Читать книгу My Bonnie: How dementia stole the love of my life - John Suchet - Страница 9

After we moved to London, just before Christmas 1983, I lost no time in introducing Bonnie to Regent’s Park, which Mum had always referred to as our ‘back garden’ when we were growing up. I walked paths with her I had walked as a kid. I took her to the top of the slope on the other side of the lake. This was where I sat on my tricycle as a toddler, put my arms up so Mum could take off my pullover, lost control of the pedals, sped down the slope, coming off at the bottom by the bridge and skidding along the tarmac. I still have the scar on the back of my left thumb. We laughed and joked and chatted, arms around each other, hugged and kissed. We were teenagers in love.

We bought two gold rings, his and hers, and had them engraved with our initials, J and B. We wear them to this day. Our flat was small, but Bon made it cosy. Our dining table was a small white kitchen table with a flap at each end. Mum and Dad came up for dinner and we squeezed round the little table. God, how happy they were. Not only was their son back in the family, but he was so self-evidently happy. Can a parent want more? Mum and Bon chatted away easily, exchanging female stories and gossip. Dad at one stage caught my eye, emitted a tiny smile and nodded. It was his way of giving a professional judgment, of saying yes, this one is a keeper.

We went to John Lewis and bought a double bed, bedclothes and curtains. Two beanbags served as easy chairs. I bought a cheap and cheerful self-assembly dressing table for Bon, and we laughed together at the mess I made of putting it together. Bon had not worked since a brief spell as an infant teacher following the Flour Council, but now she got a job as a temp and together we could just about afford the rent. We had no intention of staying long. Bon said she didn’t want to live in a flat in central London, and was longing for us to get a small house and garden somewhere. I loved living in a flat—albeit small—in the centre of town, but I would have gone to the Highlands of Scotland if she had asked me to.

We stayed in that flat for just under a year, and it was during that time that I served my penance at ITN. It was to that flat I came home with the tears pricking the backs of my eyes, determined to resign. It was during that period that I came to terms with my failure in Washington, that I put my job in perspective, that I came to realise where happiness and fulfillment really lay. And so, as I curbed my ambition and cared rather less about my job, I got better at it.

I retired from ITN at the end of March 2004, to coincide with my big birthday which did not begin with five. I approached that birthday with dread, but Bon, having got there first, helped me through. She was also an integral part of the retirement parties, official and unofficial. After all, had it not been for her, I would have handed in my resignation in a fit of pique many years before. As it was, I stayed at ITN for almost 32 years.

Now, I said to her, we could enter retirement together, do all the things we had planned, go to all the places we had talked about. We could travel Europe, even the world, going to Wagner operas. She smiled weakly.

It was some time in the months following my retirement that a couple of rather odd things happened. I was introducing a Beethoven concert in a large modern concert hall in Milton Keynes. Bonnie was backstage with me in my dressing room. About half an hour before it was due to begin, I walked her out of the dressing room, down a corridor, and pointed to the door she should go through that would lead her into the auditorium, where a seat was reserved for her. I don’t know why, some instinct made me watch her as she went. She walked down the corridor and reached the door. She stopped in front of it and hesitated. She reached for the handle, but brought her arm back again. She stood still for a moment, head bowed as if concentrating. Then she looked back round, and her face lit up when she saw me. I hurried towards her. ‘Darling, are you alright? What’s the matter?’ ‘I got confused, that’s all, I couldn’t remember…’

And the second odd thing was that she got lost at Stansted airport that day when we were flying out to France.

Towards the end of 1984, my mother told me she had heard that a much larger flat had become available one floor below. ‘Why don’t you and Bonnie look at it?’ she asked. I said we would, but we also intended starting to look for a small house soon.

As if it were yesterday, I can remember exactly what Bon said and did as we walked round the large empty flat. Doors everywhere, room after room, and something we had none of in the small flat—cupboards. ‘Cupboards! At last!’ she said. ‘Somewhere to put our coats!’ We walked the long corridor, marvelling at how many rooms there were. At the far end, the kitchen. We walked in. Bon let out a little yelp and performed a pirouette, arms outstretched. ‘It’s huge! It’s wonderful! We can eat in the kitchen! And look, more cupboards!’

The flat was elegant, with spacious rooms and molded ceilings. Classic 1920s. We walked into the large light bedroom. The ceiling had elaborate molding, in three rectangles, one directly above where the bed would go. Bon looked up at it and said, ‘I expect I will spend a lot of time looking up at that.’ I laughed out loud at the outrageousness of the remark, basking in a warm glow of expectation.

Oh please let’s live here, she implored me. The rent was higher, but by now I knew that at the very worst I was safe in my job, at the best—who could tell, maybe promotion soon? I applied to the landlord and was successful. We moved into the flat at the end of 1984, and I am sitting in it writing this now, almost 25 years later.

I had come home. Not only was I once again living in the same block of flats my brother David and I had grown up in, to be joined later by younger brother Peter, but our new flat was two doors away on the same floor as the flat we had lived in as children. I am at heart a city boy. I loved being back in the centre of London, the noise and bustle, buses and tubes, cafés and shops. Best of all, I could walk to work in 15 minutes, which meant being back with my Bonnie minutes after leaving the office.

Having said that she wanted to move to a little house with a garden in the suburbs, Bonnie soon found that she no longer heard the traffic in the busy road below, and that she didn’t miss having a garden quite as much as she thought she would. As I write this, we have been living in Chiltern Court for nearly 25 years.

Small wonder, really, that my job started to go rather well. A close colleague, the reporter and newscaster Carol Barnes, who was to die so tragically young, said to me about this time, ‘Do you know, before you went to Washington you were a complete bastard. You argued with everyone. Now you’re actually quite nice.’

In the autumn of 2004, my concerns about Bonnie were mounting. An odd remark here or there, something forgotten that should have been remembered, confusion about entries in the kitchen diary—the sort of things you put down to the ageing process, something that happens to us all. But after what had happened at the airport, I couldn’t help worrying. To begin with I joked with Bonnie: ‘You’ve got Alzheimer’s, that’s what you’ve got.’ It’s not really that tasteless—more gallows humour between two people who love each other very much, maybe an attempt to ward off the evil spirits.

But she must have caught the concern in my voice. In the spring of 2005, we were invited to the annual Arnold Bennett commemoration dinner up in his birthplace in the Potteries. I was to give a little speech, then propose a toast to the immortal memory. It was nice to do something so completely different. I am not an Arnold Bennett expert, but I do have something in common with the great under-rated English novelist. I happen to live in the same block of flats in London where he spent his final years and where he died.