When the prize-winning author developed complications from coronavirus, memories of illnesses past came to haunt her new novel
O n the third day of a Covid infection, I have a very vivid dream. In it, I am being pushed in a wheelchair down a long windowless corridor. Above my head is a string of oblong fluorescent lights and, as I move through their weak circles of illumination, I’m disconcerted to find that I’m wearing a particular purple dressing gown, about which everything is familiar: the row of pearlised buttons, its fuzzy nap, each ribbed cuff. I know where I am: the basement of a hospital in which I spent a long time as a child while incapacitated by viral encephalitis. In the dream, however, I am definitely an adult, but the hated garment has somehow stretched to fit. I wake with a lurch, to find myself in my bedroom, the plumes of steam from the atomiser reminding me that I am in bed with Covid.
There are times when your body knows something before you do. When I reach for my watch, to see what time it is, I find it hard to move my arm; when I try to move aside the duvet, my fingers refuse to grip. I decide to get out of bed but when my feet hit the floor, my legs crumple beneath me, just as they did back in 1980 when, aged eight, encephalitis was eating its way through my synapses.
A&E in the throes of a pandemic is an extraordinary environment: stuffed to capacity, understaffed, overwhelmed, with desperate people sitting on floors or in doorways or lying on gurneys. Everyone is masked, watchful and tense. When an inebriated man with a clinking bag of bottles pulls down his mask to cough, several people shriek and try to move away. But there is nowhere to move to.
I am taken from the waiting room quite quickly, to a cubicle, where the weary doctor seems to suspect I’ve suffered a stroke. I shake my head. This is no stroke, I say. The way I feel is horribly familiar: the ataxic trembling, the muscular weakness, the lack of grip. It feels like the return of old symptoms, like coming face to face with a long-lost adversary. I don’t mention my dream; this doctor has a pandemic on his hands, after all, and doesn’t require ramblings about prophetic visions.
A wheelchair – naturally – is summoned to take me to a ward housing a miscellany of Covid patients. Not the ones with the expected symptoms of breathing difficulties or sky-rocketing temperatures but those with atypical reactions to the virus: there is an extremely pale woman with purple-black stains on her fingertips, and one poor soul who is writhing in agony with abdominal pain but nobody can understand the language he is speaking.
The night wears on. Nurses circle us. More patients arrive; doctors disappear and reappear. A translator is found for the writhing man and pain relief is given. My shaking intensifies and a nurse comes and watches me, thoughtfully, before going off to make a phone call. I begin to listen to an audiobook: Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway. It’s a book I’ve read many times. I attended lectures on it at university; I know passages almost by heart. Elements of it surge through my head as I lie there: the impending party, Clarissa’s loves both lost and unrealised, Septimus’s alienation, the sparrows singing in Greek, the intriguing act of removing doors from their hinges.
One detail, however, keeps catching my attention, rising up from the text to hook its claws into me. Clarissa Dalloway is described by her neighbour as having “a touch of the bird about her … vivacious, though she was over 50, and grown very white since her illness”. The illness is, of course, influenza, the most feared disease of the time, and in naming it Woolf makes her heroine a survivor of the deadliest pandemic of the 20th century.
Woolf herself suffered multiple bouts of influenza; she writes about it almost elegiacally in her essay On Being Ill. Mrs Dalloway is set in 1923, five years on from the Spanish flu pandemic that killed 50 million people – double the number of deaths in the first world war. The word has its roots in the Medieval Latin “influentia” – it was once believed the disease was the result of unfavourable astrological influence – and has been eroded by the modern world to the much less intimidating “flu” (perhaps a form of etymological wishful thinking).
Woolf’s character strives continually to make light of her indisposition, her brush with death, as she makes her way about London. Clarissa permits herself to fret about her “pea-stick figure”, admits to the “oddest sense of being herself invisible”. The kernel of truth about her health is ascribed to a feeling of “suspense … before Big Ben strikes”, and most tellingly is inserted into midsentence parentheses: “(but that might be her heart, affected, they said, by influenza)”. Mrs Dalloway, it appears, is in denial.
Despite multiple readings, I had never before noticed the mechanisms of illness and recovery at work in the novel, and I’m riveted by the coincidence of our pandemic and Woolf’s, separated by almost exactly a century. The novel keeps me company throughout the long night, and during the next day, when I am shunted from department to department. I am with Septimus and his forlorn wife as I queue for a scan; I greet the party guests alongside Clarissa as I wait for the results. When the neurologist tells me that, no, I haven’t had a stroke, that Covid appears to have reactivated the brain inflammation I experienced as a child, I think about Clarissa and her smothered anxiety about her heart, her ability to only admit to it in a throwaway aside about Big Ben. Perhaps we all develop methods to survive the knocks of significant illnesses, ways to pick ourselves up and face the next day and the next. Like a tree that grows around an iron railing, we absorb the difficult truths about our bodies and we carry on.
