VII

THE DAY AFTER the exhausting outing to Leighton Buzzard, Marion stayed in bed, to recover. Arriving in the morning to see her there, comfortably settled on the pillows, I felt such relief, but it was a guilty relief. It is so much easier for carers if the invalid is lying all neat and tidy in bed. It is when they are struggling to haul themselves up, straining to stand, to move about in any way, that their sickness becomes obvious and pitiful. Make them stay in bed and all kinds of pretences can be maintained. So many times I knew I’d urged Marion to stay in bed, to rest, to have a little sleep, thinking not so much that it would be in her best interests as in my own. But she had resisted – what was left of life was far too precious to waste lying in bed (and she knew in any case she’d be unable to move from it soon).

She had always insisted on getting properly dressed, when I had promoted the advantages of a dressing-gown, dreading for myself, as well as her, the ordeal of putting on clothes, with all the twisting and turning and stretching and bending of her poor limbs. Stay in bed, stay in your nightdress, stay still … and now she had little choice. Her bedroom became her world for most of the day. It was a small, square room at the back of the house, a room that was to have been her study when she and Frances moved in, just before her illness was diagnosed. There were two bedrooms upstairs but, once she could no longer manage the stairs, the study became her bedroom. Her bed took up a third of the space. There was a special mattress on it, which overlapped the base slightly and made the bed look bigger than it was, and a special wedge-shaped pillow on top of the ordinary ones. A table next to the bed, under the window, held all the many drugs she took, including the ever-available liquid morphine. On the wall above her head was a large framed old map of Cumberland and, facing her, taking up nearly all of the wall, an enormous oil painting of Hyde Park at a point near the Albert Memorial, originally given to me by the friend who’d painted it. She liked the colours rather than what was depicted. It was an autumn scene, all strong oranges and yellows and browns, the paint slapped on in huge lumps. It would have driven me crazy to have to look at this all day, but she found it somehow cheerful (and also liked the idea of having saved it from being sent to a jumble sale after I’d got tired of it).

There wasn’t really room for an armchair, but we brought one into the bedroom so that we could sit comfortably during the long hours we were now going to be there. The chair faced the bed and the window, which was covered with a yellow blind. Most of the time the blind was down, since there was nothing much to see outside except the dismal backyards, and the light filtered through well enough. At least it was quiet there, which was lucky because noise of any sort had become anathema to Marion. She wanted everything to be peaceful and even the doorbell, or the crash of something dropped in another room, startled her. She couldn’t cope with anything that violated the calm she liked, including the arrival of new people.

New people, unfortunately, had to be brought into this small room all the time. She had developed a pressure sore which needed to be dressed daily, so we were now on the district nurse’s rota, and we had a Macmillan nurse overseeing all the treatment. The nurses were kind and efficient, but Marion found it hard to accept any of them. It was curious, Marion’s slight antipathy towards nurses in general. Her mother had always wanted her to be a nurse – Marion was to be a nurse, Annabel a teacher. But quite apart from the fact that nursing had never appealed to her (maybe she’d had enough, in effect nursing her own father during her adolescence) Marion would have been quite unsuited to conforming in the way the nursing profession requires. She would not have taken kindly to fitting into the hierarchy and working under sisters and matrons. There was an appealingly anarchic streak in her which showed itself in lots of trivial but telling ways, and which, if she had grown up in a different family and a different environment, could well have made her active politically.

This revealed itself quite early. She was never cowed by authority, though she defied it only in small ways and usually secretively. Once, enraged because her particular school was to celebrate the Queen’s coronation not with a party, like all the other schools, but with the planting of some shrubs in the grounds, she wrote a letter of protest to the local Director of Education, asking him if he was aware of this unfairness, and pushed it through his letterbox at night. When the headmistress subsequently announced a change of plan, and said there would be a party after all, Marion claimed this as a personal victory. It gave her great pleasure to think how she’d challenged the headmistress (even if the headmistress was unaware of it).

This side of her character had made her a very useful and popular aunt. I always refused to write notes to teachers asking for my children to be excused anything at all if, in fact, they had no real excuse – certainly not, Mummy was much too law-abiding. But Marion would, without my knowing. My youngest only had to drape her loving arms round her aunt’s neck and whimper that she hated games and hated the teacher and wished she could get out of the next horrible games afternoon, for Marion to say: ‘Give me a bit of paper and a pen, petal.’ Then she’d write a preposterous note, claiming some incomprehensible ailment as an excuse for my daughter not to be able to do games, and say, ‘That should do it.’ Apparently it always did. Maybe the teachers simply couldn’t decipher Marion’s awful handwriting. She’d join in a conspiracy with the children against teachers, expressing contempt for the majority of them, and finding few in her experience as a social worker with much understanding of children’s backgrounds. Nurses were not as bad, but she was still suspicious of them and had no awe (as her mother had) of their qualifications. It was a case of ‘So she’s a teacher, so what?’ and ‘So she’s a nurse, who cares?’

She would have preferred us to manage without nurses. The hardest for her to accept were the night-duty nurses who arrived to put her to bed (even though she was in bed most of the day, this still involved a routine of checking the pressure sore, remaking the bed and helping her to the lavatory). Theoretically, it should have been a boon, having these skilled helpers, but it wasn’t. As with most such services provided by the local authority, there was no knowing when the help would arrive. We understood this and were grateful all the same, but gratitude could soon vanish. Going to answer the door on the second night, at about ten o’clock, I heard loud laughter and shouting on the doorstep. Well, why shouldn’t nurses laugh and shout outside? But these two didn’t stop as they came charging in. They rushed past me, clattering noisily up the stairs and calling out, ‘Come to do the patient – where is she?’ The tranquil atmosphere was shattered and tension of a kind we had tried so hard, and so successfully, to banish seemed to blast through the flat like hot air.

