Nothing to Be Frightened Of (34 page)

At some point in that progress, Missing God will come to seem as delusionary a state as my mother’s when imagining that I had stood her up on the tennis court. Not that the Amoeba Proposition necessarily sees God off. It would still be compatible with the experimenting God—for such a God, were He to exist, would scarcely be interested in an eternally stable group of research specimens. Just working with and on humans for the next six billion years would be immensely dull: it might make God want to kill Himself out of boredom. And then, if we avoid handing the planet over to beetles, and successfully evolve towards brainier and more complex beings, perhaps God Hypothesis number 72b might come into play: namely, that while we don’t have immortal souls now, we shall have in the future. God is merely waiting until the Argument from Unworthiness no longer applies.

Two questions. Does realizing that, from the viewpoint of an evolving planet with six billion years still to run, we are not much more than amoebae, make it easier to accept that we do not possess free will? And if so (and even if not so), does this make it easier to die?

Chapter 63

When I remember my father, I often think of how his nails used to curve over the flesh of his fingertips. In the weeks after his cremation, I used to imagine, not his face or his bones in the furnace, but those familiar fingernails. Beyond that, I think of the various insults his body showed towards the end. A stroke-damaged brain and tongue; a long scar up his belly which he offered to show me once but I lacked the guts to see; spreading bruises on the backs of his hands from the insertion of drips. Unless we are very lucky, our bodies will reveal the history of our dying. One small revenge might be to die and show no signs of having died. Jules Renard’s mother was pulled from the well without a scratch or a scar on her. Not that Death—the ultimate bean counter—would care one way or the other. Any more than it cares whether or not we die in character.

We live, we die, we are remembered, we are forgotten. Not immediately, but in tranches. We remember our parents through most of their adult lives; our grandparents through their last third; beyond that, perhaps, lies a great-grandfather with a scratchy beard and a rank odour. Perhaps he smelt of fish. And beyond that? Photographs, and a little haphazard documentation. In the future there will be a technological update of my shallow drawer: generations of ancestors will survive on film and tape and disc, moving, talking, smiling, proving that they too were here. As an adolescent I once hid a tape recorder under the table during dinner in an attempt to prove that, far from it being the “social event” my mother decreed every meal should be, no one ever said anything remotely interesting and I should therefore be excused conversation and allowed to read a book if I preferred. I did not explain these personal aims, thinking they would become self-evident once the clatter of cutlery, banalities, and non-sequiturs was played back. Annoyingly, my mother was enchanted by the tape, declaring that we all sounded just like a Pinter play (to my mind a mixed compliment, in both directions). And then we continued exactly as before; and I never kept the tape, so that my parents’ voices are quite extinct in the world and play now only in my head.

I see (and hear) my mother in hospital, wearing a green dress, sitting canted over in a wheelchair by her bed. She was cross with me that day: not over tennis, but because I had been asked to discuss her treatment with the doctor. She resented every manifestation of incapacity, just as she resented the futile optimism of physiotherapists. When asked to name the hands on a watch, she declined; when instructed to open or close her eyes, she remained impassive. The doctors were unable to decide if it was a case of couldn’t or wouldn’t. My assumption was “wouldn’t”—that she was, in lawyer’s terminology, “mute of malice”—because in my company she was able to articulate whole sentences. Painfully—but then the sentences themselves were often filled with pain. For instance: “You don’t understand how difficult it is for a woman who has always controlled her life to be restricted like this.”

I spent some awkward minutes with her that afternoon, then went to find the doctor. His prognosis was very discouraging. As I returned to the ward, I told myself that my face must not betray his professional judgement that the next stroke would almost certainly kill her. But my mother was way ahead of me. Turning a corner, I saw, from twenty yards or more across a crowded ward, that she was beadily alert for my return; and as I progressed towards her, refining the semi-lie that I was about to tell, she stuck out her sole working forearm and delivered a thumbs-down sign. It was the most shocking thing I ever saw her do; the most admirable too, and the one occasion when she tore at my heart.

She thought the hospital ought to amputate her “useless” arm; she thought, for some time, that she was in France, and wondered how I had found her; she thought a Spanish nurse came from her Oxfordshire village, and that all the other nurses came from the various parts of England where she had lived in the previous eighty years. She thought it “stupid” not to have expired in a single go. When she asked, “Do you have any trouble comprehending me?” she pronounced each syllable of the verb fastidiously. “No, Ma,” I replied, “I understand everything you say, but you don’t always get things completely right.” “
Ha,
” she retorted, as if I were some smiley physio. “That’s putting it mildly. I’m quite
loopy.
”

Her mixture of wild confabulation and lucid insight was constantly wrong-footing. In general, she seemed serene about whether she was visited or not, and took to saying, “You must go now,” which was the complete bloody opposite of how she had been for decades. One day I looked down at the fingernails which the Witney registrar of births and deaths had admired five years previously. You could see how long it was since she had been able to do them; the heavily lacquered and lovingly shaped nails had continued to grow, pushing on to create an eighth of an inch of clear unvarnished whiteness below the cuticle. The nails she had once imagined herself still tending even if sunk in deafness. I looked upwards from the cuticles: the fingers of her dead arm had now swollen to the size, and to the outer texture, of carrots.

