My Animal Life (27 page)

Yet it is all a castle of air and spun sugar. I know now how frail it is, how quickly it shatters. My publisher is a small independent, one of the midget weightlifters still taking the strain of sustaining serious literature and scholarship here. Small, in their case, means strong and flexible, but flabby giants throw their weight about more, manipulate big sales, monopolise the book chains, pay for the best displays and pre-fixed places in the book-charts. I have not seized the handholds that make you safe ‘for ever': winning a major prize, having a major bestseller (though as I write, Saqi have just sold
the film rights to my first African novel,
My Cleaner.)
My twelve books look solid enough, on the shelf, with their avatars, in thirteen languages, and there, among them, after long travail,
The White Family
and
The Ice People
, paid for in pain, repaying with a lesson … But I take a deep breath, and touch the wood of my desk. There is still a great deal of work to be done.

And I shiver, and stare at the blank page of the future.

In the autumn of 1990, when Rosa was nearly four, there was a phone call to our London flat that sent me plunging down deep deep into a black pit of fear and grief and guilt. Dad came on first: ‘Mum has something to tell you.'

Cancer
. My mother's voice, a little hoarse, terribly truthful, spoke words in my ear that could not be taken back, that were changing life for ever, tick-tocking into my ear in the dark bedroom, while from our front room, sounds of impossible family happiness, suddenly now in the past, floated through—Nick had just come back from a trip to America, he and Rosa were tucked up on the sofa oblivious, watching
The Sound of Music. ‘Climb every mountain, cross every stream, follow every pathway, till you find your dream'
.

My mother's favourite song from the film. But she had deferred all her dreams, all the things she wanted to do, all the places she wanted to go, until my father was dead, when she would be free. Now she was telling me the bitter truth. She had cancer. It would never happen.

Why was I guilty? Because (although this is pure superstition) I had been out of touch for two months,
which was for ever, measured by the normal rhythm of communication with my parents. We wrote to each other every week, to reassure each other, we experts in the art of ‘fit and well'. It was my father's habitual opener in phone calls, a plea or pre-emptive strike, not an open-ended question: ‘So, Margaret, you're fit and well?'

But for some time I had not been fit and well at all; semi-paralysed, flattened like grass, by RSI. I was wired with pain, sapped of all strength. There was simply no vocabulary for conveying this news to my parents, even if I were able to write a letter, and to phone and say nothing seemed as bad as a lie. So I did not phone. Sudden radio silence.

Till my mother broke it with dread news. She too had stayed silent, while fear turned slowly into certainty. Then feeling for a way, herself, to break our rigid family conventions. To speak about the unspeakable, cancer.

My fault
, I thought. All my life I'd half-believed my love had kept my mother alive. For eight weeks I had let her go. And now she phoned and told me she had cancer.

Quite soon my younger brother and I were on a train to Norfolk, coming to visit my mother in hospital after her operation. Afraid of the new unthinkable reality, that Mum might die. Clutching each other's arms as we walked down the long room towards her, beds of pained strangers to either side.

She did not die.

It was a very long convalescence. She stayed in hospital for months, and my sturdy, physically fit, bike-riding mother for a little while lost all confidence. I remember encouraging her to come out of the ward into the sunlight for a walk. I'd found a door that
opened from the corridor onto the hospital garden and a bright fresh day, I wanted her to escape for a moment, and my mum, who had always longed to be up and away, clutched my arm like a different person, a different body—no, her own hurt body. ‘I don't know, Margaret.' And came so slowly, her first trip outside after the terrible delvings and cuttings of the surgeon, feeling that her body might simply fall apart if removed from the sealed fug of safety.

