Somewhere Towards the End (6 page)

On the way to the mortuary I recalled various reassuring descriptions of dead bodies: how they seemed empty and nothing to do with the person who had left them, and how beautiful faces become in the austere serenity of death. I wanted reassurance because I expected us to be in the same room as the body and to stand beside it while an attendant turned back a sheet covering its face, but that was not how it was done. We were taken into a narrow room with a large plate-glass window curtained with cheap sage-green damask. The curtain was drawn back and there was the body on the other side of the glass, lying in a box and covered up to the neck with a kind of bedspread of purple velour.

The words I spoke involuntarily were: ‘Oh
poor
little Maria!' It did not look as though it had nothing to do with her, nor was it austerely serene. What was lying there was poor little Maria with her hair in a mess and her face grubby, looking as though she were in a state of great bewilderment and dejection because something too unkind for words had been done to her. It was a comfort to remember that she was dead, and therefore couldn't possibly be feeling how she looked. But it was not a comfort to be shown so clearly that my favourite image of floating out to sea at night was nonsense. What Maria's body demonstrated was that even a quick dying can be
very nasty
.

In other ways the coroner's domain was surprisingly bracing. We approached it through a walled yard where white vans with their rear windows painted out were coming and going. One of them was backed up close to a small unloading bay. It might have been delivering groceries, but was in fact delivering a body. The men
who drove, loaded and unloaded the vans, several of whom were drinking tea in a room off the passage through which we entered, were middle-aged to elderly and looked tough and slightly ribald. They glanced at us sideways as we passed the door of their room, and in their eyes was the faintest hint – an almost imperceptible gleam – of mockery. They knew.
They knew
that however nasty death may be while it is happening, it is too ordinary an event to make a fuss about. Most of them, no doubt, went about their work soberly, but that hint of a gleam suggested that some of them might enjoy doing some flippancy to a corpse – using its navel as an ashtray, perhaps – imagining as they did it the horror of a squeamish observer. They would probably respect the grief of the bereaved, but squeamishness they would despise. Having shed it, they had moved into a category apart.

My own reaction to this place where dead bodies were all in the day's work had something prurient about it. If the men in the room off the entrance passage looked at me out of the corners of their eyes, so did I at them: I did not want to betray the extent of my curiosity, did not want to be caught at it. My awareness of the cadavers hidden in the white vans and in the accommodation specially designed for them on Maria's side of the plate-glass window, was sharp. Had I been a dog my ears would have been pricked and my hackles up. I think this odd excitement was connected at some level with the violent recoil from dead animals which seized me in childhood when I unexpectedly came on a decaying corpse hidden in long grass, or caught in a trap, or on one of those macabre gamekeeper's ‘larders', the wires on which they strung up the corpses of
‘vermin' they had trapped or shot. I often went a long way round to avoid passing one of those – in fact I think they are the reason why I have never much enjoyed walking through a wood. The two reactions seem like opposites, but could be the opposite sides of the same coin. Whatever the truth, I did call up that mortuary and those dead animals when trying to reason myself out of the night terrors in my mother's house: ‘Calm down, this is not a matter of the mind saying “Alas, she will soon be dead and gone” – to that there is a whole set of other reactions of quite a different kind. This is simply a matter of flesh shuddering because flesh rots, and it is possible not only to acknowledge the ordinariness of that dissolution, but also to feel it.' Not long afterwards I wrote a poem – or perhaps more accurately a short statement – as a result of that visit to the mortuary, which had contributed a good deal to my attitude towards death.

When the time came for my mother to die, she was almost unbelievably lucky – and therefore I was, too. On the day before her ninety-sixth birthday she walked on her two sticks down to the end
of her garden, to oversee the planting of a new eucalyptus tree by Sid Pooley. Halfway through the planting he thought she looked not quite herself. ‘Are you all right?' he asked, and she said she was feeling a bit unsteady and had better go back to the house. He helped her back, settled her in her chair, and called Eileen Barry, her home help, who came at once and recognized heart failure when she saw it. Eileen got her to the local cottage hospital and called me – by then it was 8.30 in the evening – saying it would probably be a good thing if I got there first thing next morning: no, she didn't think it was necessary for me to come straight away. I reached the hospital very early and found that my brother and my mother's favourite niece, both of whom lived fairly near, were already there. Soon after her death I again wrote a kind of poem describing it, which seems to me to belong here.

N
OW THAT I
am only seven years younger that my mother when she died, to what extent am I either supported by what I have learnt about dying, or made apprehensive about it? I have received a good deal of reassurance of a slightly wobbly kind, and also a cause for worry.

The reassurance concerns the actual process of dying. There cannot be many families in which so many people have been lucky in this respect as mine has been. Even the least lucky were spared the worst horrors of it (which can, of course and alas, be very bad). My maternal grandmother had to endure several months of distressing bedridden feebleness owing to prolonged heart failure, but she had a daughter to help her through it at home and that daughter was able to report that the attack which finally killed her was a good deal less disagreeable than some of those that she survived. My father had to endure one week that was certainly horrible, though no one could be sure how aware he was of its horribleness: he had a cerebral haemorrhage which deprived him
of speech and left him obviously extremely confused. Once settled in hospital he could respond normally when offered a basin to wash in or a meal to eat, and when you came into his room he looked pleased to see you and attempted to speak; but he could find no words and an expression of distress followed by hopelessness appeared on his face. I got the impression that he knew something was dreadfully wrong, was miserable about it, then thought, ‘Oh well, it seems I can't do anything about it so I'd better stop trying.' The doctor saw no possibility of repair to the damage, but found him physically strong, which was alarming: my mother and I couldn't bring ourselves to speak about the possibility of his living for a long time in this condition. But a second haemorrhage struck, killing him instantly, and whatever he was aware of suffering during the intervening days, there were only six of them.

