Nine Summers Read online

  ‘I’d better set up “theatre” to aspirate you, honey,’ Felix joked as he brought out two white towels from the bathroom, spread them on the bed and set out his syringe, needles, cotton wool and spirits.

  ‘They’ll have fun cleaning out the rubbish bin tomorrow morning. We’d better clear out early before they realise they’ve had a couple of old drug addicts in the place.’ We had a little energy left for laughter. We fled the hotel early and moved on to Tournus, where Felix set up his ‘theatre’ once more. But he was coughing and running a high temperature. He started once more on antibiotics.

  We continued on to Aix-en-Provence, where he again went through his usual routine. ‘Do you think they’ll set the French secret service onto us? Vieux Australiens leave a trail of syringes and needles in one hotel after another?’ I said. Felix was too tired to laugh.

  It took us five days to get to Borgo Di Bastia Creti, a fifteenth-century farming estate in the hills of Umbria, set among pines and olives and converted into luxurious rustic houses. This was to be the grand splash we had planned for our 50th wedding anniversary. But when we arrived Felix had a high temperature and I was frantic. Julie and her partner Denise, Anne and David, and my brother and his wife arrived on the following day. By the time they’d all unpacked, I could no longer cope. I rushed into our bedroom and hid under the eiderdown. Felix came in.

  ‘Honey, you’ll have to come out,’ he said. ‘I can’t, I can’t face anyone. I’m exhausted.’

  Felix’s temperature remained high but he struggled on. He suggested to the others that they go sightseeing. We were relieved to be on our own, stretched on deckchairs near the pool.

  One day during that week, we all went together to Assisi, on another day to Perugia.

  On our last evening, we gathered in the central dining room of Bastia Creti for a celebratory dinner. The long table was decorated with spring flowers and candles. The doors opened onto a terrace and garden. Veiled beams of light shone onto stone tubs of cascading flowers. The chef, a rotund Italian, had prepared a festive meal. Zucchini flowers battered and deep fried followed by ricotta and spinach gnocchi with truffle sauce, osso bucco and vegetables, finished off with zabaglione. Tuscan wines flowed. After coffee and Vin Santo, we dispersed onto the patio. A shrill chorus of crickets trilled and a full moon hung low in the sky. I looked up and made a wish.

  ‘I wonder where we’ll be this time next year?’ I took Felix’s hand.

  ‘Who knows?’

  We were apprehensive about the drive back to London. By the time we’d realised that it had been madness to drive, there was nothing else we could do. We started on the autostrada via Perugia, Florence, Bologna and Milan, and on to Lago d’Orta where we planned to stay three days. Shortly after we arrived there, Felix’s heart started to fibrillate, and continued for most of the night. He spent the following day in bed. I suggested we try to get someone to drive the car back to London, while we flew.

  ‘No, another couple of quiet days and I’ll be all right.’

  After two days at Orta San Giulio, we set off and crossed the Simplon Pass into the Berner Oberland. Two days later we arrived home, thankful to have made it in one piece.

  chapter fourteen

  During the following months, Felix’s cough was relentless. Whether it was the cough that progressively weakened him, or some other condition, we didn’t know. At the Marsden, Dr Hunt examined him, but didn’t find anything significant. He suggested Felix have more tests in Sydney. Felix saw a chest physician at a London teaching hospital who said, ‘You’d better get used to having an old man’s cough and being permanently on antibiotics. Your chest X-ray is clear.’

  ‘What about doing an MRI?’ Felix asked.

  ‘You know what a fuss they make in hospitals about the costs of these tests. You need to fill in so many forms…’

  When we left, Felix said, ‘Never mind, we’ll be in Sydney soon and I’ll get all these investigations done there.’

  ‘Don’t try to take the luggage down, ask the taxi driver to do it,’ I begged Felix on the day we left London for Sydney.

  ‘All right. Just this time.’ The fact that he agreed told me how he felt.

  Tears trickled down my cheeks as we started our descent into Sydney. Below, city lights blazed like a fun fair.

  ‘We’ve made it home,’ I whispered. ‘We’re home.’

  The family was there to meet us. At home in our flat, Felix collapsed into the big brown chair and beamed. We felt enveloped in warmth and joy. And although I didn’t want the evening to end, we were beat. During the night Felix started to fibrillate again. He’d been fibrillating more often, and for longer.

  ‘I’ll book to have X-rays, an MRI, another full blood count and an appointment with the cardiologist.’

  ‘Yes, the sooner the better,’ I said.

  His haematologist, Dr Dean, ordered a lumbar puncture and a bone marrow test.

  David and I entered the consulting room with Felix to get the results of the latest tests. Dr Dean, a middle-aged man with a round, kind face, was behind his desk. His serious expression frightened me. My heart started racing. He picked up several sheets of results from Felix’s folder. ‘I’m sorry, Felix. It’s not good news.’ He took a deep breath. ‘You have acute myeloid leukaemia.’

  No beating about the bush. Straight and to the point. He was that kind of person. Although the words themselves didn’t mean much to me, I knew it was disastrous news.

