Precious Lives

by Margaret Forster

  So we made our preparations to return, which meant telling my father that instead of staying until the end of October we were going back to London at the beginning of September. It was like saying to him that Marion was more precious to me than he was – which was true, she was. But he expressed no resentment, made no more remarks about there being plenty of others to look after her, and he seemed affected at last, he seemed sad. ‘Pity,’ he said, but that was all. For our last outing, we took him not to the Solway Marsh or any of the other country places we’d been frequenting, but just round the city, round Carlisle. It was a slow trundling round the one-way system so that he could catch up on what was happening to the streets and buildings he’d lived among all his life. He’d always loathed the Civic Centre (but then everyone in Carlisle did) and relished bewailing everything that had been knocked down to make way for it, so we drove past it on our route through the roads where he’d once lived. He liked to stop outside the house where he’d been born (Sheffield Street) and where he’d lived till he married (Richardson Street) and where my mother had been living when he courted her (Bowman Street). Round and round we went while he peered at these houses, criticising the paintwork, exclaiming over new windows. ‘Happy days,’ he said, and I saw him trying to squint at the driving mirror to see if he could catch my expression. I knew he wanted me to challenge him, to scoff at the idea of his life in Sheffield or Richardson Street being happy. I knew he wanted me to remind him of how his father had beaten him, how he’d left school at thirteen and started work in Pratchitts (an engineering factory), how badly he’d been treated and how little he’d been paid … I refrained. If he wanted to describe these as ‘happy days’, it was fine by me – and in contrast to his plight now, stuck in a nursing-home and very frail, waiting to pop off, then of course his previous life counted as happy.

  We arrived by our chosen circuitous route outside the Metal Box factory in James Street, where he’d worked more than thirty years. The building was blackened, the windows high up and dirty. But he’d once told me he’d always been glad to enter this grim-looking place of work. He’d been the first, every day, to clock on. Work, employment, were so precious to him. It defined his life, and his greatest dread was the prospect of losing it. I’d made a mistake, when I was growing up, to think his work was just something he was forced to do to earn his living and support his family. I’d thought it was like slave-labour. I was wrong. He may have had no academic qualifications but there was skill and satisfaction in what he did, which was to mend machines. I’d been in this factory only once and it had stunned me, this place of hellish noise where he spent his long days. Dirty work, and often dangerous – no wonder that when he arrived home on his bicycle he looked exhausted, his overalls smothered in oil and grease, his hands grimy and his face streaked with dirt. I’d always known I had a cheek to call anything that I did ‘work’.

  On the way back to the nursing-home we passed the end of the road leading to the street where he had last lived, but we didn’t include it in our tour. He didn’t want to go anywhere near the bungalow in which he’d spent almost thirty years (the longest time he’d lived in any house and from which, he’d always maintained, he would only leave feet first and in a box). He never mentioned his bungalow except to ask if it had been sold for a good price, and he was pleased that it had. After that, as far as he was concerned the place had disappeared from his mind – it had literally gone from his life and he didn’t want to find that after all it was still there.

  ‘I’ll be seeing you sometime, then,’ he said, when we made our difficult farewells, and in the next breath, ‘When’s Pauline coming? When’s Gordon coming? Put it on the calendar.’ I did this and said if he needed us he only had to lift the telephone and one of us would come. ‘I wouldn’t do that,’ he said, scornfully. ‘I’ll manage.’ Then there was the uncharacteristic but now usual litany of appreciation, for all we had supposedly done, echoing in our ears all the way down the corridor.