About the deaths of my paternal grandparents, my father's siblings and my mother's father I know little, but nothing was ever said to suggest that they were particularly harrowing, while on my mother's side one sister had a stroke when she was eighty-three from which she died almost at once without recovering consciousness; another aged ninety-four was distressed for less than an hour, then died in a daughter's arms just after saying that she was now feeling much better; another went quietly after becoming increasingly weak and dozy for about three weeks; and their brother, a lucky man whose luck held to the very end, was on his horse at a meet of the Norwich Stag-hounds at the age of eighty-two, talking with friends, when flop! and he fell off his horse stone dead in the
middle of a laugh. The eldest of my cousins had similar luck, falling down dead as she was making a cup of tea.

My brother, who died last year, was less lucky, but not because he was painfully ill for a long time, or afraid of death. His trouble was that he resented it because he loved his life so passionately. He was eighty-five. He knew death was coming because, having stubbornly refused to pay attention to various ailments of old age which were obvious to his anxious wife and other people, he was finally forced to recognize that his appetite had gone and that he was feeling dreadfully cold. But he still longed to be out messing about with his boats – he lived on the Norfolk coast in a place he adored and to have to leave that place and its occupations seemed to him the worst possible fate.

One afternoon not long before he died he took me out for a sail. His house is just inland from Blakeney Point, a long spit of sand dunes that runs parallel to the shore, partially enclosing a stretch of water which at low tide becomes a river snaking its way out to sea through exposed mud, but at high tide is a wide, sheltered expanse busy with small sailing boats and easily navigated by larger ones provided they are careful to observe the markers showing where the deeper channels run. On that day there was hardly a breath of wind. Sky and water were mother-of-pearl and the breasts of doves, a blend of soft blues and pinks so delicate that I had never seen its like. A small group of sailing dinghies was lying becalmed, hoping to be able to start a race (we, who were motoring, gave one of them which had no outboard engine a tow to join the group). None of the people lounging at the tiller of these little boats looked
impatient or bored, because no one could mind being becalmed in the middle of so much loveliness. When we were some way past them, near the end of the Point, almost in the open sea, a tiny popple began under our hull and and a cat's paw of breeze – a kitten's paw, more like it – just ruffled the water's surface enough for sunlight to start twinkling off the edges of each ripple; I was once told that fishermen at Aldeburgh used to call that effect of light ‘tinkling cymbals'. I shall always think of it as that, and no tinkling cymbals I ever saw were better than those we moved through when Andrew was at last able to hoist canvas and very, very gently we started to sail. We didn't talk much. Although we didn't often see each other and differed widely in many of our opinions, he and I had never lost touch with the closeness we had enjoyed in early childhood and there was much that we could understand about each other without words. That afternoon was brimming with a loveliness peculiar to that particular place; he knew that I was appreciating it, and I knew without any doubt how profoundly he was penetrated by it. He was a man who, with the help of the right wife, had finally found himself the place and the life that fulfilled him, and lived it with a completeness and intensity more often seen in an artist than in someone who should have been a farmer, had to become an army officer, and ended by teaching people sailing, and growing oysters, on the edge of the North Sea. What filled him as death approached was not fear of whatever physical battering he would have to endure (in fact there was not, at the end, any of that), but grief at having to say goodbye to what he could never have enough of.

Such a grief, it seems to me, is proof of a good, or at least an agreeable, life, and ought therefore to be something for which one is grateful – provided, of course, that one has not been cut off untimely, and I know that my brother agreed with me that once past eighty one has no right to complain about dying, because he said so. I guess that if I am given the time for it, I too shall feel at least a little of it, and hope to remember that it is simply what one has to pay for what one has enjoyed.

So: I have inherited a good chance of going fairly easily, and I have found it easy to think myself into a reasonable attitude towards death. It is not surprising, therefore, that I spend no time worrying about it. When I worry, it is about living with the body's failures, because experience has shown me that when that ordeal is less hard than it might have been, it is usually because of the presence of a daughter. And I have no daughter. Barry, the person closest to me – we became lovers sixty-three years ago and started sharing this flat eight years later – has beaten me to physical collapse, so that I have to look after him. And I haven't got the money to pay for care of any kind. If I don't have the luck to fall down dead while still able-bodied, as my uncle and my cousin did (and that luck certainly can only be hoped for, not counted on), it is going to be the geriatric ward for me.

Fortunately, if a prospect is bleak enough the mind jibs at dwelling on it. It's not a matter of
choosing
not to think about it, more of
not being able
to do so. Whatever happens, I will get through it somehow, so why fuss? Now that I have attempted to assess my own attitude, that seems to be it. Those last miserable
weeks or months (may it not be years!) when you are unable to look after yourself are so disagreeable anyway that it hardly matters how they are spent. My oldest friend died this year, my age, daughterless like me but with enough money first for carers visiting her home, then for a nursing home reckoned to be an exceptionally good one, which given what it cost it damn well should have been. From time to time, in emergencies, she also had to spend a week or so in hospital, in wards full of other ancient people, and she didn't seem to be any unhappier there than she was in the expensive ‘home'. The one real drawback to a ward, I felt, was that the nursing was better there so they were more likely to haul you back from the brink to suffer further misery than they were at the ‘home'. She, on the other hand, was always glad when hauled back. Perhaps when one comes to it one always is? By the time I've learnt whether that is true for me I shall be past handing on the news.

That is all I have to say about the event of death and what I feel about it in advance, so now I shall move on – or perhaps ‘over' is more exact – to the experience of living during one's last years.