Frances was waiting at the top of the stairs, finger to her lips. ‘Sssh!’ she pleaded. The nurses stopped. ‘Come to do the patient,’ one said. ‘I’m Frances, Marion’s carer,’ Frances whispered. ‘Who are you?’ ‘Nurses, come to do the patient.’ No smile, no lowering of the voice, no names. ‘Got to get on with it,’ one said. ‘Others to get round.’ Frances showed them into the bedroom and came out in tears a couple of minutes later. She hated to see how rough they were, hauling Marion up without saying more than the now inevitable ‘We’re nurses, come to do you.’ They were so big and powerful, more like bouncers than nurses, but who were we to criticise and demand some latter-day Florence Nightingale? We felt not just humiliated and brushed aside but curiously ashamed, as though we had let Marion down by allowing this invasion. We should have stood up to them, insisted on some personal contact however short the time, insisted on their approaching Marion quietly and gently. But we didn’t. Instead, we simply cancelled that particular service. We said we’d manage, which we did for a little while longer.

When the nights became a problem, we switched to Marie Curie nurses. They were different – quiet, friendly, composed, they slipped easily into the atmosphere we’d established. But even so, Marion didn’t want them. When, on the first night, the Marie Curie nurse settled down in the armchair for the night, Marion was appalled and in the morning told Frances to tell the nurse not to come again – ‘Say thank you, but don’t come back, we’ll manage.’ Frances, in the most tactful way possible, had to say that no, she could not manage at night, not any more. It was too hard. The broken nights, answering Marion’s every call to be taken to the lavatory, on top of the exhaustion of grief, were rapidly bringing her to breaking point. She had to have some sleep. Marion accepted this, as she accepted everything, with a good grace but she was not pleased. She wanted privacy. She hated strangers, however kind, doing anything for her. But, on the other hand, she also hated the idea of having to go into the hospice to die and she had enough commonsense to realise that if Frances cracked there would be no alternative.

It was strange, her deep aversion to the hospice which had served her so well, but she was emphatic: she wanted to die at home surrounded by her loved ones and her own things. She’d always had strong ideas about this. Everyone, she believed, should be able to die at home, and no one should die alone. It had caused her absolute agony of mind when her mother had died in the public ward of a mental hospital with demented cries all around, but no family beside her (even though Marion and I had both been with her up to six hours before). She was passionate about how wrong this was, and we had promised to respect her wishes. But in the first days of November I began to wonder if this was another promise I’d fail to keep, like the promise to my father that he’d never be put into a home. I could see circumstances changing, the strain becoming intolerable if her dying was protracted. I was staying the night by then, sleeping in an upstairs room above Marion’s, alert to the sound of the buzzer the nurse would press when she needed assistance (it took two people to help Marion to the lavatory – one nurse could no longer manage on her own). It made sense for me to be the one who got up. Frances, upon whom the burden was by far the greatest, needed more sleep. Sometimes the buzzer sounded only once, sometimes twice. On the nights when, in spite of our help, Marion fell, it could take half an hour or more to get her back into bed. She would crouch in a heap on the floor saying, ‘Wait, wait,’ and we learned, the nurse and I, not to try to lift her until she was ready. Then, with a great heave and massive determination on Marion’s part, it would be done. All this struggle could have been avoided if she had agreed to use a commode (which towards the very end she had to), but she wouldn’t. Her wish was to drag herself to the proper lavatory, whatever ordeal it put her through, and we had to support her in this. No one thought of refusing. Force is not something you use against the dying.

But this night-time ritual was endlessly distressing. Distressing and also bewildering. Again and again, at two or three in the morning, watching Marion perched on the end of the bed gathering her feeble remaining strength to try to stand and then walk, I wondered why she was doing this. What pushed her on with this compulsion not to give up? Why didn’t she just lie back on her pillows and let go? The room was so quiet. Her breathing was so heavy it filled the silence. Her eyes were shut, the effort clearly visible in her expression. Such determination for what? The mattress made little squeaking noises as she manoeuvred herself off it. ‘Sounds like a kitten,’ she said, smiling. Minutes went by. The nurse was completely relaxed and patient. She didn’t speak, just patted Marion’s hand, quite content to be directed by her. My hands were cold when, once Marion was finally on her feet, I took one arm and the nurse the other. ‘Cold hands, warm heart,’ Marion said, and laughed, delighted to be upright, delighted with another of her mother’s little clichés. Slowly, very slowly we shuffled across the three or four feet to the door, knowing that if she sank to her knees we would never manage to support her and once she was on the floor we’d have to start all over again from a much worse position. If we did get her to the door without a collapse, she never fell on the rest of the way. A handrail had been fitted onto the wall between bedroom and bathroom and in the lavatory itself there was now a specially raised seat with handrails either side. The relief of reaching it was overwhelming and, oddly, the journey back always passed without incident.

