Nothing to Be Frightened Of (17 page)

This slow physical crumbling was paralleled by an erosion of my father’s speech: of his articulation, and memory for words. (He had been a French teacher, and now his
langue
was going.) I see again the shuffle-and-push of his slow Zimmer progress from lounge to front door when he came to see me off: a stretch of time which felt endless, and where every conversational topic sounded utterly false. I would pretend to linger, look searchingly at a jug of flowers on the sideboard, or pause to observe again some knick-knack I had always disliked. Eventually, the three of us would make it to the front mat. On one occasion, my father’s farewell words were, “And next time, bring . . . bring . . .” Then he got stuck. I didn’t know whether to wait, or, with a pretence of understanding, nod agreeingly. But my mother said firmly, “Bring who?”—as if my father’s mental fallibility were something correctible by the right sort of questioning. “Bring . . . bring . . .” His expression was now one of furious frustration at his own brain. “Bring
who
?” my mother repeated. By now the answer was so obvious and unnecessary that I wanted to run out of the door, jump in the car, and drive away. Suddenly, Dad found a way round his aphasia. “Bring . . . Julian’s wife.” Ah, relief. But not quite. My mother, to my ear not sounding all that sympathetic, said, “Oh, you mean P.”—thus turning my schoolmaster father into some test-failing schoolboy.

He would stand at the front door, crouched over his frame with its stupid, empty metal basket clipped to the handlebars; his head would be tilted, as if he were trying to prevent the action of gravity on his lower jaw. I would say goodbye and set off the dozen yards or so to my car, whereupon—inevitably—my mother would “remember” something, come at a trot down the little curve of tarmac (her hurried gait emphasizing my father’s immobility), and tap on the window. I would lower it reluctantly, guessing what she was going to say. “What do you think? He’s deteriorated, hasn’t he?” I would look past my mother to my father, who knew we were talking about him, and knew that I knew that he knew. “No,” I would usually reply, out of loyalty to Dad, because the only alternative would have been to bellow, “He’s had a fucking stroke, Ma, what do you expect—volleyball?” But she would judge my diplomatic reply proof of inattention, and as I slowly let out the clutch and inched my way down the tarmac, would hold on to the window and give examples of the deterioration I had failed to observe.

I do not mean that she was unkind to him; but her way of dealing with my father’s condition was to stress her own inconvenience and suffering, while implying that his suffering was a little more his own fault than people realized. “Of course, when he falls down, he panics,” she would complain. “Well, I can’t lift him, so I have to get someone from the village to help. But he panics because he can’t get up.” Black mark. Then there was the matter of my father’s pedalling machine, which the hospital physiotherapist had provided. He was supposed to sit in his Parker Knoll and pump away at this shiny little bicycle remnant. Whether mock-cycling in an armchair struck my father as absurd, or whether he simply decided that it wouldn’t make the slightest difference to his condition, I don’t know. “He’s so stub-born,” my mother would complain.

Of course, when it came to her turn, she was just as stubborn. Her initial stroke was far more immobilizing than Dad’s first one: she was largely paralysed down her right side, and her speech was more damaged than his. She showed herself most coherent when in greatest rage at what had happened. With her good hand she would reach across and pick up her stricken arm. “And of course,” she said, sounding for a moment exactly like her old self, “this thing’s
completely useless.
” This thing had let her down, rather as my father had. And then, exactly like Dad, she treated the physiotherapists with scepticism. “They’re pushing and pulling at me,” she would complain. When I told her they were pushing and pulling at her to help her recover, she replied, satirically, “Yes, sir.” Yet she was admirably unflinching, and dismissive of what she saw as false morale-boosting. “They tell you to do something, and then they say, ‘Very good.’ It’s so stupid, I
know
it isn’t very good.” So she stopped cooperating. Her way of remaining herself was to mock professional optimism and decline the hypothetical recovery.

My niece C. went to visit her. I called to ask how it had gone, and how Ma was. “Completely bonkers when I got there, but once we started talking about make-up, completely sane.” Suspecting the harshness of youth in my niece’s assessment, I asked—perhaps a little stiffly—what form being “bonkers” had taken. “Oh, she was very angry with you. She said you’d stood her up three days running for tennis, and left her there on court.” OK, bonkers.

Not that my niece escaped censure. On one occasion she and I sat through twenty mysterious minutes of furious silence and stubborn avoidance of eye contact. Eventually, Ma turned to C. and said, “You’re a
proper monkey
, you are. But you do understand why I had to tear a strip off you, don’t you?” Perhaps such dishing-out of fantastical blame gave her the illusion of control over her life. Blame which extended also to my brother, whose absence in France did not excuse or protect him. About two weeks after her first stroke, with her speech largely incomprehensible, we were discussing—or rather, I was telling her—how I would manage things while she was in hospital. I listed the people I could consult, adding that if there was any problem, I could always fall back on my brother’s “fine brain.” With struggling pauses between each word, our mother succeeded in putting together the flawless sentence: “His fine brain doesn’t think about anything but work.”

