My Animal Life

by Maggie Gee

  Slowly, she fought her way back to fitness. Through a long summer. She was cooking again. (I judged my father harshly for that. Now I think we should judge no one harshly; the facts of life and death are harsh enough. I dare say she wanted normality back.) She was walking to the village again, then cycling, then driving.

  At first, in my mind, the sands of time were running like blinding white rain. A dementing curtain of silica, constantly in motion, distracted me from everything beyond it, crazed the real picture of my mother (who was thinner than usual, quieter than usual but herself, steadying herself, still there, still here. Who was reading again, laughing at the political sketches in the Guardian, out in her red puffa jacket, walking only a little slower than before.) For a while I couldn’t see her as she was, and enjoy her. That sibilant ‘six months’ had buried everything in dry, milling fear.

  But for our own protection, fear is usually self-limiting. When for a brief period I suffered from panic attacks, it was comforting to read that the body is physically incapable of sustaining terror for more than about twenty minutes. You just have to put your head down and get through it.

  The same held true on the bigger scale. After a few months of terror, I began to forget. Mum was putting on weight, looking better. Slowly and then faster, milestone followed milestone. Six months came and passed. Then a year. At some point she learned, not from me but a doctor, that there was some involvement of the liver, but I don’t know exactly how frank they were, and I don’t know how fully she accepted it. My mother was always an optimist; it was one of the lovable things about her, the many, many lovable things, for did she ever know how much I loved her? I think she did. I often told her.

  Our visits relaxed into something like what they had been before, though Dad’s increasing blindness meant we could not stay in the house, since blind people need everything to be in its place, and Rosa was an active five-year-old.

  A restored near-normality. Miraculous.

  The balance of power between my parents reverted. As my mother grew stronger, my father grew weaker. Dad was again the ill one, baby and boss, Mum was the organising functionary, the strong one. Slowly but surely, month by month, Dad’s Parkinson’s began to move towards its endgame. His blindness, too, got worse; he saw light and dark shapes, but not much else; he would draw Rosa close to him, and gaze past her face. He still went for his morning walks, and refused a white stick, but a neighbour took my mother to one side and told her they were all afraid of running him over, aware he could no long see cars coming (but Vic’s hearing remained supernaturally acute, perhaps fine-tuned by listening out for subversion in the kitchen). He grew thinner and frailer, and needed more clothes, layering waistcoats and woollens under his tweed jacket, his red zipped tracksuit top now like a second skin as he tried to keep warm in his last summer. And then there was another winter to get through, with no hope, now, of escaping to Portugal, with daylight diminishing too early, and the raw bitter wind that comes howling from Siberia and harrows the low, flat East Anglian land. Every morning, though, Dad got up in the dark and did his exercises, standing on one leg to tie each shoe up, making the effort, the tremendous effort, until he could no longer tie his shoes. Dressed himself up, layer after layer, and fought his way out into the featureless cold, not long after the sun cleared the red-brick bungalows and neutered yew-trees, bent forward like a sprinter, though his step was now tiny, uncertain, delicate, as if a slight breeze might have blown him off course. Mum was cutting up his food and feeding him, now. She told me she had said to him once, knowing that he was getting weaker, and she had cancer, ‘Together we can still do anything.’

  She showed love for him. She lived it out. And what do I know of the love between them, that existed when no one else was there, that somehow endured the rage and the fear?

  I hope that at last my mother was not frightened, or at least no longer frightened of him. In a way, they both got their wish, at last, though getting their wish involved their death. Vic was looked after like a baby, with no rival sibling to push him away. Aileen had a mate who did not frighten her, as her father had once frightened her in drink, as the healthy Vic sometimes frightened her in temper.

  I have not really said how bad things were, though in many other houses things were worse.

  Once, in the car—it was an accident, although they were rowing—he pushed my mother hard against the door and ‘broke her teeth’, she said: perhaps it was one tooth. This was in the months before she left. The dentist repaired it, but she had had enough.

