The Northern Clemency (89 page)

The patients sometimes arrived, and sometimes left; it was a shock one day to see a whole family in tears about the bedside of a middle-aged unconscious woman, to see himself and his father, as it were, down the vista of weeks enacting the terror and grief that had now subsided into worry and routine. Some of the patients changed out of their nightgowns into day clothes and left on the arm of a proud beaming son or husband, smiling to right and left like a new bride walking down the aisle on the arm of a husband, graciously acknowledging the nurses who had come out to say goodbye.

Others left in different ways. Vera, the frightened old woman who had so objected to Alice being in her bed, contracted flu that turned into a chest infection, into pneumonia, and was moved into the private room directly opposite Alice’s. Alice now had regular and varied visitors—Francis, Bernie, Katherine, Malcolm, Helen, Daniel, Davina and David even, Anthea, Caroline and half a dozen others. The numbers had to be limited and a timetable drawn up. But Vera had no visitors: she had no family, the nurses said, as if inviting Francis to pop in and have a kind word if he had nothing better to do; and Francis would see her tiny body lying on its side on top of the sheets, her knees drawn up and her little claw-like hands waving as if to grasp something. One
day he arrived after lunch, and through the door of Vera’s room he could see she was not there, only a heavy green zipped-up sack like the bags suits came in, like a chrysalis. He went into his mother’s room, and she was breathing peacefully, his father by her side, the machines beeping in their tranquil regular manner. A nurse popped her head round the door and said, “I’m just shutting this door for a moment,” and did so; the noise of Vera’s bed being wheeled past followed, and in a couple of minutes the nurse reopened the door. The proximity of death had been too recent for Bernie and Francis; the kind nurse had thought to spare them any sort of trauma, even what was not a trauma, the quite consoling sight of death having fallen on Vera, and for the moment missing Francis’s mother.

Outside, the landscape changed, and the seasons began to give way to each other. The savage rains and grey days that had accompanied Alice’s first awful days in the hospital grew less frequent; the landscaped grounds of the hospital began to put out bulbs, and quite at once, one day, Francis noticed a drift of sun-yellow daffodils and white snowdrops, at forty degrees in the fierce and cheek-reddening wind. Outside Alice’s window, through the Venetian blinds, had been a grim sort of little courtyard. One day he looked up from “The League of Red-Headed Men” and, to his astonishment, he saw that the tree outside was spuming with blossom. The skies cleared and were blue again; small nursery-tale animals appeared in the grounds, shooting rat-like up trees with their furry little tails behind them. He could not make his mind up whether these things were altering under his observation, or whether the biggest change was in him, that the grief and inwardness that had cloaked him for weeks, if not months, if not years, was lifting and allowing him to see what he had never truly observed before. He felt as if he was starting to watch the movements of the spring in a way he had never been capable of, and sometimes now he set down his book and talked to his mother about it instead, describing, in minute detail, the blossoming tree out of the window, the sights of planted woodland in the landscaped gardens running down to the gate of the hospital. Alice listened attentively, her eyes closed but her face tranquil and relaxed. And then one day, without any warning, the clocks went back and the spring evening was light until well after seven.

“I don’t know what you find to talk about,” Bernie said, but he smiled forgivingly; they had taken now to sharing their evening meal, and giving Alice, as Bernie said, a bit of a rest from company for an hour or so. “You were never so chatty before.”

Francis returned to work, but arranged to take Fridays and Monday mornings off, and went up to Sheffield every Thursday evening, returning on Monday mornings. The Department were being very good about it; he gave them the impression that he was an only child. Not much had changed in London. One of the lodgers had decided to move out, and the landlord asked Francis if he wanted to take over that room too. He hesitated, and then, to his surprise, said no. He had been paying some kind of attention without really knowing it, and house prices were now a lot lower than they had been for a long time. There was no reason why he should not himself buy a flat rather than go on renting three haphazard rooms on the top floor of someone else’s.

Samson stayed in Sheffield. Bernie said he didn’t mind him being around, he quite liked the company, and the butter trick seemed to have worked. Samson was almost too much at home, appropriating and curling up in Bernie’s armchair, allowing himself to be thrown off but immediately returning to curl up and purr in Bernie’s lap. There was no point at all, Francis’s father said, in objecting; cats knew their own mind and this one was more determined than most. He seemed to have taken a definite liking to Bernie, Bernie said. “I don’t know what your mother will think,” he said. Two or three weeks ago he might have said “would.”