In the morning, each Marie Curie nurse (usually a different one every night) ended her shift at seven o’clock and I got up to relieve her. With luck, Frances, knocked out by sleeping pills, might sleep another precious hour. I am always up by seven anyway, wherever I am, so it was no hardship. Early morning is my best time and I’d positively bounce into Marion’s room, all energy, only to be greeted with indignant surprise. ‘Good heavens, what are you doing here?’ she’d say, and when I replied that I’d been staying the night to help the nurse if she needed me, she’d snap, ‘Ridiculous. There’s no need for it. You should be at home. It’s too much.’ I just ignored this, made tea, chatted, tweaked at the bedcovers, employed every delaying tactic to keep her in bed until Frances woke. If Marion wanted to get up, I would have to buzz for Frances, so I did a lot of rapid talking between seven and eight in the morning, anything to distract her from wanting to get out of bed.

It was somehow a sweet, consoling scene, not a sad one, when I left, each of those November mornings, to walk home. Frances would by then be up, sitting beside Marion, in her new tartan dressing-gown, both of them sipping coffee, Radio 4 on low, the dim light coming through the blind mixing with the stronger glow of the lamp, a smell of toast hanging in the air. There seemed nothing tragic about it. It was sometimes as serene as this in the evening too. I’d return about four o’clock and make a meal, and we’d eat it on a tray in the sitting-room in front of the fire. For this great event Marion would be up for an hour or so, sitting in her nightdress in the armchair, and she would sigh with what sounded so like contentment and say, ‘Now, isn’t this cosy, isn’t this agreeable?’ and we’d say yes, it was. She’d watch Frances eat proper food – it pleased her that I was making sure Frances ate good food – and sip her own soup (less and less each evening) and say she wouldn’t call the Queen her cousin, another of her mother’s many satirical sayings. Everything was lovely; she had no complaints. All the previous agitation seemed to have gone and she was drifting with some sort of hidden tide after going against it for so long.

What exactly had changed I couldn’t tell, but something had. I watched her closely all the time without knowing any more exactly what I was looking for. There was no need to look for signs of deterioration any longer – we knew she was in the last stages of this terminal illness. We had been told so, even if we hadn’t recognised this for ourselves. Still nobody would risk giving us an informed estimate of when Marion was going to die – how could they – but one nurse had murmured she thought maybe there was a month to go and another thought three weeks maximum. But not to Christmas. No, they all shook their heads over that, she was unlikely to make Christmas.

Marion herself had stopped mentioning the troubled subject of how long she still had. Once, this awful speculation had fascinated her, but not now. She was no longer interested. What I thought I saw was a retreat from thought. Other people alleged that she was now confused and hardly knew who she was, or what she was doing – she was surely muddled, no longer of sound mind – and there was the suggestion that this was a blessing. But it was not true. Most of the time, if all was peaceful, if her routine was undisturbed, she was perfectly clear in her mind. Yet at the same time she was also having to concentrate ferociously on being always present – it was as though again and again she pulled herself back from escaping. One night she said very distinctly to Frances, ‘Goodbye.’ Frances laughed and said, ‘You mean goodnight.’ ‘No,’ Marion said, ‘goodbye.’ The conviction in her voice was eerie. She never repeated this. I imagined that, on this particular night, she had realised that when the time came for the real goodbye she either wouldn’t be able to say it or wouldn’t realise she needed to. So she got it in while she was able.

There were other curious moments like that. One morning, soon after the nurse had gone, and I was reading aloud to Marion an article from a day-old Guardian, about the increase in attacks on social workers, she suddenly leaned forward and put her hand on mine. I thought she was either bored with the article or that she wanted something. ‘Tea?’ I said. ‘I’m happy,’ she said. Then she lay back on her pillows. Her eyes still held mine. ‘I’m happy,’ she repeated; ‘got that?’ I could just have said yes, or nodded. Probably I should have just said yes, or nodded. But I didn’t. I couldn’t let this go. I said I couldn’t believe it, it was surely impossible actually to be happy. Did she mean she was content, maybe? ‘No,’ she said, very firmly, ‘I am happy. And it isn’t the drugs, before you think of that.’ And again, looking quite fierce, staring at me from her pillows, she repeated, ‘I AM HAPPY. All right?’ ‘All right,’ I said, meekly. She closed her eyes, and seemed to go back to sleep for a while, as though exhausted by making herself clear.

I should have been made happy myself by this declaration but instead I was suspicious; I couldn’t believe her for one minute. What I thought she was doing, by this insistence on her state of happiness, was to make her ‘loved ones’ able to face her death more easily; we could all say to ourselves, ‘She was happy,’ and that would be a comfort. Why be unhappy ourselves if Marion, dying, had stressed she was happy? But maybe I was doubting her happiness when in fact it was real. What right had I to interpret ‘I am happy’ as some sort of trick, or a noble attempt to be selfless? What did I know about dying? Maybe, so near to it, there is a feeling akin to happiness. Perhaps, I argued with myself, I should respect this. Marion knew something I did not: the serenity that in some cases comes before death.

