For too long I’ve been parched of thirst and unable to quench it. Too long I’ve been starving to death and haven’t died. I feel nothing. Not the wind on my face nor the spray of the sea, nor the warmth of a woman’s flesh.
The mariners, the hands on the black-sailed Black Pearl, were exposed by moonlight. They were skeletons, frames of bone with the odd patch of skin and gristle…
Saul could still feel the warmth of a woman’s flesh – and he could still transmit warmth (he was warm to be with on that last night). He always found Rosie’s presence both soothing and strengthening. And perhaps he was beginning to feel the consolation that Alzheimer’s carelessly throws your way. ‘As the condition gets worse’, wrote John Bayley in Iris, ‘it also gets better’: each new impoverishment reduces the awareness of loss.
But there were tropical deliriums yet to come. And I found it impossible not to keep thinking of Larkin’s weighty lines in the early poem ‘Next, Please’:
Only one ship is seeking us, a black-
Sailed unfamiliar, towing at her back
A huge and birdless silence: in her wake
No waters breed or break.
Cross purpose: ‘Go to your emails’
On June 29, 2010, I picked up the phone and said, ‘Hello?’
‘Martin.’
‘Ian.’
‘Bad news.’
‘Yes,’ I said, ‘bad news. Oh, very bad. We had old friends here, and we were all having a warm and wonderful time, and then the call came through and I just – I just deliquesced.’
‘…The call from?’
‘From Spain. Nicolas’s wife, saying she’d just died.’
‘Sorry. Who’d just died?’
‘My mother.’
‘Oh no!’
And as Ian commiserated, with real feeling (Hilly had endeared herself to all my friends, and indeed to everyone she’d ever met, as the obituaries unanimously stressed), I felt the unspoolings and untwinings of cross purpose…
‘Thank you, thank you,’ I said. ‘I flew back yesterday, from the funeral.’ I breathed in. ‘But that wasn’t why you rang, was it. There’s more bad news.’
‘There’s more bad news. Are you in your study? Go to your emails. I’ll hang on, so take your time. It’s to do with Hitch. I’ll hang on.’
—————
‘Instant deliquescence’ was about right: I turned to water; I was sixty, but I might as well have been six. And then, the next morning and beyond, a furtive disarray, like a relatively stable panic attack.*15 No, the death of the mother is unlike the death of the father – quite unlike.
On the night the clocks went back in 1995 I called Saul Bellow in Boston and after brief preliminaries I said,
‘My father died at noon today…So I’m afraid you’ll have to take over now.’
Towards the end of our talk I felt the truth of a (more or less) throwaway line in Herzog:
‘It’s as you say. We are born to be orphaned and to leave orphans after us. My mother’s still there of course…I’ll write. Goodbye.’
‘Well, I love you very much…Goodbye.’
And those deep syllables got me through. Within three or four days of Kingsley’s death I had the sense that I was moving, with my eyes wide open, from the reservists to the front line; the intercessionary figure was gone, and now I had to step up, I had to step forward. Again and again my body tingled with a sense of almost physical levitation; somewhere in the calves it seemed to hum…
The death of the father kicks the son upstairs. With the death of the mother, the son goes skyward too, clutching the banister, and more or less of his own volition – but he is seeking his childhood room and his childhood bed.
—————
I went to my emails and there it was. From chitch9008, addressed to ian1mcewan and martin.amis: and in his note Christopher gave a quiet forewarning of what they would all read in the papers the following day.*16
‘It’s serious,’ said Ian. ‘I’ve talked to Ray.’ Ray was Ray Dolan (Ian’s very old friend and one of the most-cited neurobiologists in his field). ‘He gave me the figures.’
I tried to listen. These figures or projections would fluctuate over time, but it seemed that our friend had a one-in-eight chance (or was it one-in-twelve) of living for another seven years. Or was it five?
‘Soon we’ll know more,’ said Ian. ‘So let’s…I think that’s very sad – I mean your mother. So let’s be in constant touch.’
‘Yes. Constant touch.’
The problem of re-entry
202 was the area code for Washington DC.
My grey house phone looked overworked and hard done by as I reached for it, all smudged and clammy with its owner’s handprints, and it looked bilious, too, as if sick to its stomach of transmitting words about infirmity and ruin…I lifted the receiver, faltered (I was hopelessly unprepared), and laid it down again and tried to organise my thoughts.
For a start, it was 11 a.m. in London, and so…My crude aide-memoire for transatlantic time (why did I still need one?) went as follows: the UK was much older than the US, so it was always later in England. And that meant, in turn, that the sun was only squinting at America’s east coast, and anyway Christopher seldom rose before ten. There were still five hours to go; and even after a long and necessary talk with Elena there were still four hours to go. I had nothing to do but sit there and smoke and wonder – What was Hitch going to say?
—————
‘The Hitch has landed,’ he used to announce every time he called from Heathrow. As we know, the habit of referring to yourself in the third person is not always a sign of cloudless mental health. Such a habit, perhaps, is to be warily
