by Paul Bailey
He gave up drinking coffee in the mornings and substituted gin and tonic instead. His belly grew larger and larger. He never seemed to have a hangover. We were walking along a street in Fulham one Saturday morning in 1984 when he stopped suddenly and vomited blood. We were not far from a hospital. He was attended to immediately in Accidents and Emergencies and the bleeding was brought to a stop. He was given an anaesthetic and later that day he was transferred to the Intensive Care Unit at Westminster Hospital, which was to become, in his own words, his ‘second home’. It was there that the doctor who was tending him told me, in a very loud voice that everyone in the corridor could hear, that if he didn’t stop drinking alcohol he would die. He would die, the doctor added, horribly. David was embarrassed and offended by this announcement, which caused staff and patients to stare at him, but it ensured that he would be teetotal for the rest of his life.
The nurses and doctors in the Intensive Care Unit admired him for his humour, his freedom from self-pity and his refusal to turn his face to the wall. The man who had been committing suicide by stealth for years was now possessed of a ferocious will to live. He refused to believe what those who loved him knew already – that he had left it too late. Whenever the instruments of survival were removed from his neck, his arms, his chest, he was unfailingly cheerful. I sat by his bed for an entire night and when a friend came to visit him the next morning I went out to get a cup of coffee and a croissant. I returned within the hour to find him sitting up and laughing. I gazed at him in amazement and anger. He was the most carefree Lazarus that could be imagined.
I brought the puppy home in April 1985 and for almost a year he revelled in her company. ‘How’s Circe?’ would be his first question when he saw me entering the Intensive Care Unit in the summer, autumn and winter of his unlikely annus mirabilis.
He was frequently tired, but the irrepressible animal, nipping at our ankles as if we were the sheep she had been trained to round up, amused and charmed him. He took Polaroid photographs of her – one, captured when she was very young, peeing on a broadsheet newspaper, fell out of a book just the other day, causing me to smile and weep. It is the earliest token of his affection for her.
One memory of his devotion to the intruder will suffice. It was a day in the late summer of 1985, and we were walking by the Thames in Chiswick in the company of two friends and their small sons, who were then five and three. We decided to cross Hammersmith Bridge and stroll along the towpath on the other side. We were halfway across when Circe slipped from her lead and dashed into the traffic. I froze with terror. The ever-practical David, despite his illness, leapt after her, catching her by the scruff of the neck and slapping her until she yelped. She was put back on the lead, and the collar was tightened in order to prevent another attempted escape.
‘You bloody fool,’ he yelled at me. And then he expressed thanks to the driver of the car that had come to a swift halt in front of the man and the dog.
At six o’clock on the morning of 15 March 1986, I awoke to find him dressed and packed. He’d had an attack in the night, had phoned the Intensive Care Unit and ordered a minicab, which drew up outside five minutes later.
We kissed goodbye.
‘I don’t want to come back this time.’ He spoke without emotion. His last words were: ‘Look after Circe.’
Disque Bleu
The Arab offered me a cigarette. ‘Smoke?’ he asked. I shook my head, and smiled to express my gratitude. He had a little boy with him, whose hair he ruffled. ‘Girl’ was his next word, followed a minute or so later by ‘new’, then ‘baby’. I indicated with a nod what he was attempting to tell me. He had come to register the birth of his daughter. He had already guessed that I was there to record someone’s death. My face had told him as much. He had recognized grief, and acknowledged it with a small gesture of kindness – the only one available to him in the curious circumstances.
That brief meeting took place on the afternoon of 27 March 1986, in a waiting room in the Westminster Council House. I remember how the Arab tried to contain his happiness by adopting a serious expression whenever our eyes met. I was touched, and slightly amused, by the way in which he manoeuvred the change from obvious delight to awkward sympathy. I desperately wanted to tell him not to bother; that the offer of the rather foul-smelling cigarette had been enough. My name was called first, and before I left I muttered words I thought he might know: ‘Thanks,’ I said, and, ‘Congratulations’.
