The Kindness of Women (36 page)

*   *   *

They buried Pilot Officer Pierce two weeks later, in the churchyard below the tilting steeple, within sight of the creek into which he had plunged on a June morning thirty-eight years earlier. His grave lay among the worn memorial stones of the local villagers and of six RAF aircrew who had been interred during the war. None of Pierce's relatives was present; the only surviving member of his family was an elderly cousin living in New Zealand, but the RAF provided the honour guard that attended the burials of recently discovered wartime aircrew, and two former pilots from his squadron made the journey to attend.

Standing behind these elderly men, their blunt and polished medals on their dark lapels, I found it difficult to believe that Pilot Officer Pierce, had he parachuted safely from his Spitfire, would now be over sixty. The small skeleton in the leathery parcel of his flying suit seemed to be that of a teenage boy, some child pilot who had bluffed his way into a wartime fighter base.

I remembered how Edward and the Norwich surgeon had laid the flattened parcel on the wet floor of the excavation pit, beside the exposed mass of the Merlin engine. As they carefully prised away the mummified leather they found a few small bones, a shoulder blade and several ribs, scarcely enough to constitute a grown man. Wearing his mud-drenched suit, David had climbed into the cockpit and sat in the pilot's seat, searching with his hands through the silt on the floor of the fuselage.

As he felt under the instrument panel and between the brake pedals, I imagined him at the controls of this Spitfire, sitting on its grass airfield somewhere in southern England in 1940. Had he or I been a few years older we would have returned to England to fight in the war, and our bones might well have been brought to light by these weekend archaeologists. I thought of the crashed Japanese and Chinese planes at Hungjao aerodrome, and of how as a ten-year-old I had often climbed into the cockpit of a forgotten fighter lying in the long grass. I had played with its rusty controls at about the same time as P. O. Pierce sat in his Spitfire at the bottom of this Norfolk creek.

With luck, the burial of his bones had laid to rest more than one young pilot. David had been reluctant to leave the excavation pit. Sitting in the cockpit, his arms black with mud, he had looked up at the daylight as if newly born into the fresh air of the Norfolk estuary from the deep memories of decades. He stood beside me through the service, wearing his RAF uniform for the first time in twenty years. Head back in the light breeze, he was smiling and handsome again, mouth working in the ironic way I remembered from the japes of our childhood. He had looked at the Lunghua commandant, Mr. Hyashi, with the same insolent grimace.

I worried that he might create a scene, but I realised later that his real recovery dated from that chance moment when he had returned with the tray of drinks across the mud flats. He had brought with him a friend from the aviation world, a burly South Korean who had once been a JAL pilot and now worked at London Airport. I was puzzled why David should have invited this impassive, middle-aged executive all the way to a modest churchyard in Norfolk, but it then occurred to me that a retired Korean pilot was as close as David could come to asking a Japanese to witness the interment of all his resentments of the past forty years.

15

THE FINAL PROGRAMME

From the start, everyone I knew felt uneasy at the very thought of Dick Sutherland's last television project. Cleo Churchill urged me not to take part—the proposed documentary struck her as ghoulish in the extreme, pandering to the exhibitionist strains in Dick's character. More tolerant of Dick, and admiring his courage, I had tried to sidestep his invitation for different reasons. In later years, countless similar programmes were to be shown on television, and the making of these films became part of the therapeutic process by which the dying prepared themselves for their deaths. But in 1979 the idea of an explicit filmed record of the last weeks running up to one's death seemed virtually pornographic.

However, as I pointed out to Cleo, the film satisfied the logic of Dick's life. He had felt fully alive only on television, and in a macabre way would be fully dead only if his last weeks, and even the moment of his death, took place under the camera lens. A BBC producer had already shown an interest in the project, and a format had been devised which would incorporate Dick's film into a documentary series about the taboos surrounding this most unmentionable of topics.

“Taboos?” Cleo scoffed at the word, when we talked it over at her publisher's office, careful to separate herself from me behind a barricade of wholesome children's books. “He's actually going to make a snuff movie. Jim, he's staging a sex-death in which he's raped out of existence by the whipped-up emotions of all those peak-time viewers. And you're going to take part?”

