Twelve Thousand Days

by Eilis Ni Dhuibhne

Next morning, Friday, one week after our drive to Gweedore, Bo stayed in bed. I gave him some tea and dry toast, which he ate. He told me he felt a bit queasy – that word again – but not too bad. It did not occur me to call the doctor – when do you call the doctor? When someone is at death’s door? Who do you call when someone is not well enough to go to the doctor but not sick enough to go to hospital?

  Neither Bo nor I wanted to go to the A&E in our local hospital, Loughlinstown, or in Vincent’s. We hate Loughlinstown but it’s just down the road. It’s handy. And everyone hates the thought of the alternative, which is Vincent’s A&E: huge, crowded, you’d be on a trolley for days. How many Irish people die because they can’t stand the thought of the A&E?

  I went into Belfield where I had a workshop at eleven. It went on till one, and I planned to stay on for a few hours, but I felt anxious and decided to go home.

  Bo was very tired, still in bed, still nauseated. The diarrhoea that had started the day before continued and he said there was nothing left in him, he felt drained. He ate a little toast and tea, however, and that stayed down. I went to the local shop and bought some natural yoghurt, which is supposed to be good for upset stomachs. I dropped into the pharmacy, bought some Imodium, to counteract the diarrhoea, and some anti-inflammatories for Bo’s gout, since he would no longer be taking the tablets that had been originally prescribed for him.

  The diarrhoea stopped. Bo had a little food – scrambled egg, toast – and felt a bit better. Did he get up that night? I think so. I think he may have come downstairs for a while. But I can’t remember.

  DAY 4

  Babette’s Feast

  Bo was teaching me Danish, in preparation for the year ahead in Copenhagen. Not for a moment did he suggest that I shouldn’t go.

  ‘You’ll go to Denmark. You’ll finish your thesis. And then we’ll get married.’

  There was no question in either of our minds. We had already come so far, taken such risks, in four days. Of course we would marry. He was my professor, I was his student. He had been in love with me for a year and I had been half in love with him for two or three years. He didn’t propose, but he talked of the marriage as if it were a done deal, and showed me the kind of house we might live in. A big house with steep gables, mock-Tudor timbering, off the Stillorgan Road. We passed it as we walked to Belfield – we even walked to Belfield sometimes, in the sunny May mornings. When half the world would see us from the 46A bus.

  ‘It’s very big.’ I couldn’t imagine living in such a house, or in any house. I couldn’t really imagine being married either, in spite of my lifelong ambition to acquire that status. The wedding was the goal, and my imaginings ended there, just where all the fairy tales stopped.

  Anyway, although everyone I knew wanted to get married, I was still very conscious of the social rules, the whispered constitution, about who you should marry – you could only marry someone of the opposite sex; you could only marry someone who was single or a widower; you could only marry someone who was a Catholic. You could only marry someone who was roughly the same age as yourself. Some clauses of the whispered constitution were also in the real constitution, the law of the land.

  I would only marry someone I was in love with.

  Bo satisfied my own main requirement. I was in love with him. I respected him. He was a good match for me and I could spend my life with him. But he did not fit the bill of ideal spouse, as far as the conventions of Ireland were concerned. Marrying the professor might be viewed as a bit of a coup in college. But outside that hermetically-sealed world the age difference would cause general disapproval, even mockery. Was there not a folk custom involving communal sneering at May-December matches? Charivari? The neighbours came to the house on the wedding night and rattled buckets or dustbin lids or something to express their disapproval.

  When my thoughts wandered along these lines it was as if all Bo’s other attributes – his lovely voice, his brilliance, his handsome body – were cancelled out by his age. I was terrified of what other people thought. I wanted universal approval. Far from being an Arctic explorer, I was a coward. I think I had been brought up to be a coward, trained to want to please everybody, with no sense of rebelling and pleasing myself.

