Our Time of Day

by Kika Markham

  A new and worrying development. Corin started to have falls: it was very alarming, as he had begun to venture out to the shops or pub on his own. Mostly the falls happened when I was around. Once down a flight of ninety steps in Harley Street. I thought he was dead, lying with a gash on his forehead, completely still, but within minutes he’d got up. As it was Harley Street there was not a single person who could help us, none of them were insured. So Jemma, who was nearby, went into The London Clinic and up to a ward and got some dressings which Sonie and I put on back in Balham.

  There were many other falls. One on a trip to see my mother, whom we were visiting often as she was becoming more frail. Some outside the house and some inside. One very bad one in the kitchen which caused a violent nose bleed. We were rushed to A&E. It took two hours for Corin to be seen – me holding his nose all the while – his mouth full of dried blood.

  The doctors were tired and overworked, finally cauterising the nostrils and discharging us at midnight. But as soon as we were in bed it started again. I rang the sister who said ‘sit him up and lean him forward and hold his nose, he mustn’t talk or speak or it will start again.’ We took it in turns to hold his nose as our arms grew tired, until it subsided at around 4.00 a.m. Throughout this Corin was stoical and brave. Sitting up against the pillows, not speaking, but smiling at my attempts to joke as we took turns to hold his nose.

  We are acting parts in a play that we have never read and never seen, whose plot we don’t know, whose existence we can glimpse, but whose beginning and end are beyond our present imagination and conception.

  Family Scenarios, R.D. Laing

  Cheek by Jowl used this quote in their notes for The Tempest and it seemed a fair description of our situation.

  Dr Jim MacKeith came to visit us. A very close friend of ours, his mother ‘Jo’ was my mother’s best friend since school days, and her daughter Alice is my oldest friend. Corin and he had worked on human rights issues together. Jim said to Corin, ‘You must write every day in your notebook, it doesn’t have to be ‘meaningful’ or clever, just simple facts, but you must write’.

  Corin’s diary

  October 2005

  The spy who came in from the cold

  In my bedroom… well, not really my bedroom, more a spare room, but made to look sort of like my bedroom. A single bed, books, records, framed prints and photos on the walls. A married, twice-married man, who, nevertheless, in his imagination, is unmarried. Outside, autumn. John le Carré.

  November, almost. Yet outside, in my garden, and in Greg and Barbara’s, the leaves on the pear tree are still dark olive. Music. BB?

  I watched a video film, taken in the US, of Vanessa, Lynn and Rachel doing a very moving performance in aid of Gregory Peck’s institute. Watching the video at Vanessa’s no one else present except she and I, was deeply moved. So little time had passed since I could sit in Vanessa’s sitting room with Rachel.

  I tried to explain this to Vanessa. She understood, I think. But although she was understanding, it was a difficult feeling. Not, in any way, Vanessa’s fault. No fault attached. Just difficult. Time passing, however short, affects two people, both very close, differently. Somewhat.

  […]

  Tonight, Sally [Simmons] comes by, for company. I’m terrifically fond of Sally. Her presence is very comforting. Though enough strange moods seem to intervene, even now.

  6.55 p.m. Pitch dark outside.

  I mentioned, when Sally came up to look at the room, my need for a larger more practical work table. ‘So you could put the lamp on it’ she suggested, quite rightly. (At present the table is so small, that the reading lamp sits on a little table beside the main table.)

  At last, in November 2005, Corin began his rehabilitation at the Wolfson Neurorehabilitation Centre as an outpatient. These are the hasty fragments of notes that I took at the first sessions.

  …One of Corin’s great resources is his capacity to adapt to his environment (his skill as an actor) a real strength. Sometimes this covers up a level of confusion and people may think he’s more in control than he is.

  He has no capacity to reflect.

  He is highly tuned to the emotional dynamic of the situation.

  His skills are fine-tuned – and he reacts but may not understand why. He can feel patronised.

  He is searching for grounding.

  He can learn but he doesn’t know he has learned it, and he can’t access it.

  His working memory is good.

  He can cope in the moment.

  All patients with brain injury have insight problems. His self-awareness has been damaged but improved insight can lead to depression…

  In other words the more he understands, the more difficult and upsetting it will be for him.

  We, the family are in trauma, he is not. In a way that is a helpful thing… Corin’s adjustment will be led by the family adjustment…

  These notes really describe the enormous challenges and difficulties that lay ahead. For a start, none of us had yet remotely adjusted to Corin’s predicament. Sometimes I think I never fully understood the severity of his illness. We, the family, should be leading the adjustment, but I wasn’t even on the first step.

  Yet here are Corin’s summaries of the first rehab sessions – and they gave so much hope to me and the family.

  Friday 25 November 2005

  Psychology session

  I’ve been questioning why I am coming to the Wolfson, and we discussed this today in the session.

