Albie returned to the hotel to bring me a change of clothes. The obscene trunks were discarded and we were transferred to a ward to spend the night. I wish I could report some unique Barcelona atmosphere, with everyone promenading down the corridors and eating octopus off cocktail sticks until dawn. It was as anxious and depressing as any hospital ward in the world, but with the oaths, groans and sobbing cries in a different accent. Albie, who had never been inside a hospital since his birth, looked shaken. ‘Dad, if this is all some elaborate ruse to stop me smoking, then it’s worked.’
‘Well, that’s something, I suppose. Albie, you can leave me here if you want.’
‘What, and go and party?’
‘At least go back to the hotel. You can’t sleep in a chair.’
‘I’ll go later. Now we need to phone Mum.’
‘I know.’
‘Do you want to do it, or shall I?’
‘I’ll talk to her, then pass her on to you.’
So I called her and next day, by the time the procedure was complete and I was waking from a sedative-assisted sleep, my wife was by my side.
169. her face
Connie lay, somewhat awkwardly, half on, half off the hospital bed, her fantastic face close to mine.
‘How are you?’
‘I’m fine! A little sore, a little bruised.’
‘I thought it was keyhole surgery.’
‘More Chubb than Yale.’
‘Are you in pain? Shall I get off you?’
‘No, no, I like having you here. Don’t move. I’m sorry if I stink.’ I had not bathed properly since the Mediterranean and was painfully aware of staleness of both breath and body.
‘Christ, I don’t care. Shows you’re alive. How was the …?’
‘A little uncomfortable. A pressure in the chest, as if someone’s got their finger inside you somehow—’
‘Bloody hell, Douglas!’
‘I’m fine. I’m sorry you had to come all this way.’
‘Well, I was thinking maybe just let it go, let him go through surgery by himself, but there was nothing on TV, so – here I am.’ Her hand was on my cheek now. ‘Look at this crazy beard. You look like you’ve been shipwrecked or something.’
‘I’ve missed you.’
‘Oh God, I’ve missed you too.’ She was crying now, and perhaps I was too. ‘Let’s do exactly this same holiday next year, shall we?’
‘Exactly like this. Don’t change a thing. I want it to be exactly like this every year.’
‘Holiday of a lifetime.’
‘Holiday of a lifetime.’
170. pillow
After the angiogram, and with the angioplasty considered a success, it was decided that the heart attack was ‘not serious’. It had certainly felt serious enough as I’d lain sprawled on the floor between those beds, but I did not quibble because the good news was that I could leave the hospital after one more night and, with the correct medication, would be allowed on a plane back to England in ten days or so.
Taking control with admirable efficiency, Connie and Albie found an apartment. This would be more comfortable and less claustrophobic than a hotel and so we filled in medical forms, scheduled various tests, and then took a taxi to Eixample, a bourgeois residential area full of rather grand apartment blocks. Ours was a pleasant, quiet, book-lined place on the first floor – not too many stairs – the home of an absent academic, with a balcony at the rear and places to walk nearby. There were Gaudí buildings and restaurants, the Sagrada Família was seven blocks away; all very civilised and ruinously expensive, too, but, perhaps for the first time in my life, I was able to point out the value of comprehensive travel insurance. We would not worry about expense. It was important that I did not worry about anything at all.
There’s a kind of luxury in convalescence, and I was carried from place to place with great care and attention like an old vase. Albie in particular was terrifically attentive and interested as if, up until now, he’d thought mortality was a myth. Some months later I discovered that my admission into hospital had been the subject of a series of verité-style photographs; stark, black-and-white high-contrast images of my gawping face while sleeping, extreme close-ups of the various heart monitors affixed to my chest, the cannula piercing my skin. To the teenager all disasters are a rite of passage, but I was happy, at long last, to have provided him with some inspiration. At least he had some photos of me now.
Once it became clear that I would not be dying any time soon, Albie lost interest. Connie and I encouraged him to leave us on our own and his relief was palpable. His college friends were meeting up in Ibiza before heading off in all kinds of directions, and he flew out to join them, with a store of dramatic stories to tell. Perhaps he embellished the truth; perhaps he’d administered CPR. Perhaps a part of him wondered how it might have felt if I hadn’t pulled through, who knows. The crisis had been mine, but I was happy for him to receive his share of attention and acclaim. I was proud of him.
What happened to Albie in Ibiza that summer I will never know, which is exactly how it should be. He contacted us daily to assure us of his safety and his happiness, which was all we asked, and for the moment my dear wife and I were alone once more.
171. homage to catalonia
Perhaps it sounds perverse, but I count my convalescence in Barcelona as among the happiest times of our marriage.
I would sleep late, with no thought of an alarm clock, while Connie sat on the balcony, with oranges and tea reading a book. When we were ready we would take a walk, perhaps down to La Boqueria, the food market that we both loved, where I would drink fruit juice but no coffee, no booze. There was much talk of my having to adopt a Mediterranean diet from now on, a gruesome notion in Berkshire but no chore whatsoever while we were here. We bought bread, olives and fruit from our favourite stalls and walked on.
