by Rick Gekoski
‘Inappropriate comes to mind.’
‘Not to me it doesn’t. He just wants to oversee things, keep a doctorly eye out, pass me on to the right people. He wants me to see a specialist he knows, and have a chest X-ray and some tests.’
To my surprise, she made the appointments the next morning, a sure sign that she suspected something was wrong.
The tests took almost no time to organise. Good old private medical care. Suzy spent a few hours at the Chelsea and Westminster having blood tests, X-rays, CT scans, being prodded and poked about, which she despised, having no experience of it save for the processes associated with Lucy’s birth – which she also had not liked. She had a monarch’s relationship with her body: if anyone was going to examine it, she would have preferred to be covered by a sheet, aloofly modest and aristocratic, not because she was bashful, but because she was physiologically snobbish. She never forgave the hostile nurse at Lucy’s birth, and vowed never again to allow herself to be handled by lesser organisms. The injunction, by now, often applied to me as well.
Lawrence’s rooms were on Wimpole Street, which he regarded as smarter than Harley Street, which is an address designed to attract Arab hypochondriacs. Wimpole Street was more discreet, soaked in the medical tonalities of that neighbourhood, classy and understated, like living in Chelsea rather than Knightsbridge. Rather to my surprise, Suzy asked me to come with her, anxious that she might forget to ask the right questions, or remember their answers.
A smoothly tailored receptionist, middle-aged and impeccably banal, showed us to the waiting area, which looked like the drawing room of a house in which the owner had no taste but some money, with soft sofas, upholstered chairs, soothing and meaningless landscape paintings on the walls, stacks of newspapers and back issues of Country Life and Tatler.
Suzy gave it a quick glance with her usual disdain, turned down the offer of coffee and biscuits, and settled down with the latest novel by Teddy St Aubyn, the fashionably grungy society novelist whom she liked disliking. ‘All that fine writing wasted on a bunch of shits,’ she’d written in a review somewhere. ‘Henry James would have been appalled.’
Lawrence came out to meet us personally – you get all the social graces with private medicine, especially when it was once conjoined with ongoing sexual care – shook my hand warmly, gave Suzy a studiedly brief hug, and ushered us down the corridor into his rooms. Sitting behind his desk, he looked at his computer screen and read for a moment before saying a word.
‘It’s bad, isn’t it?’ Suzy said.
He looked up quickly. He wasn’t used to being pre-empted, and did not allow his patients (or friends) to make their own prognoses in their own words.
‘I wouldn’t put it that way . . .’
‘How would you put it then?’
‘I’d say we have a problem, but that it is – ’
‘Don’t beat about the bush, for Christ’s sake. What is the problem?’
‘The biopsy shows that you have a growth on your lung.’
I had a notebook and pen to hand, and made a quick note. I was studying his suit jacket, as he sat with practised calm behind his reproduction Sheraton desk. A fine worsted material a shade darker than navy with a slightly lighter stripe, a black silk lining, the shoulders hardly padded: it fitted him well but not too closely, with none of that slightly larger than necessary off-the-peg looseness. The buttons were lustrous ebony secured with very fine thread, the lapels designed with his slightly portly build in mind. I would have bet a hundred pounds that it had either no label on the inside pocket, or something entirely discreet. Not the name of the tailor. Schneider of Golders Green? Never. The suit was like his Wimpole Street address: not Savile Row, probably better than Savile Row, and less expensive.
Suzy was unresponsive, and I hardly dared ask. ‘A . . . growth? Do you mean a tumour?’
‘Well, that’s a blanket term, there are all kinds of growths and tumours.’
‘Is it malignant?’
He smiled, patronisingly. ‘Not a term I’d use. But it is cancerous, and I suggest we start treatment as soon as possible.’
I made a useless note.
‘Now. Suzy, do you want the details?’
‘Of course we do,’ I said, pleased to take control, and her hand, establishing a spurious supremacy in the face of his overwhelming competence. And power.
