by Diana Athill
I’ll tell you what . . . if I die before you, which I ought to do, my letters are yours to do what you like with (I think the legal position re letters is that the letter as a physical object belongs to the person it was written to, but the contents of the letter are the writer’s copyright?). You, after my death, will have copyright as well as possession of objects – I bequeath it to you herewith – so any possibility (probably, alas, very remote) of making a few pennies from the letters will be yours. But not until after I die. I think, that way, I can avoid self-consciousness, since it will mean that the letters are now just another of the many things over which, once dead, I’ll have no control, so there’s no point in fussing about them.
Must now speed to the post office with my Income Tax Return for the year ending last April, which I forgot about completely because of Barry’s illness, and which has now reached the last possible minute before Grave Trouble ensues – somebody has advised that I should include a fat cheque with it in order to avoid Penalties – help!
OOXXOOXX
D
9 FEBRUARY 2003
Darling Edward,
We are, alas, back in the wars – not, thank god, as badly so as it first seemed, but still a worry. Four days ago Barry had a stroke. I came back from a visit to a skin clinic where I’d just been told that I’d got to have radiation on my nose of all places, and thought ‘Really, he is too self-centred’ when he made no response to this news – he was lying in bed, facing away from me as he usually is when not sitting in his chair with a book or watching the telly. Then he said, very slowly in a muffled voice, ‘There is something wrong.’ And when I asked what he meant, he couldn’t answer. He could bring out, laboriously, the first word of a sentence, and then stuck, looking very distressed and pressing his hand over his left eye.
As you can imagine, I flew to the phone – and we were extremely lucky in that the doctor came at once. She was with us within 15 minutes. It soon became obvious that he knew perfectly well what he was being asked, or shown, and was struggling to make sensible answers, but just couldn’t get the words to come out – and his blood pressure was so high that it almost gave the doctor a stroke. So she called an ambulance for us, and alerted the hospital, and back we trundled to Accident and Emergency in the Royal Free Hospital, where we spent so hideously much of last year.
This time, although I was there with him for four hours before he was found a bed, it was not so bad, because he was being attended to all the time, being given tests and so on. And by the time I left it already seemed to me that he was doing a little bit better with words. And by next morning, thank god thank god, he’d got them back. So it was a very small stroke indeed, such as lots of people have without suffering any after effects. They are keeping him in because they want to be sure they’ve got his blood pressure stabilized at a reasonable level – and also his blood sugar, which simultaneously shot up. And it seems they still have a test or two they want to do. But today he was allowed to come home to watch a particularly vital football match, though I had to return him after it. And we think he’ll be properly home tomorrow or the next day.
My own problem is a minor form of skin cancer – not the most minor, but not the dreaded melanoma. Apparently once it is removed, that’s that (whereas the melanoma crops up elsewhere and is very bad news). But if it’s not removed it can, according to my doctor, be ‘a dreadful thing’, which is why, although the one on my nose is all but invisible (with make-up, quite invisible) it has to be dealt with. They thought at first that they could just knick it out and put in a stitch or two, but say now that it may have strayed too far into the neighbouring skin for that. Which doesn’t mean straying very far.
The skin on one’s nose (the bridge of it) is stretched very tight over the bone, so only a very tiny excision can be dealt with by drawing the two sides together with stitches. Anything a bit larger has to be dealt with by either radiation or a skin graft, and I gather that radiation is likely to leave the least unsightly results. They’ve made an appointment for me on Feb. 18 – a day on which I’m due to give a talk at the local library in the evening. I must find out whether the radiation will leave me looking like Rudolf the Red Nosed Reindeer – and change the day of the appointment. [Finally they decided on a graft, which was done incredibly quickly and neatly under a local anaesthetic.]
Love Diana
25 FEBRUARY 2003
Dearest Edward,
Obsession with health can easily take over
From sex as life’s major problem . . .
