An Education

by Lynn Barber

  Theo and I followed the stretcher through the miles of corridors back to the front entrance, where a tetchy Australian woman said she was the ‘patient co-ordinator’ and she'd been looking for ‘you guys’ everywhere – it was exactly as if she was telling us off for being late at check-in. She took us down to a horrible tiny waiting room with freezing air conditioning and left us in the Arctic cold, while David was taken for his scan. After about an hour a kind Greek neurosurgeon came to explain that the scan showed extensive bleeding in the brain and that, while normally he would attempt to operate, it was obvious that any surgery would kill him. In retrospect I realise I was meant to say, ‘Well if there's nothing you can do, let him go’, but I was too confused, I didn't take the hint and said something like, ‘Well, do what you can.’ He said he would talk to David's other consultants from the bone-marrow and kidney departments who were on their way. Theo and I were so cold in the waiting room we went back up to the sweltering entrance hall and watched this procession of consultants arriving in their smart cars – a Porsche, an Aston Martin, a Mercedes – greeting each other with handshakes and slaps on the back. They disappeared down to the operating theatre and I kept walking past and peeping through the window till one of them saw me and drew down the blind. After another hour the neurosurgeon came and said they had decided there was no point in operating and they would return David to the Middlesex intensive care. At this point the Australian trolley dolly perkily told me that ‘You guys should go home and have a nice cup of tea and then tomorrow you can have a nice visit with the loved one.’ I still regret that I was too exhausted to slap her.

  Officially David's death occurred at noon on Sunday, 10 August, though even death, I learned, is not so clear cut. Theo and I grabbed a few hours sleep – poor Rosie, in Brighton, was waiting for the first train to London. We agreed to meet in intensive care as soon as Rosie could get there. Meanwhile I rang Charles very early, asking him to break the news to Maurice and try to contact Luke, who was somewhere in Scotland. Theo and I went to see David in intensive care and both promptly turned away. He was quite obviously dead, but hooked up to this horrible machine that made his chest rise and fall like some creaky Victorian waxwork. A doctor explained that he was effectively brain-dead, but they could keep him alive by machine for a day if other members of the family wanted to ‘say their goodbyes’. I relayed all this to Charles, who relayed it to Maurice and eventually Luke, who raced back from Scotland to be with Maurice.

  Theo and I had to go to the kidney unit to collect David's things – they were all piled in bags in a cupboard, another patient was already in his room, and there was no sign of Steve or the other nice nurses. The top kidney man came and explained what happened – the blood has to be thinned for dialysis so there was always a slight risk of bleeding to the brain. Back in intensive care, and now joined by Rosie, a team of doctors assembled to talk in euphemisms – basically it was just a case of deciding when to switch off the machine that was keeping David artificially alive. ‘Switch off now,’ we chorused. But, said the doctors, how did we feel about organ donation? Fine, we said, and they told us that an ‘organ co-ordinator’ would be in touch. But this meant, I realised later, that they had to keep David artificially alive in case any of his organs were needed. The organ co-ordinator rang in the afternoon with a weird questionnaire, asking among other things whether David had ever had sex with prostitutes, with animals, in Africa? ‘Not all at once,’ I joked – and heard her gasp of outrage at the other end. David would have laughed, but there was no David to hear. She told me, quite casually, that he had been declared dead at noon.

  Postscript

  When I was arranging David's funeral, the undertaker said that nowadays it was normal to have a photograph of ‘the loved one’ on the front of the Order of Service, and I said oh yes, good idea. I had hundreds of photos of David and, I thought, it would be easy to find a good one. But as I went through the family photo albums, I discovered with dismay that there were almost no photographs suitable for a funeral service, because most of them contained lobsters. Sometimes they were half lobsters surrounded by lettuce leaves on a plate, or sometimes they were live lobsters, just bought, kicking their legs at the camera, but either way the typical photograph consisted of a large lobster in the foreground with David pulling yum-yum faces in the background.

  The reason lobsters featured so prominently in our family albums was because David loved eating them, and had taught the children to love them too, so we always had lobsters for our birthdays – Theo's on 5 March, Rosie's on 3 May, mine on 22 May, David's on 1 June – and I always took photos on these occasions. There was a similar succession of photos featuring David holding Christmas puddings with flaming brandy, but the lobster ones were definitely more appealing. In a way, I felt, a picture of David with a lobster would be ideal for his funeral card, a memory of countless happy family celebrations. And the vicar had told me at least three times that he wanted the funeral to reflect my wishes. I wished for a lobster! But no – David's father would be appalled, his brother Charles would be bewildered, even his younger brother Luke, keen lobsterphile though he was, might think it was a bit disrespectful. I must bow to convention in these matters and find a lobster-less picture.

  I trawled on through the albums. There were plenty of pictures of David with the daughters on windy hilltops in the Lake District, or windy clifftops in Cornwall, but he was always wearing an anorak, with his hair blowing about. There were a few – very few – photographs of me and David together, usually dressed up for a party, both grinning cheesily and self-consciously at the camera. But they were invariably taken by the children and involved some camera-wobble. There were recent photographs of him painting in his studio but, because he was painting, he was turned away from the camera. In the end, I concluded that I possessed no straight portrait of David at all, and would have to forget the idea of a photograph on the funeral card.