His shirt was fine white cotton, hand-tailored perhaps, but I was unable to tell at the distance. It wouldn’t have surprised me if he saved a few shekels by having them made a dozen at a time in Hong Kong. But his tie, the only piece of his apparel that he would have chosen himself, the key to how discriminating he really was, was quite wrong. Expensive to be sure, Zegna, I suspected. But it had too much of the wrong shade of red, in a pattern without aesthetic conviction, lacking both style and gravitas. Vulgar, as Italian designers frequently are.
He’d been talking on and on. Suzy looked blank.
‘. . . sometime next week?’ Lawrence looked at his computer screen, made a few adjustments and looked up. ‘Chelsea and Westminster still OK with you?’
Suzy nodded.
‘I’ll send you an email confirming the details.’
He paused, and looked at her directly, personally. ‘There’s no reason not to be hopeful.’
‘Hah!’ Suzy snorted. ‘Double negatives always give the game away! You think I am going to die!’
Lawrence laughed, with a hearty confidence. ‘Of course you are.’
I made a note.
‘. . . but not yet. We’ve got a lot of tools at our disposal. The prognosis with your kind of cancer is quite favourable. You’ve got a lot of tennis matches in you yet.’ He smiled at her. ‘We do.’
We left his rooms soon after, ushered directly to the door, Lawrence standing between us (spoiler: meaningful metaphor), and giving us a reassuring hand on arm as we left.
‘See you soon. And remember what I told you!’
‘What was that?’
‘No looking on the bloody internet!’
‘Oh, that. Of course I will. Goodbye.’
We strolled down Wimpole Street for a few minutes, taking things in.
‘What next?’ I asked.
‘Fat lot of use you were. Did you listen at all?’
‘On the contrary. I looked. I was very unimpressed by his tie.’
She laughed, and took my arm. ‘Bit of a disaster. He’s so concerned to get things just so, but there’s always the tell-tale sign, isn’t there?’
‘Always.’
‘Anyhow, let’s ring and book a table at the Wolseley. See if you can spot a taxi. I fancy some caviar and a bottle of Taittinger. Then let’s go home and make love.’
This was ominous. She usually said ‘fuck’, not that we did it much. When I had recovered from being startled, I got frightened. She knew she was going to die.
At the Wolseley, I told Suzy I was going to retire from teaching.
‘Good for you. I’ve finally given you an excuse. Left to your own devices you would have been carried out of that place feet first. At least now something good can come out of this.’
It was inexpressibly kind and brave of her, and I resented it very much. ‘For goodness’ sake, darling, I hardly need you to get cancer to make my decisions for me!’
‘Of course you do. Don’t you even know that?’
After we’d got home and made stately love, I wrote a post-coital letter to the Headmaster, announcing my retirement. I did not feel it necessary to give reasons, though they were more complex than Suzy’s forthcoming decline, which was no business of his.
I ought to have done a bunk years ago. School-teaching was entropic: energy faded, differences distilled and normalised. The boys, clever and less clever, agreeable and less agreeable, began to merge into each other. This was not, I think, because after the passage of the decades one’s memory simply congealed them into an undifferentiated adolescent mass, but because our college rules and traditions, strictures and stru
ctures, our common fund of history and anecdote, set texts and exams, sporting fixtures and cultural endeavours, produced a type. Most of the great public schools do.
By the end, as passion faded, I was a type as well. For a time I resisted the process, but we masters were congealing too, and sometimes, in the Senior Common Room, I got the surreal and discomfiting impression that one of the others was me, or perhaps it was the other way round. Here we are, I observed, drinking rotten coffee and being witty and dismissive in a fond and bitchy way. Quoting, referring, citing, attaching Greek and Latin tags, self-satisfied, as individuated as a bunch of carrots – second-rate, second-hand.
I was inhabited, I could recognise – though a good deal of this becomes imperceptible over time – by the voices of others, in both high and low registers. By the internalised sentiments of the poets and novelists, by my mother’s shrill homilies, and my father’s hearty fatuities. I was the filter through which they passed and into whose mouth they issued. And the result, which is called ME, is little more than a melange of competing voices, a cacophony, unmelodious, often wracking and discordant, which, if we smooth and censor and rearrange, could be mistaken for something coherent.
