It was also heartbreaking. For in addition to a love of dogs and cooking, mother and daughter learned that they shared something far grimmer: cancer. In the months that followed, Black, then 59, a physical therapist, and Taylor, then 42, a nurse from Yorkshire, England, developed a close friendship. Making frequent trips to Phoenix, Taylor helped care for her mother until Black's death in February 1998; Taylor herself died 17 months later.
In his new book, I Hope You Have a Good Life, bestselling thriller writer Campbell Armstrong tells the women's remarkable story—which, to thicken an already operatic plot, turns out to be his story as well. Married to Black from 1965 to 1983, Armstrong did what precious few divorcés would do for their ex-spouses: He helped nurse her during her last month. With him at Black's bedside were Taylor (who was born out of wedlock before he and Black met); Armstrong's second wife, Rebecca, 51; and Armstrong and Black's three sons (Iain, 35, a medical student, Keiron, 28, a musician, and Stephen, a painter and decorator).
"It was a bit like a wagon train forming a circle to keep out marauding attackers, except the attacker in this case was cancer," says the Scottish-born Armstrong, 56, who lives with Rebecca in a 30-room 18th-century mansion in rural County Offaly, Ireland. "Some days were beautiful, some were unbearably tough, but the love was a constant. The book is [partly] about how extended families can come together at times of crisis."
For Armstrong, the author of 1987's Jig and some 20 other novels, the memoir is also about keeping the promise he made to his ex-wife to write it. More deeply, it's about coming to terms with his own past failings. "Watching Eileen and Barbara, I realized for the first time how unselfish pure love is," he says. "I selfishly put myself first for years."
That habit started, he believes, long before he left Eileen for Rebecca in 1978. The son of Thomas Black, a Glasgow shipyard worker, and Mary, a bookkeeper, Armstrong (who later took Rebecca's last name as his nom de plume) fell hard for Eileen Altman, the daughter of a Yorkshire furrier and a homemaker, when they met in the Glasgow record shop she was managing in 1961. But Armstrong, who was working odd jobs, had a roving eye. "I probably should have waited until I was 30 to get married," he says.
Instead, he and Eileen moved to Brighton, England (where Armstrong studied philosophy at Sussex University), and married in January 1965, a month after son Iain was born. By 1967, when he landed a job at a London publishing house, the pub-crawling Armstrong was well on his way to becoming an alcoholic. "I was never one to just have one glass of wine," he says.
He was also paying scant attention to Eileen and their son. Eileen had told him about the daughter she gave up, but he never asked for details. "I wish, in a way, I had," he says. "It was like she had locked a door, and it should have been opened." In 1975 Armstrong took a job teaching creative writing at Arizona State University in Tempe to supplement his then modest earnings from such thrillers as 1968's Assassins and Victims. There he met Rebecca, a teaching assistant and former dancer with the Joffrey Ballet. "Campbell has a kind of charm that makes you want to mother him," Rebecca says. "It worked for me." Eileen accepted the affair with amazing grace, showing up on her rival's doorstep one day to say the lovers belonged together. "She gave him to me," Rebecca marvels.
After settling with Rebecca in the Irish country-side in 1991, Armstrong (who quit drinking for good in 1993) saw his sons only twice a year. Eileen he saw not at all until the summer of '97, when he learned that she had lung cancer. With Rebecca's blessing ("I gave him back—Eileen needed him," she says), Armstrong flew to his ex-wife's side. "They had an agreement that if either was in trouble, they would be there for each other," their son Stephen says. "I remember the first time they saw each other, in the ICU. They hadn't seen each other in about 15 years. Tears came out of their eyes. He said, 'I'm not going to leave you this time.' "
Five thousand miles away, Taylor—who had been diagnosed with ovarian cancer the previous fall—was searching adoption records trying to arrange her own reunion with Black. Their meeting in October 1997 energized both of them. "They had a genuine belief that they could defeat cancer," Armstrong recalls. "Eileen was convinced that the reintroduction of Barbara into her life was a sign. She was convinced she was cured."
It turned out to be wishful thinking. By January 1998, both Taylor and Armstrong, who had been making periodic visits to see Black, had accepted the inevitable. In Phoenix, says Stephen, who lived nearby, "Dad would sit in Mom's room for eight hours at a time." When Armstrong and Stephen tired, Taylor often relieved them. Black and Taylor "were cramming a lifetime into a few weeks," says Rebecca, who was also often on hand. "Barbara had so much courage."
After Black's death, "Mum went into her own little world," says Heidi Taylor, 21, the oldest of-Taylor's three children (son Marcus is 18, Matthew is 15). Taylor died in a Yorkshire hospice in July 1999.
Back in County Offaly, Armstrong found memorializing both women cathartic. "When I write a novel, I write it and it's gone," he says. "But this book hasn't left me." And from now on, he won't be churning out your basic hard-boiled thriller. "In my latest, The Bad Fire, there's much more family stuff," he says. "How blind I have been all these years. Families are what we are about."
Kim Hubbard
Simon Perry in County Offaly
- Contributors:
- Simon Perry.
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