A Dog's Life (6 page)

I served the dessert. ‘It’s delicious,’ said the ever-placatory Edythe.

Sarton pushed the plate away from her. She was in need of the last word, and here it came, deafeningly. ‘I get the impression that no one in this house likes writers.’

It was impossible for David not to hear this. ‘Too fucking right,’ he called up the stairwell.

It was time for Sarton and Edythe to go, even though the proud author of forty books was spoiling for a real fight. My friend rang for a taxi, which came in ten minutes, to the relief of everybody but the disgruntled writer. Lisa and I said goodbye to Edythe, and tried to say goodbye to May Sarton, but she was muttering to herself and swaying from the drink she had knocked back with such determination.

‘I feared something like this would happen,’ Edythe confided in my old friend as they descended the stairs to the street.

We had a post-mortem. Had David met Sarton five years earlier, he would have frogmarched her out of the house. He could laugh now, which he did as the four of us repeated the various slights and insults Sarton had bestowed on the company for nearly three hours.

Sarton sent me a Christmas card, with one of her execrable poems on the back. She thanked a fellow writer for a memorable meal. The cook had been ignored once again. That she hadn’t registered, in her self-absorption, what the kindly Edythe had clearly seen – that the man who cooked the dinner was terminally ill – is a horrible fact which continues to shock me. She hadn’t noticed his gaunt eyes and sunken cheeks. Her mind was on those letters that had to be answered
personally
.

David’s oldest and staunchest friend, Bill Pashley, told me recently of their first meeting in the late 1950s. David was working as a barman in a gay club called The Calabash, which was situated – until it was raided by the police and closed – in a back street in South Kensington. Bill was sitting in the club one evening chatting to an acquaintance when he saw that the voluble young man behind the bar was making everybody laugh.

‘Who’s he?’ Bill asked.

‘I wouldn’t have anything to do with him, if I were you. He’s
dangerous
.’

It was that single word – ‘dangerous’ – that drew Bill to David. He went across to the bar and introduced himself. Bill’s self-deprecating humour and gift for recognizing and then mocking pomposity and pretentiousness greatly appealed to David, whose own talent for trenchant piss-taking was similar to his.

Bill, who now makes wedding dresses for the daughters of the titled and wealthy, only once shared a workroom with David. That once was more than enough. David created an atmosphere about him that was electric, nothing less, and Bill’s placid temperament couldn’t cope with it. Others could, and for them it was a source of inspiration, a challenge to give of their best.

‘Are you always so charming, or is today a special occasion?’ This was his standby question, delivered with an ingratiating smile, in the face of downright rudeness. He employed it for as long as I knew him, and I delighted in watching the reactions of those to whom it was addressed. People who make a habit of being insulting to their supposed inferiors tend not to have a capacity for self-deflation, and it was with a certain keen pleasure that I became aware how many of them actually thought they
were
charming, believing what David had said to be true.

David and I went about our different sexual ways eventually, but continued to live together. I still laugh when I remember his simple, but invariably successful, seduction technique. ‘Have you ever thought of having your trousers hand-made?’ he would remark,
en passant
, to the policeman – he specialized in policemen – or taxi driver, or labourer he had invited in for the ubiquitous ‘quick coffee’. The reply was always the same. ‘I couldn’t afford it, mate. Don’t have that kind of money.’

‘My prices are very reasonable. Why don’t I measure you anyway?’

Then he produced the tape measure, rather like a magician surprised to see a rabbit in his hat, and a few minutes of careful measuring would lead to the desired goal.

I was alone in the house when a woman from the wardrobe department at BBC Television phoned. She needed a piece of material urgently. She described it to me – the precise colour and pattern – and I went into his cluttered workroom to search for it. I did find it, and the woman said she would send a courier to pick it up. I also found something else that day – the evidence of his serious, private drinking. Underneath the scattered piles of silks and cottons were dozens of empty gin bottles, mostly miniatures. Why hadn’t he thrown them out with the rubbish? Had he wanted me to discover them?

He lived in fear of contracting Huntington’s chorea, and steadily killed himself in the process. It took a long time for his work to deteriorate, and when it did he was too blinded by gin to understand why no one was phoning him, apart from a couple of loyal friends who gave him the odd, relatively small, commission.

