Authors: Roberta Latow
Keoki broke down in floods of tears as he’d hoped he would not when they walked up the main staircase to the house, flanked solidly by masses of flowers. He clung to Syrah who was trying to reassure him that Ethan was still with them.
In the hall they were met by Mr Wang. The old retainer and Syrah hugged each other but said nothing. They were too choked by emotion for Mr Wang to do anything else but help her off with her jacket. It was then that Paula emerged from the library.
‘Diana, Keoki, Mr Wang will show you to your rooms. I’m sure you will want to freshen up. Why don’t you come into the library, Syrah, and we’ll put you in the picture?’
‘That can wait, Paula – I want to see my father before anything else. I would, however, be grateful if you could give Keoki and Diana something warm to drink, it’s been a long flight.’ With that she took the stairs two at a time and went directly to her father’s room.
Syrah had to take several deep breaths before gently knocking on the door. She had no preconceived idea of what to expect, having not taken in Caleb’s warning. On entering the bedroom her knees nearly buckled under her. Ethan’s room was large and lovely with a series of windows offering a view of the garden and vineyards for as far as the eye could see. But the terraces of vines rising towards the mountains
on one side and far off in to the distance towards the thin ribbon of blue that was the Pacific Ocean on the other, seemed to be visible no longer.
It had always been a rich room, sensuous in its masculine ambience. The French eighteenth-century cherrywood panelling was hung with French Napoleonic engravings, an Ingres oil of a reclining nude odalisque wearing a blue satin turban wound round her head, a David and a Delacroix. The deep, rich, egg-yolk yellow silk damask draperies tied back with massive period silk tassels she had played with as a child; the four-poster canopied bed draped in deep magenta and lined in amethyst paper taffeta; the soft and comforting light that filtered through cream-coloured silk shades on lamps whose bases were handsome period Chinese wine jars; all of this receded now to a point where it could hardly be seen for hospital apparatus: life support systems, oxygen tanks, the flashing and beeping of what little life Ethan had in him echoing from machines. Two nurses in crisp white uniforms moved around the room, another sitting by Ethan. A doctor stood at the far side of the bed making notes on a small pad.
Syrah felt a hand on her shoulder and then Caleb’s arm went around her to steady her. The room was silent except for the monitors’ sounds and a faint gravelly noise: her father struggling to say ‘Syrah’.
He managed it a second and a third time before Caleb told her, ‘If he stops calling for you once he sees you it will be a blessing for him as well as for us. I can’t bear to see him so weak, so desperate. Neither can Paula. I tried to warn you to prepare yourself, hang on for his sake.’
‘He’s not delirious, you know. Just determined to survive long enough to see you. Maybe now you’re here he can rest. That ceaseless calling for you has unnerved us all. I’m so relieved you’re here to stop it.’ The last was from Paula who had arrived to stand with them.
Syrah left them standing at the door. She walked directly to the bed and saw her father properly for the first time. He was propped up against linen pillows trimmed with ecru-coloured lace and in fact looked far better than she had expected him to. He was as handsome as he had been when she had seen him a week before except that there was no vitality left in his face. His eyes were devoid of light, passion, love for life and laughter; even the intelligence that had always shown in them was dimmed. She thought her heart would break as she watched him form his lips once more to call her name.
She approached the nurse who was sitting in a chair next to the bed. The woman was holding Ethan’s hand in hers and stroking it. She placed his hand gently on the white linen coverlet, rose from the chair and stepped aside. Syrah bent over the bed and kissed her father on the forehead, one cheek and then the other, took his hand and squeezed it. He blinked at her and stopped calling her name, closed his eyes and issued a sigh of relief.
All the colour drained from her face.
‘He’s very tired, has little strength. He’s just dozed off, he does that often.’
Syrah very nearly collapsed into the chair and took her father’s hand in hers. She leaned forward and kissed it before she turned to the nurse. ‘I’m Syrah.’
‘I’m Miss Turtle. The nurse standing with the doctor is Mrs Crumb and my other colleague is Miss Sanchez. It’s good you’re here. Don’t expect too much. Keep talking to Mr Richebourg, that’s important, and hold his hand as you’re doing now. He needs life around him and love.’ Then she walked away, leaving father and daughter together.
