CHAPTER 15

WITH A second marriage I had learnt the meaning of respect. True and enduring love was there, and sex, but both were pathways to the rock of respect. Experiencing it for the first time in my love life I recognised its impact. It meant I did nothing of which my gentle husband might have disapproved. This would have seemed a betrayal of his love. Without effort, miraculously, I believe I became a better person, blessed with jolly memories of a discarded life, viewed now through a happy, albeit astonished haze.

I was four months pregnant with our second child when my husband first became seriously ill, the first indication being coughing up blood. For four weeks the doctors didn’t think it was his damaged heart, but lung cancer. Lung cancer at thirty-two didn’t seem fair or right, not when we’d accepted the heart deformity. The tests would tell, and while waiting I had only to weather the sympathetic predictions of Irish Mary, my daily.

‘How’s Doctor?’ she would say, and one day, when we’d been told to wait another twenty-four hours for results, I said, ‘I’m afraid he’s very ill, Mary.’

‘Oh, dear,’ she said, ‘Isn’t it always the same, Mrs Dalton. It’s always the nice quiet ones who go first.’

The tests were negative and we had another year and a half in which Emmet was able to see his son born before we discovered it was his heart after all, and Mary was able to have her laments in company.

Memory’s own selector button operates at random. Now, when I think of my husband’s last night with me it is a vivid picture I receive each time of shaving his back before his operation. And going back twice, memories through memories, I remember that while shaving him, that smooth, muscular and broad back, I remembered back to the night we had first loved each other. The fire in my bedroom was alight and when he undressed and walked away from me across the room I was surprised and pleased and somehow proud to see the same back, not fully discerned in its perfect symmetry and strength under his clothes. I had loved him already, but this physical beauty of body was an unexpected gift he had brought me which I had not needed. Now, in shaving him, I hated to scrape off the few downy hairs and I thrust from my mind the vision of the scar which would soon mar it. A scythe cutting his body in two; heart surgery was in its infancy—keyhole surgery long in the future. We chatted a little about practical things—money, who would help financially if he should die, as we had never saved money. He said, ‘I don’t worry about you. If you have been able to live through the last five years with this constant dread hanging over you in the way you have, you will be able to cope with whatever life has to offer in the future.’

I held his hand, his strong gentle hand. There really wasn’t anything to say—goodnight, perhaps, a message to his father who had never fully come to terms with our marriage. ‘Tell him I don’t hold his attitude against him. I understand. I know he loves me. He can’t help it.’ I don’t remember. The things I remember are his back when I shaved it; his words which entered my very blood like a transfusion of strength; his hand as I took it, so like my son’s now. And, then, when he had said goodnight, his back again as he walked away from me down the hospital corridor to the bathroom in the new blue dressing gown his father had given him in advance for his birthday. It was the first of December: his birthday—his thirty-fourth—was not for another ten days but there might not be need for a present by that time. I had already bought, too, our daughter’s Christmas present, her first tricycle, so that he could share in the buying of it and by Christmas, if he should be dead, the present would not be such a lonely one. Our son, at fourteen months, would not be aware of Christmas yet.

His sister slept in the house that night so that I should not be alone during the long, long hours of the operation in the morning. But, in the morning, I could not stay in the house and thought for something to do, somewhere to go, that would match the effort he was making and would bring me close to him in our joint wish to live. His God, in whom I had never fully or consciously believed, was perhaps just a refuge in a vast world of concept where I could call on his beliefs, and perhaps because I was a part of him they would come to help me. I chose St James’ Church in Spanish Place—never Emmet’s church, or one to which to my knowledge, he had ever been. Perhaps I wanted it to be my own choice or perhaps it was because I could buy food for lunch in the High Street around the corner. I don’t remember the idea of the food, only that the children and their nanny and my sister-in-law were in the house and I must, through all this time, have been buying food and cooking it. I do not remember neglecting this necessity.

The church was not empty. There were a few housewives like myself, an old woman or two, dusty pale sunlight mingling with the candles, and two cleaning women with straw brooms. I sat on the edge of a pew, an intruder, borrowing my place. I could not presume on the God, the force, the whatever great strength in which I did not believe to intervene and interrupt the flow of anything so basic as Emmet’s life or death because of my own puny needs. Also, perhaps there was some superstition, a feeling that it was tempting the benevolence of this fate to ask for something not in its power to bestow. No: I must ask for something which required an equal effort from me and which I myself could provide if nothing and no one came to help me. He was called God, this force in whom Emmet believed, so, ‘Please God,’ I prayed, ‘give me the strength to bear whatever is in store for us. Just let me bear it.’

I stayed until the time came when the doctors had said they could telephone and then I went home. Emmet’s sister came to the door: she was smiling. ‘It’s all right—he’s all right—it’s all over.’ Then I cried—oh, how I cried; and dried my eyes and she patted my shoulders and we went upstairs and the telephone started to ring.

