Our Time of Day

by Kika Markham

  That summer Corin flew to New York, accompanied by Malcolm Tierney, to work with Richard Nelson on Tynan, staying with his sisters at Lynn’s home in the country. Richard and Corin had always loved working together. On 22 October, 2007, Corin gave a spectacular reading of Tynan at the Public Theatre. The audience was spellbound. Many of them didn’t know he was ill. How did Richard enable Corin to do this? I think Corin had always trusted him as a director and now he had to trust him with his illness. Richard never patronised him, he wanted the best from Corin and Corin responded.

  The next year Richard worked with Corin on De Profundis by Oscar Wilde.

  Corin performed the monologue at the National Theatre. It was both funny and heartbreaking. Corin’s tears were real, but it was Oscar you saw, weeping in prison. Trevor Nunn said it made him realise what a wonderful thing a ‘reading’ was, because it allowed the actors to be completely in the moment. At the end, the entire audience stood as one person, clapping and crying in recognition not just for his performance but his bravery.

  Corin’s diary:

  A wonderful evening at the National Theatre. The first performance [of the last two] at the Lyttelton Theatre.

  A really heart-warming reception (in fact a standing ovation!) at the end.

  Then we went upstairs to the Green Room. Darling Kika, dear Vivian and I. A lovely gathering of friends. Francis Wyndham, Peter Eyre, and... Ian Bostridge! He has invited me to do an evening with him at the Barbican in October.

  Lovely dinner in the Mezzanine. I’m afraid I drank too much. I am promising myself (and everybody else) not to do that tonight!

  Oh... a wonderful evening, though!

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  MARCH 2008

  AA

  Kika’s diary

  Saturday 8 March 2008

  Corin is becoming eccentric. He stops people in the street to talk to them. Children. Women with pushchairs or prams.

  Today he saw a sleeping baby in a buggy and talked to an older woman.

  ‘You’re the mother?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Well it’s a lovely baby.’

  ‘I’m just the...’ But Arden and I didn’t hear any more, we were getting embarrassed and waited to move him on to Café Méliès. After more chat, as we move off: ‘Well can I just kiss your hand?’ He kisses her hand Old Jolyon-style, very gracefully.

  ‘How charming!’ she cries.

  Arden and I exchange a look. Perhaps we’re being too stuffy. After all some people seem to like being accosted by Corin in the street.

  Corin’s diary

  Monday 21 July 2008

  It’s Sunday 21st and I’ve missed all the business with the Waitrose man. I don’t know what this means, but it seems profound. Kika says that I overheard a customer saying very racist remarks to a black security man. I became angry and told him that I’d heard everything and that he was to leave the premises immediately.

  ‘Fuck off out of it!’

  I was much applauded by the staff at Waitrose.

  Kika’s diary

  Tuesday 22 July 2008

  Summer Time. Alcoholic Days and Nights.

  Corin spends the evening with our friend Peter Marsden, author of a book on the Taliban and former aid worker in Afghanistan. Unfortunately, Peter’s experience of working with the Taliban was of no help when it came to persuading Corin not to drink. So I arrive back to find Corin extremely drunk. Peter leaves. Suddenly Corin heads off upstairs to get to the lavatory but doesn’t make it in time. We swear at each other, me in fury, he in misery, and I begin to scrub the carpet, shoes, socks etc., anywhere the unseemly evidence has landed. I try to persuade Corin to get into the shower, but he won’t. He takes off his clothes – but wants to have another cigarette first, and goes into the garden and sits down at the old table under the tree.

  From the kitchen door I can see his white back and bottom looming at me as he stubbornly puffs away. I want to giggle. I am holding a bowl and rubber gloves, and he is naked on a garden chair at midnight.

  When the children were little, Corin used to make up stories for them at bedtime. Their favourite was always ‘The Big Bad Monkey’. The Big Bad Monkey was the king of the jungle and was a terrible show-off. He played mean tricks on the other animals, who would finally rebel and make traps for him where he would fall into piles of shit and be very humiliated. There would be shrieks of laughter coming down the stairs and I would try and listen, but it was strictly a boy thing between the three of them.

