DIARY HELEN OSBORNE
Unlike Desert Island Discs, planning a memorial service is something only a mega- lomaniac would contemplate in advance. `I'm sure you'll find it therapeutic,' said a well-meaning friend. Not exactly, when I look back at the choices that had to be made (church, music, readings, hymns), the jug- gling, the compromises, the placations. It has been a surreal business and now it is done. As I write this, I am sitting in the library, in my husband's chair, one of his lined notepads on my knee, looking out at the hills (blue, remembered), still unable to believe that he is not on his way home for lunch, the band of the Scots Guards on his Walkman, twirling his stick and singing to the dogs, mud all over the kitchen floor. Two seasons of mourning have passed. The cher- ry tree we planted to mark the anniversary of his father's death has flowered. The aza- leas are more spectacular than ever and on Bank Holiday the public came for a squizz while the Church rattled the can. The lilies are bursting from their pots and the kitchen garden is at full throttle. In the churchyard there is an as yet unmarked grave.
Iknow how you feel,' they say to me with patent sweetness. But, oh no, you don't. 'Are you all right?' Thank you. I'm all right,' I lie. 'Time heals.' You bet it doesn't. Behind the cliches of daily human kindliness every death is different, just as the secrets of every two lives together are different and every commonplace commu- nion unique. Thirty-six hours after John's death on Christmas Eve, I switched on the early-morning news and heard his voice. Already physically bruised beyond anything I could have imagined, now the privacy of grief was shattered. The death of the 'Angry Old Man' had become a public event, some- thing to fill the gap between Christmas and New Year and, it turned out, well beyond. He had anticipated the hackneyed head- lines on this very page (Diary, 17/24 Decem- ber) but it was not something I had consid- ered as I held his hand while he struggled to die. I was unprepared for the ersatz charac- ter analysis, 'historical' assessment and 'rev- elations' which continued for another lunatic month. I was told by a harpie on the Sunday Times that we never had much of a sex life. Even my cynical pals in the press began to be a little alarmed. Now, of course, it is all nothing more than a pile of yellow- ing newspaper cuttings, but as a crash course in widowhood I can't recommend it.
It surprises me that I never felt even half- mad. It has helped to live in this valley, close-knit for centuries, where death is no metropolitan shibboleth, where Fleet Street's fancies cut no ice and where remembrance is unforced. Another cliché, yet it must be said: friends — his, mine, ours — have been astounding, even the bossy ones. 'I'm sure you're drinking too much and not eating properly.' Quite right. I've got a large Scotch and I'm watching a video of Pulp Fiction. 'What you need is a good night's sleep.' Yes, with its clutch of terrifying dreams and awakening to a dread premonition that something terrifying is about to happen and then to realise that it already has. Most sustaining of all have been the letters, which would have over- whelmed and embarrassed him, from the great, the good, strangers, even the odd theatre critic, all over the world: 'I never met him and, now, I shall miss him so much'; 'just knowing he was there was some kind of reassurance in this silly world.' They tell me of kindnesses I never knew. He advised a friend: 'Think what you think, not what you ought to think.' I'll try to remember that.
England is a far, far duller place with- out him,' someone wrote. So is this house, which he loved more than any other and begged me never to leave. He used to chide my bourgeois instincts and must be chuck- ling now as I live on a wing and a prayer to keep it against the odds of a socking mort- gage and an abyss of back tax, dependent on the fragility of revivals, the availability of theatres, directors and the love lives of actors, tb,e seating capacity of a playhouse in Tel Aviv or the state of the deutschmark. But the old house has not been gloomy since he left it that day in a snowstorm. There have been many visitors, much laughter and scabrous reminiscence. There have been the jokes and ironies he would have relished, beginning when his body went missing between the hospital and Mrs Pugh at the morgue. Then the undertaker, Ron the Box, asking if I wanted a double plpt and advising that because of the subsi- dence in the churchyard a semi-detached rather than a maisonette site was in order. So that's fixed. A BBC producer wrote to Mr Osborn (sic, as ever) inviting him to take part in a programme (contract to be sent to Celestial Productions), an Oxford literary society supplied a list of dates when he might speak and, best of all, a gentle- man from Bath requested that if there were any Turkish cigarettes left behind perhaps I would be good enough to forward them as he had run out.
Like every widow, I imagine, it is at home that I feel safest and yet most desper- ate, where the void left by the habit of daily intimacy is at its deepest and where I hear the footfall on the stair which is only the creaking of old timbers. It is here that I can still almost touch his valour and fury, his strengths and the sheer fun of sustaining one another day by day. Mishaps can become melodramas when there are no arms around you: in the first warmth of spring an inxasion of bats; a dog straying for the night; my wedding ring mislaid and I weep like a tap without a washer. I miss his morning recital of the latest boring dream, the convoluted plot of a late-night movie and every twinge and certainly can- cerous condition the dark hours have induced. I mourn those terrible periods of melancholia, as I mourned them in his life, when he was convinced all gifts had desert- ed him. Then, I look at his notes for three new projects and hear him whooping, 'I'm only just starting!' For his sake, I try to recover an inner life.
This is the beginning of the rest of your life,' comforted a tender neighbour on Christmas Day. I already knew it was the beginning of the end of my life. I watch, and unhealing time brings a stealthy change. Now, I am .seldom wracked by exhausting tempests of grief, I am less angry, less guilty, and feel none of the envy which struck sharp as sin on the night of his death when I watched couples driving away from the hos- pital into a future. My own death has lost any residual fear. John's shirts, his ties, his suits — the wardrobe of an occasional dandy — are where he left them. His pens, specs and pipes are within reach; not necrolatry but pleasant comfort. As he would always insist, 'Hope comes from within.' A long time ago I had to trust him completely dur- ing another enforced absence. I have to do so again, with rather more patience. So I hope and trust that, metaphorically, he will be back to whisk me off a second time when the unfinished business is done.
In the meantime, I hope that his memori- al do will be .considered a celebration, his parting gift, a final bottle of champagne. After all, the rest may well be silence. Who knows?
Previous page
