Waiting for Orders (19 page)

Of course, he had a lot of accidents, some of them quite serious. That was why he changed his car so often and was always having to pass more driving tests. But in only one accident was he injured badly enough to need a few days in hospital. That was how it was discovered that he had a bowel cancer. He was well into his eighties; he came through the first operation quite successfully, bought a newer, more powerful Buick and took me for a demonstration ride in it. I returned pale and shaken and although it was early in the day had a brandy. Joan predicted that René would soon have another accident and lose his driving licence permanently. She was wrong; it was the cancer that defeated him eventually.

Quite suddenly, it seemed, family and friends were dying off as if a plague had descended on us. Joan and I spent weeks inspecting private nursing homes in South East England looking for one in which my mother could spend her 87th year in reasonable comfort. We found one eventually that was just good enough, but my mother did not last the year. Joan’s
mother was the next to go, in her one hundredth year. It was after that funeral, when Joan was staying with her sister’s family in Iver Heath, that René died in the hospital at Montreux.

I was writing a novel called
Doctor Frigo
and wanted no interruptions. Some people are said to enjoy funerals, to find them vaguely comforting. I do not. I either weep and embarrass the other mourners or get seized with a terrible desire to giggle and so offend them. Whether a funeral ends, for me, in tears or sniggers depends to some extent on the deceased, of course; a death in one’s family may not always be a matter for unalloyed grief, but is more likely to be a shared grief, the kind we experience most keenly when a creative artist dies, even when his, or her, best days are done. It is when the conceits of the living, especially those of officiating clergy, are suddenly more in evidence than thoughts for the dead that laughter may begin to intrude. René’s funeral was a unique experience. Things went wrong right from the start.

Yvonne the chief mourner had no male relatives and so asked me to act as her personal escort. I had expected that one of René’s bankers would have been tapped for this duty but Yvonne said no, that René had asked for me. I didn’t believe this but it was not something one could argue about. I reported on time and found the other mourners already assembled. Yvonne began issuing orders. The hearse was at the hospital mortuary chapel with the body and all the flowers in it. The cortège would form up there. She would be with me in the following car which also belonged to the undertaker. The other guests would please follow behind us. Right? Then let’s go. She was back in Park Avenue.

It was the undertaker who brought her down to earth again. In the Commune of Montreux, he said, it was forbidden for funerals to form processions and travel
en cortège.
The hearse could proceed followed closely by one car only and must travel at normal speeds conforming to the normal traffic regulations. The other mourners must make their own separate ways to the crematorium at Vevey where they would undoubtedly arrive first. Hearses with coffins and flowers were not allowed to use the main roads because they
caused obstructions. They must use the secondary roads inland from the lake.

Yvonne said no. It was outrageous. The municipality must change its mind. Did they not know who René was, who she was? René was eighty-six; to deny a man of that age a decent funeral was disgraceful. He would not permit it. They must be told so.

Someone volunteered to call the gendarmerie and ask for a motorcycle escort out of Montreux. The undertaker said that the law was the same in Vevey. Yvonne poured herself a stiff whisky and sat down defiantly to wait. The undertaker spoke up again. Madame did not perhaps realize that the Vevey crematorium was a very busy place and that an appointment had to be made in advance. If that appointment were not kept that place on the list was forfeited. The hearse itself would even be needed for another funeral later on. He looked at his watch and then, appealingly, at the rest of us.

Yvonne drew in a deep breath. ‘Then,’ she said, ‘let the coffin with my René be taken back to the hospital chapel. Then, we shall decide what to do.’

The undertaker drew breath too, and went to the telephone. The man who had talked to the gendarmerie crept back just then to report failure. The undertaker announced the hospital’s reaction to the request for René’s re-admittance loudly and clearly.

‘The hospital refuses even to consider the matter. The deceased has been prepared for cremation. He must be cremated forthwith or the police will be informed.’

