Good Wives

by Margaret Forster

  He died that evening and was buried on the top of Mount Veia above Vailima, the next afternoon. To say Fanny was distraught was a grotesque understatement. She was overwhelmed with grief. Now no longer a wife but a widow (though she never, ever, used that word), ahead of her she had another eighteen years of life during which, after the first year of recovery, she travelled, made a new relationship (though never married again), and did many interesting things, but as far as she was concerned her real life was over. That had been with Louis. Her feelings about her own identity seemed to change. She was far too strong a personality to feel she was now nothing, that only being Louis’s partner had given life meaning – that was nonsense – but on the other hand she lost her focus. For fourteen years everything had revolved round Louis and now there was no centre. It is a feeling that all wives of Fanny’s dedication are bound to feel, the price, perhaps, of an intensely passionate marriage, the sense of loss proportionate to the weight of love and intimacy that had been there. She still felt herself to be his wife, went on defining herself by reference to him, initially finding some comfort, but only a slim one, in guarding his memory and in trying to protect it from the attacks which came.

  To Fanny, being a wife never ended, but then she did not wish it to.

  Reflections

  I ADMIRE FANNY Stevenson as much as I pity Mary Livingstone, and, while I could never have been a wife like her either, her life doesn’t fill me with such dismay. In her marriage to Louis, she was less constrained than Mary not just because he was very different from David Livingstone, but because her own expectations were different. By the time she met her second husband she had rejected the notion of abject submission – she had travelled, she had been in contact with bohemian people who allowed that women were creative too and did not relegate wives entirely to the domestic sphere. Fanny could, and did, fight her corner and was Louis’s equal in a sense that Mary was never David’s.

  But nevertheless, she fulfilled many of the conventional roles of wife just as surely as Mary did. Those words in the marriage service, ‘in sickness and in health’, were ominous for Fanny. There was a great deal of sickness in her marriage to Louis. Sometimes, it seemed her prime function was to be a nurse, and of all the jobs a wife is called upon to do nursing must be quite the worst. It scared me, remembering how my own mother-in-law’s life had been dominated by the need to nurse a husband suffering from multiple sclerosis. Unlike Fanny, who knew when she married Louis that she was marrying a sick man, my mother-in-law had had no inkling of how her major role as a wife would be as nurse. Her husband had been a particularly fit and healthy man when she made those vows promising to look after him in sickness and in health. But once he became ill, within seven years of their marriage, her days were spent washing and feeding him and pushing him around in his wheelchair, until he became bedridden. She had four young children to look after and no nursing help whatsoever. Once a year, she was given a rest when he was taken into a convalescent home for two weeks. Even then, she felt she should visit him, and when she did she told me how he would tell her to come close and then whisper in her ear, ‘Get me out of here!’ She always did, cutting short her own brief respite from nursing, her compassion far outweighing her need to rest.

  I used to try to imagine myself in this situation. Would I be able to do what she did? I doubted it (and still do). But my sister-in-law does it, as do thousands of other women. Her husband also has MS. All that has changed is, mercifully, the amount of help available to her, in contrast to the lack of it for her mother. Yet, in essence, she is just as bound by that vow to look after her husband ‘in sickness’ and ‘for worse’. The MS Society, as well as many other such societies, records how the demands of needing to nurse wreck marriages. The level of commitment necessary imposes the most stringent of tests and it is hardly surprising many fail it. My sister-in-law doesn’t. It is not simply that she is as kind and caring as her mother but that she sees herself as having no choice. Marriage, to her, was a commitment for life, whatever happened. The bad luck which befell both her and her husband could not be predicted nor could it be prepared for, though the church service tries to cover all eventualities. Would she have made the same vows if she had known what the future held? Would anyone? Is it right to ask them to? Shouldn’t there be some let-out clause? But then if there were to be such an escape route, what would be the point of marriage, of commiting oneself in the first place?

  At any rate, it was something I worried about greatly. I certainly never saw myself as having any potential to nurse – I didn’t have the temperament for it, never mind the skills. My unsuitability to be wife-as-nurse was demonstrated very quickly and clearly on our honeymoon. We went to Sardinia and a few days after we arrived my dear husband developed a boil on his bottom. He was in agony, the hideous thing growing bigger and redder by the hour, and a doctor was called to our hotel. She was a large, powerfully built woman who, it quickly emerged, did not believe in antibiotics to treat boils (though the boil was probably too far on anyway to do anything but lance it). What she did was squeeze it with her hands. She spoke no English and we spoke no Italian, but we each had some French. I’d thought I could leave her to it – God, I didn’t want to see a boil burst – but no she instructed me to stand beside the bed, upon which he, the suffering patient, lay face down, and hold a bowl, filled with boiling water, which had been brought to the room. I was to be ‘une bonne femme’ and help. To keep the bowl steady, I had to look at it, and so could not avoid having in my field of vision the sight of her broad, strong fingers pushing and pummelling the boil. Groans of pain came from the recumbent figure on the bed and a thick yellow, disgusting pus began to come out of the boil. The bowl of water began to wobble in my hands as she dipped some gauze in it, the room swam mistily before my eyes, and the last words I heard before I hit the floor were, ‘Un peu de courage, madame!’

