Wheels Within Wheels

by Dervla Murphy

  All that week I talked feverishly of going to South America with my bicycle and cycling through the Andes. It was significant that I did not drag my real ambition – to cycle to India – into this sick morass. That belonged to a happier past – and, perhaps, to a happier future. Besides, there was nothing to prevent me from cycling to India in the morning – I could easily have borrowed the necessary small sum of money – and for my purpose I needed an impractical dream that could not possibly come true.

  On August 1, having regained some outward semblance of normality, I cycled to Co Wicklow. There I spent another week – still talking of the Andes – with a family who at the time hardly knew me though they have since become close friends. Then I left for London to find, as I had convinced myself, a method of working my passage to South America. My efforts were genuine and vigorous enough – I remember visiting dozens of cargo shipping offices – but of course they failed. Meanwhile I had got a job as a canteen-hand in a home for down-and-outs in the East End. Most of my fellow workers were Irish and many of them appeared to be part-time prostitutes who, in their off-duty hours, comforted the down-and-outs for a small consideration. I liked them all, as individuals, though the crudeness of their conversation sickened me, almost literally – as it still would today, despite the changed standards of the 1970s. The home was run by a kindly woman who, when she hired me, said that I must have ‘private accommodation’ though the other girls slept four to a room. I protested at the time, sensing and objecting to élitism, but within twenty-four hours I felt very grateful for this privilege. (My room was a closet hardly big enough to hold a chair as well as the narrow iron bedstead.)

  I spent my off-duty hours, which could be at any time of the day, visiting shipping offices, museums and picture galleries; or, when I had an evening off, going to the Old Vic or Covent Garden. To an observer, my job might have seemed dreary and arduous – dishing out steaming meals for hours on end in the heat of a London August – but to me it seemed positively relaxing. My eight-hour day left me more time to myself than I had had for many years. And – most important of all – I knew that I could sleep all night, every night. Only those who have endured long periods of interrupted and insufficient sleep can appreciate what that meant. Often, during the day, I thought with luxuriating delight of the night to come – as a drug-addict might think about his next fix.

  I was of course constantly plagued by guilt. At first I ruthlessly suppressed it, but as the days passed and I unwound, and emerged from my fantasy, I allowed myself to examine it. I had certainly done a cruel thing. Although my escape had been essential it should have been effected more considerately and rationally, after alternative arrangements had been made for my mother’s welfare. But she would not have consented to any such arrangements. I reasoned that it would be unfair to blame myself alone for this cruelty. It was like some poisonous vapour exhaled by a corrupting situation to which we had all three contributed. Then, for the first time, I allowed myself to look steadily and dispassionately at my mother’s case. I can remember the spot where I finally reconciled myself to the fact that she had partly lost her reason. I was sitting outside St Paul’s, in hot noonday sun, and my whole being seemed to be wrung by pity and anguish. The death of the mind is infinitely more terrible than the death of the body and I mourned my mother that day as I was never to mourn afterwards.

  After three weeks in London I knew that I was ready to go home. I gave in my week’s notice, wrote to my parents – of whom I had had news, through Mark, every other day – and positively looked forward to being back in Lismore and seeing my friends again. As I had always been wont to do, I counted my blessings, which seemed many and various when I compared my life to the lives of my workmates in the hostel. They were, indeed, free, as I had never been. But of what value was their freedom when they were so much ‘less fortunate’ than myself?

  During that final week of liberty, while still out of my mother’s emotional grip, I resolved on a campaign that would have spared us all much suffering had it been organised a few years sooner. On my return home I would, at least for a brief period, be in command. I had demonstrated not merely a reluctance but an incapacity to survive under my mother’s régime; and, while she was still feeling the shock of my revolt, I would initiate my own reforms.

  Arriving home, on a sunny mid-September day, I found my father in a predictable state of exhaustion and my mother in an even more amenable mood than I had hoped for. Aware of the authority conferred on me by my breakdown – the family doctor, in my presence, had bluntly said, ‘I told you so’ to my mother – I announced quietly that I would engage a daily maid and take two hours off every morning or afternoon, in addition to four hours every evening. On alternate Saturdays and Sundays I would be out from two-thirty to ten-thirty and in April I would return to Spain. My mother meekly accepted all these reforms and was genially welcoming when I produced a cheerful, clean, intelligent, efficient sixteen-year-old who showed no alarm at the prospect of being left in charge of an invalid. (She was not of course expected to do any nursing chores, apart from helping my mother to drink her barley-water – which, incidentally, I was now rationing, to ensure my night’s sleep.)

  It dismayed me to find that although I had reclaimed my own bedroom, and given myself ample free time, my concentration remained unequal to reading a serious book and writing a coherent letter required a tremendous effort. Yet this was hardly surprising. The easing of my duties had not made the domestic atmosphere essentially any less tense and I was always braced for a resumption of hostilities. Outwardly my mother’s attitude had changed considerably – for instance, she never now summoned me when I was talking to my friends in the sitting-room – but I could see how much she inwardly resented the extent of my victory. Despite my full awareness of her mental condition, our antagonisms had become too deeply rooted for either of us to extirpate them when we were in close daily proximity. However, for the rest of 1959 I was well able to take the strain, largely because I believed that my next year’s holiday was secure.

