My Year Off Page 6

  I have no recollection of being moved to the National Hospital but once I was installed, with my cards and flowers, the room became a kind of home, and I diverted myself with the pleasures of classical music, constructing imaginary lists of Desert Island Discs, of which my favourite went as follows (I’ve always longed for the chance to publish this, though perhaps not in these circumstances):

  1. J. S. Bach: Suites for Unaccompanied Cello 1-6

  2. Mozart: Concerto for Violin and Orchestra No. 5

  3. Schubert: Erlkönig, D 328

  4. Mahler: Das Liede von der Erde

  5. Brahms: A German Requiem

  6. Britten: Serenade for Tenor, Horn and Strings

  7. Beethoven: Sonata No. 17, op. 31 No. 2

  8. Richard Strauss: Four Last Songs (Vier Letzte Lieder)

  It was during these long days, listening weepily to ‘Four Last Songs’ on my Discman, that it began to dawn on me exactly what kind of person she was I’d married, even though at that moment I wasn’t fit to be married to anyone, either physically or emotionally. As I wrote in my diary on 5 August, ‘The truth is: I feel oddly detached from the outside world. My image of myself during these days has been of a beetle or cockroach without a leg, flailing helplessly and covered in dirt, on the brink of extinction.’

  [6]

  Sarah

  10 October 1993 – 5 August 1995

  But wherefore say not I that I am old?

  O, love’s best habit is in seeming trust,

  And age in love loves not to have years told.

  William Shakespeare, Sonnet 138

  Lying in the National Hospital in the long aftermath of my stroke, with the question ‘Why me?’ reverberating through my thoughts, I found myself engulfed in the love of my family and especially of my wife. In my more melancholy moments I felt that the lesson in love I was getting perhaps justified the appalling physical cost.

  As I revolved my life history, searching for clues, sometimes wondering why I had been singled out for this malign punishment (a reaction common to all young stroke-sufferers), I became fascinated by Fate, and her cousin Chance. Of course, there’s good luck and there’s bad luck. When I considered my good fortune I always returned to the inspiring, ironical figure of Sarah. Nothing had been more fortuitous than our first encounter in October 1993, but once that meeting had happened, it seemed an irrevocable, immutable moment in both our personal histories.

  In October 1993, in my capacity as editor-in-chief of Faber & Faber, I was due to go to the annual Book Fair in Frankfurt. To me, this had become a regular autumnal chore and it was the measure of my disaffection with my life at this time that, when I secured a commission from the Guardian to write an article about the business of the fair, I launched into a ferocious attack on the whole institution.

  The Book Fair runs from Wednesday to Sunday, often in a tawny, Indian-summer week at the beginning of October. I remember sitting alone in my hotel room chuckling over my copy, a sustained anti-Frankfurt rant. I was due to file in time for the Saturday edition; in practice, this meant arriving at my conclusions by midday on Thursday, before the Fair was properly under way. So my piece was based less on actual reportage than on an accumulation of frustration in which I described an important bookselling institution as ‘the Jurassic Park of the international literary scene - a glossy, highly organized but empty racket whose chief beneficiaries are the hoteliers, restaurateurs and taxi-drivers of the city’. Shortly after completing this breezy polemic on Wednesday afternoon, I plunged back into the business of the Fair.

  My friend Morgan Entrekin, the publisher of the Grove Atlantic Press, a true Southern gentleman and one of the world’s great party animals, had invited me to join him and ‘some friends’ for dinner. To tell the truth, though I love Morgan dearly, I was not eager to go. From experience, I knew that these ‘friends’ would be gloriously blonde and probably none too bright but, more to the point, so tremendously keen on Morgan that there’d be little room for anyone else. I was not anxious to make up the numbers at the court of King Morgan. On the other hand, I had had no better offer that night, and we were to meet at the bar of the Park Hotel. I did not at this time have much in the way of a permanent relationship. I had been married in my twenties, a marriage that had collapsed in 1984, shortly after my thirtieth birthday. (Its failure, I’m afraid, was largely my fault.) Although it was nearly ten years since my first wife and I had separated, my life remained unsettled. I was still, metaphorically, in trouble.

