The Discourtesy of Death

by William Brodrick

  They were quiet, looking at the remains of a high window: stone clinging together in the shape of a narrow arch. There’d once been a row of them, running the length of the nave and around each transept. Light had fallen in shafts upon the bowed heads. Anselm wondered if the doctor had very subtly just laid out his understanding of the territory they were about to enter: the complex area of medical practice and the law in a changing world.

  ‘I’ve been asked to look at Jenny’s death,’ said Anselm, finally. ‘I won’t hide anything from you. I’ve spoken to Nigel and Helen and I’ve spoken to Vincent Cooper. Would you tell me about Peter and Jenny and their time together?’ He paused and then said, ‘Peter is in a prison. And I don’t mean behind bars. Would you help me free him?’

  Doctor Ingleby didn’t reply. At the mention of Peter’s name, the light in his eyes went out.

  Anselm was impressed. He’d questioned many people faced with very serious charges and most of them betrayed clear signs of discomfort. But Doctor Ingleby did not belong among them. He must have known that Anselm intended to accuse him – very respectfully – of conspiracy to murder and falsifying a certificate of death, and yet he concealed his feelings to perfection. Almost. Years of handling bad news had taught him how to hide his emotions, but there was a tell-tale tremor in his voice.

  ‘I met Peter many years ago at University Campus Suffolk,’ said Doctor Ingleby. ‘He was giving a lecture on end-of-life issues. It’s a complex subject. We both thought it important to ask the philosophical questions that arise when medical science enters unexplored territory. In fact, to ask the questions well in advance, before the technology gets us there. This is the challenge of the modern age, wouldn’t you say, Father? Magellan’s days are finally over. We know the world is round and what lies at the end of certain rivers. Now the voyage of discovery is … intellectual, ethical. We’ve entered a new, forbidding country.’

  He broke off, looking at Anselm to see if he was on board.

  ‘The right-to-die debate is one of the more compelling,’ he continued, ‘because our ability to keep someone alive puts into the question the nature of the life we would preserve – its content and quality – set against the death we would at all costs avoid. I forget the exact point Peter raised that night … I think it was something to the effect that patients must have new choices … as sophisticated and far-reaching as doctors had new obligations. I really can’t recall, save that Peter and I didn’t quite agree. We had a most urbane and stimulating argument. It made us friends … and in time close friends.’

  His voice seemed to dry out. He’d spoken airily, as if to warn Anselm, subtly, that he might be out of his depth, all the more so if he pined for the days of empire when God and the Lord Chief Justice had double-checked any prescriptions emanating from the dispensary. But then the doctor had been ambushed by feeling. It had come out when he’d said Peter’s name. Gathering himself back together, he took up his thread: ‘Needless to say, like any explorers on a quest of importance, we have our quarrels … about which route to take, whether to turn back or press on. There’s no other way. How else do you cross the Antarctic without a map?’

  Very slowly, if at all, thought Anselm. But he moved matters on: ‘You became Jenny’s doctor.’

  ‘Yes. Their previous GP had retired just before Jenny’s accident. Her replacement was newly qualified. Jenny wanted someone … older.’

  ‘And wiser?’

  ‘Possibly. She didn’t say. If she had done, I’d have directed her elsewhere. Most of all, she wanted a friend.’

  The faint tremble in Doctor Ingleby’s voice had gone. He’d found his feet now that the narrative was in his control.

  ‘There was very little I could do,’ he said, analytically. ‘Hers was not a medical problem, not truly. Physically and psychologically, she was … reduced. Reduced to what we all are, if you take away what we might call essential capacities. She was clearly depressed.’

  ‘Suicidal?’ suggested Anselm.

  ‘At one point. But she was a very brave girl. To the point of foolishness. She didn’t want medication and it might have helped, at least in the short term. But she wanted to see all the pain through to the other side, unaided, a great dancer once more, transcending the heat in her mind and body.’

  ‘What, then, could be done, medically?’

  ‘Nothing. So I paid regular visits. Talked. In time, her mood lifted. It’s a pity her uncle Nigel was so far away. He might have helped.’

  They’d walked out of the church, finding, eventually, the former cloister. It was now a grassed square. A broad band of shadow fell from a reduced refectory wall.