‘Not quite the youngest this week,’ the woman who took the death certificate from me remarked. ‘There was one yesterday who was only forty-six.’ She was stating a matter of fact. I watched her as she read the slip of paper. ‘It isn’t for me to ask you why,’ she observed, writing ‘cirrhosis of the liver’ alongside David’s name in the large ledger on the table between us. ‘Guilt,’ I ventured, without explanation. ‘I think it was guilt.’ I sat in silence until she finished. When I rose to leave, she advised me to enjoy the rest of my life. Her tone was almost brusque. ‘Yes,’ I heard myself answer.
As soon as I got home, I took Circe for a brief walk and then telephoned the undertaker nearest to the hospital in which David had died. ‘It’s Easter in a few days’ time,’ said the man I talked to. ‘We’re pretty heavily booked.’ Could he have my number? He would see what he could do. He rang back the following morning. ‘You’re in luck, Mr Bailey,’ the fruity voice announced. ‘There’s been a last-minute cancellation.’ I nearly laughed, but managed to say something absurd, like ‘Good’ instead.
The owner of the fruity voice had a rubicund face to match. ‘I’m a failed actor,’ he informed me. I had noticed a copy of the Stage on his desk. ‘You need to be a bit of a thespian in this job.’ I accepted his invitation to ‘take a pew’. ‘Shall we run through your requirements?’ We began with the most basic. Was it to be a burial or a cremation? On hearing it was the latter, he recommended Mortlake for its ‘atmosphere’. I replied that Mortlake was perfectly suitable. What kind of coffin did I prefer – plain wood, or walnut perhaps, or even mahogany? ‘Plain wood,’ I answered. ‘Very practical, Mr Bailey. Very sensible. It’s going to be burnt, after all.’ He cleared his throat and inquired if my ‘late companion’ was religious. He was a lapsed Catholic, I told him. ‘We have plenty of those,’ he said, and chuckled. ‘In that case, will you be requiring a clergyman or priest?’ We were virtually soulmates by now. ‘Good God, no,’ I said. ‘Very sensible, yet again. You’ve saved yourself a hundred and twenty pounds.’
A secular service presented no problems, he assured me. ‘I’m afraid it’s restricted to thirty minutes maximum,’ he added. He suggested that a rehearsal might be in order, given that I intended to read some Jane Austen, play a couple of tapes of Mozart arias, and have a friend address the mourners. I’d already revealed that I’d once been an actor. ‘Timing’s of the essence, Mr Bailey.’
Mr Bailey heeded his advice, and rehearsed the readings from Pride and Prejudice and Persuasion with only Circe to hear them. The funeral director made sure that the first act trio from Così fan tutte and ‘Porgi amor’ from Figaro came in and out on cue, and the publisher who praised David did so with feeling and wit and brevity. My red-faced adviser had proposed that everyone should depart in advance of the coffin’s disappearance. ‘Such an upsetting moment. Sliding away behind those curtains. Much too final.’
After the service, which had been a celebratory affair, my unlikely soulmate took me aside and confessed that the publisher’s speech had moved him deeply. ‘I have to tell you, Mr Bailey, that I too am gay,’ he said in a near-whisper, and then wagged an admonitory finger: ‘Not a word to the staff.’ He was ashamed to be dishonest – but, well, there it was. His guarded confession was the more poignant because I was certain that the people who worked with him were fully aware that he was homosexual. I found, and still find, his innocence beguiling, and his unnecessary discretion both comic and sad.
‘The ashes are in my office, safe and sound,’ he phoned to say. ‘
Come along when you’re ready.’ It was weeks, months, before I was ready. He was as cheerful as ever on the day I called to collect the urn that contained them. He poured me a sherry. ‘Do you remember the joke I made, Mr Bailey?’ He’d made so many jokes, I wasn’t certain which particular one he had in mind. ‘The cancellation joke,’ he reminded me. He proceeded to quote himself, in a fruitier voice than his customarily fruity one: ‘“You’re in luck, Mr Bailey. There’s been a last-minute cancellation”.’ Of course I remembered it. ‘I was testing you,’ he confided. ‘I try it on all my clients. You hesitated, and I knew you wanted to laugh. If you’d reacted differently, I’d have treated you more solemnly.’ I said I was glad he hadn’t; that his jokes, his performance, had been a comfort. I couldn’t imagine him being solemn. ‘It’s well within my range, solemnity,’ he intoned.
