had left off when I fell asleep: sex with Fred, or rather not-sex with Fred, and Hardy’s elegy for his first wife, which led me into uncomfortable memories of Maisie.
I try not to think of Maisie too much. The last years of her life were so awful, not just for her, but for all of us. From the moment she told me she had found a lump under her armpit I knew with terrible certainty how it would end, but not how long it would take: the endless hospital appointments, the stuffy crowded waiting rooms, the anxious consultations, the operations and chemotherapy and radiotherapy, the brief periods of respite and hope, the unspeakable depression and despair when the next scans showed they had been delusory, the gradual mutation of the house into a hospice, first with the installation of a stair-lift, and then, when even that became too much for her to manage, the conversion of the lounge into a sick room with an en suite bathroom extension, and a Macmillan nurse calling daily. Maisie was determined to die at home. She got her wish, it was all we could do for her in the end, but it took its toll of me and the children. I think one of the reasons I’m so bitter about my deafness is that having got through all that, survived that, and then found new happiness with Fred, I somehow thought I had suffered my fair share of misfortune, paid my dues as the Americans say, and that life would be plain sailing from then on. But of course that isn’t how it works, not at all.
The only way he survived the strain of that time was through work, devoting every hour that wasn’t taken up with caring for Maisie and the children to his teaching and research. In the early stages of her illness they made love to comfort each other, but as Maisie’s condition worsened it became painful for her and difficult for him, and they stopped by tacit mutual consent. Maisie raised the subject once in a touching but embarrassing way, about six months before she died, saying she would understand if he needed what she called ‘solace’ from another woman, as long as she didn’t know about it, and none of her friends did. He assured her quite sincerely that he felt no such need. She told her sister that he was ‘a saint’, but he vehemently repudiated the compliment when it was relayed to him. He claimed no virtue for his continence. He simply felt numbed by the misery of the situation.The idea of entering into an emotional relationship with another woman while Maisie was dying by inches was unthinkable, and he was not the kind of man to resort to prostitutes or massage parlours.
After Maisie’s death, that is to say after about a year had passed and he had got over the immediate sense of grief and loss, mingled with relief that her suffering was over, and his own burden lifted, he became conscious that he was a free man again, and that he was being observed with an interest that was sometimes kindly and sometimes prurient - as if his circle of acquaintance were conspiring to help him find another partner, or secretly placing bets on who it would be. He was aware, too, that Anne and Richard, both then teenagers, and fiercely loyal to the memory of their mother, reacted with extreme suspicion whenever he was out late in the evening, or mentioned some female colleague approvingly in conversation. This, he found, had an inhibiting effect on his relations with the unattached women he met, fearing that any effort to be pleasant on his part might be misinterpreted - and probably it had the same effect on them. Then Winifred Holt came into his life, initially as a student taking a Combined Honours degree in Art History and Linguistics.
It was an unusual combination, since there were not many connections between the two subjects in content or methodology. In fact the only one he could think of, as he told her in her first tutorial (the Department still had a tutorial system in those days) was Jakobson’s application of his famous metaphor/metonymy distinction to Surrealism and Cubism. She cheerfully admitted that there was no rationale for her combination of subjects, she just happened to be interested in each of them for different reasons. She had always loved going to art galleries and looking at pictures, and as