Walking Shadow, page 7
The culinary experiment of the week: one of Tony’s favourites: Tongue. Paddock Farm had agreed to source one and get it peeled and cured for a week in brine, and cooked. Don’t know what I was expecting but this rigid vacu-packed joint arrived on Friday, looking exactly as if it had been made by the RSC prop department.
Monday 25 October
Odd sense of the beginning of another week, and a determination to make each day happy in some way. But anxious, it’s the last week of the month. The fact that British Summer Time ends soon and the days are getting darker won’t help Tony’s mood. He was crying in his sleep early this morning. I wanted to wrap my arms around him, but didn’t want to wake him.
We’ve had lunch now, a favourite, Caesar salad, but for the first time he couldn’t finish it. He’s dozing here with me in the front room on his chair, while the beautiful andante from Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 12, played by Alfred Brendel, lulls him on the CD player. There is an exquisite theme in the centre of the piece which I find so beautiful. It may be a tribute by Mozart on hearing of the death of Johann Christian Bach, who was Mozart’s mentor while in London. Before he settled Tony said: ‘You know that expression people use “half dead”, well, I’m experiencing that for real.’
Tuesday 26 October
Appalling night of no sleep, then a day of the worst drowsiness yet. Tried watching Room With a View. What on earth is this story about? A piece of fluff passing itself off as great literature.
Wednesday 27 October
Marietta. Used my drawing ‘Seventy’ for discussion today. The self-portrait I did after my seventieth and the heart operation. Expresses the same thing I am experiencing now: total shock at what’s become of me. This isn’t my body. This isn’t me.
G is endlessly patient and attentive, but I remain unresponsive, scowling, withdrawn. We eat meals in silence. I think I’m subconsciously punishing him for being well. It’s ridiculous.
Made a resolution at bedtime to make more effort tomorrow, to cover up my feebleness more, to engage more.
Tony had another restless night. Yesterday the occupational therapist, Heidi, came round with her trainee nurse, Eko. She advised on everything from the height of Tony’s chair and the sofa, to getting a ‘glide-about’ commode, and shower chair. Side protectors for the hospital bed, and the dangers of crocs. A possible banister instalment and newel post addition, and a lip for the studio to allow the wheelchair access. A bit exhausting all in all, though very well meaning.
Tony had a good conversation with Randall on the phone this evening. With his new hearing aid, (which Tony bought for him) he can now hear his brother, which will ensure they can talk from now on without the frustration of Randall not really catching what is said.
Thursday 28 October
Thursday again. Terrible night. I must finally have dropped off because I had a dream and think I must have cried out. I heard Tony say, ‘It’s all right, it’s all right!’ I thought I saw him, standing on his side of the bed, with his light on and leaning towards me. I heard myself ask, ‘What’s happening?’, but now it was dark again. The nightmare developed into being alone in a smashed-up room in a dingy flat and trying to protect myself from something outside. Pretty clear that anxieties about what happens afterwards are beginning to surface in my subconscious.
Odd light outside. Slanting under rain clouds. It lit the field, making it bright green an hour or so ago, but now it feels, with the river-flow of bright clouds in the distance, as if it predicates a day of angry weather. The light outside has shifted again. To flat gloom. I think I preferred the dramatic lighting. It feels weirdly as if something is going to happen today. I wonder how close we are.
I fear that lack of sleep will make me tetchy. Knowing that he is likely to go in his sleep makes me feel as if I am about to be robbed, and what is most precious to me stolen behind my back. As I write I am listening intently to any creaks from the bedroom above.
There is tension in the field. The crows have just fled the sycamore flying stage left, and all the pigeons took off, fleeing stage right, suddenly the wind has dropped completely and the squirrel on the fence post has frozen, listening. Footsteps upstairs.
So today I cut Tony’s hair. A fairly nerve-wracking experience, having never cut anyone’s hair before. There was a stage when I thought he looked like Sarah Miles, tarred and feathered in Ryan’s Daughter. We have taken it right down so he can wash and care for it easily. But his scalp is quite scruffy where the skin flakes in patches. But it is not obvious to him, so that is good.
