When the Feast is Finished

At the end of that memorable August, Margaret and I were in Glasgow, celebrating with the Fifty-Third World SF Convention, which took over the entire vast SECC building. Something like twelve thousand people had subscribed to the event. This was the great family of SF fandom’s annual festivity. Among those present from overseas were Sam and Ingrid Lundwall from Sweden and Marcial Souto from Argentina. Margaret and Ingrid, good friends, went shopping together in Glasgow.

Marcial had once worked with Jorges Luis Borges. We’ve known each other since 1970. Conversations with him, as with Sam, rank among the pleasures of this life.

In this crowded time, Margaret remained sunny and optimistic, as my diary reports.

Monday 9th October 1995. The week when we MUST leave Woodlands. The removal vans come tomorrow. M and I have ordered our lives well and sensibly of recent years, thanks to her organising skills; we often feel this move to Headington is our big mistake. Jock MacGregor [our decorator] reassured her yesterday: ‘In a week or two you’ll have a lovely house.’

The whole matter is occasioned by our growing old and my books failing to find an audience. Best thing is to accept the situation and get on with it: as Margaret valiantly does.

So we left Woodlands and moved into the Old Headington house, in which our plumber was busy laying over four hundred metres of new copper piping.

Standing in the front of No. 39, lo and behold!, I suddenly espied both of my beautiful daughters strolling along, coming to see how we were getting on!

Both Wendy and Charlotte were as ever very close to us, and to each other. How fortunate we have been that our four children, Clive and Wendy (Margaret’s step-children) Tim and Charlotte, are peaceable people, and that we all enjoy each other’s company. One expression of our closeness was the family’s fondness of nicknames. Margaret called Tim Booj, while she herself was called Chris by Clive, Wendy and Wendy’s husband, Mark. Charlotte’s name had somehow become shortened to Chagie. And at one time, my sister Betty was known as Big Aunt Rose …

It’s a wonder that we survived the housing upheaval. We were both exhausted. Margaret was hardly able to take the rest periods recommended. The cardiologist’s analysis of Margaret’s condition was that the enlarged left ventricle of her heart was causing her shortness of breath. There was also some bacterial damage to the top part of the aorta. Her blood pressure was high.

It’s very upsetting. But Moggins remains so calm I hardly know how much to be alarmed. We got some prescribed pills from Hornby’s, the Headington pharmacy, during the day.

If one has to become ill, Oxford is an excellent city to do it in. It is well equipped with medical experts and efficient hospitals. We were to find that our new home was conveniently situated for visiting clinics, cardiologists, and those elements of a more ominous regime, oncologists and hospices. But for a while we seemed able to lead a stable life. With the aid of our GP, the heart trouble could be controlled, even improved. Margaret needed more rest; then she would be better.

Of course, rest with builders on the premises is hard to come by. Nor were we particularly expert in the subject of rest.

In 1996, I made six brief trips abroad as usual, and turned down offers of several more. On a few of these expeditions Margaret accompanied me, for instance to Madeira, Spain and Portugal. Unfortunately, she could not come with me on the most memorable visit, to Israel, on the grounds that it would be too hot for her there.

I cannot claim I was particularly well myself; sometimes I travelled because I felt an obligation to do so – although this was not so in the case of Israel. I missed Margaret on that interesting visit – indeed, I missed her as soon as I was on the El Al plane, finding I had no credit cards with me! One of my kind hosts at the Tel Aviv British Council, Mrs Sonia Feldman, trustingly lent me her credit card.

Turning up a journal I kept of the days in Israel, I find my first entry, made on the plane, reads:

I’m alone. M and I were due to make the trip, but she is too frail and unwell. She makes light of her troubles, but it’s worrying; her cardiac weakness remains a problem. She thinks too that dust from the building site (our extension is now well under way) causes her breathing problems. It may well be so.

It’s a sadness to see how much less lively she has become in the six months since we left our lovely Woodlands.

The cancer must have been at its destructive secret work, a sapper undermining her being. It is useless to curse oneself for not looking beyond the heart trouble. But one does.

Our visit to Cascais, on the Portuguese coast, was not really a success, kind though our hosts were. This was Portugal’s first international science fiction convention/conference. The occasion was very important for the organisers and they had persuaded us to go.

Go we did, despite many difficulties. We had planned to travel on from Cascais to visit Lisbon for a holiday. Friendly people met us at the airport on the Wednesday. But, on the morning of Sunday the 29th of September, I woke to find Margaret very weepy, quite unlike her usual self. She said she was feeling ill and her heart was overtaxed by heat, standing about and difficult food.

Margaret had never been a moody person. I was alarmed. At once I said that we’d better get back into the cool and the damp, and forget about Lisbon. I immediately cancelled everything, including our stay in the plush Lisbon hotel, and we returned home that evening.

On the following day, I report with relief that

Margaret is fine again – ‘right as rain’. The rain, the cold, the cloud of England, seem to suit her best. No standing about, no having to talk to people.

But she was in truth far from fine, as she recorded.

I woke feeling bad, fast heartbeats, very dry nose and eyes, cold feet. Told B who said we should go home today. I burst into tears … instead of keeping a stiff upper lip as usual. I had not admitted even to myself what an ordeal these events often are, esp. in heat and having to stand around. B so busy and preoccupied.

This entry made sad reading after her death. I could but curse myself for seeming neglectful. Yet only two pages earlier, in Margaret’s neat little A6 diary, I read of a happier mood.

