The Two of Us (27 page)

John was not good at holidays. In the past, a trip to Lake Garda had nearly ended in disaster. To avoid the British tourists,
we took to hiring a pedalo and, singing ‘I’m a pedalo and I don’t care’, we’d pedal as far away from the beach as possible.
One day a gale blew up and it took us an hour and very achy legs to get to shore.

My obsession with guidebooks and determination to see everything in them ruined a visit to Rome. When I was not dragging John
around museums and ruins, we were sitting on the lavatory, with our feet soaking in the bidet, to ease what John christened
our Marble Foot Rot. In 1998 we had a better experience with a guidebook. The
Links’ Guide to Venice
took us to glorious hidden corners and selected some special treasures from that cornucopia of a place. John never complained
as he limped round Mr Links’s suggested walks. Being carnival time, masked figures floated past and musicians serenaded us
in hidden squares that the
Guide
led us to. It was a magic holiday. The relish of this most beautiful of cities is increased selfishly for me by thinking that
one day it might be completely submerged under the sea so we are transiently privileged to experience it. We also took a wonderful
holiday in Oman where John ventured with me into the desert, but he had to wait outside the winding alleys of old Muscat where
only women visitors were allowed. I searched for two special women but never found them. Nor did I tell John about the ring
I had given away. Discussion of his mother was still out of bounds.

But the place he loved best was France. He relished good wines and I worried that he would miss them when we drove down to
the Luberon with Jo and her partner Matt (Ellie Jane’s partner being Matt Byam Shaw and Jo’s Matt Harvey, I collect son-in-laws
called Matt), stopping off in the wine and champagne areas. John enjoyed our descriptions of the wines we tasted but was not
tempted to join in. We cooked together from our battered Elizabeth David book, which we had bought from her shop in Pimlico
when we were first married. She taught the English, ourselves included, to appreciate good food. We ate in cheap cafés and
posh gourmet places. John would choose our wines with care. We enjoyed watching him enjoying us enjoying them.

His first five years of sobriety, apart from the usual marital spats, were a time of great joy for us. We almost grew up.
Ours was not a conventional love affair, but whose is? It was not textbook. We made up our rules as we went along. And then
ignored them. It consumed us for twenty-eight years. It was not mature until the very end.

The millennium celebrations nearly scuppered us again. John hated Christmas. It had always been his worst time. He had obviously
had some sad Christmases as a child, but so, I would point out, did I. So did many people. His sock at the end of the bed
with just an apple, an orange and one toy was not unusual. I did not even have that when I was evacuated. The build-up to
the millennium celebrations made John grumpy. The vacuous Dome and the Wobbly Bridge and the badly organised fireworks display
over the Thames were depressing. After Christmas the family went back to London to celebrate with their mates, and we were
left alone in Luckington. I felt suddenly left out and old. John was angry that I couldn’t be happy with him alone. We watched
the proceedings on television and ended up having a row. It seemed a good time to look through my old diaries and I was appalled
by what a miserable cow I had been. I tried to end the twentieth century by burning the most dreary ones in a bonfire in the
field, but it was raining and my melodramatic gesture fizzled out. We greeted the new millennium in sulky silence. The girls
made a decision for us. Next Christmas we must go away on our own. Forget the family and enjoy each other.

Our week in Paris over Christmas 2000 was the best of times. We had a suite at the Crillon Hotel and relished it guiltily
like the urchins we still felt we were. It was a long way from Stowell Street and the King’s Cross Road. We celebrated our
twenty-seventh wedding anniversary in one of the best restaurants in the world, Les Ambassadeurs. We marvelled at the complicated
ballet performed by the waiters as they carried out their impeccable service. We were fascinated by the
sommelier
, tasting a sip of each bottle before it was served, savouring it in his mouth and then elegantly spitting it into a silver
spittoon. John was panicked into buying a very expensive one, lest the Mighty One sneered as he spat ours. The food was the
best we had ever tasted, the coffee better than at the Grégoire, our yardstick brew from Apt, and the other diners oozed French
chic. As we raised our glasses to each other, mine with fine wine and John’s with water, his toast was: ‘Nous avons cracked
it, kid.’

