Precious Lives

by Margaret Forster

  This had been recognised by the doctors who had treated him at the infirmary and still visited him. They asked him if he’d be part of a research project, explaining that it was rare to find a man of his age in such relatively good condition physically and excellent condition mentally. They wanted him to come to a special clinic once a month and be examined and asked questions and weighed. My father was rather impressed by this emphasis on his own importance and had graciously agreed to attend the clinic. But he only went twice and then said he was being made a monkey of and wouldn’t go again. This heinous offence, this making a monkey out of him, consisted of making him sit ‘with a lot of old folk in wheelchairs’ and of asking him questions he considered ‘daft’. He’d imagined he would be treated as someone special and he wasn’t. So he announced he was putting a stop to ‘that palaver’. They’d had their chance. They’d mucked it up. If they tried to force him to continue to attend this clinic he would refuse point-blank. I was to be on stand-by to speak to the doctor in charge and tell him what’s what. Rather to my father’s disappointment, I was not called upon to do so. No attempt was made to persuade him.

  He was in fine fettle by July. Clearly, he was still nowhere near popping off. Clearly, his life still had value and meaning for him.

  I forget the exact date of the most distressing phone call I have ever received. It should be impossible to forget, but I have forgotten. All I can remember is that it was about a week before Marion’s fifty-sixth birthday on 16 July. She’d been having more trouble than usual swallowing and some new lumps had appeared in her neck. First, she’d consulted the doctor at the hospice where she’d spent those three weeks during the radiotherapy treatment. He’d continued to be so good at soothing her fears and had always said she could come back at any time if she was worried. She had an excellent relationship with the hospice staff, whereas she had none at all with anyone at the hospital. But then the hospice referred her back to the hospital, suspecting there was a flare-up of the cancer, which would need treatment they might not be able to give.

  The phone call was short and, of necessity, brutal. Frances could hardly speak, Marion did not want to try. The cancer was now terminal. There was no hope at all of curing it and very little of extending Marion’s life beyond six months. Any treatment would be palliative, concentrating on relieving pain. The cruel surgery and the radiotherapy with its vicious after-effects had all been for nothing. Everyone was devastated. The telephone suddenly seemed an instrument of torture, used to induce suffering. This woeful news wasn’t something that could be discussed or analysed – it just had to be absorbed. And then silence. Lots of phone calls consisting of one short sentence, then silence, until receivers were gently replaced.

  We left for London at once, leaving everything just as it was, pausing only to ring my father’s nursing-home to alert them to what had happened and then to ring him and repeat this. ‘So you won’t be in tomorrow,’ he said. ‘No,’ I said, ‘not for a few days.’ ‘But you’ll be back?’ ‘Oh yes,’ I assured him – after all, we would have to come back to pack up, if we decided to return to London for good instead of staying as usual to October. He cheered up at once. We set off on a roasting hot day. The whole of England seemed to be burning as feverishly as I felt I was. The hills either side of the M6 were brown with drought, the grass verges grey with dust. It was like driving through a foreign country, and when we reached London this impression grew. The city we crawled into had gone mad, abandoning any staid-ness it had ever had, any of its famous English reserve. The streets were crammed with people in shorts and beachwear, people wearing hardly anything at all, torsos slick with sweat, eyes blanked out with dark sunglasses. The pavements were crowded with tables and chairs, every café and restaurant spilling out onto them, and over the lot flourished great gaudy umbrellas with stripes and spots and abstract designs, all running into each other in a clash of furious colour. We drove through it all, hot and sticky and exhausted, in no state to visit a dying person, but we couldn’t bear to waste time going to our own house first to shower and change clothes. We went directly to Marion’s flat, in Crouch End, approaching it with eagerness but with dread. We were desperate to see her, but afraid of what we would see; we wanted simply to be with her, but knew there would be nothing simple about it.

  The curtains were all closed tightly. Was this to keep out the sun, merely to shade the rooms? Ringing the doorbell felt like an act of violence. We heard it screech inside, though we had only pressed the button once, lightly. The waiting for it to be answered, for Frances to come and let us in, seemed endless and then, when she opened the door, not long enough. Foolishly, we whispered, asked how Marion was feeling. Frances shook her head, unable to speak. Everything was so quiet as we tiptoed up the stairs. Turning the bend, I saw that the sitting-room ahead was in virtual darkness, though it was mid-afternoon. Ahead, facing the open door, was a doll’s-house. It was a lovely toy house, double-fronted, tall, with lights on in its windows. It glowed, and not just because it was lit up; it looked cheerful and welcoming. It was to be a present from Marion to her twin Annabel (who had always wanted a doll’s-house as a child), for their joint birthday.

