My Year Off Page 9

  Some of the other patients, especially the Arab diplomatic staff who occupy many of the other rooms here, seem to bargain and haggle over the cost of rooms, so if a room costs sixty pounds, they’ll haggle and say ‘How about twenty-five?’ One of the nurses said skittishly the other day that they sometimes expected to be paid with a string of goats or sheep. There are, in fact, a lot of Arab patients here and thus a lot of Arab jokes. Mr Haifa next door is known as ‘Jaffa Cake’. His visitors stand on my balcony and smoke cigarettes in the evening and chat, as if they were in Beirut.

  Today in the elevator I encountered my worst fear, a twenty-something woman with a neat incision in her head, a shaved skull, and stitching like a rugby ball. She smiled at me in a glazed way, but did not speak, and we passed like ships in the night, and I found myself thinking about her all afternoon. This is what I was afraid of when they first brought me in - the fear that they would cut me open and operate on my brain. But apparently they don’t do this now; they used to, but don’t any more.

  The thing about Queen Square is that there are all sorts and conditions of people here, often very acute cases, and you do see some extraordinary sights. In the physiotherapy ward there is an elderly, emaciated Arab gentleman who has what are known as ‘antlers’ on his head. This is a kind of metal brace designed to keep his head upright on his spine. It looks very peculiar, but I have got quite used to it now. There is also an AIDS victim suffering from brain damage, who drools and groans, and can’t stand upright. He is very haggard-looking and very sick, with Kaposi’s sarcoma all over his face.

  TUESDAY 15 AUGUST

  Last night I had a terrible headache which stopped me sleeping. For a while I wondered what would happen if I just conked out there and then. The nights are often the worst - the night is a time of fear, and wondering if I will survive. I feel very lonely and frightened then. I found myself going over the previous six hours and wondering what Sarah would say if she found me dead, and how she would cope. I love her so much, and she has been so wonderful while I have been here.

  While we were watching our wedding video, I found myself crying uncontrollably. Partly they were tears of rage and tears of frustration, and tears of love for Sarah in her predicament, and tears of happiness that I should be married to her - to someone as wonderful as her, and perhaps tears of relief, too. One thing I really admire is the way Sarah continues to work at her journalism while visiting me in hospital.

  Today I have a new physiotherapist, John, who is small and wiry and dark, and rather good. He is much less pernickety than Sandy the amusing Scot has been, and concentrates on my legs. At the moment there is no movement from the left arm, but there are a few ‘flickers’ (that’s the word they all use) in the left leg, and I can now sort of raise it up so that my knee is bent when I am lying in bed.

  It’s another boiling hot day. There are standpipes in Yorkshire, on the television. Today I discover that Dr Click’s husband is a publisher of educational books, which explains why she has been so keen to discuss books each day. I also discovered that Dr Lees’s first name is Andy or Andrew, not Adrian, as I had thought. (He still seems to me like an Adrian, not an Andy.)

  I still find I can’t keep track of time. I don’t know why this is.

  The headache makes me feel very irritated with the inefficiency of the ward. It’s still not clear when the [illegible] people will come, or when will I have the final transoesophagal cardiogram test at the Middlesex Hospital. I think back over the first two days after the stroke, and remember lovely Wicce St Clair Hawkins, the tawny-haired nurse who was so kind and thoughtful to me in the beginning.

  This morning, en route from my bath, I meet nice Dr Lees in the hall. For some reason, I feel intensely embarrassed to encounter him out of bed and so obviously vulnerable in my wheelchair. He tells me he is still trying to track the causes of the stroke, and says he has found antibodies in my thyroid, but no clot in the chambers of the heart. I am too unsure of myself to ask what any of this means, in practice. He says, none the less, that he wants to do the transoesophagal cardiogram, an investigation of the chambers of the heart.

  Susan [Sarah’s mother] rings from Maine. She sounds to be in fighting form, and it will be nice to have her back here soon. She has been so wonderfully supportive during these difficult weeks.