  I wanted to be with Bo forever and apparently he felt the same about me. But I couldn’t think of it as a reality. Anyway, we had been together for just a few weeks. In Ireland, nobody got married after a few weeks, except for one reason. You got married when you had served your time going to the pictures for a couple of years, working and saving for a deposit on a house. You got married, in Dublin, when you had taken out a mortgage and chosen a semi-detached in the suburbs. Marriage and house ownership went together like a horse and carriage. In the referendums in Ireland over the next thirty years, the reactionaries would claim, again and again, that marriage was all about a man, a woman and children. But everyone who got an engagement ring knew that marriage was about a man, a woman and a mortgage.

  Bo and I were not going to buy a house right now. But he was thinking ahead. And he longed to get out of that little flat, where there wasn’t enough room for him – or for his books. I, on the other hand, rather liked the flat: the cosiness of it, the sense of being in a little nest of books – and television. We watched Dallas together, on Saturday evenings.

  For an hour, every time we met, we had a Danish lesson. Bo gave me a copy of Babettes Gaestebud (Babette’s Feast), in Danish translation. Karen Blixen, who was Danish, wrote this story originally in English, the language she had learned in Kenya. It is said that she wrote it because a friend advised her that if she wanted to be successful in the United States she should write about food. Later she translated her own story to her native Danish; that’s the version we read. We read about half a page, at first, and as time went on a page or more. It’s a novella, rather than a short story or a novel, so it was a good choice for the time at our disposal – six weeks – before Bo would leave Dublin for the summer house in Kerry, to which he longed to go. Nothing would disturb his plans for the summer months in Dunquin. Not love or marriage or me. This was a bit of shock, but one I would get used to.

  I didn’t know a word of Danish, so we were starting from scratch. He read a sentence aloud, in an exaggerated Danish accent. (He was a Swede; the languages are very closely related, but Swedish sounds quite different from Danish and Swedes tend to think that Danish sounds laughable. The glottal stop which is characteristic of Danish is especially strange, until you get used to it. It is true that Danish doesn’t sound as musical as Swedish, but it has its own charm. Later I realised that of the Scandinavian languages, Danish is the most useful one to start with. When you have mastered the Danish phonetics, it’s fairly easy to understand the much clearer pronunciation and accents of the Swedes and the Norwegians.) Then he would translate it, word by word, and explain the grammar as we went.

  Det bodde engang ved siden af en laenge snaever fjord I Norge två søstrer … Once upon a time two sisters lived by the side of a long narrow fjord in Norway.

  Love is the best teacher. I loved the text and the teacher, so I learnt fast and well.

  After the first day, I prepared for the lessons by trying to translate, at home with the dictionary. I had to look up every single word, and I listed them all with translations at the back of the little book. In pencil – Bo would never deface a book, any book, in any way. His library was a working library, containing books he was interested in for their content – folklore, Irish literature, Icelandic literature, Swedish literature, anthropology, classics, and much else. He was not a collector as such or a bibliophile who bought books for their dates, their value, or their bindings. But he was an obsessive book buyer. And he had a fine bibliophilic sensibility. The pages and the bindings were the bodies that contained the souls of the books and he respected them.

  I was much more careless. Dog-ears never bothered me – my mother had showed me how to make them when I was a child of seven – and I occasionally used a biro to underli
ne something if I couldn’t find a pencil. And I was the kind of person who could never find a pencil, whereas Bo had a few in his breast pocket at all times, and a few on his bedside locker, and a dozen in a special container, made for him by his mother, on his big desk.

  Danish is not a very difficult language for an English speaker. It’s a Germanic language, like English, so many of the words have a familiar ring to them. Mand for man. Maelk for milk. Hus for house. And so on. The grammar too is not so different. Nouns and adjectives are gendered, and nouns and adjectives and articles agree, which is a bit more complicated than English, but it’s not a highly inflected language – less inflected than German, or Icelandic, and much less than say Finnish or Irish or Bulgarian. The thing that seemed very odd was that the article came after the noun, tacked on to it – manden instead of the man. If the article came in front, it was indefinite – en mand, a man. En barn, a child. Barnen, the child. The same system applies in Swedish and Norwegian and Icelandic (and in other unrelated languages, such as Bulgarian). Bo was surprised that I found this strange. It was so natural to him that he didn’t see the problem. And after a few weeks I got quite used to it and did not see it either.