I’d seen something like it before, after all, and also been disbelieving. My agent, Tessa Sayle, died the year before Marion of a brain tumour, in her own home. Unlike Marion, she had no partner, no twin, and though she had good friends she didn’t appear to have ‘loved ones’ around her in quite the same way. I went to visit her ten days before she died, climbing the many stairs to her top-floor flat in Kensington, heavy with the dread familiar to all who visit the dying. What would I find? How would I cope? But what I found was a cheerfulness which confounded all expectations. Tessa was in a wheelchair, her wig (she’d lost all her hair through chemotherapy) a little crooked, but otherwise as elegant as ever. A nurse was in the background but soon went out to collect a prescription. It was April and the flat was full of sunlight. I admired the views of the trees, all thick with pink and white blossom. Tessa said she was so lucky to have such views. I think she went on to repeat the word ‘lucky’ fifty times during the hour I was with her – she was so lucky, she insisted, lucky to be at home, lucky to have such good nursing care, lucky to have so many concerned friends, lucky to have such reliable staff running her agency … On and on it went, the emphasis on her luck, and she was ten days from dying, unable to walk, unable to read (and almost unable to see at all), unable to eat much. She talked animatedly, sometimes forgetting halfway through a sentence what she wanted to say and, catching herself forgetting, saying, ‘My mind is a little affected,’ or, if she’d merely been unable to pronounce a word, ‘My speech is a little muddled.’ She was clearly quite conscious of what was happening to her but she was determined not to give way to misery or fear. This was a process, the process of dying, which she was going to go through with dignity. None of her standards were to be abandoned, no matter how great the pressure. And, as with Marion, it was of supreme importance to her not to inflict on others any of the suffering she was experiencing.

But did they do it to persuade themselves? I couldn’t decide if I was right to think it was done for others, this performance – but there I was again, assuming it was a performance. Yet surely, I told myself, dying people have neither energy for, nor interest in, performing. At any rate, that statement ‘I am happy’ was the last thing of any significance that Marion ever said to me. The following week she didn’t speak much at all. She was retreating fast into some interior world of her own. In the afternoons she liked to sit in the wing armchair in the sitting-room for an hour or so, wrapped in her tartan dressing-gown, the one which matched Frances’s, listening to tapes of Scottish songs. She sat with her eyes closed, smiling, tapping the rhythms with her fingers, singing along with the words she still recalled from her childhood when her mother had sung them to her. Most of these songs were painfully suitable, ballads of lament and sorrow, and one especially was fitting enough to make us, listening, feel raw with the grief of it when she sang the words – The Four Maries (about the death of Mary Queen of Scots):

I ha’e but just begun to live,

And yet this day I dee;

Oh tie a napkin owre my face,

That the gallows I mayna’ see …

Their Scottish heritage was so important to Marion and Annabel, but neither of them had a Scottish accent, though they had been born in Scotland and spent their early childhood there. It was a way of honouring their mother, whose love of her native land (her family was from the Highlands originally, near Aberdeen) was extreme. As well as Hogmanay being enthusiastically celebrated, so was 25 January, Burns’ Night. Marion had organised Burns’ Night parties for her mother during the last years of her life, when she came to London to live with her. Tartan ran rampant – tartan tablecloth, tartan napkins, tartan ribbons and sashes, tartan-backed books of Burns’ poetry. Not that Mrs Davies needed any books. She could, and did, recite Burns by the yard, once the haggis had been eaten and the whisky drunk. There she would stand, before a propped-up photograph of Burns, her eyes shining, her already thick Scottish accent thickening, and out would come ‘To a Mouse’ –

Wee, sleekit, cow’rin’, tim’rous beastie,

O what a panic’s in thy breastie!

Thou need na start awa sae hasty

wi’ bickering brattle!

I wad be laith to rin an’ chase thee,

wi’ murdering pattle!

followed by ‘Address to a Haggis’, ‘Tam o’Shanter’, ‘To a Louse’ and all the other favourites. Marion would watch her with such pride and love, encouraging her when she faltered (though she rarely did) and laughing when she paused to explain certain words (‘A pattle is a plough-staff’ – ‘Yes, we know, Mum. Carry on’).

A tape of bagpipe music and another of Scottish reels would be played, and when her mother asked who was going to do the Highland fling, Marion would be up on her feet and performing energetically. Eventually, the merriment would die down and, as more whisky was drunk, Mrs Davies would turn a touch melancholy and begin talking about Scottish history. Culloden would be remembered as though she had been present at the slaughter of the Scots in 1746, and the Highland clearances described with heavy sighs. There was something about the sadness of all this which had always appealed to Marion as well as her mother. They were both by nature cheerful people, lacking any trace of dourness, but they could be overcome at the memory of what the ancestors they had never known had endured.

After her mother died, Marion took her ashes back to the ruins of the croft near Bonar Bridge where her family had once lived. She scattered them there and sang to herself one of Burns’ songs (though she didn’t ever tell me which one). I thought of that now when I heard her singing, and wondered if it had been his ‘Lament of Mary Queen of Scots’, the last verse of which reads –

Nae mair to me the autumn winds

Wave o’er the yellow corn!