The Ramblas was a little too touristic for us residents, so usually we would strike left or right into the back streets of Raval or the Gothic Quarter, taking frequent breaks in cafés. In a little English-language bookshop in Gràcia, Connie had found a copy of Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia and a history of the Spanish Civil War, and we would sit in the shade to read and drink fresh orange juice. In the late afternoon we’d doze, then in courtyard restaurants we’d eat early in the evening like the other tourists, resisting with some regret the chorizo, the fried squid, the cold beer, then walk slowly, very slowly, home to bed and rest.
One morning we took a taxi to the Joan Miró Foundation high above the city, which sent Connie into paroxysms but left me unsure and feeling that I still had some way to go as far as abstract art was concerned. Then a wonderful cable car from the Parc de Montjuïc to the sea, high over the harbour, over cranes and swimming pools, warehouses and motorways, over the decks of ocean liners and container ships. You see over there? There’s the Sagrada Família, and there’s the hotel where I held hands with my son and thought that I would die. The cable car lowered us gently from the mountain to the sea, and this was how my time in Barcelona felt; as if I’d been lifted up and carried with great care and affection. It was almost like early childhood, and therefore could not last forever. At some point my head would strike the door jamb, and I’d be jerked back into the real world and the consequences of my condition; the anxieties, the tests and procedures, the implications for my lifestyle and career.
But for the time being Connie and I were as harmonious and content and interested in each other, as in love, for want of a better phrase, as we had ever been. Clearly the key to having a long and successful marriage would be to have a non-lethal heart attack every three months or so for the next forty years. If I could only pull off that trick, then we might just be all right.
One night, lying in the large, cool bed I asked:
‘Do you think we can have sex again at some point? I mean without me clutching at my chest and dropping dead on top of you?’
‘Actually, I looked that up.’
‘You did?’
‘No change there then.’
She laughed, which pleased me hugely.
‘I think we’ll be all right, don’t you?’ I said.
‘That’s what I thought too,’ said Connie, and we were. We were all right.
172. home
After a week or so, we were quite the Barcelonese, if that is the word; no maps, no guidebooks, no more itineraries. We even picked up a few words of Catalan. ¡Bona tarda! ¡Si us plau! Every few days we’d make our way to the hospital and sit comfortably in Spanish waiting rooms until finally I was given the all-clear and passed back into the care of the National Health Service. It was safe for me to travel. We could go home.
‘Well. That’s good news,’ I said.
‘Isn’t it?’ said Connie.
Nevertheless, it was with some reluctance that we packed our bags and I watched uselessly as Connie carried the suitcases to the taxi. We held hands in the cab and looked out of either window. We held hands on the plane, too, Connie’s index finger along my wrist as if surreptitiously checking my pulse. The effort of achieving an entirely stress-free journey produced its own anxieties, and we neither of us spoke much. I took the window seat, my forehead resting on the glass.
The sun was shining down on all of Europe that day, and I looked out over Spain and the Mediterranean and then France’s great green centre. England rolled around to meet us; the white cliffs, the motorways, the orderly fields of corn and wheat and oilseed rape, the dull English towns with their ring roads and superstores, their high streets and roundabouts. At Heathrow we were greeted by Fran, who was full of jokes and uncharacteristic concern, and we were driven home to our door. ‘You okay getting out of the car?’ ‘You okay getting up the stairs?’ ‘You allowed a cup of coffee?’ This attentiveness soon became quite maddening, the guiding hand on the elbow, the tilt of the head and caring tone of voice, like a terrible glimpse of a geriatric life that I’d assumed was thirty or more years away, and I resolved to do everything within my power to get well. No, more than well, to become healthier and stronger than I’d been before, something that I have gone some way to achieving in the year that has passed since then. The doctors are very pleased with me now. I ride my bicycle down country lanes. I play a kind of badminton with friends, always doubles, though with less of the ferocity of old. I jog sporadically and self-consciously, unsure of what to do with my hands. The prognosis is good.
But I’m leaping ahead. I made a fuss of Mr Jones and submitted to having my face licked. I watched uselessly as Connie carried the cases upstairs. I helped unpack, restoring everything to its usual place – the toothbrush to its holder, the passport to its drawer. Fran left at last and we were alone in the house once more, experiencing that mixture of sadness and pleasure that accompanies return after a long time away; the pile of unopened mail, toast and tea, the sound of a radio, motes of dust in the air. On the hall table, a great pile of unread newspapers described events that we never knew had taken place.
‘You forgot to cancel the papers,’ I said, filling the recycling bin in one go.
‘I had other things on my mind!’ said Connie, with some irritation. ‘I thought you were dying. Remember?’
We took Mr Jones out for a walk, the usual route, up the hill and back. It was cooler than August had any right to be. There was a suggestion of autumn in the air, that hint of a change in season acting as a tap upon my shoulder. ‘I wish I’d brought a coat,’ I said as we walked slowly, arm in arm along the lane.
‘Do you want me to go back for it?’
