Precious Lives

by Margaret Forster

On Thursday 9 November, Annabel came, but not on her usual weekly visit. She was on her way to Germany to visit her daughter, a long-planned visit which Marion had been very anxious she should make. There were no pretences. Annabel could see what was happening. She knew Marion might die while she was away for those three brief days, but then she might not. She didn’t in any case wish to be there when her twin actually died – the grief and pain of it was too great, the need to witness it mercifully absent. It was so hard for her to leave, saying she’d be back on Monday, but she did it cheerfully, as she does everything, as Marion herself did. I thought, as I watched Annabel go, how rarely she and Marion had been on holiday together. When they were children, there weren’t any holidays – such luxuries didn’t feature in Davies family life – but Hunter and Annabel used to be sent at times of crisis to Cambuslang, to stay with relatives. Somehow, Marion and Johnny never were. They stayed at home, wondering why they were not the chosen ones (and the suspicion was that Hunter and Annabel were the more sociable and easier to have). Later, in adolescence, Marion did go to stay with her Scottish cousins, and was just as popular with them as Annabel, but the twins hardly ever went away together, even then.

  The only times they did were when they went to the Royal Observer Corps camps, once they had left school and were both working in offices. The ROC was really part of the Civil Defence Movement, kept going after the war (this was the 1950s) by the RAF in case it was ever needed again. The twins hadn’t the faintest interest in civil defence but they were very taken indeed by the stories circulating in Carlisle of the good times to be had at the annual camps and by the fact that they would get paid if they joined. So they joined. The headquarters was in a large Edwardian house in Norfolk Road and here they went every week, wearing a version of WAAF uniform, barely able to keep their faces straight at the sight of each other. They were taught how to plot flight paths and how to identify the various aircraft. Neither of them was much good at this but somehow they managed to pass the annual examination (mysteriously, to them, called ‘triangulation’), which entitled them both to a few shillings and to go on what they regarded as a holiday, to a camp.

  They went off to one in Kent and one in Lincolnshire, and the experience was every bit as exciting as they had been promised. They got drunk every night, met loads of boys, and loved the company of the other girls in their dormitory. The actual exercises they had to do during the day, the whole purpose of being there, were a joke – much strutting about, saluting, which gave Marion every opportunity for the parodying she relished. She would sometimes get dangerously near being openly mocking and have to be restrained by the more law-abiding but, in truth, no more respectful Annabel. But both of them thought of those weeks at the ROC camps as highlights of their youth and never needed much encouragement to demonstrate their saluting and marching abilities.

  As adults, they’d only been on a couple of holidays on their own together, once for a week to Majorca, once to Sicily. Otherwise, their times together on holiday were within family groups. Going off just on their own was always a much-talked of plan, but the organisational difficulties were formidable and now of course it would never happen. Annabel’s going off on her own that night seemed cruelly to underline this fact.

  That same night, Marion fell twice, at one in the morning and at four. The nurse and I found it almost impossible to lift her up. We spent ages, each time, kneeling on the floor, either side of her, waiting for the right moment to assist her up. ‘Wait, wait,’ Marion said. We waited. In my line of vision was the morphine bottle, ever by the bedside. I loathed the sight of it. If only, I used to think, she’d drunk the lot a couple of weeks ago and spared herself this agony – because it was agony, crouched on the floor, panting like a dog, struggling to force herself to put her feet on the floor and allow herself to be dragged, literally dragged, upwards. For what? What was the point of subjecting herself to the absolute tyranny of her dying body? I wanted to open her mouth and pour the morphine down. But she wouldn’t have been able to swallow it. She could barely swallow anything. It was too late to help death on in that way. I expect it almost always is. Those who want to die while still in control have to do it not when they are ready but while they are still able. And that, almost certainly, will be before they are ready. A fine state of affairs.

