by Diana Athill
But oddly enough I was not responsible for the worst accident I ever had – so bad that I still marvel at being alive – which happened earlier in this same year. The M11, where it bypasses Newmarket, has three lanes, and as with most three-lane motorways, the slow lane is so full of heavy vehicles travelling on the slow side of 70 m.p.h. that few cars use it, so in the other two lanes there is nothing to check the traffic from moving rather faster than it ought to, nearer to 80 m.p.h. than 70. I, on my familiar journey between London and Norfolk, was cheerfully buzzing along in the middle lane, not trying to overtake anything but simply going faster in the faster stream, and thus passing the heavy vehicles on my left. Just as my nose came level with the tail-end of one of them (not, thank god, one of the monsters), without having indicated its intention, it started to swing into the middle lane. Either I had to hit it, or I had to swerve into the fast lane. I can’t say I made a decision, I didn’t have time, I simply followed instinct and swerved. Whereupon crash! A car coming on fast in the fast lane hit me. For what seemed minutes but must have been only seconds I was sandwiched between the two vehicles, ricochetting from one to the other, then I suppose the lorry braked and the other vehicle pulled ahead. I had a flash of ‘That’s better!’ then blank horror: my car had gone out of control and what I did with my steering wheel had become utterly irrelevant, I was spinning across the width of the motorway, zig, zag, whoosh, a complete pirouette, the shoulder coming towards me, grass, thank god it’s grass, and there I was on it, facing the wrong way, and the traffic roared on. Not a single other vehicle had been touched.
The lorry didn’t stop. The car that hit me did, and its driver’s husband walked back – they had to go on some distance before being able to cross the traffic and park – to exchange addresses and insurance companies, and he was concerned and kind. By the time he reached me my greatest piece of luck (after surviving and not having caused a god-awful pile-up) had brought me an ambulance driver and his mate, who had been coming on behind and had seen the whole thing. They not only stopped, but called the police for me and then stayed with me until they came, a long half-hour. ‘Someone up there is watching out for you,’ said the driver in an awestruck voice. He also said I’d handled it well, but really all I’d done was hung on grimly and refrained from braking. It was a baking hot day, the roar and stink of the traffic was hideous, and I can’t think how, in my state of shock, I would have got through that half-hour on that narrow shoulder without the presence of those two kind men. I am still miserable at the fact that because I was in shock it never occurred to me to ask for their names and addresses.
After the first policeman arrived I slowly became able to see in a distant kind of way that it was becoming funny. He took a statement from the ambulance driver, which spared me from having to attempt a description, then said that he must get the traffic stopped so that my car could be turned round. (Because there had been no head-on impact its chassis was undamaged and it was still movable, though it was badly bashed on both sides and its near front wheel was askew. It was to emerge from being repaired as good as new.) He then tried to use his radio, and it didn’t work. Never mind, he said, here comes a colleague, and another police car drew up – and his radio didn’t work either, greatly embarrassing both of them. But when a third policeman arrived, this one on a motorbike, and his proved just as useless, it dawned on all of us that we must be in a blank spot where there was no reception. From then on, at every stage of the drama – stopping the traffic, starting it up again, summoning the AA (in vain – they deal only with breakdowns, not accidents), finding a firm in Newmarket to tow in and repair the car – the unfortunate bike man had over and over again to speed to the nearest roundabout ahead, turn to speed to the nearest roundabout astern, then turn to speed back to us, all in order to make radio calls, because it seemed that they all relied on their radio equipment so trustingly that they carried no mobiles. I was there on that shoulder for over an hour and a half before a breakdown van arrived to convey me to the repair works in Newmarket.
Once there, I realized that I was feeling distinctly unwell: shock had turned into a general physical malaise. Offered a courtesy car, I accepted it because I was still fifty-odd miles from my destination, but I was not at all sure that I would be able to drive it. There was something quite unreal about standing in that quiet office where people addressed me as though I were a normal customer, while in fact I was someone who ought to be a dead body trapped in a tangle of metal probably surrounded by a number of other dead or damaged bodies in similar tangles. I felt apologetic for being so oddly unreal, although no one seemed to be noticing.
