Ever After

10

Romantic love. A made-up thing. A concoction of the poets. Jack shall have Jill. Amor vincit omnia.

Her last role was Cleopatra. Love triumphant and transcendent. Love beyond the grave: “I am again for Cydnus to meet Mark Antony.” This was at Stratford, two summers ago. Then the symptoms made their appearance, and it had to be announced that because of sudden illness she could no longer perform. Early the next year she was dead.…

But you could say I was always a stage-widower. A stage-cuckold. The old joke about the actress’s husband: he could never get his hands on his wife’s parts. I would watch my wife go away. I would watch her disappear and turn into — these other people. With my own eyes I witnessed the inconstancy. How many times did I watch Ruth fall into another man’s embrace? Play seductress and seducee? Run squealing, half naked, round strange bedrooms? How many times did I watch her — die? And it is true that, sitting in the darkness (proud, jealous, enthralled), I would have to concede that at such moments she didn’t belong to me, she belonged to her audiences. She was everybody’s. But the thing is, she would always come back to me. Me. I don’t know why, but she did. Always. A dullness for her brightness? A nobody for her somebody? When you are out on an adventure …

I see her at the end of the garden of our cottage in Sussex, which backed on to a field that dipped down to a wood, with the Downs rising beyond. Against that backdrop, she would pace to and fro by the low, bramble-smothered fence, a book or script in one hand, gesticulating to the air, communing with invisible interlocutors, utterly bound up in herself, so that she would be unaware even of me, a privileged audience of one, watching from the window. Turning and turning again, wearing a path in the grass, now and then clawing a hand through her hair or hugging herself with both arms or offering up some half-conscious commentary on her progress — a “Now then, let’s see” or a “Fuck it! Who wrote this thing?!”—and all the time lighting cigarette after cigarette from the pack jammed in her cleavage, chucking the butts away at random (once starting a small fire in the brambles). It was at such times, rather than in the darkness of theatres, that the truth of something would come to me: that people are fuel. They are consumed. Some, for some reason, more quickly, more brightly, more readily than others. But they are burnt, used. Fuel, fire, ash.

I think she knew. I think she knew all along, even before the outward symptoms appeared. But didn’t want to spoil — not before she had to — that Cleopatra summer. What you don’t know can’t hurt you. One Sunday, that September, we drove out, with G— (an actor), to a pub we knew, somewhere in the depths of Warwickshire. A day of sweet, cidery sunshine. G— was in a strangely deferential, vaguely timid mood. If I told you who G— was, you would guess that this was not his usual style. We sat outside. She wore dark glasses and nobody recognised her. I went to get the drinks, and when I emerged, G— was kissing Ruth on the crown of the head. His own dark glasses — these incogniti—pushed up on to his brow, a hand on Ruth’s shoulder, his lips in her hair.

It wasn’t what you think. No, it wasn’t what you think. It was only the thought of the possibility. It could have been them, you see; it could have been Ruth and G— all along, not Ruth and me. Them, not us. I stood there in the doorway with the drinks, like someone standing outside their life, like someone suddenly without a life. You see, it was a solemn, intense, decorous kiss. Like a kiss of farewell, like the kiss of a priest. Like the kiss you give to the small, hard head of a child, conscious of its vulnerability, the brittleness of the skull. And I knew then, by the chill inside me, despite that soft sunshine, by the feeling that my body was like an empty sack, that she was going to die.

And her first role was Girl Number Three.

It was after her father’s death, some fifteen years ago, that I gave up my career (my blooming career as a third-rate academic) to become her “manager.” All sorts of questionable motives might be ascribed to this — and perhaps were at the time. That I wished to be more at my wife’s side — in order, that is, to keep an eye on her. That I wanted to live off her earnings. In any case, it was a bogus job. Other people — agents, theatre and film people— “managed” Ruth. I was no more than a privileged secretary-cum-minder. Since my talents were limited, I sometimes hindered rather than helped proceedings. But I would still maintain that I did it out of a desire to protect her.

