My Bonnie: How dementia stole the love of my life

In December 2008 there was a family wedding in Haddonfield, New Jersey. Bonnie’s nephew—son of her youngest brother—was getting married. I was worried about making the journey because of Bon’s health. Also it would mean staying in a hotel, with all the confusion that would bring. But it was vitally important we attend. Bon’s eldest brother Bob was terminally ill with oesophageal cancer. He had undergone several bouts of chemotherapy, but his lungs were filling up, requiring regular draining. The doctors had sent him home and warned the family he didn’t have long to live.

We went, and Bonnie coped better than I expected. There were a couple of middle-of-the-night excursions into the hotel corridor, but nothing I couldn’t handle. What really surprised me, though, was how Bon reacted to Bob’s illness. He was, frankly, in an appalling state. Skin and bone, protruding spine, sunken face, staringly bright eyes. I hugged him, and he let out a shout—I had pushed the permanently inserted catheter against his ribs. But Bon didn’t seem overly distressed. In one extraordinarily poignant moment, I saw her holding his hand and heard her telling him he must get better.

Thank goodness we made the journey. Bob died two months later. I haven’t told Bon. Why make her sad? She doesn’t need to know.

Things definitely changed some time around 1978. There was a big dinner party, about a dozen of us, all local couples, and we held it in a fancy restaurant, the French Horn in Sonning. I found myself sitting next to Bonnie, with both our spouses a fair distance away on the other side of the table. She had swept her blonde hair back from her face and held it in place with two cream combs. I don’t think I had ever seen anything more lovely. It set off her face in all its beauty, her peach skin and sparkling eyes vibrant and alive. I was in heaven. We chatted together right through the meal. God knows who was on my left or her right, but they might as well not have existed. It was the longest I had ever spoken to her for, and I wasn’t going to waste a second of it.

I could say my wit was at its sparkling best, and you would groan and roll your eyes, but really it was. Late on in the meal, she was asking me about my job. I told her I was an ITN reporter and mentioned one or two stories I had covered, and she said she had seen me on News at Ten. I was flattered. I wanted to ask her what she thought, but decided not to put her on the spot.

Then she said, and I remember it perfectly more than 30 years later, ‘Aren’t journalists supposed to be rottweilers?’ I laughed and replied, ‘Well, not me, I’m just a poodle.’ She burst into uncontrollable laughter. She threw her head back, her hair cascaded round her face, dancing below the combs. Then her head came forward, shimmering tears of laughter in her eyes. She put her hand on my arm to steady herself, but still her laughter shook her body, a sound more beautiful and joyous than any I had heard. I glanced quickly around the table—all heads had turned. Still she laughed, looking me in the eye now. Very slowly her laughter began to subside, but her cheeks were flushed, her eyes still fiery bright. She took a swallow of water. ‘You are funny,’ she said, and looked at me in a way I cannot describe. There was something new about it, something intimate.

I will wind the clock forward 10 or 12 years. We were by now married, and having dinner with a business colleague of Bonnie’s and his wife. Bonnie looked stunning in a dark skirt and colourful shaped blouse that showed her off to perfection. Her lovely hair was again pulled back and held in place by those two cream combs. ‘How did you two meet?’ the man’s wife asked. Bon shot me a look. She always felt slightly uncomfortable if I said we had been neighbours, and had asked me in the past to say something to the effect that we were introduced by friends, something neutral which should not lead to more questioning.

I said, ‘We were in a crowded room, our eyes met, I said Ugh, she said Ugh, and that was that—we are not very good with words.’ Bon did that laugh again. It was an exact repeat of the French Horn. She threw her head back and laughed until her ribs hurt. I laughed with her. The man and his wife looked at each other and joined in the laughter, but not very fully. I caught a look she gave him, which sort of said, ‘Why can’t you make me laugh like that?’

On the way home, Bon said she loved what I had said, she would never forget that it all began when we said Ugh to each other, and we laughed together all over again. Those combs are in a drawer of her dressing-table in our flat to this day. Just a few months ago, I saw her walking around the flat with them in her hand. She didn’t put them in her hair, just carried them around, occasionally putting them in her cardigan pocket, then taking them out again. I didn’t say anything. If I had said, Do you remember how I used to love you wearing those, she would just have said yes. But she wouldn’t remember really, and it might cause her a little pain deep down because she would know she doesn’t really remember. Later she put them back in the drawer and hasn’t taken them out since.

‘I am writing about you, my Bonnie.’

‘Oh are you? That’s nice,’ and she walks away.