  When Corin got ill he sometimes seemed to delight in inhabiting the Big Bad Monkey. One of the most difficult things for me to handle was the disinhibition factor, which meant he could make very graphic physical passes at women, friends, relations, friends of relations. I knew he couldn’t help it, but each time there was an incident, I felt bitterly hurt and would weep and remonstrate, and he would be puzzled and sorry.

  Disinhibition also happened over peeing. He started to pee in the garden, not discreetly, and if he thought no one was around would piss straight out of the kitchen door. I tried every tactic possible to persuade him not to do this, sometimes in tears, sometimes in anger, and sometimes sweetly, but nothing worked. One day when we were both together in the kitchen, I pulled down my trousers and pants and squatted on the doorstep. Corin looked at me in amazement. ‘Darling, what on earth are you doing?’

  ‘I thought I’d have a pee. What’s wrong? You do it all the time.’ ‘Well I will NEVER do it again!’

  He looked horrified. It was a risky strategy, but it worked and I felt incredibly proud.

  Kika’s diary

  Wednesday 23 July 2008

  Corin has agreed to try AA. As it happens, the meeting place is round the corner from where we live. Corin and I arrive an hour early and sit on a bench in the little front yard. At 7.30 some men arrive, and an Irish man with thick, grey, curly hair and a comforting voice introduces himself, shakes Corin’s hand and says ‘You’ve done the right thing coming here. I’ll make you a cup of tea’. He goes off with Corin.

  I feel as though I’m leaving one of the children behind at the first day of school, and then I realise that it was indeed the building used by Harvey’s first pre-nursery school! Later Corin comes back; he stayed for the whole meeting and was impressed by the ordinary blokes and the honesty and friendliness. Euphoria.

  Sunday 3 August 2008

  Corin is nearly mugged by a West Indian couple, a man and woman. They came to our local restaurant, Caminata, where he was having a drink with a neighbour, and refused to go away and tried to take his wallet. A guardian angel in the shape of a six-foot black man appeared, saying he was police and unless they went away he would arrest them. This did the trick and they melted away. I have tried to find out where he lived, but to no avail. He too melted away, so I haven’t been able to thank him yet.

  Saturday 9 August 2008

  I talk Corin into going to the Saturday AA meeting at 10 a.m., and go with him as far as the gate. There are already some men chatting on the steps. They look very kind. ‘Is this right for the AA?’ I only ask because they were waiting at a different entrance.

  They nod.

  ‘Don’t worry, we’ll look after him.’ And they do. Afterwards Corin says, ‘I feel in the right place.’ ‘Do you feel you have something in common?’ ‘Yes.’

  We hedge around it. It seems that he can acknowledge that he has a ‘small’ drink problem. (To me, not to the group.)

  I’ve been to Al-Anon, the organization that AA runs to help friends’ members living with alcoholics. Now I realise I shouldn’t say the word ‘alcoholic’ – he may or may not come to acknowledge it but unless it comes from him it won’t count. Looking at the leaflet of Al-Anon, You and Alcoholism, I realize I’m displaying every symptom of co-dependency – including rage. I haven’t yet committed any violence though...

  As Corin’s recovery continued, I feel able to go to France for a few days that summer, while Corin goes to stay with Jemma in Wales
.

