Met Percy on the street in front of the butcher’s, his watery eyes in the lean face set somewhere in space. Told me he’d have to go into hospital for tests. I dropped in on Rose with a plate of absolutely indigestible ‘Black Walnut flavored’ cupcakes from a Betty Crocker mix Mrs S had dug out of her closet in the kitchen (‘George and I never eat cakes and pies’) and which seemed suspiciously ancient, but thought the sugary stuff would appeal to Percy, who ate a pound of jellybabies a week. Rang once, twice. A suspicious delay. Rose came to the door still shaking with tears. Frieda ran down from our gate and came in with me. I found myself saying ‘Take it easy, love’, heartening nothings. ‘I’m so lonely‚’ Rose wailed. Percy had gone into hospital Sunday. It was last Tuesday. ‘I know I’ve got the telly and things to do, look, I’ve just done a big washing, but you get so used to having them around the house.’ She burst into fresh tears. I put my arms around her, gave her a hug. ‘I’ve hardly eaten anything today, look, I’m writing Perce a letter….’ She sniffed, showed a scrawled pencil message on the kitchen table. I ordered her to make tea, told her to come up for tea anytime. She wiped her face, peculiarly blanked out by her bare sorrows. Frieda fiddled with small ornaments, climbed the step in the kitchen and exclaimed over the birds. I left, in a hurry, to catch Marjorie S who was coming to tea after her London weekend.
Thursday, Feb. 15:
Dropped by to see Rose and ask her if she could come to dinner this weekend. Had a lamb leg. Wanted to be kind, return the roast beef and gravy dinner she brought up when I had the baby a month ago, and the white knitted suit. Her vagueness. She retold the story of the Doctor and Percy’s eye. Flew on: how Percy had called up on the phone, asked for a sweater—he sat out on the balcony, had a nice room with only one other man. She was going to get the sweater in Exeter Friday, the G’s were driving her to visit him Saturday. I asked her to dinner Sunday. She paused, looked vague, didn’t know if she was going (‘supposed to go’) to dinner at the G’s Sunday, couldn’t afford to let them down, she depended on them for her rides to Percy (she drives, but not their own present car, it’s too big). I told her a bit dryly that maybe she could find out and let me know. Aware of my impossibility as charitable worker—take my bloody offer and be grateful. She spoke of Ted’s driving her to Percy Tuesday. I a bit dubious—what had he said? How far was the hospital from Exeter? She looked miffed—I said Ted had a dentist appointment; when were the hospital hours. Two to four. Well, would that give him time to shop and do errands and go to the dentist? I knew perfectly well Ted planned to go fishing early in the day and had no doubt thought he could drop her in the environs of the hospital for the day. She said she had no way of getting there (it being an intricate route). Her flightiness. Ted said he had told her he would drop her at Newton Abbot where he had understood she could get a bus to the hospital. Her translation of this into his spending the day driving her and waiting for her. I told her to let us know if she could come to dinner, thinking she could well think about letting us down, too. Rose, a flighty, fickle gossipy lady with a good enough heart.
Friday, Feb. 16:
A flying visit from Rose. Ted let her in and she came to the playroom where we were typing opposite each other in piles of sprawled paper over the dull pewter pot of steaming tea. ‘My isn’t it lovely and warm.’ We urged her to have a cup of tea. She sat in the orange striped deck chair. ‘My isn’t it hot.’ She was expecting a phone call from ‘the girls’ (her daughters)? News: they asked for her permission to operate on Percy—her voice quavered. She couldn’t see why, he was in no pain, if you operate like that it throws your system off some way, but ‘if it’ll prolong his life.’ Ted pored hopelessly over maps of Exeter and Bovey Tracy, his day of fishing evaporating in face of the obvious impossibility of meeting Rose halfway. The prospect of Percy in hospital 6 weeks nudging us to sacrifice half a day—her kindnesses, our slowness. So he will take her to and from and forget the fishing. What is this ‘shadow’ or ‘spot’? She visits him Saturday, has promised to find out all. Is it old scars, fresh scars? He is 68. She said she was going to G’s on Sunday, but said she’d come to us on Monday for noon dinner. I have utterly forgot to describe what she wore: must train myself better, from head to toe.
