An Education Read online

  Another difficulty was that Vanity Fair writers were supposed to live a sort of Vanity Fair lifestyle, mixing with ‘movers and shakers’ and attending ‘important’ parties. Once I was actually flown over to New York and put up at the Royalton for three days to attend a Vanity Fair anniversary bash, which was huge fun but somewhat baffling – what was I doing there? But Graydon was/is a great believer in the values of parties and has proved his point with his annual post-Oscars celebration, which has become by far the hottest social ticket in Hollywood. Unfortunately, I was slow to recognize that a Graydon invitation counted as a three-line whip. The only time I seriously annoyed him – far more than when I screwed up a cover story, of which more later – was when I said I couldn't attend a dinner for Lord Snowdon because I was interviewing Michael Caine early the next morning and needed an early night. Most British editors would have been impressed by my dedication but not Graydon. ‘You're only interviewing him,’ he snorted, and I didn't like to say ‘But that's what you pay me for.’ In retrospect, I think I was far too priggish, but I came from the old Grub Street tradition whereby hacks were meant to be pariahs who would rather chew their own arms off than hobnob with celebs.

  But the major difficulty in working for Vanity Fair was that none of the big Hollywood names Graydon wanted me to interview would agree to see me. They had a (probably well-founded) distrust of British journalists, especially British journalists who bore the nickname Demon Barber, so I spent a lot of time twiddling my thumbs. Huge Fedex packages would arrive almost daily with ‘research material’ and books I ‘might like to think about’, but interviews came there none. To make matters worse I was not allowed to write for anyone else, so I became quite neurotic under the weight of all this leisure. Relax, enjoy, I told myself, but the more I said it, the more I fretted. I was not cut out for lotus-eating and could never reconcile myself to being paid an awful lot of money for doing nothing.

  Eventually Graydon phoned and said they'd got me an interview with the film actor Nick Nolte, and it would be the cover story and Annie Leibovitz would do the photographs. The interview was scheduled for a Friday evening, at Nolte's house in Malibu, so I flew out to Los Angeles, spent an enjoyable few days ‘preparing’ by the pool at the Peninsula, and was driven out to Nolte's house on Friday evening. The house itself was very dark, I remember, a bit sinister, but Nolte seemed friendly enough and when I left after about three hours, I thought the interview had gone pretty well. I checked the tapes – they were fine – and went to bed happily, looking forward to meeting Annie Leibovitz the next morning.

  I was woken by one of Vanity Fair's editors phoning from New York to ask ‘What happened?’ Apparently Nolte's publicist had called Graydon in the night to say the photo shoot was off, all future co-operation with Vanity Fair was off, because I'd upset Nolte so badly. What? But he was perfectly friendly when I left. I still to this day don't know what happened. I played the tape to Graydon and he didn't know either. Maybe I hadn't been as deferential as you are meant to be with a Hollywood star, but Nolte hadn't seemed upset at the time. Graydon behaved heroically, telling me I mustn't blame myself, but it must have been a blow for him, losing his cover story at the last minute, and having to tell Annie Leibovitz to turn round and go home. And it meant my career as a Hollywood interviewer was effectively over before it had begun – Nolte's publicist, Pat Kingsley, in those days controlled all the major stars and she was never going to let me loose on one of them again. Graydon nobly kept me on contract for two years but we both knew my future at Vanity Fair was zilch.

  And in truth I was quite glad to get back to being overworked and underpaid, in grubby old Grub Street, after the limousine luxury of Vanity Fair. I worked briefly for the Sunday Times, which was horrible, and then more enjoyably for the Telegraph Magazine, but didn't really settle down till I joined the Observer in 1996. When I first arrived, it was a bit chaotic because they'd changed editor about four times in as many years, and there were all these different strata of staff from different editorships, but once Roger Alton took over it was fine. He was the most inspiring and enthusiastic editor I have ever worked for – when he left, at Christmas 2007, we had a whole week of leaving parties when all the staff including me stood around in tears applauding him. Editors who can inspire such affection are rare – the ones usually cited are Kelvin MacKenzie at the Sun and Harold Evans at the Sunday Times – and I feel privileged to have worked for one. But his successor, John Mulholland, looks pretty promising too.