  I am brought to an understanding and acceptance of the fact that damage has been done to my memory, and my knowledge of this has been strengthened by the realisation that it is hard for me to draw conscious memories of previous events. I’ve been doing certain radio plays, for instance, but I’ve been unable to recall actually being at the radio station.

  I’m not rejecting that I have done them, because I’ve seen the evidence in my own handwriting. I need to be able to work with a system which I can trust in the same way that I have been always able to rely on my conscious recollection, which came as images to my mind, and therefore confirmed something was true.

  But now I don’t get those images, and so I need to find a new system in order to be able to find what is true. The system I am learning to rely upon involves my trusting my own handwriting. Learning to trust my handwriting as the mechanism for recalling knowledge and events is a challenge because I’ve always relied on images for these things. Now I must learn to look in my Filofax when I want to remember something. I’ve always been in control of my own life – but now, because of this memory problem I rely on other people to tell me what is there and what is not, and this frustrates me.

  Wednesday 30 November 2005

  Psychology session with Dr B

  I recognise that it is difficult for me to remember conscious memories of what has happened. It makes me feel very ‘at sea’. What are the implications of this? It feels very ominous. To be able to hold on to what has happened to me, and why. This is my goal to why I am at The Wolfson. To achieve this. It’s about revisiting this information regularly, until it becomes familiar to my unconscious memory.

  I’m not going to remember consciously what happened, but the hope is that I can hold this information as a knowledge that I can believe and trust.

  Saturday 3 December 2005

  I asked Kika what I was like before…?…? ‘Have I been away?’

  She replied, ‘Yes, in a way because you’ve been so ill, but we’re going to put everything back together like a jigsaw puzzle.’

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  OCTOBER 2005

  Back to Work

  Corin’s diary 2005

  Filming. Trying to work out where I was, what I was doing. At times I felt like a man who has fallen overboard from an immense liner.

  In the midst of this totally changed and frightening environment, the postman delivered the brown paper A4 envelope that actors long for. It was a script for Corin.

 
; Justin Hardy was making a film about the liberation of Belsen. Knowing the situation with Corin, he nevertheless wanted him to play the Major and Jemma to play a Red Cross nurse. For Jemma, who had always wanted to work with her father but never had, it was a dream come true. Arden went along with them to look after Corin and to be an extra. A bright glow in the darkest of times.

  Corin’s diary

  Sunday 29 October 2005

  A lovely day! Our visitor… Mark Rylance! An absolutely delightful man… We sat and talked for an hour in the front room and then went to the nearby Cafe Méliès.

  [undated] November 2005

  Justin Hardy visited us.

  Another lovely day.

  Arden and Jemma with me… hooray!

  Sunday 13 November 2005

  Read-through of The Belsen Redemption.

  Jemma has a good part. Arden a good job.

  Monday 14 November 2005

  A long day’s work on the Belsen script. I just want to say what a great help and pleasure it is to be working with Arden! He has such a great spirit!

  Kika’s diary

  Thursday 17 November 2005

  Jehane came by to take me down to Mum’s for the day, we were looking forward to a breakfast together but Corin wakes up confused, agitated, no heart attack, no letters, where are his clothes? Arden? Harvey? ‘Look stop playing games and talk to me as Kika would you?’ I can’t go with Jehane, which I mind terribly. C gets dressed without washing. Even in hospital he always washed.

  Corin and I made pesto together. C was nervous about doing it so I gave him the ingredients and he pounded away with the pestle. Results were pleasing. Corin was happier and the sauce was delicious. I made him a ravioli and went to get some fish and chips. ‘Don’t be long,’ he says. He rings me the moment I’m out of the door.

  Friday 18 November 2005

  Corin goes to bed early and wants me to go with him. Says ‘I love you, you are my one and only,’ then ‘Oh God, feel this lump’. I tell him it’s a defibrillator and notice that there’s a scar that I can show him next time he doesn’t believe he’s been in hospital or had a heart attack.

  I must be strong for the boys and Corin. That must be my aim. But how?

  And suddenly I got a part in a fascinating project, a BBC adaptation of The Line of Beauty by Alan Hollinghurst. At first I felt very shaky and overwhelmed by the other actors’ kindness. Luckily I was playing Margaret Thatcher, which meant I had to be steely and formidable. Unbending as well as flirtatious, but above all not an ounce of doubt or uncertainty. Impossible in my predicament but in fact it was rather liberating. I couldn’t have undertaken work without the help of our new carer Miranda, whose natural beauty, glamour and cheffing skills cheered us all up, especially Corin. She remained with us for about two years and has become a good friend.

  Then came a new play at the Arcola, Gaudeamus by Peter Morris and directed by Michael Longhurst, a brilliant satire on an American college that got closed down for experimenting in free love in the Sixties. I played a sixty-year-old classics professor who is a virgin and decides to go along with the sexual experiment. It was a cast of three and our parts were monologues. I loved my part – it was all about sex and Socrates. But I suffered from bad stage fright – so awful that I could barely stand on stage. I had huge guilt that I was able to memorise lines and Corin was not. Unbearable. Corin’s memory was legendary in the acting profession. Corin came to the first night and ‘bravoed’ at the end, always, always supporting.

