I booked a table and Susie wrapped herself in a cashmere shawl for the outing. I noticed that without Stanley my mum moved like a hare. I had to catch her up at the door of the restaurant. The waitress double-checked my order for two coupes of champagne and a bottle of wine. I explained it was correct; we were English.
I asked Susie if it was all reminding her of my father’s death. She said something and then stopped. She waved at her neck.
‘That’s not emotion, it’s my throat,’ she said, taking a sip of water. ‘I don’t remember much about your father’s funeral.’
Nor did I. I was eleven years old. I only recalled standing in a pew in an English country church and suddenly being aware of a pale coffin on a sinister, large wheeled conveyance sliding into view and resting motionless in the aisle. And I thought, my dad’s in that box.
‘What I remember the most,’ Susie said, putting down her glass of water, ‘after getting out of the car at the church – I don’t remember who made any of the arrangements – was seeing this, I think it’s called a gurney, with big wheels, with the coffin on it. That thing has stuck in my mind.’
‘Yes, it had big wheels,’ I said, ‘with long spokes, I suppose for getting up church steps and along bumpy medieval paths. It was spooky.’
‘Mmm,’ we both said.
As a child I had pictured my father inside the coffin, his hands crossed over his shroud. In his mouth was a scuba-diving regulator, and beside him an oxygen cylinder. He had just enough air to get him through the service and into the grave. As soon as the congregation had left the churchyard, the grave-diggers lifted the coffin, forced the lid, and gave my father a hand up. He pulled out the mouth-piece and tugged off his shroud to reveal a dinner jacket and bow tie. This was clearly the influence of You Only Live Twice on the imagination of a frightened and lonely little boy. The movie was released in 1967 and my father died in ’68. Standing beside the coffin my father struck a Bond-like pose. In real life he was fairly James Bondian, particularly in the Connery manifestation. Handsome, intense, glamorous, and smouldering with sex and danger. He sniffed the air, slid a silver cigarette case from his breast pocket, lit a Senior Service, snapped it shut, exhaled and said ‘Thank you gentlemen, mission accomplished. I’d better go and see M. But first I need to pay a visit to Pussy. She’ll be wanting a full debrief.’ He strode under the lynch gate to the curb, where a man pulled a tarpaulin off the white roadster we thought he had died in. He climbed in and accelerated over the horizon. Leaving us lot behind to battle on.
During one of my last shifts at Stanley’s bedside I had noticed a copy of Silence on the bookshelf under the window. I mentioned that when my father died they found – in his top pocket – a piece of paper with the last sentence of the novel written on it. I opened the slim book as Stanley slept, and read it.
There followed a bloody accusing confusion and crying noise.
No kidding.
My father, who knew a thing or two about life and death, carried his last sentence on him. He knew that you had to write, and live, to a full stop, rather than peter out in an endless chain of increasingly meaningless words that ramble and drivel and repeat and ramble and drivel until finally running out of gas before starting up again but even more weakly and never quite getting to a satisfactory end …
You get the picture.
The pain that existed within me was so patient. It would not leave until I gave it the wholehearted attention it demanded. All I did by ignoring it was pass it around my closest friends, family and down to my children.
Turning away from death, or rather trying to laugh in its face, had not served me particularly well. My progress through life had been like a game of emotional Takeshi’s Castle, the details of which are tedious to the outsider, and depressing to the insider. I stumbled and slipped and slid on and off a colourful range of self-destructive behaviours which other people seemed to land on and alight from with ease. When I stopped to catch my breath and gather myself I looked up and was hit in the face by the next stupid thing I did, and sent slapping into the water for another dousing. The best I had hoped for was to give a few people some entertainment along the way.
I looked at my mum’s soft creased face. Forty-nine years had passed since the funeral, but we had not talked of it until then. The pain of that day had been piled upon more pain, the fear on confusion, and all had been compacted so tightly it seemed overwhelmingly difficult to go back through to separate the sedimentary layers. My father’s death, and its strange silent aftermath, had never been faced. I do not think I had even once spoken to my brother about it. But Susie and I glimpsed it there for a moment, when the door opened briefly on that day.
I had noticed that I had recently felt the pain of simply being Guy easing. My long drives through France, for instance, or living by myself in the village, had been scary and lonely undertakings in the past. But I found myself now engaged in fewer elaborate acts of self-destruction, and that was a blessed relief. Was it because this process with Susie had cleared blocked lines of communication between me and her? Had she, like a good therapist, helped me reach back in time to turn the dial on the locked safe of who I am? I had spent many hours with counsellors trying to remember, or to guess, or to chance upon or to deduce, the combination that would make it click and the door swing open.
By facing death with my mother had I in some way corrected the fault with my father’s that had caused so much trouble in my life? Was this the attention that my pain demanded, and that I was finally giving it? Who knew? Maybe I had just wised up, grown up and pulled myself together. It made dealing with Susie so much easier, and made living with this new person, me, so much more rewarding.
‘How do you feel about your own death?’ I asked, enjoying this new freedom I felt with her.
‘I don’t feel like doing it now, to myself,’ she said. ‘Because now I have a cause,’ she smiled. ‘But I absolutely refuse to go through what poor old Stanley is. I really don’t want to end like that.’
‘Nor do I.’
‘And I shall fight for the right for none of us to be put through it against our will.’
The next day I left the house. Stanley was asleep or unconscious when I said goodbye, so it really didn’t matter what tone I used. I left the carers there. That’s a tough phrase. Their suffering was to continue to the end. Jane, my sister, was absolutely selfless in her service to Susie and Stanley.
On my way to Toulouse Airport I stopped for diesel because I didn’t want the rental company to charge me an exorbitant sum to top up the tank. In the end they charged me 80 euros for bringing the car back over an hour early. Handling fee. I didn’t think God would charge a handling fee for people returning early. I was just wondering how full I had to make the tank to get the needle on the French equivalent of F, when I saw a little single-seater plane flying over some leafless woods beyond the carriageway, which reminded me of the Sopwith Camel. I fancied it was Stanley at the controls.
‘With his hand firmly on his joystick!’ I imagined Rupert shouting. I pictured Stanley’s windblown face and carefree smile.
I screwed the petrol cap on, and felt in my pockets for some French cash, as I didn’t want to leave France with unspent coins and notes. In my hand I found the torn bit of packaging I had written Stanley’s comment about the economy on.
It read: It’s the beginning of the end. There’s going to be an enormous crash.
Pretty good last words.
I drew over by the compressed air and texted the house for news. The reply came back. No news. He was still holding on.