He had money troubles, too, even when he was in constant employment. Organizations like the BBC, the famous opera houses and theatrical managements seldom pay on delivery, and he often waited weeks or months for his cheque. I recall that once, exasperated beyond the limit of his limited patience, he made himself some sandwiches and mixed gin with tonic in a bottle and set off for the offices of the theatre company that owed him thousands of pounds. He arrived there at nine-thirty in the morning and sat himself down opposite the secretary who had been assuring him for six months that the cheque was on her desk ready to be signed by her boss, who seemed to be permanently absent.

‘I am going to sit here until he signs it. I’ve brought my food and drink. If I have to go to the lavatory, I shall do it on the carpet. That’s a promise.’

The secretary made a series of frantic phone calls before she located the head of the company. She told him that things were desperate. The man appeared at noon and observed that he regarded David’s behaviour as beneath contempt. He signed the cheque.

‘May I use your telephone?’ David enquired, with feigned politeness. ‘What’s the number of your bank? It would be so inconvenient if this bounced.’

David learned that there were sufficient funds in the account, while the terrified secretary and the apoplectic manager looked on. And with the words ‘Quoth the raven’ he left the premises.

He was not to be so belatedly fortunate with the management that staged the ill-fated musical
Barnardo
, about the Victorian philanthropist who founded the homes for orphaned children. This was a huge undertaking for David, so large in fact that he required the assistance of three friends whom he promised to pay handsomely. There was an initial payment. After weeks of day-and-night activity the costumes were finished and delivered. The show opened to blisteringly bad reviews. The management was forced into receivership. The cast refused to perform one night, and money was somehow found for them. They were the only people to be paid. David was never to receive the £10,000 owing to him. Yet he honoured the agreement with his friends, though it took months of back-breaking labour to do so.

He gave up drinking coffee in the mornings and substituted gin and tonic instead. His belly grew larger and larger. He never seemed to have a hangover. We were walking along a street in Fulham one Saturday morning in 1984 when he stopped suddenly and vomited blood. We were not far from a hospital. He was attended to immediately in Accidents and Emergencies and the bleeding was brought to a stop. He was given an anaesthetic and later that day he was transferred to the Intensive Care Unit at Westminster Hospital, which was to become, in his own words, his ‘second home’. It was there that the doctor who was tending him told me, in a very loud voice that everyone in the corridor could hear, that if he didn’t stop drinking alcohol he would die. He would die, the doctor added, horribly. David was embarrassed and offended by this announcement, which caused staff and patients to stare at him, but it ensured that he would be teetotal for the rest of his life.

The nurses and doctors in the Intensive Care Unit admired him for his humour, his freedom from self-pity and his refusal to turn his face to the wall. The man who had been committing suicide by stealth for years was now possessed of a ferocious will to live. He refused to believe what those who loved him knew already – that he had left it too late. Whenever the instruments of survival were removed from his neck, his arms, his chest, he was unfailingly cheerful. I sat by his bed for an entire night and when a friend came to visit him the next morning I went out to get a cup of coffee and a croissant. I returned within the hour to find him sitting up and laughing. I gazed at him in amazement and anger. He was the most carefree Lazarus that could be imagined.

I brought the puppy home in April 1985 and for almost a year he revelled in her company. ‘How’s Circe?’ would be his first question when he saw me entering the Intensive Care Unit in the summer, autumn and winter of his unlikely
annus mirabilis
.

He was frequently tired, but the irrepressible animal, nipping at our ankles as if we were the sheep she had been trained to round up, amused and charmed him. He took Polaroid photographs of her – one, captured when she was very young, peeing on a broadsheet newspaper, fell out of a book just the other day, causing me to smile and weep. It is the earliest token of his affection for her.

One memory of his devotion to the intruder will suffice. It was a day in the late summer of 1985, and we were walking by the Thames in Chiswick in the company of two friends and their small sons, who were then five and three. We decided to cross Hammersmith Bridge and stroll along the towpath on the other side. We were halfway across when Circe slipped from her lead and dashed into the traffic. I froze with terror. The ever-practical David, despite his illness, leapt after her, catching her by the scruff of the neck and slapping her until she yelped. She was put back on the lead, and the collar was tightened in order to prevent another attempted escape.