  For ten years and more the Faber & Faber office had provided me with a kind of alternative family: its authors as my friends and dependants, its staff as my intimates and surrogate siblings, and its chairman, my friend Matthew Evans, as an older and quasi-paternal figure. Now, belatedly, I had reached the point at which I was recognizing the limitations of such an institution, and of such relationships. After a decade of personal irresponsibility I was looking for a change. But that realization did not stop me from relishing one more throw of the dice in the casino of singlehood.

  That night in Frankfurt, I arrived late at the rendezvous. Morgan was already in place, enjoying his role as Mein Host; clearly unattached, he was already attended by two or three very attractive blonde women from the Calvinist parts of northern Europe. I was wondering if I should make my excuses and leave when he took me aside and explained that he’d also invited a journalist from the New York Times, who was covering the book fair for her newspaper, one Sarah Lyall. He suggested vaguely that it might do me some good, as a writer, to have a friend on the Times. Well, I’d met a few American journalists in my time, and I remember thinking, Some chance. Anyway, I decided to stay. A moment or two later, this slight blonde figure came shyly into the bar, and we were introduced. I don’t remember much about our first conversation (Sarah claims now that I simply bragged about having filed my copy with the Guardian) but I do remember feeling tremendously excited and stimulated by her presence, her company, her conversation … Unlike some Americans of my acquaintance, she seemed to have a highly developed sense of humour (I still remember the thrill of finding someone with whom to share a joke about that staple of British journalistic practice, ‘the fact too good to check’), an acute appreciation of irony and a way with words that was, to me, perfectly delightful. We fell into a conversation that seemed to go on all evening, first at dinner and then, because we were all going back to the Frankfurterhof Hotel for post-prandial drinks, during what would have been otherwise an interminable walk through the rainy, confusing streets of Frankfurt. It was then that I asked her why she’d become a journalist and she replied, very frankly, and rather to my surprise, that it was probably fear. (At that moment, she seemed to me the least fearful person I’d met in ages.) When she’d graduated from college, she told me, she’d felt strangely nervous about looking for a job; nervous about dealing with people in authority; nervous about finding her way around the world. So her decision to become a reporter was counter-intuitive, as she put it, ‘like an arachnophobe choosing a career handling spiders’. I liked the fact that Sarah looked to journalism to up-end cosy assumptions (as the Chicago night-editor’s dictum has it, ‘If your mother says she loves you - check it out’). It was during this perambulation through the freezing night that she asked me how old I was. I’d already cunningly established that she was twenty-nine, going on thirty, though in truth she looked barely twenty-one. It was then that I caught myself lying about my age. How old was I? ‘Thirty-nine,’ I snapped - supposing that forty would have seemed impossibly antique. I heard the lie with a flutter of surprise. I must be interested.

  I was more than interested. I was in love; indeed, we both were. When I try to recall that time now, after the dramas of my year off, what sticks in my mind is the moment when Sarah said that, no, she was not free for dinner on Sunday night, but that she probably could manage Monday, or Tuesday, or Wednesday, or Thursday … or Friday.

  The next few weeks flashed by. London. New York. London again. And then I was p
reparing to go away once more. Here my old nomadic life was in conflict with my new relationship, though it seemed that I’d met someone who was almost equally peripatetic. Indeed, it was not until I found myself in extremis that I discovered the extraordinary reserves of courage and resilience in Sarah’s nature.

  Although I was excited about the possibilities that Sarah seemed to offer, I was committed to a potentiall dangerous journalistic trip to the Far East, to East Timor. My friend the photographer Julio Etchart and I had already made plans. The rainy season was approaching. We could not delay a moment longer. Early in December 1993, we took off for the sad city of Dili.

