Time to Go

TIME TO GO

In memoriam S. 1927–2018

CONTENTS

Acknowledgements

1 The first pressing

2 Pernod, sunshine and siestas

3 We could have got an eight-ball

4 The man by the lake

5 Turn-ups

6 A good innings

7 The man in the loft

8 Deep-sea fishing for mackerel

9 Over the rainbow

10 Old people’s porn

11 Spiders in the mouth

12 Ginster deprivation

13 A bowl full of wishes

14 Red lines

15 The unsanctified burial ground

16 Criminal sentences

17 Tim Berners me

18 Enter Jeeves

19 Swansongs

20 Pushing the boat out

21 In orbit

22 Snow in May

23 Bunbury

24 Total War

25 The belly of the beast

26 Marvellous pompiers

27 Plutonium

28 Killing oneself successfully is not something one can practise

29 Susie’s Law

30 A bit dicky

31 The moment was perfect

32 The last sentence of silence

33 Stanley sitting on a shelf

34 At a tin table

35 The road to St Antonin

36 Les flics

It is often said it is better to leave too early rather than too late …

whether it be a job, a party or life itself.

Henry Marsh

ONE

The first pressing

I was battling through a swift visit to my elderly mother in France when she took me aside and told me she had something important she wanted to ask me, but it was privée. She was not French, but had lived there for thirty years, and liked to sprinkle a few French words around to set her, if not above, then at least apart from the expatriates who had not properly learnt to speak the language.

Susie moved to the Tarn, a region slap in the middle of France just above the Pyrenees, with her third husband Stanley, in their prime, thirty years before. She had been 50, and he 60, and both were beautiful, talented, bold and sexy, and both threw themselves into creating an enviable home in an expansive garden, which rang with conversation and laughter.

But time was a cruel companion. And it was particularly unforgiving when you spent long days in its company sunbathing, gardening, drinking and eating rich food. By 2017 Stanley and Susie were old and bent, with thinning hair and sun-beaten skin.

One thing that always brought a sparkle to Susie’s pale blue rheumy eyes was a secret, whether it was sharing one or prising one out of someone, and I could see her excitement as she crept towards her bedroom, and her impatience at finding Stanley blocking the door with his walking frame. On its ledge was a tube of ointment.

I loudly said ‘Got your KY jelly Stan!’

Without missing a beat he croaked ‘I’m afraid there’s no call for that these days.’ But at dinner the night before I had seen him pat my girlfriend Amanda’s bottom as she passed him with the dishes. He had been pulling his Rodin prepares to enter the disrobing room face.

Susie shut the door and directed me to a chair that looked as if it was in a prearranged spot. She liked to arrange things carefully, and aimed to leave nothing to chance. As she sat agonisingly slowly in front of me, the little explosions of pain from her crumbling and twisted vertebrae almost audible, I wondered what this was about. Secrets usually meant trouble with Susie. In our family, if you wanted to keep something quiet, Mum was most definitely not the word. And she was never usually interested in my opinion, or indeed anyone’s for that matter, unless it was an accurate reproduction of her own. I braced myself for trouble, as things were never straightforward with her. A request for a favour or the offer of a gift was usually part of some stratagem that only she knew the full extent of and which – when fully revealed – turned out to be a nasty surprise.

This account might be easier to read, though not tell, if Susie were a kindly, pinafore-wearing, apple-cheeked granny who lived only to show baskets of kittens to indulged grandchildren. But she was much better than that. She was a real person, who a long and varied life had knocked about a fair bit, leaving chunks missing from her personality and scar tissue from emotional wounds that still howled in pain many decades later. She was certainly no Mrs Tiggywinkle, and I would not patronise her by softening her edges and sweetening her behaviour the way elderly people so often are in literature and on film. Susie was a woman of passion, anger and determination. She still relished revenge and had many scores to settle. If anything, old age had sharpened, not mellowed, her.

