When the Feast is Finished

She must lie flat, then semi-flat, and I may be able to collect her by six, and bring her back home.

Rang my sister Betty with the news.

5th July 1996

Margaret seems fine. A bruise on her groin, otherwise lovely. We’re relieved, of course.

Wendy brought her some freesias.

6th July 1996

She really seems happy with the weight off her mind. We strolled round Headington and bought some art materials. Then a wardrobe for the guest room, for Clive and Youla [Clive’s wife] when they arrive from Athens next month. It’s Youla’s birthday. We phoned her in Prigipou.

Moggins [my pet name for Margaret] now takes pleasure in organising Twinkling of an Eye [my autobiography]. Has provided excellent index. Now she separates chapters, in preparation for submitting disks to publisher. As ever, we work amiably together.

Walking about in the sun, we admit to each other that we don’t relish the day, sure to come, when we can no longer stroll about the world freely, as now.

At this time we were light-hearted, happy in each other’s company. Nevertheless, we were under some strain. The builders, good though they were, were constantly about us. Until the new study was built on to the north of the house, Margaret and I operated in a small room, each with our computers on our desks, crunched together in a space eight by fourteen feet. The enlarged ventricle seemed a small matter, curable by cutting down on cream teas in Norfolk, by walking daily to the shops and bank.

I wonder now why we were so carefree, why we purchased with hardly a thought a house which initially caused us so much trouble and expense. Well, houses in Oxford were hard to come by but, above that, we enjoyed each other’s company, found life fun, and did not think much beyond the day. And we took it for granted that I, six years Margaret’s senior, would die first.

So our mainly sunny life continued, with trips to Spain, Portugal and Greece. This last Greek visit was in May 1997. Before we left England, we had had some anxieties regarding the heat factor and Margaret’s energies. Our problems were eased by Clive and Youla who, ensconced in Athens, made many preparations which smoothed our way.

After relaxing on the island of Aegina with Clive and Youla, we headed northwards, to the Meteora, which we had been hoping to visit ever since the mid-sixties, and then into the wilder northern Greece. Northern Greece is very different from the Classical Greece which existed to the south; here one traffics with the ghost of Byzantium, where several transitory tinpot empires ruled. When we arrived in Thessaloniki, Margaret was tired, although still game. I booked us a room in the Elektra Palace Hotel in Aristotelious Square, looking out to sea. ‘Delighted to see how happy the touch of luxury made dear Moggins’, says the journal I kept. ‘Perhaps the journey – this gorgeous idle journey! – has been a bit tough on her.’

Now I see how she felt unwell much of the time, saying nothing. She became impatient with my nostalgie de la boue at one point. We were strolling in a quieter part of Thessaloniki, as far as there is a quieter part, when we saw a pretty side street in which pseudo-acacias grew on the pavement. A little rickety hotel stood in the street. If you took a room up on the sixth floor, high above the pedestrians, you could stand on a balcony with green railings and look out on sun and the tops of the trees. It was so romantic, I longed to be there.

Saying as much started an argument. Margaret said we were too old for that kind of thing. It would be a sordid little room, up too many steps. We needed comfort at our age.

She was right. It might have been squalid up there, perched in a cheap Greek hotel. Her diary reports the incident thus:

B goes on about small romantic hotels in crummy side streets. I finally shut him up, saying I’m not up to travelling that way any more. We argue. It’s unusual.

Later, as a gesture, he buys me a pretty candle.

Although I found nothing to complain about, and much to interest us, I was not ill. Now I’m sorry I did not see how little she enjoyed the northern part of the trip.

‘You must think I’m an awful person to take out,’ she says. She smiles and takes her supper pill. She has left her food again, as invariably she does. She has the appetite of a sparrow.

Privately, she had more serious complaints. Her diary entry for the 14th of May reads:

Dreadful night, noisy music from lobby, noisy lorries setting off up hill, wild dogs barking in garden. And an empty stomach. This is something of an endurance feat and I will never agree to another trip with such hardships – Greece is such a difficult place.

It comes hard to acknowledge that my responses were so different. My journal speaks quite fondly of the hotel we were in at this time. It was called the Hotel King Alexander, and stood on a hill on well-kept grounds just outside the city of Florina. As well as the customary Greek flag, the hotel flew EU and Australian flags. We were installed in Room 104. I report it as being clean and comfortable, with a balcony, overlooking the red-roofed outer town and the mountains. I note that Margaret was pleased with it.

I was writing my notes out on the balcony at dusk. Dogs were barking in the hills and a bird occasionally gave out one beautiful liquid note. The scent of lilac lingered in the air. I wrote, in my naïve way:

I adore – am excited by – Florina. The plump little lady in the pizza restaurant speaks a few words of English, and I’m pleased.

Now I’m sad to see that Margaret suffered so much in May 1997. Our holidays abroad had always been pleasurable for her. Clearly the cancer was already surreptitiously working to make her miserable.

Margaret spoke longingly of the isle of Bornholm, in the Baltic, ‘where people are civilised and food is good.’ ‘And,’ I said, ‘it’s windy and cold.’ Here in our room, she, smiling, says, ‘You’re content wherever you are.’

And content nowhere without her.

