by Diana Athill
What news of Neil’s mother?
Much love, Diana
27 FEBRUARY 1992
My darling Edward –
How marvellous to hear from you just when I was dying for company because of dreadful happenings.
Last Saturday – five days ago, it seems weeks! – I was just beginning to feel better enough after flu to get out of bed, when Barry said ‘I don’t know why but I’ve got a belly-ache’ – ‘Indigestion, I expect – are you feeling nausea?’ – ‘I’d sort of like to vomit but I can’t.’ And then quickly, it began to get worse. He’s very bad about pain, so at first I assumed he was exaggerating something slight, but then it leapt to sweating, groaning point so I called the doctor. At weekends medical practices employ communal switchboards which supply from a pool of odds and ends. After two hours – not bad really, but oh it seemed so long! – a very small, tired shabby Indian doctor arrived, with whom B wouldn’t collaborate at all, groaning only ‘Give me morphine – why won’t the bastard give me morphine’. B’s total medical history consists of a terrifying pain in his belly thirty years go, when they told him in a hospital that he had cancer and they must operate, and he ran away from the hospital and persuaded someone who had been to Cambridge with him to supply him with morphine, which he then lived on for six weeks in perfect bliss, and the pain vanished. So I knew this morphine thing would happen and dreaded the doc getting angry. But he was very good. Firm, kind, decisive. As soon as he prodded the belly he told me ‘Something nasty going on in there, we must get him to hospital’, and he had an ambulance at the door in half an hour.
My cousin Barbara volunteered to drive me in the wake of the ambulance so that I’d eventually have someone to bring me home, and off we went to University College Hospital in Gower St. By the time we found a parking space they had him down in the X-ray dept. At about midnight a nurse came to find me and said I could go up to the ward with him. They had knocked him out with pethidine by then – he was just mobile, could climb off the stretcher and onto the bed, but now remembers not a thing about it. They operated next day and again the day after and for twenty-four hours I believed the garbled information given by a nurse. He was in intensive care and I thought they’d had to stop the first op in the middle because his lungs were in such a terrible condition. But at last I got the surgeon, thank god, and learned that his lungs were in a very bad way, which was why he was in care, but the first op had been completed and had consisted of removing a section of his lower bowel which had died because of lack of circulation, which was not caused by an evil growth but by a twisted gut; and the second op was to check that the blood-flow had been restored because there is a very rare condition which just occasionally causes blood-flow to fail spontaneously, and he was not one hundred percent sure that it didn’t cause the trouble – but all was well, it looked much healthier now, so now it was just a matter of keeping an eye on his lungs . . .
God knows how his lungs got so full of gunge – he doesn’t smoke all that much, and hasn’t smoked for all that long – but there he had to be until today, in an oxygen mask, with tubes and wires in every orifice, looking so dreadfully ill. He was much cheered up by the sweet, pretty, kind, competent girls caring for him so beautifully, and by the thought that the treatment he was getting for free must cost about £10,000 a day. Now, thank god, he’s back in an ordinary ward and is no longer having to use the oxygen mask – still being fed via a tube up his nose, and drained by other tubes, so still terribly uncomfortable, but they do let him have plenty of pethidine. He can read a newspaper and is taking in the condition of his neighbours – and still adores his nurses. Heavens, how good they are in these great old teaching hospitals, and how sublimely lucky we are to have a great old teaching hospital as our ‘local’. Today they took the plaster off his wound – they are very very pleased by the way it’s healing but I was stunned by the sight of it. It runs from about eight inches above his navel right down to vanish into his pubic hair, making a little swerve to avoid the navel – they must have had the whole of his innards out on the table. And it’s not stitched, but held together with stout metal staples at one-half inch intervals. Jesus, what a sight. It’s going to take his body a long time to recover from such a trauma. But today he is permitted to swallow very small sips of water, and he did one fart which is, as it were, the first swallow of summer. They will keep him in until he manages a shit – which I can’t imagine him doing and neither can he, poor love. And then our darling Sally and Henry in Somerset say that he can convalesce with them. Sal is being a huge help to me, telephoning all the time, full of sense and love. But oh oh what a harrowing and exhausting time, and how much discomfort and horridness he’s still got to undergo, even if he continues to get better without a hitch.
‘Say your prayers, and the body will take care of itself’ indeed!!! I have to declare myself not a customer for your health book. But of course it is the National Health, however creaky and decrepit much of it is, that enables us to believe in medicine (and the creakiness is real – even as Barbara and I were waiting in the bright, calm, orderly casualty dept. of UCH, observing how swiftly even quite minor injuries were being dealt with, I read an item in an abandoned newspaper about an old man left in a wheel-chair in a corner of the casualty dept. in a small south London hospital for six hours before someone noticed he was dead).