We attended a sung Midnight Mass at the Madeleine and squeezed hands and pressed elbows at the sublime choir. We held hands
in front of some exquisite late flower paintings by Manet and I made John laugh by weeping at their beauty – ‘Diddle-oh.’
We went to a concert of Gregorian chant, given by the St Petersburg choir in a beautiful church on the Ile St Louis. Afterwards
we ate in one of those tiny French bistros where everybody joins in the conversation until the small hours of the morning.
We lingered over coffee in the Place des Vosges. We wandered the streets, arms round each other, in the winter sunshine. Years
before, I had lost my wedding ring. It is probably at some costumier’s in the pocket of a dress I wore for a show. John bought
me a new one in Paris. It was gold with a little sapphire set in it. Later, at Luckington, I was groping in the earth for
potatoes, and I lost the stone. It left a gaping hole. I have not replaced it.

In April 2001 John played Captain Hook at the Festival Hall.

In May 2001 his dear friend Tom Courtenay presented him with the highest accolade you can receive in television – a Fellowship
of the British Academy of Film and Television.

In June 2001 he was diagnosed with cancer.

For the next eight months the fearful man became brave beyond belief. The boy who was not taught to love became the most loving
of men.

On Valentine’s Day 2002 I gave him this card:

Darling husband,

I hope you know how much I love and cherish you. I am so grateful for my love for you. It is the very centre of my life and
has been since I first set eyes on you. You are my husband, my lover and my friend.

Guess who?

He gave me two teddy bears to add to the collection he had given me over the years. His card said:

I love you more than I can say. You have given me more than any one man deserves and I know I’ll never be able to repay you.
BUT I’LL TRY.

You are the love of my life.

Me!

Seven days later he was dead.

7 July

Found in the bedside table drawer the notebook I gave
John to write his dark thoughts in. It had only one entry,
written when we were in France:

It’s so beautiful here and peaceful and I think healing.
For the last two days I have had long moments of feeling
normal (i.e. forgetting that I have the cancers). If only my
bloody voice was stronger because it’s that that reminds
me I am not myself. Poor Sheila has to listen very hard
when I speak as she is having a problem with one ear so
we’re a right pair!

We went to Saignon for morning coffee and it was lovely
up there. Sitting there with Sheila outside the church was
very, very healing I know. I am full of love for my
wonderful, wonderful wife. What would I do without her?
Don’t ask! I’m a very, very lucky man.

19

A Single Woman

IT IS INEVITABLE WHEN someone is an addict or suffers from depression that you seek for reasons. Some schools of thought maintain
that it is genetic and I am inclined to agree but I was tormented with guilt that John’s problems were somehow my fault. Certainly
my ignorance of the condition for a long while contributed to its progress.

8 July

Keep wondering if my ordinariness kept John back, stopped
him from reaching his full potential. Or was it a welcome
sanctuary? There is no doubt he could have achieved more,
Hollywood, more stage work. Would some other woman
have pushed him harder? But he used to say, ‘I’d rather be
a big fish in a small pool.’ Can’t really imagine him coping
with the rat race in LA but then he coped with worse. Did
I stunt his growth because I was as fearful as him? Perhaps
he needed someone bold and brave.

It is a good ploy to blame everything on our mothers until we too become mothers and find ourselves behaving just like them.
John would seldom talk about his. When asked he usually replied, ‘I have no mother’ in a way that brooked no further discussion.
What little he told me made me angry. I felt contempt for a woman who could just walk away from two little boys; it was not
a feeling I enjoyed. It was a weeping sore that continued to fester because it was covered up. I wanted to expose it to the
light and see if it would heal. There is no doubt that her inexplicable desertion deeply affected John and, indirectly, myself
and his daughters. I felt I had the right, when he was no longer here to be hurt by my curiosity, to find out more about her.
It was not easy. She had been erased from his life.

I start with Beattie. The blood of Mary Veronica Mullen (John’s grandmother) flows through the veins of his Auntie Beat. A
lifetime joyfully dedicated to the service of others is an old-fashioned concept but with her it continues now she is over
eighty, an apple-faced, smiling woman. It is impossible to get her to say a bad word about anyone, so she is reluctant to
criticise Dorothy, despite her disbelief that anyone could desert their children. Similarly Mildred, Jack’s second wife, still
glamorous at eighty with black hair and beautiful skin. When the boys had left home she married Jack who, together with Dorothy,
had worked in her fish and chip shop. Dorothy was ‘a good worker’, ‘very clean’, ‘well turned out’. Apart from the Ablott
nose, a bit too large for the rest of her face, she was ‘very attractive’. Because they felt protective of Jack and his boys,
she and her then husband severed all connection with the Ablotts when Dorothy had gone. Nor did she ever discuss Dorothy with
Jack when they were married as ‘it was in the past tense’.