Yes indeed! Latest news is that the stroke has left no sign – was the kind of thing described by doctors by three initials which I can’t recall except that the first is T, for transient. But the diabetes has got much worse. His GP said he thinks the pancreas must have packed up and that probably he’ll have to go on to injections, and is making an appointment for him at the hospital’s diabetes clinic. Poor Barry.
Brits and your poems: if Barbara is taken as an indicator, leave out anything about shitting (such a pity – I often practice the suggestions in ‘From The Book of Shyting’); and it might be a good thing to limit the hypochondriacal ones – I think there’s an automatic flinch from Being Sorry For Yourself in most Brits. I even have it myself, a bit: they are the ones I like least among your poems. You don’t say how large a collection you are aiming for. If you want it to be properly representative you’d need to keep one in – perhaps ‘I’ve always said that if I’d got it’ – but otherwise I think I’d skip ‘Confessions of a Hypo’. I particularly like the long poems – ‘World War II’ – ‘Visiting Home’ – for example. But I guess going for what you are best pleased with is probably the right line to take.
My little library talk was fun. Full house, and among all the grizzled heads one sleek black one – a rather good-looking man who beamed at me throughout with almost alarming enthusiasm, and turned out to be called Boris – Russian I think – and mad about Stet because he’d read it three times – ‘And because of this marvellous book I pass my examination’. I couldn’t hear what the examination was in, or for, or how Stet had helped – he had a thickish accent and there was quite a lot of background noise – but still it was very nice to know it had meant so much to him And then a lady came up and said that every month she sent a parcel to a man who is in prison in Addis Ababa, and she always includes two books, and Stet was one of them, and he’d let her know it was the one he loved best and it had changed his life!!
I was dying to find out what he was in prison in Addis Ababa for, but she quickly skipped away so I never did. But what a splendid far-flung fan to learn about!
I remember that you went to Detroit before – hope this one goes well.
Love, D
[Edward was not the only person trying to convert me to computers, but only he did something about it. On one of his London visits he took me to a cave-like space in a sort of Kasbah near where he was staying, where many cheerful young men were busily selling retired computers large and small, and made me buy an astonishingly cheap laptop. We carried it off and he sat me down to my first lesson.
I still know little more about the thing than he taught me then. It is not, I think, inability to learn that is the problem: several of my friends who are as old, or nearly as old, as I am are at home on the internet, and of course I can appreciate its usefulness. But I find that I do not want to go there, and the disinclination is active, not passive. Once someone tried to coax me into it by calling up my name, and I loathed the fact that all this information about me was available without my consent; and when kind people send me DVDs, saying ‘You can watch it on your laptop’, I never do. The new world opened up by technology leaves me so cold that I shudder and shrink from it – except for that tiny corner of it which provides me with a wonderfully sophisticated typewriter, and for that I am very grateful. From here on my letters to Edward were e-mails, except when I was separated from my laptop, or when (as quite often happened with that first one) it let me dow
n.]
11 JULY 2003
Darlings – London seems miserably empty now you are gone. I had a lovely week in the country – greatly enjoyed both my two days as a garden-visiting Oldie and my week with my sister. At the start of the former, instantly proved my authenticity as an Oldie by a) forgetting the registration number of my car when the hotel wanted it, and b) losing the key to my room within seconds of receiving it (had automatically slipped it into my handbag without realizing). But soon recovered my wits, and the gardens were lovely. My sister’s daughter from Zimbabwe was with us, looking thirty years older than her age and with an unfamiliar set of nervous habits – for example, compelled to wash everything in sight. We patiently took no notice when she removed everything from my sister’s kitchen cupboards and washed it all – it wasn’t very clean, anyway. But her sister, in a brand new house, was furious – until we persuaded her to cool it. But she soon began to relax, and it was wonderful to see her easing up and beginning to enjoy things. My nephew from Australia was there too, with his family, and when at the end of the week the niece with a new house gave a splendid party there were 90 guests, many of them family and old friends who hadn’t seen each other for years. My sister and her family lived in the Argentine for a while and it has become a tradition with them to celebrate things with an Argentine-style barbecue, which means digging a big pit, filling it with huge logs, and cooking whole animals over it – in this case two sheep. I’ve never tasted meat so delicious. And after it, bowls as big as wash-basins heaped with strawberries, monstrous piles of meringues and pints and pints of cream – it really was a most gorgeous feast, but the best part was all the reunions. So all of that was lovely, but coming home . . . Well, it’s no good going on about it, but how I wish you lived here! XXX Diana XXXXX
22 JULY 2003
A nice full diary sounds fine to me! Maybe I did meet Mrs Sullivan, but if so I’ve forgotten her. As for Barry and eating – it’s the kind of attitude a child has: if Mum says it’s good for him . . . yuck! Anything he’s told he ought to do, he has an instant reaction against. He’s always been like that – it isn’t anything to do with illness.
