Low life

A 20-minute drive through quiet country lanes then suddenly a madcap roundabout and teeming new ring road and finally the hospital car park where I leave the car unlocked and the windows down because nobody in their right mind would want to pinch a car as shabby as this. Up the grassy bank, in through the sliding doors, turn right past the café, left and left again, up two flights of stairs to level one, then a wide sunny corridor with paintings by schoolchildren and mission statements, then left and straight on without deviating as far as the front row of the pews in the hospital chapel, where I stop and kneel. As usual I have the cool silence to myself.

My luck had to run out one of these fine days. Everybody’s does sooner or later. I’ve had a fantastic run — I’ve been lucky all of my life — and shall continue to count myself fortunate. But being suddenly out of luck makes one feel unmasked, which does take a bit of getting used to. Such were the morbid thoughts running through my head as I sat in the eye clinic waiting room, already packed by 8.30, waiting to see Mr Doyle. It was my third visit in two weeks. They’d photographed the interiors of my eyeballs hundreds of times. They’d blown little puffs of air at them. They’d told me to watch the red light until it turns green, then look to the left. But I had yet to see this Mr Doyle.

My grandson Oscar (nine) shares a bedroom with his cousin Lucas (eight) and sits next to him at school. Before this year, for one tragic reason and another, Lucas hadn’t been to school for two years. So Oscar has been mentoring him in mathematics and spelling and before they go to sleep reads to him. (At the moment they’re reading Stig of the Dump.) Last week, on the final day of the school year, Lucas was given the Star Pupil of the Year award. Oscar cried. To reward them for their combined efforts I handed out cash and took them last week to Dartmoor Prison museum, situated within the grimly massive granite walls of the old prison dairy, for a treat. The bloke taking the money was a prison officer and a Scot.

‘So what are your plans?’ said our gentle, civilised Airbnb host over a tray of tea and cake to welcome us into their perfect home. I outlined the highlights of our prospective three-day literary tour. ‘The Augustus John exhibition at the Salisbury museum; the Henry Lamb at Poole; Hardy’s cottage. And if we have time the Barley Mow on the Wimborne Road where Evelyn Waugh wrote Decline and Fall.’ ‘My word, you are a cultured couple,’ he said, half-humorously. ‘Oh, we’re so cultured it’s ridiculous,’ I said. The Augustus John exhibition was wonderful. (So was Salisbury’s museum.

The train standing at platform 1A had no air-conditioning and the heat was stupefying. Latecomers pressing into the carriage reacted to it as to a slap in the face. Those with nothing better to hand fanned themselves with their tickets. The lady seated opposite me mistook my theatrical languor for conviviality. ‘I’ve been in Florence for a week and I’ve never been so hot in my life,’ she said. ‘But I’ve had such a wonderful time in school here learning Italian. Such a beautiful language. You sort of roll it around in your mouth as if you are tasting something delicious, like olive oil or something. And I made such good progress! I’m sure that if I’d done another week I would be fluent almost.

The hotel manager had arranged for me to borrow an Alfa Romeo Spider Duetto two-seater convertible (1982) for the afternoon. And now, after lunch, here it was, as promised, parked on the forecourt. ‘You’re familiar with left-hand drive cars I take it, Mr Clarke?’ she said, a touch apprehensively I thought. ‘I’ve had a Spider,’ I said. ‘Similar to this, but a later, fuel-injected model.’ A true statement — although I was as confounded by it as she was. She handed me the key and a map with a suggested scenic route marked in Biro. I climbed in, fired the thing up, and with a cheery wave, 10,000 exploratory revs and a pip on the horn I set off through the village.

As they say: it all happened so quickly that it wasn’t until afterwards. One minute I was bawling at my sister, the next NHS workers arrived from all directions and removed my mother from her house to a nursing home. It was like the dramatic conclusion to an undercover ‘sting’ operation. They came streaming in through the front door laughing and joking. To avoid doing anything silly or controversial, I removed myself from the scene. While my mother was being carried out of her front door, a diplomatic mission was dispatched to offer me a confection of emollient explanations. This consisted of a community nurse and an occupational therapist. They were not women to argue from first principles. Legality was all that mattered.

The weather forecast was rain, torrential, all day, so I took my anorak. In the hospital car park it was spitting, nothing much, so I left it in the car. My appointment was scheduled for 1.30. Before my name was called, I had time to browse the waiting-room bookshelf (paperbacks 50p, hardbacks £1). There, in the red livery of the Wordsworth Military Library, was Rorke’s Drift: A Victorian Epic by Michael Glover. I bore it back to my high-backed chair and started to read. When a nurse came in and called my name, I had to come all the way back from South Africa in 1879 to answer it. This appointment was to receive the results of a scan. I was shown to an examination room and a minute later in she sailed, my lovely oncologist.

I walked in out of the rain, dripping, and sat down beside the fire on the primitive high-backed settle. ‘Is this OK?’ I said to the guardian. ‘Yes, you’re allowed to sit on the furniture, none of which is original,’ she said. She was a small woman in her fifties, radiating an attractive combination of reverence and humility. The log fire smoking quietly in the fireplace was a wonderful, essential touch, I thought. The slow tick of a grandfather clock and the rain squalling against the windows emphasised the silence of the cottage parlour. The cob walls, painted the colour of diluted pig’s blood, were a yard thick. There was also a dresser, an oil lamp, some plain old wooden chairs and a small round table. On the table was a violin.