The neurologist says, with only slight uncertainty, that he’s sure I will recover and that rest is crucial. So I go home and quite literally crawl back into bed. Convalescence is an art I perfected at a young age. The key for me is books, books, and more books: pile them high beside your bed or on the sofa next to you; open, read, repeat. I can’t pretend to be good at the patience part of being a patient but lying still while reading comes naturally to me. After Mrs Dalloway, I conduct a search for more illness in fiction. I want books about fevers and contagions; I seek characters who, within the timeframe of their novels, pass through the fire of infection. These Covid complications, as I’m keenly aware, are keeping me from my work on a novel about Lucrezia de’ Medici. She makes a brief and silent appearance in Robert Browning’s My Last Duchess, and may or may not have been poisoned by her husband. I decide, while doing tedious physiotherapy exercises, that she too will suffer an illness, and I want to see how other writers address the topic. What does disease do to people?
I read about Anna Karenina and her malady, brought on by the weakening effects of emotional turmoil, and how she has her hair cut off. Emma Bovary undergoes a similar indisposition (which begs the question whether 19th-century novelists believed that fevers were brought on by infidelity – or perhaps just dull spouses?). In Sense and Sensibility, the passionate Marianne heads off into a rainstorm to find her beloved’s house, and is then struck down by what sounds very like influenza. Márquez was clearly intrigued by the effects of illness: in Love in the Time of Cholera, he plays on the double meanings of cholera/cólera, which encapsulate both a scientific reference to an epidemic and also rage and passion. And the inimitable José Arcadio Buendía, from One Hundred Years of Solitude, is altered from a powerful patriarch into a shrunken fool-soothsayer who must be tethered to a tree. Our Spoons Came from Woolworths, by Barbara Comyns, has as its climax an unflinching account of a destitute woman in the grip of scarlet fever trying to make her way across London while clutching her newborn daughter: not one for the faint-hearted.
I do recover, just not as quickly as I would have liked. The word I land on is “infirm”. I am infirm for several months after Covid: I can’t grip a pencil or a fork; I can’t balance; I am covered in bruises from crashing into tables and doorways; I require a stick to walk, and so my mother produces an Old Testament-prophet-style staff that belonged to a dead relative. I feel it gives my hobbling a certain gravitas. As soon as my pincer grip returns, I practise with a pencil and paper: my letters are the shaky approximations of a preschool child for a week or two, then they get smaller and smoother, and before long my slanted scrawl is back. Most important, my ability to type makes a reappearance, so I’m able to finish my novel. Lucrezia contracts a fever and with it – perhaps unsurprisingly – come bodily shakes, convulsions and a startling clarity about her position in life. Such is the way with illness.
This isn’t an account of my post-Covid struggles, largely because, compared with some people, I got off very lightly. There were moments, yes, when I felt engulfed by despair but in my heart – which, unlike Clarissa Dalloway’s, was mercifully unaffected – I knew I would get better. I had, after all, recovered from this before, hadn’t I?
Four months on, at a follow-up appointment at the hospital, the doctor runs through neurological tests and confirms that I am more or less back to where I was pre-Covid. I tell him that most of my symptoms are vanishing, except for a persistent ache in my left lung and a painfully swollen ankle. He is typing something into his computer when he says: “Covid tends to seek out and reawaken old areas of inflammation.” I tell him that, aged 12, I had pleurisy, which left me with scarring in that exact spot; I refrain from mentioning that I sprained that ankle falling off a kerb outside a nightclub in my 20s. He nods as he hits the return on his keyboard. “There you are then,” he says.
In On Being Ill, Woolf writes: “How tremendous the spiritual change that [illness] brings, how astonishing, when the lights of health go down, the undiscovered countries that are then disclosed.” The state of illness has a curiously varied momentum: it keeps us static, in a room, in a bed. It halts us in our tracks. It simultaneously pulls us back, to our younger selves and our memories of childhood sickness and disempowerment, and, perhaps most important, it propels us forward: when we are incapacitated, we long for a future without the shackles of ill health.
Perhaps as we emerge from our pandemic, we need to ensure that we take with us what we have learned, to retain the sober wisdoms of sickness. Mrs Dalloway may seek to shuck off her weakened heart, to plunge herself into parties and dresses, but she knows she cannot. Everyone she meets, as she is only too aware, considers her “changed”. And yet, she is filled with joy at the sight of flags flying above Bond Street, at “dark and prim” carnations, at “slow-swimming happy ducks”. What the novel can teach us is that it is permissible, sometimes even necessary, to place awareness of our weaknesses in protective parentheses, to nurse them in a private place, so that we may hold up our heads and walk on through life.
I make my way out of the hospital, leaning on my dead relative’s stick, rubbing the spot of my pleuritic pain, limping on my dodgy ankle. This is the spiritual change or undiscovered country of my Covid: the virus has made me at once eight, 12 and 23 years old, all at the moment I am approaching 50, which is almost Clarissa Dalloway’s age. Covid has returned me to all that I grappled with as a child with encephalitis, and the lung infection I contracted as an awkward preteen, and incongruously the blithe twentysomething who stayed out too late and pretended all those things never happened to her at all. As I make my way across the car park, all these selves seem vividly present, within me and alongside me, as if the four of us are an unfolded chain of paper-people, for ever bound together, fluttering in the stiff breeze. But then my body, of course, knew this all along.
The Marriage Portrait by Maggie O’Farrell is published by Tinder (£25) on 30 August. To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
Join Maggie O’Farrell for a Guardian Live event about The Marriage Portrait on 31 August. You can join the event at Kings Place in London or via the livestream – book here.