  Kika’s diary

  Wales, Thursday 28 August 2008

  I am on the train to Stansted. I have done it! Packed for Corin who is on the train to Wales, packed for myself. We are going to separate holidays like Anne and Claude in Anne and Muriel. I phone Corin from my train and at first he doesn’t answer, and I fear that he’s gone to the bar already or is smoking in the corridor. It has taken four years for Corin to be able to travel on his own on the tube but he has never travelled on a journey like this unaccompanied. Jemma had wanted someone to travel with him but no one was available, besides both Corin and I felt confident that he could manage it. He hadn’t been drinking for a week and although we were taking a risk, yes, because he could get off at the wrong station, become ill on the train, get caught smoking in a loo, I felt he would be OK if he could remember to keep his mobile on so Jemma and I could ring him. The fact that the mobile was ringing was a tremendous relief – the fact that he wasn’t answering was not! Meanwhile I rattled along past the sleepy barges and tumbled willow lakes and canals of the Lea Valley which shine out among the ugly suburbs and factories that accompany one on the journey from Liverpool Street to Stansted. I tried to ring him every ten minutes, with no success.

  Suddenly he answered. ‘Hellooo?’ ‘Darling! Thank goodness! Where were you?’

  ‘Asleep!’

  ‘I never thought of that. Have you got your sandwich?’ ‘I’ve eaten it.’

  ‘What, but that was meant for a mid-morning snack.’

  ‘Well I’ve eaten it, it was lovely.’

  He sounded very cheerful and together. I began to breathe more easily.

  ‘Leave it to the higher powers,’ my Al-Anon group had said and they were being proved right. In the departure lounge I rang again and he was in the car with Jemma speeding up the motorway to the Black Mountains. I felt calm and happy for the first time.

  At Bergerac, Sonie and Ernest are there to meet me, Sonie looking brown and beautiful in a blue and white dress. We drive though the luscious green countryside of the Dordogne Valley. Flowers of orange, purple, and crimson hang over the garden walls. The Vézère sparkled and lazed along under the bridges. Up the hill, through the meadows full of daisies till we arrive at La Melonie, the house with the blue doors and green shutters, bought by my father and mother back in the Sixties and now looked after by S and E. From the table under the tree we can see a red squirrel making its way down a branch. Hornets zoom about but seem more curious than hungry. As we sit down for a spread of melon, figs from the tree, cheese, stuffed courgettes and local wine, I glance at my mobile. Two messages are waiting. Both are from Jemma in an urgent voice asking me to ring her. The second one asking me to ring her as soon as possible. She hasn’t said that Corin’s ill so I’m trying not to be frightened when I call. The story is that Corin has somehow picked up the wrong case off the train and has thus lost all his clothes, his notebook with notes from Dr B’s session, his script for the BBC Turn of the Screw, and worst of all his medication. They have only just discovered this, three hours after arriving in Wales and it’s Bank Holiday with no chance of finding out anything until the following day when the bag might be returned to Bristol...

  Never in all my days of anxiety and dread about going away and what could happen, could I have dreamt up such a scenario. Ever resourceful, Jemma rang our doctor, found out what the medication was and managed to get the local chemist to give her enough for the weekend. Corin managed to buy a new pair of trousers, and I eventually collected the lost bag from Crewe station.

  Corin’s diary

  August 2008

  I’ve been staying in Wales for a week, with Jemma and Tim and their boys, Alfie and Gabe. In the evenings I read ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’. They seemed immensely moved by the Coleridge, and I felt wonderfully rewarded by their response.

  Kika’s Diary

  Saturday 11 October 2008

  I can say that in the three and a half years that followed this catastrophe, I have learned much from the events that unfolded; the compassion shown by the kind souls of Balham, shopkeepers and publicans as well as friends and neighbours. The creativity that endures despite the huge losses that occur is extraordinary. In brain injury I learned:

  That there are no answers. But they may emerge.

  The art of waiting/‘Things can change after lunch’. The art of forgiving yourself.

  That you will learn to take command of the situation and that very often you do know best...

  A week at the Bush and ‘Louise’

  I’m working on Bufonidae, a one-woman play by Bryony Lavery, which had been commissioned by the Bush Theatre.

  Kika’s diary

  Wednesday 15 October 2008

  Dress rehearsal and first night. Horrible fear which I’m trying to combat.

