Читать книгу A Small Dog Saved My Life - Bel Mooney - Страница 8

It is late last night the dog was speaking of you;

The snipe was speaking of you in the deep marsh.

It is you are the lonely bird through the woods;

And that you may be without a mate until you find me.

Lady Gregory, ‘Poets and Dreamers’ (translating eighth-century Irish)

Our farm was J’s dream from childhood, an echo of his happy family home with its barns and entourage of animals – to which ours bore a strange resemblance. An old, low, sprawling building protected from the worst winds by being tucked into a dip in the land, like the space a dog makes when it turns round and round to scoop out its bed. A house with barns and stables, a settlement whose ancient stones would become imprinted with our story, to add to all those it had known over three centuries. A home that could be created in our own image – the dank inner courtyard brought into the house, glazed and turned into an atrium, its weight supported by Bath stone corbels which we had beautifully carved by an artist-craftsman in situ to my master design. They represented the four seasons, four elements, literary themes and so on. We wanted our house to be a work of art as well as to contain our collection.

But it needed to be made bigger, for we had moved there (following J’s dream of farming organically) from a large rectory in a pretty village a few miles away and the existing farmhouse was too small for our needs. So a long, dilapidated animal shed at right angles to the main house was renovated to form a study for me, a spectacular double-height sitting room with windows on three sides and (best of all) a low, peaceful library with two window seats overlooking the valley. Across from the house was a small building which became a cottage for Robin (when he was around, as he worked a lot abroad) and our son Daniel, and (later) for J’s groom and her family. There would be extra rooms for us over there too, and across the yard was the huge barn which would become, in time, a games room. We loved to have a house full of friends and family. At New Year for instance: space was necessary. The place was unusual and extraordinary, with a 145-degree view that was miraculous when the valley was full of mist but the surrounding hills and farms rose above it, like ships on a foaming sea. I find it almost impossible to describe the magical atmosphere of the home J and I created, or its wild beauty.

The summer we moved there (1994) had been the hottest in decades and the whole valley crisped to golden brown. These were the classic dog days of summer, when Sirius burned brightly in the night sky. This is the Dog Star, the faithful creature at the heels of Orion, the brightest star in Canis Major and called Canicula (little dog) by the Romans. Strangely, native American peoples associated it with dogs too – the Cherokee seeing it as a guardian of the ‘Path of Souls’, the Blackfoot calling it ‘Dogface’ and the Alaskan Inuit naming it ‘Moon Dog’. Yes, it was right that the brightest star in the firmament should hang in the sultry night sky above our new home. But in the Iliad Homer describes this frozen firework as ‘an evil portent, bringing heat/And fevers to suffering humanity’. That was to prove right.

We celebrated the two stages of the huge building project with parties for the carpenters, stonemasons, electricians and labourers who became as familiar as friends and gained nutty tans working shirtless on the site. But by the end of that first winter we had learned the measure of the place; the wind howled about the house like the ghosts of Cathy and Heathcliff and the north-facing position meant that frost and ice would remain in pockets and corners for weeks. Our flock of Lleyn sheep huddled below the library windows, coughing and grumbling under the ancient stone walls, just a couple of metres from my books. At night the brief, harsh yelps of foxes and screech owls would shatter the bitter air. Upper Langridge Farm justified its reputation as ‘the coldest farm for miles around’ – as a neighbour had helpfully mentioned while we were moving in and I was wondering what on earth we were doing. I had wept to leave our previous home, where the children had grown up and where the fifteen years had been (for the most part) contented. For a long time I would have a recurring dream of letting myself into the old, beloved rectory, walking through rooms that were empty and just as I had left them, then creeping into the attic to hide – for ever.

J and I were brave with each other, but at times I knew even he wondered if we had done the right thing. We made mistakes with the building, which was cold, cold, cold. The wind howled not just around it but through it. Poet Michael Longley captured both the good and the bad in these lines:

No insulation –

A house full of draughts,

Visitors, friends:

Its warmth escaping –

The snow on our roof

The first to melt.

The unlit yard was slate black. One night, having driven my daughter to a friend’s (as the mothers of teenagers must), I stopped halfway down the track to the farm – because nobody was at home and I could not face its dark emptiness. I was starting to cry when, suddenly, I was startled by a flash of white and a muffled thud of paws. A badger charged across the rough track in front of my stationary car, and away into the darkness. Excited, I took it as a positive sign and went home.