  Marion was sitting in a wing armchair, her back to the doll’s-house, facing the fireplace. She was absolutely still, her arms clutching rather than resting on the arms of the chair, her back ramrod straight. She looked as if she were in a trance and we hesitated to disturb her. It was awkward, trying to embrace her in an armchair, but we tried. She nodded, and said nothing as we made stumbling attempts at sympathy. She was far away, quite removed, yet rigid with self-control. There were no tears. Frances said Marion had been watching rugby on television. It was the summer of the Rugby Union World Cup and she had become engrossed in this competition, to everyone’s surprise. Ever since the new lumps had appeared she had been watching the games and had her favourite players, most of them Australian. She hadn’t the faintest understanding of the rules of the game, but as far as she was concerned these were irrelevant – numb with fear, it was the action she liked, the running and kicking and throwing, taking her away from her own frozen condition, immobile in her chair. The players were playing for her.

  It was the following day before I was on my own with her. I was making the inevitable soup in the kitchen. She sat at the table, quite expressionless. I might as well have been with my father so far as any real communication went. Everything I found myself saying was banal and Marion didn’t seem to want to say anything at all. Nothing could have been more different from how we usually were together. In the forty years we’d known each other talk had been the connection – talk, talk, talk, vying with each other, interrupting, ranging over every conceivable topic of personal interest. It hadn’t all been chitchat either, not all of it that slip-slop of gossip said to be so beloved of women. A lot of this torrent of talk had been serious. Sometimes the content had been crucial to some decision one of us had to make, it had had far-reaching consequences. We often looked back afterwards and knew such talks had been precious and that without them things would have been different.

  Once, staying in Marion’s house in Carlisle on a visit to my sick mother, I was sitting feeding my youngest child, a baby of only three months, in the early hours of the morning, when Marion came into the room, bringing me a hot drink. She sat by the fire and watched me, the room dark except for a dim lamp. She’d always wanted children, but they hadn’t arrived and here she was, aged thirty-three, watching me with my third. There was no bitterness about her childless state and certainly no resentment or jealousy. She loved my children without wanting them to be her own. But that day, as we sat in silence, except for the sucking sounds my baby made, and the splatter of the rain against the windows, Marion talked as she’d never talked about her own feelings of some lack in her life. Maybe it was lack of children, she didn’t know, but she felt appalled at how little she seemed to have in her life. She felt she was wasting it; that life was not giving her any kind of fulfilment, but was
just passing her by. She laughed as she went over her seventeen years of work as a clerk, most of it at Tyre Services, deriding the pointless tasks, so menial, that she carried out. She couldn’t bear to think this was all she was ever going to do, this was her fate. I said she should leave Tyre Services and do something else, but she said it would only be jumping out of the frying pan and into the fire, just exchanging places of work but not the work, because she hadn’t the qualifications for a better job – ‘something else’ was likely to be something the same for someone who’d left school at sixteen without taking O-levels.

  It was the school’s fault. I sat there blaming the school. Marion had gone to the Margaret Sewell School, the second tier in Carlisle’s tripartite secondary-education system. Only the top percentage of girls who passed the eleven-plus examination went to the High School; the next lot went to the Margaret Sewell, which took pupils to O-level but not beyond, and the remainder to Secondary Moderns. From the beginning, Marion was not in the stream destined to take O-levels. She took shorthand and typing, at which she was never much good. No teacher spotted her potential, nor did anyone seem to care about her home circumstances, or make allowances for them. They didn’t act as if they even knew (though they did) about her father being bedridden with multiple sclerosis, and her mother, often ill herself, struggling to manage and relying heavily on her twin daughters. When Marion and Annabel arrived at school late, without their dinner money or their PE kit, nobody ventured to wonder why; when Marion was difficult and cheeky, when she was found smoking, when she was inattentive in class, when she seemed to have no interest in lessons, reasons for all these things were never sought. Her mother wanted her, and all her children, to stay on at school and go on to Higher Education but, unsurprisingly, Marion could not wait to leave. She hated school. She was made to feel stupid and almost came to believe she was. And besides, her expectations were low. She believed that what a girl was destined to do was work for a few years then marry and have children. She had no ambition to make any other kind of life for herself.

  But now, at thirty-three, she yearned to do just that, to make something else of her life. She was despairing of a future which held only more years at Tyre Services and of being a housewife. I was glad, listening to her, of the baby in my arms – attending to her gave me time to think, time to be careful about what I said. After a long pause, while we both sat staring into the fire, I asked what, in an ideal world, forgetting things like qualifications, she would like to do. She groaned, said there was no point thinking about that, the world wasn’t ideal, but I urged her to play the game, to indulge me. She shrugged and smiled and said she supposed some sort of social work, helping families in situations such as her own had been, but without mothers able to hold things together. That, to her, seemed a worthwhile job. I said she’d be brilliant at it and she laughed and said, ‘Fat chance!’ I wished I knew exactly how anyone became a social worker, but I was at least sure the starting point would be O-levels. I hardly dared to suggest that Marion should leave work and somehow attempt to take a few O-levels. She’d been hopeless at school and she’d never done any kind of studying since. But I did suggest it and, though she said she didn’t think she was capable, she didn’t completely reject the idea.