Bus trip to Sintra. Went along the coast to westernmost point of Europe, Cabo de Roca. So dramatic, with Atlantic waves pouring in, crashing on great cliffs.

Sintra Palace was closed. It’s a pretty rundown hilltop town, being restored, full of souvenirs. Good company on the bus … Into town for a meal on our own … Rice and seafood, quite good, ‘flan’ even better. Then to theatre where B gave his talk to a good audience. Audience laughed immoderately at B’s remarks. He was funny and good, but not that funny! Projected slides of his book covers looked good. Then twenty or so of us took over the centre of a tiny street and sat talking until 12.30. Still warm at midnight.

That was on the Friday. What was plaguing her on the Sunday must have been the undiscovered cancer and not solely the heart problem, to which we ascribed her sorrows. There was no reason to believe that something worse assailed her. Perhaps we might have been more suspicious had we been better versed in medical matters.

And she took care in that little notebook to worry about my trivial problems. She writes on the Thursday (26th of September):

Poor B, with bad legs, took ¾ pain-killer last night, which gave him a good sleep but left him very blotto this morning. (We had been to hospital and doctor about his health on Tuesday – he is nervous about his stomach and how he will cope – doctor assures us there are no life-threatening troubles, though.) I also suffer from my heart condition and lack of resistance to heat and cold.

We both became ill once we were established at home. I generally got up first, went downstairs, fed the cats, and took us up mugs of tea to begin the day. On 21st of October, I felt bad enough to remain in bed.

Lovely still sunny morning. Being in the bedroom, I’m privileged to see Margaret dress and ‘do her face’ – the morning ritual. A modest and charming ritual, sitting at her modest dressing table.

Hers is about the pleasantest face I ever set eyes on, as she is certainly the pleasantest woman. She works hard: the shopping, the cooking, the house-cleaning, much gardening, our financial affairs; and just now the seemingly endless retyping of Twinkling.

This week, she’ll drive down to Bath to see Chagie and will buy herself a large new loom.

All her activity, her travelling, her weaving, hardly indicated an invalid. Nor did she regard herself as an invalid.

I may have taken the many things Margaret so cheerfully did for granted, but I never took her for granted. I had had a taste of worse things, and rejoiced in my good fortune and her delightful presence. On the 22nd of October:

Ill or not, our days here pass pleasantly with the two of us together. They could continue thus for many a year and I’d be happy. We had the additional pleasure this afternoon of Wendy’s company for a couple of hours. She sat on the chaise longue in our (new) study, and chatted amiably of her plans, which include buying a seaside cottage at Morthoe.

While Wendy was here, Harry [Harrison] rang. He attended the memorial service for Kingsley [Amis], to which I was too under the weather to go. There he had the pleasure of seeing Hilly and Jane exchange a kiss.

With Margaret’s aid, I despatched the final version of The Twinkling of an Eye to HarperCollins, then my publisher. Life went on light-heartedly. Margaret enjoyed the literary life, with its struggles and excitements. She had perhaps had early preparation for it, since a book had been dedicated to her when she was a small girl. This sweet little book, of which ours must be one of the few surviving copies, is Bubble and the Circus, written and illustrated by Josephine Hatcher. It was published by the now defunct firm of Hollis & Carter, in 1946.

Margaret and I had known each other for forty years, and had been married for most of them. Wehad not always been as absorbed in one another as was later the case. We had both taken other lovers, brief joys that are followed by the storms of jealousy and fury which such events generally bring. Although I am not without regret that we behaved then as we did, I can see it as an episode in our maturing process. When we were reconciled, we became more dear to one another.

We drove down to Brighton, where Tim worked, met up with him, and dined with Marina Warner and a jolly crowd after the opening of Marina’s exhibition, ‘The Inner Eye’, in which I took part. Meanwhile, I began to make plans for White Mars with Sir Roger Penrose. Roger and his wife Vanessa had bought Woodlands, whereupon we became friends.

On the 11th of December in that year, 1996, Moggins and I celebrated our thirty-first wedding anniversary. We had no inkling that it was to be our last anniversary. Nevertheless, there were discomforts.

My dear faithful and true wife and I hug and kiss each other, and rejoice. We warmly remember that happy day of our marriage, and the celebrations in the Randolph Hotel with all our charming friends present. Plus the flight to Paris after, and the plush double bed in the Scandic Hotel.

But – Margaret’s celebrating with an hour in Stephen Henderson’s [our dentist’s] chair. She has to have a crown removed. Because of her heart condition, she had to take penicillin first thing. I shall go and collect her in half an hour.

By the 17th of December I report Margaret as being ‘almost over her little dental op’. Christmas was on the way. She was cooking mince-pies, and preparing to serve Christmas dinner for the whole family, as she had been doing for many a year.

Malcolm Edwards, my editor at HarperCollins, had by now had the typescript of Twinkling for two weeks, and uttered no word on the subject. My American literary agent, Robin Straus, phoned though, full of praise and excitement regarding Twinkling – ‘A unique book – I know of no autobiography like it’, etc., etc. Good.

Margaret and I gave each other a Macintosh Performa 6400/200 for Christmas. We had not yet emerged from our Mad About Computers stage.

On the last day of 1996, my spirits seem to have been low, to judge by the diary entry.

A low grade year. Margaret’s sad heart problem, the long drag of having this building enlarged, the drab political situation, the sorrow of BSE and slaughter of so many cattle, and so on … The hell with the boring Eurosceptics.