The isolation could render your heart speechless in the face of the night and its sounds. This is not a fear of marauders, you must understand – although friends would ask me, ‘Don’t you get spooked – alone here?’ It is the silence that underlies the harsh chatter of rooks in the susurrating stand of trees, as well as the sense of generations of struggle imprinted on the stones of that windy hillside. It is the exposure to such an immensity of sky you cannot but be brought face to face with your own inadequacy. And mortality. The strangest truth was this: in all the years J and I lived at the farm I (who had previously written five novels, many more children’s books and liked to paint and make things) found it impossible to create. Once the home itself was made, just living there and running our lives took almost all my reserves of energy. Feng shui practitioners would say the chi – the energy – could not stay in a house like that because the front door and the back door were exactly aligned. Whoosh – it goes, whirling through, and taking a part of your soul with it. Tractors. Hedge planting. Infected sheep. Cows getting out. People coming and going. Black ice matching the hole of the farm finances. Feed delivered by lumbering lorries. Lambing in a May frost. The track so bumpy taxis refused to come down and so it had to be made up properly, at more cost. The troughs frozen. Poisonous ragwort. Fences breaking. Running out of oil. The fox leaving two headless chickens on the track. A kitchen garden carved out of the hillside at great cost. Dead sheep.

Ah, but on summer days, the light would spill over the creamy stone floors of our hall and atrium and the homestead had a Mediterranean air and everybody who came would breathe in the scent of thyme planted in the courtyard, exclaiming with admiration at what we had created for ourselves. There was a meadow called the Aldermoor where grew about twenty varieties of wild flower. The house appeared in magazines. J said it was his favourite place in the whole world and everyone who visited saw why – even if they might not have chosen to live on the windy hill.

You have to allow places to change you, or else you will never settle, let alone be happy. I confess (broken-hearted over the move from my dream house, our rectory) that I was puzzled that my husband should become so obsessed with the need to farm, at a time when farming was not in good health. Yet that need was rooted deep in his childhood. Despite myself I understood, even if I lacked sympathy. Not only had he been a champion show-jumper in his teens, but he had studied agriculture, worked on the Royal Farm at Windsor Castle, broken and trained champion horses professionally – and that all before going to University College London to read philosophy where (a brilliant student and student editor who took on the college authorities with late-sixties radicalism) he was to write a dissertation on ‘Base and Superstructure in Marx’. There followed a distinguished career during which he reported from all over the world, made history in Ethiopia, risked his life working under cover in Pinochet’s Chile, saw terrible sights and interviewed leaders, made countless documentary series (this in the much-lamented golden era of British television), wrote books, did sterling work for various charities … But through it all he never lost his yearning for a real country life: the deep desire to plant hedges, husband good soil, stride out on land that is your own.

Whenever I welcomed him back home to the farm from London, where he would have been interviewing politicians for his eponymous weekly television programme, he would throw off his suit to pull on old clothes and stride to the sheds to help with the lambing, like a true Renaissance man. When he bought a horse (then two, then three) and was still (in his fifties) able to vault straight up without even putting a foot in the stirrup, I knew that the most accomplished gaucho in Argentina would nod approval at his prowess. Women like men who straddle more than one world.

Gradually I became tougher, although my brother-in-law once said I was the least likely farmer’s wife he had ever seen. I bought rubber boots – but rarely wore them. Learned to layer big sweaters over thick skirts. Even once drove the huge, ancient Land-Rover in the snow, because otherwise I would have been marooned. Alone on the farm (as I so often was), I learned independence. Once, with a coat over my nightdress, I even rounded up the escaped cows who were destroying the garden, placing Billie and Sam like troops on the flank and advancing fearlessly, shouting ‘Garn!’ and thwacking with my stick, driving them up to the barn, so that when the stockman and his wife arrived at last I was in charge. J was immensely (and disbelievingly) proud of me. The story of how the urban writer tamed the herd went up and down the valley. ‘Field-cred’ I called it.

One spring morning, not a year after we had moved, I experienced the epiphany which leads – in a way I can now see but could not possibly have known then – me back to the subject of this book.

It was late April and I was alone. The light woke me very early and from the window I glimpsed a morning of such limpid perfection it was impossible to remain indoors. I dressed quickly, afraid to miss the glitter of the dew, and released Billie and Sam from the laundry room where they had their beds. No need for leads. Out into the watery gold of the day with the dogs bounding and snapping at the air in exhilaration.