He died of a brain tumour. Or so they say. If you ask me, the doctors (naturally, I thought of my great-uncle George) were as baffled as we were. In the last stages he simply lost all power of identity. A mild-natured, obliging man, he slipped towards death with a stony, empty expression on his face, speechless and unhearing, not recognising his own wife or his own daughter and having no idea, so far as you could tell, who he was himself. It was as though the Bob Vaughan we knew dissolved away before some other grim, usurping, unappeasable being. Then he died.

Her mother is still alive. She married again several years ago. But I have lost touch since Ruth’s funeral and the bouts of strained communicativeness that follow a death. Now, of course, in my present woeful circumstances, I am beyond the pale. The fact is, we never got on; and neither were Ruth and her mother always the sweetest of friends. Without ever knowing it for certain, I have always imagined Joan Vaughan as the one who was against Ruth’s preposterous choice of career from the outset, waiting ever afterwards, notwithstanding all the evidence of success, to say, “I told you so.” While Bob was the classic, doting father of an only daughter, happy for his child to do whatever she wished. I picture Ruth as a young girl quarrelling with her mother, and Bob trying, rather ineffectually, to keep the peace.

I should pity Joan, who has lost a husband and a daughter, both before their time. But I don’t. She still harbours, I think, an image of Ruth as someone who might have done something solid and sensible with her life (whatever that may have been) and therefore have still been alive now; instead of this foolishness — see, it didn’t last long — this play-acting. Don’t try to be something you’re not.…

I should want to see Joan now, because only in the mother’s features might I still catch a glimpse, a living vestige, of the daughter. But that’s now how it works.

After her father’s death, Ruth’s acting took on this new dimension, this new depth and range. Everyone noticed it. But there was also — perhaps only I saw it — this new need of protection. This desire on my part to put my arms irremovably around her, as if I were holding her together, to beg for her a special immunity. Be there, always. I don’t know what makes some people exceptional — so that we say the world would be poorer without them. I don’t know why the distribution of love is so unfair. And it’s strange that I say I wished to hold her together, since it was she, after all, who held things together for me, who held my world together. I mean the world that had fallen apart (it did, you see) with my own father’s death.

You see, I protected her so she would protect me.

From Girl Number Three to the Queen of Egypt, from the Blue Moon Club to a palace by the Nile. A reviewer of those last performances wrote (without benefit of hindsight) that she evoked the “defiant incandescence of soon to be extinguished glory.” The formal obituaries referred to them as her “crowning achievement” and the “culmination of her career.” As if she had meant it that way. While the news columns dwelt on the “real-life drama”—“found dead,” “overdose of drugs”—and bandied about, without a trace of irony, it seemed, the phrase “tragic death.”

And no one, out of tact or impercipience, alluded to the simple fact that Cleopatra is a woman who, with serene and regal deliberateness, commits suicide.

“Finish, good lady, the bright day is done, and we are for the dark.”

I had to play this scene. I understood how hard it is to act. The lines were so awful, so unconvincing. I found myself uttering the hackneyed words “How long does she have?” To which, however, there was a perfectly actual, factual reply. I didn’t want to tell her. If you don’t say it, perhaps it won’t be true. If you don’t think about it, it will go away. But she simply faced me with the same question: “How long do I have?” She didn’t blink. I found I couldn’t lie. “Two or three months.” She came back with a little flurry of brightness — she was an actress, you see: “That much?” Then she gave a look, just like a little girl who’s been punished for getting beyond herself, for having big ideas about herself. I told you so, I told you so.

And there was, after all, this simple, banal explanation. She smoked. She had lung cancer. The common vice and common nemesis of nicotine. The gifted and famous are not exempt, you know. I should have told her to stop (I did), to cut it down. I should have said (but I didn’t know), if you don’t stop, you will die. But, but. The side effect of a certain way of life. Fuel, fire, ash. It might have been drugs, alcohol, screwing around and regular psychoanalysis. It was none of these. None. Just cigarettes. So many packs to learn a part. And the only time, she used to joke, she could do without, was when playing a non-smoking part (e.g., Cleopatra).

And besides, our bodies are ours — aren’t they? To do with as we like. And our lives. Our lives.

And right here in the Fellows’ Garden I furtively chuck my butts into the nearest flower bed.