Feb. 21:
Popped in on Rose, with Frieda, to get my application for Family Allowance witnessed. She and her daughter down from London at dinner at 1. A handsome, lean, girl with black short hair, a racing-horse body, a sharp nose and chin. Came in to boss mother, tell her how to sign form. Rose Emma B, Mrs in parenthesis. Blue eyeshadow from train trip down. Percy operated on, to be operated on that night. Dropped by the next night, Feb. 22, for news—he had had part of his lung taken out, was resting comfortably. What was it? They didn’t know (!), would find out Saturday when they went to visit him. They didn’t want Rose to come visit him the first day. What was it? Betty: ‘Excuse me, I have a boil on my nose.’ The TV set blaring. Frieda cried, startled. Then fascinated. A closeup of a dumptruck emptying rocks. ‘Ohhh.’
April 17:
A terrible thumping on our door about 2 o’clock. Ted and Frieda and I were eating lunch in the kitchen. Do you suppose that’s the mail? I asked, thinking Ted might have won some fabulous prize. My words were cut short by Rose’s hysterical voice ‘Ted, Ted, come quick, I think Percy’s had a stroke.’ We flung the door open, and there was Rose B, wild-eyed, clutching her open blouse which showed her slip and gabbling. ‘I’ve called the doctor,’ she cried, turning to rush back to her cottage, Ted after her. I thought I would stay and wait, and then something in me said, no, you must see this, you have never seen a stroke or a dead person. So I went. Percy was in his chair in front of the television set, twitching in a fearsome way, utterly gone off, mumbling over what I thought must be his false teeth, his eyes twitching askew, and shaking as if pierced by weak electric shocks. Rose clutched Ted. I stared from the doorway. The doctor’s car drew immediately up by the hedge at the bottom of the lane. He came very slowly and ceremoniously, head seriously lowered, to the door. Ready to meet death, I suppose. He said Thank you, and we melted back to the house. I have been waiting for this, I said. And Ted said he had, too. I was seized by dry retching at the thought of that horrible mumbling over false teeth. A disgust. Ted and I hugged each other. Frieda looked on peacefully from her lunch, her big blue eyes untroubled and clear. Later, we knocked. The elder Mrs G was there, and the shambling blond William. Rose said Percy was sleeping, and so he was, back to us on the couch. He had had five strokes that day. One more, the doctor said, and he would be gone. Ted went in later. Percy said Hello Ted, and asked after the babies.
He had been walking in the wind among our narcissi in his peajacket a few days before. He had a double rupture from coughing. The sense his morale, his spirit, had gone. That he had given in with this. Everybody, it seems, is going or dying in this cold mean spring.
April 22: Easter Sunday:
Ted and I were picking daffodils in the early evening. Rose had been arguing with Percy, and I had discreetly let my picking lead me to the hedge overlooking the lane in front of their house. I heard Rose saying ‘You’ve got to take it easy, Perce,’ in a cross voice. Then she lowered it. Popped out and stood. Ted had sat Frieda and the baby and me in the daffodils to take pictures. ‘Sylvia,’ she yoohooed across. I did not answer immediately because Ted was taking the picture. ‘Sylvia!’ ‘Just a minute Rose.’ Then she asked if she could buy a bunch of daffodils. Ted and I knew she knew we would not ask for money. Dislike her scrounging to get something out of us. We brought by a bunch. Percy was sitting up in the bed made up in the living-room for him after his stroke like a toothless bird, beaming a cracked smile, his cheeks bright pink like a baby’s. As we went in, a couple in Easter outfits came up, she with a pink hat and a bunch of red, purple and pink anemones, he moustached and serious. She all dovey bosom and coos. They had kept the Fountains pub. Now they lived in The Nest (we’ve come home to roost!), that white cute cottage opposite the Ring
o’ Bells. She told me almost immediately that she was a Catholic and set up the altar in the Town Hall after the Saturday night dances. This meant her staying up late. A young girl waiting for a ride home had come up once and said ‘Pardon me, but I can’t help thinking what a transformation, first it is a dance hall, and then it is all neatened up into a church‚’ or some such. ‘Hubby isn’t Catholic, but hubby waits up and helps me.’ How nice, I said, for hubbies to be so broadminded. Percy kept trying to say things in a vowelly mouthing which Rose translated for us. ‘You can’t raise a nation on fish alone’ was one of the sayings.
April 25:
Stopped for a second to talk to Rose on my way up from bringing a load of daffodils to Elsie for the funeral of Nancy’s mother-in-law this afternoon. We exchanged baby-information: how Nicholas had been crying the past two days and might be teeth-thing (‘Babies are so forward nowadays,’ says Rose) and how Percy had dressed himself and walked round to the back. Wasn’t it wonderful. That’s modern medicine, I said.