I walked past the well, across the wide circle of gravel, past the handsome barn and thence right into the fields. And then I saw them. The Herefords were crowding near the fence, their chestnut flanks gleaming in the sunlight as they bent their creamy topknots to tug at the grass. There is a sweetness about cows I had never noticed before: their gentle, wary eyes in big white moon faces. That heavy, grassy smell and the rhythmic, chomping sounds they make, between low, faintly protesting moos. Because it was still chilly their breaths came out in little clouds, like ectoplasm hanging in the air – the whispering spirits of their beefy herd. What had they witnessed since the seventeenth century, those pedigree Herefords, what breed memory looked out through those rolling eyes?

They ruminated and inspected me. I leaned on the fence and looked back and we were not afraid of each other. The air waited. And it was with a sudden leap of the spirit that I said aloud, ‘Good morning, girls. You’re looking so beautiful this morning! Aren’t you gorgeous?’

To speak to them like that, to acknowledge their presence as I would a fellow human and admire their individual, curly-topped, four-square magnificence, was to put us on a level. To take my part in the wholeness of things. I now realize that it was at that precise point that I allowed myself to be affected by the genius loci – the spirit of the place. And it was the animals – rather than the trees or the distant sweep of the land, or the astonishing sense of worship I felt before the first primroses and the swathes of cowslips – which eased my heart finally into love. It was my humility before the universal beauty of which the animals were a part. In making me see the truth of their existence as on a par with my own within the greater Whole they were exerting a moral power over me which I had never experienced before.

This is not what you feel when you look at an animal in a zoo, even though you might marvel at the size of the giraffe or the intricacy of the markings on a snake. Nor is it what you feel when you take the lid off a tin and allow dried food to rattle down into your big dog’s metal bowl, smiling fondly as he gobbles his supper. You may come near the sensation, though, when you watch your cat unfold its limbs and stretch – and realize that not in any universe could you ever hope to move with such indifferent grace.

I was learning from the cows.

The joy they gave me, in that brief exchange of looks and breaths that crystalline morning, when the brevity of the sunlight, the dew and all our lives, human and animal, made me catch my breath, was something I would never forget. It was as sustainable as J’s method of farming. It set me on a journey. Lolloping Billie and Sam were on it too, but it was Bonnie who would – in a future I could not have then predicted – be the truest companion.

One of my favourite writers is Edith Wharton – she who, in late middle age, would so annoy her friends by the fuss she made over ‘the damned Pekingese’. Her first biographer, Percy Lubbock, wrote: ‘There is always a dog or two about Edith in her home, a small dog of the yapping kind, a still smaller of the fidgeting and whining breed – dogs that had to be called, caressed …’ But writing an autobiography in her seventies Edith Wharton recalled the walk with her father in 1865 (when she was four), down Fifth Avenue in Manhatten, when a friend of her father’s gave her a spitz-type puppy she called Foxy, the first of her cohorts of little dogs. Near the end of her life, after an unhappy marriage but a brilliant career, when many people she loved had died and many dogs too, Wharton located the beginning of her imaginative awareness: ‘The owning of my first dog made me into a conscious, sentient person, fiercely possessive, anxiously watchful, and woke in me that long ache of pity for animals, and for all inarticulate beings, which nothing has ever stilled.’

The first couple of months of 2003 were (as always for J and me) extremely busy. What made us like that – both driving ourselves hard, always taking on extra projects, charity work and so on – and therefore unable to find much peace on our farm? The too-easy psychological answer might be that he was ever striving to emulate a famous father as well as an older brother who was himself a distinguished broadcaster. Yet the Protestant work ethic played an important role, over and above family history. I always thought that the last words of The Woodlanders summed J up, Marty South’s passionate elegy over the grave of her beloved Giles Winterborne: ‘… you was a good man, and did good things!’ Doing good things demands time and energy.

As for me, I was always striving to prove myself (girl from humble background makes good etc.) yet always worrying that I would be found out: the achievement of a distinguished degree, the marriage, the beautiful homes, the successful journalistic career, the careful glamour, the books, the programmes, the immense jollity of the parties we gave – all of it discounted when I was found out to be a fraud. To keep fear and boredom at bay, to prove myself as a multitasking, perfectionist alpha female, I – like so many women – took on too much. I also had to keep up with my husband. Had I not done so over the years of his success as an international reporter, writer and political journalist, I would have gone under. The key to our marriage was the meeting of minds in friendship. For all the flaws (what union does not have them?) I do not know what better can be said.