  The Danish lessons gave our meetings a purpose, apart from kissing and making love and having dinner. They put our relationship back on the familiar footing, student and teacher, and as a result we were totally at ease with one another. My progress delighted me. The new language unfolded in front of my eyes, step by step, word by word; I was learning to read it, with a beloved teacher to guide me. Our life together would involve many ordinary aspects, but this aspect, teaching and learning, was at its heart. In these hours we were most at peace, most ourselves.

  For the first week we met every day, and for the second, every second day. Sometimes Bo had engagements in the evening, or work that he could not put off. I had nothing to do except go to work during the day and ‘work on my thesis’, an ongoing task that was already becoming a chore rather than an exploration. Since breaking up with Oliver I hadn’t cultivated new friendships to any extent. During the two or three years I had been with him, we had spent most of our time in one another’s company. Parties and group activities we had attended together, the way young couples, married or not, do. After the break-up, it had surprised me to notice that some people who had been mutual acquaintances dropped me while continuing their friendship with Oliver. I supposed he was more interesting, more promising. And he was male, which gave him status I simply couldn’t have in the academic circles we moved in. In 1978, the Irish academic world was completely, and completely unconsciously, biased in favour of men. The vast majority of lecturers and professors in UCD were male, although in the Faculty of Arts a majority of students were women. Nobody seemed to find this state of affairs in the least bit anomalous – although they would, quite soon.

  On the evenings when I was not seeing Bo, I sat in my bedsitter and translated chunks of Babettes Gaestebud. I placed myself on an armchair by the long sash window, open to the air. Outside in the garden a huge chestnut tree flaunted its fresh spring green leaves, growing bigger almost by the minute, and its cones of creamy blossoms. The evening sun bathed the weathered slate roofs of the sweet old brick houses; light traffic hummed a soothing melody on its way from Rathmines to Harold’s Cross.

  I looked up the words in my Gyldendal’s red dictionary and slowly, like ice melting, the symbols on the page were transformed into a story I could understand, people I began to know, a place that grew familiar, word by word, line by line, page by page. A new country, a new language, new people. On the evenings with Bo, I was beginning to know him, his past, his country, his people, and on the other evenings I was beginning to know Denmark.

  No Swedish, as yet. Bo’s own language – it was close to Danish, but one thing at a time.

  My worries about what other people would think had faded, or I had pushed them away. Anyway, since we had told nobody about our relationship for the moment they didn’t think anything. Besides, we were now in a cocoon of love, in a private world that transcended everything else. When I was away from the flat I walked on air. The world around me – Rathmines with its red library building on the corner, the bridge over the sparkling waters of the Grand Canal – shimmered and sparkled and I walked with a light step everywhere. Magical, magical, the month of May played a bright and lovely tune wherever I went. My eyes were aglow, my heart was light. The ordinary world of work, family, community, the streets, the customers in the library, the catalogues to be checked, had become the unreal world. The real world was the story I escaped into – the work on that book – by the long, elegant window in the light of evening, and the flat I escaped into with Bo, that little space filled with books and with Bo himself, his voice, his laugh, his bear hug when I arrived at six o’clock.

  It was a time out of time. A summer of love.

  DAY 11,993

  D-Day

  On Saturday morning Bo was in much better form. He stayed in bed, enjoyed having breakfast there, and read. I brought over the radio from its shelf so he could listen to music if he wanted to. It was a bright sunny day and we both felt happy – it looked as if this particular crisis was over. The three pills were obviously well out of his system, he was smiling, his natural cheerful self.

