The Kindness of Women (37 page)

“You'll have time to read,” I commented. “Cleo has the keys to your house, she can pick anything you want from the shelves.”

“No—I'm too busy watching everyone here.” He pulled my arm and whispered: “You have to admire people. Most of them are far worse off than me—yards of gut cut out, half their jaws gone, ribs and God knows what. Yet they look like film extras ready to play a party scene.”

“Perhaps you should bring a camera in here?”

“It's a thought. In fact”—Dick glanced at me, as if recognising me for the first time—“they say factory production always goes down after a film-crew visit. Here I'd expect the opposite effect. Perhaps there are too many TV screens in hospitals and too few cameras. Jim, tell me about Cleo and the children. It's good to see you, by the way.”

My suggestion had taken root. He was rallying himself, trying to be interested in our inconsequential world. Looking at his long, jutting jaw, I sensed his gathering will, if not to survive, at least to impose himself on whatever time was left to him.

The following Sunday, when I visited the hospital, I learned that he had discharged himself and returned home.

*   *   *

“It looks as if I have three or four months, possibly six,” Dick explained as we sat in his computer room. “
Omnibus
and
Horizon
are both very interested…”

“Dick, are you sure?”

“They'll set up the lights and equipment for me, and some kind of static video camera we can talk into. The idea is to show what actually happens as we approach the end, and break through all the taboos and preconceptions. No high-flown stuff about life and death, but as close to our ordinary talk as we can get. We'll start with something easy to get the ball rolling, the ten best films ever made, our last trips to New York, Chomsky versus Skinner. Most of it will be taped down here, but we'll move upstairs towards the end…”

He spoke in a confident and matter-of-fact way, sitting comfortably at his desk as if he were back in his old office at the Institute of Psychology. I was impressed by his easy command of his situation—he had found a role for himself, which I considered to be quietly heroic but which he saw as merely the most interesting way of using the time left to him. He had lost even more weight and wore a high-collared shirt and silk scarf to cover his chin. A smaller and neater wig allowed him, in a certain light, to resemble his former self, but I felt once again that he had begun to reject the affable and good-humoured personality I had known for so many years.

Altogether he had made a marked recovery from the months of medical treatment. Was he enjoying one of those periods of remission that give false promise to the victim or, as I still hoped, had he made a genuine return to health? As for his macabre documentary, at its worst this was a last gamble that his own survival would invalidate the project. Or, perhaps, having rid himself of all illusions in the radio-iodine room at the Marsden, he was now free to choose whatever maverick notion he needed to fill his last days.

As we soon learned, the improvement in Dick's condition was a brief upward tremor on a steadily downward graph. The specialists at the Marsden had arranged with Dick's doctor in Richmond to provide the drugs that would hold back the metastasising tumours. Now the cure, rather than the disease, would kill him. The cancer would not spread, but the increasing doses of chemotherapy would destroy his immune system, so that the smallest respiratory infection would turn into a fatal pneumonia.

But Dick was beyond the reach of these ironies. He was conserving what strength was left to him in order to carry out an important psychological experiment that would test his audience as much as himself. During our first recorded conversation, a trial run of the equipment, I found it difficult to speak at all, as if my throat were trying to mimic Dick's ravaged larynx. Our second appointment was cancelled when I developed a heavy head cold. But Dick was insistent; for reasons of his own he had decided that I should be the moderator, in part because I had first suggested the documentary to him, but also because he wanted to involve me directly in his death.

Sitting in his study as we prepared for the first episode, I regretted raising the idea. When Dick at last settled behind his desk I could see that he was almost exhausted by the effort of calming himself for the interview. The youthful actor-psychologist had become a shrunken and wounded old man, visibly fading under his powdered wig, and I hoped that the BBC team would pull the plugs on the entire spectacle. But everything was now grist to television's mill, like the razor-toothed rollers in abattoirs that stripped the last shreds of gristle from the bones of a carcase.