  A few months later, she startled everyone by leaving Tyre Services, with the backing of her husband Jeff, and enrolling at the local Technical College to do four O-levels. After a fairly agonising time learning to learn, she passed them and promptly went on to do A-levels, which she actually found easier. She was beginning to enjoy studying and was genuinely interested in the social sciences. Success in A-levels encouraged her to apply to do a two-year social-science course at Ruskin College, Oxford, and to everyone’s delight (and astonishment) she was accepted. Life, after so long, had opened up dramatically, in ways other than educational too. Marion had married at the age of twenty-three. She loved and was attracted to Jeff, whom she married in good faith, never suspecting that her true sexual orientation was lesbian (though later she did realise there had been indications which she had failed to recognise). At Oxford, Marion was approached by a woman and surprised herself by having an affair with her. But she was still married to Jeff, and went on caring for him, if in a different way, and was deeply unhappy at the thought of breaking up her marriage and distressing not only Jeff but her mother and the rest of her family. So after Oxford, the affair over, she went back to Carlisle, started work as a social worker, and tried to pretend everything was fine (though she had, of course, told Jeff what had happened and lived with him now as a friend).

  It was a miserable year. Her unhappiness grew and so did her frustration at all the pretence. She felt there was a cruel choice facing her: either she remained in Carlisle, playing the part of the good wife, stifling her newly realised sexual identity; or else she went to London, where she felt there was the best chance of giving expression to it, and in doing so hurt Jeff by exposing the reasons for her departure to family and friends. Finally, she decided life was too short and too precious not at least to try for self-fulfilment. She applied for, and got, a job in Camden, and we found a flat for her in our street.

  I fear I may have influenced her to make that decision – ‘fear’ because by doing so I was causing such pain to Jeff. Without our finding a flat for her, and so reassuringly close to us, I doubt (and so did she) whether Marion would ever have managed to make the break. It took enough courage as it was for her to plunge into London life at the age of forty without her having to find the extra nerve to be entirely on her own. She told only her sister and brothers the real reason for leaving Carlisle and to everyone else, including her mother, said it was for career reasons. Since she had no intention of divorcing Jeff, and he had no intention of asking for a divorce, and since they remained so close, nobody questioned her explanation. People like my father may have remarked, ‘A likely story!’ privately, but nobody said anything to her.

  The memory of my conversation with her, so long ago in the winter of 1973, which seemed to have started off such an unexpected chain of events, came back so strongly to me as I stood making soup in Marion’s kitchen in almost total silence. Where was the talk now? The confidences? I wanted her to say something, anything, about what was in her head. I wanted to listen and respond. I wanted guidance from her. But maybe I should start the talking, confront the horror of this death sentence head on. I knew she despised those who were cowardly about facing up to tragedy. She’d always spoken with pitying contempt of those who shunned the dying. Someone in her office the year before had been diagnosed with Aids, and she’d scorned those afraid to touch him, making a point herself of a hug and kiss of sympathy. Perhaps, by docilely making soup, by not initiating talk myself, I was failing her. But how to begin? Where were the right words, the right phrases?

  I sat directly opposite her while she tried to sip the wretched soup. Too hot? Too thick? Queries about soup, and she was dying. It was ridiculous. It was up to me to take the lead and say something of what I wanted to say. But what was that? What did I so badly want to say that she didn’t already know? That I was sorry she was dying? For heaven’s sake. It didn’t help at all to be told the obvious – sorry, indeed. That I was sad, upset, distraught, furious? All about my feelings, and who wanted to know those? They were obvious, and irrelevant. I went on sitting there, while she went on slowly, slowly spooning soup into herself. I found myself blurting out in an attempt to start some real conversation that I imagined thinking about Annabel would be causing her the greatest anguish – her twin, to whom she was utterly devoted and who had such need of her. She nodded. I waited. ‘I’ll try a little more soup,’ she said.

  Had she disapproved of my clumsy attempt to get beyond pleasantries? I couldn’t tell. There was just no real reaction. She gave the same impression of concentrating, of holding herself together, that had struck me the moment I saw her. Being on my own with her had made no difference. There was to be no talk. Talk was too tiring, too draining. She had Frances t
o talk to and that was enough. She had no desire to communicate with anyone else. As her life closed in, there was no room there for others. It was best to acknowledge this, and not demand any but the most peripheral place in her world. And besides, she was going back into hospital, for chemotherapy, as soon as they had a bed. The hospice had advised her to agree to this chemotherapy on the grounds that it could reduce pain and possibly extend her life, and its quality, a few more months.

  So we went back to Loweswater until such time as Marion would be back home and we could be of some use in helping to look after her.

  We were there another month. Every day I phoned Frances, every day the report seemed to be worse. Marion reacted badly to the chemotherapy, which gave her dreadful diarrhoea among other side-effects, and she hated the ward she was in. She had never, she told me later, seen such suffering and it almost unhinged her mind. For Frances, and for Annabel and Jeff, who also visited, it was terrible to witness her misery and discomfort and also her rage. The calm front she had presented previously, that air of control, cracked and she could hardly endure the treatment. When the first course of drugs failed to have any effect, she refused point-blank to have a second and third course even though she was told three courses were often necessary. She wanted to go home. She wanted to die at home. No life was precious enough to have to endure this.