  At about three o’clock I went to the shopping centre in Carrickmines, to buy a new laptop. My old one was held together with Sellotape, and I had been promising to get a replacement for several months. I thought, this is the one thing I will do today, and then this problem will be solved for once and for all. I spent about an hour, perhaps an hour and a half, away from home, and in Currys I bought the laptop I am now using, from a very helpful salesman, who sold me quite a lot of additional bits and bobs – some are still in a bag somewhere in my bedroom, unused: they never will be. He kept the laptop, to install some sort of recovery programme on to it, and I was to collect it the following day, in the afternoon.

  When I got home Bo was on the floor of our bedroom, in a corner at the opposite side from the door. He was prostrate, his pyjamas were wet, and he could not get up.

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘I don’t know, I don’t know. I have wet my pants, I am incontinent.’

  ‘You’re not incontinent. That can happen to anyone. How did you get over here?’

  I wondered if he had had a stroke. I did the checks you are supposed to do in these circumstances. His voice was normal. His eyes were normal. He could raise his arms. I did not think he had had a stroke.

  I considered calling the ambulance. But the ambulance takes you to the local hospital, which is run-down and crowded. The last place Bo or I wanted him to be was that hospital.

  I tried to help him up. But he couldn’t get up. I could not understand it.

  I made a terrible mistake here. I should have called the ambulance, no matter where it would have taken him. This was a critical moment and I fluffed it. If I had known about private ambulances I would have called one. He could have been taken to the Blackrock Clinic. But I didn’t know about them, and I couldn’t get Bo into the car and drive him there. Like most people I have spoken to about this, I believed the only way you could get to Blackrock Clinic or the Beacon was under your own steam, in a car. There is a serious problem with the private hospitals in Ireland, which is that they have no emergency services – this is the case with the hospital Bo always attended, Vincent’s Private – or very limited services, 9 to 5, Monday to Friday. The regular ambulance won’t take you to the private hospitals, even if their emergency departments are open. There is an anomaly here, one more problem in the two-tier Irish health system. You can use your private hospital for consultations, operations, treatments that can be scheduled – but if you fall ill outside of office hours, you are likely to fall back into the public system.

  I moved Bo close to the side of our bed, stopped trying to get him up – he was much too heavy – and made a bed for him on the floor. The fear of Loughlinstown was driving me, rather
than concern for Bo or even for myself. Bo agreed that he didn’t want to go to the local hospital and that we shouldn’t call an ambulance.

  He slept for a while on the floor, where he was comfortable. When he woke up he asked where am I? Then he got into bed, with some help from me. He slept, had some more tea and toast. He seemed to be okay. That night, I slept in the spare room next door in order not to disturb him. I did not know that I would never again sleep in the same bed as my husband, the bed we shared for almost thirty-one years.

  SUNDAY

  DAY 11,994

  Nordic walk

  Sunday morning was sunny and fine. Bo was in good form again, cheerfully eating breakfast, reading. He got up and went to the bathroom. He was still a little ‘queasy’ but that was all. I was so sure he was on the mend that I thought about going for the hike I usually do on Sunday mornings with the Wicklow Nordic Walkers. But I decided not to and texted to cancel. Bo, in his warm optimistic voice, said, ‘But you can go for a walk here. You can walk around the park.’ Yes, I agreed, I would take a long walk on my way to get the Sunday papers.

  I walked around Shanganagh Park, the walk Bo had loved over the past five or six years. He used to do it every single day – much more often than I did. A five or six kilometre walk. He was an institution in the neighbourhood, always with a cheery smile and hello for everyone. Two years ago, when his backache became very bad, he had to stop taking this very long walk. But he continued to go up and down Corbawn Lane to buy the paper. He asked me not to accompany him – he was too slow, because of the pain, and he liked to go at exactly his own pace, a pace so slow that people often stopped to offer him a lift! It was at that point, two years ago, that I joined the Wicklow Nordic Walkers, since I could no longer go for long walks with Bo. Most weekends, I went for a hike with this group, in the grounds of Kilruddery House or in the Wicklow mountains. I loved these walks, and the people in the group.