An Education

by Lynn Barber

  Meanwhile we read ‘the book’. The book was a substantial plastic-bound manual called Your bone-marrow transplant. It was a model of clarity – and, reading it, how I longed for obfuscation! David actually shook the first time he read it. I could never read it through – I would open a page at random and put it down, feeling sick. It listed all the drugs he would have to take and their terrible side effects – nausea, hair loss, hives, mouth ulcers, diarrhoea, debilitation. Basically, he had to take a long course of toxic drugs to kill his own immune system before they could introduce the donor bone marrow, and there was a very dangerous week in the middle of the transplant when he would have no immunity at all.

  Luke went for tests as soon as David told him, but we had to wait two weeks for the results. Cruelly, on a Friday UCH rang to say they had got the results and what was Luke's phone number to tell him? He was out filming all day (he is a cameraman), his mobile was switched off. Oh please, please, I cried, tell us the results. But protocol demanded that they must tell the donor first, and they never got hold of Luke that Friday so we spent the weekend in suspense. Or rather, I spent it in suspense while David, again, was eerily patient. ‘Don't you want to know,’ I raged, ‘whether you're going to live or die? I'd be just a bit curious myself! How can you fake this stupid indifference?’ I think actually it wasn't indifference but pessimism: he fully expected bad news, as he always expected bad news; he wanted another two days of hope.

  On Monday, we got the results – Luke was a perfect match, the bone-marrow transplant could go ahead. But, they said, they still wanted to test Charles as ‘back up’. This meant waiting two more weeks till Charles returned from Papua New Guinea. David again seemed quite happy to wait, while I was climbing the walls with impatience. Why did they need to bother with Charles? He might not want to be a donor – he was diabetic and had his own health problems – also he lived in Hampshire, so it was a slog for him to come to UCH. But when he eventually got back to England and David told him, he was fine, and trotted off to UCH to be tested. He was found to be a perfect match too – in fact he was mysteriously deemed to be an even more perfect match than Luke. So he would be the prime donor, and Luke the ‘back-up’, whatever that meant.

  Only at this point did David say, laughing, ‘So they are my brothers after all!’ I was too shocked to speak. We had been married for over thirty years and only now did I discover that David had always thought what I had always thought – that maybe he was not his father's son. It was quite a reasonable suspicion because David was dark and Jewish-looking like his mother, whereas his brothers were blond and English-looking like their father. Also he was born in 1944, when his father was away fighting the war so it was not impossible, I thought, that Leonora had had a fling in his absence. I remember when I first met David's family, I wondered if I dared broach this suspicion to David, but I never did, and then of course forgot about it until what had been a question of mild historic interest became suddenly urgent in the face of the bone-marrow tests. But obviously David had been worrying about it all along – that was why he was so slow to ask Luke to get tested.

  What a lot I was learning after thirty years of marriage! I now knew that my husband hated abroad, and had suspected all his life that he was not his father's son. I've always been a great believer in the essential unknowability of other people, but it seems a bit bad not to know such things about your husband. But there was a deep substratum of emotion connected with his family that I had never understood – childhood sludge that had lain almost undisturbed throughout our marriage suddenly swirled and sent up gloopy bubbles from the murk. Why was he so reluctant to tell his father about his illness? He said it was because he didn't want to worry Maurice, but I sometimes wondered if it was because he was afraid Maurice would not be worried enough. He put off telling Maurice from month to month, and said what was the point of telling him? But then, I always thought, what was the point of not telling him? He would have to know eventually. David couldn't disappear into hospital for weeks (we were told six weeks minimum) without his father noticing.