While we waited for the sound engineer to check his levels, I noticed that Dick had taken down the California licence plates on the walls of his study, the Cocoa Beach beer mats and Cape Kennedy press badges. During the course of our interviews more of these snapshots of his past were to disappear, as if he were consciously dismantling a carefully constructed myth of himself.

But when he spoke to camera he soon rallied.

“… Many people have left detailed accounts of how they ended their lives, from the Greek Stoics to the Jewish doctors in the Warsaw ghetto who kept careful records of how they starved to death. In the past, of course, everyone knew what happened when a human being died—relatives sat around the deathbed, doing their best to comfort the dying, and most people died in their homes. Today, though, death is something we experience for the first time when it happens to us … most people die in hospital, surrounded by machines, and watching someone die, especially a person very close, is more than we can face. Why? What is it about death that so unsettles us? In this series we're going to look at death through the eyes of a single dying person—me. I'm Dr. Dick Sutherland. Three months ago my doctor told me that…”

While Dick rested from his introduction, I noticed the digital desk clock recording the date, September 23, 1979. The green rice-grain letters blinked through the minutes and hours, unmoved by the camera or Dick's commentary. He sat in a deck chair in the bathroom while the director and the series producer discussed the few fluffs and verbal slips. They decided that, given the nature of the documentary, these would only enhance its authenticity, despite the problems they posed for the dubbing of foreign-language versions sold abroad. My own role, thankfully, was limited to asking Dick a number of general questions about his state of mind.

“… How do I really feel? Does the thought that all this is going to end in two months' time—as it happens, before the last episode of my favourite TV series—throw me into a complete panic? Do I walk around all day with a feeling of terror, like a victim in a horror film? Surprisingly, the answer is no. If anything, I feel cool and detached, as if all this is happening to someone else. The brain seems to have developed a way of standing back from itself, like a locomotive uncoupling the carriages behind it. To tell the truth, the biggest problem faced by the dying is how other people feel, especially their friends. There's a real sense in which the dying have to die twice, once for themselves and once for their friends…”

Did Dick believe this? His sister and her husband, a retired Dundee accountant, had moved into the house to look after him, but they were unobtrusive, sensitive, and reassuring. As I drove home it occurred to me that Dick had many acquaintances but virtually no close friends other than myself. Did he resent my concern for him and my visits to his hospital bed? Or were the friends for whom he had to die the invisible TV audience that had invested its admiration in him for so many years and now needed to be placated?

But all sense of an audience had gone by the time of our second interview. The first recording had left me light-headed. Unable to work, I roamed from room to room. Time seemed dislocated, like an endless afternoon in a strange city. When I arrived at Richmond, an hour early, Dick scarcely seemed to recognise me and consulted his diary as if to remind himself. During the recording he sat stiffly at his desk with a brave if bleak smile and described his activities in the past week, which seemed, eerily, to resemble my own.

I noticed that more mementoes had left the walls, the ticket stubs of the Rio premiere of
2001
and photographs of himself with the American astronauts at the Houston Space Center. I guessed that he was clearing away these remnants of the past twenty years so that he could return to his youth. Steadied by the camera, he reflected on his Scottish childhood and his wartime schooldays in Australia, where he and his sister had been evacuated.

“… Thinking about the Japanese during the first years of the war was rather like thinking about death. Everyone in Australia was vaguely frightened of the Japanese soldiers and knew they were approaching, but no one had ever seen one. Of course, our idea of the Japanese was a complete caricature—very different from your case, Jim, as a boy in wartime Shanghai. You knew exactly what the Japanese were like, and you'd also seen a great deal of death. Looking back, how do you think that affected you?”

I watched the sound engineer's tape turning and looked up to find Dick watching me with surprisingly clear eyes, his long jaw raised to reveal his ravaged neck.

I replied clumsily: “I did see a lot of dead people—as you'd expect during a war. In some ways I think it was very corrupting…”

“Go on—you say corrupting, but how exactly?”

“Well … it wasn't the dead who were devalued but the living. Our expectations of life were lowered.”