  This incident is what sticks in my mind from all the scuffles and fights that were like something a child would do in a painful, unmanageable rage. I pity him for having to be violent: no one wants to be violent. When he threw a plateful of food across the table, how desperate must he have felt? How reduced to the rage of a thwarted infant. The fact remains, he was bigger than my mother, and when he was angry, out of control, so I cannot altogether pity him. I suffered from her fear; was afraid with her, and for her. Not so much for myself, once I reached adolescence, because I knew I would go away. I can’t even remember how old I was when he stopped hitting me (but isn’t there something odd about the way people say a child is ‘too old to be hit’? Does it mean ‘best only to hit children when they are too small to hit you back’?) I do remember him knocking off my glasses at the tea-table, when I was a sullen fourteen-year-old, and my brave elder brother standing up for me. We children did stand up for each other.

  So much easier for me to love my father, first when I was no longer living at home; secondly when he was no longer (I must believe) hitting my mother; thirdly when he was blind and weak and definitely not hitting anyone at all any more; and finally now he is dead. I am loving the man he would have wanted to be, and might have had a chance to be. It was for us, to support his wife and children, that he gave up the chance to be a photographer and shouldered the crippling weight of the day job, the teaching job that made him a part-time tyrant, a head teacher of the corporal punishment era who obsessively told his family about each caning, bringing the shame of that back home. ‘You’re John’s tyrant, Vic.’ But he didn’t want to be. Probably he should have been an artist, with his thin skin and keen apprehension of beauty.

  And in many respects I identify. I too am a Gee, and not always easy to live with. Gees are wonderful in theory, but oppressive and abrasive in practice. Oversensitive perfectionists who can keep working for ever, Gees have to learn the concept of ‘good enough’, ‘getting by’ and ‘leave well alone’. I have to learn them. I am learning still. My father never learned to leave people alone. He wanted more from them; restlessly, urgently, he demanded more than he could be given.

  (The body, of course, is the sane limiter of the mind. I learned not to overwork through my body refusing. Once I used to work through the night until I finished a piece; I fooled myself I was a pioneer pressing on through the hours when other people slept. Alone down that lit-up wire above the void. What arrogance! One night I fell off into nothingness and could not get back up again. I came up to bed at five, as many times before, with the light cracking the curtains like an ill-timed migraine, crawled into bed beside my husband, curled into him as usual, tried to sleep. Instead I began shivering, at first a little, then helplessly, violently, as if I were having a fit. I could not stop, and my heart began racing. Nick woke up and tried to warm me. After half an hour, he called an ambulance. Two stout ambulance-women, loud cheery Londoners, were soon in the room. After about a quarter of an hour with my heart racing over 225 beats a minute, they dressed me up, put me in the ambulance on a monitor, and belted off to Central Middlesex Hospital, Park Royal. Before we got to the hospital, my heart kicked into a normal rhythm. The conclusion in my medical notes was sound: ‘Exhaustion’. I have never tried to work through the night again. One day I will die, but I want to live.)

  Did my father once have a similar experience? He too would never give up until something was done. Even after retirement, he painted as if
he were going to the block next day, carrying on through mealtimes, the Ribena arriving like a procession of jewels, keeping him going as the light faded. But something had made him value sleep excessively. To my mother’s unspoken distress (since they always had to go to bed together, just as they did everything else together), he had to be in bed every day by 9.30. He got up after my mother, around 7.30 to 8 am, so I make it he got ten hours of sleep; enough for a baby. Which in some respects is what he would have liked to be, safe in the dark with his wife, his mother.

  She did as he asked and looked after him at home when he finally couldn’t get up any more. He had tried to outwit his own death (for the Parkinson’s never affected his brain) or perhaps to outpace it, getting to the tape before the stage of indignity and helplessness. On my last ‘normal’ visit he sat, reduced, a cold, swaddled stick-man too clenched to smile. ‘I’m no good any more, Margaret,’ he said. I should have just received the message he gave, a simple message that mattered to him, a stark truth he was brave enough to state. But instead I replied with dishonest love, ‘Don’t say that. We’re glad you’re still here.’ About three weeks before he died, he tried to kill himself with whisky (which he never drank) and aspirin. All that happened was that he did not wake up until midday the next day, with a hangover. I don’t think he considered my mother (who would have been implicated) or the children. It was the ruthless side of him; rough courage. He took on death, and lost. Then he asked his GP to help him out, and was indignant when refused. But the doctor did give him advice: ‘Stop eating.’ Dad did stop eating. Death hurried closer.

