The class, although it finds Sally Lyttelton irritating, is also proud to have her as a member. She raises the tone. Josephine finds herself wondering whether Sally will write the required 1,000-word assignment, or whether she will assume that those requirements don’t apply to her.
Last year Betty Figueroa had written an excellent and original little essay on Conrad’s narrative technique. Betty, in her late eighties, a brave and now presumably lonely old leftie of the old school, had worked for many years as a nurse with the P&O line, and was full of interesting stories (always offered tentatively, in her hesitant and light and surprisingly youthful voice) about life at sea, from the long-ago days of the long voyage to the Antipodes to the more recent age of the luxury cruise, and she was old enough to remember an age before the fax and the phone, when communications to land and other vessels were slow and sometimes misleading.(As, she pointed out, they were in the novels of Conrad.) She was a good reader, although/because she had had no formal literary training. She was something of a mystery, with her unexpected range of allusions and her loyal trade union politics, and Josephine imagined for her a romantic past, but could not give any shape to what this past might have been.
Betty’s old age shines with the aura of a lived life. A tragic love affair, a long intercontinental romance, a secret adventure, a double life? Maybe she had been a spy? Like Conrad, she knew the Far East, she knew Australia, she had travelled the wide world, and now lives alone in a ground-floor flat in Cherry Hinton. Unlike Sally Lyttelton, she is self-contained, undemanding, fortifying. She is valuable to Josephine, and is valued.
There they all are, with their poem print-outs. (She does urge them to buy Mr Nye’s poems, or at least to take them out of the library, but it’s more practical to photocopy them.) Some of them keep them tidily in folders, others crumple them up in their handbags or shopping bags. Ellen Musgrave has a ring folder which she keeps in a wholesome hessian bag with an apple design on it; Mr Pennington always brings his battered briefcase; and young Irene Lipmann (who looks after a much older husband with Alzheimer’s) can never find anything and often has to borrow poems and pencils from fellow students. Josephine knows them and does not know them, as they know and do not know her: Maureen, Deborah, Mavis, Sheila, Peter, Tanisha, Gordon, Kasha, Mr Pennington, Celine . . . She has tried to learn their names, as she does with every class, but resorts to reminding them to write their names in felt tip on folded stand-up stiff card labels and to place the labels in front of them every Tuesday morning, because there are always one or two that elude her, often in a transparently discriminatory way – the quiet one who will not speak, the indistinguishably generic everyday old person, the woman who will never meet her eye. You couldn’t mistake or forget a Sally or a Betty, but some of them blur and merge. Yet each brings to the room a hinterland, a history, a long sequence of events and decisions that have brought them here, together. Jo continues to be moved by the mystery of this communion.
What does it mean to them, this Tuesday morning? Is it just a way of passing time in company? Or do some of them feel, as she does, the surviving force and power of the poems and the plays and the novels they read, a force and a power and a solace that they in the fact and in the act of reading release and disimprison, forces that utterly transcend this institutional room and the plastic cups and the water machine and the coffee dispenser that so often goes wrong? She is sometimes tempted to judge harshly the narrow word-bound horizons of her friend Owen, but she is just the same as him, she too lives in and for words, for the words of others. Other men’s flowers. ‘These are other men’s flowers, only the string that binds them is my own.’ That’s overly modest Montaigne. She used to have more faith in the absolute value of words, of literature, and it is only now, towards the end of life, that she questions, that she senses a diminishing. And yet here she still is, still packaging words for others, providing the string, the ring folders, the photocopies. On Tuesday mornings.
