Missing Christina Read online

  Missing Christina

  Meredith Whitford

  © Meredith Whitford 2017

  Meredith Whitford has asserted her rights under the Copyright, Design and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.

  First published 2017 by Endeavour Press Ltd.

  For Edmund Romilly and Deborah, and my other friends and family.

  Table of Contents

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  Twenty

  Twenty-one

  Twenty-two

  Twenty-three

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  Part One

  This is where it all began.

  One

  America

  From: [email protected]

  To: [email protected]

  Subject: Mum – websites/obits

  Date: 7.12.07

  Dear Gail,

  I’m afraid there’s no good news. The doctors there’s no chance of recovery. With luck I will be in New York in time to say goodbye.

  Got this ready:

  1) For Mum’s website:

  We regret to advise that Chris Bryant died unexpectedly, as the result of an accident, on [date]. She will be remembered for her first great novel, the prisoner-of-war epic Escape (1976), and for her popular series of crime novels featuring Detective Inspector Simon Slaughter. She devoted much time and money to the two charities she founded, “Escape”, for homeless and at-risk teenagers, and “The Write Way”, which offered free literacy courses. We would like to ask her fans to make donations in her memory to these two charities and/or to Médécins Sans Frontières and Save the Children.

  In private life Chris Bryant was Christina, Viscountess Randall, always known to friends and family as Tia. She lived in Hertfordshire, UK. She is survived by her husband, Jon, her three children Jaques, Silvia and Toby, and her grandson, Hugo. She was 61.

  Messages of sympathy can be sent by clicking the link below [insert link, pls], or to her publishers, Randall Fyffe Randall in London, New York and Sydney.>

  2) Also pls put something on my F’book page and website.

  Will be in touch when there’s definite news about Mum.

  Love, Jaques

  *

  Usually I like New York, but not today. Not in the mood today. Noise. Rush. Hassle. Hysteria. Not a good start, when I was fighting my own hysteria.

  At least the Immigration guy was friendly. Looking from me to my passport photo he did a sort of double-take and said, “Hey, man – Jaques Randall! Sir, I’ve seen all your work!” I guess he was pronouncing my name phonetically, but he got it right, Jake-wez not Jakes or the French Jacques. As I’ve had to explain virtually from the cradle, I was named after the Jaques in As You Like It, because Mum was watching the play when she went into labour with me. “Over here for filming?” the passport man went on.

  “No,” I said. “My mother’s dying.”

  I hadn’t said that to anyone since I left home. Saying it to strangers would make it real. Also it was a private thing.

  Because of the background noise Passport Guy caught only the word 'mother’ and thought I was swearing at him. Welcome to America. He was nice, though, once he understood.

  Toby was waiting for me at the hospital, and of course I hoped, because you always do stupidly hope, that he’d give me good news, that Mum was better, was recovering, crisis over. But he took little running steps forward and flung his arms around me, a thing he hadn’t done since he was about six. I hugged him, stroking his back, then held his shoulders to look at him. It was over a year since he moved to New York, and we hadn’t met in that time – twenty-two now, he was taller and thinner, and without the puppy fat he was so like Mum it shocked me. He was pale, and dark-eyed as if he hadn’t slept. I suppose he hadn’t. Nor had I.

  “Any news?” It was the only way I could express it.

  “They said ‘sinking, but not yet.’ Christ I’m glad you’ve come.” His voice cracked on the words. He took a deep breath. “Ready?”

  “Yeah. No. Just a tick.” I took out my phone and rang home. Silvia answered on the first ring, her voice tight with fear.

  “What?”

  “Me. Just to tell you I’m here. At the hospital, I mean.”

  “Mum?”

  “Don’t know yet.”

  “Oh for God’s sake, why’d you ring if you’ve nothing to tell me? Toby’s already told me not to hope – what d’you think it’s like here?”

  I’d had half the night to know what it was like at home, and said so. “Silve, how are Dad and Granny?” Dad had collapsed when he heard the news. Granny wasn’t much better. We’d called the local GP, who spends so much time ministering to Dad’s hypochondria that she might as well move in with us, and she had treated them and put them to bed.