“Cleo … that's unfair. Think beyond the film. Aldous Huxley took LSD as he died—perhaps this is Dick's way of coping with a challenge he can't face. The film will probably never be shown, and I dare say he knows that.”

“But do you know it? Piffle!”

Three weeks earlier, after an exhausting struggle against his thyroid cancer, Dick had discharged himself from hospital. A makeup girl preparing us for a late-night discussion programme had first noticed the goitre. I remembered waiting to take Dick's chair in front of the mirror, and how he sat surrounded by all the lights and cosmetic jars, his throat bobbing as the makeup girl pointed out his enlarged Adam's apple. He caught my eye in the mirror, as if aware that a dimension had entered the script for which all his years in television had never prepared him.

He was subdued during the recording, though outwardly his confident and charming TV self. I thought, unkindly, that it took only this modest swelling, probably a cyst or mild iodine deficiency, to touch his one vulnerable point—his own body. As he smiled and spoke to camera his familiar repertory of gestures and mannerisms suddenly seemed like so much decorative armour breaking loose from a stumbling warrior. When I drove him home to Richmond, before going on to Shepperton, he was already complaining about his sore throat, almost needing to punish his body. I knew he had been slightly ill during the past year and urged him to see his doctor.

Soon after, Dick entered hospital for observation, passing into the paradoxical world of modern medicine, with all its professional expertise, ultra-high technology, and complete uncertainty. As Dick pointed out on my first visit to Kingston Hospital, the qualities traditionally ascribed to patients—self-delusion, a refusal to face the truth, irrational hope, and a despair born of underlying pessimism—in fact were those of their doctors.

“You have to realise,” he whispered to me when a nurse had declined to answer a direct question about his suspected cancer, “that the first and most important job of medical science is to protect the profession from the patients. We unsettle them and make them feel vaguely guilty. We ask questions they know they can't answer—the one thing they really want us to do is go away, or pretend that there's nothing wrong with us. What they like best of all is to admit us to hospital and then hear us say we feel fine, even if we're at death's door.”

Despite the prospect of exploratory surgery, Dick had already recovered his spirits. He flirted with the nurses and tamed the formidable senior sisters, promising them parts in his next TV series. But the reductive and grinding logic of hospital life began to take its toll, and he was astute enough to see behind the façade of ward-level optimism.

“The nurses are amazingly sunny,” I commented. “I feel as if I ought to climb into the next bed.”

“Not a good idea, on the whole. Remember, they're like hostesses in a nightclub who know the customers aren't going to enjoy the floor show.” Dick leaned against the big pillows, his keen eyes scanning the ward. “It's interesting that the higher you move up the professional ladder the more depressed the doctor becomes. Your local G.P. and the junior housemen are reasonably cheerful—they can pass on the serious decisions. But as you meet the senior consultants you find this deepening gloom, because they realise there's almost nothing they can do to help you. Serious cancers are the worst thing they have to face—they remind them of how helpless medicine really is.”

But Dick's good humour had passed when I next saw him. He had woken after surgery in acute pain, unable to swallow and convinced that another throat had been transplanted into his own. Lowering the loose cotton dressing, he showed me the wound running from ear to ear, held together by a score of metal clips and covered with dried blood. He was discharged three days later, and within a week returned to the specialists to learn the results of the biopsy.

Far from clarifying the real nature of his condition, the operation had only served to confuse it. A specialist had eventually seen Dick, and embarked on an enthusiastic account of the educational benefits of TV medical programmes. Dick described, with grim relish, how his use of the word “cancer” was met with a silent rebuke, followed by a disquisition on the meaninglessness of the term in the context of modern medicine. At last, as an afterthought, the specialist recommended the complete excision of the thyroid gland, reassuring Dick that he would reopen the old scar and so preserve his neck for the TV cameras.