Then, suddenly, Mrs Mattocks and her first-aid classes over sixty years ago, at the beginning of the war, loomed into my mind: our district nurse, very stout (my brother and I referred to her, alas, as Mrs Buttocks), whose task it was to prepare the village for invasion. Mrs Mattocks always said that in cases of shock by far the best thing was Hot Sweet Tea … and what was that in the corner of the office where I was stranded? A tea-making machine, with little envelopes of sugar in a paper cup beside it. Of course they allowed me to make myself a cup of tea, into which I put four envelopes of sugar – and Mrs Mattocks had been perfectly right! Halfway through that cup, click, and I came together. By the time it was finished I felt normal. Once in my courtesy car, I drove carefully and slowly but without a qualm. And from then on that horrible accident had so little effect on my nerves that now I say to myself, ‘With nerves as strong as that you can go on driving for at least another year. After all, the scars so far have been only on my car, not on people.’
11
WHEN YOU BEGIN discussing old age you come up against reluctance to depress either others or yourself, so you tend to focus on the more agreeable aspects of it: coming to terms with death, the continuing presence of young people, the discovery of new pursuits and so on. But I have to say that a considerable part of my own old time is taken up by doing things or (worse) failing to do things for people older, or if not older, less resistant to age, than myself. Because not everyone ages at the same rate, it is probable that eventually most people will either have to do some caring, or be cared for, and although the former must be preferable to the latter, I don’t think I am unusual in having failed to understand in advance that even the preferable alternative is far from enjoyable. Or perhaps that is just my reaction to it. There certainly are unselfish people with a bent for caring to whom it seems to come more naturally. But I can speak only for those like myself, to whom it doesn’t.
It is with Barry that this has become apparent – also, to a certain extent, with my oldest friend, Nan Taylor, who died recently, but with her I was one of a team of friends who rallied round, so although it lasted for two years or so it was never full-time. With Barry, it is, or ought to be.
He and I met in 1960, when he was still married and wishing he wasn’t. This was not because he didn’t love his wife, but because he had become sure of something he had always suspected and had foolishly attempted to ignore: he is temperamentally unfitted for marriage. He detests possessing and being possessed, not just in theory but with every atom of his being. Convinced that he didn’t love his wife less because of liking, or even loving, other women, he was unable to feel that she was reasonable when she disagreed with him, thus forcing him to deceive her, which he disliked doing. A typical unfaithful husband, in fact, though with a stronger than usual conviction of being in the right, so sure was he that an over-riding need to be someone’s One and Only is neurotic, unwholesome and the cause of many ills.
And I, at the age of forty-three (eight years older than he) felt much the same. I had turned my back with a good deal of relief on romantic love, and I had become so used to not being married that only with difficulty, and without enthusiasm, could I imagine the alternative. We came together, therefore, with no thought of marriage, simply because we liked and were physically attracted to each other, and agreed with each other about what made good writing and acti
ng (Barry wrote plays), both of us valuing clarity and naturalness above all. We had a lot to talk about together in those days, and when he said to me that if he and his wife ever did break up, the one thing he was sure of was that he would never marry again, I remember feeling relieved: I needn’t feel guilt! It was even a comfort to know that for now, anyway, there was someone else there to wash his shirts and feed him – I could enjoy all the plums of love without having to wade through the pudding. I marvelled at having gone through so much of the froth and flurry of romantic loving in my youth, when it had now become apparent that being the Other Woman suited me so very well. Our relationship gradually became firmer and firmer, more and more obviously likely to endure, but it never changed from being more like a loving friendship than an obsession.
