Life_ An Exploded Diagram - Mal Peet [113]
Ruth never quite recovered from the double blow that she’d suffered on October 28, 1962. Both Win and I had shamed her. Photographs of our different embarrassments had appeared in the Eastern Daily Press and the North Norfolk News. Smaller reports found their way onto the inside pages of the more vulgar national newspapers. Illicit sex and spectacular religious mania: not the kind of activities that would enhance your status on the Millfields estate. Especially if you were a family with a reputation for getting Above Itself. So Ruth became more and more reclusive. Conveniently — because she was looking after her mother — it became increasingly difficult for her to leave the house. Fortunately, it was still the age of the delivery van. Butchers and fishmongers and greengrocers and coal merchants and milkmen cheerfully supplied her and took the money she proffered through the half-opened back door. When such tradesmen disappeared from the streets, she came to rely on her neighbors and the telephone. She ordered clothes and shoes from the Littlewoods mail-order catalog.
She spent the last twelve years of her life alone, never venturing farther from the house than the end of the garden. The telly increasingly obsessed and satisfied her. She planned her week from the TVTimes and grew very fat on sweets and biscuits. In 1995, halfway through Countdown, her brain choked on an anagram and she fell sideways onto the sofa. Two hours later, a neighbor who’d failed to get an answer from Ruth’s phone came to the house and found her unconscious.
I flew back from New York the following day. I was sitting by her hospital bed, drawing her, when she died.
Goz surprised us all by becoming an actor. And surprised me even more by becoming a bit of a star. At Cambridge, he’d performed with the Footlights, then joined a repertory company as a do-anything dogsbody. “Assistant stage manager” is the correct term, I believe. He wrote to me now and again during my years with Julie. I may have replied once or twice; then we lost touch. Years later I went with friends to see a Royal Shakespeare Company production of Twelfth Night at the Aldwych. Goz was playing Malvolio. He’d changed his name, and it was well into the second act before I recognized his body language, saw through his beard, remembered his voice, and realized that it was him. I almost got to my feet and yelled, “Goz! What the hell are you doing up there?” He’s rather famous because in middle age he got to play, on TV, the part of a melancholic and alcoholic detective who always gets his man but never gets the girl. He has the perfect face for it, a slumped face you couldn’t lift into a smile with the help of a crane. Actually, he’s just about the happiest man I know. His show is in its sixth series, it’s an international hit, and he’s loaded. He writes and directs plays, too. Last year he was here in New York, directing and performing in an off-Broadway production of his play Brethren. We had dinner at Le Bernardin. He slupped the oysters like an expert. On my increasingly rare visits to England, I stay with him and his partner, David, at their home in Surrey.
And the Cuban Missile Crisis?
Well, it petered out. The truth is that Nikita Khrushchev was not the reckless and brutal barbarian that Kennedy had taken him for. He’d lived through the Second World War, in which more than twenty-five million Russians had died, one of them his son. He was no more eager for Armageddon than Kennedy was. It’s clear, now, that he never intended to hand control of the Soviet missiles over to that wild boy Fidel Castro. And, despite all his bluster and huffing and puffing, the fact is that as soon as Kennedy announced the sea blockade, Khrushchev gave orders that no Russian ship was to cross it. He knew the game was up. He argued, of course, that he’d won. He’d given