‘Connie, I don’t want you to—’
‘I’ll run back. Won’t take me a minute …’
‘I don’t think you should leave me.’
I spoke for some time about all we had been through. I had been thinking a great deal about where things had gone wrong, and how they might change in the future. Perhaps we might move back to London, or at least find a little place there, and spend the weekends in the city. Move to a smaller house, in the proper countryside. Go out more. Travel further afield. We talked about fresh starts and we talked about our shared past, nearly twenty-five years of it, about our daughter and our son, how we had got through all of that together and how close it had made us. Inseparable, I said, because I found the idea of life without her quite unthinkable, unthinkable in the truest sense; I could not picture a future without her by my side, and I passionately believed that we could and would be happier together than apart. I wanted us to grow old together. The idea of doing so alone, and of dying alone, it was – well, that word again – it was unthinkable, and not just unthinkable, monstrous, frightening. I’d had a glimpse of it and had felt such terror. ‘So I don’t think you should leave. Things will be better. There are only good things ahead of us from now on, and I will make you happy again, I swear.’
Despite the chill of the evening, we lay down in the long grass on the side of the hill. Connie kissed me, and laid her head on my shoulder and we stayed like this for quite some time, the sound of the M40 a little way off. ‘We’ll see,’ she said after a while. ‘There’s no rush. We’ll see. Let’s wait and see how things turn out.’
When we’d set out on our journey I had vowed that I would win her back. But it seemed that I could not fulfil my vow and despite, or perhaps because of my best efforts, I could not make her happy again, or as happy as she wanted to be. The following January, two weeks shy of twenty-five years together, we embraced and said goodbye and began our lives apart.
part nine
ENGLAND, AGAIN
–
Home is so sad. It stays as it was left,
Shaped to the comfort of the last to go
As if to win them back. Instead, bereft
Of anyone to please, it withers so,
Having no heart to put aside the theft
And turn again to what it started as,
A joyous shot at how things ought to be,
Long fallen wide. You can see how it was:
Look at the pictures and the cutlery.
The music in the piano stool. That vase.
Philip Larkin, ‘Home is so Sad’
173. points of view
Here is the same story as you might have heard it, told from alternative points of view.
A young boy grows up with a mother whom he idolises and a father he can barely believe is his own. They argue a great deal, and when not arguing they are often silent. While good-intentioned, the father lacks imagination, emotional intelligence or empathy or some such stuff. Consequently the parents’ marriage is full of tension and unspoken resentment, and the boy longs to escape. Like many teenagers, he is a little pretentious and irresponsible, and is keen to get on with life and find out who he really is. But first he must endure a long, dull holiday walking around various dusty old museums, watching his parents bickering, then making peace, then bickering again. He meets a girl, a rebel who has run away from home, and who shares his views on Art! Politics! Life! When his father insults him publicly, the boy runs away with the girl, ignoring his parents’ anxious calls and living on the money they make from busking. But the adventure sours. The girl has feelings for him that he is unable to reciprocate despite his best efforts. A question he has carried in the back of his mind for years now demands to be answered and so he flees to a city where he knows no one and asks: just who the hell am I? His father, guilt-ridden, tracks him down. An uneasy truce is established, and made firm when he manages to save his father’s life – actually save his life – in a Barcelona hotel room. Having completed this rite of passage, the charismatic, complex and unconventional young man leaves his grateful parents and sets off on his own. Who knows what adventures will come his way on this road through, etc., etc., etc.
I believe such stories are called coming-of-age stories. I can see the appeal of that mixture of idealism, cynicism, narcissism and self-righteousne
ss, with some sex and drugs thrown in. It’s not really my thing, perhaps because I’ve never understood that ‘who am I?’ question. Even as a teenager I always knew who I was, even if I didn’t much care for the answer. But I can see that Albie’s concerns were somewhat greater than my own. I can see how that story might have been of interest to some.
If not, how about this one?
A young artist – beautiful, witty, a little insecure – leads a wild and irresponsible life with her temperamental but talented boyfriend. They argue violently and break up for the last time and soon after, at a party, she meets another man, a scientist this time, passably attractive, a little conventional perhaps, but nice enough, and they begin a relationship. This man is reliable, intelligent and clearly adores her, and they fall in love. But when he asks her to marry him she hesitates. What about her work, what about the passion and unpredictability of her earlier life? Pushing these doubts aside, she says yes. They marry and for a while they are happy. But their first child dies and their second child is a source of tension. Questions arise in her mind. What about her ambitions as a painter? What about her old life? Her husband is loyal and decent and loves her very much, but her days are now provincial and dull and when the time is right, she summons up all her courage, wakes him in the night and announces her intention to leave. He is heartbroken, of course, and his heartbreak causes her some sadness too. Life alone is difficult for both of them. He asks her to return and she is tempted.
But despite its occasional loneliness there is something thrilling about her new life in a little London flat, about starting to paint again. She resists her husband’s pleas. He gets to keep the dog. She is fifty-two years old, uncertain of the future but happy to be alone.
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