  Ever since his mother died, David had been in the habit of visiting his father in Oxford at least once a fortnight. They had lunch together and visited churches or went for walks in the Chilterns. Occasionally I went too, but David seemed to prefer going alone. But increasingly, as the weeks wore on, I noticed that he seemed to come back from these visits with a heavier and heavier load of resentment – he complained that Maurice was completely self-obsessed, and only talked about his own ailments, his dodgy knee, his occasional toothache. David seemed to think that Maurice should have somehow ‘known’ that he was ill. But how could Maurice know unless David told him? I urged him again and again to tell his father, but he said it would be better to tell him when we knew the date of the transplant, when all the uncertainties were resolved. And, he told me, I had no right to interfere – it was his illness, his father. So we spent an uneasy family Christmas, with everyone, even Luke's teenage children, knowing about David but Maurice still in the dark, still talking about his dodgy knee, his twinges of toothache. David accused me of rolling my eyes at dinner. Maybe I did.

  A few days later, when we were staying with friends in Yorkshire for New Year, my parents rang to say that their cottage had been flooded, for the second time that winter. I drove down to Wiltshire to collect them and then back to London. I got so bored with them yakking on about their flooding that I snapped, ‘Listen, I have something important to tell you. Mum, put your hearing aid in. I SAID PUT YOUR HEARING AID IN. David has a very serious illness. He has to have a bone-marrow transplant. They said there's a ten per cent chance it will kill him.’ That shut them up and we spent the rest of the drive in silence. I felt quite pleased with myself.

  Punishment came a few days later when my father announced that, in view of David's illness, they had decided to sell their cottage. (Don't look for any rhyme or reason – we are in Dick Barber territory.) He was going to ring an estate agent immediately and put it on the market. This was in January, when the cottage was still ankle-deep in water, with sandbags at the door, looking as bad as it was possible for a chocolate-box thatched cottage to look. I urged patience – couldn't he wait just a couple of months, till the water had receded, till the spring bulbs and apple blossom came out, till the cottage looked beautiful again instead of bedraggled? No, no – no time like the present. My father's insane impatience was an exact counterpoint to David's insane patience – and I was driven demented by them both. I tried an appeal to pity – ‘Dad, I've got enough on my plate right now, can't you just wait till David's sorted out?’ ‘No, no, can't hang about’ – and within a week he'd sold the cottage to a passing builder for £50,000 less than the estate agent said it was worth.

  Of course he had not thought about where they would live but said airily, ‘We'll rent somewhere. Or we could stay in a hotel.’

  ‘In London?’ I trembled.

  ‘Good God no, not London,’ he roared. ‘We couldn't live in London with all that noise.’ This was delivered at his usual shouting-from-a-ship-in-high-seas volume, then, for my mother's benefit, ‘I SAID WE COULDN'T LIVE IN LONDON WITH ALL THE NOISE.’

  ‘OF COURSE NOT,’ she screeched. ‘ALL THAT TRAFFIC!’ Actually they could have lived in the middle of Spaghetti Junction without hearing a thing but fine, London was too noisy – and a weight off my mind. Now all I had to do was find them a place to rent. I trawled the internet and rang up estate agents, but found that landlords are not too keen on letting cottages to couples in their late eighties, one of whom is blind and the other arthritic. But meanwhile their cleaner had somehow found them a smart newbuilt house in Nun-ton, near Salisbury, and, by the time they told me, they'd already signed the lease and organised the move.

  David went down to help on moving day and wept when they drove away from Ebbesborne Wake – he loved the place. My parents never gave it a backward glance. They had lived there for twenty years but off with the old, on with the new. Months later th
ey proudly showed me an estate agent's ad for the cottage – except that it was now called a ‘Lodge’ and marooned in a sea of gravel, with no trace of a mossed cottage tree or rambling rose anywhere. The side lawn where I counted the fritillaries every year was covered with paving. ‘They've done it up real nice,’ my parents said proudly.

