Just Me Read online

  Like the washing-up and the fire-lighting, the pool was a throwback to our childhoods. Labour-saving machines and sleek health clubs are an improvement, but we felt a deep, nostalgic joy in getting back to basics. Even though the basics – particularly in John's childhood – were, in reality, pretty grim. But it is different when you are doing things from choice, and with someone you love.

  We had tasted the high life but we agreed we were never happier than when reading our books in the dappled shade of the two lime trees, lying side by side, on our special swing-back deck chairs that we bought in the Isle sur La Sorgue market. As I write, I have in front of me an antique toy donkey that he bought there for me, because I said it looked as though it felt lonely. Little did I think that, one day soon, so would I.

  Now, between useless attempts to coax the stove into taking the winter chill out of the house, I made a desultory list of the jobs needing to be done. And stared at it. A lot. For the next few days I wandered round in a torpor of misery. Feeling sorry for myself. Wallowing in it. Conjuring up sad ghosts. The walls echoed with lost laughter: my dear friend Sheila Gish, arriving, dressed, as usual, in glamorous white, expressing her delight at the house with her distinctive chortle which, as Simon Callow pointed out at her memorial, spanned from middle C to top E – 'Ah hah' – now dead of a grotesque cancer; Clare Venables sitting by the wood stove, poring over the cryptic crossword, her fine brain utterly bewildered by the obtuseness of the clues – also gone; John stoically bearing my clumsy nursing when changing his chemotherapy bags. My mind was obsessing on death. I was aware that this wasn't healthy. Not two years after he's gone, for God's sake. But I had no desire to snap out of it. My wretchedness was changing from an acute condition to a chronic one, like a bad back that gives you an excuse for not participating in life. All the things that used to delight me had become a burden: shopping, cooking; even the sun hurt my tear-worn eyes. I wondered how I could still suffer from water retention when so much gushed from my nose and eyes.

  I was on my knees in front of the stove, yet again struggling to light it, when a bird flew violently out of the flue into my face. It whirled around the room as I frantically struggled with windows and shutters to let it out. I hate fluttery things, be they man, flirty woman, or beast. Once, when the children were little, a bat flew into our house in the country. I hurled the kids upstairs, slammed the doors and phoned John in London to come and rescue us. He drove the hundred miles, detached a curtain to which the bat was clinging, threw it out of the window and drove back to London, muttering and swearing quite a lot. I managed to get this bird out on my own and, heart pounding, went to bed to keep warm.

  The following evening my bird paid another visit. This time I was calmer. It turned out to be a baby, not very wise, owl. It perched on the door of the stove, all eight inches of it, huge eyes surveying the room and eventually lighting on me, peering over the back of the sofa. If owls can smile, it did. Certainly its head jerked to a jokey, quizzical angle that made me feel very silly. I opened the window wide, said, 'Go on, then, bugger off, you daft owl,' and, casting a disdainful look at me, it glided with an elegant swoop into the silent blackness towards those myriad stars.

  That night I had a vivid dream that John was there with me. I reached out and touched him. I felt the roughness of his bristles. Saw the cleft in his chin and the scar. The silky receding hair, and his blue, blue, wryly smiling eyes. I went to hold him, but he turned deliberately and drifted away. I tried to call out to him but my voice wouldn't work. I woke weeping, hideously alone.

  Knowing he had really gone.

  Finally. For ever. Hiding his face amid a crowd of stars.

  And knowing I had to get rid of this house.

  It was a home that was meant to be shared. It was no longer valid. Nostalgia and happy memories weren't working for me. This beautiful place was holding me back. I needed to tear myself away; move on. Sometimes a painful wrench is necessary to mend a broken limb. The same for a heart. A couplet from a poem by Robert Frost, 'The Oven Bird', came to mind.

  The question that he frames in all but words

  Is what to make of a diminished thing.

  What indeed? My mother's maxim 'Pull yourself together' had a lot to recommend it. Never mind therapy, religion, AA – eventually it is down to you. The decision whether to sink or swim is yours.