  I’d always maintained that in these situations I wanted to know the truth. The entire truth. But now I wished I’d had more time to prepare. Prepare? I’d known for months that Felix’s health was deteriorating. Felix must have known. But we went on with the pretence that his health would improve. For a long time I’d assumed the blame, convinced myself that it was my meningitis, the slow recovery, then the breast cancer and his continuing worry about my health that had reduced him to this state. I fooled myself that when I was well again, Felix would also improve. But in my heart I knew this was wishful thinking. After all, my illness couldn’t explain the cough. Now it was out. There was a long, long silence. I didn’t dare look at Felix.

  ‘What would you suggest?’ he finally asked. ‘With a younger person, I’d probably suggest a bone marrow transplant, but…in your case, unfortunately, there is really nothing.’

  The silences grew longer. ‘How long do you think I have?’

  ‘Probably about six months.’

  I remember going out into the waiting room where Julie and Anne were waiting. I didn’t go up to Felix to hug him. I didn’t want to cry. I was numb. Felix’s face looked more lined and furrowed than ever. His shoulders were slumped. When our eyes met, he tilted his head and gave me a sad, gentle smile and took my hand.

  From there we all went out for dinner. That evening has remained a blank for me. I couldn’t speak. I knew that this time Felix wouldn’t take me aside and say, ‘We’ll work through this, honey, we always do. You and me, we always do.’

  The following day, Felix phoned the haematologist who had supervised his chemotherapy before we had left for the Mediterranean, when he had had his first recurrence. After he’d spoken to him, he came into the kitchen and said, ‘Warwick said he had a patient with acute myeloid leukaemia a couple of years ago who hung on for eighteen months and even went on an overseas trip!’

  ‘Puss, we’ll make it to Sicily yet. We’ve booked to go in March, that’s only five months away.’

  ‘You never know. You never know,’ Felix said.

  From then on, however, it was a downhill spiral.

  In the early period, after that terrible prognosis, Felix had the occasional day without a temperature and felt better, but on most days I noted in the diary:

  F. v.v.v. tired, coughing +++, has been put on more antibiotics.

  In our 55 years together, there had never been a time when we couldn’t talk. We had spent an inordinate amount of time talking. But now, I found it hard to communicate with Felix. He was s
ilent. He had turned inward, cut himself off. I didn’t know how to handle it. Some days I couldn’t stop crying.

  One night, when we were in bed holding hands, I said, ‘Puss, we always assumed we’d go together. Either drown together or crash together. Now I want to go with you, but you must help me.’

  He took a long, long time to answer. ‘The kids would be upset…’ Then, after a long pause, added, ‘…and anyway, you must write the book we were going to write.’

  Was this his way of forcing me to go on, blackmailing me with the book? Or did it really matter to him? Perhaps a little of both? I thought about it for several days, then I promised I’d do it.

  One morning when Julie was at our place, Felix mentioned that he’d love to see Broken Bay again. ‘Let’s have lunch at Akuna Bay restaurant. Get a table near the water.’ He wanted to see the place, smell the gums and hear the birds one last time. And Akuna Bay was the closest we could get by road to our favourite Smith’s Creek.

  We parked the car in the parking lot across the road from the restaurant. With Julie holding his arm on one side and me on the other, we started to walk towards the restaurant, but in the middle of the road Felix collapsed. Cars coming from both directions pulled up. Two people helped us lift and guide him back to the car. Silent and shattered, we drove straight home.

  The following day, we accepted David and Anne’s suggestion, and moved to their place, near the sea in Austinmer, south of Sydney. There, overlooking the beach and Norfolk pines on one side, and the escarpment on the other, the scent of gums, olives, lemons, orange trees and herbs permeated the garden. Native bushes attracted flocks of sulphur-crested cockatoos, rosellas and lorikeets.

  Felix sat silently for hours on the verandah, breathing the perfumed air, listening to the birds, the surf and the nightly chorus of cicadas. Wisteria and jasmine trailed along the verandah and birds of paradise swept down one side of the garden in a riot of colour.

  David took time off work. Anne helped to look after Felix and did all she could to make him comfortable. Julie drove down from Sydney every day. Jackie and Emma were there much of the time. My brother came from Israel for three days to say goodbye.

  One day, when they were discussing advances in surgery since he’d retired, Felix said to David that he’d love to see him repair an aortic aneurysm. This entailed inserting a tube through the groin artery and, using X-ray monitors, deploying the tube into the abdominal aorta.

  So, on the following morning, Anne and I drove Felix to the hospital where, with one nurse supporting him on each side, he sat and watched David through a glass partition while he performed this procedure. Emotion overwhelmed him and tears ran down his face. He was too weak to stay to the end.

  During his last week, Felix hallucinated much of the time, but was awake most of the afternoon of Jackie’s twentieth birthday and tried to join in the cheer he knew would be his last family birthday.

  ****

  It was a brilliant, soft day, the day Felix died. The sort of day he would have chosen to slip out to sea with all sails drawing. The sky was china blue, the ocean turquoise and smooth as velvet. On the beach, waves rolled onto the sand, frothed and slipped back out to sea. A gentle breeze ruffled the gums and silver olive trees. Butterflies fluttered from blossom to blossom. The scent of roses and jasmine drifted in through open doors and windows, and apart from an occasional bird call, one could touch the silence.