The pond was thickly iced, with a dusting of snow on top. In January and February 2003 I was struggling with the book of my radio series, Devout Sceptics, re-reading Daniel Deronda (because it was time to), brooding over structural problems in my sixth novel, The Invasion of Sand, taking on the chairmanship of a £2.2 million appeal to build a new children’s theatre in Bath, moving our daughter into her first London flat and supporting her through the intimidating start of her new job at the London Evening Standard and arranging all the detail of a 30-minute programme for Radio 4 to mark the 100th anniversary of Harley-Davidson motorcycles. Kitty and I were writing a joint article for the Daily Mail, J was off to Iraq to interview the Prime Minister amidst ominous rumblings from the United States and in my diary I wrote, ‘The world is such a terrible place at the moment – a cloud over all things.’

Yet amidst all that, the diary also records consolations:

11 January: Bonnie and I return in the frost-bound midnight to the empty farmhouse. Her companionship is so precious to me, so essential now. Who would have thought that I would become so dependent on a little dog?

13 January: It’s good to have J here again – so much cleverer than I could ever be – to sound ideas off. What would I be without him? This afternoon we go to the pet shop with Bonnie for new dog beds and the expedition is fun. We eat sausages, read and doze by the fire.

20 January: … so good to be home again with Bonnie. She represents home now.

2 February: … coming back home to be welcomed by an ecstatic, wriggling little dog.

Bonnie always cheered me, always inspired closeness and took both of us away from work.

The day before our thirty-fifth wedding anniversary was a normal Saturday, and so I listened to my husband on the radio, took the three dogs up through our wood for a walk and felt a great surge of happiness in the still, cold air. It was strange, I thought, to be happy when the news was full of the looming war in Iraq, but the sunlight glittered on a hard frost and I took my little dog to be groomed, and picked her up later, a fresh-smelling shorn lamb. How can one suppress natural joy? It was there every day in Bonnie’s behaviour: the irrepressible nowness of each second, the perpetual readiness for action and adventure, even if that was only chasing a leaf. Each parting would be marked by the reproachful eyes and the drooping tail, even though she had two big dogs to stay with. I would return from shopping, one hour later, to be met with such an effusion of joy, such a frolicsome licking, that there was nothing to do but laugh.

On our anniversary, 23 February, J returned from presenting his usual Sunday television programme and presented me with his gift: a fine, chunky necklace of antique coral, since the thirty-fifth is the coral anniversary. In an imaginative touch he had also entered the bookmakers Joe Coral (for the first ever time) and placed a bet that Liverpool (my home team) would win their next away football match. He handed me the betting slip – and we laughed. That night we went to our favourite restaurant (not the grandest in Bath, but we ate out rarely, preferring to be in our blue and yellow kitchen) and my diary records: ‘We ate well and drank better and talked best of all. Perfection. As I say so often, I am so lucky.’

There it is.

Liverpool did not win.

As I explained in the Introduction, writing a memoir is to offer just a slice of a life, a section of truth – like a sample taken by an archaeologist, full of priceless shards which remain, nevertheless, mere parts, fragments shored against ruin. Sometimes when my dog is snoozing on my knee I trace her ribs with my fingertips, each one in turn, imagining the fragility of her skeleton laid in earth. Yet nowadays the computer can reassemble a whole head from fragments of bone, an image of what once was (a centuries-dead face reconstructed) turning and turning in cyberspace to awe us. So my dog’s DNA will lie for ever in earth and so will mine and therefore the essence of what is true is unassailable.

That is how I feel about that last anniversary.

Whatever went before, and no matter what was to come after, what happened that day and is condensed into those few words, remains The Truth.

Yet in the end only he and I know that truth; therefore what is presented to the world remains as shards.