  Since joining the Observer, I've won two more British press awards, and was particularly pleased to get one in 2002 which meant I could say that I'd won press awards over three decades – or better still, over two millennia. I know it is appallingly naff to boast about awards but I adore them – not least because they serve to reassure my parents that I won't necessarily get the sack tomorrow. (Still waiting for that rainy day, they keep telling me I can always go back to shorthand typing.) What I love about the Observer – apart from my dear colleagues – is that it has always given me great freedom in choosing my subjects and let me run the whole gamut from, say, Kerry Katona to Gerry Adams. There is always a danger for an interviewer that you will be cast as either a lightweight or a heavyweight, but I have managed to skip fairly nimbly between the two. And that for me is the whole joy and point of interviewing – to celebrate the variety of the human race.

  Best of all, the Observer has let me develop my burgeoning interest in interviewing artists. I'd always felt that artists were terribly under-interviewed compared to, say, actors, and this was certainly true until the mid-Nineties, when the YBAs came along. But luckily I joined the Observer just when there was this eye-catching new generation of artists, led by Damien Hirst and Tracey Emin, who were more than happy to play with journalists. I love interviewing artists because I always feel I am doing something useful, which is trying to find a way of talking about art that isn't the usual impenetrable art theory bollocks but isn't Daily Mail philistinism either. It slightly reminds me of the early days of writing about sex for Penthouse – there are so many bad ways of talking about art, you feel that if you can find a good way, you are laying stepping stones across the quagmire for others to follow. Another bonus is that some of the artists I've interviewed have become good friends and enlivened my social life no end. Going to the Venice Biennale with Tracey Emin was one of the all-time fun experiences of my life, though a Suffolk weekend with Sarah Lucas was a close runner-up. I was also thrilled to be asked to be a Turner Prize juror in 2006 – it is something I like to boast about, along with my five British press awards. I am no more an art expert than I was ever a sex expert or a Victorian natural history expert, but I am more than happy to pick up any claims to expertise that come my way.

  Disaster

  So this is where I'd got to circa 2000. I was in my mid-fifties, pretty confident, pretty happy, in truth pretty smug. I loved my job, I loved my life. We had raised a family, we had bought a big house in Highgate and paid off the mortgage, the daughters were at university. My parents, long retired, were living in a beautiful village, Ebbesborne Wake, in Wiltshire where, despite Dad being blind and Mum arthritic, they seemed able to cope on their own. David's mother had died and his father had sold Little Haseley and moved into Oxford, but he too seemed able to cope. David – by now disenchanted with the Poly, which had moved to Harrow and renamed itself the University of Westminster – could afford to take early retirement and go back to painting. He rented an Acme studio in the old Pears factory in Hackney, and I waved him off after breakfast every morning and went up to my study to work. We had achieved the future we'd dreamed of all those years ago in Stockwell – David painting, me writing, free of money worries, free to run our own lives. I felt we had come through.

  The beginning of the end came in the summer of 2001 when we were staying with a friend in Gloucestershire and David woke in the night and found he couldn't pee. It was the symptom he had always dreaded, the one he had a hypochondriac's encyclopa
edic knowledge of, the first sign, he believed, of prostate cancer. I drove him to Cheltenham Hospital, David keening with pain, me mowing down foxes, rabbits, rats, stoats, as we raced over the moonlit hills to Cheltenham. In A & E, men covered in blood were shouting and fighting while a nurse asked about David's symptoms and wrote down ‘Retention.’ He was seen by an exhausted junior doctor who confirmed between yawns that yes, David had an enlarged prostate, but no, it didn't mean cancer. Many men in their fifties, she told him, suffered from an enlarged prostate – it could easily be treated with drugs. She fitted a catheter, drained his bladder, gave him some pills, and told him to consult his GP on Monday.

  The GP prescribed pills that solved the problem, so much so that David almost stopped worrying about it. The only reminder was that he had to go for a blood test every three months to check his PSA. On 16 October 2002 he went for his regular blood test at the Whittington hospital – and was called back for another test, and then another. By this stage we were expecting bad news – bad news about his prostate. But when David saw the haematologist on 25 October, he came back with news so bad we really couldn't comprehend it: they thought he had chronic leukaemia. He would have to have a bone marrow test and a spleen test to confirm it. But the doctor told David – meaning to reassure him – that he could live for another ten years.

