THE TELEPHONE RANG. It was Mother.
‘Your Father’s got cancer,’ she said.
‘What?’
She repeated it; it didn’t sound any better the second time. Anger and incredulity vied for my emotions. Then a sort of moronic numbness took over.
Father had never had a serious illness in his life, apart from an attack of pneumonia.
‘What are we going to do?’ I found myself asking.
‘Speak to the specialist,’ said Mother. She hung up.
I knew the man. His name was Professor Pounder. For some reason my fingers seemed to have thickened and I had difficulty punching the correct keys. Usually the sound of Professor Pounder’s voice was reassuring; it was tea-tepid: E. F. Benson and cricket scores. But this time menace hovered over it like a cloud.
‘I’m afraid it’s serious. I suggest you make sure your father’s will is in order.’
‘But he’s not going to die, is he?’
‘He has cancer of the throat. It’s a nasty place to have it. We will do everything we can, but it’s no use pretending.’
‘Oh, I see.’
For some reason I was embarrassed. It was almost as if Father had committed a tedious faux pas. For the first time a transference of power had occurred.
That evening, Father’s reaction was characteristic. I found him drinking champagne from a silver goblet.
‘Your old dad’s got cancer,’ he said affably. His overtly intelligent eyes glided over a portrait of one of the Wyatt architects. ‘They say they have found a lump in my throat the size of a tangerine. It must have been growing for a long time.’
He paused. ‘Now do you want to hear the good news?’
The good news? What could there possibly be?
‘The good news is that Professor Pounder says it wasn’t caused by smoking!’
Even on those terms it was difficult to share his satisfaction.
Father was admitted to the Royal Free Hospital in Hampstead the next day. A laser was to bore a hole in the tumour, enabling him to swallow food properly. The procedure would be followed by a mixture of chemotherapy and radiotherapy. Then, if the tumour shrank, the doctors would consider an operation to remove it.
Mother and Maria, my parents’ Portuguese cook, packed Father a small suitcase. Father gave directions from the middle of his room.
‘I’d like my long blue nightshirt.’
‘Oh, Woodrow,’ Mother interjected. ‘It’s so funny-looking. You can’t wear that in hospital.’
‘Yes I can. And I’d like my leather slippers, my P. D. James thriller, and my gold cigar cutter.’
‘They won’t let you smoke in hospital.’
‘We’ll see.’
Suddenly I noticed that illness had altered Father’s looks. His skin hung on his face; his arms were like spillikins. But he still had his courage and he aimed his eyes at us like a pair of gun barrels.
The following afternoon Mother and I went to see him in hospital. A surgeon was there. He looked like a film star. It made me nervous. Why is it that we always assume very good-looking people are guilty of an imposture?
He explained they would have to remove Father’s gullet and replace it with one made from his stomach lining. Apparently one didn’t really need a stomach in any case.
Father was mesmerised. Mother was teary. Father clasped her hand.
‘Don’t worry, Buttercup,’ he told her. ‘I’m not going to die.’
Father had asked me to bring him tinned turtle soup for his dinner. There was a kitchen on the floor for patients to heat their own food. He had also asked for a bottle of claret. While a nurse opened this I warmed the soup. It slopped all over the floor but the girl was kind. I wondered if Father had broached the subject of his smoking. After he had finished his soup, he reached for his cigar box.
‘Are you allowed to?’
He looked shifty.
‘Well I am, and then I’m not.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘It means that they have to turn off the oxygen if I smoke in case everything ignites.’
Crikey. ‘What if the man next door is on a respirator?’
‘Oh, he isn’t. I checked.’ He added proudly, ‘Occasionally they give me a special dispensation.’
The nurses were enthralled. Father was better than a soap opera. They laughed at his conversation, and tut-tutted when his cigar accumulated trembling lengths of ash. Sometimes he asked Mother to bring them in champagne. He didn’t like to bother them even professionally. Almost every night around ten the telephone would ring at Cavendish Avenue.
