Precious Lives

by Margaret Forster

  Was the ceremony the comfort that Marion had hoped it would be to those who loved her? Do funerals and wakes fulfil this admirable purpose? For most people probably, yes, they do. For Frances and Annabel this one did. But not for me. For me, it was a ritual which had to be gone through, willingly if it would help even one person, and because Marion had wanted it, but curiously empty, in my case, of any relieving emotion. I never felt the least bit moved, though others did. I had never felt less like weeping, though the tears of others flowed plentifully. The slow hymns, the portentous readings, the solemn prayers all helped them. Far more affecting to me was the private cremation next day. Only five of us were present – Hunter and I, Annabel, Jeff, and Frances – when, in the otherwise empty chapel, the coffin slid silently away. It seemed, in contrast to the church service, simple and so much more appropriate. I said so in my head to Marion. She laughed and told me to keep quiet, I was always out of step, and far too fond of speaking my mind. She didn’t want Annabel and Frances more distressed by any odious comparisons I might make.

  I felt quite cheerful afterwards. We’d begun talking again, Marion and I. She looked and sounded as she always had. Now she was dead, now the dreadfully prolonged cruel business of dying was over, she lived again in my mind. It was going to be, I assured her, a very safe, secure place to be. I’d look after her.

  VIII

  THE DAY MARION died, 12 November, I didn’t write my usual weekly letter to my father. My sister telephoned him and told him the news and he said, ‘Pity,’ as expected. But I wrote the following week, touching only briefly on the funeral and otherwise concentrating on family chitchat, as I knew he would want me to do. And I resumed the regular telephone calls, taking up my place again in the rota. This seemed to please him very much – ‘Grand,’ he said, ‘back to normal now.’

  Back to normal. Since it was November, it was normal to be thinking of his birthday. He would be ninety-five on 4 December. Since my brother always ‘did’ the birthday, he and his wife were going north to be there for it again. In fact, it was a good birthday and my father enjoyed it. The home made a little event of it, with a cake and candles and everyone singing ‘Happy Birthday, dear Arthur’. Gordon said that instead of embarrassing him this had amused him and he’d been in high good humour. On his calendar he wrote – ‘Got a birthday party. 95.’ Two weeks later, Pauline and her family arrived at Loweswater to spend Christmas, going in to see him on all the crucial festive days. They had Christmas dinner with him at the home and reported that he had loved all the nurses wearing paper hats and the place being lavishly decorated, and everyone in exuberant form. ‘Smashing Day,’ he put for 25 December.

  He’d had forty more years than Marion and still he looked forward to the New Year. At least there was no mix-up over his new calendar this time. I’d left it in our Loweswater house, prominently displayed, back in September, all ready for Pauline to take to him for the ceremonial opening on 1 January 1996. Horses this year, every type and colour of horse, beginning with a chestnut mare and her foal. The space for each day was broad enough for him not to have to write too small, but narrow enough for him not to have too much blank square to fill. I remarked on the telephone that I liked the August horse best, a black stallion standing on the top of a hill. He was shocked that I’d looked ahead. He never did, he said. ‘Why not?’ I asked. ‘Bad luck.’

  In February, it was my turn to go for a short visit, to help bridge the gap between Pauline’s visits at Christmas and Easter. I hadn’t seen him since September and expected to find he had deteriorated further. But he hadn’t. When I arrived, at two in the afternoon, he was sitting up alert and smart, wearing a new blue shirt and red tie, hands resting on his walking stick, as though poised for getting to his feet at a moment’s notice. And he did try to rise out of his chair as I entered the room. ‘Don’t get up, Dad,’ I protested. ‘I will if I want,’ he said, but sank back, the gesture over. He was animated, full of questions, even if they were the usual questions with which he always greeted me, about the train, whether it was full or not, whether it was on time, and the weather. I put the flowers I’d brought into a vase and the sweets on the cabinet beside him, and for a while there was a sense of bustle and activity which successfully covered up awkwardness. Because there was always awkwardness when visitors arrived. In his own house, still mobile and in control, my father had been able to cover this up with strategies of his own (a lot of pacing about, a good deal of fidgeting) but now he couldn’t. All he could do was wait, and he hated it.