I had a novel to finish and, in the immediate period after David’s death, I wrote the closing fifty pages of Gabriel’s Lament in a kind of haze, with Circe often curled about my feet.
The gently courteous Arab, the brisk registrar of births and deaths, the histrionic funeral director will continue to be vivid presences in my life. Each of them was distinctly thoughtful, distinctly solicitous.
‘Your late companion was fortunate in his friends,’ said my soulmate when I went to collect the ashes. ‘A most impressive turnout. He must have been a popular chap.’
‘He was.’
‘Unlike some I could tell you about.’
He told me about a rich old man who had written ‘reams and reams of dire epic verse’. The ‘poet’ had arranged that his service should run for an hour and a half – the time it took the funeral director to read his masterpiece aloud: ‘An appalling piece of doggerel, Mr Bailey. I performed it for what it was worth, which – alas – wasn’t much.’
The chapel at Mortlake was filled to capacity with the old man’s relatives, who listened to the endless doggerel with feigned interest. Some gave up the effort, and fell asleep. ‘There was a woman in the front row snoring.’ They were there in anticipation of the versifier’s will, which was read the same day.
‘Theirs was a wasted journey, Mr Bailey. Not a sausage did he leave them. Not a single solitary sausage. Everything was left to charity.’ He laughed. ‘Let’s toast the Keats that never was with another sherry.’
Tour de Powys
Circe and I spent the long Easter weekend after David’s death on my agent’s farm in Powys, near the Welsh border. The dog was at her happiest as she scampered across the fields at daybreak. I strolled behind her. The ball was forgotten. There were too many interesting smells to sniff out, and so much unknown territory to explore. She often turned and glanced at me impatiently, as if to accuse her sluggish master of being unadventurous. I had the impending funeral on my mind, and the question of what food I should prepare for the mourners. Grief, for the moment, was almost of secondary importance.
Circe chose to imagine that I and my closest friends could be rounded up like sheep. Human ankles were for nipping at. On that first excursion into the countryside, there were real sheep on the horizon, bleating at the approach of a stranger and his dog. To my relief, Circe went nowhere near them. She hurried on, indifferent to their presence and their noise. They were no concern of hers.
On one of those Easter mornings, I saw a man with a shotgun in the immediate distance. He was staring at Circe with keen interest. I realized that he was wondering if she was a fox, so I began to run, yelling her name. He, in turn, must have comprehended that I wasn’t some eccentric with a feral pet and greeted me with an abrupt time of day.
A year later, we stayed with Deborah, her husband Michael and their infant daughter, Jessica, again. On a fine spring afternoon three of us were sitting in front of the farmhouse, enjoying a drink, when Circe suddenly became agitated, her ears cocked, her tail wagging frantically. Within seconds, she darted off down the track that leads to the farm and was soon on the main road. We now caught sight of what she had seen – a team of cyclists, professionals to judge by their high-speed bicycles and the outfits they were wearing, who were facing the challenge of the steep hill ahead. Circe joined them in that endeavour.
Fearing for her safety, Michael and I gave chase in the car. The cyclists had no intention of stopping, and neither had Circe. She ran alongside them, matching their speed. They were breathless when they attained the peak of the hill, getting off their bikes and collapsing in a smiling heap on the grass verge. And Circe, an honoured addition to the team, fell at their feet, gasping like them and in a similar state of exhaustion.
‘That’s some animal you’ve got there,’ one of the cyclists managed to say.
‘Yes,’ I answered politely, though I was seething with fury about the silly and dangerous game they had allowed her to play.
They stroked and patted her upturned belly and told her what a clever girl she was.