  Flying via Bali, we arrived in East Timor shortly before Christmas. All my thoughts were with Sarah, who hadn’t wanted me to go, but I was exhilarated to be on the road again. No question that this was the fabled East Indies. Blink, and you could almost mistake the palm trees and corrugated roofing for the Caribbean. Almost, but not quite. As we passed through Customs I was conscious, among the taxi drivers pushing for work, of searching eyes - uniformed officials and soldiers with guns.

  We rode into the capital in a beaten-up blue taxi with door handles made of coathanger-wire and a garish photograph of Pope John Paul II on the dashboard. It was very hot, the streets were almost deserted, and beyond the broken promenade, small boys dived and splashed in the bitter sea. A hog rootled among the mangroves on the shore. Further on, there was a piazza, a statue of the Blessed Virgin Mary, and on the corner a street vendor was selling noodles in the shade of a mahogany tree.

  When we arrived at our hotel, we were aware that many people hanging about the dark lobby were noting our arrival with interest. My visa said I was a tourist, but a one-legged Australian swinging on crutches like Long John Silver, swigging from a can of local beer, asked if we were selling guns. After dark, troops in crash helmets rode shotgun in open trucks. Within hours, I was conscious only of the oppression and the fear. Timor conturbat me … What I’d been told was true: East Timor was an occupied territory, a police state, an infernal paradise, one of the saddest places in the world. Some time during my first twenty-four hours here that famous line from Doctor Faustus popped into my head: ‘Why, this is Hell, nor am I out of it.’

  Such are the paradoxes of global communication that it was not difficult to find a telephone from which to call through to Sarah in New York on the far side of the world, and thus we spoke, night after night, while the police spies hung around the gloomy, air-conditioned hotel lobby, watching my every move but unable, I judged, to understand what I was saying. In answer to her questions, I explained to Sarah that there was, along the mean, dusty streets of Dili, a kind of desolate normality to everyday existence. ‘It’s so boring here,’ whispered one of the hotel maids. Outside, especially to the south and east, there was the conflict between the army and the guerrillas, a story that had gone comparatively unreported. I persuaded Julio that it was time for us to take the bus into the interior.

  Eventually, we reached our destination, a Roman Catholic mission on the edge of a forest. Father Fernando De Souza, the local priest, was forty years old. His mission and its church were at once a school, a surgery, a place of recreation, a refuge, a social centre and a source of inspiration. Beyond the walls of the mission there were spies, policemen, informers - the Indonesian army of occupation. Inside, there was teaching, prayer and song - at almost every hour of the day there seemed to be groups of nuns and schoolchildren rehearsing anthems and Christmas carols. (I thought of Sarah in the frosty air of New York at Christmas, and felt terribly far from home.) Father De Souza said he would arrange for us to make contact with ‘the armed struggle’. He said it might take some time. So we settled down to wait. I passed the time with a copy of The Woman in White. The day slowly faded. The hours ticked by. Night fell. We sat on the verandah of the mission, waiting. I remember looking up at the stars of the southern hemisphere wheeling overhead and wishing that I had more such times in my life for reflection. When such a moment came, with a vengeance, eighteen months later, alone in the National Hospital, I remembered Father De Souza’s mission and found myself weeping inconsolably.

  After waiting for hours in the tropical darkness, I finally met a guerrilla I’ll call Joaquim Guterres, who described the activities of the freedom-fighters. Some time after midnight he handed over messages for fellow resistance workers who had somehow managed to flee abroad, and then he disappeared silently into the dark.

  Next day, we bade farewell to Father De Souza and took the bus back to Dili. We were tailed and spied on to the last. At Dili airport, officers of military intelligence were on hand to arrest and then interrogate us with futile, and quite alarming, belligerence, but for some reason that still baffles me, neither my notes nor Julio’s film were confiscated. Within hours, we were back in a world that remains largely indifferent to the terrible plight of East Timor. I filed my copy, and took the first plane to New York. It was nearly Christmas time and the city seemed more than usually magical. It was then one evening, over dinner, that Sarah and I began to speak - in a hypothetical way, I insisted, and with the immature person’s fear of commitment - about getting married. Looking back, I suppose I was vaguely conscious of being no longer a very young man, and of knowing that Sarah was the person with whom I wanted to spend the rest of my life, in the state of matrimony - a state any amount as risky as Indonesia.