‘I have had a wonderful life,’ she said to me, holding her hand in front of her mouth I feared because she was self-conscious about her teeth. ‘I have lived in beautiful houses, and here we had the garden, which has been such an enormous success. Did I tell you that the mayor asked me to enter it into a competition for the best floral village in the south of France? I won a puce cyclamen,’ she both sneered and preened. ‘He’s such a nice man, and cultured, not like an English mayor, you know, common, quite, quite different. Of course I lived in London and America in the 60s with your father, and Gloucestershire after that, before it was ruined, and had the restaurant and the film company and so many happy times …’ Her eyes were glistening as her memory reeled back a heavily edited version of her life. A competitive element had entered the discourse, as it so often did with her. She wanted to remind me that her life had not only been good, but the best. ‘I have met so many interesting people. Well, your father and I knew the best of the film and literary world. And people were much more interesting than they are now. You wouldn’t have any idea of how much better life was before your generation. But I know you know that. And Stanley and I have been on so many amazing holidays, been to China, and India …’

She was indeed a member of the generation and class that had tasted the first pressing of the olive oil of modern life. Its members had enjoyed speedy promotion in interesting jobs, spacious houses, meaningful holidays, cars to drive on empty roads and cheap fuel to put in their tanks, and it was now her grandchildren’s generation that was left to live off the congealed chip fat that remained.

She shook her head. ‘After a life like mine, I don’t want to have to live in a care home. No, Guy, I will not be put in a home. I will not be.’

I certainly sympathised with that. I wouldn’t like to live with my life reduced to a couple of framed photos, a wingback chair and a small TV. I had sympathies also for the hapless patients cooped up with Susie who would have to live out their last days listening to how glamorous and eventful her life had been compared to their tiny, fruitless existence.

‘So j’aidecidé that I shall end my life, here, in this wonderful house, with Stanley.’

‘OK,’ I said. ‘What do you mean exactly?’

‘We have decided to, er, kill ourselves,’ she smiled, ‘on the same day, at the same time. I want to go out at the top. At a time of our choosing. But I have one little problem, which is why I am asking for your help. I need to get hold of the right drugs to do it. Can you buy me some heroin?’

I leant back in my chair and tried to gather my thoughts. It perturbed me to think of her contemplating death. I had always thought that she would go on forever, pickled as she was in defiance, revenge and resentment. I was Prince Charles to her Queen, destined never to take my place at the head of the family (though I somewhat doubted Her Majesty was asking Charles to score her smack). But with our parents racing through their 80s, my generation had turned into eternal children. And my mother emanated, even in her recent diminished and bent form, so much power.

When I spoke, I told Susie that I was shocked.

She barely listened. ‘Can you get hold of some for me?’ she asked.

‘Well … I might be able to track some down … but, aren’t you allergic to morphine?’

‘Yes,’ she said.

‘Heroin is from the same family as morphine, from the opium poppy …’ As I spoke, I thought about that family, the one with heroin and morphine in it. Perhaps the only family I knew of as strange as ours.

‘Ah. Then we shall have to go another route,’ she said. ‘But what do you suggest?’ She leant forward. ‘Will you help me?’

‘What about Switzerland?’ I asked.

‘It’s no good,’ she waved her hand impatiently. ‘You need a certificate signed by two doctors, which means you basically have to have a terminal illness.’

Sounded like classic Swiss thoroughness.

‘Do you remember us taking you skiing as a child?’

‘Yes,’ I said.

‘Of course your father and I lived through the golden era of skiing. Empty runs, just a few English people. And the right sort. The only pity was that we had to take you. It was never as good again after that. Everyone was so nice, so interesting. Not like now.’

TWO

Pernod, sunshine and siestas

Sunday evening in the Ryanair shed of Toulouse Airport, eating my third panini, and staring at the passengers in the speedy boarding queue, I was reminded how mummy dressed for air travel.

But first I think we need to talk about nomenclature. Mummy. There are difficulties with this. It’s how I address her, and how I usually refer to her behind her back, but on the page the word pongs of privilege, with a top note of Norman Bates. Since turning sixty I had found it increasingly hard to say Mummy, particularly in public. It was a symptom of the Prince Charles eternal son syndrome. My strategy was to mumble the word, because the woman baulked at mum. My sisters Emma and Jane had both transitioned to mother, though Jane threw in a few mumsies to keep it casual. I couldn’t see that as a solution. Calling her Mummy made me sound weird, calling her mother made her sound weird.