A fortnight before she came home, Dad and I were summoned to see the consultant. The operation had been ‘a success', but the cancer had spread to her liver. ‘Two spots on her liver.' What did that mean? I asked. He gave us to understand that liver cancer was not considered to be treatable. But were they large spots? I asked. It sounded like such a small thing, two spots. You could take a rubber and rub them out. Then my father was asking how long she had got. The conversation seemed more and more unreal as the consultant, who I remember as thin and bald and blank, a mere cipher for death, was closing all the doors and windows on my mother's life—‘Between six months and a year.' I wanted my father to protest, but, probably in shock, he sat there silent. Then the consultant asked if we felt my mother should be told. I started to say that she should, but my father said she should be allowed to recover first, and then—‘You will tell her in your own time,' the consultant said.

Afterwards we sat outside in the sun. I said, ‘Poor Mum, I can't believe it.' My father said, ‘Well with the Parkinson's'—he had been diagnosed four years earlier, and his mobility had steadily declined, he had suffered mini-strokes and a mild heart attack—‘I've probably not got much more than a year myself.'

‘But she doesn't have to die just because you do!' I said, outraged. I was crying, he seemed impassive. Did he not love her enough to allow her her own existence, independent of his? Why didn't he grieve that her life, too, was ending? All I could think was that he was revealed in that moment as horribly selfish.

But of course she was his wife. What he spoke was just a reflex thought, a measuring out of their lives, side by side. He was probably asking himself the question that is posed by all long marriages: who will grieve for whom? Who will be alone? He said, ‘We needn't tell her yet.'

In me there was just a voice howling
Mum, Mum
. Whose wit and intelligence and strength had always been fatally compromised by her fearfulness. Who could not stand up for herself and so had put off every -thing she hardly dared to hope for into the future, when Dad would be dead. And now her future was shrivelling, vanishing, gone, like the food in the fridge she had saved too long for it ever to be eaten. All an illusion.

My own delusion, which became an obsession, was that I must at least make sure Mum knew how little time she had left. I thought then she could decide how to spend it, was determined she should not be cheated, by Dad and the doctors, of this last chance.

So I tried to tell her. I tried every way I could to tell her the cancer was not cured, there were spots on her liver, her time was short. She refused to hear me. She became, for her, uncharacteristically angry. ‘You could die before me, Margaret.' To say this to her own daughter whom she loved, her anger must have been beyond bounds. I was wrong, as so often in my life, completely and utterly. If she had known how bad things were, she
could not have recovered. To live she needed hope. And I, who loved her, who believed I loved her more than anyone else, so nearly, and wrongly, took that hope away. I saw it as my duty to everything I knew about her, to her dreams, to her secret individual self, to her clear, undeluded intelligence; I thought I owed it to the pact between us, two women in this family of men. I was desperate to be truthful even though every cell in my body was electric with the pain I must give her. But it was like beating a stick against resistant silence; her will not to hear had the invisible strength of rubber. In the end I had the sense to respect it. Sometimes all that you know counts for nothing, because the world has changed behind your back.

Slowly, she fought her way back to fitness. Through a long summer. She was cooking again. (I judged my father harshly for that. Now I think we should judge no one harshly; the facts of life and death are harsh enough. I dare say she wanted normality back.) She was walking to the village again, then cycling, then driving.

At first, in my mind, the sands of time were running like blinding white rain. A dementing curtain of silica, constantly in motion, distracted me from everything beyond it, crazed the real picture of my mother (who was thinner than usual, quieter than usual but herself, steadying herself, still there,
still here
. Who was reading again, laughing at the political sketches in the
Guardian
, out in her red puffa jacket, walking only a little slower than before.) For a while I couldn't see her as she was, and enjoy her. That sibilant ‘six months' had buried everything in dry, milling fear.

But for our own protection, fear is usually self-limiting. When for a brief period I suffered from panic attacks, it was comforting to read that the body is
physically incapable of sustaining terror for more than about twenty minutes. You just have to put your head down and get through it.

The same held true on the bigger scale. After a few months of terror, I began to forget. Mum was putting on weight, looking better. Slowly and then faster, milestone followed milestone. Six months came and passed. Then a year. At some point she learned, not from me but a doctor, that there was some involvement of the liver, but I don't know exactly how frank they were, and I don't know how fully she accepted it. My mother was always an optimist; it was one of the lovable things about her, the many, many lovable things, for did she ever know how much I loved her? I think she did. I often told her.

