frozen by the stairwell. Now he darts forward to look over the balcony at the corpse lying broken. But even as he looks a form rises by it, a wraith, a personification of malevolence. It looks up; he cannot even cry – struck dumb by what he sees. And then there is a jump cut, as in a movie. A railway station, and a young girl waiting for a train. It chugs in, one of the old-fashioned type with compartments. The girl sees one with a woman in it – with her head shrouded in a scarf – and gets in because she feels safe. Oh no, but I knew – even in the dream, the watcher knew. That spirit would kill other people’s children. Nowhere was safe.
(‘Oh Lord,’ I wrote, ‘what was all that about?’)
Our beautiful home awaited me, and it was sunny when I returned. Daniel and Kitty came to visit, as well as my parents – who lived near by. Because of the necessity for post-operative quiet I had no difficulty in keeping what I knew from everybody else. I had been looking forward to this time of rest and reading, with Bonnie on my knee playing the role perfected by Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Flush, ‘in his eternal place on my bed’. She would be like the little dogs at the feet of the ladies on medieval tombs, eternally vigilant, devotion incarnate. The point is, at this stage I had no doubt whatsoever that what was happening in J’s life would be endured, coped with and survived.
My journal records: ‘There is a space inside me, where what we must think of as “womanhood” used to be. The loss of it seems less a source of regret than of celebration. Space in my body. Space in my mind. Space in my life. Vacuums are always filled, aren’t they? So we shall wait and see what flows inwards.’
I did not know that home would never be the same again.
Susan Chilcott sang for the last time in public in June 2003, at a concert in Brussels. She was accompanied by her friend, the pianist and Radio 3 presenter Iain Burnside, and the performance was with the actress Fiona Shaw, reading from Shakespeare. Susan wore white linen. She sang (among other things) the Willow aria from Verdi’s Otello, when the doomed Desdemona, full of sorrow, remembers a song from her childhood:
The fresh streams ran between the flowery banks,
She moaned in her grief,
In bitter tears which through her eyelids sprang
Her poor heart sought relief.
Willow! Willow! Willow!
Come sing! Come sing!
The green willow shall be my garland.
Later her voice would rise in a crescendo as she begged, ‘Ch’io viva ancor, ch’io viva ancor!’ (‘Let me live longer, let me live longer!’) as death, in the form of her husband Othello, stands over her.
J was in the audience, with other friends. You would need a heart of granite not to see how unbearably poignant it must have been. The word ‘heartbreaking’ is overused, like ‘tragic’ and ‘hero’. Anyone who watched Susan Chilcott’s last performance, knowing that her life was already ebbing away, must surely have felt a breaking inside.
I wrote:
I think of her and her son with numbness, because the horror of it is so hard to imagine. As for his feelings … well, my own knowledge of love is so far removed from narrow, tabloid newspaper notions, that I can only empathize. Do we have any choice about these coups de foudre? In this case, I don’t think so. J is permanently upset – how can he not be? I don’t know how he will be able to bear what is coming, but he has made a choice to involve himself and so he has no choice but to endure.
Stricken, J asked me if I understood that he would want to spend time with Susan in the three months of life she had left. I told him I did understand. Because I did – and it makes no difference to me that other women might think me mad. This was not something cheap or clandestine; he was going away from me (and I was regaining strength daily, with enormous reserves of inner fortitude, built up over the years) to take care of somebody very special whose strength was waning. Take care of her son too.
I wrote:
I cannot begrudge a dying woman the love of my husband. Can we choose who we love? To stand in a bookshop is to stand in the midst of a great, tumultuous, seething, writhing, coiling, heaving mass of complex human emotions, and to be deafened by the screams of passion and pain. Who am I to tell them all – all those writers and their creations – that they are wrong? I suppose my sadness is chiefly because I wish J and I could have been all-in-all to each other and yet – after that first intensity of passion – it was never to be. I wonder why? He is still the person I most like to talk to, and whose various roles in life I find the most fascinating. Looking back at us in our youth, falling in love, making a home, doing finals, starting our careers, I marvel at the sheer courage of it all. Yet that swash-buckling love stepped sideways and lost itself among the alleyways of other people, other lives, self-indulgence, guilt. And then we never quite managed to find the way back.
The other day I was pierced by a pang that Dan and Kitty will never again live at home with me. Today this farm feels so empty … and yet, truthfully, I am all right. I will get through this. I know that J would not normally be here today, yet he would be here in spirit – but today he is not even here in spirit. But my little dog is at my feet. I reach forward and stroke her. I hear the fountain – and birds. I must begin to make again.
Bovine, I had watched him descend the stairs with a packed bag. What would have happened had I thrown myself down, clung to his leg, begged him not to go? I will never know because I didn’t do so. ‘I am dumb from human dignity’ wrote Yeats, and I know what that means. Yes, I am proud – but perhaps foolish too. Later I began an unfinished novel like this:
She gave her husband away.
It wasn’t that she didn’t want him any more. Oh no, at that point she wanted him maybe more than she’d ever done before. But perhaps that was contrary of her – acting the child who clutches at an old toy because a friend suddenly wants to play with it, but gives it up all the same, in the end. Maybe if she’d clutched a little more fiercely it wouldn’t have turned out as it did.
But I watched as blank passivity slid over her, and the woman who had been so deliciously bad in her past embraced a perverse form of sainthood. She became the kind of person friends described as ‘so good’, with that slight shake of the head which indicates disquiet, calling into question their own selfishness, but also her common humanity. Good behaviour can sometimes seem intolerable, since we wish others to rage against the dying of the light, as we would ourselves.
I shook my head as she – so generously, so calmly – gave her husband away, and then turned to me as if to ask ‘Why did this happen?’, those great eyes filling, that generous mouth folded into a moue of sadness. You could strike a woman like that. You could shake her until the teeth rattled, and all her features fell apart, that beauty destroyed forever, with all the rest. But I was her friend and that defined my role – to witness all, to allow all, until the moment they both fell into the pit, at which point I would stretch out my hand to help.
Sometimes it is easier to tell a story in the third person. Yet I find these days I no longer want to make up characters (except for children) when each day, through my work as an advice columnist, I deal with reality and have to try to tell it as it is. When we were both young journalists J used to ask me if I ever thought of writing a novel. He thought it the way I should go. Excited as I was then by filing reports from every corner of Britain for magazines and newspapers, I said I had no wish to. Why would you want to make it up? I asked him. But he was to encourage me, patiently over the years, to write fiction. Without him, I doubt I would ever have done so. Without him, I