And, in the narrow house of death,

Let winter round me rave;

And the next flow’rs that deck the spring

Bloom on my peaceful grave –

Returning each day around four o’clock, after the few hours I’d spent at home, I’d hear those Scottish ballads again the moment I opened the door. Going up into the sitting-room, I’d find one or other of Marion’s close friends blind with tears as they sat in front of her. But Marion herself was never in tears, and she no longer saw that others were, so could not be distressed by their distress. We’d get her back to bed, with great difficulty, always liable to find she slumped onto the floor even with one of us on either side. Getting her up again grew harder and harder, and it was obvious we were approaching some sort of crisis. We had a Macmillan nurse, we had district nurses, we had Marie Curie nurses, and yet we were still on the brink of not being able to manage. The district nurses, who came twice a day to dress the now horrifically deep pressure sore and the wound in the neck (which had opened up further), had begun to murmur that Marion might be ‘more comfortable’ in the hospice. But we’d promised she could die at home, and besides, what did they mean by ‘more comfortable’? What could a hospice provide that we could not provide? Politely, they said that her dying might be far more prolonged than had been anticipated and that during it Marion’s requirements would change in such a way that we would be unable to meet them. Such as? Such as the need, once she was completely bedridden (which was imminent), to be lifted on and off a bed pan, which, in view of the pressure sore, would take skilled hands. We, Frances and I, did not have skilled hands. We just had loving ones. Love, it seemed, could not compete with skill in this case. And in the hospice they had hoists, to make lifting easier and less painful, and special mattresses, and ways of administering pain relief. There was the faintest, the very faintest, insinuation that by keeping Marion at home we might be depriving her of comfort.

It was distressing to have to consider this. If only we knew how long there was to go – the reluctant cry of everyone who watches someone die. Miracles could be performed, anything endured, anything arranged, if we knew there was only a week, a month, a fixed time to aim for. But without this information, which no one could give us (though, when pushed now, the nurses were suddenly guessing that Marion had no more than two weeks left), we were obliged to contemplate a stage where we might finally be failing her. Maybe we already were; maybe we just didn’t realise it. Then one of the nurses suggested a compromise: why not take Marion to the hospice just for a weekend? During it, Frances and I could both get some real rest, and something might be done to ease the pressure sore and deal with the oozing from the neck wound. Forty-eight hours of respite care might be of benefit to everyone.

It was a delicate situation. Frances was against moving Marion to the hospice. I couldn’t bring myself to urge it because, if I did, it would seem that I was saying I had had enough; and if I did say that, Frances could not manage on her own, no matter how many nurses came in and out. I realised that I wanted it to be over, ‘it’ being Marion’s death. I wanted it to be over now as quickly as possible and I had wanted this for at least a week. But Frances did not want it to be over. She wanted life to go on as long as possible, down to the last tiny flicker. If Marion had been writhing in pain then, of course, her feelings would have been different, but since she was not, and furthermore she was happy, or so she said, Frances saw every justification for clinging on to each precious minute of life, whatever Marion’s state. Her attitude was that since death was approaching rapidly anyway, why hurry it? Mine was, since it was coming soon inevitably, why delay it? Marion’s condition appalled me. I saw in it agonising suffering, even if there was no pain. Frances saw only an infinitely slow drifting away which she wanted to be part of as long as possible. If Marion was moved to the hospice she feared not only an acceleration of her dying but being separated from it – the intimacy we had at home would be destroyed. She didn’t want to spend Marion’s last days in a sterile white room in an institution, no matter how kind and caring and skilled the staff. She wanted them both to be utterly comfortable amid their own things, enveloped in an atmosphere domestic and lovingly familiar.

She was right. I knew she was right. Quite apart from Marion herself believing that this was how people should die, I could see that dying in one’s own bed at home is always preferable to the alternative. But still my imagination leapt ahead, to having to look after a bedridden Marion who would have to be regularly turned and whose sores and wounds would make this difficult to do. If she were in the hospice, the responsibility on us would diminish at once. If she were in the hospice, we could sleep. Instantly, I felt craven and despicable – it was shameful of me to make such calculations. So I backed the braver Frances up. When one of the nurses took me aside and implied that if I said I couldn’t go on, or if I suggested that the hospice might be better for Marion now, Frances would have to weaken, I said no, I couldn’t do that: Marion wanted to die at home and we must see that she did. The nurse was worried. She, in turn, began wondering aloud how long she and her team could sanction Marion’s being nursed at home. She said she would have to consult her superior.

What was very clear was that Marion herself no longer had any say in the matter. She was long, long past being in control of her own life, never mind of her death. Her earlier assurances that she would take all the liquid morphine and finish herself off when she felt she’d ‘had enough’ had been pointless. All we could assume was that while she was in control she had never in fact ‘had enough’.

That, in itself, seemed to me hugely significant.

On Thursday 9 November, Annabel came, but not on her usual weekly visit. She was on her way to Germany to visit her daughter, a long-planned visit which Marion had been very anxious she should make. There were no pretences. Annabel could see what was happening. She knew Marion might die while she was away for those three brief days, but then she might not. She didn’t in any case wish to be there when her twin actually died – the grief and pain of it was too great, the need to witness it mercifully absent. It was so hard for her to leave, saying she’d be back on Monday, but she did it cheerfully, as she does everything, as Marion herself did. I thought, as I watched Annabel go, how rarely she and Marion had been on holiday together. When they were children, there weren’t any holidays – such luxuries didn’t feature in Davies family life – but Hunter and Annabel used to be sent at times of crisis to Cambuslang, to stay with relatives. Somehow, Marion and Johnny never were. They stayed at home, wondering why they were not the chosen ones (and the suspicion was that Hunter and Annabel were the more sociable and easier to have). Later, in adolescence, Marion did go to stay with her Scottish cousins, and was just as popular with them as Annabel, but the twins hardly ever went away together, even then.