We did a big haircut this morning: hair to a No. 3, beard only a bit longer. Will make hair washing in the period ahead easier. It was fun, like doing a new look for my next part – Dying Man – and I felt no drowsiness. And G and I were really engaging.
I was so nervous that when the phone suddenly rang on the desk in the bedroom, I bit my tongue. It’s quite a deep bite, and right in the middle. But the tongue seems to be a rather resilient organ, and after mouth-washing it a few times, it already feels on the mend.
The phone went several times. The district nurse; the delivery company about to deliver a whole load of stuff: bedside supports, inflatable cushion, an extra pee bottle etc.; and the surgery trying to arrange a Covid booster for Tony.
And the front doorbell went. That turned out to be a real delight. A package of two delicious Kobe steaks from Thelma, all packaged and wrapped in freezer bags. There are also instructions about how best to serve.
Eve: watched An Evening with Peter Ustinov. The man was a genius. Such subtlety and grace to his work, but hilarious, too.
Friday 29 October
I mentioned to the substitute doctor (Dr Sam) that the district nurse had suggested I talk to her about liquid morphine as a help with my breathlessness. I thought morphine was for the very last stage, but to my surprise Dr Sam recommended it and by noon I had some.
Dr Sam said that on the plus side it would help my breathing and bring a sense of wellbeing. The negative side – it would cause drowsiness. More? I couldn’t do more. Anyway, took 2.5 ml and almost instantly fell into a deep sleep for an hour. Then went into the kitchen for lunch, and again it lived up to its reputation. I was less breathless and felt very chirpy. At 2 p.m., and overcome by another deep, hour-long sleep. Decided not to take more until bedtime. Dr S was very relaxed about freedom of usage.
So I’m a morphine man now. Like the sound of it.
After lunch he settled for another doze while I got the yeast ready for our second batch of bagels. Then I slipped back to sit opposite him in the window. I am writing a chapter in the book on Venus and Adonis, and the workshop where the puppeteers created the figure of Death for the first time, lots of cardboard and gaffer tape, sash cord and toilet rolls. I tried to describe the moment when they made Venus swing happily from Death’s little pinkie, and how it captivated me, a highly original version of the danse macabre.
Suddenly, Tony shuddered. He sat bolt upright, his eyes flickering in a shock reaction, and then he went still. For a second I thought this is it – here is the moment. Breath held. Then he came to.
He said he had felt as if someone had grabbed him in his sleep, and their face, close to his, was whispering in his ear, and yet he could still see me sitting there. I worry that this may be some hallucinogenic effect of the morphine. But it scared me stiff, and I think it did him, too. And what I couldn’t stop thinking was that, like Holbein’s famous woodcuts of the Dance of Death, the grim-grinning ghost had come for Tony.
We feel as though we have heard from pretty much everyone we know . . . with the odd exception of Simon Callow.
Saturday 30 October
Thelma Holt had herself driven up from London. As gifts, she had already arranged for genuine Kobe beef to be sent to us and today she arrived with another case of champagne. It was a joy to see her. Thought how blessed we were to have had such an extraordinary woman in our lives: one who had the power to make impossible projects happen.
NOVEMBER
‘Thou met’st with things dying, I with things new born’ Monday 1 November
Secret Fear.
Today becomes November.
I think my death will be in November.
Email from Simon Callow. We expected him to make contact among the very first. Now he explains, saying that knowing that Tony was terminally ill had paralysed him.
I could scarcely engage with the information – it simply seemed impossible. Tony and I have travelled through life with such strange synchronisation, often separated by oceans and continents, too often not seeing each other or even communicating, but never, in my case, certainly, unaware of each other, as if we were brothers, or each other’s shadow, partly defining each other – sometimes by the parallels and sometimes by the divergences – partly echoing each other in hauntingly different ways.