“Is that because they were too high in the first place?” Before I could reply, Dick continued in a last surge of breath: “Perhaps we have exaggerated ideas about life, expectations that we see are unrealistic only as it draws to an end? It may be that we've allowed life and death to become polarised, when they're really much closer to each other than we realise. As I get nearer to my own death the distance seems to shrink…”

After the recording Dick held my hand in a friendly but absentminded way. He walked stiffly into the dining room, which overlooked his high-walled garden. Had he begun to forget me, along with the beer mats and the American licence plates? Yet his apparently impromptu question had made a telling point, addressed more to me than to the television audience, a brief but acute inquiry into my own motives and character.

The days between our recordings seemed to lengthen, as if I were applying some unconscious brake to time in an attempt to hold back the approaching end. A different man was emerging through Dick's wasted features, far more self-reliant than the television performer he had seduced himself into becoming. At our third and fourth interviews he spoke to camera in a short-breathed and almost impatient tone, describing his pleasure in the everyday world around him, in the garden and fish pond, his sense of triumph at winning the affection of his neighbours' cat. But these pleasures seemed as abstract as the moves in a chess game. I guessed that he was entering a realm where, seeing everything with absolute clarity, he no longer cared to be distracted by pleasures of any kind.

Our fifth recording was cancelled, and I assumed that Dick had decided to end the series. But his sister told me that he had briefly returned to the Marsden, to be introduced to a new regimen of drugs that would stabilise a secondary tumour in his knee. By now, two months after discharging himself, he breathed with continuous effort, his diaphragm forced into his ribcage by the enlarging lobes of his liver. On the day of our interview his sister and I knocked on his bedroom door, unable to get a reply. We entered to find the French windows open to the cool November air. Dick was sitting in his woollen dressing gown at the bottom of the garden, staring at the house without noticing us. I had seen the same fixed eyes in my neighbours' golden retriever when it had crept into the garden to die. Only when Dick rose from his deck chair and stepped slowly towards us did time begin again.

Without any greeting, he led me to his computer room, where a small editing suite had been installed. Before the arrival of the BBC crew Dick began to run through the film of our earlier conversations. Shifting the clips of film with his impatient fingers, he stared at himself as he addressed the camera. Until then I had been glad that the TV screen was helping to ease his last days. The medium that had trivialised his scientific career had appeared to come to his rescue, but now its magic had dimmed.

The BBC crew arrived, and we could hear their lowered voices in the hall. Usually their appearance provided Dick with a slight lift, and the expression would return to his face like a bucket drawn from a dark well. But he ignored them, staring at the empty screen of the editing machine. I touched his arm, thinking that he had lost consciousness, but his eyes were alert.

“Dick, they're here…”

“You can tell them to wait.” He gestured dismissively at the screen. “The producer's lost his nerve—he wants to change the ‘direction' of the series. Can you believe that? A little late in the day. Bring in other topics, what do I now think of abortion? Abortion—do-it-yourself genocide … He didn't like that.”

He laughed thinly, massaging his knee through his pyjamas.

“Dick, can you walk? I'll bring the wheelchair.”

“No—it's just down the hall. The surgeon at the Marsden talked about a prosthetic limb. The wonders of modern prosthetics, dear God—the castration complex raised to the level of an art form. He explained that they're close to ‘understanding' disease—they don't realise that they're soon going to be overwhelmed by an epidemic of
imaginary
diseases. The one thing we treasure most is a corrupt version of ourselves.” He held my wrist, aware that I was trembling. “Now, this experiment … Someone else will have to take over. Perhaps one day, who knows…”

These were the last words that Dick spoke to me. He stood up and stepped quietly into his bedroom with a backward wave of the hand. He closed the door, leaving me to apologise to the film crew. He had spoken matter-of-factly of our “experiment,” and I realised that he had taken part in the documentary with one end in mind. The series had been a desperate stratagem that alone might have saved him. He had literally put his faith in my ironic prophecy that he would make the first great scientific discovery on television, and had gambled against all logic that the scientific discovery would be his recovery from inoperable cancer.