  I discovered today that Sarah is also writing what she calls a ‘psycho-diary’. God knows what she is putting in it - probably complaints about my bad temper during these last few days. One of the things about the irritation of being in hospital is that there are so few people you can take your irritation out on. So she has become a lightning conductor for my rage. The one thing that will always calm me down, I’ve found, is being read to. Sarah has a fine reading voice, very pleasant and soothing and I look forward to our reading sessions. The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe brings back so many memories of childhood. We sit in a shady green part of Queen’s Square, and read aloud to each other, or rather, Sarah reads aloud to me. She reads very pleasantly, and it’s restful to sit in the cool of the evening, watching the winos on the benches in the distance while the gnats buzz over our heads in the twilight.

  It was the measure of my loss of confidence in myself after the stroke that my biggest fear on these outings was that I’d run into someone from the Faber office across the square. At this stage, it was still my ambition to recover enough fitness to be able to resume my old life as editor-in-chief. The more my convalescence unfolded the more I came to recognize that I could not possibly cross the square back to my old job. At first, the constraint was physical; as time went on, the reservation became psychological. It seemed depressing to acknowledge that forty-odd years had been tossed casually into the dustbin of history.

  I dread seeing a colleague [I wrote in my diary] to whom I’ll have to explain myself. We always choose a time when everyone’s gone home, i.e. after seven o’clock, and on the whole we aren’t disturbed. We go to the far end, behind the statue of Queen Charlotte, and sit under the trees. I have taken this square for granted for so long, have walked through it and round it, not thinking, and now here I am, an integrated part of its little eco-system, and I am quite a bit grateful for the greenery I can experience here. I do occasionally feel very sad that I can’t have more of the summer to myself.

  The dusty trees of Heaven and bedraggled rosebushes of the square became all the more precious as battered, metropolitan representatives of the English countryside that I could otherwise glimpse only on television.

  MY DIARY: WEDNESDAY 16 AUGUST

  Today, a very cheery visit from Robert Harris [friend, and author of Fatherland], who arrived with some Fortnum and Mason biscuits and a bottle of Krug vintage champagne. What a good friend he is! People say the most extraordinary things in hospitals - Robert said he felt ‘very envious of my experience’. I think he intended a joke, but I was not in a mood for irony and said, rather coolly, that he was welcome to it. We agreed that would both have dinner at the Manoir au Quat’ Saisons with Raymond Blanc when I get out. Apparently Raymond Blanc had a stroke some years ago, and has now made a full recovery. Well, that’s some kind of role model.

  SARAH’S DIARY: 16 AUGUST

  I know it’s going to be a long haul. But it’s hard to adjust to that. I dreamed last night that I had polio [her father had suffered polio as a child] and couldn’t walk. For a bit – but that when I started to recover Robert still had it far more seriously. I felt pathetic and weak and sorry for myself, while my side was paralysed. I keep wondering what this is like for him. I feel very alone and very scared. I look at him – I know it’s not fair – and I pray that his leg and arm will start to move again – right now. The doctor has just come in and said there is no way to predict what he’ll be like in 12 months’ time. Robert has a raging headache again. I am so afraid that it means that something else will happen. I think I will always be afraid, for the rest of our lives. If it was bad before, my worry is a hundred times worse now. Everything seems so preca
rious. It’s hard not to feel a real panic, a constant sense of being overwhelmed, as if you’re drowning.

  It’s getting better, but slowly, and the people you deal with in positions of authority really are quite unable to offer much reassurance. The thing is, I think they don’t know. Robert’s left leg is moving a bit, and also his left shoulder, but not his arm at all. His speech is almost back to normal, except when he talks quickly – then he tends to stutter. My moods go so up and down – euphoria when he seems to be making progress, despair when he doesn’t, a sense of dread all the time. The hard part is the feeling that you have to have all the optimism in the world to help the person get better, while preparing yourself for the very worst outcome. I’m not sure how to get both of those at once. People say I should take it one day at a time, but that’s hard to do.