  Eventually, I had to sit down, on the bed, facing him. He fell asleep, his head sunk on his chest. I studied his calendar carefully. February was illustrated with three white horses drinking at a pond. Very nice, very rural. I could get five minutes’ chat out of that when he woke, by considering whether the horses were siblings, by speculating on the location of the pond – oh, a wonderful conversational piece there. I noticed the writing on the calendar wasn’t all his. The nurses and carers had added things. ‘Andrea and Lynne on holiday’ I read for 3 February. He must have told them to jot this down. They wouldn’t have dared to do it otherwise. His own words were hard to decipher now, but then what was there to decipher? ‘Light drops of rain’, and impossible squiggles followed by ‘Dry Sunny later’. I scrutinised the missing words and, after consideration worthy of a scholar unravelling a medieval document, decided he’d just repeated ‘Light drops of rain’, then, realising this, had written over them. That was all right, then. Only the weather seemed to be recorded now. There was no gardening, of course, to merit notes, and no outings to list at the moment, though he had regular visits from quite a variety of people and in that respect was well off. By comparison with other patients, that is. By comparison with Marion, very well off just through being alive. What a silly thought to come into my head, one which showed me only too clearly and unpleasantly the resentment that lurked there. As if the poor old man could help living longer than Marion. When someone young died, my mother used to wail that she wished God had taken her instead; but my father never voiced such sentiments, and I was fairly certain he never harboured them either.

  He woke up and looked startled when he saw me there. ‘You still here?’ he said. I said Yes, for another hour or so, and then for tomorrow too. What a long hour (so long that I was timing it to the minute). The hours I sat with him during the last days he spent in his own house had been long enough, but then I’d been able to break the monotony by making tea, washing dishes, picking flowers – there’d always been some little action to hand. Here, in this one small room, there was none. I’d already done the flowers, trimming each carnation, arranging them with infinite care, a veritable Constance Spry. Going out to fill the bird container with nuts was the only other ploy I could think of. There was a box of nuts in the bottom drawer of his bureau. I asked permission to get them. It was eagerly given. He was as keen as I was that one of us at least should be doing something. I spun the task out to a full quarter of an hour by dint of dropping the nuts in one by one, then going in search of water to fill that part of the tray. Through the windows I saw not only my father watching me but all the faces staring in my direction from the rooms which overlooked the garden. I felt I was on a stage, my audience desperate for something dramatic to happen to relieve the unbearable tedium. If only an eagle would swoop down and carry me off, or if only I could be attacked by a Hitchcockian band of smaller birds. Plop, plop, went the nuts. And then I was done, the show was over in all its disappointing ordinariness.

  I returned to my father’s room, feeling as always that entertainment was expected of me. My function was to distract him, to brighten up his dull days. He was always quick to complain about any visitors who ‘just sat’ when they came to see him – ‘I had to do all the talking. They just sat.’ I decided to tidy his cabinet drawers. But when I suggested this, he wasn’t enthusiastic. The two drawers in the little bedside cabinet between bed and armchair were his last area of privacy, because he could no longer g
et to his bureau drawers unaided and so could not secrete things there. But finally, he said he supposed these drawers could do with a bit of a turn-out and I could go ahead while he supervised.

  The top drawer was in a terrible mess, one great jumble of things jammed into it. I fished out not one but three salt cellars. Salt from all of them had spilled everywhere. To each there was a history which he relished relating. The most valued was a small, blue plastic item he had brought from his own kitchen and greatly treasured. It seemed this had been accidentally removed on a tray and the other two were substitutes provided by the home when his could not be found. ‘I raised hell,’ he said, with satisfaction. ‘I wasn’t going to have it pinched.’ I laughed at the idea of anyone deliberately stealing a blue plastic salt cellar, but he glared at me and said I might laugh but I didn’t know what went on and he had to be alert at all times, or else. He also had a whole packet of Saxa salt with the salt cellars. ‘Don’t they have salt here?’ I asked. Yes, but not the sort he liked and never enough of it. ‘Too much salt is bad for you,’ I said. His turn to laugh.

