The Enemy of the Good

by Michael Arditti

  ‘To my lasting dismay, I myself have played an unwitting part in the Hadza decline. My books put the tribe on the tourist map and, as ever, the tourists are destroying the distinctive culture that first attracted them. In one camp, for instance, the Hadza have started to make loincloths out of skin, which visitors expect, rather than the bark they’ve used since time immemorial. They spend the tips they receive on alcohol, and a previously peaceable people has grown combative. We’re exporting Western values of avarice, belligerence and commercialism, thereby enabling some commentators to rub their hands and assert that such values are universal. I’m past the age when I can survive in the bush; I must leave it to those who are younger and stronger to take up the cause. So many experiments in communal living have failed over the years, but the Hadza are far more than an experiment. We’re in danger not only of destroying a unique and precious people but of losing a model of altruism that may be our last hope for the world.’

  5

  Despite his increasing frailty, Edwin begged Marta to take him into Oxford, rejecting her alternative suggestion of a stroll around the lake as indignantly as a child confined to the shallow end of a swimming pool. Having checked with the doctor, who assured her – rather too readily – that the journey could do him no harm, she asked the nurses to help him dress, their cheery condescension a double affront to a man more accustomed to the deference of his chaplain in the vestry. Desperate to assert himself, he insisted on buttoning his own coat, giving up in dismay after fumbling with every hole. When Linda, at her most powdery, exhorted him to ‘leave the naughty buttons to us,’ he let out such a plaintive wail that Marta would gladly have throttled her. Showing unsuspected restraint, she reminded them that her husband was eighty-three, not three, and led him down the stairs and out to the porch. With Karen’s assistance, she helped him into the car, where, after making him a nest of pillows and sitting down beside him, she placed Mr Shepherd under such strict constraints that he drove most of the way in first gear.

  On reaching town they tottered down the High, where their chance meetings with the Dean of Wadham (colitis) and the Bursar of Brasenose (gout) gave new meaning to the hoary joke about dons greeting one another with an organ recital. Shunning any further encounters, Marta led Edwin into the seclusion of New College Lane, where the ancient walls prompted Karen, whose enthusiasm for jewellery-making had waned since Frank’s defection, to muse on the attractions of academe.

  ‘Who’s that?’ she asked, pointing to a statue beside the main gateway.

  ‘William of Wykeham,’ Edwin exclaimed in a rare burst of lucidity. ‘You remember, Manners maketh man.’

  ‘Not any man I know,’ Karen said with a sniff.

  ‘The bishop who founded the college.’

  ‘They should put a statue up to you,’ Karen said, to which Edwin responded with a gurgle that mingled mockery, gratitude and incomprehension. ‘Clement can design it. We’ll start a subscription. Like Nelson’s Column.’ The gurgle grew louder and Marta felt a sharp tug on her arm as Edwin spun round and fell down in a fit.

  She stared at the writhing body, aware of the need to act but unable even to feel. The perspective was all wrong. Instead of standing by her side, he was at her feet, his limbs jerking like Ajax’s when he dozed by the fire. A trickle of foam formed at the corner of his mouth and the nightmare suddenly became real. She sank to her knees and clasped his hand, at which moment he fell still.

  ‘He’s dead!’ Karen screamed.

  ‘Nonsense! Do you have a phone?’

  ‘I’ve got no more credit. I was going to ask. I’ve been ringing Frank – ’

  ‘Find mine and dial 999! Call an ambulance,’ she added, no longer afraid to state the obvious. As Karen rummaged in her bag, she rubbed Edwin’s hands and searched for words of comfort, but all that came to mind was a Polish lullaby her mother used to sing and which she feared would disorientate him further. So she whispered his name over and over in his ear, breaking off to confirm to Karen that they were at the front gate of New College and to reiterate the need for haste.

  ‘Shall I take off my jumper?’

  ‘What? What for?’ she asked, as a disconcerting image flashed across her brain.

  ‘To make a pillow.’

  ‘Yes, of course. Good idea!’ She continued to whisper his name, gazing up and down the deserted alleyway, regretting that they had ever strayed from the High. Although barely a minute had passed since their call, she was incensed by the ambulance’s delay. She pondered asking Karen to phone Mr Shepherd but, given the urgency, sent her into the college for a porter. She sat, cradling Edwin’s head, when a distraught middle-aged woman appeared at the end of the lane.