  I was staying with my elder brother in Lincolnshire when my mother phoned. ‘Come,’ she said. ‘Dad can’t get up. I can’t manage on my own.’ She, who always managed, needed us at last.

  The doctor had put him on a morphine pump, a little black-and-clear vial attached to a vein, fixed by the side of the bed where he lay. Dad did not really want his children there, but he accepted my mother needed me. He was no longer making the rules. I tried to tell him that I loved him. In the overheated house, death ground into gear, getting ready for the last assault. Shrunken as Dad was, he still seemed so strong.

  My mother became desperate to get out of the house. Only an hour before he died, she made me go for a walk in the next-door field, leaving my father alone with the elderly home help, who was naturally unwilling to be left in charge, and I was very anxious, and eager to get back, but Mum doggedly wanted to stay out in the air. There was no sunshine, just a wide grey sky. We seemed dwarfed by it, in the empty field. Coarse grass, rugged cloud, red clover, and a death going on in the red brick box nearby. ‘Mum, we have to go back.’ Holding hands, we went back.

  Till the end he kept surfacing, uneasy, desperate, and we were torn between pity and fear, and used the manual override on the pump to take him back down to oblivion. In the end, his strong body was overcome. His colour changed, suddenly yellow-white all over, and his hand, very quickly, felt icy cold.

  His death was not calm, or kind, or resigned, but he died at home, as was his wish, protected from strangers, free of nurses. It was the end his own father had begged for: ‘Don’t let me go to Rennie Lodge, Aileen.’

  At his funeral, all his children spoke. I chose Shakespeare’s ‘Fear no more the heat o’ the sun.’ He was a fearful man who no longer had anything to be afraid of; he was a brave man despite his fear; he had always, unstintingly, uncomplainingly, supported us. Home was what he lived for and he loved us absolutely, with a blind, worry-filled, concentrated love. He was fiercely proud of each one of us, and prayed for us each night on his knees, though he was too obstinate to go to church. His belief in me helped me to write. He told Aunty Kit I would be a great writer. My mother ferried this back to me, and though he was formally unqualified to make the judgement, that generous faith surged like a wave behind me.

  I imagine my father slipping once again through the golden fields of grain between Stony Stratford and Wolverton, sloping home through the late sun, light on his small feet, stopping to dribble and kick a stone, his check Viyella shirt soft and warm on his neck, his pale blue painter’s and meteorologist’s eyes as keen as they were when he was a boy, enjoying and naming the gentle feathers of cirrus cloud high in the sky, nothing to worry about, no one to fret, the money he had earned a friendly weight in his pocket, going home for a rest now, Vic Gee of Wolverton, sure he would be welcome at last, going home.

  Fear no more the heat o’ the sun

  Nor the winter’s barren rages.

  Thou thy earthly task hast done,

  Home art gone, and ta’en thy wages.

  Mum died exhausted, herself, six months later. At least she had lived alone, and for herself, for a while, and danced in the kitchen to her tapes, and come to London, and watched The Sound of Music tucked up in bed with her adored Rosa, and met my friends, who liked her; and at home, made a friendship, unmonitored by Dad, with her witty neighbour Janet, and rode her red bike, and drove off to Weybourne every morning before breakfast to go swimming.

  And then there were the weeks we spent together, Mum and I, a final gift from the gods before everything was taken away. We had never had enough time à deux: never had a mum-and-daughter day out, or lunch out, let alone a mum-and-daughter holiday. Dad was jealous even of the coffees we had, at the Copper Kettle, in Billingshurst, when we were shopping. He would tap his watch: ‘What took you so long?’