  Quite. No courage at all, from a wife merely watching a husband in pain and in no pain herself except in her imagination. The doctor’s contempt was fully justified. How on earth was I going to cope? What kind of wife would I be if called upon to nurse? When we got home, back to the Vale of Health in London’s Hampstead, there was another test. I’d always known he had asthma but I’d never seen him have an attack. His line was that he’d had it as a child and was now clear of it. What a lie. That was how he dealt with it, by denying it, and usually it worked very well as a technique. But one night, a foggy night in November, when the pond over which our flat looked was blanked out with thick mist, he started wheezing. It got worse and worse and I didn’t know what to do. He couldn’t speak and I thought he was going to choke. He had no Ventolin inhaler at the time, only some medication in tablet form and this didn’t work. I rang the doctor. She came and gave him an injection, and he recovered. Soon afterwards, she prescribed the inhaler, and since then, and since we moved from the (in his case) misnamed Vale of Health, he has never had such a severe attack. When he has a mild attack, he knows how to handle it and so do I. The name of the game (some game) is distraction, taking his mind off it, and I can do that.

  But what if he had had to have dreadful operations and I had been called upon, as his wife, to dress his wounds? What if he’d succumbed to horrible diseases which required me to clean sores? I’d have been useless, crashing about and fainting all the time. I’ve always been a fainter, from a very early age. I could faint just entering a hospital or, never mind entering one, seeing one in a film – crash, that would be me in the middle of a row in a cinema. Definitely a bad bargain as a wife, not a Florence Nightingale bone in my body. But, as that great woman so famously said in her Notes on Nursing, there is more to the task than the practical business of bandaging wounds. There is the psychological aspect, and maybe, once I’d come round from the faint, I could handle that.

  Surprisingly (well, I was very surprised) I found I could. Invalids like to feel someone is looking after their needs competently, without fuss and yet firmly. That I can do. I even like do
ing it. I can wash fevered brows, provide tempting food, plump up pillows, change sheets and pyjamas – full marks there, I think. And I can deal with the ‘I’m-never-going-to-get-better’ moans and the ‘I’m-so-bored-talk-to-me’ entreaties very well. I can parry fear with common sense, soothe by pointing out minuscule signs of recovery, cheer by stressing that this will not go on for ever (whatever it is). I am not patient or calm by nature, but I can be both when I am the wife-as-nurse. And yet I wonder if I could find the reserves of strength over long periods which Fanny had to find. I’ve never had to look after a sick husband for more than a few weeks – an attack of jaundice, two cartilage operations, that kind of thing. It’s been more of a test dealing with the trivial complaints – then, I feel irritated to be regarded as a nurse just because I am a wife.

  Most wives will be familiar with what I mean – the so-called ‘flu’ (which is only an ordinary cold), the agonising, sinister stomach pains (merely the result of greed), the dreadful earache (two hours at a football match on a freezing day without a hat). All of these demand attention, from wives who are expected to offer unlimited tender loving care. I can only manage so much. He likes to detail his symptoms in a way that amazes me, mainly because I never do the same. Wives, on the whole, I think, don’t. They simply don’t say, ‘I’ve got a terrible sore throat and I feel hot and sweaty, what shall I do?’ What they do, what I do, is dose myself with aspirin and go to bed. I don’t want to share my illness and I don’t want to be told what I should do when it is so obvious. I don’t want to be nursed, but he does.

  But in a long marriage, as both partners age, the nursing bit is bound to loom more seriously even if nothing dramatic and tragic happens. Fanny never got to that stage (and neither of course did Mary). Louis was dead before he was old and in the fourteen years they were married Fanny nursed specific illnesses and not general frailty. It’s when couples hit sixty that the marriage service promise (not that I ever made it) to look after each other, that ‘in sickness and in health’ part, takes on a whole new dimension. I’ve had a chilling glimpse of what it can be like. In the last decade, rheumatoid arthritis has come to call and when it was first diagnosed I had intimations of what it was going to be like nursing a husband virtually crippled. Walking was painful for him, typing agony, his whole very active life distorted, and with it the threat that his personality would be too. He has always been a madly active person, ever restless, never walking if he could run and dash. To see him obliged to use a stick, forcing himself to walk a mere hundred yards, was frightening, and even worse was watching him struggle with massively swollen hands to use his word processor. No walking? No working? He’d go mad, and so would I. But true sympathy was easy to find when the need for it was so acute. The nursing wasn’t a matter of obligation, it had nothing to do with duty as a wife, but was a natural response.

  All the same, a future in which wife-as-nurse seemed destined to obliterate all other roles was unbearable to think about. What would it do to us? I know enough wives who’ve had to find out and I didn’t want to be one of them, fearing I’d fail to sustain the sympathy over a long period of time. One half of my head said there could be no escape if this fate befell me – ‘for better for worse’ even if I’d never actually said those words – but the other said I’d have to, I’d have to find some measure of escape, devise ways of escaping a role I didn’t want (though who does?). In fact, a drug was found to which the arthritis responded and, miraculously, his limbs straightened, the pain subsided and within a year he was back to normal, within another he was off the drug and still well. During the time he was on it, and had to take it without fail, he would have liked me to be in charge of the tablets, doling them out as required, but I refused. It was his responsibility. I didn’t want to be pushed into being the one who in effect controlled his medication. I can’t bear to see wives saying, ‘Here, dear, here’s your pills, now take them like a good boy.’ What on earth does that do to a marriage?