Finally the marriage did break up (not because of me, though for reasons of convenience I agreed to being cited as the cause) and Barry set about living on his own, at which he was very bad. I can no longer remember exactly how and why he moved in to share my flat – it made little difference to the amount we were seeing of each other – but I think it was after we had stopped being lovers. Yes: piecing together scraps of memory in a way that would be tedious to go into, I am sure it was. But because there was such a gradual move from love affair into settled companionship, it is no longer possible for me to date this.
What I can date, however, is the much later beginning of Barry’s illness. It was in January 2002. In fact he had begun to be diabetic some time earlier, with the less acute form of diabetes which strikes in old age, but at first he was unaware of it and then the doctor he happened to consult made light of it, telling him not to worry because it could easily be controlled by medication and a sensible diet. The only parts of that advice he heeded were ‘not to worry’ and ‘medication’. He assured himself and me that all he need do was take his pill and forget about it, that was what Doctor X had said. Doctor X. Given what happened later, it is lucky for her, my publisher and me that I have genuinely forgotten her name. Barry had got himself onto her books before we were living together, when his health was fine, and had decided he liked her. And I, knowing nothing about diabetes except that in its acute form the patient is dependent on insulin injections so what a relief that this was not going to be necessary for Barry, was happy to let him potter along in what I didn’t realize was his folly.
Why I failed to recognize his folly was because, except for one emergency which had been dealt with by his wife, I had never known him in anything but excellent health. Not so much as a cold, or a headache, or an attack of indigestion, had he ever had in my experience of him. It is true that his attitude to illness in others was simplistic: ‘Is it cancer?’, ‘Is he going to die?’, ‘Is he in pain?’ were his inevitable questions, and reassured on those points he would dismiss the matter. But it took me quite a while to see that when he himself had to consult a doctor all he paid attention to was the question of pain, which he was less able to tolerate than anyone else I have ever known. If he is hurting, then he becomes frantic for the doctor to stop it. ‘Give me morphine!’ he insists, and considers the withholding of it an outrage. This, it turned out, was because the one, wife-attended emergency, a twisted gut, had caused him agony, which was eased only when a friend from his days as an undergraduate at Cambridge, who had become a doctor, smuggled him some morphine which not only plunged him into blissful comfort, but also cured him – or so it seemed. So now, if something hurts, he will demand morphine, but any other kind of problem he can’t bring himself to think about. As soon as a doctor, or nurse, or anyone else starts giving him advice about diet, or explaining any kind of treatment other than the simply analgesic, he visibly switches off. Something inside him decides: ‘This is going to be boring, even disagreeable advice, so I shan’t listen.’ And that’s that.
He didn’t keep up the pottering for long. Early in January 2002 Doctor X sent him up to the Royal Free Hospital for some kind of minor intervention on his penis, and two days later his waterworks seized up. This process I shall not describe, for which you should be grateful. It is an excruciating business, which involved us in a midnight run by ambulance to Accident and Emergency, where we had a four-hour wait, Barry in increasing agony, before a doctor appeared to put him on a catheter … on which, for a complexity of reasons, he was to remain for three months before the simple operation on his prostate gland which would end that particular trouble (which was not cancer) was performed. It doesn’t take long for anyone on a catheter to learn that the basic discomfort and humiliation is the least of it, because painful infections become frequent. We were soon miserably accustomed to those emergency ambulance runs and those grim hours in Accident and Emergency, but nothing was more appalling than when, having at last called him in for his operation, they then cancelled it at the last minute on the grounds that his heart was not up to it (grounds which luckily, but mysteriously, vanished later), and sent him home without a word as to what was to happen next. Unable to get any information from the hospital, I called Dr X in desperation, asking, ‘But is he going to have to continue on a catheter for the rest of his life?’ To which she replied: ‘Poor Barry. It does sometimes happen, I’m afraid.’