On Greece’s northern frontier with Macedonia, she bought herself a pack of little bottles of Unterberg, ‘natural herb bitters taken for digestion’. It was uncharacteristic of her. She made a joke of it, and I swigged a bottle with her.

This account stands as an example of male insensitivity. It is also an example of Margaret’s self-effacement. She was ‘a good sport’; she tried not to spoil other people’s enjoyment. At this period, neither of us knew that a more sinister and lethal ill than her enlarged ventricle was creeping up on her. And she looked so well …

Back in England, summer was upon us. Our house was finished, our garden was landscaped, our waterfall was tinkling away. We sat in our pleasing paved helix outside the house, doing very little. Margaret read gardening books and nursed Sotkin. We had two cats, the second being Macramé, but kindly, furry Sotkin, was her treasure. Perhaps she needed his comfort as he obviously needed hers.

Although I was writing my utopia, White Mars, in collaboration with Sir Roger Penrose, I now worked fewer hours. When I bumped into my neighbour Harry Brack, we went and drank coffee and conversed in the Café Noir. When I returned to Margaret, she said, ‘That’s just the sort of thing you should be doing, now that you’re retired.’

But. I find it is one thing to sit and talk over coffee with a friend when you can go home to your wife, and quite another when you can’t, when there’s no wife. Who wants to talk in those circumstances? I would rather be alone, skulking.

Our last summer drifted by. It was on the 20th of July we enjoyed that happy lunch with the Rubinsteins in their garden.

But on the following day, Margaret wrote to our GP, Dr Neil MacLennan, asking for another appointment with Dr Hart, her cardiologist, whom she had been consulting since September 1995. On that occasion my diary says:

My peachy creature had to go to the cardiologist, Mr Hart (sic), for examination. She gets short of breath. The diagnosis: the walls of her heart are too thick, while slight blood pressure affects the situation. More tests to come.

She displayed no anxiety before the examination. I concealed my anxiety. Afterwards she appeared smiling and calm as usual.

Following Mr Hart’s advice, we’ll now be careful about diet, to protect the tender walls of that tender heart. No more cream teas, jam roly-polys, pork pies, etc. … A part of me regards myself as indestructible; another part admits the truth – about both of us …

One cannot resist searching through old notebooks for indications one ignored, warnings to which a blind eye had been turned. For instance, during that last summer in Woodlands, on Boars Hill, Margaret was under the weather. Hardly surprising. It was the third hottest August since records began.

‘My dear wife wilts’, says the diary on the 3rd.

On the 10th, she went into the Acland, Oxford’s private hospital, for a colonoscopy, under Mr Kettlewell. When I went in to see her, she was enjoying a light meal and was in bonny spirits. She always made so little fuss. On the following day, when she was back home, I took her her breakfast in bed, and she had a gentle day. On the 16th, we drove up to Stratford-on-Avon to see Vanbrugh’s The Relapse or ‘Virtue in Danger’, and laughed heartily.

During this hectic time, we were endeavouring to sell our Boars Hill house and to prepare the place in Old Headington for human habitation.

And why did we sell up, after eleven happy years on Boars Hill? To leave was originally Margaret’s idea. She explained that we were growing older and feebler. Her diaries of the time indicate that I was rather unwell and working under stress, at least in her opinion. There were many old Boars Hill couples living deteriorating lives in deteriorating housing; she did not wish us to follow the same downward path. She was finding the tending of her long flowerbed beyond her. Soon the pruning and lopping of borders would be beyond me.

Slowly I warmed to her plan. One of the few shortcomings of Boars Hill was that one could walk nowhere. Not down into Wootton or, in the other direction, down to the Abingdon Road and Oxford. We had to use the car to get anywhere. After much searching, we bought the house in Old Headington and began slowly to clear out the possessions we had accumulated on the hill.

The move proved to be an excellent decision. Did Margaret have an intuition of the illness that was to kill her in two years’ time? I am convinced this was the case, at least in part. If not, then it was Margaret’s good sense. We needed to live in a simpler place.

Margaret disputed the role of intuition in our move into town. However, understandings arise from our bodies and seep into consciousness by devious paths which science may one day come to understand. During our last months in Woodlands and our first few months in Hambleden, I developed a phobia of finding a snake about the house, more particularly the all-devouring anaconda. I tried to turn this fear into a joke; Margaret was not happy with it. The all-devouring one was lurking in the dark. Probably she was already in its coils.

Yet we remained happy and carefree, as far as that was possible. We were of that fortunate few for whom being happy had become a habit. On my birthday in 1996, the 18th of August, Margaret’s present to me was the newly published two-volume set of Claire Clairmont’s Correspondence. She read the letters with me.

We had received an offer for the purchase of Woodlands, and we threw a party – a farewell party it was to be. A band of musicians calling themselves ‘The Skeleton Crew’ played baroque music until late. Our local caterers, the Huxters, served gorgeous food, and sixty of our friends attended. Margaret was a wonderful hostess, looking slender and lovely. No one could suspect there was anything troubling her.

During the evening, I persuaded her to stroll with me downhill to the bottom of the rear lawn. We looked back. There in the dark, like a ship, sailed our house, its windows alight, full of family, friends, food, drink and happiness: something we had conjured up together.

And when the guests had departed, Tim and I sat peacefully together and finished up what remained of an excellent Brie.