Then it began raining. The clouds had been thickening steadily since Colette had fallen asleep. The temperature had dropped, and now little bursts of light rain were beginning to fall. Still Aldous couldn’t wake his wife, or elicit from her anything more than a brief opening of the eyes, a murmured ‘go away, let me sleep’, or smile. The rain became heavier. Aldous had to pick his wife up (how light she was), and carry her over to the shelter of the trees. He put her down on a dry bed of golden moss, out of the rain, and looked back at the site of their picnic, a few yards away. The wine bottle was still there, and the remains of the pie in its foil dish, the bags and other paraphernalia. He was about to go and gather them up when he noticed large drips of water falling on Colette, and the volume of the rain increase from a mild hiss to a gravelly roar. He picked Colette up again and carried her through the woods.
He managed to carry her all the way back to the car, although he had to put her down and rest several times. She woke once, and laughed at him, before falling back asleep.
No one was around to see him carry his wife over the stile and across the lane to the car, or see the way she flopped and drooped when he propped her against the side of the car while he searched for the keys, though it was with great relief that he finally settled her in her seat. They were both sopping wet.
Colette didn’t wake on the journey home, though by the time they pulled up outside the house, she was conscious, and looking dreamily about her.
‘Are you alright now?’ Aldous said, ‘are you going to wake up?’
Colette nodded and she managed to walk into the house slowly, but once inside dropped into her armchair and, yawning deeply, fell asleep again.
Aldous unfolded the bed settee and made the bed for her. He carried her into the front room and laid her down to sleep there. She didn’t wake up.
Colette didn’t wake up the next day, not properly. She would wake enough to open her eyes, acknowledge her surroundings, drink some water, but she was asleep again within a few minutes. She said only odd words ‘hallo’, ‘thankyou’, ‘what time is it?’.
It wasn’t until Juliette came round on the second day that Aldous was pursuaded to call a doctor.
Dr Low suggested Colette was suffering from anaemia, and prescribed iron tablets.
‘I told you it was nothing to worry about,’ said Aldous triumphantly to his daughter, ‘just low energy. She’ll soon be fine.’
Juliette wasn’t convinced.
‘She’s not just tired,’ she said, ‘she looks to me like she’s wasting away.’
They tried the iron tablets. They seemed to bring Colette to consciousness for longer spells, though she wouldn’t get out of bed.
Colette had trouble climbing the stairs to the toilet. She insisted that she take up residence of the front bedroom, recently vacated by Juliette and Boris, but still bearing their traces. The coordinated decoration, the screen by the old sink, the carpet.
She had been a little hurt when Juliette and Boris had announced their plan to leave, having taken out a mortgage on an upstairs flat near The Lemon Tree. After all the effort they’d spent on transforming Janus’s old room it seemed rather a waste. But she was glad of the welcoming space they’d left.
‘It’s such a cosy room now,’ said Colette sleepily, ‘such a cosy room.’
When, after a week, Colette had shown no sign of improvement, Juliette called her own doctor. He recommended that she go into hospital.
So Colette spent a week in Hope Ward. The hospital took lots of blood from Colette, and conducted lots of tests. They tested so many things that they seemed to lose the thread of what they were looking for, it seemed to Aldous. Whenever he asked what was the matter with her, the doctors said they were waiting for the results of some tests, or if they’d had results, these results were dependent on other tests. After a week Aldous was no clearer on what was wrong with his wife.
In hospital she seemed to improve. She was sitting up and talking.
‘They’ve been telling me off about my drinking,’ she said, in an amused, almost pleased way. She seemed pleased that they were interested enough to notice.
Colette had stopped drinking. She had also stopped taking sleeping pills.
When she came home from hospital, she was back to her normal self for a few days, but the tiredness gradually came back. She had to retire to bed again and this time she seemed to fall into a deeper state of weakness than before.
She remained in bed for nearly a month. Because she had been in hospital, Aldous felt that the medical route had been followed to a dead end. They either had forgotten about her or had decided there was nothing that could be done.
Aldous, in the meantime, was taking on a full-time nursing role. He had to do everything in the house, the shopping, cooking, washing, cleaning as well as tending to his wife’s needs. When he phoned the hospital again, they sent around a home help, a brisk woman full of unwanted advice, who offered to clean the house one afternoon a week. It was Myra who eventually persuaded Aldous to call an ambulance. She hadn’t seen Colette for several weeks, and the physical changes in her appearance were more apparent to her.
‘She looks as though she’s turning into a reptile,’ she said.
Further tests were conducted.
This time the results were more decisive. The doctors declared that Colette was suffering from cirrhosis of the liver. She was put in an intensive care unit where she was fed with drips and her body condition monitored by a little assembly of machines. One of the doctors explained that she had only ten per cent of working liver left.
‘It’s a funny thing about the liver,’ the young doctor explained, ‘it withers away bit by bit, and you don’t notice because it can carry on functioning perfectly, even down to about twelve per cent. But less than that and it suddenly throws in the towel. So, in other words, you get no warning. Half your liver could be dead and you wouldn’t know anything about it. I’m afraid your wife’s down to the very limit of her functioning liver. Her recovery will depend on very careful control of her diet, and how she responds to treatment . . .’