A self? Forget it. Behind the façade of even the most orderly-looking of selves, the benign vicar or the cheerful butcher, is a maelstrom of opposing voices and forces, dark rumblings and regrets, yearnings to be elsewhere, other, and someone else, free and wild. Everyone is a moon, and has a dark side.
Those boys, had they followed my passionate admonitions, might have ended like me now – as a chamber in which everything and nothing echoes. I imposed on them the myriad voices of others, recommended them as constituent parts of developing being, suggested that such voices are easily assimilable, and even more dangerously suggested that they might become an authentic element of the developing self.
Why assume this? Why is the voice of that miserable stringy Hamlet, wracked by guilt and indecision, or that dopey Wordsworth retreating into his gloomy lakeside cottage, to be recommended to the young? What do they know of such things? Their life experiences neither promote such musings and choices, nor recognise them as real. Literature is dangerous. You can define yourself in and through it, make yourself, try to become someone cultured, well read and referenced, big yourself up like a dentist’s receptionist.
Literature doesn’t mediate or explain our experience, it replaces it. I should have taught them that they have to choose: between the philosopher’s silence or the shitslingers jabbering away. But I didn’t know it at the time.
I am overcome by chagrin, contemplating this. I wonder if those once-innocent boys might forgive me? I wonder if they have even noticed? I rather hope not.
Suzy had cancer. Following the habit of a lifetime, I sought consolation in my reading – fading nosegays of wisdom to sniff when the life ordure became overpowering. Like that poor Joan D’Idiot after her hubby dropped dead at the breakfast table. Probably never felt more than a few cornflakes up his nose. Lucky him. And she, poor shocked thing, did what she could: consulted the great and the good, the sages, the geniuses on whom she – we – have been raised.
But let’s face it, citing is the opposite of thinking: all this splashing about in the hot tub of literature merely appropriates the emotions and thoughts of others. You don’t have to think or feel for yourself, just to pick and choose, like magpies assembling shiny trinkets of discarded verbiage.
We don’t have God, so we have literature, with its associated proverbs and allegories, its received wisdom. We quote and genuflect and defer and pay homage, as if in a holy sanctuary. But just as God failed us, so too will reading. We will turn against it as certainly, and rightly, as we did against Him. Nobody, and nothing, can explain life for us. It’s not a mystery, a problem or a puzzle, it doesn’t have a meaning or a solution. It just is, make of it what you wish. Or better yet, just get on with it and hope for a modicum of good luck.
Reflexively leafing through my internal pages, I revert to Yeats, repair to Eliot, return to Dickens – and am disappointed in new and surprising ways: their lines have atrophied from insufficient exercise, or gone stiff with overuse. My rancid touchstones. The better known the sentiment, the less likely it is to retain its power. It will have turned into one of those homilies that we mistake for wisdom, from which we seek comfort:
Consume my heart away; sick with desire
And fastened to a dying animal
It knows not what it is . . .
Wrong! Wrong again. Is there a poet who isn’t a D’idiot? Not a dying animal, a dying person. Persons are dreadful at dying. Animals drop off the perch, fall asleep on the hearth, slink off into the woods feeling poorly. They have nothing to reflect upon, or to make a fuss about. Poor Josef K. in The Trial, whose pathetic final thought before he is executed is: ‘like a dog’. Wrong! He’d be lucky to die like a dog.
Something’s going to kill you. Why make a fuss? But we do, we do. We try to understand. I have to remember this in order to disremember, before it dismembers me. But I am not deluded, or fortunate enough, to expect consolation from scribbling. There is none, neither from others nor from oneself.
Do you imagine you can exorcise what oppresses you in life by giving vent to it in art? No. The heart’s dross does not find its way onto paper: all you pour out there is ink.
Suzy wasn’t interested in the details of her forthcoming treatment, what drugs she was to be given, what the blood counts might indicate, what to expect next. These were things to be endured, and it did no good to anticipate them fearfully. There’d be plenty of time for dread. She did, however, have one pressing question.
‘My hair?’
‘Yes.’ Lawrence’s voice was firm but – to my ear at least – wistful. Presumably he loved Suzy’s hair as much as I did.
