When the Feast is Finished. Brian Aldiss
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BRIAN ALDISS
With Margaret Aldiss
When the Feast is Finished
A memoir of Love and Bereavement
HarperVoyager
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
This ebook first published in Great Britain by HarperVoyager in 2015
Copyright © Brian Aldiss 2015
Cover layout design © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2015
Cover photograph © Shutterstock.com
Brian Aldiss asserts the moral right to
be identified as the author of this work.
A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.
Source ISBN: 978-0-00-748260-3
Ebook Edition © July 2015 ISBN: 978-0-00-748261-0
Version: 2015-07-01
To Alison
Who made my life habitable
after the feast was finished –
with much gratitude
In loving memory of my wife,
Margaret Christie Manson Aldisss
I cried for madder music and for stronger wine,
But when the feast is finished and the lamps expire,
There falls thy shadow, Cynara! the night is thine;
And I am desolate and sick of an old passion,
Yea, hungry for the lips of my desire:
I have been faithful to thee, Cynara! in my fashion.
ERNEST DOWSON
Contents
We must all be grateful to Brian Aldiss for his courage and determination in writing this fine book about the terminal illness of his wife, Margaret, who claimed she was not ‘important’ enough for such attention. In doing so, he has given us a portrait of a remarkable woman and a remarkable marriage; he has also produced the best day-to-day, personal account of a terminal illness I have ever read.
Anyone who has worked with the dying will instantly recognise the authenticity of this account, which is particularly valuable to medical professionals in its report of the first-rate hospice care provided by the Sir Michael Sobell House, Oxford. For this reason alone, the book should be read by every hospice worker and all medical and nursing students and practitioners.
For the general reader, the extraordinary honesty of the book makes it compelling reading. Brian Aldiss is an excellent writer and he writes as life really is: raw, contradictory, repetitive, bright at one moment, unbearable