  About his other problems I will show merciful restraint and say little, though they are all relevant to the wife-as-nurse role. There is, for example, the stomach problem. He has not got an ulcer but something like an ulcer, some tendency for the stomach lining to become inflamed, resulting in searing pains during the night. Always in the night. I wake up, hear the crinkle of tinfoil as he opens and takes a tablet. I lie there, sleep ruined, remembering what he drank in the evening: white wine, red wine, whisky (because Spurs won/lost, it makes no difference, celebration or consolation both call for whisky). Sometimes, he has the effrontery to say, ‘You shouldn’t have let me have all that wine’ or whisky or whatever, and I am furious. I don’t intend to ‘let’ him do or not do anything. Being his wife does not mean I have to.

  This is deeply, deeply boring and has nothing to do with me as his wife. Real need, yes; self-created need, no. I think wives should be tough. They should refuse to become surrogate mothers.

  Fanny proved a good hostess once she was settled in Samoa, but her attitude to entertaining and being sociable while she was living in Bournemouth struck many chords with me. Louis wanted company, she didn’t. A good wife even today is expected to welcome her husband’s friends and be hospitable and, just as it did between Fanny and Louis, this can cause trouble.

  My mother was staying with us, soon after we were married, and we went for short, sedate walks in the evening. It was August, during a spell of hot weather, and we were taking a rest, sitting on a bench, when two men stopped in front of us and said hello to Hunter. They were both journalists and there was some animated chat about newspapers. They asked where he was living and he told them, said we lived in a flat five minutes away. Then I heard him say, ‘Why don’t you –’ and I knew what would follow, so I cleared my throat and he got my (mean) message and finished ‘– drop in sometime.’ When, of course, he had been going to say ‘come back with us and have some coffee or a drink’. My mother was appalled. As we walked home, she told me I’d behaved badly, that my husband had wanted to invite his friends round and it was my duty as his wife to welcome them. I said it wasn’t. I said there was no such duty. I didn’t feel like having these two strangers home and if he wanted to he could have a drink, or whatever, with them somewhere else. She tried to get Hunter to agree with her, and to be annoyed with me, but he said he didn’t really care. But in spite of what I’d said, about having no obligations socially as a wife, I felt guilty. He knew how antisocial I was, he’d always known and accepted this, but perhaps now I was a wife I should try harder.

  The late Nicholas Tomalin, his immediate superior on the Sunday Times where he was soon working, certainly thought so. Nick was a very successful journalist, an amusing and charming man, clever and well liked, with a huge circle of friends whom he was in the habit of entertaining regularly and generously at his Camden Town home where he lived with his wife Claire and three daughters. We’d been to dinner there. Twelve of us sat round a big kitchen table and ate a delicious meal. It must have seemed that I was thoroughly enjoying myself but I wasn’t, though I felt ashamed that I wasn’t. For God’s sake, why wasn’t I? I just don’t like dinner-parties, that’s all. It’s silly, I know, but I would always rather be somewhere else, preferably at home.

  Anyway, one day Nick rang, asking if he could pop round and see me that afternoon. He knew Hunter was out of town because he himself had sent him to interview someone, so I couldn’t imagine why he was coming at all. Why would he want to see me? But he came, and we sat in the garden drinking tea and he was very pleasant, as he always was, and then he put his cup down down very carefully and said there was something he wanted to say which he hoped would not offend me. He didn’t mean in any way to upset me, he was speaking as a friend, but he wondered if I’d realised how much my dislike of any kind of socialising was going to hinder Hunter’s career. He said a journalist had to have contacts of every variety, that it was essential to mix with as many people as possible and move in as many different circles as he could. He had to entertain an
d be entertained and the co-operation of a wife was important. It was doing him no good at all to have a wife reluctant to participate in the social round.

  I was stunned. I can’t remember what I said in reply, if I said anything (I usually do). I know I didn’t laugh, as I should have done, and I know I wasn’t angry, which would have been justified, but probably not a good idea. I think I was too shaken at this image of myself as a wife-who-was-a-career-wrecker to be able to respond at all. Nick had touched my fear that I was a bad wife, he’d voiced my own dread. I liked him, and believed absolutely that he was indeed, as he had said, telling me this for my own good. We chatted some more, and then he left, and if I didn’t exactly cry with mortification I was absurdly near doing so. Then Hunter came home and was treated to this saga, accompanied by wails of misery. First he said Nick had a cheek, then he said that to believe what he’d said was stupid. He rhymed off a list of journalists whom he admired and knew for a fact had wives who never went anywhere. He said it was just that Nick operated in the way we knew he did but that didn’t mean everyone else had to. I should ignore him, and what’s for supper?