He was not to be so belatedly fortunate with the management that staged the ill-fated musical Barnardo, about the Victorian philanthropist who founded the homes for orphaned children. This was a huge undertaking for David, so large in fact that he required the assistance of three friends whom he promised to pay handsomely. There was an initial payment. After weeks of day-and-night activity the costumes were finished and delivered. The show opened to blisteringly bad reviews. The management was forced into receivership. The cast refused to perform one night, and money was somehow found for them. They were the only people to be paid. David was never to receive the £10,000 owing to him. Yet he honoured the agreement with his friends, though it took months of back-breaking labour to do so.
He gave up drinking coffee in the mornings and substituted gin and tonic instead. His belly grew larger and larger. He never seemed to have a hangover. We were walking along a street in Fulham one Saturday morning in 1984 when he stopped suddenly and vomited blood. We were not far from a hospital. He was attended to immediately in Accidents and Emergencies and the bleeding was brought to a stop. He was given an anaesthetic and later that day he was transferred to the Intensive Care Unit at Westminster Hospital, which was to become, in his own words, his ‘second home’. It was there that the doctor who was tending him told me, in a very loud voice that everyone in the corridor could hear, that if he didn’t stop drinking alcohol he would die. He would die, the doctor added, horribly. David was embarrassed and offended by this announcement, which caused staff and patients to stare at him, but it ensured that he would be teetotal for the rest of his life.
The nurses and doctors in the Intensive Care Unit admired him for his humour, his freedom from self-pity and his refusal to turn his face to the wall. The man who had been committing suicide by stealth for years was now possessed of a ferocious will to live. He refused to believe what those who loved him knew already – that he had left it too late. Whenever the instruments of survival were removed from his neck, his arms, his chest, he was unfailingly cheerful. I sat by his bed for an entire night and when a friend came to visit him the next morning I went out to get a cup of coffee and a croissant. I returned within the hour to find him sitting up and laughing. I gazed at him in amazement and anger. He was the most carefree Lazarus that could be imagined.
I brought the puppy home in April 1985 and for almost a year he revelled in her company. ‘How’s Circe?’ would be his first question when he saw me entering the Intensive Care Unit in the summer, autumn and winter of his unlikely annus mirabilis.
He was frequently tired, but the irrepressible animal, nipping at our ankles as if we were the sheep she had been trained to round up, amused and charmed him. He took Polaroid photographs of her – one, captured when she was very young, peeing on a broadsheet newspaper, fell out of a book just the other day, causing me to smile and weep. It is the earliest token of his affection for her.
One memory of his devotion to the intruder will suffice. It was a day in the late summer of 1985, and we were walking by the Thames in Chiswick in the company of two friends and their small sons, who were then five and three. We decided to cross Hammersmith Bridge and stroll along the towpath on the other side. We were halfway across when Circe slipped from her lead and dashed into the traffic. I froze with terror. The ever-practical David, despite his illness, leapt after her, catching her by the scruff of the neck and slapping her until she yelped. She was put back on the lead, and the collar was tightened in order to prevent another attempted escape.
‘You bloody fool,’ he yelled at me. And then he expressed thanks to the driver of the car that had come to a swift halt in front of the man and the dog.
At six o’clock on the morning of 15 March 1986, I awoke to find him dressed and packed. He’d had an attack in the night, had phoned the Intensive Care Unit and ordered a minicab, which drew up outside five minutes later.
We kissed goodbye.
‘I don’t want to come back this time.’ He spoke without emotion. His last words were: ‘Look after Circe.’
Disque Bleu
The Arab offered me a cigarette. ‘Smoke?’ he asked. I shook my head, and smiled to express my gratitude. He had a little boy with him, whose hair he ruffled. ‘Girl’ was his next word, followed a minute or so later by ‘new’, then ‘baby’. I indicated with a nod what he was attempting to tell me. He had come to register the birth of his daughter. He had already guessed that I was there to record someone’s death. My face had told him as much. He had recognized grief, and acknowledged it with a small gesture of kindness – the only one available to him in the curious circumstances.