term expedients but nothing more lasting. I have to prepare myself – we all do – for the inevitable.’

Marta was moved by the children’s response, the shocked silence
interrupted
by Shoana’s sobs. She longed for Zvi to take her in his arms, to acknowledge that there were more important things in life than law, but he stood helplessly by her side, the clenched fists and swollen vein on his
forehead
attesting to his inner conflict.

‘Don’t cry, Shoana,’ he pleaded. ‘I can’t bear it.’

With Zvi keeping his distance, it was left to Clement to reach out and hold his sister’s hand. He himself said nothing, as though struggling to
reconcile
such malignancy with his faith in a benign universe. Mike and Carla sat grim-faced and even Zvi, who had known them for only a few months, seemed to share in the pervading grief.

‘It’s no tragedy,’ Edwin insisted, with an acceptance too heartfelt to count as courage. ‘I’m eighty-three years old. I’ve had more than my biblical span.’

‘That must be the first time in years you’ve drawn comfort from the Bible,’ Clement said, forcing even Shoana to smile.

They ate a surprisingly convivial lunch. Edwin regaled them with tales of the more bizarre figures he had encountered in the Lords, before reminding Clement of his fury when Mark invoked his ninety-minute seniority to sit in the Eldest Sons’ Box at the State Opening of Parliament. She was struck by the irony that, with the steroids relieving the pressure on his brain, he was more relaxed and lucid than he had been for months. Her determination to enjoy the lull, however short-lived, faltered only when Shoana’s question as to whether they should tell Helena set Clement wondering if their aunt had gone slightly senile.

‘She seemed perfectly normal at… when I last saw her,’ Shoana said.

‘Then explain this. About three weeks ago, out of the blue, she sent me one of those actors’ First Night cards. Some Shakespearian character on the front – ’

‘Hotspur,’ Mike interjected.

‘Hotspur, thanks. And the words
Break a leg
inside. Except that she’d drawn a neat line through
Break
and replaced it with
Mend
.’

‘You know Helena,’ Marta said uneasily, ‘she’s always been eccentric.’

‘Runs in the family,’ Mike said, and the three outsiders smiled.

The show of unity collapsed at the end of the meal, once Edwin, at Marta’s insistence, had gone upstairs to rest.

‘How can we be sure the doctors have got it right?’ Shoana asked. ‘Did you demand a second opinion?’

‘Do you really think that’s necessary?’ Marta replied. ‘Your father’s changed so much these last few months. You mentioned yourself the way that he told the time. Mrs Shepherd noticed him counting the figures on his coins. And I’ve seen so many little things, or rather I’ve tried to blot them out. Suddenly they all make sense.’

‘So what do we know about his consultant? And the department? You have the money to go privately.’

‘It’s not a question of money, darling, but of principles. And a principle’s no less valid because it’s under pressure.’

‘You mean you’ll let Pa die for the sake of a principle?’ she asked.

‘Nanna, that’s a dreadful thing to say!’ Clement interjected.

‘It’s Shoana, Shoana! Will you please stop treating me like a child?’

‘I’m sorry. I wouldn’t want to offend your principles.’

‘Oh, ha ha! It’s your fault this has happened.’

‘Stop right there!’ Marta said. ‘I won’t listen to another word.’

‘When did Pa start going downhill? When he was hit by the glass!’

‘Bullshit!’ Mike said. ‘Tumours aren’t caused by trauma.’

‘It might have bled into it and made it worse.’

‘That’s simply not true,’ Marta said. ‘There’s no blame of any kind. End of story.’

She succeeded in halting the argument but, as she gazed at Clement, she was less convinced of having dispelled the guilt.

The next morning she took Edwin back to hospital for a preliminary meeting with the oncology and radiography teams, who outlined their plan to give him chemotherapy once a day for a week, followed by six weeks of
radiotherapy
. She listened in dismay while they explained, first, that they lacked clear evidence that the chemo was beneficial in such cases and, second, that it had to be given in particularly heavy doses to cross the blood-brain barrier. In spite of her resolve to view each new day as a bonus, she worried that it might be a treatment too far. Edwin felt no such misgivings, telling the doctors that he was ‘putting myself in your hands’, a statement confirmed all too literally in the afternoon, when he sat uncomplaining for four hours as they moulded a mask to his head. Two days later she brought him back to radiography, where he lay flat on his face all morning while they matched up the images from the
MRI
scan with the x-rays and drew an intricate web of guidelines on the mask.