  ‘Daddy!’ she shouted, running towards them. ‘Oh thank God!’ she said, after peering at Edwin. ‘I thought it was my father.’ Marta stared at her in disbelief. ‘Excuse me, but you haven’t seen him, have you? Seventy-five. Bald. Alzheimer’s. I turned my back and he’d vanished.’

  ‘It’s my husband,’ Marta said, pain bleaching the outrage from her voice. ‘Eighty-three. Bald. A brain tumour.’

  ‘Yes, of course,’ the woman said, lingering uneasily. ‘I’m sorry… so sorry, but I must find my father.’ Marta turned her attention back to Edwin and, by the time she looked up, the woman had gone. Moments later Karen arrived with the porter. Marta thanked him for coming, although his stock reassurance made her feel like a bystander.

  To her intense relief Edwin soon recovered consciousness, although he showed no inclination to move. Indeed, he seemed so comfortable lying in the street that he started to sing. She made out only a few slurred words about ‘arches’, but the song was evidently known to the porter who, wearing his bulk lightly, squatted on the ground beside him and joined in. His rousing refrain of ‘pavement is my pillow’ not only struck her as the kindest of courtesies to Edwin but dispelled her fears that her husband had lost his mind.

  The ambulance arrived in mid-chorus. While the men strapped Edwin to the stretcher, Karen argued that her assistance entitled her to next-of-kin status, even holding up her crumpled jersey as proof.

  ‘It’s out of the question,’ Marta said. ‘Mr Shepherd will drive you home. I’ll ring when I have news.’ Pecking Karen’s cheek, she stepped into the van and took her place at Edwin’s side.

  On reaching the hospital, they were rushed through A & E and straight up to Oncology. ‘Not to worry. We’ve been expecting the fits,’ the consultant announced, as blithely as if he had been forecasting wintry weather.

  ‘So why did no one warn me?’

  ‘There was no point in alarming you unduly. But now they’ve occurred, I imagine they’ll be fairly regular.’

  ‘How regular’s regular?’

  ‘I don’t think it’s helpful to speculate, do you?’ he asked, in a tone suggesting that there was something unsporting in her attempt to stay ahead of the game. ‘We’ll keep him in for a few days to monitor his condition. Check there are no nasty surprises.’

  ‘Of course,’ she said sourly. ‘We wouldn’t want any of those.’

  ‘Given the risk – I’d almost say the certainty – that, with his immune system shot to pieces, your husband has shingles, I can’t keep him among vulnerable patients in Oncology. So we’ll send him to Infectious Diseases on the top floor.’

  ‘What sort of infectious diseases?’

  ‘E Coli… dengue fever. He’ll be fine.’

  After making sure that he was comfortable, she went back to Beckley where she found Ruth and Linda in the parlour, poring over the Travel section of the Sunday Times. She realised with a jolt that her horizons had grown so narrow in recent weeks that she had come to discard Travel as instinctively as Money and Sport. She gave them a brief account of Edwin’s collapse and told them to take a few days off until his return. Then, overcome by fatigue, she broke her own rule and asked Mrs Shepherd to bring her a bowl of soup in bed.

  Much refreshed the next morning, she returned to the Radcliffe where she spent
most of the day with Edwin. She swiftly established a visiting routine, modified only by his growing derangement. Whether because of the tumour itself, the drugs or the claustrophobic room, he became convinced that he was in a cabin on a cruise ship.

  ‘The children have sent me here because it’s simpler. If I die, there won’t have to be a funeral; they’ll just tip me overboard and splash! Splash! Splash!’

  ‘Darling, please!’

  ‘When they offer you a ticket, make sure you refuse!’

  ‘Think, darling, I’m here with you now. If you’re on a ship, then so am I.’

  ‘Please don’t muddle me,’ he said with a whimper. ‘Am I going mad?’

  ‘Not at all. They’ve put you on some extremely strong drugs to control the fits. As soon as they’ve reduced the dose, you’ll be fine.’

  ‘I’d be better off dead.’

  ‘We all lose track of things as we get older.’