  There were pounds of sweets in the drawer, bags of Devon Toffees and Barley Sugars and Mint Humbugs, all broken into, and in some cases the individual sweets had been unwrapped, sucked for a while, then dropped back into the bags. He wouldn’t let me throw any away, not even the ones that had picked up hairs. ‘Waste not, want not,’ he said. Several handkerchiefs of dubious cleanliness lay on top of two pairs of broken spectacles, the lenses of each right eye cracked diagonally. I said these really were useless and made to chuck them in the bin, but no, he insisted on keeping them because the left lenses were intact and who knows, they might come in useful. There was a spoon, sticky with sugar, in one corner of the drawer. ‘Careful,’ he said, as I took it out and wiped it, ‘that’s precious.’ His grandchild, my eldest daughter, had sent it from Botswana. It had a long black wooden handle, its end carved into the shape of a rhinoceros, and on the back of the bowl of the spoon was engraved the head of George VI. My father stirred his tea with this spoon. No other would do. After each stirring he just tossed it into his drawer, ‘for security’, and enjoyed trying to find it again later. The remaining contents of his top drawer were letters from me and Pauline. ‘What’s got into you?’ I teased (though since my father didn’t recognise the concept of anything as frivolous as teasing, this had no effect). ‘Keeping letters now?’ ‘I have to hang on to something,’ he said, defensively.

  The bottom drawer had ties in it. Lots of ties, all creased and screwed up, heavily spotted with stains. ‘Dad,’ I protested, ‘these need to be cleaned. Give them to the girls to take to the laundry.’ He said he didn’t want them washed, washing ruined ties, but when I offered to have them dry-cleaned he said, No, it was too expensive. I said I could stand the expense, for heaven’s sake, but he was getting irritated, so I just put the ties back. An hour had almost passed by now. An hour in the company of my own father, whom I hadn’t seen for five months, and all I could think about was escape. I didn’t dare look at the time again, though with the alarm clock facing me and the large mantelpiece clock he’d been given on his marriage in 1931 ticking away, it was difficult not to be aware of each second passing. Next day, I vowed, I’d bring some sewing or knitting. What a joke. I hadn’t knitted anything since I was six, when I managed to knit a dishcloth using very thick needles and rope-like yarn, and as for sewing I had always loathed it. I’d have to buy one of those tray cloths stamped with a pattern and sit decorously embroidering it. It would be a return to the nineteenth century: I’d be a woman silently sewing to fill a void.

  It was almost the time when I’d decided I could decently leave – he’d earlier encouraged me to walk the long way, while it was still light, to Jeff’s, where I was to stay – when he suddenly said, ‘I’m not getting any better,’ and shook his head. ‘You’re better than you were a year ago, when you came in here,’ I said. He gave a little snort of derision. ‘It’s hard getting up from this chair,’ he said, ‘and I could do that easy when I came here. I could walk without a stick, nearly.’ He tried to get on his feet, to demonstrate his lack of strength and, though he managed to stand, he swayed alarmingly. I put out my hand to steady him. – ‘No!’ he said. ‘I have to do it myself. I have to manage. I have to get better.’ He said he’d walk me to the front door, which I didn’t want him to do. I’d rather have said goodbye to him in his room, where he looked secure. All down the corridors he clung to the rail which ran along the walls. There were gaps with no rail, where doors appeared, and he was obliged to take my arm. I could feel the bone beneath the jacket and shirt sleeves. That’s all his arm was, a bone, a thin layer of skin stretched tight over a bone with no flesh to pad it out. Marion might have been desperately thin, but her arm had been much more substantial when she died. ‘See, I’m not getting any better,’ he repeated as he edged his way slowly along. I said nothing. What could I say, in the face of this evidence that he thought old age a disease from which he expected to get better? How could he not recognise that this was not an illness from which he could recover but the approach to the ending of life?