The beginning of his treatment coincided with a further decline in his
condition
. The tumour took over their lives as relentlessly as a newborn child. Her initial gratitude on learning that he would be able to have the chemotherapy at home gave way to despair during two harrowing nights in which he gasped and shook and gulped and spewed, begging to be left to lie in his vomit rather than have to haul his aching body out of the sheets. Time no longer seemed such a worthwhile return for suffering, and she was relieved when the
remaining
four sessions were cancelled. After three days grace, they began the
radiotherapy
, for which they had to make a daily journey to the Radcliffe, where he was clipped into the mask and bombarded with rays. Her attempt to combine each trip with a treat, as though taking a child to the dentist, had to be
abandoned
when he grew progressively weaker. The steroids took a savage toll, his belly bloating while his legs and bottom wasted away. With his grey face, bull’s hump, puffed cheeks and waxy skin, he no longer looked like himself but a man with cancer or, rather, a character with cancer in a
TV
soap.

For all their efforts at concealment, the news of his illness leaked out,
exciting
both genuine concern and morbid curiosity. Friends and colleagues made discreet enquiries, while journalists put more intrusive questions. The owner of their favourite Oxford restaurant sent a complete dinner for two – which was eaten by one, twice. A young man, fresh from publishing a history of royal pets, declared his intention of writing his biography and requested an interview ‘before it’s too late’. The children kept in regular contact; Shoana’s commitments at work and home restricted her visits to Sundays, but
Clement’s
empty diary left him free to come and go throughout the week. While grateful for his support, she was suspicious of his motives. After a lifetime of intellectual struggle, Edwin needed to conserve his strength for basic survival, yet, walking in on them one afternoon, she found them so locked in debate that they barely acknowledged her presence.

‘With due respect to Descartes,’ Edwin rasped, ‘the soul isn’t the breath in the machine, but the illusion that permits the machine to run in the face of imminent breakdown. So the question arises: at what point should the machine be scrapped?’

‘I assure that you it arises for those of us who believe in the soul too.’

‘What do we do when the machine serves no purpose: when it’s clogged up and corroded but continues to guzzle fuel; worse, when its toxic waste
contaminates
its surroundings?’

‘What a depressing conversation!’ Marta interposed lightly.

‘But a vital one,’ Clement retorted.

‘Yes, my dear,’ Edwin added, ‘I’m afraid it is. If only identity death could be as clearly determined as brain death. People see Granny living – for want of a better word – with Alzheimer’s, gazing blankly at the wall, good for nothing but to open her bladder and bowels, and they think “Maybe she’s happy in her own world? Maybe she’s filling the wall with memories?” I very much doubt it, although I’m willing to grant the possibility. But what about someone who’s terminally ill, with a pain that gnaws away at their whole being?’

‘You won’t have pain, my darling,’ Marta said. ‘Just say the word and they’ll give you morphine.’

‘But what will I do to the rest of you? The longer I live, the more life I’ll suck out of you.’

‘You give me life! You always have.’

‘But that might change. Don’t I deserve as much consideration as a sick dog you’d take to the vet?’

‘You want us to help you die?’ she asked in horror.

‘When the time comes,’ he said, looking at Clement. ‘Who else can I trust? Not strangers. Not even myself. Only the people who love me, people who won’t be offended by my decline so much as outraged by it, who’ll leave me the dignity of being me.’