  But then when I opened one of the letters of condolence (how quickly one acquires the ghastly terminology! Of course I mean letters from friends) a photograph fell out and it was a lovely picture of David smiling with a backdrop of foliage behind. The letter was from Eric Christiansen and said it was taken at Eric's 60th birthday party, by his wife Sukey. Anyway, it was a perfect portrait and the printers said they could take out the foliage and put just David's face on the funeral card. So that's what they did, and it looked fine – though still, as I stared dry-eyed at the card throughout the funeral service, I regretted the missing lobster.

  Afterwards several friends asked if I had copies of the photograph that they could keep, so I got a dozen printed. I kept the original – with foliage – and put it in a silver frame. I knew I ought to have a photograph of David on the mantelpiece, so I had that one, and a windy anorak one of him with the daughters in Cornwall. And then, as a compromise, I also had a lobster one, not framed, stuck pseudo-casually in the corner of the overmantel mirror. I felt I was doing all the correct widow things.

  Some weeks later David's ex-colleague Paddy Scannell sent me the University of Westminster newsletter with an obituary of David. This was an extended version of his Guardian obituary and far from thrilling. But what was sensational was the photograph they used. It was one I had never seen before and showed David beaming, happy, exuberant and, I could tell, a bit drunk. He was smiling with deep fondness into the camera, or, more accurately, at the person holding the camera. I wrote to Paddy thanking him for the obituary and asking, as casually as I could, where the photograph came from and whether there was any chance of my getting a print? I explained that most of my photographs of David entailed lobsters and that straight portraits of him were rare. I asked – again, I hoped, casually – who took the photograph and on what occasion.

  Paddy wrote back that the photograph belonged to an ex-colleague who was currently in the States but that he would get a copy for me as soon as she came back. She! Of course it was confirmation of what I suspected. Because it seemed obvious to me wh
en I first saw the photo that David was in love with whoever took it. It was not just the affection in his smile – it was more the confidence that seemed to say, ‘Okay, so I'm drunk, but I know you won't mind.’ I had never asked David if he had affairs but I could chart, over the years, certain periods when he seemed to stay late at work, or when he had mysterious extra lectures or conferences to attend at the weekends. And when he was extra nice to me. Of course he was always nice to me, but there was sometimes an extra niceness that I thought betokened guilt.

  Anyway I was now sure that I had proof of his infidelity – I could see that it would not exactly stand up in court but it was clear-cut proof to me. And the feeling it aroused in me was… Actually all sorts of confused feelings, but predominantly relief. Relief from a great weight of guilt that had been sitting on me like a boulder since David died. Guilt that I hadn't spent enough time with him in hospital, guilt that I was in the garden at home when he had his haematoma; guilt that I hadn't listened to his worries sympathetically, that I had been so brisk – of course you won't die, I'd told him, the doctors know what they are doing. And guilt, before that, aeons and aeons of guilt stretching back over all the years of our marriage. I was never a good wife; he should never have married me; he deserved someone nicer. But if he was unfaithful, ah, that made everything so much easier.

  Losing my guilt was just what I needed at the time. It enabled me to stop obsessing about what happened in hospital and start thinking about how I could get on with my life. I'd been almost paralysed since David's death, but now I felt this great surge of energy in the course of which I organised an exhibition of David's work, had the house redecorated, built a fence, replanted the front garden. Some months later another letter from Paddy arrived, containing a photo. It took me a minute to recognise it – there was David beaming at the camera, slightly drunk, but there was another man next to him, also beaming at the camera, also slightly drunk, leaning on David's shoulder. Paddy's letter explained that the printers had managed to delete the other man when they used the photo for David's obituary. His name was Frank H, he was an ex-colleague of David's and the photograph was taken at his leaving party by his wife.

  Good God. Frank H's leaving party had actually engraved itself on my memory as one of the nights years ago when David mysteriously stayed out late, and I remember thinking at the time, ‘I have never even heard him mention a colleague called Frank H, so why does he need to attend his leaving party?’ In fact if you had asked me to list all the reasons why I ever suspected David of being unfaithful, Frank H's leaving party – this mysterious colleague I'd never heard of till he left – would probably have come top of the list. And now here was Frank H – a pleasant enough bloke by the look of him – with his hand affectionately on David's shoulder, beaming at the camera just like David. And when I studied it carefully, I could see what the photograph showed. David was somewhat drunk but Frank H was very drunk – he was leaning on David's shoulder probably to stop himself swaying. And David was smiling at Mrs H to reassure her, laughing about good old Frank, this dear old colleague who had got a bit squiffy. Thus, anyway, my reading of the picture, and why it now has pride of place on my mantelpiece. But, as I said before, I am a deep believer in the unknowability of other people – such was the lesson I learned from Simon all those years ago.

  Thanks

  I should like to thank Tony Lacey and all at Penguin for having faith in me; likewise, my agent Gill Coleridge. Thanks too to Ian Jack for publishing my original story in Granta, and to Nick Hornby, Amanda Posey and Finola Dwyer for making it into such a brilliant film. I am grateful to all my Observer colleagues, but especially John Mulholland, Jane Ferguson and Nicola Jeal, for turning a blind eye to my slacking while I finished this book. Friends who helped with encouragement are too many to list but they know who they are. And, as always, love and thanks to my daughters, Rosie and Theo, for their constant support.