After two days in hospital she suffered a stroke.
She lived for another five days.
During this time Aldous and the children visited frequently. Colette didn’t appear to comprehend anything that was said to her. When she spoke it was to utter incomprehensible, or seemingly meaningless, phrases.
‘Some terrible things have come out of the Matto Grosso,’ she said, quietly, as she twisted and turned. She appeared restlessly energetic in her bed, which had bars around it to stop her falling out. She constantly writhed in her white sheets, and her red hair was large, glossy and ruffled. She didn’t appear to be in any discomfort, just restless. Her hands had been bandaged to stop her scratching her face. She constantly bit at these bandages in an attempt to remove them. Over the days she talked more, though her words still contained no sense. She seemed to recognize Aldous, and would frequently hug him.
‘Orpheus and his lute,’ she said. They were the last words Aldous heard her say. She suffered a second stroke that night, and died.
When the phone call came, Aldous felt a curious sensation of strength. Of emboldenment. He insisted on viewing her body. The children went as well. He was glad they did because she looked beautiful, and in her motionlessness, peaceful. It was as though she was relishing stillness, in the way that athletes do when they’ve finished running, or a mountaineer when he reaches the summit and lays himself flat to bask in thin sunshine.
28
The very day after the funeral, Aldous had to drive James and Marilyn to Heathrow for the flight to Caracas that had been booked weeks before. Having recovered from the wounds of their earlier expedition they were to spend eighteen months doing fieldwork in the Venezuelan rainforest. The general feeling was that the timing was fortunate. It meant Colette’s death could not be dwelt on too much. It meant that everybody had to be focused on continuing life. The whole family made it to the airpor
t to see James and Marilyn off. They didn’t have suitcases, they had rucksacks, one rucksack each, which contained all they needed for a year and a half. Aldous suddenly felt very envious of James, with his whole life contained in a rucksack, whereas he had a whole house to lug around for the rest of his life. The casualness with which young people travelled these days continued to astonish him. At his son’s age Aldous would no more have thought of travelling into the South American jungle than he would have of camping on the moon. The only people who ever went there were either monocled missionaries or explorers in pith helmets. And yet James was wearing nothing more than a faded purple T-shirt and a floppy pair of jeans.
Later he watched the couple as they were consumed, first by the passport control, then by low cloud as their plane climbed. The cloud was of such density Aldous was almost expecting a pluff sound as the plane entered. And then they were gone. Juliette, Boris, Myra, Julian and Aldous stood in a line on top of a breezy multi-storey car park watching an empty patch of grey weather. Already another plane was lined up on the runway to follow it.
It was just Aldous and Myra who came to see Julian off at Victoria Coach Station, only a week later. He had taken a job as a deck cadet aboard the Sealink ferry Vespasian which plied the channel between Dover and Ostende. He would be based at Ostende. Aldous was surprised at how little Myra seemed affected by the occasion. He’d expected a tearful, Brief Encounter-style parting, but instead Myra seemed rather bored. Once Julian had boarded his Dover-bound National Express coach she stood alongside, and they mouthed things through the window at each other, failing completely in their lip-reading, and giving up. Then Julian vanished in a blue cloud of carbon monoxide.
At home, what had seemed fortuitous timing in these distracting departures, now appeared almost crass in their swift following-on from Colette’s death. It made Aldous feel as though he had been ignored in the plans for a mass breakout, and was left pondering over the open trapdoor in the floor. He had a sense of being left behind, of being the only object in his house. He was now the only living thing it contained.
Aldous convinced himself that all his life he’d wanted nothing more than to be alone. That solitude was his preferred state, his ideal condition. How happy Adam should have been, he thought, to have been sole occupier of paradise, to have his own garden to wander in. For the first time in his life Aldous realized he could do anything he wanted without having to consider the ways and desires of other people. So, a week after Julian had left for Belgium, he decided to take a train to Oxford, for no other reason than the fact that he’d never really looked properly around the place, and that he’d always wanted to. The train took little more than half an hour and Aldous walked into the city with great enthusiasm. He bought a little guide book and wandered among the carved quadrangles. He felt a little like Jude Fawley in Jude the Obscure. The towering architecture began to take on something of the appearance of battlements and fortresses. In a museum he came across a blackboard that had been used by Einstein in one of his lectures. Someone had thought to frame it and protect the ephemeral chalk markings with glass. The marks on the board were little white worms dangling in empty space. Incomprehensible equations. Aldous read that the lecture had been concerned with the nature of time.
Afterwards Aldous sat in a small park of ornamental willows and wept. He realized he now had more time than he knew what to do with. More time than he could ever want. He was healthy. He was sixty-seven. He had no job, no wife, no children, no mortgage, no pets, and perhaps a good ten years of active life left, perhaps fifteen, perhaps twenty. Those years spread before him with a vastness such as the early palaeontologists must have recognized when they first realized that the Earth was much older than the Bible had told them. Not a few thousand years old, but five billion years. What had the world been doing all that time, what species had risen and fallen, what ages had passed? And in the future, the pathway of time stretched further than the human race could ever walk. More time than humanity could ever fill. No matter how long the human race lasted, it would only ever be a flicker in the life of the universe, a twitch of an eyelid.