I should blame it all, perhaps, on that conjectural ancestor of mine, the resourceful Sir Walter, who, among his countless other claims to fame, I believe, popularized the noxious New World weed. But just take him for an example. Smoked all his life like a chimney: died by the axe. There is no accounting. We have to die of something: a lung cancer, a throat cancer, a brain tumour, a bullet in the head.

But not of love, never of love. Leave that for the sonneteers. “Men have died from time to time, and worms have eaten them, but not for love.”

From the Queen of Egypt to a worried woman in a waiting room. From Cleopatra to a hospital case. From a thousand parts — tragic queen, frothy French farce flirt — to the only, unfeigned dénouement of her stricken body branded with the scars of an unsuccessful operation. So why all this acting stuff? Why all this poetry stuff? Why all this imagining it otherwise?

We gravitated towards the cottage, neglecting the London flat. We moved in things that were dear to us, such as the clock made in 1845 by John Pearce of Launceston. For me — I won’t deny it — this retreat from the publicity that was part of her life — this having Ruth to myself — was a kind of terrible boon. I think we did what most people would have done in the circumstances. We drew a circle around ourselves. We tried to carry on as if nothing were different. You could call this acting too, and one day, we knew, it would have to stop. But I ask myself: in those final weeks, were we happy? It’s not an absurd question. The human frame, it seems, has this stubborn capacity for existing in spite of the facts. We went for gentle walks in the brittle winter days. Put logs on the fire. We summoned memories while trying to pretend we were not summoning memories. Made plans — as if plans were feasible. Spent Christmas with Joan and her second husband, Roy — an exercise so mawkish, so awkward, so like a piece of treacly black comedy, that you were tricked into thinking none of it could be real.

I fielded (still technically her manager) the commiserative calls, dealt with the kind-but-cruel welter of mail. I developed unsuspected skills as a nurse, chef, maid-of-all-work. We tried to submit to the illusion that all this was some kind of benign interlude, a period of rest, of convalescence. Not a— Then a look of quiet urgency, of concentration, would come into her eyes, which would seem to make my presence futile. As if somewhere, deep inside herself, she were searching for someone. I would think: I must distract her. Distract her? I didn’t allow myself to think that all this withdrawal, this retrenchment in a country cottage, this privacy, this trying to be simply, at last, herself, was itself a kind of rehearsal (so rich with stage fright), a learning of the final part.

“Give me my robe, put on my crown …”

I think she wanted recognition. She achieved it. Some of us want recognition, some of us don’t. Potter wants it. I can live without it (perhaps I should rephrase that). And some of us who want it never achieve it. It’s a funny thing, recognition. You achieve it and then you have problems about being recognised. You go around in dark glasses. And though you are recognised, everyone wants to know about this other person, this elusive, hard-to-spot character called “the real you.” The “real Ruth Vaughan,” as the journalists would have it. No one would recognise me, but nobody would want to ask me about the real me.

(Though I wonder who he is — really I do).

She used to say — a strange thing for an actress — that she never knew what she looked like, she couldn’t have described her own face if she were asked. My experience is different. When I look in the mirror (especially these days), I see this incorrigible mask. I know it’s not me, but I’m stuck with it. Perhaps it amounts to the same: you might be anybody. Which means I have the makings of an actor too. But not the gift.

How could you describe her face? There was no other word for it: it was full of life. So full of life. I think she was beautiful, but that is not an objective statement. I think she was beautiful because she was her. Because she was Ruth. She had brown-green eyes and a way of smiling and laughing with them before even moving her lips. Off-stage, off-screen, people always found her smaller, slighter than they had imagined. She had this — naturalness. Yet she was an actress. But isn’t that what actors seek — naturalness? There was this space that was always hers, just hers; this magic, mobile space. There were these audiences who claimed her, but there was always this space that was hers alone. And back in the days before she was famous, when she was only Girl Number Three …

Romantic, impossible love. The student and the chorus girl. The scholar and the actress.

She cut the process short. She couldn’t bear, or bear that I should bear, the coming disintegration, which, on that February day, by some inner gauge that very sick people have, she must have known was about to begin. I can’t think of any other reason. No, I can’t think of any other reason.