‘You bloody fool,’ he yelled at me. And then he expressed thanks to the driver of the car that had come to a swift halt in front of the man and the dog.

At six o’clock on the morning of 15 March 1986, I awoke to find him dressed and packed. He’d had an attack in the night, had phoned the Intensive Care Unit and ordered a minicab, which drew up outside five minutes later.

We kissed goodbye.

‘I don’t want to come back this time.’ He spoke without emotion. His last words were: ‘Look after Circe.’

The Arab offered me a cigarette. ‘Smoke?’ he asked. I shook my head, and smiled to express my gratitude. He had a little boy with him, whose hair he ruffled. ‘Girl’ was his next word, followed a minute or so later by ‘new’, then ‘baby’. I indicated with a nod what he was attempting to tell me. He had come to register the birth of his daughter. He had already guessed that I was there to record someone’s death. My face had told him as much. He had recognized grief, and acknowledged it with a small gesture of kindness – the only one available to him in the curious circumstances.

That brief meeting took place on the afternoon of 27 March 1986, in a waiting room in the Westminster Council House. I remember how the Arab tried to contain his happiness by adopting a serious expression whenever our eyes met. I was touched, and slightly amused, by the way in which he manoeuvred the change from obvious delight to awkward sympathy. I desperately wanted to tell him not to bother; that the offer of the rather foul-smelling cigarette had been enough. My name was called first, and before I left I muttered words I thought he might know: ‘Thanks,’ I said, and, ‘Congratulations’.

‘Not
quite
the youngest this week,’ the woman who took the death certificate from me remarked. ‘There was one yesterday who was only forty-six.’ She was stating a matter of fact. I watched her as she read the slip of paper. ‘It isn’t for me to ask you why,’ she observed, writing ‘cirrhosis of the liver’ alongside David’s name in the large ledger on the table between us. ‘Guilt,’ I ventured, without explanation. ‘I think it was guilt.’ I sat in silence until she finished. When I rose to leave, she advised me to enjoy the rest of my life. Her tone was almost brusque. ‘Yes,’ I heard myself answer.

As soon as I got home, I took Circe for a brief walk and then telephoned the undertaker nearest to the hospital in which David had died. ‘It’s Easter in a few days’ time,’ said the man I talked to. ‘We’re pretty heavily booked.’ Could he have my number? He would see what he could do. He rang back the following morning. ‘You’re in luck, Mr Bailey,’ the fruity voice announced. ‘There’s been a last-minute cancellation.’ I nearly laughed, but managed to say something absurd, like ‘Good’ instead.

The owner of the fruity voice had a rubicund face to match. ‘I’m a failed actor,’ he informed me. I had noticed a copy of the
Stage
on his desk. ‘You need to be a bit of a thespian in this job.’ I accepted his invitation to ‘take a pew’. ‘Shall we run through your requirements?’ We began with the most basic. Was it to be a burial or a cremation? On hearing it was the latter, he recommended Mortlake for its ‘atmosphere’. I replied that Mortlake was perfectly suitable. What kind of coffin did I prefer – plain wood, or walnut perhaps, or even mahogany? ‘Plain wood,’ I answered. ‘Very practical, Mr Bailey. Very sensible. It’s going to be burnt, after all.’ He cleared his throat and inquired if my ‘late companion’ was religious. He was a lapsed Catholic, I told him. ‘We have plenty of those,’ he said, and chuckled. ‘In that case, will you be requiring a clergyman or priest?’ We were virtually soulmates by now. ‘Good God, no,’ I said. ‘Very sensible, yet again. You’ve saved yourself a hundred and twenty pounds.’

A secular service presented no problems, he assured me. ‘I’m afraid it’s restricted to thirty minutes maximum,’ he added. He suggested that a rehearsal might be in order, given that I intended to read some Jane Austen, play a couple of tapes of Mozart arias, and have a friend address the mourners. I’d already revealed that I’d once been an actor. ‘Timing’s of the essence, Mr Bailey.’