After several minutes the doctor Syrah had known all her life approached her. He patted her on the shoulder, checked the machines monitoring his patient, then asked to have a private word with her.
Together they walked to the windows. ‘Ethan will rest more comfortably now that you’re here, Syrah. He might even rally somewhat, but you mustn’t raise your hopes. I doubt he can sustain even a partial recovery. I’m sorry.’
‘Do you think he understands how ill he is?’
‘His mind isn’t addled, just slower. He can speak when he has the strength and wants to, and at least make himself understood. But it’s best to remember that every word he utters is a tremendous struggle for him. You should try to do most of the talking, Syrah. Ethan is partially paralysed down his left side.
‘I think you ought to know that he left a copy of a letter with me years ago – the original is lodged with his attorney. He wants not to be kept alive on a life support machine and to die with as much dignity as is possible. If I am to obey his wishes that means your father has no more than a few hours, a day or so at the most.’
The tears were running down Syrah’s cheeks. She wiped them away
with her fingertips but felt somehow more composed. She looked towards the four-poster bed and asked the doctor, ‘Is there a problem about granting my father’s last wishes?’
‘No, not unless you or Caleb make one.’
‘Then Ethan must die as he wanted to, with dignity and in this room as he has always known it. I’m certain Caleb will agree. Please make my father as comfortable as possible but have all these machines removed. Immediately! I need half an hour and then I’m moving in here to remain with my father. I know that’s what he would want me to do.’
‘My dear girl, I have no doubt about that nor that all your father was hanging on for was you. He’ll drift away when he knows you are ready to let him go.’
‘The mere sight of Ethan, feeling his hand in mine has given me strength. It’s restored my confidence to do what is right for him. I can think of nothing else. I don’t want to think of anything else. I love my father so very much it’s impossible for me to let him or myself down in his time of need. My time of intolerable loss. I intend to turn this final journey he is about to take into as beautiful and easy a passage as I can for him. He deserves nothing less.’
Syrah took a hurried bath and changed into a pair of wide silver grey linen trousers and a white silk crêpe-de-chine blouse. After that she went directly to the rooms Diana and Keoki had been given.
She placed an arm around her son, kissed him and took Diana’s hand in hers. ‘I need you two to support me more than I have ever needed anyone in my life. The news isn’t good. We’re going to lose your Poppy, Keoki. I promise, when the time is right, you can see him and kiss him farewell. But that’s all I can promise. Keoki, I’m going to spend all my time with Ethan. That means I’ll have no time for you or anything else. Can you understand that and let Diana play mummy for me?’
Keoki, choked up with the pain of having to lose his grandfather, could hardly speak.
‘Yes,’ he managed at last.
‘And forgive me for abandoning you at a time when I should be with you to comfort you?’
He just managed a nod of his head. Mother and son kissed and hugged each other then. Tears were brimming in Diana’s eyes when the two women briefly embraced and Syrah fled from the room.
She could hear Paula chiding Caleb about something. Seeing them at the foot of the stairs, she descended and asked, ‘Can I have a quick word?’
Caleb, looking as if he welcomed the interruption, said, ‘Yes, of course,’ and the three of them went into the sitting room. For a brief moment Syrah saw a certain vulnerability in him that reminded her of the Caleb she had known before Paula, a kindly brother with a more generous heart.
She went straight to the point. ‘I hope you agree with me that Dad should die as he wants to, with dignity?’
‘Yes, certainly,’ answered Caleb.
‘I’m moving into his room, to stay with him and make him as comfortable as I can.’
‘I rather expected you would,’ said Paula. And for once there was no facetiousness in her voice. She was too relieved that Syrah had taken over a role she herself did not want to play.
Syrah left the sitting room and a silent Caleb and Paula. In the hall she met Mr Wang who accompanied her to Ethan’s room where they found him still with his eyes closed. Under the doctor’s instructions the nurses were disengaging the last of the medical equipment, rolling and carrying what seemed like an inordinate amount of hospital machinery from the room. All that remained were oxygen tanks and a nurse’s station: a table containing all they might need to keep their patient comfortable hidden by a sixteenth-century tapestry screen.