  'Live adventurously', a Quaker advice, was also whirling around somewhere.

  Well, what about it, Sheila? As John would say, 'Put your money where your mouth is.' Be a depressed widow boring the arse off everyone, or get on with life. Your choice.

  If you are alive you've got to flap your arms and legs,

  you've got to jump around a lot. For life is the very

  opposite of death and you must, at the very least, think

  noisy and colourfully or you are not alive.

  Mel Brooks

  2

  London · Liverpool

  THE FIRST CHOICE I made was to put the house on the market. What would John think of me putting his beloved home up for sale? There we go again. What would he think? He's not here to think anything. It's down to me. So, come on. Get on with it. Phone the immobiliers. Dither, dither.

  In the end, I got my friend Liz to do it. I just couldn't get my act together sufficiently to organise it. Then I fled back to London and sank into the Slough of Despond.

  This wretchedness is beginning to sound remarkably like self-pity. I hope not. I have never wondered why sad things have happened to me; indulged in the 'why me?' syndrome. The death of my first and second husband from the same cancer; my grandson's brain tumour; my own cancer; other things – it's life. Or death. There is no reason, no punishing for past sins, no testing of faith, no lessons learnt. It just is. I'm not being picked on, it happens to everyone. I accept that. Nothing I can do. In Penelope Lively's wonderful novel Moon Tiger, the protagonist Claudia says: 'I think of how once I was brash enough to believe I could dictate to life, instead of which it has turned on me with its fangs bared.' Now, I was afraid that if I didn't do a bit of dictating I'd get bitten. Or become catatonic. Better to keep flapping and jumping. No time for self-pity. Busy myself with displacement activities.

  One of these activities dismissed any claim to personal harddonebyness. A couple of young directors – a Jewish man, Tim Roseman, and a Lebanese woman, Rima Brihi – had interviewed people from both sides of the catastrophe of modern Israel and, helped by Robin Soans, had compiled the gathered material into a play. Called the Arab-Israeli Cookbook it centred on food because the writers discovered how important the preparing and eating of meals was to maintaining a simple routine – a semblance of normality – in the chaos of continual conflict. When I read it, despite being a bit old for performing in rooms above pubs, I had to be part of it.

  It was damned hard work. Eight actors were called upon to play forty-three characters, and the research needed to fill in the background of the subject was demanding. We listened to talks by Jews and Palestinians desperate to let their voices be heard above the tumult of ill-informed world opinion, all of them quietly working to counter extremism and find a solution. My friend Thelma Ruby lent us films of her family who went to the Promised Land, full of dreams of setting up a perfect socialist state. I had seen the early Palestinian refugee camps when I visited Beirut in the sixties; miles of sordid plastic tents, children playing in raw sewage, desperate overcrowding. I was afraid then that the Jewish dream of a longed-for home-land could not be successfully achieved at such a cost. But I remembered too, as a young woman, meeting people who had gone to work in the early kibbutzim who were thrilled by the vision of making the desert bloom and living in peace after the Holocaust.

  The most challenging aspect of the play for me was that, in the tiny Gate Theatre with the audience breathing down my neck, I had to prepare and cook an Arab dish ready for the cast to eat on stage, without poisoning them. (There were no understudies.) Compared to that, the task of playing five different charact
ers was a piece of falafel. The horror of the blown-up buses, the endless waits at checkpoints, of cherished sons becoming suicide bombers, was starkly brought to life by the characters' testimonies, which we endeavoured to deliver with simplicity and honesty. It was a moving experience, every night, for us as well as the audience. Listening to the news about war zones, it is easy to forget that there are people trying to live their lives, eating, sleeping, teaching their children and making love. Everyday life continues, or tries to. Faced with the seriousness of the project it would have been churlish to moan abut the backstage conditions. Nevertheless I did.