There was a subtle change one summer’s evening in, I think, 1979. Bonnie and her husband invited my wife and me up to their house for dinner. Don’t think me vain, but I can remember exactly what I was wearing that night, and for good reason. I had on a dark blue blazer, open neck blue shirt and new pale blue slacks. We arrived a little early (probably my fault), the back door was open, and Bonnie called down to us to make ourselves at home in the sitting room, that she and her husband would be down in a minute.

There was a news journal on the coffee table. I picked it up and flicked through it. Aware that she would walk through the door at any moment, I affected insouciance, standing in relaxed manner, weight on one leg, the other informally outstretched, not taking in a single word on the printed page in front of me, hoping I was striking an irresistibly alluring image. The minutes passed. Finally I heard the light footsteps approaching, I adjusted my pose slightly—back that little bit straighter, biceps slightly flexed, one eyebrow subtly raised, nostrils marginally flared, a look of utterly false concentration on my face as I affected to be studying a learned article about something happening somewhere in the world. She walked in. I raised my head slowly and at an angle, a Cary Grant smile playing on one corner of my mouth, hoping it would strike the perfect combination of intelligence and pleasurably interrupted concentration.

‘Ooh look,’ she cooed, ‘John all dishy in blue.’

I chuckled in a manly way and flicked my head so a lock of hair fell springily onto my forehead. Rather that’s what I wished I had done. In fact I half-dropped the journal, slightly lost my balance on the supporting leg, caught my breath so I nearly choked, and all round made a pretty damn fool of myself.

But she said it, she really did say it. I remember the words exactly, and can even hear her tone of voice—mild, pleasurable and seductive—30 years on. After that, I spent the evening in a sort of daze. I can’t remember anything of how the dinner went, what we talked about, except that I recall running those few words through my head again and again and again. Why did she say it? What did it mean? Was she trying to say something more? Was it, in fact, a subtle way of saying something else?

I knew I was fooling myself. The answers to all these stupid questions were pretty obvious. She said it on the spur of the moment, without pausing for thought. But that in itself was amazing enough: it meant she really thought it. If she hadn’t thought it, she wouldn’t have said it. I reasoned that much, so I probably spent the rest of the evening with a foolish and rather smug grin on my face.

There was more to come. When it came time to say goodnight, Bonnie and her husband escorted us out of the front door. It was a warm rather sultry evening. It was customary to administer a French-style peck on both cheeks. She and I had done it a dozen times at various social functions. I moved towards Bonnie, she moved towards me, and as I leaned forward she didn’t turn her head, so I kissed her on the lips. Just fleetingly, no more than a split second. But all the clichés happened. A shaft of heat shot through my body, a mini-explosion went off in my head, my mouth hung half open, a smile spread from ear to ear. I let her go, I couldn’t repeat it, but as she drew back her eyes didn’t leave mine.

Now I really did have a question to ask myself. Was that deliberate? I lay in bed that night asking the question, I awoke the next morning still asking the question, and continued to ask it for the next several months, during which I did not see her. It had to be, didn’t it? Would a woman accidentally do that? Surely not.

You will not be surprised to learn that some years later, when we were at last together, I asked her the question. I didn’t expect her even to remember the occasion, let alone what happened, so I began at the beginning, as it were, by reminding her we had arrived a little early and I was standing reading the news journal. ‘And I said John all dishy in blue,’ she interrupted. ‘Yes, and when we left at the end of the evening…’, ‘I kissed you on the lips,’ she said.

My parents were totally out of the picture. Not totally out of my mind, but Moya didn’t know that. I had successfully sublimated the guilt, so that as far as she was concerned my life revolved exclusively round my ‘new’ family.

There were jolts. I was crossing a footbridge at South Kensington tube station one day, and there was a huge poster that said, ‘Honour thy Father and Mother’. I swallowed hard and cursed the interfering group of religious bigots that had put it up. I would dream of Mum and Dad, and wake with a leaden feeling of guilt in my head. Then, at a social gathering one Christmas at the home of a mutual friend who lived in the same road, Bonnie and I were engaged in polite conversation. I think we were talking about Watergate, President Ford’s outrageous pardon of his predecessor, something like that anyway, when—clearly intending no more than a continuation of chat—unwittingly Bonnie rocked me to the foundations. She asked me about my family, my parents. Nothing abnormal about that, except to someone in my situation. I tried to think quickly of something appropriate to say, something that would sound fine and lead to no further questioning. But what came out was ‘I, er, I don’t see my parents.’ I prayed she would simply move the conversation on, but she was appalled. She repeated what I had said, pausing between each word.

‘But that’s awful,’ she said, ‘really awful. Oh, I am so sad for you.’

I felt tears well up in me. Unwittingly she had broken through the defensive wall I had so carefully constructed around me. I knew it was wrong, she knew it was wrong, but I didn’t know what to do about it. This particular boat most certainly did not need rocking. It would sink, and I would sink with it.