Yvonne finished her whisky and rose to her feet again, magnificent in defeat. ‘Your arm, please, Eric,’ she said proudly. I gave her my arm and we went down to the undertaker’s car.

From then on everything seemed to move very quickly like a two-reel Buster Keaton. The undertaker had been speaking the truth. We were by then within minutes of losing our place in the queue at Vevey. The hearse shot away from the hospital with Yvonne and me in the second car after it. The secondary roads were often not much more than narrow lanes and the hearse driver in front was a demon. Yvonne became quite animated and exclaimed with delight when we shaved past a
farm tractor. She drew another deep breath and then turned to me, her eyes gleaming. ‘René’s Last Ride,’ she cried and made it sound like a John Ford Western.

We reached the crematorium only just in time to prevent another funeral party getting our place. They had to wait. Yvonne didn’t care; as our mourners filed into the chapel for the ceremony she seized my arm and took me with her following the coffin on its way to the business end of the crematorium at the back. ‘We must say goodbye to René’, she said; ‘allons.’

When we caught up with the hearse the undertaker and his men were carrying the wreaths through a back door of the chapel and the coffin was being manhandled on to a flimsy metal trolley by three old men in work smocks. The sudden eruption of Yvonne into their territory upset them. Calling ‘René’ in a loud voice she made as if to throw herself at the coffin, the small end of which was already on the trolley. The old man holding the trolley backed off, the trolley swerved and the wooden lid of the coffin slid off sideways. It had not been screwed down and now one could see why. The fine hardwood box had been only for show; inside it was the plastic coffin that was going into the crematorium furnace. It was of plastic foam, the kind of white moulded material now used for shipping electronic things like video cassette players and personal computers. Unfortunately, the lid of the inner coffin was also unfastened – candidates for cremation must be accompanied by a doctor’s identification certificate – and as one of the other old men tried to save the wooden lid from falling he knocked the plastic lid completely off. At the same moment the third old man pulled the trolley out of harm’s way and let the end of the coffin fall. Yvonne cried ‘René’ again and, lo and behold, he stood before us. Well, almost stood.

He was wearing a dark-blue suit, a white poplin shirt and a Chavet tie. His hands were neatly crossed on his breast, his eyes were closed and his lips were set in a little pout of displeasure. I had seen that pout before, when a bottle of wine he had taken some trouble over turned out to be corky and when the colonel had set up a ping-pong table on the lawn just under the Thierens’ balcony. But it was inefficiency rather than misfortune and madness that triggered that pout more often. One could, after all, try another bottle of the wine and one
could wait with crossed fingers for that fool of a colonel’s doctor to tell him that fast ping-pong with teenage sons as opponents was inviting an early coronary; but where flagrant inefficiency was concerned there was nothing to be done but to start firing. In a life of steel he had seen it happen again and again; he had made it happen himself. One ignored middle management and disposed of the real incompetents at the top.

At the Vevey crematorium middle management disposed of us quite quickly and politely. They were used to lunatics and indignation. By the time the canned Bach cantata had been played we were almost back on the undertaker’s time schedule. There was no clergyman of any denomination present. René and Yvonne had always been agnostics. The cantata had been played to cover a passage of time and to make it seem as if the ashes of the deceased were already all that remained of him; and, of course, to show a proper respect for his passing. The bankers did not stay for the smoked salmon sandwiches and champagne to follow; once the formalities were over they preferred to leave everything to the lawyer.

When we lived in California it had been the custom for persons of our age to have an annual medical check-up. The custom had been a ritual and so, naturally, there had been jokes about it: the oldest was the one about the man who, having had everything checked – heart, lungs, liver, kidneys, blood and central nervous system – and everything found good, walks out of the doctor’s office and dies of a massive coronary while waiting for the elevator. It was no doubt a true story and everyone smiled a little at it, but they still had their check-ups. If anything looked wrong and the patient could afford it he would be shipped off to one of the assembly-line consultancy organizations, like the Mayo Clinic, for a really big definitive check-up. The medical insurance assessors believed in the check-up system. Not to believe in it was like not cleaning one’s teeth, or not believing that prevention was better than cure.