  I shared a cell, ten feet by eight feet, with two other actors – my daughter Abigail and Amanda Boxer – all our costumes for the numerous characters we played, plus the prop department. And a pigeon. He flew in one day and our bird-loving fellow actor and nutter, Amanda, persuaded us he should be made welcome. The lavatory was shared with the audience, and as I preferred not to meet them in the toilet just before trying to convince them that I was a tragic old Arab lady, the only alternative was to use another disgusting lavatory for the pub clients, who certainly had no intention of attending our moving evening. One had to be careful not to wet one's costume on the urine-drenched floor. When the lavatory suddenly started erupting like a Vesuvius-type bidet, we had to improvise reasons in the dialogue for soaking wet trousers and skirts.

  Actors are asked to perform in conditions that would merit closure if animals were involved. What's more, though some, like me, whinge and moan, we still carry on doing the job. Usually for a pittance that a roadsweeper would laugh at. Or, indeed, in some fringe theatres for no money at all. I don't think the public realise, when they begrudge 'taxpayers' money' – that bellyaching phrase – being used for theatre, how much the artists themselves subsidise the arts. Backstage conditions in most West End theatres are comfy for the mice and cockroaches that live there, but freezing in the winter and boiling hot and airless in the summer, with toilet facilities only slightly better than those in the average fringe venue. Every time I go to a theatre and sit with my knees under my chin and have to queue for a drink or a pee, I darkly wish that, for all their beauty, these old theatres would be ripped out and replaced by something more congenial.

  This discomfort in my working life, including film locations in cemeteries, pig farms, mental hospitals, morgues, and, in recent years, frequently inside coffins, has meant that, from the moment I made some money, my first priority was somewhere comfortable to come home to. It seems to be a human trait to make a nest. When I did the Quaker food run for the homeless, I was impressed by how doorways, and particularly the bullring at Waterloo, were decked out to create a personal space for each of the inhabitants. However temporary my base, starting with a rented basement room in Pimlico, it has always been my pride and joy and absorbed my attention and wages.

  After John's death, I had no intention of moving home in London. We lived in a house of which he was never particularly fond, so – unlike France – there were no great happy memories to disquiet me. Then I was invited to a party by my friends Delena Kidd and Gary Raymond, in their house overlooking the river in Hammersmith. I have always felt a passionate attachment to the Thames. The Pimlico basement was near it, it ran past our old family home in Chiswick, and a house we once had in the country was close to its source. Delena and Gary had lived around the corner from me when I was married to my first husband, Alec Ross, and our children had grown up together. It felt like it would be a perfect life circle if we could be neighbours again, now with our grandchildren. That and glorious views of my comforting ever-flowing Thames. I asked them to keep their ears to the ground for any houses becoming available. A possibility of radical change had presented itself that was in keeping with my new resolve.

  Delena was more diligent than I could ever have hoped. The residents did not seem to have John's and my grim tenacity in relationships. First, my friends located a couple discussing divorce and I kept an eye on their marriage for a few months, disgracefully unsympathetic to their misery. Then Delena phoned to say she had heard of another couple in difficulties. She brazenly slipped them a note asking if they were moving and, bingo, they were going their separate ways. I pounced and within days the deal was done.

  So – a fresh start, in a house that John had no attachment to, and wouldn't even have liked. Planes roar over the Thames and cars hum on Hammersmith Bridge. John loved the tranquillity of our house in Wiltshire, but peace and quiet are anathema to me. I grind to a halt in the country, start to ache all over from inactivity. I don't care for hunting, horses scare me, and squelching over some drenched fields soon palls. Small doses of country life are therapeutic, but eventually, sitting looking at flowers grow stultifies me. The mooing of cows depresses me; but I find the sound of planes and cars reassuring. As I grow older I need to be in the city observing – if not always taking part in – seething activity. I want human beings around me. Lots of them. Not sheep and rabbits.

  Not only would John not have liked the house, but, with the help of my daughter Ellie Jane, I set about decorating it in a way that would have made him very nervous. Minimalist verging on stark. It was my way of trying to accept his absence. Spring-cleaning the memories. Who was I trying to fool?