  ‘I began to come more frequently,’ said Doctor Ingleby, gazing around at the neat lawn. ‘And at a very specific moment, for no apparent reason, she changed. I was astonished to find that she was all at once … at peace. Profoundly at peace. The cancer diagnosis came in shortly afterwards but it didn’t seem to have any appreciable effect. She was already deeply’ – the doctor looked to the ground as if he might find the right word lying in the grass – ‘reconciled … and that preceding reconciliation overwhelmed the power of the later illness, what it would do and where it would lead. It was almost as if she was one step ahead and couldn’t be caught.’

  Was that a hint? thought Anselm. Are you trying to tell me that Jenny had made a choice, forbidden by the law, and that the choice had set her free? That he knew the Exit Mask was in a garden shed?

  ‘How did Peter manage?’ asked Anselm, heading off towards the Chapter Room, the place of big decisions.

  ‘Heroically,’ came Doctor Ingleby’s voice from behind. ‘He was devoted to her. From the moment she fell off that stage, he was there, at her side.’

  ‘No, he wasn’t,’ observed Anselm. ‘He was on Question Time.’

  Anselm had spoken like he’d done in the Old Bailey. Instinct had taken over. The repressed barrister had wanted to pique the witness to get behind his self-control.

  ‘That’s cheap, I’m afraid,’ said Doctor Ingleby.

  He’d overtaken Anselm and stood between him and the broken entrance to the room where monks had listened to the wise teaching of their abbot. ‘Yes, his relationship with Jenny had been strained. They were very different people struggling to keep hold of the happy ground where they’d met. But they found it eventually. I don’t know how, but they did. I saw them together, right up to the day Jenny died. You didn’t.’

  Anselm remained firm. Sometimes you had to push a witness.

  ‘But prior to the fall,’ he observed, reluctantly, ‘he was more in London than Polstead. And on Jenny’s big night, her modest return to the public eye, he was on Question Time.’

  Anselm wasn’t criticising Peter; he wanted to know if the doctor knew how Peter had reacted to the inner crisis that had engulfed him: the loss of his vibrant public life; and whether he’d considered – even in a kind of madness – a radical solution to his predicament.

  ‘That is exactly what Emma would have said,’ replied Doctor Ingleby, his injury giving way to a kind of tired recognition. ‘She never gave Peter a chance, not even after he’d changed. A man can change, can’t he?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘He can turn around completely without being condemned for who he once was?’

  ‘Well, yes … but that’s part of the old country, isn’t it?’ Anselm gave the shrug of the slightly lost. ‘I wasn’t too sure we brought it with us when we crossed over into the land of forbidding opportunity.’

  The doctor half-smiled. ‘We didn’t leave everything behind.’

  ‘Did Peter?’

  ‘I’m not sure I take your meaning.’

  ‘I’m wondering if he found a new way to deal with terminal cancer.’ Doctor Ingleby was taller than Anselm and he looked down at him with the stillness of a man checking an X-ray. He waited a very long while, and then, suddenly, he relaxed.

  ‘I think you and Peter would get on rather well. You’re not that different. He, to
o, says outrageous things that he doesn’t quite mean. His heart is never on his sleeve, always in a back pocket, and usually of trousers he’s not wearing. I’m assuming yours is in a side chapel at Larkwood.’

  Doctor Ingleby had, of course, completely ignored Anselm’s accusation against Peter and, by implication, the charge against himself: that he’d covered up this unspecified ‘new way’ with a false death certificate. His voice had remained steady. Was this because he believed that, regardless of anything Anselm might say, Vincent Cooper had destroyed the Exit Mask? Was this the calming factor?

  ‘Could you tell me about Emma?’ asked Anselm, changing tack. He’d detected a certain antipathy to the woman who hadn’t given Peter a chance.

  ‘If Peter’s heart was sometimes out of sight, Emma’s was lost … and she never found it again. Never went looking. She never got over the greater crisis.’

  ‘Jenny’s accident?’

  ‘No, Peter’s arrival into the family.’

