Una had offered to get some of those talking books. Derek Jacobi reading Great Expectations, that sort of thing. But listening wasn’t the same as reading. Not as intimate. And there was nothing wrong with her eyes. Her eyes were among the few things left to her that worked perfectly. Like her hair, which went on growing as if it hadn’t the slightest suspicion of what was happening in the rest of her body. She needed to speak to Una about the medication. The painkillers were not killing any more, and the stuff she was on now just constipated her, something she detested. She wanted the next level. Nepenthe? Or there was Oromorph, which she had been told tasted like whisky. That might do. But perhaps it would be wiser to speak directly to Brando. He was the power and the glory, the last word in it all. And he had promised to look in before the end of the week. Sit on the bed and chat. Then an odd minute or two of staring at the ceiling while he touched her chest and neck, saying how he hoped his hands weren’t cold, which they never were. Secret confab with Una downstairs. Milligrams of this, millilitres of that. Update the prognosis. Leave.
How had they managed it in the old days? In Dumas’ time? A maid tiptoeing out of the door with a chamber pot. Pomanders to cover the stinks. The doctors and apothecaries bringing their rubbish. Numbing people was an art form now. There were pain specialists in pain laboratories, and the World Health people had created an analgesic ‘ladder’ so that you were never just in pain, plain and simple. She had to keep a record for Una in a little red ‘Silverstone’ notebook. Sharp. A dull ache. Jabs. Waves. She had awarded herself seven once. Ten meant the worst you could imagine. You had to keep ten in reserve. Then, if you were lucky, they did for you, like Cousin Rose at Bransgore, a tumour the size of a football in her stomach, taking a syrup called Brompton’s cocktail and dying like a seventeen-year-old dope fiend, Lord knows what gurning at her from the shadows. But that was years ago. It would be much neater now. Some harmless-looking tablet you could swallow with a sip of tea. Something they kept in a special container, like a monstrance, in a cupboard to which Brando had the key.
Or would they force her to go on? Make her live until she was an utter stranger to herself? She glanced across at the pillbox on the bedside table, its segments like the chambers of a gun. If she were to take a whole week’s pills in one go, with, say, a large Scotch, would that do for her? Could she be sure of it? Nights were the worst, of course. Days she could still endure, despite the occasional snap of temper, those moments when she thought why bother, why go on if going on just meant more of this. She knew now what turning your face to the wall meant, and it tempted her, saying no to the fag-end of life, yes to oblivion. If that’s what it was. Oblivion. But not quite yet. There were still good times. Little unexpected pleasures. A card from an old friend. The greenness of grass. Some nonsense on the radio that made her laugh. Even the sound of Mrs Samson singing to herself in the kitchen, a fifty-year-old woman singing like a girl. You couldn’t explain it to people without sounding gaga. But when the light began to fail, however lovely the evening, she became nervous and plucked at herself. Drawing the curtains didn’t help. Night thickened behind them, pressing at the glass like floodwater.
She opened the book, wondering if another page might tempt her to sleep. It was such a delicate little book, hardly bigger than her hand. Dark blue binding coming unstuck at the spine. Very fine paper – wartime paper – that tore if you turned the page too quickly. Her father had given it to her. Desmond Wilcox. Captain. And because he had not written an inscription she had done it herself, in black ink, on the page opposite a picture of Rosa showing Cornelius the precious tulip at his prison door.
For Alice from Daddy. April 29 1953.
He had bought it on one of his business trips. In Bath perhaps, or Wells, or Salisbury. There were businesses once. Gravel. Irrigation pumps. Even some scheme to do with growing mushrooms in an old barracks near Chard. But she was not very old before she understood that ‘business’ was mostly a euphemism for taking off on the motorbike, a machine like the skeleton of a greyhound, oily black, impossibly loud, pouring smoke like a bonfire when he started it. She had a memory of him – though in fact it was the memory of a photograph – sitting astride the motorbike on the drive, leather jacket, old parachute boots, goggles that made him look like the Baron von Richthofen. Never said when he was coming back. Hours. Days. Just her and her mother in the house, listening. On a still day you could hear the engine all the way to West Lavington.
Had he ever come home without something for her? Some little parcel thrust into one of the pockets of his jacket, a peek of brown paper, the loop of a white string bow? Then handing it to her as though it were worthless, something picked up on the way. Never waited to be thanked. Hated fussing. Just gave her the present and went out to pull weeds, or mend the seed boxes, or put creosote on the fencing, or any of those numberless, endless little jobs that went on, painstakingly, year after year, until suddenly, one day, they didn’t.
‘Well, then, on the 20th of August, 1672, as we have already stated at the beginning of this chapter, the whole town was crowding towards the Buitenhof, to witness the departure of Cornelius De Witte from prison, as he was going to exile…’
She was four when he went to the war and she saw him twice before it was over. A man in khaki who gave her bars of Cadbury’s chocolate in wax-paper wrappers. When he came back for good he was a hero. Tunisia, Sicily, Arnhem. Especially Arnhem. Above all, Arnhem. Second Battalion the Parachute Regiment. One of the sixteen who got out. Won his DSO there rescuing his sergeant. Desmond Wilcox, Captain. DSO. The one who stepped forward when the others were too frightened or weary or confused. Wouldn’t that be enough? Knowing it was you? Remembering it? But when the street parties were over and the flags were back in the attics, he didn’t seem to believe in much. Not in God or King George or the Welfare State. Something had been lost. In the Rhine perhaps. All that gallant slaughter. And truly, she had tried to understand, but how could she, girl that she was? Though now that she was older, much older than he’d ever been, she thought she did understand. The blankness. The way sense can unravel so completely you never quite recover it. What was the word for when nothing made sense any more? The one time she asked him about the war he’d made a face as though tasting something unpleasant on his tongue, and said, ‘Oh, that.’ Didn’t have the language for it, any more than she had the words now to tell the others what it was like, every night a stepping-stone and always wondering if there would be another, or if the next step would take her into the water.
The last summer of his life he sat hours together on the old chintz-covered swing-bed in front of the willow tree, chain-smoking Woodbines and watching the shadows flood the lawn until they swallowed him and only the tip of his cigarette still showed, a faint red pulse. How she had longed to bring him in, to rescue him as he had rescued his sergeant. Her mother wasn’t up to it, sitting all day in the kitchen listening to Alma Cogan and Ronnie Hilton on the wireless, biting her nails until they bled. So it was she who had gone, crossing the lawn at dusk to stand in front of him, waiting for the right words to come into her head, for a dove that would bring her the gift of speech. But nothing came, and he had gazed up at her through the smoke of his cigarette as though from the far side of a pane of glass. He felt sorry for her perhaps, knowing why she had come out, knowing the impossibility of it. But instead of saying sit down beside me Alice, sit down, daughter, and we will try to understand together the unbearable truth that love is not always enough, that people cannot always be brought back in, he had said, very conversationally, as though in reference to a discussion he had been having with her in his head for weeks, ‘They used flame-throwers, you know.’ And she had nodded, yes, Daddy, and left him, and gone to her room, and pushed her face into the pillow and bawled. Because she should have done it, should have, and she had failed.