When God Was a Rabbit

29 July 1997

Jenny

Something happened that I thought you’d like to know about. Last afternoon, riding painlessly on a wave of morphine, Ginger told us about a visit she’d had earlier in the day. That was strange because neither Arthur nor I had seen a visitor and we’d been there all morning. He’d brought her flowers, she said, this man; he’d brought her favourites, white roses; flowers that adorned her dressing room in her heyday and whose scent made her feel that anything was possible. I looked at Arthur and we shrugged, because there were no white roses, just a small vase of freesias that one of the nurses had brought in a couple of days before. But she made us smell the white roses, and we did and she was right, the scent was strong. Ginger said her visitor was an older man, sixty, maybe, but still handsome, but age didn’t matter because he’d found her and he was exactly as she’d imagined. His name was Don and he was her son. She’d given him up years ago, she said, but she knew it was him when he walked in. He’d brought her flowers, you see. Roses. White roses. And his name was Don. He’d come looking for her and he’d found her. And now she felt good. She was calm and now she could go.

We’ll never know the truth of that story, and I don’t think either of us wants to really. It was a story that began and ended in that room. Arthur says everyone takes something to the grave . . .

There were no long speeches or great goodbyes in the end; Ginger simply slipped away at four in the morning whilst we were sleeping. I awoke soon after – an intuition, maybe? – I looked over at her and knew she’d gone, as if the very air that once inhabited her body had been sucked out and replaced by a contoured landscape of concavity. I kissed her and said goodbye. Arthur stirred; I knelt down and gently woke him up.

‘She’s gone, Arthur,’ I said, and he nodded and said, ‘Oh,’ and then I left him to say his farewell, as I went to find a nurse.

I walked down the one hundred and thirty-one steps that I had walked four times a day for six weeks and went into the square. It was dark, of course; sporadic lights and the sound of the fountain. I looked up at the sky. ‘There’s a new star tonight,’ my brother would have said, had I been younger, had he been there; and for forty minutes I looked for it. But I had become too old. I couldn’t see her anywhere. Where she had been, was now just space.

She died a month before Princess Diana.

‘So as not to steal her thunder,’ we all said.