Sheila had said that she didn’t want him to know what was happening. I had just finished telling her that her dying belonged to her and that she shouldn’t consider anyone else’s wishes, so I could hardly overrule this decision even though I disagreed with it. She said that she could cope with everything except the thought of his life without her, and so we kept him in the dark.
They had stopped sharing a bed when he came home after his stay in hospital with the kidney infection, and his lack of mobility meant that they wouldn’t run into each other. They would each call out, ‘Good morning, darling,’ when the carer was helping him along the corridor to the bathroom. Sheila did her dying only a few yards away from him, but towards the end their connection had dwindled to this ritual exchange. She had uncoupled the marital train and left her husband behind in a siding.
Her last public appearance had been on my birthday, in late October. We had gone to the ENO to see Janáček’s From The House Of The Dead. It’s an uplifting piece of work, if you like your uplift very bleak indeed. My taste rather than hers, though she seemed to enjoy the evening. Her illness hadn’t shown itself, still wore the mask of health. She had a cough, but nothing out of the way in a late-October audience. In fact her discreet style of coughing, never disrupting the music, was more like the stylized enactment of symptoms the heroine gives on stage, in an opera of a lusher type, to give formal notice that she is mortally ill. Sheila, on the other hand, had enough energy to walk most of the way home, up St Martin’s Lane and then Monmouth Street to where we intersected with the bus routes running along New Oxford Street in the direction of our homes.
Dad took in the fact of Sheila’s death cleanly, but didn’t ask for details. He may not have realized that her body was still in the flat at the time. When the undertakers came to collect it later in the day there was a potentially awkward moment. His bedroom (not the marital bedroom but what had once been his study) lay immediately inside the flat’s front door, and it wasn’t usual for his door to be closed. But it wasn’t too artificial a piece of behaviour for me to slip into his room and distract him with chat, keeping the door closed behind me, while the undertaker’s men passed in through the hall and then back out with their load.
Dad’s days were more or less the same before and after his widowering (if that word exists). After his assisted shower he would be based in his room for the morning, with the radio on. Towards lunchtime he would move to the sitting-room and watch television. There was a convention in force that Dad was strongly interested in the news, a fan of rugby no matter who was playing and involved almost on a cellular level when a Welsh squad was on the pitch, but in practice the gaze he turned on the screen was neutral, if not slightly mystified.
I could leave Dad on his own for a couple of hours with a clear conscience, long enough to go to the gym or meet a friend for coffee. I’d tell him when I’d be back, and he was never anxious. I don’t know that he actually remembered when I’d be back on such occasions, or even who it was that would be returning. Dad’s egotism was deep, though not cold, and he didn’t need an acute short-term memory to know that he was Sir William Mars-Jones, and therefore the sort of person who would in the natural order of things be looked after. It would never have occurred to him that he might be restricting my life, and this was as it should be. If family history had played out differently and I had been looking after my mother, things would have been much more difficult, although her personality was much more open and tender, in fact for that very reason. She would have worried obsessively that there were other things I would rather be doing, actually should be doing, and would automatically have characterized herself as a burden. Dad could never be a burden, in his own mind, which was a factor in allowing him not to be one. He didn’t obsessively enter other people’s thoughts.
It’s part of my psychology, not perhaps the deepest part but part of what I work up and perform, to take things in my stride, to make out that nothing slows me down or drags me off course. I tell people that as long as I have ten minutes to myself at some stage, the day feels as if it belongs to me, and saying so makes it more likely. Nevertheless there are hazards to behaving in this way. Like any other policy of believing your own publicity, it can invite the collapse it refuses to consider.
On the other hand, I gave up remarkably little. There was for instance a piano in the flat, an upright Monington & Weston, lacquered in a Chinese style, which my parents had seen on the pavement outside a music shop and decided they had to have. This was the instrument I had learned on, and Dad had learned to blot out the sounds I made in my earliest, most ham-fisted years. I remember him inspecting the sheet music, when I was about thirteen, and asking politely what the marking ‘pp’ meant. ‘It means very quiet indeed,’ I explained. ‘Fancy that,’ he said neutrally, but I was slow to take the hint. I was having a Debussy phase at the time, but the Cathédrale Engloutie from his first book of Preludes wasn’t going to stay submerged for long while I was on hand to pump it up.
Now that I was in the full flower of semi-competence, he was tolerant and even appreciative of my playing, though in a rather codified way. He would wait for the end of the first piece and then applaud heartily from wherever he was stationed in the flat, expressing warm approval for a job well done and a hope that the recital was now over. This hint I understood. My taste in music was not his.
It seemed to me that an electronic keyboard would, with its headphone option, enable me to spare Dad any disturbance. I would also be able to play in the late or early hours if I couldn’t sleep. I don’t know why I didn’t ask Dad if he minded me using his money for this purpose. He wasn’t likely to refuse. Perhaps I wanted to spice up my virtuous persona with a little high-minded embezzling. What sort of person abuses his power of attorney to steal from his helpless father? I bought an ex-demonstration Clavinova from Chappell’s, its price reduced by a third but still amounting to a couple of thousand pounds. It enormously increased my sense of psychological space. It was like having an extra room built onto the flat, where nobody went but me.
I also had access to the organ in Gray’s Inn Chapel, by triple permission of Dean, Preacher and Organist. The organist, Christopher Bowers-Broadbent, had actively encouraged me, giving me my only actual piece of advice on how to manage the instrument, though it sounded like something from an old manual of etiquette for lady travellers. Keep your knees together, and don’t look down.
My sleeping quarters were upstairs in a converted attic. There were small skylights of clouded glass but no windows, and no plumbing. The ceilings were a lot lower than the ones downstairs, and sometimes I hit my head on the lintels despite my long familiarity with the spaces. The flat was built after the war to replace what had been bombed, approximating to the Georgian pattern but making no claim to elegance. My parents had been the first tenants, moving in at about the time I was born, and they had converted the flat ahead of time by installing a spiral staircase to the attic, which would more normally be accessed from a trap door above the shared landing outside the front door.
My love life wasn’t hampered by my new role as carer. Dad knew my partner, Keith, well enough, though he had never felt it necessary to remember the name. It certainly wasn’t hard to have Keith over for a meal on a Saturday, for instance, and then to say, ‘Dad, Keith’s going home now,’ while in fact running him a bath.
Many of Dad’s old friends lived nearby. Emlyn Hooson lived across the landing, Henrietta Wilson was next door at number 5, the formidable Edith Wellwood lived at number 1 (a building dating from 1695 that had dodged the bombs responsible for so much damage to the Inn). The Lewises, Esyr and Elizabeth, lived in South Square a hundred yards or so away. Anything beyond that, the distant purlieus of Raymond and Verulam Buildings, qualified in Edith’s eyes as the ‘suburbs’ of Gray’s Inn, though she had the demanding and unstable perspective of the socialist snob, embarrassed that the address given on her birth certificate was Caledonian Road and painfully conscious of being the poorest resident. When she had first seen the Gray’s Inn in the 1930s, looking down into its gardens from the top deck of a bus, she had wondered what this place could possibly be. A posh lunatic asylum seemed to be the likeliest answer, and now she was an inmate of it.