  One day, surrounded by my new furniture and memory-proof white walls, I noticed on the ceiling the reflection of the river in the sun, dancing and flickering. And there he was, lying on a different sofa but with that beatific boy's smile, relishing the same image in the house he had loved two miles upstream. He would not be shut out. But now he was a memory rather than an expected presence and there was sadness in that. My acceptance in Saignon of his absolute absence made these seemingly unavoidable reminders difficult to bear in a different way. How was I to dismiss them from my mind?

  It was a good time to take stock of my situation. At seventy-three I optimistically estimated that I might have seven more years of vigorous life left. Judging by how quickly the last seven had gone, time was short. What was I going to do with what was left?

  I was doomed if the only option was to pursue the acceptable old-lady occupations. Grannying is fun but only a part-time job as their mothers want them back, especially as my rules on bedtime, sweeties and teeth-cleaning are apt to be a bit lax. All my daughters have somehow turned out to be wonderful mothers. Just as I followed Dr Spock they have various gurus whose methods of childcare they pursue. When I look after my grandchildren I do my best to adhere to the routines but I am easily hoodwinked into believing that 'Mummy lets us stay up till midnight/eat ice-cream after we've cleaned our teeth/swing on the chandelier'.

  Joanna's Charlie, aged three, and Alfie, aged one, are bewitching children. To begin with I had some trouble connecting with Alfie. He would stare at me long and hard through his half-inch-long Thaw lashes, flicking alarmed sideways glances at his mother as if to say 'Is she safe? Who is this diddle-oh? Of all the nanas in the world why did you lumber me with this one?' One night when I was babysitting he woke up. He probably would have gone to sleep again but I seized the opportunity to get him up and do some bonding. Hearing The Animal Boogie and the Ukulele Orchestra of Great Britain, Charlie too came downstairs and joined us for a bit of bopping. There being, by then, no likelihood of a return to bed, their parents came home to find us in a row on the sofa, eating chocolate and watching the late-night horror movie – their bedtime routine ruined. No, a reliable granny I am not.

  I have tried entertaining à la Nigella and it ends in chaos and tears; garden plants die when I look at them: all suitable pursuits for the elderly, all beyond my capability. With a lifetime's experience behind me, I am most myself pretending to be someone else on a screen or stage. Undignified though that might be. Acting is what I am best at. Luckily for me it is a job that has no retirement limits; it can continue till you drop down dead as long as you can still remember the lines and not bump into the scenery – and as long as someone will offer you the roles.

  Ellie Jane's partner Matt
hew Byam Shaw, a producer, suggested something that might suit me. I am all for nepotism but when my son-not-in-law suggested that the mother-in-law from hell in The Anniversary would be the ideal role for me I was momentarily taken aback.

  In 1966 I had played the part of the feisty daughter-in-law in the original production with Mona Washbourne as the appalling mum. Then I played the same part in the film version of the play, opposite Bette Davis frightening us all to death both on screen and off. However, very soon after I finish in any play, my brain completely erases all the lines from my memory. It is probably a defence mechanism, as the amount of words I have learnt over the sixty years of my working life would, if retained, probably blow the system. So I had to re-read the script.

  What I did remember was that the laughs were some of the biggest I can recall in a theatre, as well as gasps of shock at Mum's cruelty, and applause when anyone scored a point against her. Altogether, a total theatrical experience that engaged an audience on every level. Or offended some, which is also what theatre should do. Would it still work in a world that is less shocked by people behaving badly?

  Well it did. We opened at the Playhouse in Liverpool, the theatre where John began his career straight from RADA, and it was a riot. I was in my element. Packed audiences howling with laughter and cheering at the curtain call. The audiences in Liverpool are marvellously uninhibited.

  All my career I have loved working in the provinces, as we used to call Birmingham, Leeds, Manchester and their like. When touring a show pre opening in the West End of London, there are always dark murmurings about being 'OK on the road but what about in Town?' As though the audiences in London are not just different but in some way superior to the rest of England. More serious. More discerning. Nonsense. It either works or it doesn't.