“The remarkable thing,” Dick confided to Cleo and myself, “is that no one will tell me I have cancer. It's as if they want to hide the news from themselves, just when I've been able to face it. Now I feel almost guilty. A brain tumour with lots of secondaries in the lungs and liver would have been the decent thing…”

Cleo and I admired Dick's courage and humour, which sadly deserted him after the second operation. The complete removal of his thyroid lowered his metabolism, and he became lethargic and dispirited. His appearance radically changed. A long, pointed jaw jutted from his eroded neck, and we both noticed that he no longer glanced at himself in the hand mirror that a nurse had given him.

When we arrived he stared at us as if we belonged to an alien species and his true companions were his fellow patients in the ward. I sensed that he regretted his own self-delusions, of which the greatest had been his apparently sincere attempt to discover the truth about his cancer. This was a bluff that had now been called. His attitude to the nursing staff had also changed. All irony and humour had gone, and he was far more docile and cooperative, like a rebellious prisoner at last accepting the unwritten rules of an institution.

Exhausted by the radiation therapy, Dick lay against his pillows, his bald head covered by the NASA baseball cap that Cleo had found in his computer room at Richmond. He had lost interest in himself, and neither the nurses nor the registrar to whom we spoke seemed to have any clear idea of his real condition. Concerned with its own needs, the hospital moved in a parallel world to that of its patients.

*   *   *

After three weeks of radiation therapy, Dick learned that the last of the malignant tissue had yet to be eradicated. He was now completely hairless and no longer bothered to wear his NASA cap or conceal his ravaged neck. Leaning on my arm, he walked with difficulty to the ambulance that would take him to what, in a moment of brave but tired humour, he described as the “Caesar's Palace of cancer therapy”—the Royal Marsden Hospital to the south of London.

As it happened, this ultra-modern hospital might well have been a hotel-casino on the Las Vegas strip. Its airy corridors were hung with Pop Art posters, and Dick was given a ward to himself, with telephone, television, and disposable toilet. In fact, this room was an isolation cell, in which he was imprisoned for nine days, watched by the Geiger counter above his bed, until he had excreted the last of the radioactive iodine. When he spoke to us on the telephone, as Cleo and I stood by the lead-glass windows under the warning neon sign, his voice seemed to lift from a tape played at wavering speeds. The nurses who entered his room to take his blood and urine samples wore heavy gloves and protective overalls, and left him as quickly as they could, like conspirators setting a lethal device with the shortest of fuses.

Despite some success in eradicating the tumour, malignant cells had rooted themselves in his spine and liver. Too weak to bear any further treatment at the Marsden, Dick was returned by ambulance to Kingston Hospital and the chemotherapy ward of last resort.

Here, left to recover and without medication, he began to improve. I felt a surge of affection for him as he rallied himself, sitting up in bed to try on his new wig, shuffling along the landings with us as he craned through the windows for a distant view of the river and his Richmond house, even asking Cleo about her publishing career. When he was strong enough to submit to chemotherapy he would be moved to a sterile room, which would give his depressed immune system the best chance of fighting off any passing infection.

Making sure that the nurses were elsewhere, he showed me briefly into the small, sterilised cell that was being prepared for him, a cubicle stripped of all furniture and fittings that might harbour bacteria, with a sealed door and windows and a ventilation system that resembled a midget submarine's. Eerily, the screen of a TV set was set into the wall behind a thick glass plate, as if even television was withdrawing from Dick.

“Cosy, isn't it?” Hunched inside his dressing gown, Dick straightened his wig and beckoned me away. “Just the place to take your last view of the world. Did you notice the TV screen? Like a retina seen from the rear.”

“Dick, come on…” I held his arm as he hobbled away, aware how much stronger he was, like a wiry and determined old man. “You're so much better—you may never move there. I can feel it.”

“I can feel it, all right…” He let me help him onto a settee in the patients' dayroom, then pulled up a wooden chair for me. As he stared around the room I realised how much he had changed. He had lost all illusions about himself—he had always enjoyed being recognised in public, but no one now, neither the nursing staff nor his fellow patients, remembered the handsome presenter-psychologist who had fronted so many popular-science programmes. Dick appeared not to care. To show his indifference to his earlier self, he had selected an oversize golden wig, almost a caricature of his sandy hair.