Lunch with P, at his house. I last saw him not two months ago, and was shocked, but then he was in the middle of a bout of covid. C had told me on the phone that he'd been unwell when they were away, and had been in hospital since, so I was braced. But not braced enough.
He met me as I walked through from the hall into the vast kitchen. Tall, gaunt, his cheeks and lips drawn back exposing his teeth, skull-like; unshaven, thin, greasy, unkempt hair, jaundiced, his skin a sickly grey-yellow. His liver is shot.
"How do I look?"
"You look fine" I lied, then instantly regretted it, I should have been honest, wry; "I've seen you looking better" would have done it.
He shuffled awkwardly, weakly, around the kitchen table, blue, monogrammed loafers clonking and dragging on the stone floor. He was uncomfortable, trying not to be in my direct line of sight, so I had to keep turning to talk to him. He normally does the cooking, and kept barking instructions at C. Or trying to bark. His frustration was palpable.
Eventually he settled in a chair by the window in the soft autumn sun, warming. He was wearing a jacket, a grey mohair scarf around his neck. It wasn't cold, but he was. I sat on the bench beside him, and he relaxed, talked of plans for next summer. We would go to France, to the Jura, and we should take the train down to Avignon, see Marseille again, drive up to the Vaucluse.
We had lunch in the loggia, the three of us, rabbit stew, cheese, some berries. Chablis. He had a glass in front of him, but barely touched it. Neither did the stew interest him. In the far distance, across the fields and the woods, I could see a bright splash of newness, the house that is being built beyond the village. He was on reality TV, she's a young actress, beautiful, I told them. I remembered her name. "Ah, yes". They'd seen her on the TV, 'Our Girl'. We talked of Paris, and he wanted to go, now, on the Eurostar. Sometimes he was distant, vague, and seemed to be holding different conversation to us. C explained that it was the painkillers. Eventually he became tired and agitated, and finally, quite suddenly, he made paltry excuses and shuffled indoors to sleep.
C and I talked a little, furtively. The hospital, a top private affair in London, was awful, the food dire, the place not being cleaned properly. She'd had to wash him and change his sheets herself. He's on constant painkillers, abdominal drains every three weeks.
"Does he look worse to you? I see him every day, I can't tell any more." Concerned, fragile.
"Much worse, I'm sorry. What's the prognosis?" I asked, as if I didn't know. "Can they transplant?"
"No, there's nothing they can do. Its because of the cancer." She looked calm, accepting. We could hear him banging around in the kitchen again, he hadn't yet gone up, so we stopped. I helped her clear the table. She tripped on the steps going up to the kitchen and went down, broke all the plates she was carrying.
"Were they the real ones, or the fakes?" she laughed, to herself. He'd gone now. They'd had some copies made last year, when the kitchen was done. There was a spot of fresh blood on her nose.
...
I woke not long after four this morning, needed a pee. It was very dark. When I came back from the bathroom an owl screeched in the walnut tree, but instead of staying in the back of the room I thoughtlessly went to the open window, silencing it. I tried reading some dire political analysis on the phone to trick myself back to sleep, but it didn't work. Overtired now, my mind a spinning turmoil. What will I do when the house is gone, if it goes? Will we be able to secure the land, get planning consent? Have I got the energy. The money, always the money. What the hell am I going to do? Is my daughter going to be alright in this new job, the pressure is hurting her? P, his kindness, his enormous generosity, Glynebourne, Venice, France, Duxford to awe at sweeping Spitfires with the children, houseparties, the two of us dancing around the table in the vast hall, shouting "Hurry up Harry, come on!", as the girls mocked our stupidity. Weekend dinner parties, the extraordinary cast of characters, too many of them now dead. He got drunk and wept the day David died, 'Five Years' playing on the system. Five years. The festival when they forgot to sell any tickets, so held a party instead. The magical summer night when we took it in turns to read poetry by candlelight in the poolhouse.
"I shall make this girl a bed of ferns..."
The children. They're all far too young for this. Much too young.
I went down and made myself tea at dawn, took it back to bed, read a bit more. That did it. When I woke, my vision was filled through my closed eyelids with a plank of old oak, beeswaxed to a soft, fluid sheen. There were marks, softened by time and use. The grain was fine, liquid. I knew that when I opened my eyes it would be gone, so I held it for a while.
I looked out of the window. Still, autumnal, misty grey, numb, dumb. Not even a twitch of breeze in the leaves of the poplars.
It felt as though the world had been paused.