When the Feast is Finished. Brian Aldiss
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a sadness to see how much less lively she has become in the six months since we left our lovely Woodlands.
The cancer must have been at its destructive secret work, a sapper undermining her being. It is useless to curse oneself for not looking beyond the heart trouble. But one does.
Our visit to Cascais, on the Portuguese coast, was not really a success, kind though our hosts were. This was Portugal’s first international science fiction convention/conference. The occasion was very important for the organisers and they had persuaded us to go.
Go we did, despite many difficulties. We had planned to travel on from Cascais to visit Lisbon for a holiday. Friendly people met us at the airport on the Wednesday. But, on the morning of Sunday the 29th of September, I woke to find Margaret very weepy, quite unlike her usual self. She said she was feeling ill and her heart was overtaxed by heat, standing about and difficult food.
Margaret had never been a moody person. I was alarmed. At once I said that we’d better get back into the cool and the damp, and forget about Lisbon. I immediately cancelled everything, including our stay in the plush Lisbon hotel, and we returned home that evening.
On the following day, I report with relief that
Margaret is fine again – ‘right as rain’. The rain, the cold, the cloud of England, seem to suit her best. No standing about, no having to talk to people.
But she was in truth far from fine, as she recorded.
I woke feeling bad, fast heartbeats, very dry nose and eyes, cold feet. Told B who said we should go home today. I burst into tears … instead of keeping a stiff upper lip as usual. I had not admitted even to myself what an ordeal these events often are, esp. in heat and having to stand around. B so busy and preoccupied.
This entry made sad reading after her death. I could but curse myself for seeming neglectful. Yet only two pages earlier, in Margaret’s neat little A6 diary, I read of a happier mood.
Bus trip to Sintra. Went along the coast to westernmost point of Europe, Cabo de Roca. So dramatic, with Atlantic waves pouring in, crashing on great cliffs.
Sintra Palace was closed. It’s a pretty rundown hilltop town, being restored, full of souvenirs. Good company on the bus … Into town for a meal on our own … Rice and seafood, quite good, ‘flan’ even better. Then to theatre where B gave his talk to a good audience. Audience laughed immoderately at B’s remarks. He was funny and good, but not that funny! Projected slides of his book covers looked good. Then twenty or so of us took over the centre of a tiny street and sat talking until 12.30. Still warm at midnight.
That was on the Friday. What was plaguing her on the Sunday must have been the undiscovered cancer and not solely the heart problem, to which we ascribed her sorrows. There was no reason to believe that something worse assailed her. Perhaps we might have been more suspicious had we been better versed in medical matters.
And she took care in that little notebook to worry about my trivial problems. She writes on the Thursday (26th of September):
Poor B, with bad legs, took ¾ pain-killer last night, which gave him a good sleep but left him very blotto this morning. (We had been to hospital and doctor about his health on Tuesday – he is nervous about his stomach and how he will cope – doctor assures us there are no life-threatening troubles, though.) I also suffer from my heart condition and lack of resistance to heat and cold.
We both became ill once we were established at home. I generally got up first, went downstairs, fed the cats, and took us up mugs of tea to begin the day. On 21st of October, I felt bad enough to remain in bed.
Lovely still sunny morning. Being in the bedroom, I’m privileged to see Margaret dress and ‘do her face’ – the morning ritual. A modest and charming ritual, sitting at her modest dressing table.
Hers is about the pleasantest face I ever set eyes on, as she is certainly the pleasantest woman. She works hard: the shopping, the cooking, the house-cleaning, much gardening, our financial affairs; and just now the seemingly endless retyping of Twinkling.
This week, she’ll drive down to Bath to see Chagie and will buy herself a large new loom.
All her activity, her travelling, her weaving, hardly indicated an invalid. Nor did she regard herself as an invalid.
I may have taken the many things Margaret so cheerfully did for granted, but I never took her for granted. I had had a taste of worse things, and rejoiced in my good fortune and her delightful presence. On the 22nd of October:
Ill or not, our days here pass pleasantly with the two of us together. They could continue thus for many a year and I’d be happy. We had the additional pleasure this afternoon of Wendy’s company for a couple of hours. She sat on the chaise longue in our (new) study, and chatted amiably of her plans, which include buying a seaside cottage at Morthoe.
While Wendy was here, Harry [Harrison] rang. He attended the memorial service for Kingsley [Amis], to which I was too under the weather to go. There he had the pleasure of seeing Hilly and Jane exchange a kiss.
With Margaret’s aid, I despatched the final version of The Twinkling of an Eye to HarperCollins, then my publisher. Life went on light-heartedly. Margaret enjoyed the literary life, with its struggles and excitements. She had perhaps had early preparation for it, since a book had been dedicated to her when she was a small girl. This sweet little book, of which ours must be one of the few surviving copies, is Bubble and the Circus, written and illustrated by Josephine Hatcher. It was published by the now defunct firm of Hollis & Carter, in 1946.
Margaret and I had known each other for forty years, and had been married for most of them. We had not always been as absorbed in one another as was later the case. We had both taken other lovers, brief joys that are followed by the storms of jealousy and fury which such events generally bring. Although I am not without regret that we behaved then as we did, I can see it as an episode in our maturing process. When we were reconciled, we became more dear to one another.
We drove down to Brighton, where Tim worked, met up with him, and dined with Marina Warner and a jolly crowd after the opening of Marina’s exhibition, ‘The Inner Eye’, in which I took part. Meanwhile, I began to make plans for White Mars with Sir Roger Penrose. Roger and his wife Vanessa had bought Woodlands, whereupon we became friends.
On the 11th of December in that year, 1996, Moggins and I celebrated our thirty-first wedding anniversary. We had no inkling that it was to be our last anniversary. Nevertheless, there were discomforts.
My dear faithful and true wife and I hug and kiss each other, and rejoice. We warmly remember that happy day of our marriage, and the celebrations in the Randolph Hotel with all our charming friends present. Plus the flight to Paris after, and the plush double bed in the Scandic Hotel.
But – Margaret’s celebrating with an hour in Stephen Henderson’s [our dentist’s] chair. She has to have a crown removed. Because of her heart condition, she had to take penicillin first thing. I shall go and collect her in half an hour.
By the 17th of December I report Margaret as being ‘almost over her little dental op’. Christmas was on the way. She was cooking mince-pies, and preparing to serve Christmas dinner for the whole family, as she had been doing for many a year.
Malcolm Edwards, my editor at HarperCollins, had by now had the typescript of Twinkling for two weeks, and uttered no word on the subject. My American literary agent, Robin Straus, phoned though, full of praise and excitement regarding Twinkling – ‘A unique book – I know of no autobiography like it’, etc., etc. Good.
Margaret and I gave each other a Macintosh Performa 6400/200 for Christmas. We had not yet emerged from our Mad About Computers stage.
On the last day of 1996, my spirits seem to have been low, to judge by the diary entry.
A low grade year. Margaret’s sad heart problem, the long drag of having this building enlarged, the drab political situation, the sorrow of BSE and