  My mobile rings in the dressing room. A message from our friend Bill Bingham, saying he’s had a great afternoon with Corin and has left him in the capable hands of Louise.

  Louise...??!! What? Who?

  All kinds of images assail me, Louise massaging him and giving him a blow job in the sitting room.

  Patricia, our temporary carer, is the next to ring, ‘He’s gone out with this woman and they’ve gone to the cashpoint, I’m trying to follow them...’

  I walk down the Goldhawk Road, script in one hand, mobile in the other. I can’t remember any text at all. I can only think of a young woman who is about to rob Corin, or seduce him.

  I dry very badly in the dress rehearsal but get through the first night without a prompt. After the show I go to the Polish restaurant with Josie O’Rourke, Artistic Director at the Bush, and her parents. I am happy. We never find out who Louise was and what actually happened, although Corin had drawn out £100 but had nothing the next day. I’m sure he picked her up in a pub and asked her round. He seemed unsure who she was, when asked, except that she might have been collecting for a jumble sale. She hasn’t turned up since. Although I’m rather hoping she will. I’m looking forward to hearing her story.

  Kika’s diary

  Sunday 19 October 2008

  We walk to the bookshop. When we go for a walk, Corin often walks on the opposite pavement. He doesn’t come into the shop and has a coffee outside on the way back. He doesn’t want to talk.

  ‘You aren’t enjoying this are you?’

  ‘Yes, yes, it’s lovely darling.’

  He is polite and smiling. Walking quite fast for him. Never complaining. Locked away. Locked away from me with his placating smile and affectionate words. All I can do is hold his hand, which is warm and comforting. We shuffle through the pile of yellow and red sycamore leaves, along the path.

  Kika’s diary

  Saturday 25 October 2008

  Vanessa gives a radiant last performance [in the Joan Didion play, The Year of Magical Thinking, at the National Theatre]. We all manage to get lost going back to her dressing room. When we get there, Carlo, Vanessa’s son, is offering sweet fairy cakes made by Lily and Jenny, his daughter and wife. Everyone else in the group has a wheat allergy and can’t eat them. So, being helpful, Corin and I end up eating them all.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  MARCH 2009

  Going On

  Corin’s diary

  Sunday 22 February 2009

  Jemma came for lunch and I showed her the winnings I received from last night’s bet. (Arsenal beat Milan i.e. £200.)

  Kika said I had a fall in the kitchen.

  Corin’s diary:

  Friday 6 March 2009

  I have just woken up at 3 p.m. I decided to come downstairs and write a diary saying that, as usual, I had no idea of what I had done in the morning, what I had earlier for lunch, whether I had read the paper etc., etc. That would have been normal. But the situation was sharper than that. I discovered that I have a public performance, of a play called The Trainer. It is co-written by composer Keith Burstein whom I have met, and therefore know. A little. But a public performance! A reading, I assume. I
, for certain, don’t know any of my parts, lines. I am to wear a suit, I am told, and shall have to wash my hair.

  Corin had forgotten that he had in fact produced Keith’s opera, Manifest Destiny, years earlier. The reading went very well, performed by a brilliant cast: Tim Piggott-Smith, Janie Dee, Roger Lloyd-Pack and Corin.

  We needed the sense of ‘going on’. Corin and I were both locked in separate sorrowful worlds. Petra had observed one day that nature had not left Corin with anguish, but there was no certainty of that. I was still afraid of opening up a possible sorrow that I might not be able to contain or help him with. In a way we both understood that we couldn’t risk damaging each other. We lived another sort of life, on a simpler level and kinder, with less expectation. I was struck by something Mark Thomas said about his father in a radio interview; ‘we were learning to live with what we have of one another’. My analysis was strengthening me. I was getting better at dealing with my sorrow, rage and self-pity, able to be kinder to myself and that meant I was able to be kinder to Corin. Theatre was our consolation. The expression ‘Doctor Theatre’, a phrase used by all actors when ill, was never so true.