As a child, she had dreamed she might be a writer. She had written poems and stories, as children do, publishing in the school magazine, surreptitiously entering competitions, submitting to and being rejected by Sunday newspapers and literary periodicals. She never really thought she’d be able to make it, so aware was she of the gulf that separated her juvenile attempts from the grandeur of the writers she most admired, so she was not cast down by failure. Her progressive plate-glass university simultaneously knocked her literary ambitions out of her by sharpening her critical faculties and by weakening her respect for the commercial world of ‘publishing’: she became a reader rather than a writer, a teacher rather than a creator and, when her husband’s academic migrations permitted, she committed herself to the luxury of little essays into arcane interpretation. She never wanted to write about the great ones: she wanted to read them, sometimes with others. To share them, as the jargon goes. She was, is, good at that. She likes to read in company.
Towards the end of the class, Sheila Rookwood says she would like to read out one of her own poems, a poem inspired by the theme of their discussions. She asks if she may. In principle Josephine discourages this kind of departure, because that is not what her course is for; if people want to read their poetry aloud to other students, they should go to a creative writing class. (Josephine is sceptical of the value of such classes, although she has been persuaded to see that they have an important social role.) But in practice she allows it. Nobody in this group is likely to abuse a time slot, apart from Sally Lyttelton, who is a special case. She has had groups with one or two crazy and noisy participants, with no sense of the limits of other people’s interest or tolerance, but those gathered here this morning are all polite people, mutually supportive. They will listen to Sheila’s poem, which she promises is short.
Sheila herself is short: petite, diminutive. She’s quite young, in her early sixties, and full of a bright and engaging energy. She works part-time at Addenbrooke’s Hospital, and spends most of the rest of her time looking after a mother with dementia. Her Tuesday mornings, she has told Josephine, are her respite, her refuge, her care home. She is elf-like, with a pointed chin and thin arched eyebrows and huge, grey, slightly protuberant eyes, which she enhances with mascara and eye-liner and eye-shadow of novel shades. The damage around her eyes is grave, but she does not cease boldly to accentuate them. She usually wears coloured leggings and over them tunic or smock-like garments, sometimes with elaborately and jokily uneven hemlines. Peter Pan, not Wendy. Everybody likes Sheila Rookwood.
Her poem is about dementia.
Midway up the stair, she stops.
She has forgotten why she is here.
Is she going up, or is she going down?
She has forgotten.
I summon to this ancient winding stair
She cannot move.
She calls for her daughter.
She calls for her daughter.
Mamma, mamma, she cries.
For her daughter.
And crazy Jane
Crazy Sheila
Crazy Mamma
Crazy daughter
Weeping, arm in arm descend the stair.
It’s not a very good poem, as a poem, but it’s affecting and the group listens respectfully. Josephine, who had never been very close to her own mother, has always been disturbed by reports of the very old calling for their long-dead mothers on their deathbeds, partly because she knows that however demented she may become, she won’t be doing that, and she hopes that her children, in their turn, won’t be calling for her. She hopes and believes that Nat and Andrew have grown up and cut free.
Sheila has told the class stories about her mother’s erratic behaviour, making light of it, making fun of it – the stubbornness over items of clothing, the obsession with putting her cosmetics in the refrigerator as though they were perishable snacks, the mislaid brassiere discovered in the depths of her handbag, the puzzled attempts to eat soup with a knife and fork, the inappropriate responses to items of news on the telev
ision. But there is nothing funny about standing on a staircase, lost in your own home.
Yeats’s ‘Dialogue of Self and Soul’ is one of the greatest poems in the English language, and Josephine is glad she included it and its winding ancient stair in the reading list. And why should Sheila not pay homage to it? Yeats’s aristocratic vision might not have encompassed this small ageing hardworking middle-class English woman, bravely battling on and fighting a fight which all shall lose, amidst the accoutrements, not of ancient scabbards and faded ensigns and flowering, silken, old embroidery, but of incontinence pads, medication packs, liquidised vegetables and alarm buttons. But here Sheila is, speaking to Yeats, encompassing Yeats. Yeats has comforted Sheila more than the carer’s guide to dementia that she bought, in desperation, a book which referred to the care object as a ‘piglet’ – an acronym for the ‘Person I Give Love and Endless Therapy To’. Sheila has confided to Josephine that she cannot think of her mother in those terms. The tips in the book are useful, but the language is undignified. Her mother is still a human being, an old woman, albeit demented, not a piglet, not a nursery rhyme toy.
