John Suchet - My Bonnie - How dementia stole the love of my life

I can’t remember much more of what she said. I just wanted her to go on speaking and never stop.

In December 2008 there was a family wedding in Haddonfield, New Jersey. Bonnie’s nephew—son of her youngest brother—was getting married. I was worried about making the journey because of Bon’s health. Also it would mean staying in a hotel, with all the confusion that would bring. But it was vitally important we attend. Bon’s eldest brother Bob was terminally ill with oesophageal cancer. He had undergone several bouts of chemotherapy, but his lungs were filling up, requiring regular draining. The doctors had sent him home and warned the family he didn’t have long to live.

We went, and Bonnie coped better than I expected. There were a couple of middle-of-the-night excursions into the hotel corridor, but nothing I couldn’t handle. What really surprised me, though, was how Bon reacted to Bob’s illness. He was, frankly, in an appalling state. Skin and bone, protruding spine, sunken face, staringly bright eyes. I hugged him, and he let out a shout—I had pushed the permanently inserted catheter against his ribs. But Bon didn’t seem overly distressed. In one extraordinarily poignant moment, I saw her holding his hand and heard her telling him he must get better.

Thank goodness we made the journey. Bob died two months later. I haven’t told Bon. Why make her sad? She doesn’t need to know.

Things definitely changed some time around 1978. There was a big dinner party, about a dozen of us, all local couples, and we held it in a fancy restaurant, the French Horn in Sonning. I found myself sitting next to Bonnie, with both our spouses a fair distance away on the other side of the table. She had swept her blonde hair back from her face and held it in place with two cream combs. I don’t think I had ever seen anything more lovely. It set off her face in all its beauty, her peach skin and sparkling eyes vibrant and alive. I was in heaven. We chatted together right through the meal. God knows who was on my left or her right, but they might as well not have existed. It was the longest I had ever spoken to her for, and I wasn’t going to waste a second of it.

I could say my wit was at its sparkling best, and you would groan and roll your eyes, but really it was. Late on in the meal, she was asking me about my job. I told her I was an ITN reporter and mentioned one or two stories I had covered, and she said she had seen me on News at Ten. I was flattered. I wanted to ask her what she thought, but decided not to put her on the spot.

Then she said, and I remember it perfectly more than 30 years later, ‘Aren’t journalists supposed to be rottweilers?’ I laughed and replied, ‘Well, not me, I’m just a poodle.’ She burst into uncontrollable laughter. She threw her head back, her hair cascaded round her face, dancing below the combs. Then her head came forward, shimmering tears of laughter in her eyes. She put her hand on my arm to steady herself, but still her laughter shook her body, a sound more beautiful and joyous than any I had heard. I glanced quickly around the table—all heads had turned. Still she laughed, looking me in the eye now. Very slowly her laughter began to subside, but her cheeks were flushed, her eyes still fiery bright. She took a swallow of water. ‘You are funny,’ she said, and looked at me in a way I cannot describe. There was something new about it, something intimate.

I will wind the clock forward 10 or 12 years. We were by now married, and having dinner with a business colleague of Bonnie’s and his wife. Bonnie looked stunning in a dark skirt and colourful shaped blouse that showed her off to perfection. Her lovely hair was again pulled back and held in place by those two cream combs. ‘How did you two meet?’ the man’s wife asked. Bon shot me a look. She always felt slightly uncomfortable if I said we had been neighbours, and had asked me in the past to say something to the effect that we were introduced by friends, something neutral which should not lead to more questioning.

I said, ‘We were in a crowded room, our eyes met, I said Ugh, she said Ugh, and that was that—we are not very good with words.’ Bon did that laugh again. It was an exact repeat of the French Horn. She threw her head back and laughed until her ribs hurt. I laughed with her. The man and his wife looked at each other and joined in the laughter, but not very fully. I caught a look she gave him, which sort of said, ‘Why can’t you make me laugh like that?’

On the way home, Bon said she loved what I had said, she would never forget that it all began when we said Ugh to each other, and we laughed together all over again. Those combs are in a drawer of her dressing-table in our flat to this day. Just a few months ago, I saw her walking around the flat with them in her hand. She didn’t put them in her hair, just carried them around, occasionally putting them in her cardigan pocket, then taking them out again. I didn’t say anything. If I had said, Do you remember how I used to love you wearing those, she would just have said yes. But she wouldn’t remember really, and it might cause her a little pain deep down because she would know she doesn’t really remember. Later she put them back in the drawer and hasn’t taken them out since.

‘I am writing about you, my Bonnie.’

‘Oh are you? That’s nice,’ and she walks away.

There was a subtle change one summer’s evening in, I think, 1979. Bonnie and her husband invited my wife and me up to their house for dinner. Don’t think me vain, but I can remember exactly what I was wearing that night, and for good reason. I had on a dark blue blazer, open neck blue shirt and new pale blue slacks. We arrived a little early (probably my fault), the back door was open, and Bonnie called down to us to make ourselves at home in the sitting room, that she and her husband would be down in a minute.

There was a news journal on the coffee table. I picked it up and flicked through it. Aware that she would walk through the door at any moment, I affected insouciance, standing in relaxed manner, weight on one leg, the other informally outstretched, not taking in a single word on the printed page in front of me, hoping I was striking an irresistibly alluring image. The minutes passed. Finally I heard the light footsteps approaching, I adjusted my pose slightly—back that little bit straighter, biceps slightly flexed, one eyebrow subtly raised, nostrils marginally flared, a look of utterly false concentration on my face as I affected to be studying a learned article about something happening somewhere in the world. She walked in. I raised my head slowly and at an angle, a Cary Grant smile playing on one corner of my mouth, hoping it would strike the perfect combination of intelligence and pleasurably interrupted concentration.

‘Ooh look,’ she cooed, ‘John all dishy in blue.’

I chuckled in a manly way and flicked my head so a lock of hair fell springily onto my forehead. Rather that’s what I wished I had done. In fact I half-dropped the journal, slightly lost my balance on the supporting leg, caught my breath so I nearly choked, and all round made a pretty damn fool of myself.

But she said it, she really did say it. I remember the words exactly, and can even hear her tone of voice—mild, pleasurable and seductive—30 years on. After that, I spent the evening in a sort of daze. I can’t remember anything of how the dinner went, what we talked about, except that I recall running those few words through my head again and again and again. Why did she say it? What did it mean? Was she trying to say something more? Was it, in fact, a subtle way of saying something else?

I knew I was fooling myself. The answers to all these stupid questions were pretty obvious. She said it on the spur of the moment, without pausing for thought. But that in itself was amazing enough: it meant she really thought it. If she hadn’t thought it, she wouldn’t have said it. I reasoned that much, so I probably spent the rest of the evening with a foolish and rather smug grin on my face.