Clement’s rapid agreement brought back memories of their conversation after Shoana’s wedding. It was as if he were using his father’s case as a dry run for his own. She herself was more guarded, insisting that her sole concern was for his comfort, but, as she witnessed his ever-increasing distress, she
wondered
if her true concern were to protect herself. The one thing she could promise him was that he would never be a burden. To be close to him even in his illness was a blessing. He slept a great deal, and she wanted nothing more than to watch over him, allowing her memory to range across more than four decades of married life. A bishop’s wife had never been an easy role for her. She had been a gift to the headline writers:
Pot in the Palace
, when she admitted smoking hemp with the Hadza;
Wells Farrago
, when she opened the palace to striking miners. Edwin’s wife, however, had been the role of a lifetime. A phrase from a letter he had written to her half a century ago came back as vividly as if she had read it that morning: ‘Love means that I’d rather be with you than be myself.’

For the rest of his life, she was determined that he would be both.

On completing the radiotherapy, Edwin went back into hospital for a series of tests. Faced with the constant stream of doctors seeking to monitor his brain function, he joked that he had a formula ready to spout at the first sight of a white coat: ‘My name is Edwin Granville. I was born in 1924. The prime
minister’s
name is Gordon Brown.’

The joke fell flat when one of the white coats revealed that the radiotherapy had failed to shrink the tumour. Marta took Edwin home where, within days, he was showing a marked decline. He sat stock-still for hours and, when he did move, he invariably forgot the reason, causing himself much distress. He was given heavy doses of steroids which greatly increased his appetite. For all the satisfaction it afforded Mrs Shepherd, whose cooking hadn’t met with such enthusiasm since Mark left home, the extra bulk made it harder for Marta to manage him. She cursed the irony that, whereas other cancers made people lose weight, his made him balloon. Confronted with tasks that would have daunted a younger, larger woman, she employed two nurses, Ruth and Linda, to bath and dress him. They gradually took over his care, until there was little for her to do but count out his pills, remembering which he should take on an empty stomach and which with food. She gave thanks that the regimen was so complex, conscious that the small mercy she was able to offer him amounted to a vital one for her.

She seized the moments when he was resting to work on her Royal Society lecture. She had been elected an honorary fellow and, as an additional
accolade
, invited to address her new associates on the afternoon of the admissions ceremony. It was so hard to focus on anything other than his illness that her first thought had been to decline, but Edwin refused to hear of it.

‘Since when have you been a quitter?’ he asked. ‘Besides you don’t have the right. It’s a tribute not just to you but to anthropology. Have you
forgotten
how it used to infuriate you when diehards dismissed it as “sociology in tents”? Not to mention my mother who, no matter how often you explained, could never get a handle on it?’

‘She thought I was a phrenologist.’

‘Yes, and told all her friends you’d gone to Africa to measure the bumps on the natives’ heads!’

Marta laughed and realised that she had no choice but to accept the
invitation
. As she typed up her notes on her trusty Remington, she relived the excitement of her initial encounter with the Hadza. People had thought it mad, and even indecent, for a young woman to be travelling alone through Africa. Edwin’s had been a rare voice of encouragement. Her trip coincided with his curacy in Clapham. They joked that they would both be at the mercy of savages, a joke which in retrospect filled her with shame. Her reception in Kampala had been equally discouraging. The colonial government looked askance at anthropologists who, by living among the locals, fostered the
subversive
notion that whites were no different from blacks. She had to obtain permission to enter the savannah from the District Commissioner, who
summoned
her to a humid office where he sat sweatily swatting flies under a
mildewed
photograph of the Queen.

‘I’d no idea you’d be so young,’ he said in a manner at once avuncular and menacing.

‘If you keep me waiting any longer,’ she replied, ‘I won’t be.’

It was because she was young that she made light of the difficulties, both of the language and the terrain. It was hard enough to locate the tribe, entailing an arduous three-day drive through the Serengeti, but harder still to gain their trust. For once being short worked in her favour, since even the Hadza men were no more than five foot tall. In the end she won them round by a mixture of sympathy and blandishment, asserting that the Hadza had a history worthy of record. While neighbouring tribes disparaged them as thieves and
murderers
who had fled from settled communities to live as outlaws, her aim was to redress the balance and restore their good name.