  Now I came to stay with Mum on her own, and we had a month of amity and happiness, Marg and Mum, Mum and Marg. My husband let me go, as he always let me go, as Vic could never let Aileen go. I wrote in the day, in the warm cedar shed, and in the evening we ate delicious meals and drank sherry and watched TV. And my mother bought clothes. After a lifetime of ‘not spoiling herself’, she spent the small reserve of money in the bank on jackets and skirts and blouses, all in the bright colours she loved, mostly scarlet. Maybe she had a premonition, one of her rare and unlucky premonitions, that there would be no use for the money later.

  Mum explaining the world to me. She said, ‘I grew up in the woods and fields. Scatter me in the woods and fields.’

  On the station platform at Sheringham, seeing me off on an autumnal evening after the happy month we had spent together, a wintry chill in the air but the sky midnight blue and drenched with small bright stars, Mum held my hand in the dark. Our living hands, flesh over the bone. There weren’t many passengers. The train was late. She said, ‘I feel fine, let’s wish for a couple of years. Three. Five.’ ‘Yes,’ I said fervently. ‘I’m wishing.’ ‘How about seven?’ she said. ‘Seven,’ I agreed, clutching at her living hand, but the night felt cold, and inside me some voice was saying, ‘Not seven’, and the train for Norwich shunted into the station.

  Three weeks after I went back to London, by a random side-blow of fate, perhaps through overworking on the novel in our first house, where the new central heating wasn’t yet installed, I was in hospital with pneumonia, taken in as an emergency with a sky-high temperature and put on intravenous antibiotics while I lay there seeing visions of crystalline architecture that are, it seems, a side-effect of brain chemistry in fever. Coming out weak and thin, I had been home only a few days when I got the phone call from my mother. She had always asked for so little, but now she was urgent and direct, as only once before, when my father was dying. ‘Margaret, please come. Will you come?’

  Mum had woken up to find she had turned yellow, and was very afraid. She had arranged an appointment with the doctor, knowing that if this was jaundice, it probably came from her liver. After that call I went to Norfolk, and did not leave her.

  Next day Mum’s face was more yellow than before. We visited the surgery together. The doctor, who knew her history, looked stricken, but agreed there was more than one possible explanation. We begged for some that weren’t cancer, and he gave them, but in his eyes we could see he did not believe them. ‘Have you been losing weight?’ he asked my mother. ‘No,’ she said. And then, ‘Only a few pounds.’
He was nodding his head. That was what he expected.

  We went into the Norwich hospital, and they ran tests. We had prayed it was a random infection: there was no infection. As the results came in, the news grew steadily worse. We kept hoping, but every day there was less to hope for. Concentrated, hope became fiercer and more desperate, but began to be tinged with leaden despair. Mum had hoped for seven years; soon we hoped for months. And then for weeks, and then only days. At last there was nothing left to hope for, not even our desperate plan to get her out to spend a last Christmas with us in London. A last-ditch operation was too painful to endure; I suppose she was too ill for them to use general anaesthetic. They had to stop, in mid-session, trying to introduce a stent which would have helped her liver manage for a few more weeks. She was brought back to the ward, dark with pain.

  In her remaining days, she wrote kind, bright letters, in her normal firm and impeccable hand, some to people who’d been too afraid to come to see her once they knew that she was dying. The family arrived, and sat around the bed, and my mother managed to laugh with them. My brothers came, and Mum’s beloved grandchildren. Mum’s ability to enjoy herself, anywhere, at any time, bubbled up, miraculous. She let my daughter feed her grapes. As she floated away, in the end, on morphine, time circled back to its beginning, to that graveyard opposite the tiny house in London Road, Stony Stratford, where she grew up with all those brothers and sisters, and she saw the ‘women in long white dresses’ she remembered from the years after the First World War, and her own mother, May, gentle mouth and dreamy eyes, the person of whom she remembered only kindness; and she said the phrase I can never forget, ‘There’s someone waiting for me at home who’s good as gold, good as gold.’ I sat by her bedside, by then on my own, on that long last night, stroking her hand. For her it was a comfort, going home, but in retrospect it made me afraid, since I never, for myself, want to go back home, if home means the family I grew up in.