I went to the theatre last Friday – the first time for ages. Was given some comps for the Jean Rhys play [After Mrs Rochester], which has been moved into the West End. Interesting direction and brilliant performances, but was spoilt simply as a play by a weak second half, and as a life of Jean Rhys, which is what it rashly declares itself to be – very inadequate. What was nice was that the theatre provided excellent head-sets for the deaf, so that I heard everything, and that afterwards the friend I’d invited to go with me drove me round to see what the new pedestrianized Trafalgar Square is like, and it’s lovely. The post-theatre West End, which had been getting more and more squalid, seemed suddenly to have become spacious and calm and pleasant.
I’m going to have an interesting lunch tomorrow with the mistress dumped by Vidia Naipaul when he married his Indian wife – after 25 years together she learnt about his marriage from a newspaper. She’s been trying to meet me for ages, since reading Stet, but her rare visits from her native Argentina have never so far fitted in. To be continued in our next. XXXXX Diana
24 JULY 2003
I know what you mean about dining out – I like the idea of it much more than doing it, these days. In fact I sometimes don’t go to things I’ve said ‘yes’ to when it actually comes to the point. I say I’m ill, or something. But still, it is nice to have people wanting to see you.
Vidia’s lady is still very much the Argentinian beauty – of course, she’s looking older, but expensive raw silk dress in vivid lemon yellow, very close fitting and low-necked and exactly matching her elegant sandals and handbag. She was not only cheerful, but triumphant: he’s been getting in touch with her quite often recently, trying to persuade her to meet him, and she has been greatly enjoying saying No. She gave several amusing examples of his monstrousness . . . but all the same, I would not be surprised to hear that she ended by capitulating. Their affaire was obviously passionate enough to embrace a lot of monstrosity and was equally obviously the centre of her life for 25 years, so I guess life without it is pretty boring. The reason why she is determined to dodge his biographer [Patrick French] is because, she says, her letters to him are not only embarrassingly ‘soppy’ but also appallingly illiterate – I don’t think she’d mind being written about but shrivels at the idea of being quoted. By an odd coincidence, the biographer called me on the very day I met her – I saw him yesterday. I like him – he wrote an excellent biog of a famous British soldier-explorer called Younghusband about which I once wrote him a congratulatory letter which he remembers with pride and joy. We had a v. interesting talk about Vidia – I said nothing about my meeting with Margaret, referring to her only in relation to what he knew I knew of her. Don’t want to get mixed up with his dealings with her. He will write a good book, I think. He’s got the right sort of intense interest in how people work. And Vidia may have made a mistake (from his own point of view) in giving him permission to ‘do’ him. Patrick will certainly not try to hurt anyone for hurting’s sake, but he has got an astonishingly clear eye! But whether I’ll ever see it, who knows. He thinks it’ll take him about four years to finish. [He was right. The World Is What It Is was published in 2008.] This has got too long for an e-mail – sorry! XXXXXXX Diana
13 AUGUST 2003
Dearest Edward,
I’ve been in a rather peculiar relationship with my e-mail recently. When I open the window it always tells me no messages are waiting – then I diddle about and it divulges that one message is there – then quite suddenly it says four messages are there so I’ve just (hurrah hurrah) printed out your lovely four last messages, with the two attachments. At the stage when it was divulging only one message I wrote you a rather frantic heatwave-influenced reply, but it didn’t seem willing to send it. So now I’m falling back on good old letter-writing . . . Have learnt how to get my window back into its proper place, which I did by borrowing a ‘for Dummies’ book from a neighbour in the country, to which I had fled for five nights. Allow me to tell you how I did it. Click on any part of window. Hold down Alt key and press spacebar. A menu appears. Select the word move. A four-headed arrow appears. Press arrow keys until windows border moves to an acceptable position. Press enter. And there you are. What a relief.
