Brief Lives (10 page)

MY MOTHER DIED
in the spring of that same year, three months after I had made my decision to resign myself to a life for which I no longer had any taste. This death, on the morning of a cold day in late March, filled me with such despair that I suffered in a very real physical sense, and when I looked around the house in Gertrude Street I felt threatened by an overwhelming panic, as if I had been forcibly put down in alien territory, removed from home against my will, and left alone for ever and ever. This was ridiculous, because I was a middle-aged woman, and, as far as I knew, of sound mind. On the day of her death, after Joan Barber had telephoned me to say that she had found my mother when she went in at her usual time, I rushed out into the silent street, hoping that someone would come to my rescue, throwing myself onto the kindness of strangers. But there was no one about, only the sound of a distant car, which grew briefly louder and then quieter, until it disappeared altogether. I stood in the greyish silence, unable to
believe that I should never hear my mother’s voice again. After a while a 31 bus turned round the corner and stopped outside the café: the driver climbed down from the cab and went inside. That was the only human presence I encountered that morning, yet I stood there shivering, unable to face the journey and the house that awaited me.

Mother never got to live in the flat of her dreams, with the fitted carpet and the wall lights, and perhaps a few flowerbeds outside tended by a contract gardener. I found her more than one such flat, but she refused to move from the house in which we had all lived when I was young. By the end of her life it had grown very shabby, and although Joan Barber was good about clearing up she was not enterprising enough to see to things like getting the windows cleaned, which I had done, on a step ladder, on my now more frequent visits. I had performed many sad tasks, sad because they spoke of decay. When I went into the kitchen with the food I took over, I could smell stale dusters and dishcloths, hear the tap dripping into the new red plastic basin I had bought her, see that the clock had stopped, that she had not replaced last year’s calendar, which still showed September, under a reproduction of Canaletto’s
Warwick Castle
. Before taking off my coat I would note what had to be done. The little parcels of cold salmon, of tongue, of fruit tart, the hothouse peach and the madeira cake, would be put into the larder to replace the little parcels left over from my last visit, which had not been touched. Mother refused to eat, either out of genuine incapacity or of languor. I mentioned this to Joan Barber, who said, ‘Oh, I see that she has a milky drink every morning. And she likes those biscuits I bring her.’ The biscuits were the sort of chocolate and synthetic marshmallow confections that were designed to appeal to children. Thus my mother subsisted
on what was not real food, or perhaps the sort of food that an impatient parent would hand out to stop a toddler from grizzling. The sight of an abandoned plate containing a biscuit from which a minute bite had been taken, as if by a child, and which my mother had felt unable to finish, affected me inordinately. It was the first thing I found when I entered the house after her death. It was her last meal.

I think we both knew that she was dying, although I was better at hiding the knowledge from myself than she was. I went on filling the house with factitious business and conversation, hoping to bring at least a faint smile to her face. My basket of morsels small enough to tempt her was unwrapped for her inspection and put away; I would at least be able to persuade her to eat some lunch, and I knew I should be with her every day to perform this little ceremony, although I also knew that the battle was already lost. My mother was not frightened. The discovery of her devotion to my father and his memory had made me jumpy, irritable, as if this were somehow a dangerous path to pursue. She wanted to join him, but I wanted her to live. That was not surprising: I wanted everyone to live—I wanted to live myself. But while I talked to my mother in a brisk voice, mentally noting that the kitchen floor needed cleaning and that I could just manage to do it, as well as washing the tea-towels, before it was time for me to go back to Gertrude Street, she would smile at me, as if in forebearance, as if to humour me, and go off for her rest.

While Mother slept, in her dark bedroom, with the looming old-fashioned furniture and the blue patterned carpet that my father had laid so badly, I scrubbed the floor and did the washing, trying to dispel the sad odours which had built up in that silent kitchen. Soon I was taking over bottles of bleach and disinfectant and going through the house, the
whole house, which seemed to me redolent of desertion and neglect. I was like the sorcerer’s apprentice, sweeping and polishing under some terrible compulsion, not because my mother wanted me to, but rather because she was now utterly indifferent to her surroundings, did not notice those sad odours, had become an old lady who wore thick stockings and wide shoes, she who had been so fastidious, so critical, so elegant in her modest way. I would make her a cup of tea and take it to her bedroom to wake her: I was anxious to get home before Owen, even anxious to get away from Mother. But she would awaken from her sleep with a slightly renewed sense of—what was it? Energy? Conviction?—and she would ask me about myself. I was too frightened to tell her. I kept up a bright chatter, which sounded too loud in my ears, and so she learned all the unimportant things about my life: what I cooked, what Owen was doing, who was coming to dinner. None of this was of any interest, either to my mother or to myself. Her eyes would be fixed on my face, although her expression indicated absence. ‘Do you still sing?’ she once interrupted me, as I was telling her about Owen’s last trip. ‘Sing to me, Fay.’ So I held her hand and sang her some of my old songs. It was then that we both knew that she would die very soon.

