Page 13 of The Love of My Life
I saw some of the resulting proposals, which described my wife as a SPARKLING NEW TALENT. She found it embarrassing; I found it very funny.
A year later she co-presented a three-part series with an established BBC naturalist and – in my very subjective opinion – radically outshone him. Before the final episode had aired, she was recommissioned for a second series. Viewers loved that she was funny even when barnacled to a cliff, waves smashing below.
Emma is not a celebrity, of course, and to this day I don’t see her as famous: she’s a self-confessed nerd, an academic. Her only motivation in taking the presenting job was to share her love of that magical place where the terrestrial world peters off into the unknowns of the ocean. She hated the attention and did the bare minimum of publicity interviews whenThis Landwas in its prime. Even now she won’t come to newspaper parties. She says we’re all vultures.
But the fact remains that, long after she disappeared from TV screens, we’re still stopped in the street so that she can sign autographs, or discuss cliff zonation with socially awkward men. She was even asked to doStrictly. (She said no.)
I imagine most papers would run an obit if she died.
‘Now that everything’s looking – well, good,’ Kelvin says, ‘I wonder if you’d be happy to take a look at what we’ve written?’
‘As it happens, I’ve already made a start.’
Kelvin looks uncertain. ‘You have?’
‘Yes. It was a sort of personal project, really, but I’m sure one of you could knock it into shape.’
A pause. Then Kelvin says, ‘It can’t have been an easy task, with cancer treatment rumbling on in the background.’ His face greys with effort: this is way too touchy-feely for him. ‘But I’m sure any obit you’ve written for Emma will be significantly more personal and honest.’
I almost laugh at the irony of his trust in me. The fact of the matter is, my obituary for Emma is full of holes. It’s not honest at all.
Emma had an agent, back when she was presenting; a zealous and fiery woman called Mags Tenterden whom Emma worshipped. Mags was in negotiations with the BBC over the third series when Emma was, very suddenly, dropped from the programme, an old-timer booked in her place. There was an apocryphal story about changes in the commissioning team, but no reasonable explanation for Emma having taken the fall.
I was with her when she got the phone call. I don’t think I’ll ever forget her face.
I wondered, at first, if they just didn’t want the uncertainty of a presenter with low-grade cancer and a child on the way, but it turned out Emma hadn’t told them about either.
In an act of baffling cruelty, Mags Tenterden dropped Emma from her client list the following week. I think this unspeakable abandonment was the final straw, because, in the months that followed, Emma had one of her longest ever depressive episodes. She went off to spend three whole weeks on the lonely coast of Northumberland, isolated except for my weekend visits. Occasional emails would arrive, strange passages of abstracted prose about the secrets of the ocean, but mostly she was completely closed down, even when I visited. ‘I’m just looking for crabs,’ she’d said, one evening, in her B&B. ‘That’s all I can cope with right now. Just looking for crabs.’
Her normal route out of what I’ve always called her Times involves what she describes as a ‘kickstarter’ stint on medication, but she was too afraid to take antidepressants with a baby on board. On her return to London she told me she was ‘just going to have to tough this one out’.
She had begun to recover by the time Ruby was born, but was then razed by severe postnatal depression. I don’t think she fully came back until Ruby started sleeping through at thirteen months, and the low mood still comes and goes to this day. Her hoarding is certainly getting worse.
None of this appears in the piece I’ve written.
‘I’m sure she’d be flattered,’ I tell Kelvin. ‘But she did explicitly ban me from writing a stock. She doesn’t know I’ve been writing one.’
‘Ah. Well, I’d be happy for you to send some notes to Jonty or Sheila ...’
‘I’ll send it over to Sheila. Or maybe Jonty,’ I add, remembering Sheila’s unaccountable interest in my wife the other day.
‘Excellent!’ Kelvin looks over his shoulder. The man’s longing for the lesser demands of a quiet computer screen, so I thank him for bringing the matter up discreetly, and let him go.
Emma miscarried twice while we were trying to conceive. When we returned from the hospital the second time I put her to bed and went down to make tea. On my return I found her with tears peeling soundlessly down her cheeks, and John Keats with his kind, canine nose on her old appendix scar.
‘I’m fine,’ she was telling him. ‘Absolutely fine, John, don’t you worry about me.’
Not even the dog is privy to her inner landscape. I’m allowed in, her friend Jill’s allowed in, and that’s it.
For this reason I find myself hesitating before typing up my stock notes to send to Jonty. Even though it goes against everything I know as an obituary writer, I feel a duty to keep my real wife to myself. Why not just give the world the version of Emma they already love? The laughing TV presenter with her windmill gesticulations, the adopter of rescue dogs with names like Frogman and Jesus; the granddaughter of foul-mouthed, chain-smoking Gloria Bigelow, one of the earliest female MPs?
There is more than enough of that Emma to share with the world.
I send Kelvin an email and tell him I’ve decided I’ll write Emma’s stock after all.
*
In the weeks to come I will think back to this afternoon, these last few moments before the world starts to spin at a different angle, and I’ll envy myself this fantasy – this belief that I am one of only two people who knows about Emma’s inner world.