Despite months of stubborn noncooperation in hospital, she recovered some of her speech, though none of her movement. Not being one to fool herself, she announced that she was incapable of returning to live in her bungalow. A staff nurse called Sally came to assess her ability to function in the nursing home C. and I were hoping to get her into. Ma claimed to have already inspected the place and found it “pukka”; though I suspect that her “visit” had been fabulated from reading a brochure. She told Staff Nurse Sally that she had decided to take her meals alone in her room: she couldn’t eat with the other residents because she lacked the use of her right arm. “Oh, don’t be silly,” said the nurse. “It doesn’t matter.” My mother’s reply was commanding: “When I say it matters,
it matters.
” “Have you ever been a teacher?” was Sally’s canny riposte.

Chapter 30

As a young man, I was terrified of flying. The book I would choose to read on a plane would be something I felt appropriate to have found on my corpse. I remember taking
Bouvard et Pécuchet
on a flight from Paris to London, deluding myself that after the inevitable crash a) there would be an identifiable body on which it might be found; b) that Flaubert in French paperback would survive impact and flames; c) that when recovered, it would still be grasped in my miraculously surviving (if perhaps severed) hand, a stiffened forefinger bookmarking a particularly admired passage, of which posterity would therefore take note. A likely story—and I was naturally too scared during the flight to concentrate on a novel whose ironic truths in any case tend to be withheld from younger readers.

I was largely cured of my fear at Athens airport. I was in my mid-twenties, and had arrived in good time for my flight home—such good time (so eager to leave) that instead of being several hours early, I was a whole day and several hours early. My ticket could not be changed; I had no money to go back into the city and find a hotel; so I camped out at the airport. Again, I can remember the book—the crash companion—I had with me: a volume of Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet. To kill time, I went up on to the viewing roof of the terminal building. From there, I watched plane after plane take off, plane after plane land. Some of them probably belonged to dodgy airlines and were crewed by drunks; but none of them crashed. I watched scores of planes not crash. And this visual, rather than statistical, demonstration of the safety of flying convinced me.

Could I try this trick again? If I looked on death more closely and more frequently—took a job as an undertaker’s assistant or mortuary clerk—might I again, by the evidence of familiarity, lose my fear? Possibly. But there ’s a fallacy here, which my brother, as a philosopher, would quickly point out. (Although he would probably delete that descriptive phrase. When I showed him the opening pages of this book, he declined my assumption that it was “as a philosopher” that he distrusted memory. “Is it ‘as a philosopher’ that I think all that? No more than it is ‘as a philosopher’ that I think no second-hand car salesmen are reliable.” Perhaps; though even his denial sounds to me like a philosopher’s denial.) The fallacy is this: at Athens airport, I was watching thousands and thousands of passengers
not
die. At an undertaker’s or mortuary, I would be confirming my worst suspicion: that the death rate for the human race is not a jot lower than one hundred per cent.

Chapter 31

There’s another flaw in that “best-case” death scenario I was describing. Let’s assume the doctor says you will live long enough and lucidly enough to complete your final book. Who wouldn’t drag the work out as long as possible? Scheherazade never ran out of stories. “Morphine drip?” “Oh no, still quite a few chapters to go. The fact is, there’s a lot more to say about death than I’d imagined . . .” And so your selfish wish to survive would act to the structural detriment of the book.

Some years ago, a British journalist, John Diamond, was diagnosed with cancer, and turned his condition into a weekly column. Rightly, he maintained the same perky tone that characterized the rest of his work; rightly, he admitted cowardice and panic alongside curiosity and occasional courage. His account sounded completely authentic: this was what living with cancer entailed; nor did being ill make you a different person, or stop you having rows with your wife. Like many other readers, I used to quietly urge him on from week to week. But after a year and more . . . well, a certain narrative expectation inevitably built up. Hey, miracle cure! Hey, I was just having you on! No, neither of those would work as endings. Diamond had to die; and he duly, correctly (in narrative terms) did. Though—how can I put this?—a stern literary critic might complain that his story lacked compactness towards the end.

I may be dead by the time you are reading this sentence. In which case, any complaints about the book will not be answered. On the other hand, we may both be alive now (you by definition so), but you could die before me. Had you thought of that? Sorry to bring it up, but it is a possibility, at least for a few more years. In which case, my condolences to your nearest and dearest. And as the Friday lunchers were saying—or rather, never saying, though perhaps occasionally thinking—in that Hungarian restaurant: either I’ll be going to your funeral, or you’ll be coming to mine. Such has always been the case, of course; but this grimly unshiftable either/or takes on sharper definition in later years. In the matter of you and me—assuming I’m not already, definitively dead by the time you’re reading this—you’re more likely, actuarially, to see me out than the other way round. And there’s still that other possibility—that I might die in the middle of writing this book. Which would be unsatisfactory for both of us—unless you were about to give up anyway, at exactly the point where the narrative breaks off. I might die in the middle of a sentence, even. Perhaps right in the middle of a wo

Just kidding. Though not entirely so. I’ve never written a book, except my first, without at some point considering that I might die before it was completed. This is all part of the superstition, the folklore, the mania of the business, the fetishistic fuss. The right pencils, felt-tips, biros, notebooks, paper, typewriter: necessities which are also objective correlatives for the proper state of mind. This is created by putting aside all that might harmfully impinge, narrowing the focus until only what’s important remains: me, you, the world, and the book—and how to make it as good as it can possibly be. Reminding myself of mortality (or, more truthfully, mortality reminding me of itself ) is a useful and necessary prod.