She was barely seventy, not old enough to die, but her vitality had left her when my father died, and I was not enough to reconcile her to life without him. This was the grief that I carried, almost but not quite unnoticed, throughout my adult life. I could not imagine wanting to die if Owen died, and this too was in a sense forbidden knowledge. Although my mother had grumbled at my father, both of them knew that there was no anger in her reproaches, and she would never be in the slightest sense affected by them. As far as I could see, their life together
was unambitious, unremarkable, yet I remember it as happy. The fact that this memory was so strong was crucial to my life, for against it I measured everything that happened to me, principally my marriage. I knew that I was not as happy as my mother had been, although the knowledge, which was ineradicable, took a long time to filter through to my consciousness. My mother thus laid a heavy burden on me without knowing it. But she was not to blame, nor was I ever crass enough to blame her. I can say with pride and gratitude that my mother and I loved each other without a shadow. And in the last two weeks of her life, when she could barely get out of bed, I was with her, going back to Gertrude Street only very late. ‘Not up yet?’ I had said to her one morning. I said it playfully, to hide my panic. She merely drew aside the bedclothes to show me her swollen legs and feet. So I let her stay there, although my instincts was to import nurses, doctors, even to get her admitted to hospital. I did none of these things, but it was a struggle to know how to behave in the face of the great separation which was soon to overtake us. I sang to her, and when I felt the tears rising in my throat I hurried out of the room and prepared the milk and the childish biscuits that she liked, or at that stage pretended to like. In the end she slept more and more. Once she woke up, looked at me, and sighed. ‘Fay,’ she whispered. ‘Fay.’ ‘What is it?’ I said. But she never spoke again.

When I left her that evening she was calm and smiling, although she said nothing, merely pressed my hand and held it to her face. I thought it safe to go home. Or did I? Perhaps I could stand no more. I left the house at ten o’clock, and she must have died in the night, because when Joan Barber let herself in on the following morning there was no sign of life: the tap still dripped into the red plastic
basin, but that was all—no answer to her call, no stirring as she went up the stairs into the bedroom. She came down again and telephoned me. When I got there the first thing I saw was the abandoned biscuit with which I had tried to tempt her the previous day. Otherwise everything was in order. She had made a will some time before and had given it to me for safe-keeping. She had nothing to leave me but the house, and so it became mine. I think she still regarded it as my natural, my only home. In this she was prescient. But because it enshrined so much love, love that could never come again, I also knew that I would sell it when the time came. This I never told her.

I was surprised by the number of people who came to the funeral, for as far as I knew Mother saw nobody. Yet those of my father’s friends who had survived her turned up faithfully. My father had been a popular man, and his easy simple conviviality had been shared by men like himself, small-time, respectable, in a humble way of business. They came, in their unflattering oblong overcoats and their trilby hats, old men now, eyes watering with the cold or with reminiscence, cigarettes lit with shaky hands. They kissed me as a matter of course: was I not in their eyes still a child? And they promised me their help if I should ever need it: I had only to get in touch. Business cards and pieces of paper bearing telephone numbers were handed over. Owen became impatient, as he had been throughout the ceremony. Once it was over he got in the car and went off to Hanover Square. I went back to the house and served sherry and seed cake to the old men and their wives. Then I cleared up, and carefully locked the front door behind me. ‘Take a taxi, Fay,’ I heard Mother say. So I took a taxi and went back to Gertrude Street. There was nowhere else to go.

Owen was furious at being exposed to my humble origins, for he had managed to forget them, or to overlook them. The tap dripping in the red plastic basin, the old men at the funeral, shook him out of whatever complacency was left to him. My preoccupation with my mother’s dwindling life had been merciful in one way: it had helped me not to think about Owen’s business affairs, which I now suspected were irregular. I surmised that he was keeping part of the money due to the firm and must have been falsifying accounts. Naturally I could not prove this, nor did I ever know whether or not my suspicions were correct. I think now that something was on Charlie’s mind, and that Owen was questioned, but that he was able to give a reassuring account of himself. Owen had brought a great deal of money into the firm in the way of fees: he had a number of important clients, whose lordly manner, it was assumed, had recommended itself to him. Nothing was said, but I have an inkling that a mild word of warning was issued. Coming from Charlie it would have been deceptively mild, but Owen took notice of it. There were in addition one or two telephone calls from his uncle, Bernard Langdon, which left him red-faced and seething. I could be nothing but an additional irritant to him, and I learned to contain my grief, or at least not to display it when Owen was at home, which he was quite frequently then, not out of deference but out of prudence. For a few weeks he went off to Hanover Square every morning like a model employee. I never asked him what transpired there, nor would he have told me if I had. He merely asked me how the sale of the house was progressing. I think he considered it might be a good idea to have some money in reserve, in case any should be demanded of him. I had no idea how things were to be managed. Fortunately, or unfortunately, I was too
taken up with my own sadness to brood for long on my husband’s troubles. This was only one indication of the estrangement I had begun to notice.

I was very lonely during the weeks that followed my mother’s death. I knew that I should never again be all the world to anyone, as it says in the song. Normally I despise women who claim never to have got over their parents’ death, or who affirm that their fathers were the most perfect men who had ever lived. I despise them, but I understand them. How can any later love compensate for the first, unless it is perfect? My simple parents had thought me unique, matchless, yet they had let me go away from them without a murmur of protest. I tried to ask myself whether I could have done more—been more—than was really the case, but it was too late, and the questions seemed artificial even as I asked them. Parents do die, and children survive them: moreover I was in my fifth decade and had left childhood far behind. Yet at that time I grew wistful, thinking of all that I had lost or forgone. I had voluntarily entered a world in which a certain obliquity seemed to be taken for granted, pretty manners hiding a very real indifference. No one was unkind to me. But I felt a coldness in the atmosphere whenever my mother-in-law was present, and I was oppressed by the knowledge that I must continue to dance attendance on Julia, if only to please Charlie, on whose goodwill Owen depended. But I saw it for what it was; there was no question of love, or even liking. Even Owen, from whom I now expected little, disappointed me.