  Emma had never accepted him, never accepted his place in Jenny’s life. That was her tragedy. Only Michael respected her decisions. When Doctor Ingleby had met them together, as a couple, he’d even wondered if she resented her own husband – his place in Jenny’s life, his importance and closeness. She’d liked to have been the great figure of salvation in her daughter’s life, and she wasn’t. Nobody was. Nobody could be. Michael understood that, which brought him even closer, whereas Emma … Emma was left excluded by her own longing. She’d resented Nigel, too, because even though he was far away, he’d represented spiritual support, the voice of God even … the possibility of some transcendent response to Jenny’s suffering.

  ‘She even resented me, I think,’ said Doctor Ingleby. ‘My place as a health professional. She once remarked that a human being was the one animal she wasn’t allowed to treat. She’d liked to have been there at Jenny’s side giving her the tetanus injection, but she couldn’t. Jenny had far more than a cut to the knee. Her condition was beyond us both. Beyond everyone. And Emma found herself empty-handed and furthest away, miles behind the vicar in Zimbabwe.’

  But what a performer she was, thought Anselm. Because poor Doctor Goodwin had no idea that his sister-in-law couldn’t stand him any more than his brother. Neither did Helen. She’d been on the phone to Emma for years bridging the gap, as women so often do when men fall out like boys. It had generated a kind of rarefied intimacy based on the mutual recognition that they were keeping the family together. And all the while, Emma had been seething.

  Baked Alaska. Hot on the outside and cold in the middle.

  They’d reached the crumbling doorway. Ahead, like a section of wall fallen flat on the ground, lay a slab of shadow covering half the Chapter House. They both lingered in the afternoon light of the cloister, and then Anselm stepped forward over a vanished threshold. Instantly he felt the cold.

  ‘This is the room of teaching and decision, is it not?’ asked Doctor Ingleby, entering and taking a position where a bench would have stood.

  ‘Yes,’ replied Anselm. ‘It’s a place where everyone has the right to speak honestly without fear of condemnation, without fear of being quoted afterwards, without pressure to conform to the will of the majority.’

  Doctor Ingleby seemed to like that. He smiled, his half-moon eyes dwelling on Anselm as if he were the abbot of these revered ruins.

  ‘Tell me, then, why it is you accuse me with silence? What is it that you dare not say?’

  Anselm shivered slightly. He felt the gaze of a multitude, but they were very much alone.

  ‘I have received a letter which suggests that Peter may have killed Jenny.’

  The doctor seemed to jot down the point on a mental pad.

  ‘I have spoken to someone who manufactured an Exit Mask at Jenny’s request.’

  More impassive noting.

  ‘This person tells me Peter and Jenny considered you to be a doctor they could trust. Someone who would look the other way. A part of the plan. Perhaps Peter misunderstood you during that friendly argument over end-of-life issues … the stuff you can’t remember about new choices and new obligations.’

  A nod of acknowledgement, as if the point was already taken.

  ‘The facts, then, suggest assisted suicide,’ concluded Anselm. ‘The letter, however, indicates otherwise. I’m told that certain members of the family agree. They remain silent to protect Timothy.’

  Doctor Ingleby seemed to put his pen away and flip shut the pad. Anselm couldn’t gauge his reaction to anything he’d said. The earlier vulnerability had been completely effaced. This – thought Anselm – is the resolve of someone who wants to put out a blaze, and fast. The building was on fire and lives were at stake. And he, Doctor Ingleby, had spent a lifetime saving them.

  ‘Let this case go, Father,’ he said, gruffly, as if braving the smoke. ‘People will get hurt, and they needn’t. And there’s no need. Jenny died of bowel cancer. I should know. I signed the certificate of death.’

  The doctor made a slight bow as if the Chapter meeting were over and then walked slowly away, entering the sunlight to step over a low wall robbed of stone. After a moment, Anselm turned and ran towards the entrance of the abbey. He arrived just in time to spot the doctor’s departing car: a royal-blue Sunbeam Singer Chamois, one of the few classic cars that had ever made an impression upon him.

  26

  Michael pulled over to the side of the narrow lane. There, at the end of a winding track, protected by trees and a wild, high hedge, stood a ramshackle cottage. The thatch was green and dirty brown, the old straw rotting in the damp morning air. Windows were cracked or boarded over. A white enamel sink lay in a field as if it had been shot trying to run away. A couple of crows pecked the ground, their yellow beaks stealing the scattered seed. The horizon was bare, save for more hedges and more trees.