I am going to use mum, not to annoy her, though I think it will, but because it seems simplest, and I will add Susie for variation.

When flying, Susie favoured an ensemble with an ambitious touch, like a linen suit and hat, and often a new pair of shoes that pinched her feet. But she refused to use a wheelchair, and only recently had accepted a ride on those beeping golf carts. The bar for disability at airports was set low. I often smiled at what thirty years ago would have been considered a miracle, but now was an unremarkable event: someone standing up from a wheelchair.

My mum had known the glory years of international air travel, between the first transatlantic flight and the birth of Ryanair. Or was it 9/11 that did for it, with the glamour-sapping security measures it forced on us all? My father took full advantage of the new freedoms of the age of Aquarius, and he and my mum, sometimes with me and my siblings, jetted around the world and lived in many beautiful places: Allassio, Kashmir, Malibu, and Minorca, when the Balearics really were sleepy deserted islands long before mass tourism. We lived in a farmhouse a short walk from a deserted beach through an olive grove ringing with crickets. We never saw a tourist. There were none in those days. We four children grew up suntanned with no fear of cancer, and ran free in the era before paedophiles and road traffic shut down childhood. My parents seemed to have had an equally good time. They, after all, had discovered in about three years, wine, garlic, olive oil, Pernod, sunshine and siestas.

Susie had had a good life. But even so, something in her plan didn’t quite add up for me.

The principal flaw was that she wasn’t ill or that infirm. I have friends who after an agonised discussion with siblings and doctors have reluctantly agreed to put a Do Not Resuscitate Order on a parent or grandparent. But these oldies were in tumorous pain, incontinent, and/or lost to this world, incapable of remembering their own or their children’s names. Their lives were as hopeless as a dried out hanging basket.

My mum could get up, dress herself, call friends, go shopping, write emails, cook lunch, track down the mayor and issue a bollocking in French about some minor village issue, lie on the sofa with The Guardian digest, rise at six, pour three or four whiskies without spilling a drop, cook a three-course meal, and settle back on the sofa to follow the complex plot of a box set before undressing, removing her make-up and reading a decent book prior to an undisturbed night of sleep.

On this most recent visit she had told me she was landscaping the village car park and planning to write a new book. The landscaping project was the consequence of her having persuaded the Commune to chop down two ancient plane trees that were partially obscuring the view from her sitting room. With plant catalogues open on her desk, she was throwing herself into the task of proving to the Commune how superior a plants’ woman she was.

When last year she had started complaining about the trees in her view, everyone who knew her said ‘Susie, forget the trees, the view is still beautiful, and for half the year they won’t have any leaves on them.’

The view was indeed majestic even with the trees standing. From Susie’s grey cotton sofas you could see for twenty-five miles across a classic French pastoral quilt of fields, stone farmsteads, oak woods and cute villages – each with a steeple. The trees in the foreground were about forty yards from the house, and obscured a small portion of the vista. They were a minor irritant, best ignored. Any attempt to remove them would frustrate her, annoy her neighbours, turn the mayor against her, and make things worse – we all said. This was discussed against the background of two obsessive court cases she had pursued for years against neighbours for things they did that annoyed her. Dismissing our advice, she lobbied and she cajoled and sure enough, she got them cut down. This was not the act of a geriatric letting the reins of life fall from feeble hands. It was the machinations of a determined and effective woman enjoying her power. So why had she asked me about killing herself?

I also remembered that on the second day of my four-day visit Susie had instructed me to pick up some heavy box files and take them through to the kitchen. She kept huge amounts of old papers, in files, in plastic boxes and in steel cabinets that were always close to hand. She stood behind me, a small, twisted woman with knobbly knuckles, watching everything I did as if she didn’t have enough faith in me to carry a plastic box from one room to another without messing up.

‘Move that one, push it forwards, that’s it,’ she instructed, just before I was about to do precisely that. ‘Put it over there,’ she pointed at the kitchen table – the only feasible surface to put it on. I turned to get the second box as she said ‘Now get the other one.’

In one box was the transcript of the Appeal Court Case Susie was involved in during the 1980s against a neighbour who was making an ugly noise