Weeks later, we learnt that a letter from the hospital about Barry’s treatment was lying unopened on her desk. What was going on there we never discovered, but from our point of view she, our only hope, was simply fading away. For some time, when I went to her surgery to collect his diabetes pills, they were forthcoming – there was even a short time when I thought what a nice surgery it was compared to my own doctor’s, never any wait, without asking myself why there was hardly ever anyone there but me! Then, if one needed to see her, the answer would be: ‘Doctor’s not in today, perhaps if you tried tomorrow afternoon.’ If you asked could you see her partner instead: ‘I’m afraid he is out on a call.’ And so on and so on, until the day when the answer came as an hysterical-sounding shriek: ‘There is no doctor at this surgery.’ At which point I was able to persuade Barry that he would be better off under my own doctor. Not that it got him any nearer his operation.
Given three months of the National Health at its groggiest plus Dr X, both Barry and I were eventually reduced to the condition of zombies – and we were reasonably alert and well-informed old people. What it would have done to less privileged oldies, heaven knows. We ceased to believe that anything we did or said could do any good; no one was ever going to tell us anything, and if they did we would be fools to believe them; so we sank into doing nothing, just sitting there miserably waiting for who knew what. It was our beloved Sally who rescued us. It was she who came up to London, called the consultant’s Harley Street number and made an appointment for Barry as a private patient. And my word, the difference £225 can make! The mysterious figure protected by a flock of white coats, vanishing round distant corners of corridors, became a pleasant and reassuring man ready to answer all our questions with lucid explanations. No no no, of course Barry was not going to remain on a catheter for ever, that hardly ever happened and he was sure it wouldn’t do so in this case. The delay was simply because he was not going to operate without further consultation with the cardiac specialist so that he could decide between using a normal anaesthetic or an epidural, and the cardiac specialist happened to be away on his holiday and would not be back for another three weeks. Only when we got home after that meeting did it occur to me that this was an amazingly long holiday. Sitting face to face with the consultant our gratitude for having questions answered as though we were rational adults was so extreme that we ceased to be anything of the sort. The humiliations of illness go deep: we didn’t cease to be zombies, we just became, for the moment, happy zombies.
The three weeks became nearer five, and very long weeks they were – long enough to include fretful telephone calls (when the consultant announced that he was going to operate tomorrow, he added pettishly ‘I was going to operate tomorrow anyway, it’s nothing to do with those telephone calls’, which instantly made
me suppose that it was). And it was successful, though the wound took several weeks to heal and a few more infections had to be fought off. But Barry has never recovered his health.
While all this was going on I did something I had never done before. I kept a diary. It was written in fat chunks with long gaps in between, not day by day, so it is more retrospective than diaries usually are, and it gives a better picture of what happened to our relationship than anything I could write now.
I can’t remember whether, at the beginning of Barry and me, I felt a passing scruple at taking up so quickly and enthusiastically with yet another married man. I suppose I may have done. But I can remember quite clearly thinking what a comfort it was that he had a nice, competent wife to look after him, so I needn’t ever worry on his behalf. And when, after Mary kicked him out, he ended up living with me, the ‘not-having-to-take-care’ didn’t change much. By then we’d gone off the boil sexually and he was even less keen than I was about ‘marriedness’, so it was more like friends deciding to share a flat than the setting-up of a ménage. There was never, for instance, any question of my doing his washing, and he was always ready to share the cooking. In recent years, when his eccentricities began to take over to the extent of sometimes being a bit of a bore, and mine the same no doubt, all we had to do was drift gently into going even more our own ways, so it has never been claustrophobic. I think it must be quite rare for a relationship to be as enjoyable as ours was for the first eight years or so, and simultaneously so undemanding. And then for the undemandingness to continue contentedly for the next forty-odd years!
And then – this prostate trouble. Although the habit of not looking after him was ingrained – well, you just can’t disregard the seizing up of someone’s urinary system. That dreadful night when we had to dial 999 for the emergency ambulance plunged us into a situation where looking after just had to be done.