As she unlocks her bike from the alley railings and sets off to the University Library and the diaries of Valentine Studdert Meade, Josephine receives a clear image of her friend Fran climbing the punitive concrete stairwell with her briefcase and her shopping bags, a visitation followed swiftly by an image of Fran’s husband Claude Stubbs, Claude the Knife. She hasn’t seen Claude much over the years but she’d seen a lot of him when she was living in Romley, when her husband Alec was in his first teaching post at Romley Polytechnic, a post which, against the odds, had proved a springboard to a good career. Claude too had moved on from Romley to better things. Claude had made several passes at her in the old days, as children were ferried backwards and forwards across the couple of miles between their homes, from tea parties, from excursions to the boring overfed old ducks in the park, from mutual child-minding sessions, but she had never had time to succumb. Just as well, probably, but he had been attractive, in a saturnine and incipiently fleshly way. He wasn’t a bad man, Claude, but Fran was certainly better off without him.
Not that she was without him. She was still cooking him plated meals. Fran must get something out of this arrangement, but Josephine was not sure what it might be.
Claude Stubbs, reclining on his comfortable bed of pain, and comfortably high on his plumped pillows, has just been watching, for the second time, a clip of a newly acquired biopic about his beloved, with quotes from various interviews conducted over her lifetime. He has Callas on many a CD and DVD, in many roles, but he also has some sequences of her as herself. Here she is speaking about the death of the great love of her life, Ari Onassis, and she declaims, he interprets it, tragically, ‘Da allora un giorno in più era, per fortuna, un giorno in meno.’
This sentence deeply intrigues him. His opera Italian is not good, but passable, and he recognises and in isolation understands every single word of this utterance, but what can it mean? At the age of fifty-three the diva died young, by today’s standards, but of what? A heart attack? A broken heart? Boredom? Suicide? Dermatomyositis? Precipitate weight loss? Of the sadness of not being able to sing anymore? We do not know. She was full of cortisone and immunosuppressants, as Claude himself is full of steroids and Chablis and psilocybin. She was a tragic heroine in her own drama, but it was a drama of slow (though not so very slow) decline, not a drama of sudden death. Thus died Brünnhilde, Norma, Medea, Tosca, Violetta, Elisabetta, Euridice . . .
Ari Onassis had died, probably unnecessarily, of a botched gallbladder operation.
Claude thinks that what she was saying was that ‘from then on, one day more was, fortunately, one day less’. She was saying that she rejoiced at the death of each day for she no longer wished to live. She saw the rest of her life without Onassis and without her singing voice as a fixed sentence to be endured. She could cross the days off the calendar, as she approached the goal of death from the jail of life.
There had not been so many of them, for she did not long survive Onassis. But long enough to know despair. Claude has counted them. He has counted out her days.
The thought of her prowling angrily and desperately, lonely and bored and abandoned to grief, month after month, around her Paris apartment (for so he knows it must have been) fills him with an emotion that is not unlike pleasure. In those last two years of her life, in those dragging months and weeks and days, counting out the terrible hours, she had belonged to nobody, she had wanted nobody, she had had everything, she had lost everything, she had nothing left to desire on earth, and therefore she belonged to Claude Stubbs as much as to anyone, she was his for the imagining, his for the taking, for she was nobody’s. She had entered the dark antechamber of the void amidst the crimson drapes and fluted columns, behind the iron grille and the curtained window. Every day a day the less.
Claude does not think about his own approaching death in this dramatic manner. He is stoic and calm and philosophical and has made himself as comfortable as possible. But he is glad that Callas was able to project all this terminal passion and grief for him, in her last bitterness as well as in her triumphant prime. She had acted out the glory. She was the very body of the glory. He doesn’t have to go through all that. That’s what opera is for, that’s what theatre is for, that’s what art is for. It spares us the effort. It shows forth what we don’t have to go through.