  After East Timor I needed no encouragement to devote my time to her. Her conversation was always so delightfully whimsical, variously flippant, ironical and charming. Our first year, from Christmas 1993 to Christmas 1994, was much about looking forward to the time we’d spend together. We made a point of visiting each other, either in London or New York, at least once a month, and the year flashed by in a whirl of bargain-basement transatlantic flights. Less than twelve months after we’d first met we were engaged to be married and the date for the wedding set: 13 May 1995. I was, in the words of romantic fiction, ‘the happiest man alive’.

  I used to save up books to read on my red-eye trips from New York to London. One of these, devoured in a single flight, was Sherwin Nuland’s compulsive bestseller How We Die. I returned to it when I began to write this book, and found the following passage marked in the margin: ‘In previous centuries, men believed in the concept of ars moriendi, the art of dying.’

  On All Saints Day, 1 November 1994, Sarah came to live in London. I decided that this was a momentous transition for me and I decided to attempt a diary (soon discarded, however). My first entry ran: ‘Our first day together passed like a dream. S. slept all day, and five enormous suitcase now fill the downstairs living room. This, apparently, is just the hors d’oeuvre to the main course. Watching Channel Four News, we discussed the difference between “yob” and “hooligan”.’ Sarah now says that I had also to explain to her the meaning of ‘toff’.

  We were married outside Philadelphia on a glorious day in spring. In my speech I said that, like the defeated British troops at Yorktown, I’d had my world turned upside-down by an American. I’d certainly never expected to return to Pennsylvania in such idyllic circumstances. Sarah was, I said, ‘my American Revolution, my Declaration of Independence, my first and only Amendment, my Supreme Court and my Boston Tea Party’, deeply felt sentiments that were greeted with drunken whoops of joyous acclaim by family and friends. Our honeymoon was spent in Morocco. When we came back to London, Sarah found an assignment waiting for her from Vanity Fair. Would she go to San Francisco to interview the novelist Amy Tan? So at lunchtime on Saturday 22 July I took her to Heathrow for the flight. As I accelerated the car away from the unloading bay, I remember watching her diminutive figure on the kerb in the rearview mirror …

  [7]

  ‘Robert McCrum Is Dead’

  6-12 August

  The report of my death was an exaggeration.

  Mark Twain, 1897

  One morning at the National Hospital the bedside phone rang at nine thirty. ‘The Holloway Police here. We have to identify a
dead body. Where is Queen Square?’ Me: ‘I’m not dead; I’m just a patient.’ Cop: ‘I’m sorry, sir, but we have orders to identify this body and I was given this extension. Where’s Queen Square?’ Me: ‘I’m not a corpse, thank you very much. Don’t you have a map?’ Cop: ‘I was hoping for a bit of co-operation and politeness.’ Me (suddenly furious): ‘The kind of politeness, I suppose, for which the Metropolitan Police are renowned.’ I slammed the phone down.

  Sometimes I wondered when I was going to open the newspaper and read my own obituary. I discovered that, in the outside world, my stroke had caused something of a stir among the small world of media-dwellers, writers, journalists and editors, who had lived as I once had. It was as though the Grim Reaper had coughed, or tapped us all on the shoulder. The chairman of Faber & Faber, Matthew Evans, joked that he was becoming so fed up with answering questions about my state of health that he wanted to sport a lapel button: ‘Robert McCrum is dead.’

  So the year faded and summer turned to autumn, while I eagerly monitored the tiny external changes that constitute convalescence after a stroke. At first, my left leg had been totally paralysed and wholly unresponsive to the commands of movement. Miraculously, it seemed, within a few days, I was beginning to be able to move it, very slightly, as it lay at rest on the mattress. The left side of my face, which had seemed so numb and lifeless, was beginning to recover sensation, and my speech was slowly becoming more intelligible.