  Then we were out of the home; we had left him again. Each time we couldn’t help wondering if this might be the last time. When a man was nearly ninety-five and perfectly likely to ‘pop off’ any minute, every farewell might turn out to be the final one. One man had ‘popped’ the day before. My father had reported this with some relish. ‘Fell into his dinner,’ he told us. ‘Pity.’ We weren’t sure if the pity was for the death or the ruined dinner. And the week before, another patient had attempted to do his own popping and had failed. My father loved the drama of it. The poor man had tried to cut his own throat – ‘Daft,’ my father said. ‘Fancy using picture glass! He’d have been better with a razor.’ He shook his head. ‘Any road, made a damned mess. Not nice for them young lasses to clean up.’ Quite. The staff had tried hard, naturally, to shield the other patients from this catastrophe, but they hadn’t managed to hide it from my very alert father. ‘I knew what was going on,’ he said, nodding his head with satisfaction. ‘All running up and down and yelling for this and that. Pandemonium, it was, and I got to the door before they could shut it. Oh what a mess, what a carry-on. What the hell did he try it for? Beats me.’ I didn’t dare suggest that this man had perhaps tried to take his own life because it didn’t feel worth having any more – he was ninety, I knew he had just lost his wife, and he had Parkinson’s disease. ‘Anyway,’ my father finished, ‘he’s learnt his lesson.’

  What was the lesson, Dad? That’s what I’d like to have asked, but I would only have got a withering glare in reply. The lesson, I had to imagine, was that in my father’s opinion it was not up to you to pre-empt fate. When your number was up, it was up – that sort of homespun philosophy. Attempts at suicide were an impertinence. My father might hate all religion and have no faith of any kind, but he clearly still believed in some immutable law of life which laid down a natural progression towards death that was not to be tampered with. Everything was somehow ordered, though not by any God. By whom, then? He had no idea, and wasted no time pondering.

  So far, he hadn’t shifted this point of view.

  VI

  THE CHANGE IN Marion was remarkable. She was no longer sitting rigid and controlled, in a world of her own, but was back, not to her old self, how could she be, but to being with us all again, present, not suspended in some shadow world nobody else inhabited. She was alert and talkative, willing to relate the horror of the failed chemotherapy treatment and the relief of leaving the ward where she’d felt no connection with anyone even though she knew she, too, was dying. Arriving home, she’d felt better immediately, but what had actually produced such an improvement in her condition was the steroids. The hospice had prescribed them, to boost her energy, and they had had a dramatic effect. Nothing could change the terminal nature of her illness, but these steroids changed the way she felt. She was able to get up and go for walks and have some kind of normal existence.

  She seemed so cheerful it was almost eerie. This, she said, was because there was no hope left. She felt calm, now that the turmoil of hoping was over. Hope had evaporated, once the chemotherapy failed, and she hadn’t been sorry in the end to see it go, because as long as it had been around, hovering teasingly in the air, she had been disturbed. She thought there was no sillier phrase than ‘Never give up hope’, as though hope in itself was something solid and trustworthy. Equally annoying to her was the insistence on fighting cancer – she wondered why cancer seemed to be the only disease referred to as one that was fought, one that was invariably described in terms of a battle. She was sure she had indeed fought, that there had been nothing fatalistic and defeatist about her attitude, but she objected to the idea of being conquered. Still, the suspense was over. She’d hated this suspense, always wondering if it would be at this check-up or the next, or the one after when the bad news would be broken to her. She’d thought she would have a couple of years left, and was sure she’d been promised them when she agreed to the surgery and radiotherapy, or at least a good chance of having them, but all that was over now. She had felt
shocked on being told nothing more could be done, but once the shock passed she felt less exhausted. It was the hope, the suspense, which had been hard to endure.

  She had, then, no hope, and yet one afternoon she laughed and said, ‘I don’t believe it, of course. I don’t believe I am going to die soon.’ I must have looked worried because she instantly went on, ‘I mean, I do believe it, I know it’s the truth, but it’s just that it seems impossible. I believe it, and I don’t believe it. But that’s got nothing to do with having hope. I really have no hope.’ There was nothing desperate about her tone of voice, nothing distressing. It was interesting her, trying to work out how her feelings seemed so contradictory. How could she at one and the same time believe and yet not believe she was dying? She rejected the suggestion that this might be because on one level she was not accepting the verdict – no, she was quite sure that was not the case. She simply decided that as long as she was actually living, breathing and eating and talking and walking, the impossibility of ‘ceasing to be’ was a kind of tautology. It was, she came to consider, in the nature of being alive to be unable to imagine being dead.