May 15:
Heard a whooshing outside the gate as I came into the house with a load of clean laundry, and dashed to the big kitchen window to see who was trespassing. Old Percy, with fixed, mad blue eye and a rusty scythe, was attacking the ‘Japanese creeper’ bambooey plant which had shot up green in the alley by the drive. I was outraged and scared. He had come over, beckoning in his sinister senile way, a few days ago with a bag of fusty jellybabies for Frieda which I immediately threw away, and warned me that this Japanese creeper was overtaking our field and we better cut it down. I told Ted Percy was cutting down the stalks and we flew out. Hey Percy, leave off that, Ted said. I stood disapproving behind him, wiping my hands on a towel. Percy smiled foolishly, mumbled. Thought I was doing you a favor, he says. The scythe clattered out of his shaking hand onto the gravel. He had left a green mash of stalks, almost impossible to detach from the roots after his botched cutting. No sign of Rose. Had intuition she was hiding. She had come over a few days before to buy some daffodils for this hubby-loving Catholic who’d been helping her round the house. I thought I’d let her pay for these in earnest, as it was a gift. Why should I supply free gifts for other people to give? Said a bob a dozen. She looked stunned. Is that too much for you? I asked dryly. It obviously was. She must have expected further largesse. I told her that was what we charged everyone and picked her 3 dozen for her 2 bob while she sat over a cup of tea and minded Frieda. It had been pouring all day and I wore my Wellingtons. Now she has invited me down for a cup of tea today (May 17), and I feel sick about going because Percy makes me sick. I won’t bring Frieda, I think. Rose told Ted yesterday that Percy goes ‘funny’, has his left arm and side hang loose. Says she hopes the doctor will say something about this when Percy goes for the post-operation checkup.
May 17:
Rose had popped out the day before and asked me for tea. I gardened heavily up to the church clock’s striking four. Went down in my brown work-pants. She all dressed up in a blue suit, freshly done dark brown hair (dyed?) and stockings riddled with runs. Raised her eyebrows at my wet knees. Percy not so bad, livelier, but his left hand goes dead and he seems always to be having turns. Saw she had four cups all ready, and herrings on toast, so ran up for Ted. His presence a relief. Rose mouthed about Percy’s condition, very bad, she had to dress him, he took all her time. I had a revulsion at the cold herrings on cold toast, a feeling they took on a corruption from Percy. Discussing the cost of heating, admiring their new gas poker fixed in fireplace, we saw Mrs G, resplendent in black furry cossack cap, dragging the sullen, shaved-bob Miriam, age 3 in July, and exhibiting a flat silver ring and eating, as always and forever, a cellophane tube of colored sweets. I took this occasion to leave and attend to Nicholas (who was screaming on his back in the pram) and Frieda (crying upstairs). The Gs, Herbert odd and sidelong and extinguished, came over, ostensibly to see Nicholas. Mrs G said she thought I looked like Mary G’s baby Joyce. I felt flattered. She thinks Ted looks just like her son William. Resemblances to loved one’s the height of praise. Discussed William’s new milk cow (cost about £75), he future of apples.
June 7:
Well, Percy B is dying. That is the verdict. Poor old Perce, says everybody. Rose comes up almost every day. ‘Te-ed’ she calls in her hysterical, throbbing voice. And Ted comes, from the study, the tennis court, the orchard, wherever, to lift the dying man from his armchair to his bed. He is very quiet afterwards. He is a bag of bones, says Ted. I saw him in one ‘turn’ or ‘do’, lying back on the bed, toothless, all beakiness of nose and chin, eyes sunken as if they were not, shuddering and blinking in a fearful way. And all about the world is gold and green, dripping with laburnum and buttercups and the sweet stench of June. In the cottage the fire is on and it is a dark twilight. The midwife said Percy would go into a coma this weekend and then ‘anything could happen’. The sleeping pills the doctor gives him don’t work, says Rose. He is calling all night: Rose, Rose, Rose. It has happened so quickly. First Rose stopped the doctor in January when I had the baby for a look at Percy’s running eye and a check on his weight-loss. Then he was in hospital for lung X-rays. Then in again for a big surgery for ‘something on the lung’. Did they find him so far gone with cancer they sewed him up again? Then home, walking, improving, but oddly quenched in his brightness and his songs. I found a wrinkled white paper bag of dusty jellybabies in the car yesterday from Rose. Then his five strokes. Now his diminishing.