  “Gran’s being brave and that’s so heart-breaking I wish she’d take that quack’s pills like Dad. He’s been doped to the eyeballs since you left.”

  Oblivion always was Dad’s first recourse in any crisis. Nevertheless, I said, “But what if he, well, has to come over here?”

  Silvia’s voice gentled to sadness. “He won’t want to. You know that. But I’ll try to make him – get him to… Ring me as soon as – when –”

  “All right.” No point in saying more. I disconnected, and followed Toby down to Intensive Care or whatever it’s called. The nurses were expecting us, and they were kind in their distracted way. One, perhaps more senior or the one used to breaking bad news, said with welcome directness that there were signs that it wouldn’t be long now. Sinking, she said. Be prepared. Perhaps only an hour or two.

  I took three long breaths, the way I do before going on stage, and went into Mum’s room. She’d been in quite a bad accident, hit by a taxi, thrown into the path of another car and then to the pavement, but most of her injuries were, let’s say, not visible to visitors. All the same, I had tried to be prepared for anything. Anything except this stillness, this absence. Mum was always a restless, untidy sleeper, and I had never seen her lying flat and straight, unmoving. Jesus, how often have I been in cop or hospital shows on TV, playing everything from the bloodily dying victim to the harassed but caring young doctor – so surely this was only another film set, the nurses extras, the ward a construction of flats and backing. Any moment now the director would call “Cut!” and Mum would sit up, pull off all these tubes and drips, wait for the make-up girl to touch up those signs of injury.

  The chart on the end of the bed said “DNR”. Do Not Resuscitate.

  I took the chair nearest the bed, and held Mum’s hand. Her hands were like mine, square and long-fingered, although her knuckles were knotty with the beginning of arthritis. Her nails had been torn and broken in the accident, and that would have distressed her, for she always took great care of them, buffing them to a diamond shine. Holding that flaccid, cool hand I said, “Mum, it’s me, it’s Jaques. Sorry I couldn’t get here sooner.” They say that hearing is the last sense to go, and I suppose that despite everything I had expected some response, but the monitors beeped on without change. I kept on talking to her. I told
her Toby was here, that Dad was on his way (a lie, but it no longer mattered), I told her Hugo had another tooth and was almost crawling. I think I even talked about the weather.

  Nurses came and went. A doctor swept in, saying with the supreme tact of his kind, “Not long now.” The woman with him, a medical social worker I think she said, sat down beside me and clicked the top of her pen. She had already talked to Mrs, er, Lady Randall’s other son about this, she said, but was I quite aware…

  I was. Mum was a vocal, often vituperative, supporter of voluntary euthanasia and opponent of arrogant medical meddling. She always said that once your mind goes, or your faculties, you’re no longer a sentient human being, and thus better off dead, and the medical profession could keep its hands, and its tubes and respirators and wonder drugs, well away from her. She’d signed one of those Living Wills and carried a card saying so. Also she was an organ donor – another card in her wallet said so, as did her MedicAlert bracelet (allergic to morphine.) Toby had rung home about this, and Uncle Quentin, Mum’s cousin and solicitor, had faxed some sort of consent to the hospital for her organs to be harvested. Not that anyone used the word ‘harvested’, any more than they said ‘corpse’ or ‘body’ or ‘dead’. Euphemisms rule. Our Loved One was Helping Others Even After Her Passing.

  I signed forms, then said, “What exactly happens?”

  “When your mother passes, you may have a moment alone with her. Then, I’m afraid, we must move quickly. Later you can see her again if you wish. I can make all the arrangements with the funeral home if you wish.”

  Toby and I exchanged a helpless glance, he looking to me because I was the eldest, me to him because I was in a foreign country. Then, together, we said, “Make the arrangements.”

  Mum died about an hour later. She made a sound, really just an exhalation, nothing more than “Eh…” I wondered if she was trying to say my name. Then she just ceased to be alive. Toby and I both saw it. Her face smoothed, she looked younger. Peaceful.