J was the Chairman of the Bath International Music Festival and worked tirelessly to promote it. It was he who had taken me to my first big classical concert at the Festival Hall in 1968, although in my late teens I did begin a small collection of budget classical LPs. When we met he was rather entertained that I could be so admiring of his piano playing, since I knew so little about technique. When I was 30 a friend took me for the first time to the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, and my tears at the end of La Bohème began a craze for opera which took me to some of the great opera houses of the world and led me to study the famous Kobbé guide so that I knew all the stories. Yet by 2003 I had grown tired of the form, and returned to jazz and blues as my cooking music of choice, as well as classic pop tracks (‘Leader of the Pack’ etc.), cajun, country, not to mention urban grooves like Fishbelly Black. Our musical tastes had slightly diverged, although we shared a love of chamber music.

I remain unsure of exactly how it came about but this is what I know. Just after our anniversary J had been asked to interview Susan Chilcott where she lived, in a village called Blagdon, not far from Bath and Bristol. The article was to appear in the local evening paper, its purpose to promote the long-established Mid-Somerset Festival, invaluable for its encouragement of young performers each March. Later it was to amaze people that somebody as well known as J should agree to write for a local paper; at the time I hardly knew this was happening because I was planning a trip to Milwaukee as well as starting work on a public lecture at Bath University on the subject of pornography. Still, had it registered on my radar I would have attributed it to his good will. And I do know for certain that there was nothing suspicious about the meeting – on one level. Yet they had liked each other enormously at that dinner party four months before, and she told a mutual friend (I heard later) that she was excited to see him again.

In her case, I should probably have felt the same. Over the years she must have sat next to any number of self-centred men at dinner – you know the ones – who never ask a question yet, puffed up with needy masculine ego, assume you will uncover every achievement and interest in their lives. Sitting next to J she would have dazzled but been enchanted too, since he, the consummate interviewer, would always be sure to find out what made the most humble person tick, let alone a beautiful soprano.

He went to Blagdon that day.

They fell in love.

How can I know what happened? The novelist in me could write the scene and invest it with heady tension. But I never asked how it all came about, and speculation is irrelevant. What’s more, in the days following I noticed no change. Our life was hurtling on in its normal way, and I had no inkling of any undercurrent tugging my husband into deeper water. But just as one reads a novel, listens to music or looks at a great painting differently once you know the circumstances of its composition or future, so it is impossible to look back without seeing clouds mass over our farm, our life.

So now I see everything we did after 23 February in the light of what was to come. Evenings with friends in London during which we argued about Iraq; me interviewing Ben Okri at the Bath Literature Festival; our children visiting for weekends to tell us how their jobs were progressing; one special evening when J and I ate caviar (a gift from a friend), blinis and sour cream helped down by shots of bison grass vodka, followed by pot-roasted pheasant and mashed potato with good red wine and then home-made rhubarb crumble and my own ice cream – all by candlelight in front of a crackling dining-room fire. Good times, all – yet now overshadowed.

My own days were made gloomy by work on my lecture for Bath University. Despite the laisse-faire attitude of so many of my peers, my attitude to pornography and the insidious ‘pornogrification’ of society – a subject I’d visited often in journalism – has remained constant over the years: I detested it for reasons that went beyond feminism and perhaps might be called humanist. And now the cruel hydra of internet porn is indestructible. I investigated, read – and became depressed. The dark world I uncovered revolted me even more than I expected. With hindsight it was a mistake to take it on; the task made me withdrawn, and perhaps less observant of what was going on in J’s life than I might otherwise have been. A diary entry is very telling:

20 March: The farm is bathed in sunlight but I proceeded to make myself miserable by doing a trawl of porn sites to see what can be accessed freely and easily. It was far, far worse than expected and as I went on I became so overwhelmed by the scale of the horror that my mouth was dry – and at one point I had to walk out into the garden for air. The birds were singing, the crocuses pale gold in sunlight, and sweet little Bonnie rushed about at my feet – all white, all innocence. Yet not even she could make me feel better. That other world was ‘in’ my computer, ‘in’ the very air that I had breathed in my study. I felt polluted. Everything spoiled by it. The violence, the hatred against women defies description. This wretched lecture is a terrible black burden pressing down on me.

Meanwhile J was spending much time in London making extra programmes about the war in Iraq and besides writing the lecture I was planning a trip to Kenya for the charity Plan International, to visit my sponsored child and write about the trip for the London Evening Standard. I was also unwell; not in pain but afflicted by inconvenient female problems which grew worse and worse. And amidst the repetitive exhaustion of my diary I see one entry, laden now with irony. I went to visit a friend who had recently moved to Bath and wrote: ‘What would it be like to be middle aged and alone, your husband having departed? I should realize, perhaps, just how lucky I am.’

