Just Me Read online

  Just Me

  BY THE SAME AUTHOR

  Ramblings of an Actress

  The Two of Us

  Just Me

  SHEILA HANCOCK

  First published in Great Britain 2008

  Copyright © Sheila Hancock

  This electronic edition published 2009 by Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

  The right of Sheila Hancock to be identified as the author of this work has been

  asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

  All rights reserved. You may not copy, distribute, transmit, reproduce or

  otherwise make available this publication (or any part of it) in any form, or by any

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  to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

  Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, 36 Soho Square, London W1D 3QY

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

  ISBN 978-1-4088-0159-8

  www.bloomsbury.com/sheilahancock

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  With profound thanks to my editor Victoria Millar,

  whose patience, diligence and friendship were invaluable.

  Contents

  Prologue: Saignon

  1 Provence

  2 London · Liverpool

  3 Ramsgate · Herne Bay · Puglia

  4 Hammersmith · Chiswick

  5 Budapest

  6 Gatwick · Antibes · Africa

  7 Thailand

  8 Bexleyheath · Berkshire · Dorset

  9 King's Cross · Pimlico · The City · Milan · Guernsey

  10 Westphalia · Berlin

  11 Manchester · London

  12 Venice · Fontenay Abbey · Milan

  13 London

  14 Budapest

  15 Provence

  Epilogue: Saignon

  Copyright Acknowledgements

  Try to praise the mutilated world.

  Remember June's long days,

  and wild strawberries, drops of wine, the dew.

  The nettles that methodically overgrow

  the abandoned homesteads of exiles.

  You must praise the mutilated world.

  You watched the stylish yachts and ships;

  one of them had a long trip ahead of it,

  while salty oblivion awaited others.

  You've seen the refugees heading nowhere,

  you've heard the executioners sing joyfully.

  You should praise the mutilated world.

  Remember the moments when we were together

  in a white room and the curtain fluttered.

  Return in thought to the concert where music flared.

  You gathered acorns in the park in autumn

  and leaves eddied over the earth's scars.

  Praise the mutilated world

  and the grey feather a thrush lost,

  and the gentle light that strays and vanishes

  and returns.

  'Try to Praise the Mutilated World'

  by Adam Zagajewski

  PROLOGUE

  Saignon

  I OPEN THE SHUTTERS, expecting sun, but there is a dense mist shrouding the view. I get back into the Phwah bed, so called because my husband deemed it the most comfortable bed in the world, and that was the noise he made as he sank into it, luxuriating, beaming.

  But now, I am sitting in it alone.

  I love this room. It is like being in the clouds or under the sea, with its sky-blue walls and white, translucent, wafting curtains. It was nearly like being in an inkpot when my daughter Joanna and I first applied the blue ochre, but a day sponging white on top, before John saw the disaster, turned it into a triumph of interior décor.

  So, here I am, in this room, on this bed, writing this, sipping my tea and watching the landscape reveal itself as the rising sun melts the haze. It is like that big scene in a panto. From my principal-boy days, I seem to remember it was called the revelation scene. No – transformation scene.

  That's it.

  Transformation.

  There's a word that 'speaks to my condition' as we Quakers say. In panto, it is all done with dry ice and gauzes that slowly fly out revealing a jewelled cave, or Cinders in her ball gown, in a coach drawn by defecating ponies. Or a country scena, an ill-painted version of this. I half-expect Snow White to enter and sing a song about being lost and frightened. But no, there is no sound of an audience coughing its disapproval of the smog drifting, as it always does, over the front of the stalls. There is only the din of frogs, giggling and whoroping, as they do whatever it is that frogs do here in the spring. There are distant bells. The dogs across the valley greet each other and wake a frantic woodpecker and the bird that sounds like a telephone.

  The bosky tang of fir and rosemary prickles my nostrils. Later, in the summer, the sweet, soft, lavender smell will take its place. But now it is this smell. Only this place, at this time of day, at this time of year, with this mist, has this smell. It has to be savoured now, this moment.

  Now.

  I am here now. The old sixties mantra.

  The scene unfolds. Gradually, the lime tree in the foreground is lit from behind, so that its opening leaves shine fresh green, and crystals sparkle on the twigs. It is the first season since its partner in the garden was felled and it seems to be adjusting well.

  The sun has really got into its stride now. Next the forest is illuminated, then finally the horizon, the backdrop, the spectacular mountains of the Ventoux and the Luberon and the vast, arching, blue sky.

  Now the sun is streaming through the window, so I strip off, and run through some basic yoga poses, my naked body sapping up the warmth. I feel lithe and healthy, despite the sagging flesh, which, as no one can see it but me, is not a worry. The framework beneath still functions.

  For which I am truly grateful.

  As I am for many things. Just being here, for one. People have died, and, back in London, even now, a friend is in the painful process of making her exit.

  Whereas, I am dressed and off to Saignon for breakfast.