The only times they did were when they went to the Royal Observer Corps camps, once they had left school and were both working in offices. The ROC was really part of the Civil Defence Movement, kept going after the war (this was the 1950s) by the RAF in case it was ever needed again. The twins hadn’t the faintest interest in civil defence but they were very taken indeed by the stories circulating in Carlisle of the good times to be had at the annual camps and by the fact that they would get paid if they joined. So they joined. The headquarters was in a large Edwardian house in Norfolk Road and here they went every week, wearing a version of WAAF uniform, barely able to keep their faces straight at the sight of each other. They were taught how to plot flight paths and how to identify the various aircraft. Neither of them was much good at this but somehow they managed to pass the annual examination (mysteriously, to them, called ‘triangulation’), which entitled them both to a few shillings and to go on what they regarded as a holiday, to a camp.

They went off to one in Kent and one in Lincolnshire, and the experience was every bit as exciting as they had been promised. They got drunk every night, met loads of boys, and loved the company of the other girls in their dormitory. The actual exercises they had to do during the day, the whole purpose of being there, were a joke – much strutting about, saluting, which gave Marion every opportunity for the parodying she relished. She would sometimes get dangerously near being openly mocking and have to be restrained by the more law-abiding but, in truth, no more respectful Annabel. But both of them thought of those weeks at the ROC camps as highlights of their youth and never needed much encouragement to demonstrate their saluting and marching abilities.

As adults, they’d only been on a couple of holidays on their own together, once for a week to Majorca, once to Sicily. Otherwise, their times together on holiday were within family groups. Going off just on their own was always a much-talked of plan, but the organisational difficulties were formidable and now of course it would never happen. Annabel’s going off on her own that night seemed cruelly to underline this fact.

That same night, Marion fell twice, at one in the morning and at four. The nurse and I found it almost impossible to lift her up. We spent ages, each time, kneeling on the floor, either side of her, waiting for the right moment to assist her up. ‘Wait, wait,’ Marion said. We waited. In my line of vision was the morphine bottle, ever by the bedside. I loathed the sight of it. If only, I used to think, she’d drunk the lot a couple of weeks ago and spared herself this agony – because it was agony, crouched on the floor, panting like a dog, struggling to force herself to put her feet on the floor and allow herself to be dragged, literally dragged, upwards. For what? What was the point of subjecting herself to the absolute tyranny of her dying body? I wanted to open her mouth and pour the morphine down. But she wouldn’t have been able to swallow it. She could barely swallow anything. It was too late to help death on in that way. I expect it almost always is. Those who want to die while still in control have to do it not when they are ready but while they are still able. And that, almost certainly, will be before they are ready. A fine state of affairs.

Marion was exhausted after that night. She slept through the night nurse’s departure and the arrival of the district nurse. All day she was drowsy, though not actually asleep. In the evening, Frances went out for a meal with two friends. She had barely left Marion’s side for weeks but had been persuaded to take this short break. The restaurant was just round the corner and she had her mobile phone with her. Two people had to be with Marion, so Hunter joined me. We sat quite cosily in the bedroom, Hunter entertaining us in the way Marion liked, in the best Davies family tradition with all kinds of anecdotes. Marion smiled and hummed a bit and made one or two rambling remarks connected with nothing. I tried to feed her some ice-cream but she couldn’t swallow it, and then some jelly, a few spoonfuls of which did slip down. She mumbled something about the Lonsdale and asked what day it was. ‘Friday,’ I said. ‘Oh, a busy night tonight,’ she said.

The Lonsdale was one of five cinemas doing booming business in Carlisle in the 1950s, when we were all growing up there, and by far the smartest. Marion worked there as an usherette during the period she was saving up to emigrate to New Zealand. She’d leave her office job at five o’clock, dash home for tea, then rush back into town to be ready for the parade. The manager of the Lonsdale was a military type, a Mr Scott-Buccleuh, who ran the cinema exactly like a military operation. The entire staff had to be on parade by a quarter to six, ready to open for the first house of the evening. The usherettes would go to their respective stations – Marion was usually put in the back stalls – and wait for Mr Scott-Buccleuh to march onto the stage, where he stood to rigid attention and roared out the names of the various parts of the cinema. ‘Front Circle present and correct?’ he’d bellow, and the appropriate usherette had to shout back: ‘Yes, Mr Scott-Buccleuh!’ When all the usherettes had responded, the order came, ‘Check torches!’ Torches would be flashed (Marion loved that bit and could hardly contain her mirth – he made it sound as though the torches were rifles), and then at last Mr Scott-Buccleuh would yell: ‘All correct! Doors open!’

Marion used to say that, usually, far from an eager horde of cinema-goers who must be controlled surging in, a couple of old-age pensioners would totter through the doors and everyone would feel vaguely let down. It was eight o’clock before the multitudes arrived and suddenly the usherettes were busy. It was extraordinary how she liked being busy, how she enjoyed this job in spite of having already worked a long day. She loved the power of the torch, knowing exactly where to direct the beam to discomfort the well-known regular raincoat brigade, or disturb lovers seeking anonymity in the back rows. She play-acted through the evening, delighting in the manager’s self-importance and using the breaks in the staff-room (while the big picture was on) to mimic him. The usherettes were nearly all smokers and she was comfortable, puffing away with them and swapping stories, even though most of them were much older than she was.