Driving back to London, the setting sun in my mirror, the Haffner Symphony on the radio, I thought: if this is what it’s like for someone who has worked with her brain all her life, and can afford decent care, I don’t want it. Then wondered if I was deluding myself, and would want it, when it came, on any terms; or whether I would have the courage or the cunning to circumvent it; or whether it just happens, and by happening condemns you to see it through, ragingly, dreadingly. However much you escape your parents in life, they are likely to reclaim you in death—in the manner of your death. The novelist Mary Wesley wrote: “My family has a propensity—it must be our genes—for dropping dead. Here one minute, gone the next. Neat. I pray that I have inherited this gene. I have no wish to linger, to become a bed-bound bore. A short sharp shock for my loved ones is what I want: nicer for them, lovely for me.”

This is a commonly expressed hope, but one my GP disapproves of. Citing this passage, she calls it “perhaps another manifestation of the contemporary denial of death,” and an attitude that “attaches no value to the opportunities provided by a final illness.” I don’t think either of my parents would have thought of their final illnesses as providing “opportunities”: for sharing memories, saying farewell, expressing remorse or forgiveness; while the funeral-planning—that’s to say, their desire for an inexpensive and virtually mourner-free cremation—had been stated some time before. Would my parents have “succeeded at death” if they had become emotional, confessional, soppy? Would they have found out that this was what they had always wanted? I rather doubt it. Though I regret my father never told me he loved me, I’m pretty sure that he did or had, and his melancholy silence on this and other key matters at least meant that he died in character.

When my mother was first in hospital, there was a comatose old woman in the next bed. She lay on her back, quite unmoving. One afternoon, with my mother in a fairly loopy state of mind, the woman’s husband arrived. He was a small, neat, respectable working man, probably in his late sixties. “Hello, Dulcie, it’s Albert,” he announced in a ward-filling voice, with a rich, pure Oxfordshire accent which should have been recorded before it died out. “Hello my darling, hello my love, are you going to wake up for me?” He kissed her echoingly. “It’s Albert, darling, are you going to wake up for me?” Then: “I’ll just turn you so I can put your hearing aid in.” A nurse arrived. “I’m putting her hearing aid in. She didn’t wake up for me this morning. Oh, it’s fallen out. There, I’m going to turn you some more. Hello darling, hello Dulcie, hello my beautiful, it’s Albert, are you going to wake up for me?” And so on, at intervals, for the next quarter of an hour, with a brief break of, “You said something, didn’t you, I know you said something, what did you say?” Then back to “Hello darling, it’s Albert, are you going to wake up for me?” interspersed with more kissing. It pierced the heart (and the head), and was only bearable by its edge of black comedy. My mother and I naturally pretended that nothing was going on, or if it was, nothing that we could hear; though the fact that my father’s name had also been Albert was not, I suspect, lost on her.

The fingernails on my mother’s useless arm continued to grow at exactly the same rate as the fingernails on the one with which she gave herself the thumbs-down; then she died and, contrary to popular belief, all ten nails stopped growing immediately. As had my father’s, which curled round and over the flesh of his finger-pads. My brother’s nails (and teeth) have always been stronger than mine, a detail I used to put down to the fact that he is shorter than me, and therefore his calcium is more concentrated. This may be scientific nonsense (and the answer lie in differing brands of commercial baby-milk). In any case, I have thinned my fingernails over the years by running them between my front teeth, automatically, when I am reading, writing, worrying, correcting this very sentence. Perhaps I should stop and find out if they will grow curvingly over my fingertips as my father comes to reclaim me.

Chapter 64

Montmartre Cemetery is a green, cat-ridden place, cool and breezy even on a hot Parisian day; it is intimate, contoured, and reassuring. Unlike the vast necropolis of Père-Lachaise, it creates the illusion—which a few graveyards do—that only those buried here have ever died; further, that they once lived quite close, perhaps in the very houses that rise at the cemetery’s boundary; further still, that death is maybe not such a bad business after all. Jules Renard, five months before he died: “As soon as you look it properly in the face, death is gentle to understand.”

Here lie some of my dead; most of them, being writers, in the lower and therefore cheaper section. Stendhal was buried here some thirty years after he had been “seized with a fierce palpitation of the heart” outside Santa Croce, and felt as if “the wellspring of life was dried up within me, and I walked in constant fear of falling to the ground.” We wish to die not just in character but in the manner of our own expectation? Stendhal was granted such fortune. After suffering a first stroke, he wrote, “I find that there’s nothing ridiculous about dropping dead in the street, as long as one doesn’t do it deliberately.” On 22 March 1842, after dining at the Foreign Ministry, he got the non-ridiculous end he sought, on the pavement of the Rue Neuvedes-Capucines. He was buried as “Arrigo Beyle, Milanese,” a rebuke to the French who did not read him, and a tribute to the city where the smell of horse dung had moved him almost to tears. And as a man not unprepared for death (he made twenty-one wills), Stendhal composed his own epitaph:
Scrisse. Amo. Visse.
He wrote. He loved. He lived.

A few steps away lie the Goncourt Brothers. “Two names, two sets of dates, they thought that was enough.
Hé! hé!
” But this is not how their tomb strikes me. For a start, it is a family grave: two children buried with their parents. They are sons first, writers second; and perhaps a family burial is like a family meal—a social occasion, as my mother used to insist. One at which certain rules apply: for instance, no boasting. So the only indicator of the brothers’ fame is the pair of low-relief copper portraits on the tomb’s upper surface, with Edmond and Jules facing one another in death as they did in their inseparable lives together.