Claude recognises that many find it hard to step back, to retire, to give up. His first wife Fran seems unable to stop running around, and he concedes that some of what she does may even be useful, and serve purposes other than merely keeping her busy. He was himself relieved when he completed his last operation and laid down his shining sterile silver tools forever. He had taken retirement at the proper age, but he had already had enough. He didn’t yearn to go on and on chopping people up, as some of his colleagues appear to do. He didn’t like the new keyhole and laser technology; he didn’t want to have to go on retraining and retraining, at his age. He’d made a few mistakes in his time, as was only normal, and although he’d never been reproached for them, even by the relatives of the victims, he knew towards the end that he’d had enough. He didn’t want to make a bosh of things, to go out with a bad legacy. He’d like respectful obituaries in the right places, please.
I’m dying a good death, thinks Claude complacently, as he switches off Callas and returns to Classic FM.
After a cheerful burst of Vivaldi, there’s a newsflash about yet another ageing showbiz paedophile appearing in court. Fascinating, this new pandemic of child abuse.
He’s been intrigued by all these late-life arrests, by all these revelations of what they now call ‘historic’ abuse, by the sniffing and grubbing after offences committed thirty years ago. While he’s always proudly considered himself a bit of a lecher, he had luckily never fancied underage kiddies, and has never had to resort to underhand means. He’s been very up-front, very overt, in his overtly carnal way. (Persephone would, he was sure, testify that he has never been underhand or oblique in his approaches.) He’s intrigued, as is Fran, by the idea that you should call no man happy until he is dead, and is wondering now, as she has wondered, whether it makes any difference to your lifetime happiness if your reputation is about to be posthumously destroyed, as was entertainer Jimmy Savile’s. It can’t, logically, because when you’re dead you’re dead, and, as you don’t believe in an afterlife, you won’t know anything about it. But it may cast a backward shadow before you die? A proleptic tremor? You may worry in old age that the bad stuff will come out later and upset your family.
People do care, on their deathbeds, deeply, about their reputations, their fame, their legacy, their obituaries, about what happens next. He’s seen a lot of that. Vanity and doubt, doubt and vanity. He’s been close to those last shameful worldly torments.
He had a dubious celebrity patient once, a surgical success story at the time, although dead now of other causes. Claude
had had his suspicions about this character. Although not a censorious man, he had thought this chap flash and fishy. He was a singer, of sorts, and an entertainer, of sorts: not the kind of music Claude had ever cared for, but teenagers had gone wild for it. Christopher and Poppet had known about Jax, and were impressed when the time came that their father was about to carve him up. The public image of Jax Conan had been ubiquitous and inescapable, and the private hospital in which Claude had cut out some of his larynx had been thrilled to have him there. He was an international star. Fans had mobbed the ugly forecourt, security guards had patrolled the side streets, police had been summoned to keep the peace. The private hospital loved that kind of publicity. Photographers from the pavement had aimed their zooms at the windows of what they hoped was his private suite.
Jax had been a strangely glittering figure, dressed (though not in the consulting room) in silver spangles and flounces, in purples and in reds, his ink-black shoulder-length hair cut off at a fierce Red Indian angle and his false empurpled lashes encrusted and bejewelled. But to Claude he wasn’t very convincing. He was neither camp nor kitsch. He wasn’t gay and he wasn’t straight. He was a creep, and now of course, retrospectively, although well dead, revealed as a specimen of a classic 1970s showbiz paedophile. At the time, Claude hadn’t known that that was what he was, because the category, as a category, didn’t yet exist. And he still hasn’t been outed by the press, because what would be the point? He’s dead, and it’s not easy to get money out of a dead estate.
The Dark Flood Rises Page 13
