This Much Is True

Perhaps it was knowing that Heather was gay that gave me the courage to make my move. After I had bundled Katy out the door, and returned to the kitchen, Heather said something like, ‘God! Why on earth did Katy go off like that? I would have gone with her.’

I said, ‘But I didn’t want you to go with her, I wanted you to stay.’ There was a pause. I said, ‘I’m queer, and I think you are too… aren’t you?’ She started to shake. I got up from the table, went around behind her chair and stood and stroked her head. A masterstroke, if I may say so. I have good massaging hands and I think that calmed her down.

Heather and I started our relationship that very night — and it never stopped. She phoned Jan Adams where she’d been staying, and explained that she wasn’t coming home. I heard her say, ‘I like Miriam.’ Next to getting into Cambridge, that was the best moment of my life. It was a feeling of connection on a level completely different to anything I had experienced before.

My emotions, my attention and my sexuality were totally focused on Heather. She engaged my interest and always has. She’s powerful and enigmatic. She is also reserved, and feeling her respond to me and realising that I could awaken her

affection and sexuality was an intoxicating experience.

We didn’t get out of bed for a week.

Later, Heather told me that she had said to herself at lunch that day: ‘Miriam can’t be queer. She’s so noisy!’ For Heather, the whole concept of being gay was shrouded in secrecy. She couldn’t imagine that anybody could say, ‘I fancy you. I’m gay. Let’s fuck.’

My parents were two opposites attracting: Heather and I are the same. Those early patterns are important — they form the paradigm for your future relationships. I am a clone of my mother, whereas my partner resembles my father — she’s a thoughtful person, a quiet, undemonstrative scholar. Although theirs was a passionate relationship in which they were often at odds, my parents adored each other.

Being in a relationship with someone for fifty-three years is a big achievement. It’s difficult to look at someone objectively when you love them. And I love Heather. I get angry with her and she gets very angry with me, but I recognise her complete integrity. Nearly everybody has flaws of honesty; Heather has none. It doesn’t make her an easy person to be with, but there is a complete decency about her, which is refreshing and precious and rare.

Heather is an academic and a scholar: an Indonesianist. To begin with, she was working in Malaysia at Kuala Lumpur University, then she got a job at the Free University of Amsterdam, and she’s been in Holland ever since. She would come to London, of course, and I would go over to her seventeenth-century house on the Prinsengracht. We used to keep a little day boat on the canal outside the house. It had an outboard motor engine, which you started by sharply pulling a string, like a lawnmower, and off this little boat went. I loved that, but, eventually, because we didn’t use it enough, we gave it away.

This last winter, all the Amsterdam canals froze over. It doesn’t happen often nowadays — one winter, about twenty-five years ago, all the canals were completely frozen, and everybody was out skating, racing by, laughing, their breath in clouds. We watched them for hours, sitting at the high glass windows overlooking the canal: it was like looking at a painting in the Rijksmuseum.

After one of Heather’s research visits abroad, she caught a respiratory virus. It developed into the illness called chronic fatigue syndrome and has never left her. At one time in the nineties, it got so bad she couldn’t walk or stand, and I had to feed her. Many thousands of people never recover and doctors don’t yet know what causes it. Indeed, for many years it wasn’t recognised as an illness. Dr Ramsay was the only doctor who got it right. He told Heather she would never recover. She never has. It meant she had to work part-time at the Free University in Amsterdam, but her half-time is equal to anyone else’s full-time. Despite all the odds, she has continued to teach, consult and write; her latest book, Seaways and Gatekeepers, is a work of majestic scholarship about the trade routes of South East Asia from the seventeenth century until today. I am deeply proud of her.

She has been a huge influence on my life. People ask, ‘What is the secret of your relationship?’ I reply it is love and trust, and telling the truth. Never let the sun set on a quarrel. And communication — that is paramount: you must talk to your partner. We don’t live together, either — we have always led separate lives, which is probably why we’ve lasted this long. She likes to work and I do, too. The day after she completed her latest book, she began the next. She said, ‘What would I do if I didn’t work? Who would I be?’