  ‘Then we’d all be better off dead.’

  Notwithstanding his despair, she remained hopeful that the one virtue of his regression to childhood might be the recovery of his faith. She knew the comfort it had once brought him and longed for it to do so again. That hope was dashed during a visit from the chaplain, who strode into the room in the regulation mask and gown like an army padre in desert fatigues. Goaded into action, Edwin showed that, although lying flat, he was far from supine.

  ‘Did no one ever tell you not to hit a man when he’s down?’ he croaked. ‘I got shingles because my defences were shattered; I’m not going to get God.’ He gave a dry laugh, which turned first into a wheeze and then into a prolonged fit of coughing. The chaplain fled, but Edwin’s victory proved to be hollow, sapping what little lucidity he had left and plunging him into torpor. When a junior doctor examined him two hours later, with the usual request for the name of the Prime Minister, she gave up hope of ‘Gordon Brown’, expecting to be dragged back to the Wilson or even the Macmillan era. In the event he said nothing, simply flashing a drugged smile which, try as she might, she could not pretend was serene.

  ‘Then who’s that?’ the consultant asked, pointing to Marta.

  ‘If you say your mother, I’ll kill you,’ she said lightly.

  ‘Good,’ he said. She stared at him aghast. ‘Good,’ he repeated. ‘I’d like that.’

  The visiting restrictions in the closed ward strengthened her resolve to confine the news of Edwin’s readmission to the children. During painful phone calls in which Shoana hit at her irresponsibility in taking Edwin into Oxford and Clement at God’s in keeping him alive, they both promised to visit the following day, Clement arriving by train at nine in the morning and Shoana driving up with Carla after lunch. Their responses to their father’s new ward were very different, with Clement suspecting a conspiracy behind his transfer to Infectious Diseases and Shoana reassured that it was effectively a private room. Far from taking comfort from the presence of his family, Edwin was unsettled by the four masked figures huddled around his bed. So Marta sent Clement back to Beckley, only to find herself similarly dispatched half an hour later when Shoana offered to keep vigil while she and Carla went out for tea. Though the two files poking out of her bag threatened to limit Shoana’s vigilance, Marta seized on the temporary respite, choosing to go to the Randolph, its old-world opulence as far removed from the brutalism of the hospital as the pot of Earl Grey was from the vending-machine tea.

  They sat quietly in a secluded corner of the lounge beside a large urn of arum lilies. ‘Shall I be mother?’ Marta asked, reaching for the teapot. ‘Oh I’m so sorry…’ The cosy English idiom had never sounded so cruel.

  ‘Not to worry,’ Carla said, smiling bravely. ‘I can live without pouring.’

  ‘Tell me about yourself, your work, how everything’s going with Curtis!’ Marta said hurriedly.

  ‘All at once? Wow! Work’s great. I’ve accepted a commission to design – design, mind – and make a window for the Beatrix Potter museum in Windermere.’

  ‘That’s wonderful!’

  ‘I hope so. I haven’t told Clem yet. I know nursery animals aren’t exactly his thing, and I’m sure they were looking for a woman. But with his current block…’

  ‘He’s not blocked! As I understand it, a block is something you can’t control.’ Edwin’s illness had left her increasingly impatient with Clement’s frittering of his talents. ‘He’s simply depressed.’

  ‘Life on the Curtis front is less rosy.’ Carla’s abrupt change of tack felt like a rebuke. ‘I wish he’d been able to come to your Royal Society lecture.’

  ‘Really? Why?’

  ‘To shake up his ideas. He’s the ultimate determinist. In his view, we’re not just doomed to repeat the mistakes of past generations but our own past lives. If I’d known the full story when we met, I’d have run a mile. He seemed so quirky… intriguing. Now I’m not sure he isn’t a little mad. If I challenge something he says or suggest we might have a problem, he’ll relate it to a time when we were Lollards in the fourteenth-century Marches or a mercenary captain and his mistress in eighteenth-century France. From as far back as he can remember – or, rather, as far back as he’s regressed – we’ve been doomed to destroy one another.’

  ‘Mightn’t it perhaps be time to walk away and break the cycle?’ Marta asked gently.