Our visits relaxed into something like what they had been before, though Dad's increasing blindness meant we could not stay in the house, since blind people need everything to be in its place, and Rosa was an active five-year-old.

A restored near-normality. Miraculous.

The balance of power between my parents reverted. As my mother grew stronger, my father grew weaker. Dad was again the ill one, baby and boss, Mum was the organising functionary, the strong one. Slowly but surely, month by month, Dad's Parkinson's began to move towards its endgame. His blindness, too, got worse; he saw light and dark shapes, but not much else; he would draw Rosa close to him, and gaze past her face. He still went for his morning walks, and refused a white stick, but a neighbour took my mother to one side and told her they were all afraid of running him over, aware he could no long see cars coming (but Vic's hearing remained supernaturally
acute, perhaps fine-tuned by listening out for subversion in the kitchen). He grew thinner and frailer, and needed more clothes, layering waistcoats and woollens under his tweed jacket, his red zipped tracksuit top now like a second skin as he tried to keep warm in his last summer. And then there was another winter to get through, with no hope, now, of escaping to Portugal, with daylight diminishing too early, and the raw bitter wind that comes howling from Siberia and harrows the low, flat East Anglian land. Every morning, though, Dad got up in the dark and did his exercises, standing on one leg to tie each shoe up, making the effort, the tremendous effort, until he could no longer tie his shoes. Dressed himself up, layer after layer, and fought his way out into the featureless cold, not long after the sun cleared the red-brick bungalows and neutered yew-trees, bent forward like a sprinter, though his step was now tiny, uncertain, delicate, as if a slight breeze might have blown him off course. Mum was cutting up his food and feeding him, now. She told me she had said to him once, knowing that he was getting weaker, and she had cancer, ‘Together we can still do anything.'

She showed love for him. She lived it out. And what do I know of the love between them, that existed when no one else was there, that somehow endured the rage and the fear?

I hope that at last my mother was not frightened, or at least no longer frightened of him. In a way, they both got their wish, at last, though getting their wish involved their death. Vic was looked after like a baby, with no rival sibling to push him away. Aileen had a mate who did not frighten her, as her father had once frightened her in drink, as the healthy Vic sometimes frightened her in temper.

I have not really said how bad things were, though in many other houses things were worse.

Once, in the car—it was an accident, although they were rowing—he pushed my mother hard against the door and ‘broke her teeth', she said: perhaps it was one tooth. This was in the months before she left. The dentist repaired it, but she had had enough.

This incident is what sticks in my mind from all the scuffles and fights that were like something a child would do in a painful, unmanageable rage. I pity him for having to be violent: no one wants to be violent. When he threw a plateful of food across the table, how desperate must he have felt? How reduced to the rage of a thwarted infant. The fact remains, he was bigger than my mother, and when he was angry, out of control, so I cannot altogether pity him. I suffered from her fear; was afraid with her, and for her. Not so much for myself, once I reached adolescence, because I knew I would go away. I can't even remember how old I was when he stopped hitting me (but isn't there something odd about the way people say a child is ‘too old to be hit'? Does it mean ‘best only to hit children when they are too small to hit you back'?) I do remember him knocking off my glasses at the tea-table, when I was a sullen fourteen-year-old, and my brave elder brother standing up for me. We children did stand up for each other.

So much easier for me to love my father, first when I was no longer living at home; secondly when he was no longer (I must believe) hitting my mother; thirdly when he was blind and weak and definitely not hitting anyone at all any more; and finally now he is dead. I am loving the man he would have wanted to be, and might have had a chance to be. It was for us, to support
his wife and children, that he gave up the chance to be a photographer and shouldered the crippling weight of the day job, the teaching job that made him a part-time tyrant, a head teacher of the corporal punishment era who obsessively told his family about each caning, bringing the shame of that back home. ‘You're John's tyrant, Vic.' But he didn't want to be. Probably he should have been an artist, with his thin skin and keen apprehension of beauty.