  I went to see him again in March, the same short two-day trip, just so that he would not be too long without family attention before Easter, and Pauline’s longer visit. The same routine, the same feelings of depression. He was even thinner and I was told he wasn’t eating as well. His breakfast was all he wanted now – no other food all day. When I arrived, the pudding from his lunch was still there on a tray, untouched. ‘I told them not to bring it,’ he said. Sitting on the edge of his bed, my feet knocked against something. I bent down and lifted the counterpane to investigate. There was a plate full of food – a potato, a piece of meat, some shreds of cabbage and some slices of carrot. He’d fallen into a doze, but when I lifted the plate up he woke and became fully alert and furious: ‘Don’t touch! Leave it!’ It was ridiculous. Nobody would force him to eat anything, nobody would be angry if he didn’t want food. I said this to him – ‘Why don’t you just say you’re not hungry?’ He shook his head, put his finger to his lips, and gestured that I should put the plate back.

  The staff knew, of course they knew, what he was doing, but they played the game he wanted to play. The plates of food were tactfully removed at the end of each day when he was in the bathroom. They gave him less and less, so that his reduced appetite would not be overwhelmed, but he still left most of his lunch and tea and supper, and hid it. But where did he imagine all the full plates were going once he’d stuck them under his bed? Or did he think they were all still there, plates and plates of rejected food slowly rotting underneath him while he slept? He still ate every scrap of his cooked breakfast, especially every morsel of bacon, no matter how difficult this was due to the state of his teeth. He still had all his own bottom teeth, which did most of the chewing, but they were beginning to loosen. When a tooth felt loose enough he pulled it out himself. A dentist had visited him in the home and done his best to make his mouth comfortable, but it was a fairly hopeless task – ‘I’ve got him beat.’

  Before I left this time I wrote on his calendar the date Pauline would be arriving, to stay at Loweswater for two whole weeks and coming in every other day. ‘Good,’ he said. The nights were getting lighter, spring was near, and he was cheerful. He’d survived another winter and now he would get out and about again. I wrote down our date of arrival too. Always a happy moment for him, knowing we would be near, only forty minutes away for a whole five months. ‘Let’s hope you don’t have to go gallivanting back to London again this summer,’ he said. Gallivanting? I thought about challenging him on that one but decided to let it go. It was easy to understand how important it was for him to rely on us staying close for an unbroken stretch of time. The summer routine was so much better for him than the winter one. A weekly letter and a thrice-weekly phone call were nothing compared to a twice-weekly visit and a daily phone call.

  I don’t recall how this daily phone call started. What had been wrong w
ith the winter rota, when I used to phone alternately with Pauline and Gordon? There should have been less reason now, not more, to phone. But somehow I’d slipped into this ‘quick call’ business at six o’clock and like all such fixtures involving my father it could not be stopped once started. And God knows, it was easy enough to do: only a matter of exchanging pleasantries, giving him reassurance – hardly a burden. He liked to tell any of the staff in his room at the time, ‘Watch the clock. When it gets to six, she’ll ring.’ Such triumph when I did. Now that I was seeing him so regularly there wasn’t much to say, but I always found something – the first sweetpea out, a red squirrel in the garden, a new postman … It didn’t matter. All he wanted was another marker to help him feel his way through time. Duty done, I could relax.

  Driving into Carlisle from Loweswater, on our first visit of summer 1996, duty weighed more heavily than it had ever done. Duty sounds such an ugly, cold, hard word, signifying a lack of love or pleasure or tenderness, devoid of those qualities one can feel happy to possess. Doing only one’s duty towards one’s parents smacks of implied resentment, stinks of self-righteousness. I knew that perfectly well. It was awful to be going to visit my father out of duty. I wanted to be going to see him out of anything but that. I wanted to discover within myself feelings of genuine warmth and love, but I couldn’t. There was something there, though, which was either not quite duty or which softened it into a feeling less repugnant. In theory, I did not agree that children are honour-bound to look after parents simply because those parents have given them life: I refused to acknowledge that there was an indisputable duty. And yet there I was, identifying duty as the reason I looked after my father and stayed close to him.