Poems, as you can imagine, are far from my mind at present – a great delight at your response to the one about Ma. You really have made me happy, bless you. I think you are right about dropping the last two lines and calling it ‘The Gift’. I was uneasy about those lines.
Now I’m going to bed very early. It was amazing, what adrenalin did for me at the start of B’s illness, but now the post-flu ‘debility’ of which my doctor warned me has got me and I feel dim and grim. Much love, Diana
P.P.S. – A little old verse called ‘In a Tetchy Mood’
The poem about his wife’s lipstick on the rim of the
cup
and the poem about his lack of nerve to kill
a rabbit caught in a trap . . .
The poem about god’s presence in every leaf and
stone
and the poem about light and darkness
being one . . .
Too little or too large – too bad
I’d rather read
a well-composed and witty ad.
3 MARCH 1992
Dearest Edward,
Barry home! Goes back end of this week to have his huge row of metal staples taken out, but they say that doesn’t hurt. He’s still feeling very weak (naturally) but food goes in and comes out normally – amazingly quick recovery, in fact. What a relief!
Herewith the finished Ma poem complete with your suggestions, a new verse and one afterthought alteration. B likes it, too.
Love from Diana
Attached: a poem for Edward Field, whose words made me write it. Diana Athill 3-3-92
THE GIFT
It took my mother two days to die, the first of them
cruel
as her body, ninety-five years old, crashed beyond repair.
I found her, ‘an emergency’ behind screens in a
crowded ward,
jaw dropped, tongue lolling, eyes unseeing.
Unconscious? No. When about to vomit she gasped
‘Basin!’
She was aware of what she was having to endure.
I put my hand on hers. Her head shifted, her eyelids
heaved up.
Her eyes focussed.
Out of deep in that dying woman came a great flash
of recognition and of utmost joy.
My brother was there. Later he said
‘That was a very beautiful smile she gave you.’
To me it was a moment when a love I had never
doubted
flamed into visibility
and I saw what I believed in.
Next morning: quietness, sleep,
intervals of m
urmured talk: which made sense.
‘She is better!’
‘She is feeling much better,’ said the nurse,
‘but she is still very very ill.’
I understood the warning and that what seemed
miracle was morphine.
What did I feel? I’d become Siamese twins, one of
which
wanted her never to die, while the other
was dismayed at the thought of her coming back to
life –
of having to go on dreading pain for her; go on
foreseeing
her increasing helplessness and feeling guilt
at not giving up my life to be with her all the time
(she never asked for that but I knew she longed for it).
What I felt was bad at being in two minds; but only for
a while, because
perched in my skull above this conflict there was a
referee
saying ‘Neither of you can win so shut up
and get on with doing whatever comes next.’
Her collapsed body eased, she was disconcerting to be
with
because so alive.
There she was, on the edge of ceasing to exist,
and she was unchanged, tired but perfectly ordinary,
telling me what to do with her dog and where to find
her will.
When someone protested ‘But you’ll soon be back
home’ she was impatient,
saying crossly ‘I could go any minute’.
Then, after a long sleep, she turned her head a little
and said
‘Did I tell you that last week Jack drove me
to the nursery garden, to buy that eucalyptus tree?’
I too loved that garden and the drive through country
we had both known all our lives.
‘You told me he was going to,’ I said. ‘Was it fun?’
She answered dreamily – her last words before
sleeping again,
out of which sleep she didn’t wake:
‘It was absolutely divine.’
15 APRIL 1992
Dearest Edward –
High time I sent you a progress report on B. His operation, huge as it was, gave him amazingly little trouble once he was unhooked from all those alarming tubes, and he was released from hospital a week after it, still with his gleaming metal staples in him from top to bottom but able to eat and digest normally. He therefore expected to be fully himself in no time, but in fact – naturally – felt pretty wobbly for a good many weeks and was not quite strong even two weeks ago – when what did he do but go down with bronchitis. Filled with anti-biotics for a week and me thinking ‘Will I be able to go away on the 12th for my week in Shropshire with my sister?’ (a holiday I was dying for). Which in fact I did (I’m there as I write) because he thought he could manage OK and I’m phoning every day and could always rush home if necessary. Everyone says that it takes ages to get completely over such a big op, at his age, and I fear that’s so (my macabre old brother’s immediate comment: ‘He’ll never get over that’) but he’s basically so healthy that I think he’ll be alright again in another eight weeks or so – I mean quite alright. He can already potter down to the shops and so on – just feels more tired afterwards than he should. So that’s him.