Two months later, I was in the Bath Clinic. My womb had gone, but my room was full of flowers. When the anaesthetist came to see me he admired them and I said, ‘Yes, I’m lucky.’ He was tall, middle-aged, South African. He smiled and said, ‘You make your luck.’

In the silence after his departure I wondered if that was true. I had just learned that my husband was in love with somebody else – and yet that was not the worst thing. During the previous weeks he had seemed so weighed down. It was inevitable that he would have to share it with me – because, after all, we shared almost everything. When, after many years, a married couple become linked symbiotically, they may perhaps live as brother-sisterly best friends and soulmates rather than lovers, yet know what the other is thinking, before the thought has formed. As Judith Thurman puts it (writing about Colette), ‘A marriage may be sustained by a deep complicity between two spouses, long after the extinction of desire.’ You are attuned to nuances of mood – unless, that is, you allow work and other preoccupations to blind you. The lecture given, the programmes completed, everything else laid aside because of my physical health and the urgency of the hysterectomy, I became aware again, woke up to the real world. And the horizons all around our home filled with his unhappiness.

Dates and details do not matter. The simple truth was this: J and Susan Chilcott had fallen passionately in love, but their affair was not to last long – as such. For only about three months later she discovered that the breast cancer for which she had been treated two years earlier had returned, spread to her liver and would not let her live. The beautiful woman of 40, at the very height of her powers (although perhaps not, since opera singers grow in maturity), with a four-year-old son whom she adored and called the light of her life, had been given her sentence. She could expect perhaps another three months. I lay in my room at the clinic, minus my womb, looking at my flowers, full of sorrow for her, brooding hopelessly on the pitiless inevitability of it. Like J, I wondered how people could believe there is a god.

Morphine-induced imaginings chill the soul. I had a dream in that scented room. I am a woman who has lost many children, yet I am outside her, looking on. She goes with my husband to visit a certain church, running through the flowery graveyard as if for refuge. She is drawn to ascend the winding stair into the gallery and her husband follows. Up there is an elaborate monument, covered with dust and spider webs. It is black and grey marble, with skulls beneath. She is looking up and sees that the names of the dead on the tomb are those of her own children, and as she stares in disbelief something is rearing up, a carved figure come to life, arms stretching out towards her. And she is plucked, carried up into the air, then hurled forward over the balustrade, to smash down dead on the floor of the church below. In this short time her husband has been frozen by the stairwell. Now he darts forward to look over the balcony at the corpse lying broken. But even as he looks a form rises by it, a wraith, a personification of malevolence. It looks up; he cannot even cry – struck dumb by what he sees. And then there is a jump cut, as in a movie. A railway station, and a young girl waiting for a train. It chugs in, one of the old-fashioned type with compartments. The girl sees one with a woman in it – with her head shrouded in a scarf – and gets in because she feels safe. Oh no, but I knew – even in the dream, the watcher knew. That spirit would kill other people’s children. Nowhere was safe.

(‘Oh Lord,’ I wrote, ‘what was all that about?’)

Our beautiful home awaited me, and it was sunny when I returned. Daniel and Kitty came to visit, as well as my parents – who lived near by. Because of the necessity for post-operative quiet I had no difficulty in keeping what I knew from everybody else. I had been looking forward to this time of rest and reading, with Bonnie on my knee playing the role perfected by Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Flush, ‘in his eternal place on my bed’. She would be like the little dogs at the feet of the ladies on medieval tombs, eternally vigilant, devotion incarnate. The point is, at this stage I had no doubt whatsoever that what was happening in J’s life would be endured, coped with and survived.

My journal records: ‘There is a space inside me, where what we must think of as “womanhood” used to be. The loss of it seems less a source of regret than of celebration. Space in my body. Space in my mind. Space in my life. Vacuums are always filled, aren’t they? So we shall wait and see what flows inwards.’

I did not know that home would never be the same again.

Susan Chilcott sang for the last time in public in June 2003, at a concert in Brussels. She was accompanied by her friend, the pianist and Radio 3 presenter Iain Burnside, and the performance was with the actress Fiona Shaw, reading from Shakespeare. Susan wore white linen. She sang (among other things) the Willow aria from Verdi’s Otello, when the doomed Desdemona, full of sorrow, remembers a song from her childhood:

The fresh streams ran between the flowery banks,

She moaned in her grief,

In bitter tears which through her eyelids sprang

Her poor heart sought relief.