  Ten years! David was then fifty-eight; neither of us had ever doubted that he would live into his nineties like his father. He didn't smoke, barely drank, took loads of exercise and looked absurdly young. On the rare occasions I tried to imagine my own death, David was always at the bedside, holding my hand. But now, for the first time, I had to contemplate the idea that I might outlive David, that I might one day be a widow. But still – ten years down the line. How could I imagine that? And how was I supposed to comport myself in the meantime? Was I suddenly supposed to be the doting wife, sticking to my husband's side, tending his every whim? For ten days maybe, but not for ten years. Anyway, it would drive him mad, never mind me.

  I said tentatively, and hoping for the answer no, ‘Perhaps I should give up work and we could travel to India, Australia, all those places you've never been?’ He laughed and said, ‘I never want to go abroad again. I hate abroad.’ This was as much of a shock as the ten years. He always loved abroad, I thought – all our married life I'd felt guilty that my work often took me abroad and his never did. And every year I would book us a foreign holiday – resenting it – because I thought it was unfair that I had all those stamps in my passport and he didn't. ‘Since when did you hate abroad?’ ‘Oh, years now,’ he said casually. I felt as outraged as if he'd told me he'd been having an affair for years now. But perhaps this is what goes wrong with long marriages – you state your opinions, your likes and dislikes, at the beginning and then forget to mention when they change.

  ‘But you go abroad,’ he said. ‘I won't stop you.’

  ‘But I never want to go abroad!’

  ‘Yes, you do, you like it.’

  ‘No I don't, I hate it.’

  ‘But you're always going.’

  ‘But I always hate it.’

  Thus my very first attempt to play the self-sacrificing wife resulted in a blazing row within minutes and I thought, ‘Well sod that, I won't try again.’ Which was fine, because at least now we could carry on as normal but with the advantage of knowing something we'd inexplicably missed knowing for years – that neither of us ever wanted to go abroad. He said we'd go to Cornwall in the spring as we always did, and then make the usual rounds of friends in Norfolk, Yorkshire, Scotland, the Peak District, but for our main holiday, instead of going abroad, we'd take a big house in the Lake District and have friends to stay.

  So I spent hours on the internet ostensibly looking for holiday houses in the Lake District, while actually reading all the dozens of leukaemia websites. Very few of them said anything about life expectancy – but the ones that did suggested five years rather than ten. I felt grateful yet again that David had never mastered the internet. Rosie meanwhile was printing out some of the more anodyne leukaemia websites – I noticed that she was careful to leave out all the bad bits.

  David's next appointment was with a top haematologist and, armed with knowledge from the internet, I told him to find out whether he had hairy-cell leukaemia or the other sort. He came back saying he didn't have leukaemia at all – he had something called myelofibrosis which was a disease of the bone marrow. ‘Oh, that's good news,’ I said – surely it was better to have something you'd never heard of than something that was known to kill people? Yes, he agreed, it was good news – so we rang all our friends and said, ‘Good news! It's not leukaemia after all.’

  Or rather, I rang all our friends. David, from the beginning, thought it was wrong of me to tell people about his illness. He would have kept it a secret from everyone, even our daughters, if he could. This had been a bone of contention throughout our marriage – his habit of secrecy, mine of disclosure. He couldn't see why I needed to confide in friends; I couldn't see why he needed to keep secrets. He thought I was a blabbermouth; I thought he was paranoid. I told him I liked talking to friends, and there wasn't much point in talking to them if I wasn't going to tell them things. I often noticed when I interviewed people that they would say, ‘Well, everyone has skeletons in their closets’, but actually I could never think of a single toe-bone of a skeleton in mine, not because I'd led a virtuous life, but because I'd never kept anything secret for more than ten minutes. I think keeping secrets is a strain, almost a sickness. It queers your relationships, means you must always live in fear of being ‘exposed’. And whereas generally I thought David's habit of secrecy was a man thing, and my habit of blabbing was a woman thing – not that he was wrong and I was right, but just an innate difference of temperament – I felt absolutely sure over his illness that it was right to tell our friends, and that it was unthinkable not to, and therefore I went ahead and told everyone before he had a chance to stop me. Everyone, that is, except his family – I accepted that it was up to him, not me, to tell his brothers and father at a time of his choosing