  As I bent over to kiss him goodbye I promised to write our story. Then, with his gaze focused beyond the window, towards the sky and the escarpment, he raised an arm as if responding to someone or something, and breathed his last.

  And as I gazed one last time on his still, white face, I relived the night of that terrible storm, when a shaft of moonlight pierced the enveloping blackness, shone down the hatch and glowed on Felix’s sleeping face like an eerie painting. Then once again, that strange, unearthly love for him welled inside me and I tasted salty tears.

  epilogue

  Later that morning, David and I sat alone in the herb garden. A giant bright green and red king parrot appeared on a low branch on a nearby lemon tree. He sat motionless, staring directly at us for a long time. His fixed gaze on our faces was eerie. He frightened me. Then suddenly, he spread his wings and flew straight at us. We ducked. He just missed us, veered and disappeared. David had never seen that bird before and has never seen him since.

  In the afternoon, two men in black suits came to Austinmer to take Felix back to Sydney for the funeral. They were Russian immigrants who had never driven down Bulli Pass or seen the views over the South Coast before.

  ‘Zis is paradise on earth, for why did he leave zis?’ one of them said.

  Julie asked them to follow her car, so that Felix would travel one last time along his favourite route to Sydney via Stanwell Park. At one point, Julie realised she was running out of petrol and stopped at a tiny garage. When she came out, she was taken aback by the sight of two short, black-clad, rotund men, cigarettes in hand, gazing over the panoramic view of the ocean and steep coastline.

  ‘Hey, Pop!’ she exclaimed, ‘Look at that sky, the sea, that coastline! Look, there’s a long, black limousine and two Mafiosi. Pop! You’ve made it to Sicily after all!’

  acknowledgments

  Of course I was going to write this book. I’d promised Felix that I would. But I needed the encouragement of friends and family to persuade me to try to have it published.

  Arnie Goldman was the first to convince me. He spent hours going through pages I’d written, making comments and suggestions. Ken and Elaine Moon nursed me along and kept me at it by reading each chapter as I wrote it. I’m not sure I would have finished without them. I am also indebted to Eve Heller, Betty Raghavan and Agnes Selby for their comments. My family supported me, read excerpts and made suggestions. My son David went through the manuscript several times, and checked facts. Susan Hampton did a radical first edit and cut the book to a manageable size.

  Some time later, I met Josephine Brouard, when I patted her dog Indy and told her that I suffered from dog deprivation. Apart from letting me take Indy for walks, she introduced me to Hazel Flynn, commissioning editor for Pier 9. And that was my good fortune. Hazel and my editor Sarah Baker have been extraordinarily patient and a delight to work with. I am extremely grateful to them and to the team at Pier 9.

  Unfortunately, there is no way I can thank all the people we met during our peregrinations, strangers who went out of their way to help us. My thanks to them all.

  sailing terms

  aft the back of the boat; the stern

  autohelm automatic steering

  bar a long sandy shoal or a ridge of sand; usually at the mouth of a river or at the entrance to a harbour

  boom horizontal pole attached at right angles to the lower part of a mast

  bow the front of the boat

  broad reach sailing not directly downwind, but still away from wind

  cockpit the area to the rear of a sailing boat, where helmsman and crew sit

  companionway the shaft housing the ladder that leads down to the cabin

  compass the instrument used to measure direction

  coordinates where the longitude and latitude intersect to indicate a particular spot

  crosstree one of the horizontal spreaders or pieces of timber or metal that cross the mast

  dead reckoning to calculate position by the boat’s speed and direction

  fairway the main channel used by boats in restricted water

  forward front of the boat; the bow

  GPS global positioning system; satellite radio navigation that gives one’s position

  head the toilet on a boat

  headsail(s) the sail or sails in front of the mast

  heave to turn the boat into the wind so it stops moving and doesn’t drift

  jackstay line, rigged along the boat, to which a safety harness can be clipped

  ketch a boat with two masts (the forward mast is the taller one)<
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  knot a measurement for speed: 1 knot = 1 nautical mile per hour

  leads markers used in channels and at bar entrances to indicate the navigable channel

  lee the side sheltered from the wind

  log a written record of the courses sailed and other information

  main the main sail on the mast

  mast the vertical pole on which the sails are hoisted

  mizzen the smaller mast at the back of a ketch

  nautical mile unit of measurement used for distance at sea: 1 nautical mile = 1.15 statute mile = 1852 m

  port the left side of a boat when one is facing the bow

  roadstead an anchorage some way out from the shore

  running sailing with the wind when the wind is from behind

  satnav satellite navigation, which gives one’s position

  sloop yacht with a single mast

  starboard the right side of the boat when one is facing the bow

  stays wires used to support masts

  stern the back of the boat

  washboards boards used to close the companionway

  way-points the points plotted on a chart when planning a route by sea

  windward the windward side is the side of the boat the wind hits first

  working sailing into the wind

  yaw the movement of a boat when it goes off-course