When the Feast is Finished. Brian Aldiss
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I concealed my anxiety. Afterwards she appeared smiling and calm as usual.
Following Mr Hart’s advice, we’ll now be careful about diet, to protect the tender walls of that tender heart. No more cream teas, jam roly-polys, pork pies, etc. … A part of me regards myself as indestructible; another part admits the truth – about both of us …
One cannot resist searching through old notebooks for indications one ignored, warnings to which a blind eye had been turned. For instance, during that last summer in Woodlands, on Boars Hill, Margaret was under the weather. Hardly surprising. It was the third hottest August since records began.
‘My dear wife wilts’, says the diary on the 3rd.
On the 10th, she went into the Acland, Oxford’s private hospital, for a colonoscopy, under Mr Kettlewell. When I went in to see her, she was enjoying a light meal and was in bonny spirits. She always made so little fuss. On the following day, when she was back home, I took her her breakfast in bed, and she had a gentle day. On the 16th, we drove up to Stratford-on-Avon to see Vanbrugh’s The Relapse or ‘Virtue in Danger’, and laughed heartily.
During this hectic time, we were endeavouring to sell our Boars Hill house and to prepare the place in Old Headington for human habitation.
And why did we sell up, after eleven happy years on Boars Hill? To leave was originally Margaret’s idea. She explained that we were growing older and feebler. Her diaries of the time indicate that I was rather unwell and working under stress, at least in her opinion. There were many old Boars Hill couples living deteriorating lives in deteriorating housing; she did not wish us to follow the same downward path. She was finding the tending of her long flowerbed beyond her. Soon the pruning and lopping of borders would be beyond me.
Slowly I warmed to her plan. One of the few shortcomings of Boars Hill was that one could walk nowhere. Not down into Wootton or, in the other direction, down to the Abingdon Road and Oxford. We had to use the car to get anywhere. After much searching, we bought the house in Old Headington and began slowly to clear out the possessions we had accumulated on the hill.
The move proved to be an excellent decision. Did Margaret have an intuition of the illness that was to kill her in two years’ time? I am convinced this was the case, at least in part. If not, then it was Margaret’s good sense. We needed to live in a simpler place.
Margaret disputed the role of intuition in our move into town. However, understandings arise from our bodies and seep into consciousness by devious paths which science may one day come to understand. During our last months in Woodlands and our first few months in Hambleden, I developed a phobia of finding a snake about the house, more particularly the all-devouring anaconda. I tried to turn this fear into a joke; Margaret was not happy with it. The all-devouring one was lurking in the dark. Probably she was already in its coils.
Yet we remained happy and carefree, as far as that was possible. We were of that fortunate few for whom being happy had become a habit. On my birthday in 1996, the 18th of August, Margaret’s present to me was the newly published two-volume set of Claire Clairmont’s Correspondence. She read the letters with me.
We had received an offer for the purchase of Woodlands, and we threw a party – a farewell party it was to be. A band of musicians calling themselves ‘The Skeleton Crew’ played baroque music until late. Our local caterers, the Huxters, served gorgeous food, and sixty of our friends attended. Margaret was a wonderful hostess, looking slender and lovely. No one could suspect there was anything troubling her.
During the evening, I persuaded her to stroll with me downhill to the bottom of the rear lawn. We looked back. There in the dark, like a ship, sailed our house, its windows alight, full of family, friends, food, drink and happiness: something we had conjured up together.
And when the guests had departed, Tim and I sat peacefully together and finished up what remained of an excellent Brie.
At the end of that memorable August, Margaret and I were in Glasgow, celebrating with the Fifty-Third World SF Convention, which took over the entire vast SECC building. Something like twelve thousand people had subscribed to the event. This was the great family of SF fandom’s annual festivity. Among those present from overseas were Sam and Ingrid Lundwall from Sweden and Marcial Souto from Argentina. Margaret and Ingrid, good friends, went shopping together in Glasgow.
Marcial had once worked with Jorges Luis Borges. We’ve known each other since 1970. Conversations with him, as with Sam, rank among the pleasures of this life.
In this crowded time, Margaret remained sunny and optimistic, as my diary reports.
Monday 9th October 1995. The week when we MUST leave Woodlands. The removal vans come tomorrow. M and I have ordered our lives well and sensibly of recent years, thanks to her organising skills; we often feel this move to Headington is our big mistake. Jock MacGregor [our decorator] reassured her yesterday: ‘In a week or two you’ll have a lovely house.’
The whole matter is occasioned by our growing old and my books failing to find an audience. Best thing is to accept the situation and get on with it: as Margaret valiantly does.
So we left Woodlands and moved into the Old Headington house, in which our plumber was busy laying over four hundred metres of new copper piping.
Standing in the front of No. 39, lo and behold!, I suddenly espied both of my beautiful daughters strolling along, coming to see how we were getting on!
Both Wendy and Charlotte were as ever very close to us, and to each other. How fortunate we have been that our four children, Clive and Wendy (Margaret’s step-children) Tim and Charlotte, are peaceable people, and that we all enjoy each other’s company. One expression of our closeness was the family’s fondness of nicknames. Margaret called Tim Booj, while she herself was called Chris by Clive, Wendy and Wendy’s husband, Mark. Charlotte’s name had somehow become shortened to Chagie. And at one time, my sister Betty was known as Big Aunt Rose …
It’s a wonder that we survived the housing upheaval. We were both exhausted. Margaret was hardly able to take the rest periods recommended. The cardiologist’s analysis of Margaret’s condition was that the enlarged left ventricle of her heart was causing her shortness of breath. There was also some bacterial damage to the top part of the aorta. Her blood pressure was high.
It’s very upsetting. But Moggins remains so calm I hardly know how much to be alarmed. We got some prescribed pills from Hornby’s, the Headington pharmacy, during the day.
If one has to become ill, Oxford is an excellent city to do it in. It is well equipped with medical experts and efficient hospitals. We were to find that our new home was conveniently situated for visiting clinics, cardiologists, and those elements of a more ominous regime, oncologists and hospices. But for a while we seemed able to lead a stable life. With the aid of our GP, the heart trouble could be controlled, even improved. Margaret needed more rest; then she would be better.
Of course, rest with builders on the premises is hard to come by. Nor were we particularly expert in the subject of rest.
In 1996, I made six brief trips abroad as usual, and turned down offers of several more. On a few of these expeditions Margaret accompanied me, for instance to Madeira, Spain and Portugal. Unfortunately, she could not come with me on the most memorable visit, to Israel, on the grounds that it would be too hot for her there.
I cannot claim I was particularly well myself; sometimes I travelled because I felt an obligation to do so – although this was not so in the case of Israel. I missed Margaret on that interesting visit – indeed, I missed her as soon as I was on the El Al plane, finding I had no credit cards with me! One of my kind hosts at the Tel Aviv British Council, Mrs Sonia Feldman, trustingly lent me her credit card.
Turning up a journal I kept of the days in Israel, I find my first entry, made on the plane, reads:
I’m alone. M and I were due to make the trip, but she is too frail and unwell. She makes light of her troubles, but it’s worrying; her cardiac weakness remains a problem. She thinks too that dust from the building site (our extension is now well under