She became less boisterous as she got older. She was fifteen when, to my horror and amazement, she reverted to the worrying habit of her giddy youth. We were coming to the end of the morning run in Ravenscourt Park. I saw a cyclist in nearby Paddenswick Road, and so did she. Off she sped, old as she was, as she’d sped long ago, and my heart beat faster at the thought of her being run over. But she and I were lucky, for another dog owner – a woman of few words – was standing at the pedestrian crossing with her two charges. She grabbed hold of Circe with her free left hand and chided her for her bad behaviour. I thanked the woman and apologized for my dog’s recklessness.
That was Circe’s final brush with death. Many more cyclists were to come into her line of vision, but she merely barked at them now. I recalled that afternoon in 1987, and the chase up the hill, and her moments of glory when she reached the peak. Those cyclists had complimented her on her quickness and cleverness, and she had basked in their sincere appreciation, while I could only bless the fates for sparing her once again.
Trial by Jury
In July 1986 I was summoned to do jury service at Acton Crown Court. I took Circe to the park as soon as it opened, dragged her home a little earlier than usual and then set off to be a responsible citizen. During that happy week I sat in on two extraordinary trials, both of which I remember keenly.
The first involved a personable young black man who was stopped for speeding in Oxford Street. When questioned by the two policemen who brought him to a halt, he explained that he taught baseball at a college of further education and that he was late for class. The constables insisted that he open the boot of his car. He did so, and a baseball bat was revealed. Although he had already told them the nature of his work, one of the policemen asked him what he used the bat for. He was astonished, and in his astonishment risked a joke. ‘For hitting people like you,’ he replied with a smile. He was instantly arrested and later charged with being in possession of a dangerous weapon.
The defendant smiled throughout his day-long trial. The policemen appeared, separately, in the witness box. Each said that the other had ordered the man to open the boot, and each announced that he had asked the question that led to the man’s arrest.
The principal of the college spoke glowingly of the teacher’s achievements. His sunny disposition made him immensely popular with the students. He could never resist a joke, and that was the reason he was in court. If he had a failing, it was his inability to curb his tongue.
We, the jury, adjourned to deliberate. Eleven of us, including an eloquently persuasive Indian, agreed that the case was farcical. There was a solitary dissident – a grey-faced woman who kept insisting that if you couldn’t trust the police you couldn’t trust anyone. The fact that the policemen had only brought the young man to trial with their own promotion in mind had to be spelt out to her for a wearying hour or so. If he’d been white, he would have been fined for speeding, his excuse would have been believed, and the boot never opened.
‘You have to have faith in the police,’ she reiterated. ‘I was brought up to have faith in the police.’
On this particular occasion, the Indian observed sweetly, her faith was misplaced. Hadn’t she noticed that the men’s statements differed? The defence counsel had seized on this obvious truth. We had to bring in a unanimous verdict.
The woman, complaining that she wasn’t pleased with what she was doing, finally relented. I was elected to speak for my fellow jurors.
The judge congratulated us on our decision. He accused the police of wasting the court’s time and of humiliating a patently innocent man. He ended by advising the teacher of baseball to refrain from making a joke if he was ever apprehended again. The teacher’s smile was now fulsome.
The second trial I attended was brief and bizarre. The defendant was an elegantly dressed man in his thirties who was arrested on his return to England from America, where he had been working for five years. His case was therefore history. The charge against him was that he and another man had committed an act of gross indecency in the cemetery adjoining Brompton Oratory at three in the morning. It was alleged that he and his partner had indulged in mutual masturbation whilst seated on a tomb. A titter ran through the court when the prosecuting counsel declared that the men had caused grave offence to the public. The man in the dock allowed himself the trace of a smile.
Before our deliberations were over – the Indian wondering precisely who was being offended at three in the morning – we were instructed to return to the courtroom. The man had been advised to plead guilty, as the other man in the case had done, and was consequently fined £50 and cautioned. I thought of the ‘law’s delay’ and the ‘insolence of office’ on my way home to Circe, who would be desperate for exercise.