I drove to the ferry on the last day of March. It was an unusually warm day, and I enjoyed standing on deck, watching the white cliffs of Dover recede while the smokers arced fag butts into the brown English Channel.
I didn’t drive South. I motored. I toured. Rather than hammering sleep-deprived, unshaven and bloated with junk food down the motorway, I took small diversions. It was as though a month was scrolled forward in the natural calendar every two hundred miles I travelled. In Paris the leaves were coming out in the street where I stopped for lunch with my friend Nick. I told him the purpose of my mission. He said that his parents, both in their 70s, seeing the end in sight, had embarked on a spending spree. They lived in the suburbs, twenty minutes from the Eiffel Tower, but had put an offer in on a pied-à-terre in town so they could take in shows and not have the trouble of driving home. They had been to Venice for the Anish Kapoor, to New York for the Rauschenburg, and planned a trip to Madrid to spend a couple of days in the Prado.
I meandered to Blois and Chambourg-sur-Indre, with the window open and my foot soft on the pedal. I ate diner in a cafe and overnighted in an auberge on the Loire.
In Poitiers, when I stopped to refuel, I noticed blossom over an orchard beyond the chain-link fence. When I turned off near Toulouse for Susie and Stanley the verges were speckled with yellow cowslips and purple orchids, and the woods had unfolded glossy canopies.
It had grown so warm, hot even, that I took off my jacket and wished I was wearing lighter shoes, when I suddenly remembered the pork. It had been in the back of the car since the night before last when I had bought it in Tesco on Cromwell Road. I also remembered that the two gammon joints, bursting with pigginess through their string vests under the plastic packaging, were reduced in price because they were either on or near to their sell-by date.
The British nosh run was a well-established activity in the expatriate community in the South of France. Since the heightened security measures at airports and Ryanair’s desire to get holidaymakers to wear only the clothes they could fit in their pockets, getting unavailable British comestibles in France has grown increasingly difficult. Our people out there were desperate for tea, Marmite, pork pies and bacon, the way the old sailors needed limes to stave off scurvy (though what disease the Brits were keeping at bay with that diet I could only imagine). The greatest delicacy was fresh ham. A boned leg of outdoor-reared English cured ham could cause mayhem. And with Brexit, things were bound to get harder. I could be carrying the last dry-cured bacon across the Channel for months. When I stopped for a cup of coffee near the Dordogne, I drew the roller blind so the contents of my boot were hidden. If a roaming Brit spotted that packaging I could be torn to shreds by a pack of expats, demented from Ginster deprivation. When I got back in the car I thought I smelt something unusual. I feared it might be the pork, which had now been 48 hours in a hot airless boot. At this rate I was going to kill my mum, and possibly a few other expats, with pork. Like a UKIP assassin picking off Europhile traitors. I put my foot down and turned up at Susie’s door carrying a straining carrier bag at 11 p.m.
She had got smaller since I last saw her, and her left eye had a reflective glint like a fish scale, I guessed from a growing cataract. Both she and Stanley reminded me of screwed up balls of paper that had been half-flattened. And Susie was crying. I know things are grim when people cry with joy at my arrival. I held her in a hug and felt her bones through the sagging clothes. She was standing as straight as she could but I could see it was hurting her.
‘I better put this in the freezer,’ I said. She was so unsteady on her feet she moved like she was on board a ferry in a heavy sea, gripping the fridge door for support and then the sideboard, moving her hands before her feet.
‘Thank you, thank you. I’m going to be very popular with this,’ she said. I am sure she had her strategy well-planned. With that kind of pork you could set the rules in expat France, the way the yanks used nylons to get what they wanted in wartime Britain. Susie would make them listen. She’d invite them round with the promise of Tesco’s finest farm-reared rolled shoulder, sit them down and soften them up with an hour of the peace group, before moving onto her garden triumphs. Then, while they were salivating with thoughts of gammon and pineapple, she’d turn the screws with the new car park planting scheme.
The house hadn’t gone to pot. But I saw that there were child-gates at the top of the stairs, and I soon worked out why when I saw Stanley piloting his wheel chair after four whiskies. It was not a criminal offence to drive a wheel chair under the influence, but if they ever brought one in, which I expect they will, I don’t think Stanley is going to care. He’s a drunk wheeler, that’s how he rolls.
Susie told me she had had E. coli. ‘Apparently they have it in all the hospitals in Britain; they don’t have it in France at all.’ Somehow she got it. But she seemed to be a lot better. I went to bed glad I had driven so many miles to be with them. She had been ill. Unlike once or twice in the past when she had faked dying to get me, and on one occasion my son, over to France … only to meet us smiling at the door, saying something like ‘you’re just in time for a game of boules, then we’re going down to the village for dinner.’