  Then, soon after Christmas, hostilities were resumed in a new and baffling way. My mother developed asthma and suffered frequent violent spasms at all hours of the night and day. This terrifying affliction was in a sense the most harrowing of all her diseases, not only for its victim but for my father and myself, who both loved her so much – though my love had long since ceased to be apparent. It of course meant that she could no longer be left in the care of a maidservant, that my bedroom again had to be sacrificed and that our nights were more broken even than hitherto. Also, before long it had been made plain that I could not reasonably expect to get away to Spain in April.

  We still had Mary to do the housework and I still insisted on my alternate Saturdays and Sundays off duty. Otherwise we were back to the impasse of the previous year and by April I was again losing my grip. One symptom of this was an extreme, neurotic self-contempt. I had accepted that my mother was mentally ill, I daily witnessed her physical sufferings – yet I could feel no compassion or tenderness. I could not make myself feign sympathy during those ravaging asthmatic attacks. Worse, I now sometimes regarded my mother with a hatred that seemed to flare up like a sheet of evil fire from some diabolical inner volcano. It was her body that I hated – the body that had already destroyed the reality of her and was threatening to destroy my own reality. Afterwards, I understood this hatred as love gone underground. Then, I was aware of it only as a base emotion that frightened and disgusted me. I could not see deep enough within myself to discern my intense distress at my mother’s agony. Had my natural reactions not been suppressed I might have disintegrated even sooner than I did. By concentrating on my own miseries, and callously ignoring my mother’s, I at least remained sane enough to nurse her.

  Several times, that summer, asthmatic attacks threatened my mother’s life. And I did not find it necessary to conceal from myself the fact that I longed for her to die. The mother I had loved and the person I had admired was already dea
d. The tortured body, the tragically disordered mind and the degraded, petty emotions were a heart-breaking travesty. Yet our doctor had assured us that with the aid of modern drugs, attentive nursing and a basically ox-like constitution, my mother could live another twenty years. I dared not allow myself to dwell upon this prognosis. In twenty years’ time I would be nearing fifty – a middle-aged woman, drained of physical stamina, emotionally embittered and intellectually atrophied. There were enough such dutiful unmarried daughters around Lismore for me to have a clear prevision of myself in 1980. It was about then that I switched from sherry to whiskey.

  16

  My father was sixty on December 16, 1960 – a singularly auspicious date, my mother used to say, being also the birthday of Beethoven and Jane Austen. A few days later he went down with influenza, from which he usually recovered within forty-eight hours. But his resistance had been drastically lowered by the griefs and anxieties of the past few years and this time he spent a week in bed. While still convalescent he insisted on going to Dublin, by train, in blizzard conditions, on December 27. He had promised to lead a delegation of librarians to discuss with a government minister some – to him – vitally important point concerning the development of the library service; and he refused to back down at the eleventh hour, having had no opportunity to brief a substitute leader. My mother did all she could to check this lunacy, but on such an issue not even she could sway my father.

  When he arrived home three days later, glorying in his delegation’s victory over the minister, my mother and I were both shocked by his appearance. He went straight to bed and next morning was running a high temperature and too weak to stand up. At first we took this to be a not surprising influenza relapse, but by New Year’s Day our doctor was suspecting nephritis. On January 3 a specialist came from Cork and explained that this well-known complication of neglected ‘flu did not require hospital treatment. Given my father’s medical record – apart from two attacks of sciatica, he had never in his life had any illness more serious than ‘flu – it would probably right itself in a matter of weeks. I listened to these cheerful assurances with a disbelief that reminded me of Godfrey’s Peruvian plans. On January 2 (the second anniversary of Godfrey’s death) I had realised that my father was dying – and that he knew it.

  For the next month I nursed both my parents, with the aid of twice-daily visits from the Jubilee Nurse. I lived on whiskey and cigarettes and often did not bother to undress at night when I slept on a camp-bed in my father’s room. My mother now demanded far less attention. Engrossed in the suspense and horror of my father’s illness, she was neglecting her barley-water treatment and had had no asthmatic attack since New Year’s Eve. Her anguish, at the prospect of losing all that really mattered to her in this world, completely dissolved my hard core of unfeeling. We sat up at night over tumblers of whiskey, and my mother reverted to smoking Turkish cigarettes specially sent from Dublin – an indulgence foresworn, many years before, in the cause of economy – and we talked as adult friends, savouring the sort of relationship that should always have been ours. I marvelled then at this rebirth, in the shadow of death, of the person I had thought lost for ever.

  For some three weeks my mother continued to hope, or to pretend to herself that she was hoping, yet my father’s condition gave her less and less reason to do so. Meanwhile I existed in a strange state of thought-suspension, not attempting to cope intellectually with what I had never tried to evade emotionally. I only knew how thankful I was that the specialist had advised against hospital treatment. During those weeks a twenty-year-old barrier went down and the ordeal of witnessing my father’s physical dissolution was eased by the fact that he was so palpably unafraid of death. Going into his room one dark afternoon at the end of January, I found him lying there, looking serenely out at the wide grey sky, with a hand on his open bible. I had thought of him, these past few years, as suffering no less than myself though in very different ways. Now I saw how wrong I had been. He wore an armour that I had not inherited.