  And then, just when Corin was beginning to fret about the next job, as all actors do, and having to be reassured and reminded that he’d only just completed the work on the Belsen film, he got offered another great role. Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape for the radio. Polly Thomas (the director) said:

  …I hadn’t known Corin before his stroke, and was unprepared for the sudden transformation. As he read, as he became Krapp, he unleashed great power and energy. It was extraordinary – in a simple setting, Beckett’s brilliant, sly words were brought to life as if they had been written for Corin.

  There were some film roles that Corin performed which was joyful for all of us although I will not divulge here how we got insurance. Another nightmare for people who have had a heart attack. Justin Hardy, Robin Soames, Stephen Poliakoff, and Polly Thomas, Ned Chaillet, and Nicholas Hytner are all directors that were willing to take the risk with Corin and I thank them for it profoundly.

  In December we were lucky enough (through Tim Owen, my son-in-law, who knew him through his human rights work) to get a consultation with Professor Michael Kopelman, Head of the Neuropsychiatry and Memory Disorders Clinic and Professor of Neuropsychiatry at the Institute of Psychiatry, King’s College, London.

  Corin’s diary

  December 2005

  This morning we saw Mike Kopelman at St Thomas’s.

  I like him. Seeing him and Kika with me gives me confidence.

  Kopelman, or Mike as we came to know him, said that Corin needed intensive rehab, but that he wouldn’t get it on the NHS, which was depressing. He also explained that there was so much more to be learned about brain injury than was in the textbooks and that essentially it is time that brings about change. Kopelman does not have a private practice. He is dedicated to the NHS, therefore his clinic is always full, sometimes oversubscribed. He was kind and wise and always helpful. It was a tremendous relief to know that he would see Corin regularly as his time at the Wolfson Clinic was coming to an end. Meanwhile I was starting to see an analyst to help me deal with the anxiety attacks and a kind of morbid depression which overwhelmed me at times.

  Corin missed the intellectual excitement of academic life and was always trying to get Gabe, me, Alfie, and Jemma down to Cambridge, and I did go with him two or three times. We would walk along the Cam with family friend Marina Voikhanskaya. She would feed us home-grown tomatoes, cheese, red wine, and strawberries. Happy visits.

  Years later we went to a lecture on memory given by Professor Kopelman at King’s College in London. There was a north-east wind blowing, and hail, and we couldn’t get a taxi. We arrived at the hall soaking wet. As soon as the lecture began Corin sat forward. He was completely engrossed as he is at the theatre, watching and listening with a sort of fierce detachment. By that I mean Corin was never someone you could nudge or whisper to in the middle of a performance. Oh how I wished I had thought of it before now. Taking him to a lecture, I mean.

  Jim MacKeith’s widow Keesje was at Kopelman’s lecture with Gwen, their beautiful daughter, they were all friends. I write this today because one of the most moving experiences back in 2006 was when Kopelman came over to our place and listened with some friends to Krapp’s Last Tape being broadcast. Corin was so happy. We toasted him with champagne. I liked the fact that they both got the chance to see and hear each other’s work.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  2006

  Holiday Breaks

  Corin’s diary

  Wednesday 15 March 2006

  A lovely visit from Jemma. We walked on Tooting Common and it gave me so much joy to be with her.

  Corin keeps asking me when we’re going to Paris. The thought of the Eurostar journey and the wine, was too daunting for now, so I ask him if he’d like to go to Cornwall and he’s very pleased.

  Cornwall 2006

  Corin, Petra and I went to Zennor for three days. It was quite early on in Corin’s illness and I hadn’t travelled with him before, so Petra kindly came with me. On the way down Corin refused to observe the no smoking signs on the train, and kept disappearing into the loo for a quick smoke. Very soon loudspeakers announced that smoking on trains is forbidden, and anyone caught would be fined and put off the train. Then Transport Police started to patrol the corridors, following the smell of Benson & Hedges as it wafted down the corridor. Petra and I turned to stone and read our books intently each time they passed: we knew where Corin was. How he managed to avoid them we will never know, but he did, and got to Penzance withou
t being caught. Corin wrote a short account.

  Corin s diary

  I had a lovely short (two days) holiday in Cornwall, staying with Sue Wilson [the very nice owner of the B&B]. Two women arrived yesterday morning, one of them Rachel Kavanaugh, the artistic director at Birmingham Repertory.

  I’m afraid I didn’t stay to talk with them, but went down to The Tinners Arms for a drink. Last night, we went to a lovely hotel with a restaurant for dinner. I had a fish called ling!

  A most enjoyable time. No swimming, though we did go down to the sea.

  Very Nice.

  Petra’s Poem

  St Ives

  Now we have reached the shoreline and the tide is going out –

  The sand is stretched with little shells and seagulls shout –