Tony delighted to receive it. He wrote back immediately wishing he could reply in detail:
Wish I could write a book about this whole journey. Dying is the strangest thing people will ever experience. But its most overwhelming feature (if you don’t have pain, which, luckily, I’ve been spared so far) is the intense, non-stop drowsiness. I’m writing this now with my lids half closed, and my fingers fumbling on the keys.
Simon wrote back saying how haunting he found Tony’s letter: ‘I wept when I read it, but not for pity, or even for sadness. It was for the simple beauty and profundity of it. You really are facing the Mysteries, now. How deeply I wish you could write a book about the journey you’re on.’
These two men, both Geminian, almost twins, born a day apart, finally became friends two decades ago when Tony admitted in an article he wrote about playing Leontes in The Winter’s Tale that, though he never suffered from sexual jealousy, he had from the professional kind, and that from a very early point in his career he thought Simon was having his career. They met for lunch and Simon admitted that he thought exactly the same thing, and they became friends. ‘What an extraordinary story we’ve lived through,’ Tony wrote, ‘sometimes intertwining, sometimes not.’
Simon writes how lucky both men have been in the ‘steadfastness’ of their partners. Simon married his partner Sebastian Fox in 2016. ‘For flighty, divided creatures such as you and me, that rock solidity is a gift beyond purchase.’
Then Simon adds his own gift: ‘What you wrote made me think of the four extraordinary songs by Richard Strauss, the last music he ever wrote.’ He continues: ‘Strauss, like Stravinsky, was a Gemini, sometimes too clever for his own good, but always with a thread of redeeming wit running through everything.’ And sweetly he sent Tony the translation of the text of Eichendorff’s poem, the final part of the ‘Four Last Songs’.
We listened to Schwarzkopf singing ‘Im Abendrot’ – At Sunset − suffused with a sense of calm, of acceptance.
‘Wir sind durch Not und Freude Gegangen Hand in Hand;
vom Wandern ruhen wir beide nun überm stillen Land.’
‘Through sorrow and joy, we have gone hand-in-hand;
we are both at rest from our wanderings now above the quiet land.’
Tuesday 2 November
7 a.m. Very grateful for the extra hour of light this morning. Having turned the clocks back, on Saturday night, though it is now dark by 5 p.m. it’s light by 6.30 a.m. again, which feels like a reprieve, for the hours in the day, which I get to myself to write before Tony emerges. I have bathed, and dressed because we are expecting a delivery today . . . of more ‘stuff’: some armrests for the bed; a shower chair with arms; and some chair-raisers.
The syrup-coloured sun just cresting the horizon flushes the horse chestnut in golden light.
This week, quietly, I need to find out about funeral directors, and confirm how the process of having a service at Holy Trinity and getting a cremation done is all interwoven.
Tony says he likes the idea of some of his ashes being portioned out: save some, so our ashes can be buried together under a tree in the Theatre Gardens with a little sign; have some scattered from Big Rock. I like the idea of being scattered from Clopton Bridge so they float past the theatre and the church over the weir and are gone.
Depressed. The morphine hasn’t really helped. Like every other cancer idiot in the world I fell into the trap of saying I can beat this.
Wednesday 3 November
I’ve got terminal liver cancer. I’m going to die.
The completeness, the finality of the fact which I am facing up to as I lie in bed, this is overwhelming, there is nothing to be done. I have no options.
Marietta proposed an idea: that I say to myself: ‘I choose Death.’
This sticks with me during the day. There’s something too crude about it – a line from an action movie – but if I made it ‘I choose to die . . .’
That’s better.
Can’t work it out yet.
It mustn’t just be pretence.
Taking control when there’s none to be had.
On the other hand there is something very powerful.
The swans on the Avon are dying. An outbreak of avian bird flu has hit the population of eighty birds, and literally decimated them. Twelve have died already. Fifteen per cent. Inordinately sad.
G back from the vicar. The challenge is how to have a church service without there being too much ‘church’ in it. I don’t want hymns, I definitely don’t want an organ playing. G thinks they can work round these things.
A rather fun session discussing invites and songs/speeches.