  A few day later the specialist came again and advised my father’s removal to hospital. At seven o’clock an ambulance arrived and, as the stretcher was being carried past my mother’s open door, my father weakly called, ‘Au revoir!’ My mother and I both got slightly drunk that night as we listened to a Brandenberg Concerto and the Archduke Trio.

  During the next week I travelled daily to Cork while kindly neighbours sat with my mother saying appropriate things in hushed tones. The nurses and doctors described my father as one of the most considerate and selfless patients they had ever met. Then, on February 9 – the thirtieth anniversary of my parents’ wedding – I was warned that he could not possibly live more than another two days, and that he had been told this. Yet when I went into his room he seemed no worse than previously. We looked at each other, and then spontaneously shook hands with a curious mixture of formality and tenderness. ‘Will Kit be able to come?’ my father asked. I assured him that she would – in fact her suitcases were already packed – and within half-an-hour I had booked another hospital room and organised an ambulance in which I drove back to Lismore. Three hours later, my mother’s bath chair was wheeled close to my father’s bedside.

  Despite the medical forecast, a few days passed, and another few days, and a week, and still my father lived on, calm and clear of mind, steady of speech, holding his wife’s deformed hand for hours on end. I was entirely superfluous to both of them and spent most of the day in my mother’s room across the corridor, reading P. G. Wodehouse and sipping whiskey. When I joined them at mealtimes, to feed my mother, I often found them laughing together. Sometimes my father attempted to discuss the practical problems that were looming for his widow and daughter. But my mother would dryly point out that this was an inappropriate time to change a life-long habit of concentrating on spiritual rather than monetary matters. I saw then how firmly they believed in a reunion elsewhere. To me, death was a question mark. To them, it was a temporary separation – sad beyond measure, yet not final. At that time a strange sort of gaiety possessed us as a family, artificial on one level, genuine on another. And as the days passed my father, inexplicably, continued to live. His doctors used to pace up and down the corridors in a ferment of scientific curiosity and bewilderment, muttering theories sotto voce. To me, however, my father’s surviving was a clear case of mind over matter; he did not want to leave my mother. He himself took a keen interest in the mystery of his own continuing existence. Medical conundrums had always fascinated him and now he was not only willing but eager to consider the most grisly hypotheses with his doctors.

  By this stage, inevitably, my mother had begun to hope again, though she would not admit as much. But then, on the morning of February 25, my father had a haemorrhage and became perceptibly weaker. Yet he did not lose consciousness and all that day, as we sat by his bed, he was aware of us. At twenty to seven in the evening he was still holding my mother’s hand firmly with his right hand. I was holding his left hand, with a finger on the slowing pulse. So gently did he go that I realised it moments before my mother did.

  The hospital staff were a little disconcerted by my mother’s composure – and, indeed, by mine. Tears, one gathered, were obligatory, yet we shed not one between us. As I went to and fro, arranging what had to be arranged, I was pursued up and down corridors by perplexed nuns brandishing unwanted sleeping pills and assuring me that everybody needed sedatives after a bereavement.

  My father’s was the first corpse I had seen, yet it left me unmoved. It was simply an irrelevant, impermanent piece of matter. As the funeral procession travelled to Lismore I sat by my mother in the ambulance behind the hearse, more conscious of apprehension about my new responsibilities than of grief.

  My father was buried in Lismore on February 27 – the first of his family, for many generations, to be laid to rest outside Dublin. The town that had received him so coldly thirty years earlier closed its shops in mourning, and it comforted us that the phrases of praise and r
egret were uttered not only because convention prescribed them.

  I stood between Daphne and Brian at the graveside, disliking my conspicuous rôle as chief mourner and feeling more embarrassed than distressed by the inescapable ritual. Many, I knew, were expecting me to break down and add a touch of drama to the occasion. The Irish have a flair for wringing from death the last drop of emotion and they do not quite understand those who react otherwise. It was a still, sunny day, the air damp and warm; birds sang their first desultory spring songs in the grassy graveyard – until alarmed by the volley of shots that rang out over the coffin of a man who had been a soldier not only in his youth.

  * * *

  We all enjoy drama with some part of ourselves – whatever its source – and are stimulated by it. But now suddenly the tension, the need for courage, the compulsion to consider only the dying, the will to control panic and grief, the first challenging confrontation with the vast, incomprehensible fact of Absence – all were gone. So too, on the morning after the funeral, were the visiting friends and relatives from Dublin. My mother and I faced each other, alone, in a house that felt chill and damp after two and a half weeks of emptiness. Soon it had become clear that my mother expected me to be able, by some miracle, to fill my father’s place. The absurdity of this expectation both touched and enraged me. I had hoped that she and I could continue to build on our new friendship, but if my mother could not accept me as myself she would have to forgo all the support that I was then most willing to give.