Willow! Willow! Willow!

Come sing! Come sing!

The green willow shall be my garland.

Later her voice would rise in a crescendo as she begged, ‘Ch’io viva ancor, ch’io viva ancor!’ (‘Let me live longer, let me live longer!’) as death, in the form of her husband Othello, stands over her.

J was in the audience, with other friends. You would need a heart of granite not to see how unbearably poignant it must have been. The word ‘heartbreaking’ is overused, like ‘tragic’ and ‘hero’. Anyone who watched Susan Chilcott’s last performance, knowing that her life was already ebbing away, must surely have felt a breaking inside.

I wrote:

I think of her and her son with numbness, because the horror of it is so hard to imagine. As for his feelings … well, my own knowledge of love is so far removed from narrow, tabloid newspaper notions, that I can only empathize. Do we have any choice about these coups de foudre? In this case, I don’t think so. J is permanently upset – how can he not be? I don’t know how he will be able to bear what is coming, but he has made a choice to involve himself and so he has no choice but to endure.

Stricken, J asked me if I understood that he would want to spend time with Susan in the three months of life she had left. I told him I did understand. Because I did – and it makes no difference to me that other women might think me mad. This was not something cheap or clandestine; he was going away from me (and I was regaining strength daily, with enormous reserves of inner fortitude, built up over the years) to take care of somebody very special whose strength was waning. Take care of her son too.

I wrote:

I cannot begrudge a dying woman the love of my husband. Can we choose who we love? To stand in a bookshop is to stand in the midst of a great, tumultuous, seething, writhing, coiling, heaving mass of complex human emotions, and to be deafened by the screams of passion and pain. Who am I to tell them all – all those writers and their creations – that they are wrong? I suppose my sadness is chiefly because I wish J and I could have been all-in-all to each other and yet – after that first intensity of passion – it was never to be. I wonder why? He is still the person I most like to talk to, and whose various roles in life I find the most fascinating. Looking back at us in our youth, falling in love, making a home, doing finals, starting our careers, I marvel at the sheer courage of it all. Yet that swash-buckling love stepped sideways and lost itself among the alleyways of other people, other lives, self-indulgence, guilt. And then we never quite managed to find the way back.

The other day I was pierced by a pang that Dan and Kitty will never again live at home with me. Today this farm feels so empty … and yet, truthfully, I am all right. I will get through this. I know that J would not normally be here today, yet he would be here in spirit – but today he is not even here in spirit. But my little dog is at my feet. I reach forward and stroke her. I hear the fountain – and birds. I must begin to make again.

Bovine, I had watched him descend the stairs with a packed bag. What would have happened had I thrown myself down, clung to his leg, begged him not to go? I will never know because I didn’t do so. ‘I am dumb from human dignity’ wrote Yeats, and I know what that means. Yes, I am proud – but perhaps foolish too. Later I began an unfinished novel like this:

She gave her husband away.

It wasn’t that she didn’t want him any more. Oh no, at that point she wanted him maybe more than she’d ever done before. But perhaps that was contrary of her – acting the child who clutches at an old toy because a friend suddenly wants to play with it, but gives it up all the same, in the end. Maybe if she’d clutched a little more fiercely it wouldn’t have turned out as it did.

But I watched as blank passivity slid over her, and the woman who had been so deliciously bad in her past embraced a perverse form of sainthood. She became the kind of person friends described as ‘so good’, with that slight shake of the head which indicates disquiet, calling into question their own selfishness, but also her common humanity. Good behaviour can sometimes seem intolerable, since we wish others to rage against the dying of the light, as we would ourselves.

I shook my head as she – so generously, so calmly – gave her husband away, and then turned to me as if to ask ‘Why did this happen?’, those great eyes filling, that generous mouth folded into a moue of sadness. You could strike a woman like that. You could shake her until the teeth rattled, and all her features fell apart, that beauty destroyed forever, with all the rest. But I was her friend and that defined my role – to witness all, to allow all, until the moment they both fell into the pit, at which point I would stretch out my hand to help.