Everybody has so easily given him up. Rose looks younger and younger. Mary G set her hair yesterday. She felt creepy about it, left baby Joyce with me and came over in between rinses in her frilly apron, dark-haired, white-skinned, with her high, sweet child-voice. Percy looked terrible since she had seen him last, she said. She thought cancer went wild if it was exposed to the air. The general sentiment of townsfolk: doctors just experiment on you in hospital. Once you’re in, if you’re old, you’re a goner.
June 9:
Met the rector coming out of his house-building site across the road. He turned up the lane to the house with me. I could feel his professional gravity coming over him. He read the notice on Rose’s door as I went on up, then went round back. ‘Sylvia!’ I heard Rose hiss behind me, and turned. She was pantomiming the rector’s arrival and making lemon-moues and rejecting motions with one hand, very chipper.
July 2:
Percy B is dead. He died just at midnight, Monday, June 25th, and was buried Friday, June 29th, at 2:30. I find this difficult to believe. It all began with his eye watering, and Rose calling in the doctor, just after the birth of Nicholas. I have written a long poem ‘Berck-Plage’ about it. Very moved. Several terrible glimpses.
Ted had for some days stopped lifting Percy in and out of bed. He could not take his sleeping pills, or swallow. The doctor was starting to give him injections. Morphia? He was in pain when he was conscious. The nurse counted 45 seconds between one breath and another. I decided to see him, I must see him, so went with Ted and Frieda. Rose and the smiling Catholic woman were lying on deck chairs in the yard. Rose’s white face crumpled the minute she tried to speak. ‘The nurse told us to sit out. There’s no more we can do. Isn’t it awful to see him like this?’ See him if you like, she told me. I went in through the quiet kitchen with Ted. The living-room was full, still, hot with some awful translation taking place. Percy lay back on a heap of white pillows in his striped pajamas, his face already passed from humanity, the nose a spiralling fleshless beak in thin air, the chin fallen in a point from it, like an opposite pole, and the mouth like an inverted black heart stamped into the yellow flesh between, a great raucous breath coming and going there with great effort like an awful bird, caught, but about to depart. His eyes showed through partly open lids like dissolved soaps or a clotted pus. I was very sick at this and had a bad migraine over my left eye for the rest of the day. The end, even of so marginal a man, a horror.
When Ted and I drove out to Exeter to catch the London train the following morning, the
stone house was still, dewy and peaceful, the curtains stirring in the dawn air. He is dead, I said. Or he will be dead when we get back. He had died that night, mother said over the phone, when I called her up the following evening.
Went down after his death, the next day, the 27th. Ted had been down in the morning, said Percy was still on the bed, very yellow, his jaw bound and a book, a big brown book, propping it till it stiffened properly. When I went down they had just brought the coffin and put him in. The living-room where he had lain was in an upheaval—bed rolled from the wall, mattresses on the lawn, sheets and pillows washed and airing. He lay in the sewing room, or parlor, in a long coffin of orangey soap-coloured oak with silver handles, the lid propped against the wall at his head with a silver scroll: Percy B, Died June 25, 1962. The raw date a shock. A sheet covered the coffin. Rose lifted it. A pale white beaked face, as of paper, rose under the veil that covered the hole cut in the glued white cloth cover. The mouth looked glued, the face powdered. She quickly put down the sheet. I hugged her. She kissed me and burst into tears. The dark, rotund sister from London with purple eye-circles deplored: They have no hearse, they have only a cart. Friday, the day of the funeral, hot and blue, with theatrical white clouds passing. Ted and I, dressed in hot blacks, passed the church, saw the bowler-hatted men coming out of the gate with a high, spider-wheeled black cart. They are going to call for the corpse, we said; we left a grocery order. The awful feeling of great grins coming onto the face, unstoppable. A relief; this is the hostage for death, we are safe for the time-being. We strolled round the church in the bright heat, the pollarded green limes like green balls, the far hills red, just ploughed, and one stooked with newly glittering wheat. Debated whether to wait out, or go in. Elsie, with her stump-foot was going in. Then Grace, Jim’s wife. We went in. Heard priest meeting corpse at gate, incantating, coming close. Hair-raising. We stood. The flowery casket, nodding and flirting its petals, led up the aisle. The handsome mourners in black down to gloves and handbag, Rose, three daughters including the marble-beautiful model, one husband, Mrs G and the Catholic, smiling, only not smiling, the smile in abeyance, suspended. I hardly heard a word of the service, Mr Lane for once quenched by the grandeur of ceremony, a vessel, as it should be.