It’s wrong, of course. Suicide. My father was wrong. Ruth was wrong. I— But I’m still here. We don’t have the right. To take ourselves from ourselves. And from other people. It’s cowardly. It’s selfish. The mess it leaves for others. But there would have been mess anyway. It’s vain: a last bid for posthumous limelight; a staged exit. “I have immortal longings …” A form of death not so uncommon among actors. Though they aren’t supposed to. They are supposed, by the sheer force of their personalities, to make miracle recoveries and so inspire us all. They are supposed to turn their inexorable demises into brave, grotesque performances on behalf of medical research funds. We look to actors and actresses — don’t we? — to show us how to act.

You keep saying to yourself (trying to dismiss the thought, trying to give it your utmost attention) there will come a last time for everything. A last time to do this, a last time we do that. Simple, inconsequential things. A last day, a last hour. Then, when the last time comes, you don’t realise it’s the last time. She wanted to sleep. She slept all that afternoon. It was during these increasingly frequent periods when she slept in the day that I would begin, then immediately abandon, the exercise of trying to imagine the world without her. It was a fine, cold, clear day. I looked out towards the end of the garden. Beyond the trees on the other side of the field, the silver tip of a silage tower, hidden in the summer, glinted ruddily. Huge shadows barred the glowing folds of the Downs.

She didn’t wake till dark. I remember that she said she’d meant to wake before it was dark, and she gave a little, half-asleep, worried look. That same night, according to the findings of the inquest, she died, by her own hand, between the hours of three and five in the morning.

And I will never know whether she made up her mind suddenly, waking that night while I slept, or whether the intention was there even as she woke that afternoon. Even before then. And I will never know — it is an absurd, hypothetical question — whether, if I had had the choice, I would have wished for such a cruel, merciful blow or would have preferred her to linger on for more precious weeks, perhaps months, becoming less and less like the woman I would want to remember. A matter of recognition. I have the contrast, now, with my mother: a wasted figure, sprouting tubes in a hospital bed, resolutely letting her own death run its full course. Could I have borne to see Ruth like that?

But my mother was seventy-eight. And “resolutely”? I wonder, now.

I came down the stairs. Her body was lying on the sofa. Not “she”; her body. The difference sinks in. There were the pills; the empty tumbler on the coffee table. Cliché props.

“Our wooing doth not end like an old play; Jack hath not Jill.”

It’s not the end of the world. It is the end of the world. None of the arguments, none of the catechisms work. There was a time — don’t you remember? — when you never knew her; you lived without her then. No amount of grief ever brought anyone back. You wring your heart out over the death of one woman; but thousands die every hour, every minute. Well, I’m sorry. I’m selfish, I’m feeble, I only have heart enough for one.

Life goes on. It doesn’t go on. Yes, yes, I know, all we want in the end, we living, breathing creatures (am I still one of them?) is life. All we want to believe in is the persistence and vitality of life. Faced with the choice between death and the merest hint of life, what scrap, what token wouldn’t we cling to in order to keep that belief? A leaf? A single moist, green leaf? That will do, that will be enough. What do the dying cling to in their final moments? Sunlight through a curtain, the sound of a tennis game, the noise from a Paris street?

Good God, I am surrounded by leaves! But only Ruth will do. She represented life to me. I know that, now she is dead. She was life to me. And that isn’t just vain hyperbole, is it? She was an actress, wasn’t she? It was her job: to represent life to people.

I picked up the note. It was meant only for me, but it had to be submitted as evidence to the coroner. “I never could stand drawn-out farewells.…” I stooped over her body. It is almost inspiring, almost uplifting, at first, to be in the presence of such a momentous event. Later the madness, the helplessness, but first the gravity of the situation. I stooped over her body, as if I had rehearsed it all before and knew exactly what to do.

Romantic love. Romantic love. The first, flustered kiss on a wet night in a taxi to Girl Number Three. The last kiss, at the break of dawn, to the Queen of Egypt. “Now boast thee, death, in thy possession lies a lass unparallel’d.”

And in between? Happiness. Yes, I commemorate it. Happiness ever after.