In Switzerland, as in the rest of Europe, a patient goes to see a doctor when he has an unfamiliar illness or pain that he cannot treat hmself. What he seeks is diagnosis and either treatment or reassurance. Of course, it helps, and saves time,
if he is already known to the doctor, but a copy of last year’s check-up results is not the same thing as a medical history.

Joan was used to the American way and when I lived there I acepted it too. Both of us submitted to medical insurance policy examinations in the same week. We were the same age and both in work. Joan was pronounced Al; I emerged as uninsurable. No reason was given other than the bromide about these verdicts being actuarially determined. Joan certainly looked better than I did and, heard through a stethoscope, probably sounded better too.

We were in our early seventies when things began to go wrong. Joan had bought the film rights of a story by H.E. Bates and had asked Peter Hall, the stage director, to collaborate with her on the script. The star was to be James Mason, by then a close neighbour in Switzerland.

The onset of Joan’s illness was ‘insidious’. I had sometimes encountered the word in medical literature and wondered how such a melodramatic adjective – ‘treacherous, crafty, proceeding or progressing secretly or subtly’ according to the OED – could have a medical use. I understand better now. The onset of Joan’s illness was subtle and altogether secret; the illness did not even have a name.

That spring we went for a spell to Los Angeles and stayed at a small hotel on Wilshire near the Country Club. Inquiries soon revealed that the doctor with the best reputation as a diagnostician had an office in Beverly Hills. He was Billy Wilder’s doctor and since Billy was a friend of ours the doctor was helpful in finding time to take Joan’s case. There were two weeks of tests, some of which had already been done in London, but no clear diagnosis. The last and most important service this doctor performed for us was to write a letter to our GP in London reporting his findings and suggesting that a neurologist be consulted. The possibility of there being a brain tumour was touched upon.

The Computerized Axial Tomography Scanner was invented in Britain and first used there. Among the many things it made possible was speedy and comprehensive radiological examination of the brain. When we returned to Europe from that Los Angeles spring we did not know that the CT scanner existed. Our GP did, however; he also knew how to gain access to one of
these scarce machines and a consultant neurologist who could interpret the machine’s findings.

Joan and I went together to hear what the University College Hospital consultant had to say. He was, and is, a plain speaker.

‘The good news is that there is no brain tumour.’

The less good news was that there was, nevertheless, plainly discernible brain damage. Causes unknown, as they were unknown in other diseases of this sort; one saw it mostly in the common dementias like Alzheimer’s disease, Pick’s disease and Creuzfeldt-Jakob. When we know the causes of this kind of atrophy we can look for a cure. In the meantime the answer was care and management.

That was almost fifteen years ago. The care has been professional; the courage has been Joan’s. We sold the apartment in Switzerland. Invalid care is more easily managed in one’s native language.

It was strange living in England again; at first there was so much catching up to do; and there was such an unpleasant smell in the London air, like that of a cheap air freshener and particularly noticeable around the skirts of the mother of parliaments. The smell was that of decaying cover-up and PR work, of course, and such messes should have been cleared up, but the English had got into the habit of believing that corruption and turpitude in high places only happened abroad; and in the face of all the evidence to the contrary the habit lingered.

Even more deeply ingrained was the British habit of groundless national self-congratulation.

The modern youth cult was first identified as a twentieth-century social novelty by academic anthropologists working in mid-thirties New Deal America. It was quickly recognized, however, that Madison, Ohio, where the first work had been done, was typical not only of middle America, but of most of the large towns and cities of the United States; this teenage thing was an All-American high school student phenomenon and of immediate economic importance. When, twenty years later, the same teenage phenomenon showed up in England it was treated not as a predictable side-effect of Marshall Plan aid flowing into the economy, but hailed as a post-war triumph of the British people’s genius for creating new social institutions.