  Marion was exhausted after that night. She slept through the night nurse’s departure and the arrival of the district nurse. All day she was drowsy, though not actually asleep. In the evening, Frances went out for a meal with two friends. She had barely left Marion’s side for weeks but had been persuaded to take this short break. The restaurant was just round the corner and she had her mobile phone with her. Two people had to be with Marion, so Hunter joined me. We sat quite cosily in the bedroom, Hunter entertaining us in the way Marion liked, in the best Davies family tradition with all kinds of anecdotes. Marion smiled and hummed a bit and made one or two rambling remarks connected with nothing. I tried to feed her some ice-cream but she couldn’t swallow it, and then some jelly, a few spoonfuls of which did slip down. She mumbled something about the Lonsdale and asked what day it was. ‘Friday,’ I said. ‘Oh, a busy night tonight,’ she said.

  The Lonsdale was one of five cinemas doing booming business in Carlisle in the 1950s, when we were all growing up there, and by far the smartest. Marion worked there as an usherette during the period she was saving up to emigrate to New Zealand. She’d leave her office job at five o’clock, dash home for tea, then rush back into town to be ready for the parade. The manager of the Lonsdale was a military type, a Mr Scott-Buccleuh, who ran the cinema exactly like a military operation. The entire staff had to be on parade by a quarter to six, ready to open for the first house of the evening. The usherettes would go to their respective stations – Marion was usually put in the back stalls – and wait for Mr Scott-Buccleuh to march onto the stage, where he stood to rigid attention and roared out the names of the various parts of the cinema. ‘Front Circle present and correct?’ he’d bellow, and the appropriate usherette had to shout back: ‘Yes, Mr Scott-Buccleuh!’ When all the usherettes had responded, the order came, ‘Check torches!’ Torches would be flashed (Marion loved that bit and could hardly contain her mirth – he made it sound as though the torches were rifles), and then at last Mr Scott-Buccleuh would yell: ‘All correct! Doors open!’

  Marion used to say that, usually, far from an eager horde of cinema-goers who must be controlled surging in, a couple of old-age pensioners would totter through the doors and everyone would feel vaguely let down. It was eight o’clock before the multitudes arrived and suddenly the usherettes were busy. It was extraordinary how she liked being busy, how she enjoyed this job in spite of having already worked a long day. She loved the power of the torch, knowing exactly where to direct the beam to discomfort the well-known regular raincoat brigade, or disturb lovers seeking anonymity in the back rows. She play-acted through the evening, delighting in the manager’s self-importance and using the breaks in the staff-room (while the big picture was on) to mimic him. The usherettes were nearly all smokers and she was comfortable, puffing away with them and swapping stories, even though most of them were much older than she was.

  The Lonsdale years were decades ago now, but she smiled at the memory and we all took the chance to reminisce furiously about the ABC minors’ club on Saturday mornings at the Lonsdale, and the Beatles coming to give a concert there later on. It was such a comfort for the three of us to be united like that, effortlessly able to communicate through the memories of all those shared times, all of us with the same background, all of us bound together, firmly rooted in Carlisle lore. We never had to explain anything. Then Hunter, who was writing a book about lottery winners, suggested she chose six numbers and he’d buy her a lottery ticket. She thought hard and came up with six numbers, pausing a long time between each choice, but three of them were the same. It seemed so awful to be asking a dying person to choose lottery numbers. Where would any winnings be sent if she were to be
a winner? But she was amused and that was all that mattered. There was no possibility, after all, of any meaningful conversation.

  This thought was what kept me awake that night as I lay in bed in the room above Marion’s – all the time I’d had with her alone in the last two months and yet the sum total of what had been said was pitifully unimportant. But what was it I wanted to say to her that I hadn’t said? And more importantly, had she been given the opportunity to say what she wanted to say to me? I think so. But what she had wanted to say turned out to be apparently of very little consequence. It had been a kind of conceit, I decided, to imagine otherwise. I’d looked for messages and she had none to give. I’d looked for enlightenment and, though she had struggled to provide it and had managed to articulate something of how she felt, it was still vague, muted, her new knowledge, of what it felt like to die. She’d told all of us that she regarded herself as having had a perfectly good life; she’d told us she valued us and had felt valued by us; she’d told us we must not go to pieces after her death. Beyond that, what was there to say, except goodbye? All words were useless, helpless to convey anything at all.