I discover from John’s old schoolfriend Harvey Bryant that John had visited his mother when she worked at the Shakespeare
Pub in Manchester and he was at Ducie Tech. On the several occasions Harvey went with him, they seemed relaxed together in
a way that signified it was a fairly regular occurrence. Keeping these visits secret from his father and brother must have
been torture, but then he was used to keeping secrets for his mum. Then there was the visit in 1960 with Barry J. Gordon and
again in 1969 at my insistence. I am fairly sure he never saw his mother again after his marriage to me. Which is significant.

In December 2002, as I approach the first anniversary of John’s death, I decide to visit Manchester to try to get some sense
of the woman. I do not have much to go on. A Christmas card from a Mr and Mrs Calland, purporting to be an aunt and uncle,
and a copy of the decree absolute of Jack and Dorothy’s divorce from the Family Records Office that gives me nothing except
the date and place of their marriage and that the Respondent had ‘deserted the Petitioner without cause’. No records of the
custody proceedings exist. After John died I found a bill for the administration of her estate in his drawer. It mentions
paying some debts, correspondence with a Mr B. H. Welsh, and personal effects to be collected from Llandudno by a Mrs C. Simpson.
None of it means anything to me.

10 July

Friends Helen and Hattie to stay in France. They love it.
It is a beautiful place. Why can’t I enjoy it for myself? First
it was for John and the family, now it is in danger of being
for my friends or the kids. Must I always live my life through
others? Hattie and Helen have learned to live well on their
own. So must I.

I find Mr and Mrs Calland in a pleasant sheltered housing estate on the edge of the Peak District. Terrie Calland had been
a singer with Bonelli’s Band for fifteen years at Belle Vue. Dolly’s brother Alan, ‘a lovable rogue’, had wooed her away from
her first husband and eventually married and then divorced her. Those people who knew Dorothy best called her Dolly, and that
is how I now begin to think of her. It seems to suit her better.

The Catholic Terrie obviously found Dolly a bit much. No surprise there then. She was ‘flighty’, had ‘a bit of a mouth on
her’ and ‘used language’. Terrie is still a twinkly woman born, unbelievably, in 1917, whose memory is beginning to fail,
but she prefers to forget her brief marriage to Alan anyway. She does remember Jack as a lovely man and thinks Dolly was a
fool to leave him. Did Jack really tell Terrie that he wished he’d met her sooner? Was he a bit of a romancer? Or is it wishful
thinking on her part?

I move into central Manchester and stay there, as I have many times on tour with shows. Despite the rain, Manchester has always
appealed to me. It was built by ordinary men with vision. There is no aristocracy or ruling family, just bluff
nouveaux
riches
making money by the sweat of their brows and, of course, other people’s. It was the Dissenter Churches, mainly the Unitarians
and the Quakers, that pushed forward social reforms, and the city was accepting of anyone from anywhere who had something
to offer, accounting for the diverse mixture of Germans, Jews, Armenians, Turks, Austrians, Portuguese. Since the rebuilding
after the massive IRA bomb in 1996 and the holding of the Commonwealth Games it has cleaned itself up and is very perky. Those
early intellectuals would be thrilled at the refurbished art gallery, the imaginative use of the Royal Exchange to house one
of our leading theatre companies, and the new, perfect concert hall, the Bridgewater Hall. The city feels alive and kicking,
as it must have done to John as a boy, even though it was coated with grime then and usually seen through a thick smog. The
trams are back. How John would have loved that. Now they are sleek, purring beasts, so he might have missed the rattling and
shaking of those childhood journeys.