The nice young house doctor rang and said I might come to see Emmet in the afternoon although he would be in great pain and would not be very aware of my presence. ‘But it helps,’ he said, ‘It helps, just if you sit and hold his hand.’ Oh, why was I frightened. Now, when I remember that I was frightened the thought is a sharp pain that I did not give him as much help as I might have done. His sister offered to come with me, and I needed her. I had been warned of the oxygen tent in which I would find him, and the blood drip on one side and the tubes from his wound draining on the other side, and I was afraid to face it alone. Nobody had warned me of his pain—of how his face would look black and grey with pain and drained of all blood and the usual tints of flesh. I held his hand but all he could say to me, if indeed he knew it was me, was, ‘Take away the pain—oh, please take away the pain.’ The pain was between us; it made a mockery of his strength and struck him down to the level of ordinary men. It jeered at the bond between us which in full consciousness would have restored the personality of my husband to that black and grey face on the pillow. Every two minutes they took his pulse. The doctors had told me that if his pulse rate remained stable he could leave the oxygen tent in twenty-four hours and we could begin to look forward rather than back. In each two-minute interval hung our lives.

Then—a blank—a long gap in my memory. Only now, as I write this, over the years of that blank, do I remember that Tam and Maggy Williams bundled me off to a celebratory dinner at the Ivy. We laughed and cried and joked and I was swept along by their love and the shared enjoyment of our lives—theirs, mine, Emmet’s. Champagne had never seemed so effervescent. At lunchtime the next day Emmet’s old doctor came with more champagne. We drank and celebrated and I think I cried a little more. I remember the chimney piece and resting my head on my hand on it and sobbing, ‘Oh, George, I love him so much.’

‘I know you do, old girl. I know you do.’

But was it that day or another day—a day when he was already dead and I cried, ‘I loved him so much’? The events are mixed in the mind: the memory of the carvings on the chimney piece is vivid—and the words and old George’s sympathetic murmurings, but whether Emmet was dead or alive then, this I do not remember.

That afternoon when I visited him the oxygen tent was gone. Emmet was still grey, with a stubble of unshaven whisker on his face which looked indecent, as if purposefully left there to emphasise his pain and his helplessness. But he was better and in control once more, as always. He was very proud of his pulse rate and made me feel it. He had never had a normal one before and was delighted at this novelty. He was able to tell me all the details of his operation and how very much worse his condition had been than they had suspected, and how marvellously the surgeon had displayed his skill.

‘Are you happy?’ he asked when he had finished. I could not say yes because I knew we had only won the first small victory.

‘I feel as if I have just run a very long race,’ was the best I could do.

‘I love you,’ he said. I didn’t tell him I loved him too. I didn’t say it. I don’t know why. It seemed unnecessary to me, but for him to have used up his new little strength to say it to me may have meant that it was necessary to him, and in this I failed him. He asked for orange juice, and although there was a greengrocer across the street and I could have gone, it was late and foggy and past the children’s bedtime and I needed to get home to them. ‘I’ll bring it with me later—around 7.30—will that be all right?’

I never told him that last time that I loved him and I never got him his orange juice, for by the time I got back to the hospital that night he had already started on the road to dying and the oranges lay forgotten forever on a waiting-room table.

Then sharp into my memory springs the window pane in that waiting room. It was solid—an inescapable and tangible hard surface on which to concentrate as the ground beneath my feet became a void. It reflected me; and it was hard and cold and therefore a necessity to accept. I looked through it to the fog, and felt it and pressed my hands against it and talked to it. I told it he was dying, that this was what I had prepared for and it had come and I was standing up looking out a window into a fog with a white ceiling light reflected behind me and my husband was dying in the next room and that I must keep standing up like this in one place or another and clutch onto tangible realities to be faced—me and the sheet of glass—and the unrelenting feel of it against my palms and not expect or hope for anything more ever except the capacity to recognise reality. Reality had become me on one side of the glass and a foggy London night on the other; street lights outside and cars driving by and the necessity only of deciding what minute details of living to perform next.

They wouldn’t let me go in to him. It had happened as I was coming up in the lift and when the lift stopped at his floor nurses and doctors were hurrying down the passage to his room. I sent messages: I asked the house doctor to tell him I was there outside but there was no time for messages, or place, or room around that crowded bed where they worked to restore rhythm to his heart. I don’t know what he felt, or thought, or said—if he asked for me, or was frightened, or just again possessed by pain. I only know now that I should have forced my way in. It would have made no difference to his death, but perhaps to his dying. He did it alone, under the anaesthetic when they opened up his chest once more to massage that valiant heart. And I sat, surrounded this time, four hours later, by his family whom I had telephoned, but also alone, and felt him die without me. I knew it—the moment of his death. A cold and shocking shiver took hold of me: blankets were brought and brandy, but nothing took away the cold, and that, I am certain, was the moment of his dying. An hour later they came in and told me, and life without him began.