  ‘This’ll do,’ said Michael. ‘This is my valley in the Blue Stack Mountains. This is the way to Morning Light; the only way.’

  He drove down the track, parked and unchained a gate with wire for hinges. The front door to the property was secured with a padlock. Using the car’s jack, Michael smashed it clean off the frame and stepped inside. The dark and damp crawled all over him like germs in a grave. A faint wan light leaked into the room through holes in a ragged curtain. The place was sodden with forgotten voices, lives spent in earnest, not knowing that this is how their world of cares would end. As Michael’s eyes got accustomed to the dark, he gradually perceived an uneven tiled floor, pitted plaster walls, a metal bucket, pieces of blackened wood, wallpaper hanging like blown streamers, a dank, empty grate.

  Within five minutes, Michael had prepared the room. He’d placed the armchair by the fireplace, replicating the position of Peter’s worn lounger in Polstead, the comfortable cushioned seat in which he’d read those heavy books, warming his toes, throwing an occasional glace towards Jenny in her bed by the window. He never sat anywhere else. Michael could almost see him, legs crossed and thinking hard. Twelve steps from an imagined fuse box.

  ‘Yes, this will do,’ said Michael, sitting down.

  ‘Timothy, would you come here please?’

  Michael sat in Peter’s chair to give himself the authority he didn’t possess in the Henderson household. He’d just brought Jenny back from Pin Mill on the day she’d asked him to untie her laces once and for all. En route, he’d paused to buy a hardback diary. It was in a paper bag on his knees.

  ‘You and I must help each other,’ he said.

  ‘How, Granddad?’

  ‘By being strong.’

  Timothy sat on a stool by the fire. Like many ten-year-olds, he seemed so much younger. He certainly wasn’t ready to deal with his mother’s sudden incapacity. His father’s almost drunken disorientation.

  ‘We have to work together, you and I,’ said Michael. ‘We have to bring something good out of this.’

  The boy didn’t look convinced. The boy appraised his grandfather with the disturbing percipience of the youn
g who see life for what it is without yet being frightened. His hair was black and expensively dishevelled – a ‘look’ recommended by the stylist because it meant you didn’t have to comb your hair in the morning. He wore a red T-shirt. His eyes were dark and emotional like his mother’s; his expressions mentally calculating like his father.

  ‘Something good,’ repeated Michael.

  ‘Is that possible?’

  For a brief moment, Michael remembered Jenny at Timothy’s age, lying in bed one night. She’d been frightened about something, and he’d said, ‘I’ll always look after you,’ and she’d replied, unblinking and with perfect composure, ‘No, you won’t.’ She’d grown to forget the exchange, but back then, on the cusp of growing up, she’d appreciated, as we all must, that we step into the world alone and will leave it in a like manner. That there are experiences in between that lie beyond the protection of those who love us, who would happily die to save our life. Timothy was appraising Michael now as Jenny had done then: with a kind of dark knowledge that the parent had forgotten or was hiding away.

  ‘Yes, it is possible,’ replied Michael, firmly.

  There was much to say that he could not say, but that he believed, passionately: that Jenny’s accident was a shattering experience but that, in time, another kind of life could be built on the other side of disappointment, however crushing. That other people had been there and found peace. Making that point would have to wait, as much for Timothy as Jenny. For the moment Michael wanted to put in place some basic ground rules for the future that had opened out for them all.

  He took the boy’s hands in his and said, ‘You must lead an absolutely normal life. Do the things you would have done if your mother hadn’t fallen off that stage.’

  ‘Wasn’t paralysed.’

  ‘Yes. Paralysed. She feels stranded, unable to move, a boat stuck in the harbour’ – Michael saw the phrase in Timothy’s mind: ‘Because she is’ – ‘and the last thing she wants is for you to feel tied to the house, tied to the room … obliged … obliged to be there, to be sad, to limit your own life. You set her free to cope as best she can if she sees that you are free. Climb trees. Phone your friends. Get annoyed because you have to go to bed. Ask to stay up late. She can be happy at least to see you happy. She can begin to find a new normality, if you are normal.’