‘I can’t find my book. Where did you put it, Buttercup?’
‘I don’t remember. Ask one of the night nurses to help you look for it.’
‘Oh I couldn’t waste their time like that.’
Or, ‘I can’t turn off one of the lights. I don’t know where the switch is. Could you come out to the hospital and turn it off?’
‘You must be mad. Ring for the nurse.’
‘Oh, I don’t like to disturb them.’
The news was bad. They couldn’t operate on Father after all. His stomach was disfigured by an aneurysm, a swollen vein that could burst at any moment were it disturbed. Then he would bleed to death. The news was good. The chemotherapy had shrunk the tumour by a third. Maybe they could control its growth for a few years.
‘I’ll live another ten,’ declared Father confidently. ‘I can’t afford to die yet.’
He looked at Mother. ‘There are too many things I want to do.’
Father had chemotherapy and radiotherapy every day. They gave him unusually high doses. On weekends he was allowed home. Friends were generous; they sent caviare and foie gras, about the only two things Father could eat without pain, as his throat felt as tight as a miser’s fist. The Duke and Duchess of Marlborough arrived with a magnum of vintage champagne. Father was moved. He talked to them as if he hadn’t a care in the world.
I often think that only stupid people are never really afraid. Or very unimaginative ones. Father was neither. His imagination was prefectly capable of running riot in the most gruesome way. He knew very well that the chances of recovery from throat cancer were slim. So it wasn’t ignorance that enabled him to maintain his jollity. Part of it was his belief in the real efficacy of positive thoughts, but it was also a consideration for others. He couldn’t bear to see either Mother or me upset.
During the tribulations of my life, Father had often shut himself in his room and wept for my misfortunes, but now he saw it as his duty to keep up our spirits.
Mother would try to arrange small dinners on Sunday evening with old friends. Often Father would look haggard and skeletal. The anti-nausea pills he was given left him disorientated. But he would behave as if the Queen were coming to dine. He would dress with the utmost care in one of his brightest silk waistcoats and one of his largest bow ties, and he would be downstairs to receive his guests. Then he would joke with them and talk about books, or politics or gossip.
He never spoke of his cancer. He never wrote about it in his newspaper articles. In a period when litigation and finger-pointing were replacing old-fashioned ideas of responsibility, Father clung to the tenets of human free will. Only Mother and I knew how much he suffered.
They had fitted into his body something called the Hickman Line that pumped continual chemotherapy into his chest even when he slept. The only time I saw him cry was over Mimi, our little wiggling bitch puppy, a soft-haired Papillon with huge eyes. She used to sleep on Father’s bed. Mother was worried that she would either damage the Hickman Line or tear it out. Father was mournful. The whites of his eyes showed larger than ever and they began to swell up. He begged Mother to let Mimi stay in the room.
‘She’ll think I’ve deserted her,’ he said.
But Mother cried more often than he did. She cried because she understood how he really dreaded the return to hospital on Monday mornings, wondering as he must, whether he would leave it again alive.
It was December. The tumour had continued to shrink. Paul Getty invited Father on his yacht the Talitha the following February to watch cricket in Barbados. This gave him something to look forward to. One Saturday he made it to the birthday lunch of a friend in Wiltshire. Father’s clothes hung on him. He stumbled; his sleekly-knitted composure was beginning to unravel.
The following week the Daily Telegraph asked me to go to India. The Dalai Lama was granting a rare interview. As Father seemed in no immediate danger, I said yes.
I went to visit him the day before my flight. He was concerned about my going, not for himself but because India was full of disease and danger, especially for a woman travelling alone (I was booked on a lone three-day train journey from Delhi to the Northern frontier.)
He kept repeating, I must be careful. I must drink only bottled water on which the seal was unbroken. I must not eat fruit. He recalled Rose Aylmer, a Victorian beauty on whose gravestone were inscribed the words, ‘She died of eating that dangerous fruit the mangoe.’