As for me – I’m less exhausted than I might be, but still very ready for this break, and I wish it were longer. My sister and her husband live in Zimbabwe, but he inherited this house from his stepmother, two years ago, and now they manage to spend a part of each year here. It’s a heavenly part of the country – my favourite part of it – and the house is a charming old farmhouse, long and low and white and a bit crumbly – very old, and with an extremely relaxed and friendly atmosphere about it. My sister could hardly be less like me and is a bit of a racist, so no question of her and Barry having more than the slightest acquaintance. But I’m very fond of her all the same, and she of me – we tolerate each other’s habits of mind because of the thickness of blood I suppose, and actually like each other’s natures a lot otherwise. And part of me enjoys revisiting the pastimes of my youth, such as going to horse fairs and feeding chickens and such. She’s gone off today to collect a couple of her younger grandchildren, whom we are entertaining over Easter, which will be fun. If change is the essence of holiday, then this is a good one. Must now buzz off to the local (and ravishing) market town to buy in a supply of ice cream, Coca-Cola, etc. for the children. Much love, Diana
9 SEPTEMBER 1992
Dearest Edward,
Today I told Tom that I’d rather leave the firm at the end of this month, than wait until the end of the year – did I tell you that I told him some time ago that I would retire then? He’s been away for a couple of weeks, on holiday in Spain, and during those weeks hardly a single telephone call came in, hardly a manuscript arrived . . . the place was dead, and those of us left in it sat doing crossword puzzles and reading paperbacks. He still goes through the motions of believing that a last-minute sale of the property (the two houses) could save the firm, but does so in a very low-key, zombie-like way. He didn’t make the smallest attempt to persuade me to change my mind. Dreadfully depressing tho’ it is for all of us, it’s worse for him. He’s always been so macho – how will he be able to bear the humiliation of failure?
As for me . . . I’ve got a record of Big Bill Broonzy singing the blues, and my favourite song on it is ‘Walking down the road feeling bad. / Walking down the road feeling so mis’able and baaad’ and all the way from the carpark to the office, this morning it was going through my head . . .
I find that it’s actually frightening, to one who has been going to an office every weekday for fifty years (dear God! but it really is at least that long), to realize that in less than three weeks – no more office. And that in spite of the fact that the office has become intolerable, so that I’ve been longing to be rid of it. But I don’t doubt, really, that I have been right in believing that retirement will be enjoyable once the first shock of it is over. One thing I shall do instantly; write for an application form to Hawthornden Castle – a Scottish mini-Yaddo (you get only six weeks there at a time), so that I can get dug into my story of the Rise and Fall of a publishing house. It will at least, now, have a Shape! People who have been to Hawthornden go weak at the knees when they remember the bliss of it. While on the home front nothing could be more timely, since Barbara has just acquired the most magical puppy – a cube of white swansdown with three shiny black currants stuck in it, which is convinced that it’s the Hound of the Baskervilles – which needs someone to spend the day with while Barbara is out. Barry is benevolently inclined towards her (the puppy – called Hannah), but is not good at interpreting the signs which mean ‘Quick – pounce on her and get her onto a sheet of newspaper before it happens!’ So that until I can be there, I rather discourage her presence on my carpets. And on top of that, a lot needs doing at Barbara’s mother’s house in Norfolk, which we are slightly expanding so our builder, a beguiling gnomelike being who recognized us at once as two times the sucker than just one of us would have been, has been making the best of us. It wasn’t surprising that he discovered the whole house needed re-wiring – it obviously did – but did it really have to be entirely re-plumbed? And did the foundations for the new conservatory-garden room really need to be (as he proudly declared) ‘strong enough to hold a cathedral’? And did two bathrooms have to be wholly re-tiled because showers were being put in? And did . . . and did . . . Finally, of course, the whole bloody thing is having to be redecorated, including new stair and hall carpet, just because we wanted one bedroom added for me. And we are ending up with a new kitchen so stunning that we will have, like it or not, to give dinners to swarms of neighbours whenever we go there for a weekend – which isn’t all that often. So the sooner I can get down there and keep an eye on colours, the better. (You would think that, after all that, I’d have a
country retreat for writing my book in, and not have to go to Hawthornden Castle – but actually, once down in Norfolk (or up in Norfolk?) one never has a moment’s peace.)