I remember my son’s headmaster asking me how my mother was and having no idea what he was talking about, although I had told him only two weeks earlier she was dying.
But they were different this trip. Stanley could only put one foot about six inches in front of the other and moved like he had pooed his pants. He was meant to walk as much as possible but sat all day at his modelling table, retreating into a happy childhood, building model aeroplanes and ships. His completed models were displayed not entirely wholeheartedly by my mother in the house. She permitted a six-foot-long HMS Hood to lie at anchor in the freezer room downstairs, but was ambivalent about a magnificent wooden HMS Victory that hove to in the sitting room under a spotlight, though the most negative she could get away with was ‘the shelf is too big’.
The house possessed the torpor I remembered from Nanna’s care home. Stanley was on the sofa staring at Cash in the Attic – he wished there was – and he didn’t turn his head when I came in and said hello. Susie was upstairs asleep. They kept the schedule of Elvis Presley in his last days. They rose at 11 a.m., slept a lot of the afternoon, hit the pill bottle and drinks tray at 8 and shuffled weaving to bed at about 3.30 a.m. Although there were indeed two wheelchairs, my mother did not use hers, and Stanley preferred to stamp in tiny steps like a stroppy toddler. The baby gates were presumably fitted to stop the drinks trolley cannoning off Stanley and down the stairs.
From time to time a nurse called at the house to check up on them. I was in the kitchen when Stanley said ‘Ca, c’est mon beau fils.’
The nurse shot me a dark look, as if to say ‘Where the hell have you been?’ I remembered that we were in a part of rural Catholic France where good offspring look after their parents in their homes, and enjoy the sacrifice.
When she departed, Stanley and I sat down to a bowl of soup. I had noticed that when he ate in front of Susie he made a lot of noise. There was grunting, slurping, sniffing and gurgling on top of the percussive clicking of cutlery on teeth, followed by long choking coughs, which effectively stopped Susie talking, though she tried to raise her voice above the din. Dining just with me he drank his soup in silence, and I thought, that’s a thirty year marriage.
He put down his spoon, and asked if he could talk to me off the record. Code for not telling Susie. It was easy to talk in confidence in this house because they both spent so long getting from one room to another that I could hear them coming for hours. I had been using this advantage to avoid them, nipping up the stairs when I heard the clunk of the lift coming into life, or darting onto the balcony when I heard one of them shuffling down the corridor in my direction.
He forgot what he wanted to say, so I said, ‘One of the reasons I’m here is that I don’t think we should be talking about shortening your lives, but making them as good as possible for as long as they last. What I want to know from you is what you want to do before you die, so I can make it happen, or at least try to. So you are actually doing what you want to do and enjoying life, rather than simply existing.’
‘What do I want to do?’ he thought, but not for long. ‘Me? Marry a rich widow who thinks of sex as much as I do and sail first class with her on the Queen Mary to see my American descendants in New York. And I want a full-time carer, to dress and bathe me, she’s called Maria, she worked for a friend, a very intelligent young girl. With lovely hands and slim body so she doesn’t take up too much space, though her breasts are large. So surprising really with a waist that slim …’
‘I’ll put that on the list,’ I said. ‘Is there anything else you want to do, with Mummy for instance?’
‘Oh. You mean before she dies?’ He sunk into silence. I guessed he was running through the score of things he wanted to do, striking each one out, trying to find one he might conceivably be permitted to do. ‘My model making,’ he said, back in little boy mode, pointing to the scale model of the Sopwith Camel he had recently ordered on the Internet.
‘Well we’ll put that on the list. Time for hobbies. Very important,’ I said. ‘But we must think of more things. I am going to do the same thing with Susie. Ask her what she wants to do before she dies. It’s important.’
‘I can tell you. She wants to rule the world,’ he said, then held up his finger. ‘I have just remembered what I wanted to talk to you about. Money.’ He rambled around the subject for a bit and then came to the point: he wanted to know if I’d pony up for Susie’s care. ‘A full-time carer, living in,’ he explained, ‘which is what she will need, is six hundred francs, I mean euros a week. That’s near enough thirty thousand pounds a year. We need you to pay for that.’ He smiled at me, his take-pity-on-me-I’m-just-an-old-man-with-slow-onset-dementia smile. Quite a useful weapon to have in the arsenal. I thought, let’s get back to assisted suicide. I had seriously underestimated its benefits.