A Small Dog Saved My Life. Bel Mooney

unfinished novel like this:

      She gave her husband away.

      It wasn’t that she didn’t want him any more. Oh no, at that point she wanted him maybe more than she’d ever done before. But perhaps that was contrary of her – acting the child who clutches at an old toy because a friend suddenly wants to play with it, but gives it up all the same, in the end. Maybe if she’d clutched a little more fiercely it wouldn’t have turned out as it did.

      But I watched as blank passivity slid over her, and the woman who had been so deliciously bad in her past embraced a perverse form of sainthood. She became the kind of person friends described as ‘so good’, with that slight shake of the head which indicates disquiet, calling into question their own selfishness, but also her common humanity. Good behaviour can sometimes seem intolerable, since we wish others to rage against the dying of the light, as we would ourselves.

      I shook my head as she – so generously, so calmly – gave her husband away, and then turned to me as if to ask ‘Why did this happen?’, those great eyes filling, that generous mouth folded into a moue of sadness. You could strike a woman like that. You could shake her until the teeth rattled, and all her features fell apart, that beauty destroyed forever, with all the rest. But I was her friend and that defined my role – to witness all, to allow all, until the moment they both fell into the pit, at which point I would stretch out my hand to help.

      Sometimes it is easier to tell a story in the third person. Yet I find these days I no longer want to make up characters (except for children) when each day, through my work as an advice columnist, I deal with reality and have to try to tell it as it is. When we were both young journalists J used to ask me if I ever thought of writing a novel. He thought it the way I should go. Excited as I was then by filing reports from every corner of Britain for magazines and newspapers, I said I had no wish to. Why would you want to make it up? I asked him. But he was to encourage me, patiently over the years, to write fiction. Without him, I doubt I would ever have done so. Without him, I doubt I will again.

      On 20 June my parents came to lunch to celebrate my mother’s birthday and the ‘official birthday’ of Bonnie, who had come to live with us on that day a year earlier. Lunch was outside in the courtyard, under the cream umbrella. I tied ribbons on Mum’s chair, on Bonnie’s basket, round her neck. J’s absence was unremarked because it was unremarkable. He was a busy man. The dog’s presence made it all much easier. By focusing on her and the meal I could deflect any anxiety my perceptive mother must have felt, looking at my face.

      Here I reach the limit of what I can write about that summer. So much must remain unrecorded, although I will never forget. Too painful to recall the hope we shared that after it was over (it was not possible to utter the brutal words ‘After she is dead’) we could put it all back together. J and I had been through much in our long marriage but we recognized that this earthquake was truly terrifying, like nothing before. I wondered if, afterwards, we would find we had moved on a ratchet, making it impossible to go back. Can you go back? I asked myself if I would be able to live with a perfect ghost – my husband forever haunted by that amazing voice, like a mariner tied to a mast still hearing the fatal sirens’ song. I wondered – when I finally told our children and the three of us talked obsessively about the subject, raging over bottles of white wine late into the night as moths slammed at the kitchen window – if I could recover the man I had known.

      Susan Chilcott died in J’s arms on 4 September. The obituaries were unanimous. The Independent noted: ‘Her death came three months after she made her operatic debut at the Royal Opera House, in which her “radiant” and “glorious” performance outshone even that of her co-star, Placido Domingo.’ The Guardian said:

      Susan Chilcott, who has died of cancer aged 40, was one of the most compelling and intense English operatic stars to emerge in the last decade, with a wonderfully fresh, attractive and open personality and a rare commitment to her work. Her career was so distressingly short that too little of her best work has been captured on DVD or CD. But her singing had a purity and a forceful dramatic impact that made her a formidable operatic actor. Her last role on stage was Jenufa, which she sang in English for Welsh National Opera last March, with Sir Charles Mackerras conducting … Sadly, when the run ended, Chilcott was too ill to record the work with Mackerras, as he had wanted. Her last performance, in Brussels in June, was … with the pianist Iain Burnside and actor Fiona Shaw – and she was singing better than ever. Chilcott made an indelible impression on those who saw and heard her, or worked with her.

      On the day of her funeral at Wells Cathedral hundreds of people gathered to pay their respects. By this stage I had begun to feel enraged that – in the eyes of all those people – J was ‘allowed’ the role of widower. In fact Susan was married to her manager, although they were not living as man and wife and he was not the father of her son. But what do such details matter? I had packed my own bag, said goodbye to the dogs and cats, felt the (increasing) pang at leaving Bonnie – and was off to Heathrow. At the very hour of her funeral I was high above the Atlantic, en route for my beloved United States. I had work to do, but also needed to escape.

      Snapshots in a family photograph album can come unstuck in time – adrift from captions which identify person, time and place. Will future generations know who they were, those faces caught faking smiles? Will any of it survive? Knowing all, remembering all, I can still only bear to offer small fragments of what Philip Larkin calls ‘a past that now no one can share’.

      In Point Reyes, Marin County, somebody has altered a sign on a wall from ‘No Parking’ to ‘No Barking’ and my laughter is over the top, hysterical. But when, not long afterwards, I see scrawled on a post overlooking San Francisco, ‘I almost died here – but no such luck,’ I become ridiculously upset. The view from the Marin Headlands – the Golden Gate Bridge, dwarfed sailboats, white caps on sparkling water – is perfect, and yet I feel my head is crumbling.

      I talk obsessively about Bonnie to anyone who will listen (mercifully, Americans like dogs), miss her dreadfully and note, ‘Who would have thought I would be so dependent on her?’ Pulling out her photograph to show to our lovely, kind niece, who shares a house with friends in Oakland, I think of Amy Tan and my last visit, when none of this misery could have been dreamt of. The point is, in talking about my love for my dog I’m really talking about my love of home, of J – just as Elizabeth Barrett Browning used Flush as displacement.