Sometimes it is easier to tell a story in the third person. Yet I find these days I no longer want to make up characters (except for children) when each day, through my work as an advice columnist, I deal with reality and have to try to tell it as it is. When we were both young journalists J used to ask me if I ever thought of writing a novel. He thought it the way I should go. Excited as I was then by filing reports from every corner of Britain for magazines and newspapers, I said I had no wish to. Why would you want to make it up? I asked him. But he was to encourage me, patiently over the years, to write fiction. Without him, I doubt I would ever have done so. Without him, I doubt I will again.

On 20 June my parents came to lunch to celebrate my mother’s birthday and the ‘official birthday’ of Bonnie, who had come to live with us on that day a year earlier. Lunch was outside in the courtyard, under the cream umbrella. I tied ribbons on Mum’s chair, on Bonnie’s basket, round her neck. J’s absence was unremarked because it was unremarkable. He was a busy man. The dog’s presence made it all much easier. By focusing on her and the meal I could deflect any anxiety my perceptive mother must have felt, looking at my face.

Here I reach the limit of what I can write about that summer. So much must remain unrecorded, although I will never forget. Too painful to recall the hope we shared that after it was over (it was not possible to utter the brutal words ‘After she is dead’) we could put it all back together. J and I had been through much in our long marriage but we recognized that this earthquake was truly terrifying, like nothing before. I wondered if, afterwards, we would find we had moved on a ratchet, making it impossible to go back. Can you go back? I asked myself if I would be able to live with a perfect ghost – my husband forever haunted by that amazing voice, like a mariner tied to a mast still hearing the fatal sirens’ song. I wondered – when I finally told our children and the three of us talked obsessively about the subject, raging over bottles of white wine late into the night as moths slammed at the kitchen window – if I could recover the man I had known.

Susan Chilcott died in J’s arms on 4 September. The obituaries were unanimous. The Independent noted: ‘Her death came three months after she made her operatic debut at the Royal Opera House, in which her “radiant” and “glorious” performance outshone even that of her co-star, Placido Domingo.’ The Guardian said:

Susan Chilcott, who has died of cancer aged 40, was one of the most compelling and intense English operatic stars to emerge in the last decade, with a wonderfully fresh, attractive and open personality and a rare commitment to her work. Her career was so distressingly short that too little of her best work has been captured on DVD or CD. But her singing had a purity and a forceful dramatic impact that made her a formidable operatic actor. Her last role on stage was Jenufa, which she sang in English for Welsh National Opera last March, with Sir Charles Mackerras conducting … Sadly, when the run ended, Chilcott was too ill to record the work with Mackerras, as he had wanted. Her last performance, in Brussels in June, was … with the pianist Iain Burnside and actor Fiona Shaw – and she was singing better than ever. Chilcott made an indelible impression on those who saw and heard her, or worked with her.

On the day of her funeral at Wells Cathedral hundreds of people gathered to pay their respects. By this stage I had begun to feel enraged that – in the eyes of all those people – J was ‘allowed’ the role of widower. In fact Susan was married to her manager, although they were not living as man and wife and he was not the father of her son. But what do such details matter? I had packed my own bag, said goodbye to the dogs and cats, felt the (increasing) pang at leaving Bonnie – and was off to Heathrow. At the very hour of her funeral I was high above the Atlantic, en route for my beloved United States. I had work to do, but also needed to escape.

Snapshots in a family photograph album can come unstuck in time – adrift from captions which identify person, time and place. Will future generations know who they were, those faces caught faking smiles? Will any of it survive? Knowing all, remembering all, I can still only bear to offer small fragments of what Philip Larkin calls ‘a past that now no one can share’.

In Point Reyes, Marin County, somebody has altered a sign on a wall from ‘No Parking’ to ‘No Barking’ and my laughter is over the top, hysterical. But when, not long afterwards, I see scrawled on a post overlooking San Francisco, ‘I almost died here – but no such luck,’ I become ridiculously upset. The view from the Marin Headlands – the Golden Gate Bridge, dwarfed sailboats, white caps on sparkling water – is perfect, and yet I feel my head is crumbling.

I talk obsessively about Bonnie to anyone who will listen (mercifully, Americans like dogs), miss her dreadfully and note, ‘Who would have thought I would be so dependent on her?’ Pulling out her photograph to show to our lovely, kind niece, who shares a house with friends in Oakland, I think of Amy Tan and my last visit, when none of this misery could have been dreamt of. The point is, in talking about my love for my dog I’m really talking about my love of home, of J – just as Elizabeth Barrett Browning used Flush as displacement.