  Settled with my bowl of hot chocolate and warm almond croissant and my notebook, I drink in the sun on my face and the view of the sturdy – no – etched as it is by the morning light and shadows, majestic, Romanesque village church.

  I marvel that just over a year ago I could not sit here without tears streaming down my face. I had to stop coming. This place, so potent to our relationship, both when my husband was alive and because of a note he had written that I discovered after his death, became anathema to me. So what has happened to change all that? To allow me to sit here with a smile on my face?

  Alone. Content.

  Even, I venture to say, happy. Now, this moment, anyway. Sanguine about what may come next and my ability to cope with it.

  Whatever.

  Your body was a temple to Delight;

  Cold are its ashes whence the breath is fled,

  Yet here one time your spirit was wont to move;

  Here might I hope to find you day or night,

  And here I come to look for you, my love,

  Even now, foolishly, knowing you are dead.

  From 'As to some lovely temple, tenantless'

  by Edna St Vincent Millay

  1

  Provence<
br />
  COPING AND HAPPY I was not, when, early in 2004, I arrived at our house in Provence. I had escaped after a disastrous Christmas, suffering from a deep depression. As was the weather. Alone, lugging my case, I wallowed through mud, down the track to the house. Scythed by a Mistral and drenched by the rain, I battled to open the heavy shutters.

  Inside, the house was bleak. I struggled to light the wood stove – a job John had always done – and discovered the gas canisters for the oven had run out. Starving after the long drive through France, and desperate for something hot to eat, I went and got a new one from the garage. Carrying it through the garden nearly crippled me.

  That night in the Phwah bed I tossed and turned in its vastness, kept awake by the aching absence, combined with the worrying presence of loirs scampering in the roof. These are pretty pests that eat through wires and beams and have to be got rid of. Not a task I relished. The house seemed to be conspiring to make me even more aware of how inadequate I was without John. Two years after his death. I felt feeble and stupid and utterly miserable.

  Next morning the sun shone again with its usual brilliance, and I wandered the soaked and battered garden, performing by myself the ritual check that had always started our visits, when we listed the tasks to be undertaken to repair our beloved house after the ravages of the winter. The peach, apricot, quince, fig and cherry trees seemed to have turned into a jungle. A broken branch of the walnut was hitting the roof and dislodging the antique Provençal tiles; it was probably providing a highway for the loirs and squirrels I had heard the night before playing boules with stored nuts in the eaves.

  John was besotted with that tree. When he was a child, every Christmas, his father brought home wet walnuts, and he and his brother Ray cracked them open, dipped them in salt and relished the delicacy, despite the inevitable mouth ulcers that followed. To have an endless supply growing in his garden was magic. But the walnuts were a sad disappointment to John. Each year there would be a huge crop but some nasty black blight always attacked the nuts and rendered them inedible. He even resorted to sending a question into the radio programme Gardeners' Question Time. On their advice he poured buckets of water on to the tree, to no avail. A year after his death, it yielded a treeful of perfect juicy nuts. They were stored in baskets, in the cellar.

  Waiting.

  Everyone had joked that it was a sign of divine, or leastways, a ghostly John's intervention, but I had rejected such comforting myths. I could not contemplate 'how-pleased-John-would-have-been'-type thinking. It seemed an impertinence to attribute thoughts to the absent John that I wanted to hear. The man could be unpredictable, bad-tempered and perverse. And I had no right to concoct a picture of him to bring myself, or anyone else, comfort. How often we do that when people die. 'How So-and-so would have loved that.' 'She would have wanted such-and-such', gradually shaping the dead person into a creature we want to be with.

  I wanted to be with him all right. But not with some distorted invention. I wanted him with me in person, cracking the nuts, and dipping them in salt, and drooling. Or spitting them out and saying they weren't worth waiting for. Who knows how he would react? But dear God, I wanted to.

  Now, as I looked at the buds appearing ready for another crop, a relentless, new season, I was beginning to suspect I never would.

  The acceptance of that bitter truth was slow in coming. For two years I was doing well. I kept him with me as I relived our life together in the book I wrote. When it was published, the thousands of letters I received showed I had inadvertently tapped into a great pool of grief. It had not been my intention to write such a book. I replied as best I could to my correspondents; because many of them were keeping their despair secret, yet felt they could share it with a stranger. I arrogantly felt responsible for helping them. I, after all, was doing all right. On the road to recovery. Some of the people were still grieving personal tragedy four, five, even twenty years, later. I was mystified by this. My immediate searing anguish at John's death had, I thought, waned into something more benign.

  Because he was coming back.

  He'd often gone away. But he always came back. For two years I assumed that at any moment he would walk through the door and say, 'All right, kid?' I was expecting it during Christmas 2003. But I was alone in that belief.

