And right here in the Fellows’ Garden I furtively chuck my butts into the nearest flower bed.
I should blame it all, perhaps, on that conjectural ancestor of mine, the resourceful Sir Walter, who, among his countless other claims to fame, I believe, popularized the noxious New World weed. But just take him for an example. Smoked all his life like a chimney: died by the axe. There is no accounting. We have to die of something: a lung cancer, a throat cancer, a brain tumour, a bullet in the head.
But not of love, never of love. Leave that for the sonneteers. “Men have died from time to time, and worms have eaten them, but not for love.”
From the Queen of Egypt to a worried woman in a waiting room. From Cleopatra to a hospital case. From a thousand parts — tragic queen, frothy French farce flirt — to the only, unfeigned dénouement of her stricken body branded with the scars of an unsuccessful operation. So why all this acting stuff? Why all this poetry stuff? Why all this imagining it otherwise?
We gravitated towards the cottage, neglecting the London flat. We moved in things that were dear to us, such as the clock made in 1845 by John Pearce of Launceston. For me — I won’t deny it — this retreat from the publicity that was part of her life — this having Ruth to myself — was a kind of terrible boon. I think we did what most people would have done in the circumstances. We drew a circle around ourselves. We tried to carry on as if nothing were different. You could call this acting too, and one day, we knew, it would have to stop. But I ask myself: in those final weeks, were we happy? It’s not an absurd question. The human frame, it seems, has this stubborn capacity for existing in spite of the facts. We went for gentle walks in the brittle winter days. Put logs on the fire. We summoned memories while trying to pretend we were not summoning memories. Made plans — as if plans were feasible. Spent Christmas with Joan and her second husband, Roy — an exercise so mawkish, so awkward, so like a piece of treacly black comedy, that you were tricked into thinking none of it could be real.
I fielded (still technically her manager) the commiserative calls, dealt with the kind-but-cruel welter of mail. I developed unsuspected skills as a nurse, chef, maid-of-all-work. We tried to submit to the illusion that all this was some kind of benign interlude, a period of rest, of convalescence. Not a— Then a look of quiet urgency, of concentration, would come into her eyes, which would seem to make my presence futile. As if somewhere, deep inside herself, she were searching for someone. I would think: I must distract her. Distract her? I didn’t allow myself to think that all this withdrawal, this retrenchment in a country cottage, this privacy, this trying to be simply, at last, herself, was itself a kind of rehearsal (so rich with stage fright), a learning of the final part.
“Give me my robe, put on my crown …”
I think she wanted recognition. She achieved it. Some of us want recognition, some of us don’t. Potter wants it. I can live without it (perhaps I should rephrase that). And some of us who want it never achieve it. It’s a funny thing, recognition. You achieve it and then you have problems about being recognised. You go around in dark glasses. And though you are recognised, everyone wants to know about this other person, this elusive, hard-to-spot character called “the real you.” The “real Ruth Vaughan,” as the journalists would have it. No one would recognise me, but nobody would want to ask me about the real me.
(Though I wonder who he is — really I do).
She used to say — a strange thing for an actress — that she never knew what she looked like, she couldn’t have described her own face if she were asked. My experience is different. When I look in the mirror (especially these days), I see this incorrigible mask. I know it’s not me, but I’m stuck with it. Perhaps it amounts to the same: you might be anybody. Which means I have the makings of an actor too. But not the gift.
How could you describe her face? There was no other word for it: it was full of life. So full of life. I think she was beautiful, but that is not an objective statement. I think she was beautiful because she was her. Because she was Ruth. She had brown-green eyes and a way of smiling and laughing with them before even moving her lips. Off-stage, off-screen, people always found her smaller, slighter than they had imagined. She had this — naturalness. Yet she was an actress. But isn’t that what actors seek — naturalness? There was this space that was always hers, just hers; this magic, mobile space. There were these audiences who claimed her, but there was always this space that was hers alone. And back in the days before she was famous, when she was only Girl Number Three …
Romantic, impossible love. The student and the chorus girl. The scholar and the actress.
She cut the process short. She couldn’t bear, or bear that I should bear, the coming disintegration, which, on that February day, by some inner gauge that very sick people have, she must have known was about to begin. I can’t think of any other reason. No, I can’t think of any other reason.
It’s wrong, of course. Suicide. My father was wrong. Ruth was wrong. I— But I’m still here. We don’t have the right. To take ourselves from ourselves. And from other people. It’s cowardly. It’s selfish. The mess it leaves for others. But there would have been mess anyway. It’s vain: a last bid for posthumous limelight; a staged exit. “I have immortal longings …” A form of death not so uncommon among actors. Though they aren’t supposed to. They are supposed, by the sheer force of their personalities, to make miracle recoveries and so inspire us all. They are supposed to turn their inexorable demises into brave, grotesque performances on behalf of medical research funds. We look to actors and actresses — don’t we? — to show us how to act.
You keep saying to yourself (trying to dismiss the thought, trying to give it your utmost attention) there will come a last time for everything. A last time to do this, a last time we do that. Simple, inconsequential things. A last day, a last hour. Then, when the last time comes, you don’t realise it’s the last time. She wanted to sleep. She slept all that afternoon. It was during these increasingly frequent periods when she slept in the day that I would begin, then immediately abandon, the exercise of trying to imagine the world without her. It was a fine, cold, clear day. I looked out towards the end of the garden. Beyond the trees on the other side of the field, the silver tip of a silage tower, hidden in the summer, glinted ruddily. Huge shadows barred the glowing folds of the Downs.
She didn’t wake till dark. I remember that she said she’d meant to wake before it was dark, and she gave a little, half-asleep, worried look. That same night, according to the findings of the inquest, she died, by her own hand, between the hours of three and five in the morning.
And I will never know whether she made up her mind suddenly, waking that night while I slept, or whether the intention was there even as she woke that afternoon. Even before then. And I will never know — it is an absurd, hypothetical question — whether, if I had had the choice, I would have wished for such a cruel, merciful blow or would have preferred her to linger on for more precious weeks, perhaps months, becoming less and less like the woman I would want to remember. A matter of recognition. I have the contrast, now, with my mother: a wasted figure, sprouting tubes in a hospital bed, resolutely letting her own death run its full course. Could I have borne to see Ruth like that?
But my mother was seventy-eight. And “resolutely”? I wonder, now.
I came down the stairs. Her body was lying on the sofa. Not “she”; her body. The difference sinks in. There were the pills; the empty tumbler on the coffee table. Cliché props.