  MY DIARY: THURSDAY 17 AUGUST

  The Middlesex [Hospital] has just rung: I may not eat or drink till all the tests are done today. This is because of the anaesthetic I shall have to take for the transoesophagal operation. So the thing about being a patient is that you have to accept whatever the medical profession decides, without complaint, and if, like the guy down the hall, you refuse or disobey, there’s a big crisis.

  A bit later Dr Chandra – young, impressive, well dressed – comes in to describe what the next lot of tests will be like. There will be a camera down my throat, then another blood test. He says that after six weeks they can make a fairly good prediction of what sort of recovery I should have in the long term.

  The operating staff, in their green gowns, float about the hospital like actors backstage. In the operating theatre they are on stage of course, and this is where the real drama is. The back of the hospital is just like a Richard Rogers building run amok – blackened air vents and wrought-iron fire escapes. The building roars like a hive of bees in the hot sun, and I sense that microbes, perhaps a hundred years old, are lurking in the rust of the metal. There is a curious intimacy in a hospital – nobody has anything to hide. Once you are here you have to expose every part of your body to the nurses. There’s no privacy. As well as this, you are weak and they are strong. This can make nurses seem like sadists or authoritarians.

  The truth is that [the members of] the medical profession hate a mystery, though actually they live with it every day of their working lives; they have to know the reasons for things, and they have to be in control. The thing then about having a stroke is that they don’t know why it happened, and they are not in control. As a patient, all you can do is to lie here, and allow time to take its course, and time to heal. There is no other cure. If I was in an African village I would have no different a treatment: the fact is that I have had almost no medication since I arrived here, apart from anti-depressants, and the only future medication will probably be an aspirin a day.

  Today the nice Chinese nurse Philippe (the one they all call ‘Phirrip’!) gave me a mirror to shave with. I find myself with a sad, defeated expression that reflects my inner mood after nearly a month here. The good news is that at least my facial appearance is not hideously deformed, as I believe it can be.

  Several months later, when I came to read The Diving Bell and the Butterfly I encountered, in Jean-Dominique’s Bauby’s description of his appearance after his terrible stroke, the actualization of my worst fears at this time:

  Reflected in the windowpane I saw the head of a man who seemed to have emerged from a vat of formaldehyde. His mouth was twisted, his nose damaged, his hair tousled, his gaze full of fear. One eye was sewn shut, the other goggled like the doomed eye of Cain. For a moment I stared at that dilated pupil before I realized it was only mine.

  In fact, many of the people who came to visit remarked on how well, and young, I looked, comments which seemed, to me, cruelly at odds with my inner feelings.

  MY DIARY: FRIDAY 18 AUGUST

  Today I had routine physiotherapy in the morning with John Marsden, then I went across to the Middlesex, and had the camera shoved down my throat. First they sprayed my throat with a kind of cocaine substitute or substance designed to freeze the throat. Then they give you a mild shot of anaesthetic to lull you, and then they stick a camera smeared with jelly down your throat, and then they film you from inside the throat, or rather, they film the back of the heart from inside the throat.

  The doctors said I was a good patient, and I certainly did my best to put up with the pain and difficulty of the operation as easily as possible.

  It was nice to go to the Middlesex Hospital by ambulance and see something of the outside world, to see the people walking along the street and the life outside, the life I have been missing these last several days.

  In the evening Sarah read to me from ‘Narnia’, and then we had a glass of wine, and then we had a visit from Roger Alton, of the Guardian, who was very cheery.

  Jeremy Paxman sent me some champagne with an amusing letter, which was kind, and I also had a letter from Ish [Kazuo Ishiguro] to say how glad he was to see me much better than he’d expected. This seems to be the general reaction from visitors, who expect the worst.

