Free Somewhere Towards the End by Diana Athill

not to think about it, more of not being able to do so. Whatever happens, I will get through it somehow, so why fuss? Now that I have attempted to assess my own attitude, that seems to be it. Those last miserableweeks or months (may it not be years!) when you are unable to look after yourself are so disagreeable anyway that it hardly matters how they are spent. My oldest friend died this year, my age, daughterless like me but with enough money first for carers visiting her home, then for a nursing home reckoned to be an exceptionally good one, which given what it cost it damn well should have been. From time to time, in emergencies, she also had to spend a week or so in hospital, in wards full of other ancient people, and she didn’t seem to be any unhappier there than she was in the expensive ‘home’. The one real drawback to a ward, I felt, was that the nursing was better there so they were more likely to haul you back from the brink to suffer further misery than they were at the ‘home’. She, on the other hand, was always glad when hauled back. Perhaps when one comes to it one always is? By the time I’ve learnt whether that is true for me I shall be past handing on the news.
    That is all I have to say about the event of death and what I feel about it in advance, so now I shall move on – or perhaps ‘over’ is more exact – to the experience of living during one’s last years.

7
    W HAT HAPPENS TODAY is, of course, closely interwoven with what happened yesterday, being simply a continuation of the same process: only those old people afflicted with senile dementia move on to another plane. For the rest of us, as we have sown, so do we reap. And one of the best parts of my harvest comes from a lucky piece of sowing a long time ago.
    Soon after the event described on page 24, when I first had to accept the fact that I was on the wane sexually, Barry Reckord, my lover-turned-just-friend, decided to take a play of his, White Witch , to Jamaica. All but one of the people in the play are Jamaicans, so those parts could be cast when he got there, but the ‘witch’ herself is English, so her interpreter had to be found here and taken with him. He couldn’t afford an established actor, so it had to be someone young and inexperienced who was going to be offered the thrill of this big and juicy part, and who would probably be excited enough by it to take off happily for several months in the Caribbean on very little money.
    Almost the first he auditioned was a farmer’s daughter from Somerset, Sally Cary, who read the part well and was pretty enough for it, although to my mind her looks ought to have been a touch more extreme and eccentric. Barry liked them, however, and judged (rightly) that she would be capable of expressing the part’s character once on stage. So off they went, and the production was successful. I was not surprised when it became apparent from Barry’s letters that he and Sally had slipped into an affair.
    When they got back to England I was, however, slightly surprised to see how serious it was – certainly very far from being a passing flutter. But that was explained almost at once. Barry and I are similar in our responses to intelligence, honesty and generosity, so when it turned out that Sally was one of the nicest young women – one of the nicest people – I had ever met, I had no trouble understanding why he loved her. Certainly if I had still been in a physical relationship with him it would have pained me to see them together, but because by then I had fully acknowledged within myself that sex between us was gone for good, it didn’t worry me. It was a great piece of luck that this important shift in our relationship had happened before Sally came into our lives.
    She found herself a bedsitter not far from us, and returned to the nerve-racking routine of auditions, getting work so rarely that paying for her room was not