20 July

Really laughed with Hattie and Helen today. We got lost
somewhere near Bonnieux looking for the Gare Café. Also
trying to buy a screw to mend the chair. Saw a group of
hefty half-naked workmen doing the road. Hattie, demure
in cotton sunhat, wound down the window and in rather
posh franglais asked the way. One spoke a little English so
she followed up with ‘Do you think we’ll get a long screw
in Bonnieux?’ The double meaning was possibly lost on
them, but our raucous laughter was not. They obviously
thought, ‘These old English biddies are game.’ Lots of
nudging and leering ensued. We set off on our quest – a
long screw being a very inviting prospect – but kept getting
lost and passing them again. God knows what they thought.

I set about getting someone to drive me around and I land on my feet. Shaun is short, pink-faced and shy. He has never met
a ‘superstar’. I quickly disabuse him of that idea and it isn’t long before he comments – with some disappointment – how ‘ordinary’
I am. When I invite him into the Malmaison Hotel to have a coffee while we map out our journey, he says he can’t, look at
him. Oh Lord, do people still feel they have no right to enter the portals of the posh? If unworthiness is bred in you, how
do you convince yourself you are as good as the next person? I assure Shaun that I think his bright anorak and jeans are great
and, of course, the trendies and businessmen having their breakfast meetings don’t turn a hair. It’s all in the minds of the
cowed. Shaun and I get on like a house on fire. I say I want him to park in various areas and I will go for a walk, knock
on a few doors and come back to the car. He will not hear of leaving me alone. Although he only comes up to my shoulder I
assess he will be a more ferocious bodyguard than any real superstar’s big bruisers.

Our first stop is the rough triangle that encompassed Stowell Street, now a desolate wasteland. A few prefabricated car auction
places and tin huts stand where once was that teeming working-class area, full of suffering and love. The old living conditions
were shameful, but to destroy the community and replace it with nothing seems mindless. Similarly, where the beautiful Belle
Vue gave gaiety to these hard-working folk, there are a few rather nasty housing estates and yet more undeveloped sites. The
multiplex cinema provides some non-participatory entertainment, and a huge hypermarket caters for our modern recreation of
shopping. There is still a greyhound track and a snooker hall, but gone are the elegant walks and meeting places that brought
the people together and the enterprises that provided much-needed employment for the locals. Only the old remember the place
now.

On to Daneholme Road, and this is depressing. What must have been a showplace of an estate is now neglected and bleak. I ring
the bell of No. 2 and the flat above, but there is no movement apart from the rubbish blowing around in the garden. The other
doors I knock on are opened with much clanking of chains and bolts. One front-door window is boarded from a recent break-in.
This old man comes to the door looking neglected and grubby and is obviously too frightened to undo the chain. Peeping through
the small gap, he tells me that he and his wife knew Jack but now he lives alone. He would not have been so isolated in the
days when the neighbourhood rallied round to watch over John and Ray.

Another two houses I visit welcome me warmly with mugs of tea. I have the usual battle recording my chats over the background
of continuous daytime TV. These homes of the old residents are immaculate little havens in this wilderness. Full of knick-knacks
and crocheted cushions and homemade rag rugs, they are, I imagine, unchanged since the fifties. The TV makeovers have not
influenced them. They tell tales of the decline of their district. How it is the dumping ground for those needing a short-term
stay, who naturally take no pride in their temporary homes. Some are refugees and it is easy to understand how incipient racist
attitudes have arisen.

22 July

Hattie and Helen have left. Alone in the French house
for the first time. I felt him around me – a benign presence.
It felt comfortable. Went to a recital of the Goldberg
Variations on a clavichord in the church at Saignon. Chatted
to a few people. The concert started with shafts of sun
lighting the church and ended with candles flickering. It
was quite lovely. But still I am thinking I wish he was here
to be thrilled with me.

Shaun is getting worried about his car. He reminds me that the Gallagher brothers lived in Burnage and I think that colours
his judgement somewhat. All I sense is a numbing apathy. We pass the Burnage cinema, scene of John’s former glories, which
has been a supermarket at some time but is now boarded up and falling into ruin.

The old Victorian building of Green End Junior School is intact, but surrounded by forbidding high wire fences and padlocked
gates. Inside it is brightly painted and warm and cheerful. One little boy has been reported for ‘using language’. Does he
have a mum like Dolly, I wonder. I am told that broken families are now the rule rather than the exception. All the notices
are in four languages, demonstrating the extra skills needed by teachers in a school like this. The Deputy Head produces an
ancient form photo, and at the end of the back row, a bit on his own, is a sad, fat little boy – recognisably John.