When he got home he found a letter for him on the mat. It was his new bus pass. A free bus pass. The GLC had recently announced free travel on London Transport for all old age pensioners.
At first Aldous used the bus pass as a means of escape. He could ride the red buses all day and not have to sit at home in an empty house. He could spend a whole day on the Circle Line going round and round and round. He descended the escalators and travelled the tunnels, he rode the red buses as far as they would take him, to all the termini, to all the depots. He wanted to feel, as he did so, a part of the metabolism of the living organism that was a great city, whose streets and museums and galleries, whose pubs and cafés and theatres and lights and colours and people were all waiting to be explored.
But it didn’t work. Somehow the city would not yield itself to him. Like the parapets and battlements of Oxford, it seemed shut against him. Closed, withdrawn, impenetrable.
Janus Brian kept coming to Aldous’s mind. He had watched a man go through the process of losing his wife, of becoming a widower. He had watched him crumble and disintegrate. But Aldous was determined he wasn’t going to be like that. He wasn’t going to go down that road. But at the same time Aldous found himself wandering down that very same road – Leicester Avenue, where Janus Brian had lived before moving to High Wycombe, the cul-de-sac where no one ever walked unless they lived there, or knew someone who lived there. Aldous walked the gently sloping road, deepening between houses, the bright front gardens that became steeper and steeper, until the houses were high in the air, like castles on mounds, behind stepped front gardens brilliant with lavender.
Outside Janus Brian’s old house he stopped. Structurally it was the same building, the same garden, yet in every other way it was different. The front garden had been turned over, the old honesty bush had gone, and the carefully constructed rockery had been dismantled. Rockeries were old fashioned now. The new garden was full of small pine trees. The window frames of the house had been replaced. There seemed to be a new roof, Aldous couldn’t be sure. But there was a general sense of smartness about it. There were lavish-looking curtains in the window tied up in fussy bunches. Upstairs the small front bedroom displayed evidence of children. A mobile hanging, a teddy bear propped on a sill and watching crookedly through the glass. They were living properly, the new people in this house. They knew what they were supposed to do. They knew what to expect and what was expected of them.
And so did everyone else in Leicester Avenue. The road was a series of repeated statements, colourfully expressed in flowers and paintwork, in cars and stained glass, with only minor variations. Hardly variations at all. If he had any sense, Aldous thought, he should go home now and make the same statement, tear down that confusion in his front garden, fell the acacia, slaughter the pyracantha, plant a lavender bush and some ornamental pines.
He walked all afternoon through the streets that contained these gardens, more gardens than he could have dreamt of. Has no one realized it before, he thought, that if all the gardens of London could be fitted together and their fences removed we would have more garden than buildings. Roses and tulips and saxifrage and lobelias and spindthrift and monkey-puzzle trees, a whole county of them. More flowers than we have a right to enjoy. More trees. More lawns. Another street of gardens. Another avenue of lavender. All on display. All saying we are here and we are doing fine. Aldous’s mind was drifting into an immense garden that was ranged before him in a hostile manner. He swung his fists at a laurel bush, he punched a camellia in its bright pink face. He kicked the heads off roses and fell into a tulip bed where he rolled in the flowers, kicking like a baby.
‘It’s Mr Jones isn’t it?’
Aldous looked up and saw someone he vaguely recognized. A bulky, unshaven man wearing a sort of sailor’s cap.
‘That’s not your garden is it?’
Looking ar
ound him, Aldous slowly became aware of his situation. He saw he was sitting in the flower-bed of a front garden. He looked at his hands, they were fists gripping bunches of tulips. Now he realized what that creaking, popping sound had been. The stretching and snapping of tulip stalks.
‘Bit hungry are we?’
The fat man was looking faintly amused. Then Aldous noticed the taste in his mouth. A bitter, sharp taste. There was something in there. He dropped the tulips from one of his fists and brought the hand to his mouth. There was something long and floppy protruding. He gently extracted it, carefully, so as not to dislodge his palate which was slightly entangled with it. He saw the thing. A tulip with a long stalk. A shiny strand of Aldous’s own saliva clung to it.
‘Good job no one’s in,’ the fat man said. Aldous looked over his shoulder and saw a house he didn’t recognize. One of the tall, older houses with a wooden front veranda that you found in older parts of the district. There was a grey stillness in the windows indicating the house was empty. Aldous could not remember how he had entered this garden.
‘How’s the bath? Holding up?’
Again Aldous looked around him, as if trying once and for all to get the hang of his situation, sitting squarely on his bottom, his legs stretched out straight before him, a havoc of torn and tangled flowers all around him, green tulip-stalk juice dribbling down his chin, the shreds of tulips in one fist. Yes, it was rather like having a bath. What a clever thing to think – that he was having a bath. Aldous looked closer at the man. He was a dirty man. Grimy, greasy, like a coal miner, which made the white paper bag he was holding in the crook of his arm seem all the whiter. Eventually Aldous placed him. It was Butcher, the plumber who had installed their new bathroom.
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