October 1980. Bonnie’s husband, an economist, was away on a business trip. Moya and I invited her down to ours for the evening so she wouldn’t be on her own. I offered Bonnie a pre-dinner drink and replenished it despite her protestations. She and her husband had recently returned from a trip to Sri Lanka. Bon said she had found the atmosphere there almost erotic. The sultry heat, she said, and the people walking so languidly, their hips swaying and their loose clothing swaying too, men and women alike.

I don’t know about bloody Sri Lanka, but hearing Bonnie talk like that was pretty damn erotic for me. My imagination soared and the thought of Bonnie becoming aroused, combined most certainly with a strong scotch and soda, brought a crimson heat to my face which I made no attempt to conceal. I probably spent the rest of the evening grinning like the proverbial Cheshire cat. After all, I was in close proximity to a calm, softly spoken, gentle woman who had begun to fill my waking thoughts, and most of my nightly ones as well.

Some time around the middle of the evening, the heavens opened and the rain came bucketing down. It pounded on the roof and we could hear it splashing off the pavement outside. Throughout the evening, I made sure Bon’s wine glass was never empty, although I noticed she wised up to this quickly and never had more than a sip or two before I wielded the bottle again. Finally she said she ought to get back home and relieve the babysitter, who was looking after her two children. My wife nodded. Then she said, and these were her exact words, ‘John, you’re not going to let Bonnie walk home alone, are you, in this pouring rain? You must go with her.’

I swallowed hard. ‘Of course,’ I said, as a thousand butterflies suddenly took flight in my stomach. I remember the feeling. If this had been a movie, the camera would have caught the smug smile of satisfaction as I realised this was the moment I had waited for for so long. In fact, the feeling that filled me was closer to panic. What should I do? How should I behave? What if, in the next few minutes, it became transparently clear to me that Bonnie had no more feeling for me than any other bloke she had come into contact with? The illusion, the fictional edifice I had built, would be fatally breached and come tumbling down.

Oh Lordy, oh God, oh Hell, I thought as I took the umbrella my wife handed to me. We stepped outside, the two of us, making small exclamatory noises as the rain hit us. Bonnie took a hurried couple of steps to the gate before I could get the umbrella up. Rejection. Obvious. Fool. I hurried after her and onto the pavement. She waited for me to catch up. Ha! Good sign. Or not. The street lamp lit up her face as she half turned, the rain soaking her and drops rolling down her cheeks. She was smiling a wide smile.

‘Here,’ I said, ‘come under the umbrella.’ I raised it over her head and in a move that seemed as natural as breathing, I put my arm round her. She allowed me to draw her body closer to me. We walked that way up the slope to her house, in step with each other and laughing like teenagers. We reached the back door of her house. A dim light came from inside, but apart from that we were in darkness. The overhanging roof gave us slight shelter from the rain, but not much.

I put down the umbrella and reached out to her. Her arms reached out to me. We took a step towards each other and our lips locked in a moment of the most intense passion I had ever felt. We kissed as though our lives depended on it. I parted her lips with my tongue, she responded and she pressed herself fully against me. I tasted her, inhaled her scent. I stroked her body with my hands, feeling up and down her back, the indent of her waist, then, gently, the contours of her front. She made small gasping sounds, seeming to crave me as much as I craved her. I felt her hands on my back, my neck, my head.

I don’t know how long that immortal first kiss lasted. Minutes, certainly. In the movie I would have told her how I loved her, how I had longed for her, how I had waited for this moment. She would have sighed ecstatically, returned my ardent words, probably to the strains of Rachmaninov. In fact, we said nothing. Our eyes held each other for a few moments. I picked up the umbrella and walked back down the slope.

I have thought about this moment a million times in the more than 30 years since it happened. Bonnie and I have talked about it, laughed over it. It has always led to a repeat performance. Today, as I write about it for the first time, it only brings tears to my eyes.

Bonnie is pacing round the house and I want to tell her what I am remembering, but I don’t. Why talk of something that will mean nothing to her now, and might make her regret that she can’t remember it?

But can I really be sure it will mean nothing to her? What if I am wrong, and she does remember it? If she does, it will bring her a lot of pleasure. I decide to test it in as gentle a way as I can.

I go out onto the terrace, and of course Bon follows me out there. We stroll around for a few moments, then I lean against the table and say, ‘Come here, darling, come here a moment.’ ‘Why?’ ‘I want to ask you something.’

She walks towards me and stands facing me.

‘Do you remember our first kiss?’

‘Of course I do.’

‘When was it?’

‘Er…I don’t know.’

‘Take a guess.’

‘Five years ago?’

‘Yeah!’ I say, raising my arms in triumph. She smiles with satisfaction.

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