  Another very disturbed night followed, and then, in the morning, Saturday, we had great difficulty keeping Marion in bed once the Marie Curie nurse had gone. She was agitated, incredibly restless, and kept trying to get out of bed, but I couldn’t let her until Frances came down. She sat on the edge of the bed, the covers thrown back, and I sat facing her, my knees jammed against hers, talking frantically about Armistice Day ceremonies. When I had to call for Frances – I could no longer prevent Marion from trying to stand – she was calmer, and agreed to stay in bed until the district nurse came. When she appeared, it took the three of us to support Marion. It was only two steps to the chair she would sit in while the bed was made, but it seemed like two hundred, so agonisingly slow were her movements. The bed was quickly remade but then the pressure sore had to be dressed, and that was best done with Marion leaning against the bed while we held her up, so we prepared ourselves for the ordeal (and I thought how easily this could have been done in the hospice).

  Getting her onto her feet from the chair was hard enough, but the moment she was at last upright, Frances and I on either side and the nurse hovering, she collapsed – swiftly, absolutely suddenly, just down. The nurse wanted to send for more help but we wanted to let Marion try to get up first. We sank down beside her and talked quietly to her and stroked her back, and told her to take it easy, not to worry, there was plenty of time, plenty of time … Her breathing was heavy and we wondered if she had simply fallen asleep, but eventually she sighed and said, ‘Wait, wait,’ as she always did. And then, as we levered her up, she managed to get onto her knees and, after another long wait, to raise herself further, and we quickly pushed the chair beneath her and lowered her into it. It was easy then to shove the chair towards the bed and half tip her out onto it. The sore was dressed, the neck bandaged and at last she was tucked up, drowsy and still breathing heavily. ‘Thank you, now,’ she said, and went to sleep, propped up high on her pillows but soon slumping forward.

  We were drained and exhausted, and went to sit in the next room, shaken by the drama of it all. The nurse came in. ‘This can’t go on,’ she said: ‘Marion needs to be in a hospice.’ Frances lashed out, saying she would not accept that the hospice could look after Marion better than we could. The nurse muttered something about a hoist, as she had done before, and a pump to deliver the morphine into the system more effectively, and yet another kind of water mattress. A hoist? Fine, we’d get a hoist, and a pump, and the special mattress: we’d order them all on Monday. The nurse was silent. Then she said that the point she’d warned us about had been reached and that she couldn’t accept responsibility for letting this go on. She’d be discussing it with her superior on Monday. We said nothing, still too distressed to argue effectively. We went on sitting there after she’d gone, trying to calm ourselves. Marion’s breathing was so very loud we could hear it through the wall. It was laboured and harsh. We went to look at her and saw mucus dribbling from her nose. We had to keep wiping it away, but this did not disturb her. She slept on, and we thought that was good. Perhaps she would sleep all day and make up for her broken night.

  Friends and family came and went, tiptoeing up the stairs, talking in whispers. I wasn’t scheduled to stay that night – it was to be my first night at home for a week and I was going to try to have a ten-hour sleep to prepare myself for what might be the long haul ahead. A kind friend of Marion’s and Frances’s was to take my place, and off I went at about five o’clock, reluctant to go but knowing I should be sensible. We all had to husband our resources. I went to look at Marion before I left. There was no change. She was still asleep, as she had been since ten in the morning. She looked awful, all hunched up, nose leaking, face swollen and grey, hair damp with perspiration. I walked home, glad to be outside, though the air was cold and far from fresh all the noisy way until I’d crossed Highgate Hill. I went straight to bed, slept for a few hours, and then woke around three. When the telephone rang just before seven I was ready for it. Even before I answered I knew Marion was dead.

  The relief was instant. It was all over, all that horror. She’d died at home, and though only the Marie Curie nurse was with her when her breathing stopped, she had indeed been surrounded by those who loved her, as she had wished, right up to her last moments of consciousness.