  I didn’t know what to do. Well, you don’t, do you. You can’t just walk out. There’s a feeling that something is expected, even required. Actors are always conscious of the audience. Yet Mum was dead, I couldn’t speak to her, she was no longer there. I kissed her forehead, then her hand. I could think of nothing to say, or not aloud. To myself, to Mum, I said, I love you, I’ll miss you, you were a good mother, my friend, we’ll all miss you, I don’t know what we’ll do without you. Toby kissed her, and I saw his lips moving as he said his own farewell. Then nurses came, and that arrogant doctor, and quite gently but firmly and with some haste we were eased out of the room.

  We held each other, too numb for tears. It wasn’t real yet. Things like this don’t really happen. They happen on TV, in the America of film. This, now, had the same lack of reality, because it just could not be true. If this had happened at home I’d have felt shock, threat, grief, but not this unreality. America made it dishonest.

  But of course it was real. My mother was dead.

  *

  There was a place we could sit, have coffee, make phone calls. That social worker made it tactfully clear that there was no point in waiting until whatever was being done to Mum was over; she would call us, she said, but for now we must sit down, take a moment. She brought us each a cup of coffee, and it was disgusting, weak and thick with sugar, but we drank it.

  Then, phone calls. Silvia. Uncle Quentin. Gail, Mum’s secretary. They would tell everyone else. Toby said, “What shall we do now? I don’t want to stay here.”

  “Back to your place?”

  He shook his head. “Not yet. Only want to be with you.”

  “So do I. Not others, yet.” I looked at my watch again. 8.12.07. The eighth… “I know what we’ll do. Something for Mum. We’ll go to Strawberry Fields.”

  Toby looked at me as if I’d gone mad. “Why the fuck?”

  “Because it’s the eighth. It’s the anniversary of John Lennon’s death. Mum would’ve gone.” He wasn’t sure if I meant it, not sure if he wanted to do it. Nor was I, because frankly I can take or leave the Beatles, and I’m not one for empty gestures of sentiment. Yet it seemed important to go, for Mum. After a moment Toby’s face cleared and he said, “Yeah, let’s. Mum was gonna go. She missed the twenty-fifth anniversary, so she planned this whole book tour around having half this week here in New York. She told me Sunday, when she got here, she was gonna go today, then up to Boston tomorrow. Y’okay, let’s do it.”

  “Is it far?” I had no idea where in the city we were.

  “Nah. Walk it.”

  It was a good day for walking. The earlier flurry of snow had cleared, and although the air was stingingly cold the crispness was rather pleasant. The streets were the usual NY mayhem. On Fifth Avenue women were wearing fur, something you rarely see anywhere else these days. Normally I would’ve enjoyed being here, for after all it’s New York. It’s cool, it’s the Big Apple and Gotham City, it’s Friends and Law and Order and Madison Square Garden, it’s the Empire State Building, it’s Gene Kelly and Frank Sinatra and the other one singing, it’s Broadway and Times Square, it’s the National Gallery, it’s Garbo’s salary. It’s got a buzz, it’s alive, it’s got those gorgeous buildings, it’s got imagination and fun.

  But now it would always be the place where my mother died.

  In the park squirrels leapt and chattered, and the clopping of the carriage horses’ hooves rang clearly. Tourists stared and wandered. A demented jogger sweated past. I recognised The Dakota over on a corner, and knew we were nearly there.

  Strawberry Fields, the shrine to Lennon, is a circular, vivid mosaic near the western edge of Central Park. Today other pilgrims had come, hundreds, perhaps thousands. Four young guys were playing Beatles songs on guitars, people were singing quietly, for themselves. Nothing was formal or organised; it was personal and private, a nice thing. A lot of flowers, single blooms and bunches, had been laid, and I regretted I hadn’t thought to bring some. Never mind. That I was there was what mattered. Like Toby, some of the people were so young they weren’t born when Lennon died. One girl, who looked about seventeen, was dressed in 70s hippy flower-decked combats, her hair in an Afro. She wept as she sang along. A smartly dressed woman, a typical NYC businesswoman in killer heels and gold jewellery, was crying too. There were tourists here as well as locals – I heard Australian accents from two women, French from a group of four; they were particularly good on ʽMichelle’. Texan and Chicago voices, German, English.