The Lonsdale years were decades ago now, but she smiled at the memory and we all took the chance to reminisce furiously about the ABC minors’ club on Saturday mornings at the Lonsdale, and the Beatles coming to give a concert there later on. It was such a comfort for the three of us to be united like that, effortlessly able to communicate through the memories of all those shared times, all of us with the same background, all of us bound together, firmly rooted in Carlisle lore. We never had to explain anything. Then Hunter, who was writing a book about lottery winners, suggested she chose six numbers and he’d buy her a lottery ticket. She thought hard and came up with six numbers, pausing a long time between each choice, but three of them were the same. It seemed so awful to be asking a dying person to choose lottery numbers. Where would any winnings be sent if she were to be a winner? But she was amused and that was all that mattered. There was no possibility, after all, of any meaningful conversation.

This thought was what kept me awake that night as I lay in bed in the room above Marion’s – all the time I’d had with her alone in the last two months and yet the sum total of what had been said was pitifully unimportant. But what was it I wanted to say to her that I hadn’t said? And more importantly, had she been given the opportunity to say what she wanted to say to me? I think so. But what she had wanted to say turned out to be apparently of very little consequence. It had been a kind of conceit, I decided, to imagine otherwise. I’d looked for messages and she had none to give. I’d looked for enlightenment and, though she had struggled to provide it and had managed to articulate something of how she felt, it was still vague, muted, her new knowledge, of what it felt like to die. She’d told all of us that she regarded herself as having had a perfectly good life; she’d told us she valued us and had felt valued by us; she’d told us we must not go to pieces after her death. Beyond that, what was there to say, except goodbye? All words were useless, helpless to convey anything at all.

Another very disturbed night followed, and then, in the morning, Saturday, we had great difficulty keeping Marion in bed once the Marie Curie nurse had gone. She was agitated, incredibly restless, and kept trying to get out of bed, but I couldn’t let her until Frances came down. She sat on the edge of the bed, the covers thrown back, and I sat facing her, my knees jammed against hers, talking frantically about Armistice Day ceremonies. When I had to call for Frances – I could no longer prevent Marion from trying to stand – she was calmer, and agreed to stay in bed until the district nurse came. When she appeared, it took the three of us to support Marion. It was only two steps to the chair she would sit in while the bed was made, but it seemed like two hundred, so agonisingly slow were her movements. The bed was quickly remade but then the pressure sore had to be dressed, and that was best done with Marion leaning against the bed while we held her up, so we prepared ourselves for the ordeal (and I thought how easily this could have been done in the hospice).

Getting her onto her feet from the chair was hard enough, but the moment she was at last upright, Frances and I on either side and the nurse hovering, she collapsed – swiftly, absolutely suddenly, just down. The nurse wanted to send for more help but we wanted to let Marion try to get up first. We sank down beside her and talked quietly to her and stroked her back, and told her to take it easy, not to worry, there was plenty of time, plenty of time … Her breathing was heavy and we wondered if she had simply fallen asleep, but eventually she sighed and said, ‘Wait, wait,’ as she always did. And then, as we levered her up, she managed to get onto her knees and, after another long wait, to raise herself further, and we quickly pushed the chair beneath her and lowered her into it. It was easy then to shove the chair towards the bed and half tip her out onto it. The sore was dressed, the neck bandaged and at last she was tucked up, drowsy and still breathing heavily. ‘Thank you, now,’ she said, and went to sleep, propped up high on her pillows but soon slumping forward.

We were drained and exhausted, and went to sit in the next room, shaken by the drama of it all. The nurse came in. ‘This can’t go on,’ she said: ‘Marion needs to be in a hospice.’ Frances lashed out, saying she would not accept that the hospice could look after Marion better than we could. The nurse muttered something about a hoist, as she had done before, and a pump to deliver the morphine into the system more effectively, and yet another kind of water mattress. A hoist? Fine, we’d get a hoist, and a pump, and the special mattress: we’d order them all on Monday. The nurse was silent. Then she said that the point she’d warned us about had been reached and that she couldn’t accept responsibility for letting this go on. She’d be discussing it with her superior on Monday. We said nothing, still too distressed to argue effectively. We went on sitting there after she’d gone, trying to calm ourselves. Marion’s breathing was so very loud we could hear it through the wall. It was laboured and harsh. We went to look at her and saw mucus dribbling from her nose. We had to keep wiping it away, but this did not disturb her. She slept on, and we thought that was good. Perhaps she would sleep all day and make up for her broken night.

Friends and family came and went, tiptoeing up the stairs, talking in whispers. I wasn’t scheduled to stay that night – it was to be my first night at home for a week and I was going to try to have a ten-hour sleep to prepare myself for what might be the long haul ahead. A kind friend of Marion’s and Frances’s was to take my place, and off I went at about five o’clock, reluctant to go but knowing I should be sensible. We all had to husband our resources. I went to look at Marion before I left. There was no change. She was still asleep, as she had been since ten in the morning. She looked awful, all hunched up, nose leaking, face swollen and grey, hair damp with perspiration. I walked home, glad to be outside, though the air was cold and far from fresh all the noisy way until I’d crossed Highgate Hill. I went straight to bed, slept for a few hours, and then woke around three. When the telephone rang just before seven I was ready for it. Even before I answered I knew Marion was dead.

The relief was instant. It was all over, all that horror. She’d died at home, and though only the Marie Curie nurse was with her when her breathing stopped, she had indeed been surrounded by those who loved her, as she had wished, right up to her last moments of consciousness.