  And then another disaster out of the blue – our dear friend Richard died. His partner Hugh found him dead in bed when he took him his morning tea. Hugh rang me distraught and I turned up on his Hampstead doorstep just as the police were arriving – apparently they have to investigate any sudden death. They were polite but I suddenly realised why civil partnerships are necessary – they addressed all their questions to me as if Hugh did not exist. I said, ‘But Hugh is his flatmate, he's lived with Richard for twenty-five years.’ But still with every question, they turned to me – When did Richard last visit his GP? Had he complained of any illness? – and I would ask Hugh and relay the answer to them. And the police insisted on phoning Richard's brother to ask what arrangements he wanted to make for the ‘disposal of the remains’ after the autopsy and again Richard's brother kept saying, ‘Well what does Hugh want?’ But in the eyes of the police Hugh had no status at all.

  They took Richard's body away in an unmarked gray van. The autopsy revealed what we expected – that he died of a heart attack. He was buried on a beautiful spring day in the churchyard of his brother's village in Sussex. Getting dressed for the funeral, David found that he could no longer do up the jacket of his best suit over his bulging spleen. At the service he said to me lightly, ‘I like a traditional church funeral, all the old hymns,’ and I nodded and said yes of course, I agreed.

  Shortly afterwards, we went to a solicitor and made our wills, leaving everything to each other. We had never discussed doing it before. But somehow Richard's death made it all right to raise these taboo subjects – the will, the funeral – and I thought that, of all the many favours Richard had done us, he did almost the biggest in death. It meant that David, Rosie, Theo and I were able to weep together at his funeral and talk about what hymns we liked and what readings. Keen atheists though we were, we agreed a church service was best.

  At last all the tests were complete and the hospital fixed a date for David to have his spleen removed – apparently this was essential because otherwise the spleen would make competing platelets and mess up his transplant. Then he would have six to eight weeks to recover before he went into UCH. We arranged to go to Cornwall for Easter, and then to the Lake District just before the splenectomy, so he would be as fit as possible from all those long walks. At this point David finally told his father, who was, predictably, hurt that David hadn't told him before. He asked about David's operation and then went back to complaining about his dodgy knee, his twanging teeth.

  A couple of weeks before Easter, David went for his regular prostate test – and was told he had prostate cancer. He had moved up a notch on the prostate scale, which was the point at which they stopped talking about an enlarged prostate and started talking about cancer. If he went up another notch, it meant the cancer had become ‘aggressive’ and might ‘break out’. So did that mean his transplant would not now go ahead? After all, they had made an exception in agreeing to treat him when he was over the age limit; it would be an even bigger exception to agree to treat him when he had cancer. The great god MacKinnon referred him to a whole new set of doctors at the Royal Free who would have to decide what to do about his cancer.

  So we went on holiday to Cornwall with this terrible uncertainty. If they treated his prostate – and even if they cured it completely – he would probably be too late to have the transplant. Or if they went ahead with the transplant, it would mean leaving the cancer to grow, unchecked, for however long it would take his bone marrow to recover. At this point, for the first time, I began to despair. I thought, he's going to be in and out of hospital for the rest of his life – why not just say to hell with treatment, let's go for two good years. But when I very tentatively floated this idea, David seemed so upset I never mentioned it again.

  But, for all the uncertainty, we were closer on this holiday that we had been for years – it felt like a return to the happiest early days of our marriage and young parenthood. We walked the same cliff paths, admired the same wild flowers and reminisced about our first holidays in Cornwall when Rosie and Theo were babies. How energetic we were then! We would think nothing of walking from Coverack to Cadgwith over the huge cliffs of Black Head with Rosie on David's shoulders, Theo in a sling on my tummy, all of us so thrilled to be in Cornwall, so enchanted by the cliffs and the view. We were terribly poor, and terribly happy. The rot set in a few years later when I suffered a string of slipped discs, which meant I could never walk long distances again. By then I was back at work, so we could afford much more luxurious foreign holidays, in villas with pools and maids, and those holidays were fun too, but we were never such a self-contained little family again.