  It’s wonderful to be here, it’s certainly a thrill. I sang along too. I know all the words. So does Toby, although he’d never admit it. We were raised on the Beatles, the Stones, The Yardbirds, The Who, Queen, Led Zep, Black Sabbath… And, here, it was OK to cry. Easier than it would have been alone. Here, grief was in order, even if it wasn’t for Lennon. In that public privacy we stood with our arms around each other, and gently wept, until somehow it was bearable.

  Toby bought a bunch of flowers from a nearby cart, whose owner no doubt gives annual thanks on his knees to Mark Chapman, and we wrote “Tia” on the back of a business card, tucked it inside the flowers and added it to the others. We took some photos, asked a girl nearby to snap the two of us. She looked at me as if she almost recognised me, then turned raptly back to singing with the others.

  We stayed for perhaps an hour, then crossed the street to The Dakota. Of course there was nothing to see, except a handsome black porter in an immaculate uniform, and the sign forbidding entry. I was only a baby when Lennon died, so I have no memory of my parents’ reaction, but their shock and outrage have reverberated down the years, so that I can understand what an iconic figure he was to my parents’ generation and how shocking his death was. Also, of course, it was a personal grief because they knew him, they knew all the Beatles, and the Stones, knew anyone like that you care to name. Now, we’re inured to assassinations and outrages, or believe we are. Perhaps nothing, not even quite 9/11, can have the same power to shock my generation in the same
way.

  A bunch of Japanese tourists rushed down upon the Dakota’s doorman, cameras clicking. “Is this where?” “Did it happen here? Light here?” “Rennon died here?” “Dakota, here?” That poor man – this must go on all day, perhaps every day. I hoped he was being paid triple time. He answered patiently and courteously, without distaste, but for a second his eyes met mine. We moved quietly away.

  “Mum would have liked that,” Toby said.

  “John Lennon would’ve been sixty-seven this year.” At their 25th anniversary party Dad sang ʽWhen I’m sixty-four’ to Mum, but he changed the lyric to ‘when I’m eighty-four’. It was a pretty pukatronic moment, but Mum seemed to like it; she cried. “I wonder what he’d be like now. Would he have stayed in the U.S. under Reagan? Under Bush? Perhaps he’d be a right-wing old fart by now.”

  “No, worse: he’d’ve turned into Bono. Don’t you wish they’d all just shut up? Rock stars should stick to booze and drugs, not saving the world.”

  “Oh, too right.” At the same instant we both thought of Dad, and laughed. Back in the 70s he played bass in a metal band called, we hesitate to remember, Goat-riding Virgins From Hell. ‘Twats with Strats’ is our private name for them. There are photos. YouTube. MTV. Dad favoured leather vests over bare skin and had hair down below his knees. The band imploded after a few years; Dad calls it “artistic differences”, code for the drummer being strapped to a bed screaming about the giant mice, and the rhythm guitarist losing some quite important appendages. Dad came home and joined the family publishing company, and although he sometimes plays a pub gig with a few other ancients, that’s it for the rock god.

  Dad. I knew I should talk to him. Or at least to his tame GP. She was a bit free with the prescription pad for my liking, but I supposed she knew what she’s doing. Should I ring her and say, Get him in a state to fly over here? No. He’d be useless. He’s not good at crises. Ignore it and it’ll go away, is his motto. What that means is, someone else will take care of it, and that person was usually Mum. Dad adored her, adored us kids, but he’s afraid of emotion and perhaps of responsibility; almost, he takes such things as a personal affront or an unfair imposition. When I was seven and my kitten was run over in the street, he saw the body on his way to work, and kept going, ringing Mum from his office, so that it was she who broke the news to me, went out to bring poor Socksy’s stiff little body inside, dug the grave in the back garden, made me understand (it was my first experience of death) that Socksy wouldn’t somehow be there next morning. Yet Dad cried when he came home that night, and he took infinite pains over a little marker for the grave. When Toby was caught selling drugs at school he took a plane to Australia. If he couldn’t physically escape he whistled up his tame quack and doped himself into oblivion. She, the local GP, must be the last doctor in England if not the world who makes house calls; her surgery’s in the village near home, and she seemed willing to trot around whenever Dad fancied he’s ill. I’d seen her at least once a month for about ten years, but she was such a dull little woman I could never remember her name, and I only knew she had a face because I would have noticed if she hadn’t.