  All this came out when we talked, and now we talked again all the time. Easily. Freely. Each day, I went over to Crouch End to be with Marion while Frances tried to go to work for a short while. Sometimes I went in the morning, sometimes the afternoon, and usually for two or three hours. If it was the morning, our time was spent in the kitchen. It was a small room, rather cramped because of all the stuff in it – a gigantic fridge-freezer, a washing-machine, a cooker and a boiler. Not much room to move about, what with all this and a table and chairs. To me, it was claustrophobic, but Marion preferred sitting there to the lovely, spacious, sparsely furnished sitting-room at the front of the flat. She looked thoroughly uncomfortable, perched on an upright wooden chair near the window, jammed between table and freezer, but she pronounced herself content there and it was hard to shift her. It was still early September and the wonderful summer went on and on – the morning sun poured through the window and the box of plants on the sill had to be constantly watered. The view from this window was neither pretty nor interesting. It was of back gardens and yards, all small, many overgrown and neglected, and of washing hanging out to dry, and of walls and fences. No people, no traffic. At least it was peaceful.

  But views didn’t matter as much to Marion as to some people. This was just as well. She’d never lived in a house or flat with what could be called an interesting view from any window and had never expressed regret about this. The windows of the council house where she was brought up were small and at the front looked out onto the identical drab houses opposite, their concrete-rendered façades long since blackened and ugly, and at the back onto a neglected small garden. The Davies children tried not to see it at all, constantly averting their guilty eyes from the grass their mother urged them to cut and the flower beds she pleaded with them to weed. None of them had green fingers, least of all Marion. A garden, to her, wasn’t even something to enjoy looking at – it was a place to sit in to catch any available sunshine. Yet a couple of years before her illness, when she was living in the ground-floor flat below this one, which she and Frances had now bought, she had suddenly started trying to make the garden attractive. There had been a great deal of rushing backwards and forwards to garden centres looking for bargains, and a lot of huffing and puffing as she dug-in various plants. A clematis she put against the fence flourished and she was thrilled. The next project was what she grandly referred to as ‘my rockery’. To everyone else it looked like a hopelessly untidy heap of randomly placed stones set in mud.

  In her Crouch End kitchen I busied myself cooking or tidying up, and Marion sat there and smoked. If she had only months left to live, and if she was going to be receiving no treatment which could be made harder to endure if she smoked, then she wanted to smoke. It was a pleasure she had missed most bitterly. She could hardly taste the cigarettes since her taste-buds had been virtually destroyed, but she still loved to smoke again. On the table were letters and cards which flooded in by every post and which she enjoyed opening and reading. Every message of sympathy and concern meant something to her. She appreciated these signs that people valued her, which surprised me, though I don’t know why. She was also not averse to visitors, though they had to be very carefully chosen. She said she only wanted what she mockingly called her ‘loved ones’ around her, but this inner circle could sometimes be breached. Arrangements were made if she gave the nod. Frances or I would be detailed to ring chosen visitors, and these privileged few would arrive bearing what they hoped were appropriate gifts. Opening the door to them, I’d see their hesitation, sometimes their apprehension, and always their anxiety as to how they should behave, what they should say. Especially what they should say. Visiting the dying is so very tricky, oh dear yes. There’s not a single book of etiquette on how to be polite and say the right thing to the dying.