The dead body was lying flat on its back, covers pulled up to its bandaged neck, hair neatly brushed. Since I’d seen such bodies before, four of them by then, I had no fear of this one. A dead body was an object, a cadaver, no longer a person, and I’d always found it strangely reassuring that this should be so. Before I saw my first dead body, a cousin’s, when I was fourteen or so, my imagination had terrified me – I’d envisaged something repellent and disgusting, something hideously disfigured, perhaps covered in slime, or crawling already with maggots. The reality had surprised me. I felt nothing, confronted with the corpse, which had seemed bloodless and devoid of any ability to scare. But I’d wondered if I’d feel differently when the dead person meant something more to me. If corpses had been loved when alive, would they have the power to be frightening or at least to awe? I found they didn’t. Later, when my mother died, my father had exclaimed on seeing her body, ‘That’s not her!’ He hadn’t meant that it was the wrong dead body but that this was no longer his wife. And I thought he was right. Death was, as I’d thought since I lost all my childhood religious faith, definitely the end. Even those who believe that a soul or spirit has flown from the body to some other place do not deny that the corpse is a husk, empty and worthless.

Some people want to see the body, some don’t, saying they prefer to remember the person alive. Some invest the corpse with feeling and treat it as an object worthy of reverence or even as a still living, but sleeping, thing. Either way, dead bodies have their own mystique and a house with one in it can make people shudder. Frances wanted Marion’s body to be seen and could herself scarcely bear to leave its side. She maintained that Marion looked peaceful and that she had a smile on her face. To me, her face looked grotesque, distorted by the cancer cells packed within it, her smile – a grimace. I looked at it and banished it, replacing it with Marion’s face before the disease began. For me this lifeless thing, lying there, had nothing to do with Marion. But for Frances, it did. She didn’t want to part with Marion’s body and wouldn’t let it be taken to a funeral parlour, not yet. She was desperate to keep it, to invest it with continuing meaning.

But on Monday morning it had to be removed. Only the fact that it was mid-November and suddenly cold, and that the bedroom window had been wide open all night, had kept the body from smelling worse than it did. The undertaker’s men came at nine o’clock, as arranged. Frances, distraught, shut herself in her bedroom. She begged me not to let these men be disrespectful, not to let them handle Marion roughly. But I didn’t need to tell them anything. They spoke in whispers, came in quietly, carrying not a coffin but some sort of black bag. I showed them into the room. They asked if I wanted the dead lady’s nightdress removed and left. I said No. The very idea seemed bizarre and made me feel nauseous; or perhaps it was the atmosphere in the room. The body went into the bag. It was lifted as though it were an object so precious and fragile it might break. Carefully, slowly, silently, the bend in the stairs was negotiated, the bundle taken out of the house. The leading man took a quick look up and down the street. No one about. Another man went ahead and opened the doors of the hearse. The distance from front door to car was covered in seconds. The doors were closed, and off they went.

‘Thank God that’s over,’ said Marion in my head. ‘Now get me a cigarette.’

Then there was the funeral, just as it had been organised and planned by Marion. A packed church. We sang ‘Guide Me O Thou Great Redeemer’, ‘The King of Love My Shepherd Is’, and ‘For All the Saints Who From Their Labours Rest’. Very mournful, hardly comforting. There were readings – Ecclesiastes 3, Verses 1–8 (‘To everything there is a season …’), and Matthew 5, verses 1–10, 14–6 (‘And seeing the multitudes …’). I couldn’t imagine why she had selected the Matthew verses. Why hadn’t she chosen something from Burns’ poetry? It would have had more meaning. Hunter gave an address, talked about Marion’s life. It provoked some quiet laughter and was a relief to many. I concentrated on looking at the flowers, white lilies and roses, and at the bunches of heather I’d put on the coffin. What a carry-on, as Marion would have said, it had been to get heather in November. I’d tied the bunches with tartan ribbons and we’d draped a tartan sash of Annabel’s, one worn for Burns’ Night festivities, underneath.

Then we went back to the flat, to which the entire congregation had been invited. The rooms overflowed with mourners, the stairs were jammed with them, and there was soon a queue outside. The people in the downstairs flat kindly opened up their rooms, too, so that mourners did not have to stand on the pavement. For hours and hours Marion’s family and friends ate and drank and reminisced. Then at last they left.

Was the ceremony the comfort that Marion had hoped it would be to those who loved her? Do funerals and wakes fulfil this admirable purpose? For most people probably, yes, they do. For Frances and Annabel this one did. But not for me. For me, it was a ritual which had to be gone through, willingly if it would help even one person, and because Marion had wanted it, but curiously empty, in my case, of any relieving emotion. I never felt the least bit moved, though others did. I had never felt less like weeping, though the tears of others flowed plentifully. The slow hymns, the portentous readings, the solemn prayers all helped them. Far more affecting to me was the private cremation next day. Only five of us were present – Hunter and I, Annabel, Jeff, and Frances – when, in the otherwise empty chapel, the coffin slid silently away. It seemed, in contrast to the church service, simple and so much more appropriate. I said so in my head to Marion. She laughed and told me to keep quiet, I was always out of step, and far too fond of speaking my mind. She didn’t want Annabel and Frances more distressed by any odious comparisons I might make.

I felt quite cheerful afterwards. We’d begun talking again, Marion and I. She looked and sounded as she always had. Now she was dead, now the dreadfully prolonged cruel business of dying was over, she lived again in my mind. It was going to be, I assured her, a very safe, secure place to be. I’d look after her.