  That Easter in Cornwall gave us a much-needed chance to remember why we'd fallen in love in the first place. Our marriage had become like a neglected allotment where no one had bothered to do any weeding for a long time. But in Cornwall we found ourselves going back to the early days, delighting in each other's knowledge (David's of flowers, mine of birds), laughing at each other's fears (David's of heights, mine of cows), holding hands along the cliffs. I thought: this is how our marriage should be from now on. Maybe I could even give up work and we could move to Cornwall? David laughed when I suggested it – ‘You'd be bored rigid within days!’ But he seemed happy that I'd made the offer. And all the time, in the background, in the small hours, in bed, we were making these secret calculations – cancer, transplant, transplant, cancer – how long, O lord, how long?

  After Cornwall, there was a rush of hospital appointments – scans for his prostate cancer, tests on his spleen, tests on his blood, one day good news, one day bad, a whole new cast of doctors at the Royal Free as well as the bone-marrow lot at UCH, the spleen lot at the Middlesex and the haematology lot at the Whittington. David never explicitly gave up going to his studio but there was hardly a day when he didn't have a hospital appointment. And occasionally he would say things – ‘I can't face another biopsy’ or ‘I don't want to take pills that make me fat’ – that made me wonder if he realised what a long, ghastly business the transplant would be. Eventually the Royal Free oncologists and the UCH transplant team somehow decided between them that he would have the transplant first and then worry about the prostate cancer later. There was a chance, they said, that the transplant would arrest the cancer. So finally we had the dates – splenectomy in May, transplant in July – which gave an illusion of certainty to his future.

  I delivered him to the Middlesex for his splenectomy on 18 May. He had never spent a night in hospital before and was appalled by the lack of privacy, the idea that he would have to talk to strangers just because they happened to be in the next bed. I told him off for being such an uptight Old Etonian and in the end, of course, he got quite fond of his neighbours. But he never stopped being shocked that they didn't read. He could lose himself in Saint-Simon – they couldn't even manage the Sun.

  The operation went well and left only a two-inch scar, though apparently David's spleen was so enormous the surgeon had it pickled as an exhibit. My birthday fell the day after his operation and I thought David was bound to forget, but in fact he had made me a beautiful sketchbook of small abstract paintings – the best present he ever gave me, which he must have been working on for months. He was home in time for his birthday ten days later, which we celebrated with lobster and champagne. He was a bit tireder, a bit thinner – he lost half a stone in hospital – but looked fine. The only bad news was that his blood platelet count was extremely high and he had to inject himself to prevent clotting. He had been warned this might happen, but still it was frightening, learning to use these syringes – a reminder that something mysterious and foul was still going on.

  He wa
s told to spend the two months between his splenectomy and transplant building his strength and putting on weight, which he happily did. A week before his transplant we went to a friend's son's wedding in Northern Ireland, and David was on brilliant form, singing, joking, dancing the night away. When he told friends that he was going into hospital for a bone-marrow transplant they simply didn't believe him. The following Sunday we drank champagne and sat in the garden till the sun set. It was the start of England's longest, hottest summer for a century – and David's last day at home. Next morning, Monday, 7 July, I delivered him to UCH.

  The sad thing, reading my diary, is how the months of diagnosis and waiting and indecision before David's transplant tended to push us onto separate paths. In the diary, I find myself increasingly describing him like ‘the patient’ – noting his odd moods, his sudden furies, his ‘twitchiness’, but seeing these as symptoms rather than real feelings. Inevitably he began to seem self-obsessed, always talking about his illness, and the next hospital appointment. And the appointments came thicker and faster as the months went on, throwing up a whole cast of doctors who were only names to me – Panos, the Cypriot haematologist he revered; Miller, the urologist he loathed because he stuck his finger up his bottom; and the all-powerful MacKinnon, who decided whether he could have the transplant or not. I never met any of them – David never suggested that I should come on these hospital appointments and nor did I. I don't know whether it was in his mind but it was certainly in mine that perhaps if I accompanied him, it would remind the doctors that he was older than he looked and therefore less eligible for a transplant. Also we both agreed that I would tend to say the wrong thing, ask awkward questions, as I always did – though in retrospect that is exactly what I wish I had done.