I am afraid I became exasperated. I said contemptuous, bitter-tinted things. I didn’t know it was the last time I would ever see my father.
Long aeroplane flights usually enthralled me. But I didn’t enjoy this flight. I was tense. I thought it was nerves about the interview, but these were unaccustomed. It was a crise de foie – but not from any wine.
It was three in the morning when I arrived at Delhi airport. A representative from the travel company organising my journey north was there to meet me. He was young and had a pockmarked face, which was nonetheless ingratiating. He looked like someone who would instantly relinquish his seat on the underground or bus.
I thought of Father having been here back in the Forties. By coincidence I was staying at the Imperial Hotel in Delhi, where he had stayed.
My room was cool; a mixture of colonial and modern Hiltonese. I should have gone straight to sleep, for I was exhausted. But anxiety compelled me to telephone Cavendish Avenue. When I heard Maria’s voice at the other end I knew something had happened. She at once passed me to Mother.
‘You might have to come back.’
‘Why?’
How stupid. I knew why.
‘Your father collapsed at home this evening. We took him to hospital in an ambulance. He’s bleeding. The doctors are doing tests. If it’s the tumour bleeding, they can stop it. If it’s something else, they can’t. We’ll know in an hour or so. I’ll ring you back. Go to sleep.’
An hour or so. Slit-slavering hell. I started to smoke. I walked up and down. Everything seemed overwhelmingly brown: the room, the furniture, the air. It was a brownness that enveloped you in a hole, an ocean of sludge
Then the telephone rang again. Mother was at the hospital. I could barely understand what she was saying.
‘It’ll be over in a few hours.’
‘What?’
‘It’s the aneurysm. It burst. They can do nothing. You’ve got to come back at once.’
‘But it’s four in the morning. How can I? I haven’t enough money to buy a new ticket. Everything is shut. Oh my God. I can’t.’
‘Do you want to miss your father’s funeral?’ My eyes faintly filled with tears. I stared inertly into space like a shell-shocked soldier. Then I rang the concierge.
‘I have to get a ticket on the next plane back to London. My father is very ill.’
They called the boy from the travel agency. He called the airport. They weren’t sure if there was anything available so soon, but I could come anyway. On the way the boy asked me questions. His expression had a fresh sweetness. He didn’t realise my father was dying. I think he thought he just had appendicitis or something. He kept saying, When your father is better come back to Delhi and I’ll show you around.
The car crawled. Every few minutes we had to stop because cows were crossing the road. I hated India, I hated Delhi. I hated cows. The boy kept apologising.
‘We’ll be there soon.’
The airport was full of Indians. It would be, wouldn’t it? They made a lot of noise. Some of it was happy and trivial noise; over a sandwich; a lovers’ tiff; an impending honeymoon. I hated India. I hated happy people. We went to the Air India Office. The odour of lavatory disinfectant was chloroforming. Nothing. But some Dutch airline had a seat, only it meant changing.
On the flight I drank a bottle of wine and took three sleeping pills. I slept all the way to Copenhagen. Once in the airport, I ran to a telephone. It was eight and a half hours since I had left India.
‘Is he . . .?’
‘He’s still alive but . . .’ Mother broke down. ‘It won’t be long now. He’s on morphine.’
‘Don’t cry,’ I said feebly. ‘I’m coming.’
The sun was shining through the airport windows. Its bright pitiless light mocked my misery.
For some reason I bought a tin of caviare at Duty Free. Then I went to the Oyster and Seafood bar and ordered six oysters and two Manhattan cocktails. I swilled the alcohol around in my mouth until I could hear it. When they called the flight to London, I felt almost happy. A Dutchman, built like a Neanderthal, sat next to me on the plane. He talked endlessly about his children, his job, his holiday plans. He asked me about my parents. I didn’t want to say anything so replied they were both well.