  ‘Yes, it might. Yes, it is. Except for one thing: I’m hooked. There’s something about him that touches me more deeply than anyone since Mark. He’s so lost, so vulnerable. I start to wonder if it’s just that I want to mother him; then we make love and I realise that it’s so much more. I know how hard it is for you to comprehend; we’re all in awe of your relationship with Edwin. But in some unfathomable way I need Curtis.’

  ‘And yet he makes you unhappy.’

  ‘Wretched. I tell him and he says it’s all part of the pattern. I think he feels he’s being honest.’

  ‘At least you have your faith.’

  While she had long found the Christian view of suffering as ordained by God and superseded by Christ to be both inconsistent and disempowering, Marta had some sympathy with the Buddhist view that it was the pathway to a spiritual life. The distinction broke down when they returned to the ward to find Edwin insensible with pain. Shoana sat by his side, a strange, almost beatific, expression on her face. The reason became clear when she announced that she had something to tell them.

  ‘I wasn’t going to say anything – that is not to anyone but Zvi – for another few weeks.’ Marta’s heart skipped a beat. ‘But I think we could all do with some good news, don’t you?’

  ‘Say what, darling? Don’t keep us in suspense!’

  ‘I’m pregnant, Ma! It’s two months.’

  Marta felt dizzy with delight, almost tripping over Edwin’s drip in her rush to kiss her.

  ‘I’m so happy, my darling.’

  ‘Thank you, Ma. I’d virtually given up hope. I know you don’t believe in miracles.’

  ‘No, but I believe in gifts, and this is the best I could ever have wished for.’ Moreover, with her daughter only four months married, she would never have dared to wish for it so soon.

  ‘Really?’

  ‘For you. For us. For us all.’

  ‘Yes, it’s wonderful,’ Carla said, as she crossed the room to hug Shoana, veiling the pain of frustrated motherhood in the joy of becoming an aunt.

  ‘Truly wonderful,’ Marta echoed. Neither Carla’s bittersweet tears nor the poignancy of learning of new life in a ward of deadly infection could dampen her euphoria. This was the news for which she had waited so long: the prospect of a grandchild who would legitimise her love for future generations. She had spelt out her priorities as a young woman, when she refused to marry Edwin until she had finished her thesis or to start a family until three fieldtrips later, but, while there was no point in regrets, let alone recantations, she was ever more aware that all the honours and awards on her shelves failed to conceal the lack of grandchildren’s drawings. She dreaded the invitation to
another ruby wedding or seventieth birthday party where they were handed canapés by the hosts’ doe-eyed granddaughter or listened to an oboe recital by their precocious grandson. Shoana’s announcement opened up a world of possibilities where, in swift succession, she pictured herself gazing at the dinosaur in the Natural History Museum, shouting ‘Behind you!’ at the pantomime, and refurbishing the doll’s house in the nursery, her moist palm a token not only of her own excitement but of the hot little hand soon to be clutching hers.

  She turned her attention to Edwin, whose vacant features were thrown into relief by the flurry of emotion around him. Pulling up a chair, she sat down and clasped his hand. ‘Did you hear, my darling? You’re going to be a grandfather.’ She broke off on realising how little chance there was that he would survive for seven months. ‘He smiled, did you see?’ She appealed to the younger women, both too caught up in their own fantasies to collude in hers.

  ‘I saw nothing, Ma,’ Shoana said sadly. ‘Not even a twinge.’

  ‘It’s the drugs he’s on to stop the fits. They wipe him out.’

  ‘But he has to take them for the rest of his life,’ Shoana said, her quavering voice suggesting that the phrase had been given new meaning by the life she was bringing into the world.

  ‘Now I don’t want you worrying about your father. He has the very best doctors and, as soon as they give us the go-ahead, we’ll take him back to Beckley, which is sure to cheer him up. The only thing you must think about – the only thing he’d want you to think about – is yourself.’

  ‘Can I be hearing right?’ Shoana teased. ‘Marta Gorski telling me to look after number one!’

  ‘But it’s not just number one, is it?’ Carla said. ‘Not any more.’

  Marta promised Shoana to tell no one, not even Mrs Shepherd, at least until the end of the first trimester, but she secured a special dispensation for Clement, whose response when she broke the news at dinner, was further evidence of his depression.