A Small Dog Saved My Life. Bel Mooney

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.