I took some tranquillisers, saying I was afraid of flying. When we arrived in Heathrow I could barely walk. I was as drunk as a hog; my nerves castrated by liquor. Somehow I got my luggage off the carousel and found a taxi. The driver took the longest, most circuitous route into London. Politely I asked if he could go a little faster.
He snapped at me, ‘Proper little madame, aren’t you. Scared you’ll be late for your hairdresser’s appointment?’
It was a quarter to five in the afternoon. I wondered whether to tell him my father was dying but decided, strangely, that it would be a breach of manners.
Time crawled by on feet of lead. We finally pulled up outside Cavendish Avenue. Maria had heard the taxi and had run outside. She fell into my arms. She was in tears.
‘He died ten minutes ago,’ she said. All I could think of to say was ‘Blast.’
When Mother returned from the hospital, she sat beside me on a sofa and told me what had happened.
It was ironic that it wasn’t the cancer that killed Father. He had been watching the television when he felt a pain in his belly. He went to put himself to bed and fell on the floor screaming. The ambulance came; Mother and Maria went with him to the Royal Free. The doctor in charge found that Father was haemorrhaging from somewhere. He was very weak and only semi-conscious.
After some tests they found it was not the tumour. That aneurysm had burst. After thirty years it had finally got him. Perhaps the chemotherapy had irritated it. Mother’s voice became quiet. She said, ‘I will never forget what happened next for the rest of my life.’
Father was now fully conscious. One of the young doctors sat down beside him. Mother thought he was going to reassure Father. This is what he said.
‘You had better get your family around you and say goodbye. You have only two more hours to live.’
Anyone would have been knocked sideways by this. Father protested feebly, ‘But I don’t want to die so soon.’
Then he tried to smile. He motioned to a professor who had been giving him chemotherapy.
‘Would you mind doing something for me, jotting something down on a piece of paper. It’s the hymns I’d like to be played at my funeral.’
He asked this as if he really hoped it would be no bother.
Father began calmly, ‘I’d like “A Servant with this Clause”, and maybe “Jerusalem” if that’s not too much of a cliché. I’d also like that bit about vanity of vanities from Ecclesiastes.’
He wanted to be buried in Weeford, where the Wyatt family had originally come from. He asked Mother not to forget that he had scribbled a note about his memorial service and filed it away downstairs. He would like either Roy Jenkins or Mrs Thatcher to give the address. He would also like ‘The Battle Hymn of the Republic’ and ‘Stand Up and Fight’ from Carmen Jones.
‘I don’t want my friends to be bored,’ he said firmly.
They put Father on morphine after that. But he didn’t die in two hour. They told Mother to go home and try to sleep. All night she and Maria hugged each other. At eight Mother returned to the hospital. Father was half awake. It was their thirty-second wedding anniversary. Before Father had collapsed, Mother had planned a supper at home that evening. Father’s mind was pellucid enough and he remembered.
‘Happy anniversary, Buttercup,’ he said and squeezed her hand.
How do men die, with wild regret, with bitter tears? Father died showing a splendour of the soul, uncomplaining, resigned, loving. He slipped into a trance. During the afternoon blood began to come out of his mouth. Mother couldn’t stand it so a male nurse said, ‘I’ll hold his hand until the end.’
At five o’clock they turned off the machines. The doctors said it had been a privilege to look after him.
That night we ate the caviare I had bought. I remembered Father telling me that on the afternoon of his own father’s death he had gone to the cinema and watched a musical with Ginger Rogers. That night I watched Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds.
A few days later I stood over Father’s coffin in the cold church in Weeford. I read out the lines from Ecclesiastes. I was dry-eyed throughout.
Norman Lamont, who was one of the mourners, said to me, ‘How could you stand over your father’s coffin like that and not cry?’
I knew why. Father used to say I never cried over the big things.
Father was the biggest thing in my life.