Noticing that in talking or emailing others, I say ‘we’. As though G & I are both dying. He isn’t, but he’s holding my hand every step of the way. It’s enormously comforting to say ‘we’.
I barely have any energy/interest for emails. Favourite thing is sitting in my chair in the big window, opposite Greg, as he works. But means I spend all day there, often dozing.
Watching Tony sleep I remember a line that Michel de Montaigne wrote about his beloved Etienne de La Boétie. ‘If pressed to say why I loved him, I could only reply “Because I was I; because he was he”.’
Eve: another of G’s astonishing meal treats. A fresh grilled Dover sole from Rick Stein’s famous restaurant in Padstow, which we always meant to visit but never did. Delicious beyond belief.
After an episode of Succession, he said he wanted to go to bed, but for once I just wanted to stay and watch some crap TV. And for a second I made him feel, albeit fleetingly, that he was a burden. ‘Don’t you usually help me up?’ was all he had to say for me to feel wretched, and selfish, and lonely.
Saturday 6 November
This afternoon I suggested we sat outside and got some fresh air. Not a particularly nice afternoon, but we put on his coat and scarf and he sat in one of the new deck chairs. I decided to sweep the loggia of leaves, and then, as he seemed fine just watching me potter, I cleared away the steamer deck chairs, and the parasol, and the new furniture from the patio (encrusted with fallen yew berries) and put the braai into the loggia too.
And of course all I could think was ‘This is the last time . . . if this comes out ever again, he won’t be here’. I know he’s thinking the same thing.
It’s 4.15 and getting dark already.
The day was grey, but not too cold. Sat outside, wrapped in jersey, jacket and scarf – oh the fresh air! – while G packed away the garden chairs and furniture for the winter.
When we moved back inside, he said, ‘It’s not fair. Where’s it all gone? Where’s the light?’
Monday 8 November
Watching a rather beautiful documentary on Truman Capote and Tennessee Williams on BBC4. We are approaching ten to nine. And Tony suddenly flags.
‘Would you mind . . .’ he said.
‘Of course,’ I said, ‘. . . if we go to bed?’
‘Yes, please.’
‘Of course.’
But as I help him up off the couch he seems exhausted, thin, had enough.
I follow him up, holding his hips from behind and lifting him as he chooses to climb the next step. I don’t know if I am helping. I hope so. He doesn’t say. He’s too tired.
Tuesday 9 November
Delicious task this morning. The destruction of those paintings of mine that I hate. I’ve left it a bit late, don’t have the strength for stabbing and slashing attacks I’d planned, but compromise by doing the first cut on each one myself, then let Greg finish them off.
Latest thought about my dying motto:
Dying is part of me.
It has not come from Mars.
My height is part of me.
Gayness is part of me.
Acting is part of me.
A certain talent is part of me.
A leaking heart valve, and autoimmune hepatitis is part of me.
(And so on . . .)
Dying is part of me.
Didn’t fully sustain me through the morning though. At about noon started to feel a kind of panic attack. The drowsiness was overpowering me again (despite another twelve-hour sleep) and, in trying to resist it, felt I was writhing around within myself. I wasn’t myself. Was this death close to?
G suggested a nap. I did for an hour. Felt better. Had a G&T. Felt almost normal.
Once I had got him to bed last night I could see Tony was troubled. He struggled to say, ‘I think . . . We may have reached the time when I stay in bed . . .’ Today it is exactly five months since the diagnosis. So we have defied the three to four months. If the prognosis is right at three to six months then we have another four weeks. Impossible. He talks about making sure things are all clear and ready, ‘if I die suddenly . . .’. Oh please don’t let that happen, not after so long at each other’s sides.
I check a website for what needs to be done.
The press is full of ‘necrophilia outrage’, a man raping the cadavers of over 100 women in hospital mortuaries in Tunbridge Wells. How would you deal with that if it was your daughter, your sister, your mother, your gran? Would you want to know?
And there is one grim laugh as I tell him that the funeral director has suggested that we could separate the funeral in Holy Trinity and the cremation at Oakley Wood, which could happen the following morning.