She thought that the War had prepared her to survive anything but, whether because life in England had softened her or else conditions in the bush were tougher than those she had previously known, she found the first few months very wearing. No field report or guidebook had warned her of the long nights in rudimentary shelters and the incessant noise: the
shrilling
, shrieking and chirruping, and, most enervating of all, the cackling of the hyenas (many years later, taking the children to a Hollywood version of
King Solomon’s Mines
, she scorned the entire film except for the soundtrack). She was similarly daunted by the lack of privacy. She came from a world in which it was easy to shut people out – indeed, one that was built on that premise – but, apart from going into the bush to have intercourse, the tribe remained constantly together. For all that there were no guards or walls, she might have been back in the ghetto, especially given the reeking bodies, the only
difference
lying in the undertone of wood smoke to the Hadza sweat.

She had to accept the fact, as wounding to her self-esteem as the District Commissioner’s condescension, that she was as much an object of curiosity to them as they were to her. Even after the children had ascertained, with a complete lack of inhibition, that her hair was not grass, that she was white all over and that she was a real woman, their mothers expressed doubts as to whether she reproduced in the same way. Recalling their confusion, she amused herself by speculating on the impressions that a Hadza anthropologist would have gathered had she come to the West, returning to the tribe with the cautionary tale of
The Babylon People
.

Her lecture drafted, she left Edwin in the care of Clement and the nurses and went up to London to attend the New Fellows seminars at the Society. The thrill of being party to the latest scientific developments palled, as she listened to a young geneticist’s account of implanting a growth chromosome from cows into pigs that caused them to triple in size with no decline in the quality of pork. The only defect was a weakness in the legs that required them to wear callipers. She baulked at his comparison of his butcher’s hybrid (pow? cog?) with a nectarine, as if he were simply intervening at a different stage in the food chain. As he appealed for the audience’s discretion to avoid inciting the animal rights lobby or, in his phrase, ‘the flat earth brigade who refuse to accept that animals are subject to the same evolutionary forces as humans’, she felt an unexpected sympathy for Noah’s Ark.

She stayed in London overnight and, the following lunchtime, made her way back down a drizzly Pall Mall to the Society’s headquarters, where she waited for her family to arrive. Carla was the first, wearing a bright batik dress that failed to conceal the tiredness in her eyes. ‘Curtis sends his apologies,’ she said, ‘but his boss has just bought a large collection of 78s that he wants him to catalogue.’

‘I quite understand,’ Marta replied, unaware that she had invited him.

Minutes later, Clement and Mike came in with Edwin, whom they had driven down from Beckley that morning. As they led him slowly up the steps and into a hastily vacated chair where he sat with a blank look and a mild tremor, Marta felt the same thought running through all their heads: whether he would ever be well enough to make such a journey again.

Shoana was the last, blaming her delay on the sudden downpour and the dearth of taxis. Her sharp recoil from the porter who offered to take her sodden coat alerted Marta to her failure to allow for her daughter’s diet. ‘There must be something you can eat,’ she said in dismay. ‘What about salmon? That was safe for Zvi.’

For a moment Shoana looked pained, but a glance at her father put matters in perspective. ‘Don’t worry, Ma. I had a sandwich at my desk before I left. I’m happy to sit and chat while the rest of you eat. Truly!’

Deeply grateful for the fiction, Marta led the way to the lifts through a knot of smartly dressed new fellows and their families. Clement and Mike took Edwin down in the first lift, leaving Shoana, Carla and herself to wait for the second. Just as its doors opened, two young men in morning coats ran up.

‘Room for a couple of little ones?’ the fleshier of the two asked.

‘Of course,’ Marta said.

‘I’ll take the stairs,’ Shoana said.

‘We can easily squeeze up, darling.’

‘No, I could do with the exercise.’

As Shoana strode off, to the men’s consternation, Marta realised that a squeeze was precisely what she wished to avoid.