  Marion liked, afterwards, to discuss how her visitors had felt. She was amused at how quickly they relaxed, once they saw she wasn’t lying prone on a sofa weeping, once they saw she was composed. She made their visits pleasant. Something they’d dreaded became a pleasure. The conversation quickly turned to their own concerns, and Marion would listen carefully and, astonishingly, give something back. But she was tired afterwards. She had to prepare for each visitor by having a nap beforehand and needed another rest to recover when they’d gone. Conserving her new-found energy, which was mostly a steroids-induced illusion, was something she had to learn to do. There was not much of her precious life left so it must not be squandered. But she was determined not to spend whatever time remained just sitting about. She wanted to go out. In the early afternoons we went for walks. It was a great performance, the getting ready to go, the selecting of whichever jacket and scarf she would wear, the choosing of the shoes in which she would feel most confident. She needed an arm to link now, to steady her (her balance wasn’t perfect) and so we walked very close together along the streets and at a slow pace.

  Everything, absolutely everything, was worthy of comment. Marion had always been a great dasher – dashing here, dashing there, hurtling from one place to another and often going from front door to car without seeing anything. Now she scrutinised every house, every vehicle, every dog and cat. She stopped to admire bright scarlet geraniums in a window box, a new brass knocker on a door, a blue and white number plate on a gate. She’d lived in her street nearly eight years (she’d bought a flat there after she moved from our street) but knew few of her neighbours – it was a typical London street with an ever-changing population and most of its inhabitants were out at work all day. But occasionally she would see someone she vaguely knew and then she liked to stop and pass the time of day. When an Irish woman who lived across the road rushed across to ask her how she was, she was so pleased. The woman was friendly and sympathetic in the right sort of way – kind, gentle, cheerful with it. If an acquaintance clearly tried to avoid her she was pitying rather than hurt – ‘Poor soul, they know no better.’ She was parodying her mother, who had been fond of this remark, but it gave us an excuse to laugh. Marion had loved everything about her mother, but what she had loved most of all was her sense of humour. This was of the sardonic variety, occasionally verging towards the sarcastic. Human behaviour, with its absurdities and stupidities, was the main source of derision. Marion had endlessly laughed at her mother laughing, relishing the pleasure she so visibly and audibly derived from displays of the ridiculous. It was a Dickensian kind of humour (Dickens was Mrs Davies’ favourite author – she could recite whole passages), dependent for the joke not so much on what was said as how. There was nothing inherently funny, for example, about Mrs Davies saying, ‘Anyone seen my milkman?’ and yet she’d collapse with laughter after she’d said it. This phrase came from observing an old neighbour of hers who used to say this at the same time as fluttering her hand near her cheek to draw attention to a ring she’d been given – ‘Anyone seen my milkman?’ mea
ning ‘Can everyone see this diamond I’m flashing and are you all jealous?’ Marion still used the phrase, murmuring it quietly whenever someone tried to conceal that they were showing off.

  We walked round the block, literally. We turned left out of her door and down her long street, then left again into a short stretch where there were a few shops. One was a pretty little gift shop which also sold a few fresh flowers. Marion loved to look round it and always urged me to go inside. Her behaviour in this tiny shop was odd. She smiled all the time and went round and round in the confined space peering at the things for sale, lifting up all the bits and pieces as though searching for something in particular. The young male assistant, whose eyes had flown to Marion’s neck wound at once, always politely asked if he could help, and his help was just as politely declined. He withdrew into a back room, trusting us entirely. ‘What are you looking for?’ I whispered to Marion, to be told, ‘Oh, I don’t know, just something, but I’ll find it.’ Candles were examined and sniffed, greeting cards held up and scrutinised, artificial flowers fiddled with, and still she went on searching. The shop assistant peeped round the corner occasionally and smiled too and raised his eyebrows questioningly at me, and I raised mine back and shrugged. ‘There isn’t any hurry,’ Marion said. I agreed. I hoped she didn’t think I was impatient, because I wasn’t, I was just at a loss. I began picking up things myself in desperation. ‘These are nice,’ I said, holding out to her some wooden fruits impregnated with the appropriate oils to make them smell of their shape, of lemon and apple and pear. She sniffed – ‘Oh yes!’ she exclaimed. So I bought two wooden lemons and an apple and a pear and she was content. We could go.