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Although my parents lived on the outskirts of Birmingham, their lives tended to revolve around a quiescent, reasonably pretty market town which lay some six or seven miles from their home. It boasted one small hospital, to which my father had been admitted on the day of his attack: visiting hours were from two-thirty to three-thirty in the afternoon, and from six-thirty to eight o’clock in the evening. This meant that the hours between our visits were the most tense and problematic of the day. We would emerge from the hospital into the visitors’ car park and the bright afternoon sunshine, and my mother, who had completely lost the capacity (although it had never before deserted her in the last twenty-five years) to plan her shopping more than a few hours in advance, would drive us both to the local supermarket to buy some packets of frozen food for our evening meal. While she was making this purchase I would get out of the car and wander down the almost deserted High Street – indeed, the only real shopping street – puzzled to think that I had once been unable to conceive of a metropolis more teeming or animated. I looked into the branch of Woolworth’s where I used to spend my long-saved pocket money on budget-priced records; into the newsagent’s where it was possible to buy – although I’d had no inkling of it at the time – only a fraction of the titles available in London; and into the town’s only bookshop, laid out on one thinly stocked floor about thirty feet square, which for years had seemed to me to resemble nothing less than a modern library of Alexandria. It was here, towards the end of my teens, that I used to linger for hours, staring at the covers of the latest paperbacks while Verity fumed and stamped her feet outside. The very sight of these books had never failed to fill me with wonder: they seemed to imply the existence of a distant world populated by beautiful, talented people and devoted to the most high-minded literary ideals (the same world, of course, into which chance would one day allow me to dip my own uncertain feet, only to find it as cold and unwelcoming as the pool which had numbed me into unassuageable tears on that fateful birthday).
After this, anyway, came the most important part of the ritual. We would get back to the house, make two cups of instant coffee, lay out a plate of digestive or Rich Tea biscuits and then, for half an hour, settle down in front of the television to watch a quiz show: a show of awesome frivolity and tameness which we none the less followed with idolatrous concentration, as though to miss even a few seconds of it were to render the whole experience meaningless.
There were two simple elements to this programme: a game involving numbers, where the contestants had to perform some basic mental arithmetic (I was quite good at this one, whereas my mother invariably got into a muddle and found herself beaten by the clock); and a lexical game, in which they vied with each other to see who could make the longer word out of nine randomly selected letters of the alphabet. My mother took it more seriously than I did, always making sure that she had pencil and paper to hand before sitting down to watch, and every so often she would actually beat the contestants: I can well remember her flush of triumph at making an eight-letter word, ‘wardrobe’, out of the letters R,E,B,G,A,R,W,O,D, when the best that the wi
In any case, Fiona and I had more serious matters to occupy us, because the dramatic change which her illness wrought on our viewing habits happened to coincide with a period of political upheaval in both the domestic and the international spheres. Late in November, just a few days after she had been to see her doctor for the second time, the Tory party leadership crisis came to a head and Mrs Thatcher was forced to resign. It was a week of intense, if transient, media excitement, and we were able to gorge ourselves on a diet of end-to-end news programmes, special late-night panel discussions and extended bulletins. And then on the day she went for her outpatients’ appointment, we heard that Saddam Hussein had rejected Security Council Resolution 678, an ultimatum authorizing the use of ‘all necessary means’ if Iraq had failed to withdraw from Kuwait by January 15th, and soon he was on French television saying that he thought there was a 50–50 chance of armed conflict; and even though he now started releasing the hostages, so that they were all home a week or so before Christmas, it still felt as if the politicians and the army leaders were hell bent on dragging us into war. But the strange thing is that Fiona, who Was a peace-loving person and not very interested in politics, took a kind of comfort from all of this, and I began to suspect that, like my mother with her quiz show, she had chosen to use it as a way of shielding herself from the fear which was otherwise liable to swamp her.
This time the doctor had listened more carefully. He examined her neck when she told him about the growth, which was bigger than it used to be, she said, almost two inches across, and he wrote down everything she told him about it but still said there was probably nothing to worry about, that the fevers and night sweats might well derive from something else entirely, some aggressive but treatable infection. But there was no point in taking u
As I mentioned, there was a good deal of silence between us: on Fiona’s part because talking made her throat burn, on mine because I could never think of anything to say. But I do remember one conversation which took place in the dead half hour between the Nine O’Clock News and the News at Ten, and which began with her making an unexpected remark.
She said: ‘You don’t have to do this every evening, you know.’