  SATURDAY 19 AUGUST

  Sarah took me into the square this morning, where it suddenly occurred to me that the russet brick of the National is the same russet brick as the russet brick of Pont Street and the Cadogan Hotel, a kind of Devonshire red, and of course built at about the same time. I found myself wondering about the architect involved (and the brickworks) and then my thoughts spun on to Oscar Wilde’s arrest at the Cadogan. When I analysed this to myself I decided that it was because I felt as though I too had been arrested. On the way out we passed a man with his head stitched like a second-hand football the whole way round, but he was actually walking, and seemed to be okay. You do see the most extraordinary sights in the National.

  In the afternoon I watched the VJ victory parade on television – Ghurkas and veterans all in their sixties and seventies, like my father. The thing about the veterans of the Second World War is the self-satisfaction they have, the look of real survivors from a world our world has forgotten. They seem curiously proud, though presumably their memories are full of pain and sorrow. You don’t have to be in your seventies, either. How often as schoolboys did we parade in front of war memorials with the ‘Names of the Fallen’. I realize as I watch that this is the world I grew up with at school, as a child or as a boy – a world of Spitfires and Colonel Bogey and American jeeps, Lancaster bombers and khaki, and the many war stories from people who had survived. To see the troops marching down the Mall was to see an empire in full retreat, oddly enough, and to see eccentric items of clothing one hasn’t seen for years, topis and khaki felt hats and strange uniforms with brassy medals, full of memories but meaningless too, to a new generation. As I watched this parade the room was filled with the smell of cigar-smoke from the visiting Arabs in the hallway outside.

  In the evening I read the first two chapters of Reg Gadney’s new novel, but I still find I can’t concentrate for more than 30–45 minutes at a stretch.

  SARAH’S DIARY: 19 AUGUST

  I can say now that I think he’s going to come through this. I spoke to a friend of Steve and Cynthia’s who told me about his stroke at the age of fifteen – one of dozens of accounts I have heard first and second hand – he was totally paralysed and couldn’t speak or remember words, and now his foot doesn’t flex on its own and his hand won’t co-operate, but that’s all. I can live with that sort of thing, but I feel this is a long slow march through a very humid jungle, full of insects. As Christine [Robert’s mother] said: upwards all the way, but with jagged edges. Robert is becoming much stronger and moving his leg, but still not walking. His speech often sounds almost normal, but he is not talking a lot, and not quickly – I imagine because he is tired, but I am really not sure. He has a nagging, persistent fear that the change will be permanent. He is trying hard to be cheerful and succeeding mostly, but I can tell that he often feels quite blue. The most he will say, though, is that he feels fed up. I am slogging al
ong, still exhausted, still waking up feeling worse than I did when I went to sleep. Every day no matter what, I wake up at five to seven. The heat is very wilting, so the windows are wide open. The noises, the cars, the traffic feel as if they are coming from the room. I am wearing swidgy yellow ear plugs and feeling ever weirder. Sara Mosle will be here this weekend, a wonderful help. It will be so nice to see her and it means I don’t have to go home to an empty house at night. My parents-in-law reported yesterday that Dr Lees, the cool neurologist, spoke excitedly at Robert’s progress, and said that at this rate he would be walking again soon. I assumed he wouldn’t have said it unless it was very much the case, because from what I can tell, these guys are cautious and conservative and go far on the worst case side in making predictions.

  MY DIARY: SUNDAY 20 AUGUST

  At ten o’clock we went into the square, with Sarah pushing me as usual, and read newspapers until driven indoors by a gang of evangelicals singing hymns into a microphone, karaoke-style, on the other side of the square. Then we had lunch at the Queen’s Larder, where there is a sign saying that the ‘queen’ of the Square is Queen Charlotte, George III’s wife. Apparently when mad King George was in hospital here, during his time with Dr Willis in the 1770s, she used to keep delicacies for him in the pub (which became known as the Queen’s Larder) and would visit him here. When I think of George and his wife I think of his delightful ‘Mrs King’. After lunch I sunbathed in the wheelchair, and then fell asleep. Later, we went back to the room and I slept early.