As usual I go downstairs at five o’clock in the morning and into the dining room, which now serves as my mother’s bedroom. She generally sleeps fitfully until about four, punctuated by visits to the lavatory, the door of which is beside her bed, on the side she sleeps on. These visits are undertaken with the deliberation and the creeping slowness of a two-toed sloth. One wonders how she manages it. After she wakes she lies there, praying for everybody, I expect, until this zombie appears at five. I help her on with her dressing gown and day socks and assist her on the ten-yard expedition from the bed to the recliner chair in the adjoining sitting room. Finally I draw back the curtains on the surreal, pink-tinged clouds of another June dawn. But this morning the bed is empty.

Of course the varifocals I bought online were a waste of money. When they came in the post and I first put them on I could see the world up to and including my fingernails but anything beyond was a blur. I should have guessed that emailing a photo of my face with a credit card fixed to my forehead, as directed, was too rough and ready a guide to the correct measurements. If the glasses had been right it would have been more of a surprise. Being poor is always more expensive in the long run. I’d have been better off spending the £200 on some class As and a hat and going to a party. These were the second pair of glasses I’d bought online whose only possible use was as an executioner’s blindfold.

Considerate to the last, she had her order of service arranged in her mind. I sat close with my notebook. She didn’t want a eulogy, she said, but she is definite about the hymns and readings. To kick off, she would like that old Russian roof-raiser ‘How Great Thou Art’. Then, ‘Lord, For the Years Your Love Has  Kept and Guided’. And for the big finish: ‘In Christ Alone (My Hope Is Found)’. If there is to be a psalm, she would like number 121: ‘I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills, from whence cometh my help.’ Lately there’s been a funeral a week in the village church. Currently on the mantelpiece are three funeral order of service booklets commemorating deceased neighbours.

The mental fruit of yet another sleepless night was that my mother was determined to arrange her funeral as quickly and as cheaply as possible. A friend had told her, she said, that the Co-op do a version called a ‘Simple Funeral’ for less than £2,000. Please would I look it up on the internet for her? The state-funded carer had been in and out already and she was washed and dressed and sitting in her electric recliner, wet hair combed back like a teddy boy, and in her eyes you could see her will burning brightly. I, on the other hand, had slept long and profoundly and was not yet fully returned from a very long way away. I was still in my pyjamas.

So far this latest Mistral wind has blown for two and a half weeks. The Mistral is said to blow for three hours, three days or three weeks. It is also said to unhinge people. I had just arrived back in France when it started, and lately I have felt distinctly homicidal for no particular reason. Every morning, too, I’ve congratulated God for not making me responsible for my dreams. Since this wind got up, I’ve been out to lunch once and twice to dinner parties. The lunch was jolly and I was perfectly sane. After it, the foreign correspondent stood up, drained his glass, said: ‘Don’t you just love the smell of tear gas!’ and headed off to Paris to report to camera from the midst of a predicted May Day riot. The first of the two dinner parties was at our place.

Santino was unusually short in the leg and, in his mid-twenties, was already rapidly losing his hair. He had recently come from Argentina to France to train as a tourist guide. He was earnest about his vocation and hoped one day, he told us, to become a guide specialising in Unesco World Heritage sites. To this end he was studying every night into the small hours, cramming into his head as much French history — and whatever else guides have to learn to pass the rigorous guiding exams — as he possibly could. When Santino smiled, his eyes closed automatically and the effect was endearing until one saw the abjectness.

‘How’s your day going?’ said the taxi driver as he snapped his knob into drive. If I caught the plane it would be a miracle. Angry with myself for failing once again adequately to plan a simple journey to Bristol airport, I decided to tell him. ‘Well, my mother is dying of cancer, my brother’s cancer has spread to his hip, and mine is showing signs of waking up. I’ve just had a tax bill for 30 grand, I’ve had three hours’ sleep in the last 36, and unless you get me to the airport in 40 minutes I’m going to miss a plane. Otherwise everything is tickety-boo.’ ‘So where are you off to today?’ he said, sincerely envious. ‘France,’ I said. ‘France!’ he exclaimed. ‘Do you like wine?

We drove north and parked in the designated car park with a quarter of an hour to spare before the minibus was due to pick us up and take us to our holiday destination. On it would be up to six strangers with whom we were to spend a week in the confined space of a boat. Marvellous. Happy days. There was only one slight snag. Catriona and I would be enjoying the holiday for free in exchange for my writing an article about it. And the company sponsoring us had asked me not to tell the others, who were paying a great deal of money, about this arrangement. We had chosen a spot next to a tricolour-decked modernist monument to General de Gaulle and sat with our luggage on the monument’s plinth in the sunshine and waited.

In the Easter holidays, plus two school days, for which his mother will be fined or, as a serial offender, she will be summoned to appear in court (not that she’s bothered, bless her), I took grandson Oscar to Provence for a week. The flights cost us nothing because a neighbour passed on his air miles to us, plus an upgrade to Club Europe, which is business class. Grandad was excited about the upgrade because it would enable Oscar to see how the other half lived, and perhaps make his own judgment about whether a slightly wider seat on a plane was worth trying harder at school for. The night before the flight we stayed at a hotel. ‘Why aren’t you at school?’ said the receptionist to Oscar. Our Club Europe tickets entitled us to use the business lounge.