  The family all congregated at our house in Wiltshire to celebrate together. My daughters went to great pains to arrange a lovely time for my grandchildren and me. All was noise and excitement from which I felt utterly detached. I had known the same feeling when I had a mini nervous breakdown some years before. It is marvellously described by Sylvia Plath in The Bell Jar: 'I couldn't get myself to react. I felt very still and very empty, the way the eye of a tornado must feel, moving dully along the middle of the surrounding hullabaloo.' I tried to snap out of my stupor and join in the fun. I should be over it by now. All the books say so. And the time-is-a-great-healer merchants.

  I looked round the festive table and realised I was the only one who had not moved on.

  Two of the little ones were not even born when John was alive, and the other three could not remember him. The adults did. Stories were exchanged about his notorious bah-humbug attitude to Christmas, but the tales of his sometimes destructive behaviour were leavened with laughter. He had become a fond memory. An acceptable version to treasure and chuckle over. But it wasn't my reality. The imperfect one I ached for.

  Mute with misery I was a death's head at the feast. Banquo's ghost had nothing on me. I couldn't join in the reminiscence. Relegating him to the past. I wanted him in the present, in the flesh. Especially the flesh, as it happens. To caress and cling to. As my daughters could to their partners. I did my best to smile benignly, as befitted my role of brave widow, while they chattered about their plans for their homes, their children, their future. Mine did not feature. I could see they were worried about me and didn't know what else they could do. They were sensible. They knew he wouldn't come back. And quite rightly, life would go on without him. Whereas, mine was on hold. Why? It would have been madness if voiced, even to myself.

  I could not let him go.

  He wouldn't like it. I had to wait.

  The world outside the family had moved on, too. When it was mooted that a spin-off of Morse should be done and I was kindly consulted, I said how pleased I was, because all his work mates would be employed and Kevin Whately would have a lovely job. But I was gutted. Finally Inspector Mouse, as we called him, would also be well and truly gone. Bless him, he too would be as dead as a doornail. And I was distraught at the finality of it.

  Surrounded as I was by evidence of my family's adaptation to John's death and their healthy ability to move on, I was aware that my behaviour was out of line. I knew the danger signs. I was depressed. I was certainly depressing the hell out of everyone else. My daughters' profound grief at their father's death had mercifully mellowed, only to be replaced by anxiety about their disturbed mother. I felt ashamed but powerless to snap out of it. I was irritable with the children.

  I was furious when one of my grandchildren, Charlie John, pulled a book from the shelves and left it on the floor. It was the poems of W. B. Yeats. Inside John had written 'I love these poems almost as much as I love you, December 1983'. Marked in pencil was the following poem:

  When you are old and grey and full of sleep,

  And nodding by the fire, take down this book,

  And slowly read, and dream of the soft look

  Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep;

  How many loved your moments of glad grace,

  And loved your beauty with love false or true,

  But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you,

  And loved the sorrows of your changing face;

  And bending down beside the glowing bars,

  Murmur, a little sadly, how Love fled

  And paced upon the mountains overhead

  And hid his face amid a crowd of stars.

  In Provence John would stand on the
patio, gazing in wonder at the myriads of stars sparkling there that the London city glare obliterates. So perhaps this was a message. I needed to see those stars, where he was maybe hiding his face. I could hang on, stop him slipping away. Feel his presence. France had always been a haven of peace for us. That was what I needed. So off I went. Which is how I came to trudge through the mud to be confronted by loirs, recalcitrant wood stoves, and all the rest of the mountainous molehills.

  I was fourteen when I visited France for the first time. It blew my suburban mind. I ventured nervously from a pebble-dashed semi in Bexleyheath, where the regular fare was a joint roasted on Sunday, cold on Monday, shepherd's pied on Tuesday, and rissoles (whatever happened to rissoles?) on Wednesday, and the rest of the week was sardines or tomatoes on toast, Welsh rarebit and a nice bit of cod in a daring parsley sauce. Conversation at table was about how I was doing at school, or Dad at the factory, or Mum in the shop. Anything likely to be controversial was taboo. If the grannies were there, my contribution was limited by the injunctions 'Don't speak with your mouth full' and 'Little girls should be seen and not heard'. From there, via an au-pair job organised by my school during the summer holidays, I was catapulted into a wealthy, sophisticated, Parisian household. My employer was the epitome of French chic, with black hair oiled back into a chignon, crimson lips and fingernails, and couture clothes. The husband was a bigwig with the Comédie Française, so their guests were louche and exciting people who sat around arguing passionately, long into the night, about the arts and politics. It was a seismic culture shock.

  I helped prepare the meals. Even salad was a revelation. No limp lettuce leaf and half a tomato here. I swung the salad dryer full of aromatic leaves picked from the garden, and watched while Madame dressed them with pungent olive oil that bore no resemblance to the yellow stuff I bought in Boots to treat my earache. I sampled frogs' legs, snails and dishes that aroused taste buds that had hitherto lain dormant. A different wine was served for each course to enhance the food. It was nectar for the gods. I had only previously sipped the sugary Barsac that Dad ceremoniously produced once a year at Christmas. The meals went on for hours and the smell of perfume, garlic and Gauloises made me swoon with delight.