When the Feast is Finished. Brian Aldiss

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      Now I’m sad to see that Margaret suffered so much in May 1997. Our holidays abroad had always been pleasurable for her. Clearly the cancer was already surreptitiously working to make her miserable.

      Margaret spoke longingly of the isle of Bornholm, in the Baltic, ‘where people are civilised and food is good.’ ‘And,’ I said, ‘it’s windy and cold.’ Here in our room, she, smiling, says, ‘You’re content wherever you are.’

      And content nowhere without her.

      On Greece’s northern frontier with Macedonia, she bought herself a pack of little bottles of Unterberg, ‘natural herb bitters taken for digestion’. It was uncharacteristic of her. She made a joke of it, and I swigged a bottle with her.

      This account stands as an example of male insensitivity. It is also an example of Margaret’s self-effacement. She was ‘a good sport’; she tried not to spoil other people’s enjoyment. At this period, neither of us knew that a more sinister and lethal ill than her enlarged ventricle was creeping up on her. And she looked so well …

      Back in England, summer was upon us. Our house was finished, our garden was landscaped, our waterfall was tinkling away. We sat in our pleasing paved helix outside the house, doing very little. Margaret read gardening books and nursed Sotkin. We had two cats, the second being Macramé, but kindly, furry Sotkin, was her treasure. Perhaps she needed his comfort as he obviously needed hers.

      Although I was writing my utopia, White Mars, in collaboration with Sir Roger Penrose, I now worked fewer hours. When I bumped into my neighbour Harry Brack, we went and drank coffee and conversed in the Café Noir. When I returned to Margaret, she said, ‘That’s just the sort of thing you should be doing, now that you’re retired.’

      But. I find it is one thing to sit and talk over coffee with a friend when you can go home to your wife, and quite another when you can’t, when there’s no wife. Who wants to talk in those circumstances? I would rather be alone, skulking.

      Our last summer drifted by. It was on the 20th of July we enjoyed that happy lunch with the Rubinsteins in their garden.

      But on the following day, Margaret wrote to our GP, Dr Neil MacLennan, asking for another appointment with Dr Hart, her cardiologist, whom she had been consulting since September 1995. On that occasion my diary says:

      My peachy creature had to go to the cardiologist, Mr Hart (sic), for examination. She gets short of breath. The diagnosis: the walls of her heart are too thick, while slight blood pressure affects the situation. More tests to come.

      She displayed no anxiety before the examination. I concealed my anxiety. Afterwards she appeared smiling and calm as usual.

      Following Mr Hart’s advice, we’ll now be careful about diet, to protect the tender walls of that tender heart. No more cream teas, jam roly-polys, pork pies, etc. … A part of me regards myself as indestructible; another part admits the truth – about both of us …

      One cannot resist searching through old notebooks for indications one ignored, warnings to which a blind eye had been turned. For instance, during that last summer in Woodlands, on Boars Hill, Margaret was under the weather. Hardly surprising. It was the third hottest August since records began.

      ‘My dear wife wilts’, says the diary on the 3rd.

      On the 10th, she went into the Acland, Oxford’s private hospital, for a colonoscopy, under Mr Kettlewell. When I went in to see her, she was enjoying a light meal and was in bonny spirits. She always made so little fuss. On the following day, when she was back home, I took her her breakfast in bed, and she had a gentle day. On the 16th, we drove up to Stratford-on-Avon to see Vanbrugh’s The Relapse or ‘Virtue in Danger’, and laughed heartily.

      During this hectic time, we were endeavouring to sell our Boars Hill house and to prepare the place in Old Headington for human habitation.

      And why did we sell up, after eleven happy years on Boars Hill? To leave was originally Margaret’s idea. She explained that we were growing older and feebler. Her diaries of the time indicate that I was rather unwell and working under stress, at least in her opinion. There were many old Boars Hill couples living deteriorating lives in deteriorating housing; she did not wish us to follow the same downward path. She was finding the tending of her long flowerbed beyond her. Soon the pruning and lopping of borders would be beyond me.

      Slowly I warmed to her plan. One of the few shortcomings of Boars Hill was that one could walk nowhere. Not down into Wootton or, in the other direction, down to the Abingdon Road and Oxford. We had to use the car to get anywhere. After much searching, we bought the house in Old Headington and began slowly to clear out the possessions we had accumulated on the hill.

      The move proved to be an excellent decision. Did Margaret have an intuition of the illness that was to kill her in two years’ time? I am convinced this was the case, at least in part. If not, then it was Margaret’s good sense. We needed to live in a simpler place.

      Margaret disputed the role of intuition in our move into town. However, understandings arise from our bodies and seep into consciousness by devious paths which science may one day come to understand. During our last months in Woodlands and our first few months in Hambleden, I developed a phobia of finding a snake about the house, more particularly the all-devouring anaconda. I tried to turn this fear into a joke; Margaret was not happy with it. The all-devouring one was lurking in the dark. Probably she was already in its coils.

      Yet we remained happy and carefree, as far as that was possible. We were of that fortunate few for whom being happy had become a habit. On my birthday in 1996, the 18th of August, Margaret’s present to me was the newly published two-volume set of Claire Clairmont’s Correspondence. She read the letters with me.

      We had received an offer for the purchase of Woodlands, and we threw a party – a farewell party it was to be. A band of musicians calling themselves ‘The Skeleton Crew’ played baroque music until late. Our local caterers, the Huxters, served gorgeous food, and sixty of our friends attended. Margaret was a wonderful hostess, looking slender and lovely. No one could suspect there was anything troubling her.

      During the evening, I persuaded her to stroll with me downhill to the bottom of the rear lawn. We looked back. There in the dark, like a ship, sailed our house, its windows alight, full of family, friends, food, drink and happiness: something we had conjured up together.

      And when the guests had departed, Tim and I sat peacefully together and finished up what remained of an excellent Brie.

      At the end of that memorable August, Margaret and I were in Glasgow, celebrating with the Fifty-Third World SF Convention, which took over the entire vast SECC building. Something like twelve thousand people had subscribed to the event. This was the great family of SF fandom’s annual festivity. Among those present from overseas were Sam and Ingrid Lundwall from Sweden and Marcial Souto from Argentina. Margaret and Ingrid, good friends, went shopping together in Glasgow.

      Marcial had once worked with Jorges Luis Borges. We’ve known each other since 1970. Conversations with him, as with Sam, rank among the pleasures of this life.

      In this crowded time, Margaret remained sunny and optimistic, as my diary reports.

      Monday 9th October 1995. The week when we MUST leave Woodlands. The removal vans come tomorrow. M and I have ordered our lives well and sensibly of recent years, thanks to her organising skills; we often feel this move to Headington is our big mistake. Jock MacGregor [our decorator] reassured her yesterday: ‘In СКАЧАТЬ