‘Jonjon’ll be here till seven, Miss Phelps. If you should…’
‘Thank you, Meg. I’ll ring if need be.’
Phoebe kept her gaze on the closing door, saying, ‘Graeme. Oh come on. There was my perfectly nice, perfectly weak, perfectly bedridden mother. And there was Sir Grae, the househusband, giving me my bath and then shooing me into the Jag. He didn’t hate money. Money was the love of his life. He just couldn’t earn any. And whenever he got his hands on a few quid he went and pissed it away at the Ritz. Graeme let it happen for money. So much a week. When the Timmy business happened, and Father Gabriel stirred, Daddy tried to coax me into it.’
Another silence. ‘A compound crime,’ he said, ‘giving you a compound wound – Graeme orphaned you, Phoebe.’
‘Yes. Jane was right. And not just that. He widowed me too. That’s how it feels. And now I’m Widow Twankey, up in her spinster pad. God’s blood.’ Another silence. ‘Sir Grae, when he was finally dying he clutched my arm and said, I’m sorry, I’m sorry. Can you forgive me? I said not a word. Then he coughed with a huge splat and he was gone. Gone to Hell…Then I really started to eat.
‘Notice all the books, Mart? I used to spend the whole time reading. Then I stopped. I didn’t want to be interested in anything. You know, that’s what I thought when I saw Christopher’d died. I thought, Oh and he was interested in so many things…Me, I could go any time. I’ve got a suicide pact’s worth of pills stored away. Any time at all.
‘There was a thing about you in the Mail. You and your tell-all novel. I want you to know that you can say anything you like about me. Anything. Don’t even change my name. And Martin. Did you love me? I think you must’ve, or how else did you stick it? I felt love coming at me, and I liked it, and I pretended a bit, but I couldn’t do it back. It’s like asthma. You can breathe in but you can’t breathe out. I’m sorry I couldn’t.’
‘Don’t be. I never said the words, but there was love. There was definitely love.’
‘Oh no…I was planning to be mean to you but I find I’ve gone and let you off. Give me your hand. I just want to kiss it goodbye. And then leave.’
‘One other kiss.’ He gazed down at her and imagined the full-length figurehead of a pagan sailing ship, carved out of the heaviest redwood and all swollen in the sun. Her face – he pressed his lips to it. ‘There.’
‘Thank you. Now let me sleep. Goodbye. Let me sleep now.’
*1 Life can be very simple. When I turned sixty I cut my carcinogen intake by about 80 per cent. It was no doubt far too little and far too late – but it instantly cured me of thinking about suicide. Probably because my death is no longer something I’m so actively engaged in bringing about. As I say, life can be very simple.
*2 Not quite a retch but somewhere between an abrupt gulp and a stoppered hiccup…I’d like to have a look at the technical literature on sexuality and the gag reflex. In my own male circle it was occasionally discussed, but only in the context of going to bed with two girls at once (what we called a ‘carwash’) – something never achieved by any of us; it had to do, then, with the vision of carnal gluttony…The reflex is not exclusively male; Janet Malcolm, the biographer of Sylvia Plath, acknowledged it when she first laid eyes on the husky Ted Hughes.
PART V
ULTIMATE: DOING THE DYING
It seemed that out of battle I escaped
Those flies I thought I saw in Christopher’s room. Were they ‘death receptors’?
Death receptors actually exist – they occupy the surfaces of living cells. The science of it I find impenetrable, but I was haunted at once by the imagery. Death receptors are ‘signalling pathways’ from a cytoplasmic region known as ‘the death domain’, and may be imagined as ghostly groundsmen and chambermaids: their mission is to prepare the body to accommodate its strange new guest.
The swarming vermin in the sickroom were death receptors, given flesh and blood and a smear of hair by my eyes.
‘She died instantly’. Oh no she didn’t. I have never believed for a moment that anyone dies instantly. It takes a while to die; even the wallshadows of Hiroshima and Nagasaki took a while to die. I have similar objections to ‘he died in his sleep’. Oh no he didn’t. He had to wake up first, just long enough to do the dying. Or maybe he had a certain kind of bad dream: the kind that under-anaesthetised patients are said to have during surgery…
The chapter heading above is the first line of Wilfred Owen’s ‘Strange Meeting’ (1918). Our narrator, our warrior poet, has escaped from battle, but only by being killed on its field. He has passed from life to death, and the immense and solemn toil of the crossing, with all it asks of you, is beautifully and terrifyingly rendered by means of high technique. The combination of the stately pentameter and the grating half-rhymes or slant rhymes (or, in Owen’s virtuoso use of them, dissonant assonances):
It seemed that out of battle I escaped
Down some profound dull tunnel, long since scooped,
Through granites which titanic wars had groined,
Yet also there encumbered sleepers groaned…
Escaped, scooped, groined, groaned: the slant rhymes, the dissonant assonances that will roll through you when you do the dying.
The Poet December 1985
In the latter months of 1984, the year before his body went over the waterfall, Philip Larkin was unprecedentedly overweight (sixteen stone), ‘terribly deaf’, and ‘drinking like a fish’. He would start the day with a glass or two of