After a subdued meal in the gloomy subterranean restaurant, Marta was glad to escape to the library for an official photograph. She returned downstairs for the ceremony, pausing only to smile at her family strategically grouped by the door, as she was escorted to the front of the hall. Sitting alongside the other new fellows, she studied the portrait of Charles II, the jovial features befitting the Merry Monarch sobriquet, until a steward, dwarfed by a huge silver mace, led in the formal procession. Following the president’s speech of welcome, the four dozen new fellows were called up to the platform one by one, receiving their scrolls and resuming their seats by way of the archivist’s table, where they added their names to those of the host of luminaries in the Charter Book. As the sole honorary fellow, she was left until last, hesitating only when the archivist handed her a quill which looked as venerable as the mace. She dipped it in the inkwell, signed her name and returned to her chair, relieved to have blotted neither her own copybook nor theirs.

She was less confident when, after a fraught family tea on the terrace during which a stubbornly independent Edwin tipped the milk jug over Carla’s new dress, she returned to the packed hall to deliver her talk. Despite the
catchpenny
title,
Eden Revisited
, she intended it as a sober account of the lessons to be drawn from Hadza life in the first decade of a new millennium. Having thanked the Society for the double honour of the fellowship and the lecture, she took up the theme.

‘Fifty-four years ago as a very young anthropologist, I made my first trip to what was then Tanganyika to study a little-known gathering-hunting society, the Hadza. It wasn’t a popular line at a time when the emphasis – not to mention, the money – in academic circles was on examining social change. I was regarded as hopelessly old-fashioned for wanting to visit the tribe in its traditional setting rather than charting how such people had adapted to the growth of independence movements and urbanisation. For all that I
disagreed
, I could never have predicted the extraordinary impact that an account of the Hadza was to have on people across the globe. Wherever you went in the late sixties and seventies, be it a university campus or a peace rally, a pop concert or a protest march, you could be certain of finding at least one person wearing a T-shirt with the slogan
We are the Eden People
. To my mind, the reason for such identification is clear. The Hadza help us to answer a question that remains as urgent today as at any time in the past: ‘How do we live an authentic life?’ Some people seek answers in the Bible or the Quran, observing man-made laws that purport to be God’s. They’re so frightened of the
conflicts
of modernity that they cling to an ancient mythology. The Hadza, on the other hand, observe laws that go back much further and are rooted in the earth.

‘From my very first encounter with the Hadza, I had a profound sense of coming home, an instinctive connection that went beyond that of family or nation to the deepest level of my psyche. I’m aware, especially in this august gathering, that it may not be best scientific practice but, having spoken to many other visitors, I’ve found the instinct to be widely shared: a feeling of kinship with our earliest ancestors.

‘This isn’t sentimentality. The human race is generally held to have descended from people who lived on the edge of the Central African
savannah
. Both external evidence and their own oral tradition suggest that, whereas other tribes moved on, the Hadza have stayed in the same place. In a very real sense they are our earliest ancestors, providing us with a family tree that stretches back two thousand generations. Is it any wonder then that the
evolutionary
psychologists, who make so much of an
ancestral environment
in which we developed our repertoire of
hard-wired responses
, have launched such a sustained and, if I may say so, intemperate attack on my work? For, in offering an account of this ancient people, who reject fixed gender roles and small family units, who exhibit neither elitism nor aggression, I’ve dared to challenge them on their own ground.

‘My greatest challenge was – and is – to the field of biological determinism. At no time since the Calvinist heyday has the ideology of determinism held such sway as it does today. Not only our intellectual but our economic and political life are governed by the theory that human beings are mere
mechanisms
to ensure the survival of our genes. But it’s important to remember that it is just a theory, and likewise to remember how previous dominant theories have been displaced. Plato believed in the Four Humours. Was he such an intellectual lightweight? Sir Isaac Newton, one of the most eminent former members of this Society, was a dedicated alchemist. So surely it’s possible – I go no further – that current genetic theories will themselves one day be
superseded
? In the meantime, we should beware of building them into an
overarching
philosophy. From St Augustine’s Original Sin through Hobbes’s collective self-interest to Darwin’s survival of the fittest, theologians, philosophers and scientists have focused on the vicious and competitive aspects of human nature. The same is true of today’s biological determinists. Yet, when we visit the Hadza in their ancestral environment or, more pertinently, the
ancestral environment
of the Hadza, we find not greed, violence and constraint, but altruism and collaboration.