A more comfortable chair replaced the one alongside the bed. Mr Wang set a marble-topped Directoire table next to that and on it a silver tray with a cut glass decanter of malt whisky, a glass tumbler and a plate of smoked salmon sandwiches that he had carried into the room.
By the time Syrah sat in the chair, placed now so that she could hold her father’s hand and they could look at each other, Ethan was free of any visible medical wiring except for a slim line of oxygen. He was dressed in the top half of a pair of coral-coloured silk pyjamas: Chinese dragons woven into the fine silk showed faintly in the soft warm light of a lamp standing on the table next to the bed.
Syrah leaned forward and rearranged the collar. The silk felt soft and luxurious. She ran her hand down the sleeve and adjusted the cuff. Memories flooded back as she took his hand in hers and stroked it.
‘That Christmas so many years ago … we always called it “The Christmas of the silk pyjamas.” I bought them on that bi-plane exhibition and display I attended in Hong Kong. You still look handsome in them. Remember what you said on first seeing them? “Syrah, they’re fit for an Emperor. Every man at some time in his life would like at least once to feel like a royal, if only in bed. What a grand present.” You’re wearing them now, Ethan.’
As she turned away from her father to speak to Mr Wang, she felt a faint squeeze of her hand and turned back to see her father open his eyes and blink at her.
‘You understood every word I said! Oh, thank God.’
Ethan blinked several times more and squeezed her hand again. Was there more strength in his grasp? Did she imagine it? Did she imagine renewed light in his eyes? Nurse Crumb was approaching the bed but Syrah waved her back.
‘We’ll beat this, Ethan.’
She read his lips as he formed them into a definite, ‘No.’ It took time and tremendous effort before quite clearly, in a whisper, he added, ‘Love you, Syrah.’
She turned to Mr Wang and the three nurses standing near the window, watching their patient and his daughter. The look of astonishment on their faces was proof enough to her that her father was rallying. She knew in her heart that it was not to be for long and that was not because the doctor and nurses had told her so but because her father had. Ethan had never lied to her.
She smiled at the others in the room. An hour, several, a day or days, no matter how little or how much time Ethan had left on this earth, she intended to spend it with him, as pleasantly and peacefully as she could make it for them both. He knew he was going to die and was not frightened at the prospect. Ethan was living now to make certain Syrah need not fear for him and his passing. He and his daughter had always been able to read each other’s feelings; they had been that close ever since she was a child.
Still holding his hand, she called the nurses over to her. At that
moment the doctor returned to the room and went directly to Ethan. Everyone in the room, including Caleb and Paula who had followed in the doctor’s footsteps, heard Ethan say in an exhausted whisper, ‘Thank you, Abe, my children.’
It was not difficult to understand that he was thanking them for obeying his instructions on how he wished to end his life. No one seemed to know what to say next and it fell to Syrah to break the silence. She spoke first to Mr Wang. ‘Ethan loves flowers, especially white ones in this room, masses of Casablanca lilies in that Ming vase on the table over there, and white roses, three dozen, in the vase he usually has on the library table.’
She turned to gaze into her father’s eyes and told him, ‘I always thought it was so clever of you to turn that turret at the end of the room into a library. I remember even as a child adoring the adventure of walking up those winding stone stairs surrounded by book-lined walls.’
‘You can draw from the flowers Dad has received from well wishers, Mr Wang,’ suggested Paula.
‘As long as they are what my father likes,’ added Syrah.
‘I think we’re too many here, Dad. We don’t want to tire you out. Paula and I will leave you with Syrah.’ Then turning to his sister, Caleb suggested, ‘We’ll talk later about a roster.’
No, we won’t, Caleb! was what went through her mind. But she said nothing. He was, after all, trying to do his best for all concerned: he could not help the coldness in his voice, the attempt to deal with these last hours of his father’s life as if he were organising a work program. That was just Caleb.
Instead Syrah turned her attention to the nurses. ‘I know how hard you’ve worked to save my father and the care you’re giving him, but while I am grateful beyond words for what you are doing for him, I would ask you one further favour. Could you tend to him out of uniform, wearing dresses? Something bright to remind him of pretty women walking about in everyday life. It would be so nice for him if things appeared as normal as possible.’