  The dead body was lying flat on its back, covers pulled up to its bandaged neck, hair neatly brushed. Since I’d seen such bodies before, four of them by then, I had no fear of this one. A dead body was an object, a cadaver, no longer a person, and I’d always found it strangely reassuring that this should be so. Before I saw my first dead body, a cousin’s, when I was fourteen or so, my imagination had terrified me – I’d envisaged something repellent and disgusting, something hideously disfigured, perhaps covered in slime, or crawling already with maggots. The reality had surprised me. I felt nothing, confronted with the corpse, which had seemed bloodless and devoid of any ability to scare. But I’d wondered if I’d feel differently when the dead person meant something more to me. If corpses had been loved when alive, would they have the power to be frightening or at least to awe? I found they didn’t. Later, when my mother died, my father had exclaimed on seeing her body, ‘That’s not her!’ He hadn’t meant that it was the wrong dead body but that this was no longer his wife. And I thought he was right. Death was, as I’d thought since I lost all my childhood religious faith, definitely the end. Even those who believe that a soul or spirit has flown from the body to some other place do not deny that the corpse is a husk, empty and worthless.

  Some people want to see the body, some don’t, saying they prefer to remember the person alive. Some invest the corpse with feeling and treat it as an object worthy of reverence or even as a still living, but sleeping, thing. Either way, dead bodies have their own mystique and a house with one in it can make people shudder. Frances wanted Marion’s body to be seen and could herself scarcely bear to leave its side. She maintained that Marion looked peaceful and that she had a smile on her face. To me, her face looked grotesque, distorted by the cancer cells packed within it, her smile – a grimace. I looked at it and banished it, replacing it with Marion’s face before the disease began. For me this lifeless thing, lying there, had nothing to do with Marion. But for Frances, it did. She didn’t want to part with Marion’s body and wouldn’t let it be taken to a funeral parlour, not yet. She was desperate to keep it, to invest it with continuing meaning.

  But on Monday morning it had to be removed. Only the fact that it was mid-November and suddenly cold, and that the bedroom window had been wide open all night, had kept the body from smelling worse than it did. The undertaker’s men came at nine o’clock, as arranged. Frances, distraught, shut herself in her bedroom. She begged me not to let these men be disrespectful, not to let them handle Marion roughly. But I didn’t need to tell them anything. They spoke in whispers, came in quietly,
carrying not a coffin but some sort of black bag. I showed them into the room. They asked if I wanted the dead lady’s nightdress removed and left. I said No. The very idea seemed bizarre and made me feel nauseous; or perhaps it was the atmosphere in the room. The body went into the bag. It was lifted as though it were an object so precious and fragile it might break. Carefully, slowly, silently, the bend in the stairs was negotiated, the bundle taken out of the house. The leading man took a quick look up and down the street. No one about. Another man went ahead and opened the doors of the hearse. The distance from front door to car was covered in seconds. The doors were closed, and off they went.

  ‘Thank God that’s over,’ said Marion in my head. ‘Now get me a cigarette.’

  Then there was the funeral, just as it had been organised and planned by Marion. A packed church. We sang ‘Guide Me O Thou Great Redeemer’, ‘The King of Love My Shepherd Is’, and ‘For All the Saints Who From Their Labours Rest’. Very mournful, hardly comforting. There were readings – Ecclesiastes 3, Verses 1–8 (‘To everything there is a season …’), and Matthew 5, verses 1–10, 14–6 (‘And seeing the multitudes …’). I couldn’t imagine why she had selected the Matthew verses. Why hadn’t she chosen something from Burns’ poetry? It would have had more meaning. Hunter gave an address, talked about Marion’s life. It provoked some quiet laughter and was a relief to many. I concentrated on looking at the flowers, white lilies and roses, and at the bunches of heather I’d put on the coffin. What a carry-on, as Marion would have said, it had been to get heather in November. I’d tied the bunches with tartan ribbons and we’d draped a tartan sash of Annabel’s, one worn for Burns’ Night festivities, underneath.

  Then we went back to the flat, to which the entire congregation had been invited. The rooms overflowed with mourners, the stairs were jammed with them, and there was soon a queue outside. The people in the downstairs flat kindly opened up their rooms, too, so that mourners did not have to stand on the pavement. For hours and hours Marion’s family and friends ate and drank and reminisced. Then at last they left.