To put you in the picture which my lost e-mails would have done: Barry came home a week earlier than he’d said because he was too bored to stand another minute of it. It’s hard to see why, since by his own account he was living in exactly the same way there as he does here – except that he ‘couldn’t be bothered’ to give himself injections and reverted to the pills all the time he was there. He seemed neither better nor worse than when he left, and has resumed his old regime. On the whole he is surviving this god-awful heatwave better than I am because he’s got a very good electric fan and doesn’t have to do any shopping or domestic tasks.
But last Thursday (today is Wednesday August 13), when Barbara had just left for a five day jaunt to Kenya on behalf of the Economist and I had taken over Hannah, it was impossible to sleep a single wink all night, so at 3.30 a.m. I thought what the fuck, why don’t I just get up and spend the rest of the night driving gently to Norfolk, and since I’d just filled the fridge, and Barry said yes of course he could manage, off Hannah and I went in the comparative cool of the night outside. And there I stayed until yesterday (Barbara came home this evening and would have been appalled had her little dog not been back to greet her). Even there it was too hot to do anything much during the day, but it did cool down pleasantly each evening so that one could sleep at night.
Barry had sounded cheerful on the phone and had said he was going out to buy food, but on my return I found that all he had bought was a chocolate cake and chocolate ice cream ‘which’ – reproachfully – ‘sent my blood sugar up a lot’.
On top of which, I had forgotten that I was due to pay for renewal of my parking pe
rmit, so this morning I discovered a fifty-pound ticket on my windscreen. The renewal office isn’t far away, so I thought ‘I’ll just nip round there when my shopping’s done’, which I did – only to be sent home to get the car’s registration document, my full driving licence (as opposed to the little card one carries around all the time) and a minimum of two documents from a Camden source proving that I am me. So back I go . . . and find that I have lost my purse. One, as they say, of those days. Oh yes, and in addition to all that – a couple of weeks ago I was put on a course of antibiotics because for the first time in my life I’ve got cystitis, and it has now become apparent that the antibiotics haven’t worked. To tell the truth, fuck is an understatement of my feelings about today. The only nice thing was when all your e-mails turned up, adding up to a lovely long letter. I’m entering all your Tips in my Tip List, and wish indeed that I could be sipping some of your yummy Dutch liquor with you. Love and love
28 AUGUST 2003
Disasters do not come singly! Instead of waking up refreshed today, I have the most frightful sciatica which prevented me from getting any sleep at all. It started two days earlier, first with only a shadowy twinge, then worse so that it did in fact keep me awake for half of Tuesday night, and last night it came in full-blast, and is still at it today, so this morning I hobbled off to the doc, who confirmed after a good deal of tapping and tweaking, that the source of the pain is not the hip, which is what it feels like and which had made me fear bad arthritis, but is the lower back, where the sciatic nerve is being pinched. Doctors can do nothing about sciatica except give one strong painkillers and say that it will go away sooner or later, with luck. Ouch!!! Because a pain which gets worse when you lie down in bed is really nasty. I called my osteopath, only to learn via an answering machine that he has emigrated to New Zealand. His friend who had taken over the practice said on the machine that she would call me back if I wanted an appointment, but hasn’t yet done so. The painkillers are making the pain less at the moment although they don’t abolish it, and I’m praying that they’ll enable me to go to sleep tonight.