  What made this period all so strange was that David was told he had a mortal disease while he had no obvious symptoms at all – he looked perfectly fit until the day he went into hospital. The only concrete symptom the doctor could point to was that he had an enlarged spleen, and David agreed, when the doctor showed him where his spleen was, that yes, there was a sort of lump there and sometimes he'd noticed his waistband getting tighter. As the months went on, the lump got larger and I could sometimes see it bulging through his shirt. The only other slight sign was an occasional red rash on his cheeks which the doctor said was ‘insignificant’. It was very significant to David – he hated anything that impaired his looks.

  But yet, in a way, there had been symptoms – I had noticed for the past two or three years that David was finally ageing. Not ageing dramatically, not looking like a man in his late fifties, but he had aged from looking about thirty throughout his forties, to suddenly looking maybe forty-five. There were a few lines on his cheeks, some new hollows and stringy bits in his neck, the odd liver spot on his hands, and the faintest beginnings of a tonsure hole in his thick dark hair. I used to point these out with some glee – I longed for him to age a bit – I told him that I didn't mind people mistaking him for my toy boy but I resented it when they mistook him for my son. I was only ten days older than David, but at some point soon after forty I turned middle-aged whereas he never did. But for the last two or three years, I realised, he'd been catching up – and catching up fast. It wasn't just the bald spot, the mottled hands, but more a tiredness – the creaky way he heaved himself up from the sofa, the way sometimes he put his elbows on the table and sunk his head in his hands as if the weight of carrying it was too much. And I noticed he was ageing in other ways – he hated pop music, he grumbled about people using mobile phones on the train. I used to think sometimes, ‘You look so young still, but mentally you are older than me.’
/>   Of course I read up myelofibrosis on the internet and learned it was a progressive furring-up of the bone marrow, but again, as with leukaemia, there was little detail about life expectancy – though one site mentioned four years. That was the worst – other sites tended to say five to ten years if they said anything at all. But still, while our friends were still congratulating him on not having leukaemia, it occurred to me that maybe, just maybe, myelofibrosis was worse.

  He went to see the head haematologist at the Whittington who told him that the only cure for myelofibrosis was a bone-marrow transplant – but that the top age for bone-marrow transplants was fifty-five. However, he said, he would refer him to Dr MacKinnon, the head of bone-marrow transplants at UCH. From then on Dr MacKinnon became our god – on his say-so David's life depended. David came back from seeing him with good news, and bad. The good news was that he agreed David could have a transplant, despite being over-age, provided they could find a suitable donor. But the risks of fatality were quite high – 10 per cent if the donor was a sibling, 30 per cent if a stranger. The bad news was that, without it, David had only ‘two good years’ to live. Moreover, he should have the transplant as soon as possible because otherwise the fibrosis would be too advanced for it to work. Since then, I've wondered a lot about those two good years. I wish I'd asked: would there have been two good years, and then say two goodish, and two or three not so good – I mean how long, actually, would he have lived? But David didn't even ask those questions – he had total trust in Dr MacKinnon. He would have the transplant; he would be cured; hooray!

  Dr MacKinnon's decision was influenced by the fact that David had two brothers, either of whom could be donors. He said that obviously they would need to come to UCH for extensive testing beforehand, but that the actual bone-marrow donation process was no big deal. I had imagined it entailed carving a sort of osso buco lump out of a limb and somehow grafting it onto David's bone but, on the contrary, it was just a needle in the arm, hardly more than donating blood. Charles, David's elder brother, was inconveniently in Papua New Guinea visiting his son who was doing VSO there, but Luke, his younger brother, lived just down the road. If it had been me, I'd have run to Luke's house the minute I got back from the hospital, but David waited several days before going to see him. I wondered why he was so reluctant to go; David told me not to nag.