‘Will it fall out?’
‘Almost certainly.’
‘All of it?’
‘Yes, I’m sorry, it’s – ’
‘How long do I have?’
Lawrence looked startled. They had agreed that this was not a helpful question. ‘I don’t really think – ’ he began.
‘Before my hair falls out, dummy!’
‘Oh. Sorry. It might happen quite quickly when the chemo starts, or perhaps – ’
‘Then,’ said Suzy firmly, ‘I’d better make some plans.’
Lawrence had done his homework, and handed her a print-out from his computer tray, listing all of the top wig-makers in London, who proudly offered real human hair. It was not clear what unreal human hair might have consisted of. Perhaps it might have been plucked from sheepdogs? All of these ghoulishly estimable businesses guaranteed that their wigs would be indistinguishable from an authentic headful, even to the most experienced eye.
I immediately joined Lawrence in suggesting we make an appointment. At least it was something to do. Perhaps, even, there might be some fun in it? A Marilyn Monroe wig, or an Audrey Hepburn? Suzy had always loved playing with different hairstyles, long and flowy one year, gamine the next, let the grey out, get rid of it, add some blonde streaks, use a bit of henna.
‘Nope. Not for me, thanks. I’d loathe wearing some impoverished Croatian’s hair while she has to languish behind the curtains until her hair grows back, just to pay for the groceries for a few months.’
‘But darling,’ I said, perhaps a little plaintively, ‘you can’t intend just to go bald.’
‘I don’t have any choice in the matter,’ she said tartly. ‘It’s only a question of what I am going to do about it!’
‘And . . .’
‘Hats! I’ve always adored hats. I am well known for the audacity of my hats. I’ll have a look around, see what I might resurrect . . . Or perhaps I might try something new.’
‘Good idea,’ I agreed. ‘Why not discuss it with Lucy, she might have some ideas?’
‘Lucy! You’ve got to be kidding.’
She was quite right. Lucy! How idiotic! ‘Yes. She’d have you dressed like Paddington be
ar.’
There was a long pause as Suzy straightened up from her slumped position, and a light shone in eyes that had been dimmed with exhaustion and fear. ‘Oh you little angel, you! You are so clever!’
‘What’d I do?’
Lawrence leaned over his desk. ‘Yes, what did he do?’
‘He’s got it! It will be so chic. A Paddington hat. With just enough bald peeping out underneath to make it whimsical and absurd and tragic at the same time. So memorable! Red! I might get a brown one as well!’
I hadn’t seen her so animated in weeks. It’s no wonder Freud didn’t know what a woman wants. A Paddington hat!
Suzy searched for a source, but most such hats were for children, and she eventually had some made. After her hair fell out, and she began to wear them around town – when she could face it, or at home when she couldn’t – others began to copy her. How adorable it was, how chic, how audacious! For a time it was infra dig to be seen without one. But the fad passed almost as quickly as Suzy did.
Suzy hated the metaphor. ‘I am not battling cancer, fighting the good fight, my body is not being attacked. I am just dying of a disease. How mundane is that?’
Hers was the fashionable position, but wrong. If she didn’t feel like a soldier, I did. It was war: we marshalled our forces, found the best generals and military advisers, sought reinforcements, gathered an extensive arsenal of weapons, hunkered down and prayed for victory. It was as cruel as war, as arbitrary, as inevitable and exhausting.
She took to her bed, and belatedly began to do her homework. She read cancer memoirs and a variety of death stories. Brave ones, scared ones, morbid ones, mordant ones, sentimental ones, trying-not-to-be-sentimental-but-failing ones. Long goodbyes. Soon enough she wanted to hurl them across the room, but hadn’t the strength. She took to flipping them, one by one, wearily onto the carpet by the side of the bed, a pile of death droppings.
‘Throw these away, will you?’
‘Had enough?’
‘You’d swear they got ill just to have a hot topic to write about. Must get cancer! It sells! Who the hell took these cancer fuckwits seriously before they tumoured out? Well, fuck them. It’s bad enough lying here decomposing without having to transmit the gory details.’
