Christine Brooke-Rose: Life, End of

But after a while, what emerges is this newly discovered notion, out of an article, about the only real problem for the disabled being Other People. Well. Sartre said it fifty years ago, but only for the dead, already in hell. Whereas today it’s generally understood, it’s a widespread platitude, that everyone is especially kind to the handicapped.

She reacts with live interest, listening suddenly to a genuine problem. She understands, agrees, generalises, theorises, sympathises, commiserates with abstractions, contributes, develops.

But it’s time to change the topic. Never remain too long on an individual notion. Or is it a fantasy?

So how was Philadelphia? Did you manage to see Jean-Yves and the typescript?

What typescript? Why Jean-Yves? I’ve never heard of this.

He has the typescript of my last critical book — last in every sense — in which you’re generously quoted. I told you about it, and thought you might like to see it before it goes to the publisher.

What! I know nothing about it. Is it the book I just received before leaving? I haven’t had time to read it. But thank you. Apart from that I haven’t heard from you for ages.

No? Don’t you remember, you rang me, transatlantically, to say you were going to Philadelphia for a term, and to give me your e-mail address? And I suggested you should contact Jean-Yves, and gave you his number, in case you were interested and had time. I also told him to expect you, and why.

Come off it honey, you’re inventing all this.

That would surprise me. You’ve never before rung me to give information of your movements in the States, we’re not on inti-interfering terms, so it was very memorable.

Holding on to the sides of the armchair for extra ground contact with the earth the planet the universe. Naturally, the person who forgets or invents must be the disabled, not the over-busy one.

She changes the subject.

I saw Brenda in London, and when I told her I was visiting you she insisted I should come to see her. And to bring you. Can you ring her?

Hesitation. A trip. An extra person. More vein-bursting effects.

But you say you just saw her in London.

Yes, but she wants to show me her house here. Come on.

O.P.s: those who impose their own agenda on the old and ill, their own interests thoughts desires convenience without so much as asking if the convenience is reciprocal.

Well, I’m a bit tired. Can’t you go alone? I know the house.

Nonsense, it’ll do you good. For heaven’s sake, I came to see you, we don’t have much time, I can’t go off visiting and leaving you here.

Astonishingly, under reflecting eyes, she herself transforms, visibly and audibly, into O.P. It’s true the hanidicap is still barely visible. Walking with a cane, however wrenching, can still be elegant. The polyneuritis is not yet theatening. It’s Vasco de Qualmer who threatens.

We’ll go together. You must guide me. Ring her.

And later: you sounded very distant. Almost rude with her.

Grappling down the steps on the pillars of fire, gripping the ramp and holding not using the cane. The cane, a third leg. But difficult on steps, so a mere nuisance, the ramp more sure. In the car the guiding takes over, but as little as possible, restricted to two gentle warnings of sharply curved stops ahead when another road is to meet this one at an acute angle from the right, to force all drivers to stop and look. She can hardly manage European gears, drives much too fast for country lanes and hugs the middle, moving to the side only at the last second before an oncoming vehicle. The rented car could land in a ditch, isolated, no cell-phones, with a foreigner and one lame passenger unable to walk for help. It looks very different from the passenger seat, she says at a murmured demur.

I’ve been a passenger now for five years, Oenone, on this same road, with friends or ambulance-car drivers, and I’ve never experienced fear. This is not said.

A familiar dangerous situation lies ahead, a sharp turn right and uphill, with a small layby to the left for taking the turn correctly, arriving on the wooded uphill right and not the uphill left to face a fast downward car. The explanation is proffered gently, amicably. She ignores it. Luckily there is no fast downward car. Ouf!

Shut up! I’m a very good driver.

The visit is just for coffee, so not too long, but their house-seeing means sitting alone, unable to climb, with a fourth lady who has to be worked on hard to create alas platitudes.

Over at last. She wants to see the tomb of a mutual poet-friend in a neighbouring village. Despite attending the funeral at a time when driving is child’s play, the exact topological memory has gone. Which means half an hour of silent but very painful limping up and down the cemetary lanes to find it. But at last it’s there, with our joint sadness at that loss, till she lays three small stones in a triangle on the mottled dark rose marble. Then back to the car, with anginal lacerations, silent again. On the way to the home village restaurant where she is doing the inviting in return for yesterday’s dinner, she twice faces another car in a narrow one-car passage, and each time edges forward dangerously for the other to back. Silence. Like the British no doubt, when top nation. In any top nation every individual however ordinary feels superior to the rest of the world. She is not of course ordinary. She is a very successful one-generation American. But it happens very quickly. And takes a century to unlearn.

Conversation somehow revives, the old and easy talk returns, about books of fiction and criticism and the people writing them. Sitting, with a glass of red wine, the most allowed, soothes away the thundering in the chest. The feet can’t feel the floor yet burn like two roaring fires as always.

Can I leave my handbag, sorry my purse, on the table, Oenone, under your watchful eye? It’s become very tiresome to carry with the cane in the other hand. And there are three steps into the loo.

But the return finds her standing with her back to the table, examining some cheap costume jewellery for sale in a display cabinet. The handbag is still on the table, full of not only money but documents, medical and identity cards the loss of which creates one long hell. But they’re inside, so nothing is said. She comes back to the table with three items.

I’d like to buy one, please advise me, which is the nicest?

A small implosion occurs, at the last.

Don’t ask me, I hate costume jewellery so wouldn’t know.

There’s no doubt about the rudeness. She says nothing, as with her Shut up un-met, buys one and we leave the restaurant to say goodbye beside the car.

Don’t worry, I’ll walk back home, it’ll do me good.

She seems to believe that.

It was very good of you to come, Oenone, thank you so much.

Lovely to see you dear, and a very good idea about renting a car, we were able to get around a bit. Take care. Get well soon.

She seems to believe that too. She certainly believes she has been very gracious to a friend become a rude and fussy person.

Then comes the fissuring climb through the village, with the constant stops to sit on steps or low walls round flower beds till the sundering anginal pains that now come at once with the slightest movement calm down and go away. The thirty-year friendship is over, for both. Oenone has become O.P.

How pseudo, deutero it all is, compared to so much worse in the world. Ah, the world. But it is the repetition, from all walks of life, that slowly destroys, turns the looking-glass into a mirror, distorting or true, both cruel.

From the bedroom window the dry-stone wall slants left, east-south-east, hogging the view, because this is an original shepherd’s house attached to two larger ones to the west, with walls dividing the gardens to afford more sun next door. The huge ground floor now divided into boiler-room, garage and guest-room, is the original sheepfold.