And then one day Alice opened her eyes. Francis heard about it from his father, during the week, over the phone, and felt guilt and regret that he had not been there. The phone had rung in his room in London only five minutes after he had got home. Afterwards he wondered why his father had not called him at work; perhaps he thought, and perhaps rightly, that Francis would want to make sure of his own response. He wondered, too, how often he had called and left no message, waiting anxiously for Francis to pick up the phone and not wanting to leave a message that might, even for two minutes, be frightening, asking him to telephone as soon as possible. Francis picked up the phone, and immediately, his voice full of delight, his father said, “She opened her eyes today.” She hadn’t spoken, and probably couldn’t, but she had eagerly drunk one glass of water, then another, and had even hungrily eaten some food before closing her eyes and sinking back into what, now, seemed very much like sleep. “She’s lost a lot of weight,” Bernie said. “At least from her face it looks as if she has. She must have been hungry, not eating all that time.” Then he laughed, incredulous: the fact that Alice had not been eating was not something that had occurred to him at all.

It was a Wednesday night, and Francis went up on the Thursday night as usual, going straight from the office with his packed bag and determined that, if he could, he would stay an extra day after the weekend. On the train, he went to the buffet car, and with an experienced and tired eye ran through the seven choices of sandwich in the little fridge.

“Can I help you at all?” the steward said; he was snappy, camp, with one silver earring and an unsmiling lined face under his spiked black hair.

“Just a cup of tea,” Francis said. He had had every single sandwich on this service over the last few weeks; he was sick of them all, and decided he was going to bring his own if he had to eat on the train.

He arrived at the hospital that evening full of apologies, but it wasn’t quite clear to his father what he might be apologizing for. It didn’t seem to him as though Francis, through a misplaced trust in personal duties and professional obligations, had excused himself from an important stage in his mother’s recovery as a too-burdened young parent might miss, through his labours in a City office, his infant’s first words, his infant’s first steps. And in any case, tingeing their relief and delight was the remembered advice from the doctor that Alice, should she come through this—and surely, now, she had come through this—might well find herself in possession of a character not her own.

It was too early to say, Bernie said, and just as he did so, Alice in her bed opened her eyes again, like a child delighted to repeat a party trick to gather praise from a new guest. For a moment her eyes were the heartrendingly groggy-blank blue he had seen over and over when the nurses had lifted her eyelids against her will and called her name in her ear, to test for responses. But then something within her, something undeterminable by the clues being gathered by the machines by her bed, visibly gathered and tensed and focused on Francis; and, without any doubt, she knew him as he knew her. There was no change of personality in those blue eyes. Her mouth moved a little.

“She might want some water,” Bernie said. Francis got up to fetch a cup from the side table, now bearing a familiar object, a small china angel that Francis recognized as always having been on her bedside table at home. When he returned, she had closed her eyes, but he gently raised the purple plastic cup with its infantile beaker-top to her mouth, and she opened them again, feasting them on him. She drank a little, but he sensed she hadn’t particularly wanted that, and lowered it
again. “What is it, Mum?” he said, and her mouth moved again. “It’s all right now,” he said. She had been trying to say something.

“I’ve told Sandra,” Bernie said, when they were in the car going home. “Alex. About your mother coming round. She was delighted, and relieved, she said. She’s hoping to come over to see us very soon.”

“I don’t know why she hasn’t come already,” Francis said crossly.

Bernie looked at him in surprise. “That’s not like you,” he said, pausing at some traffic-lights. “And it’s not fair. You can’t just pop over from Australia at the drop of a hat.”

Francis thought, on the whole, that you could, but he didn’t say anything more. It proved to him what he had never consciously thought but had, clearly enough, concluded within himself, that his father had given up on Sandra, and whatever regrets and pain that decision had caused him, he would be determinedly grateful for being allowed to telephone her if it did not occur to her to telephone them, for a telephone call from her when he might have hoped for a letter, for anything at all, any evidence of concern at the most extreme and painful episodes of family existence in place of what might be hoped for, her presence and her once-familiar face and love. In television dramas, in books, this kind of severance took place with abruptness and with some cause, after some splendid and memorable exchange of views. In England, though such a severance could and did take place, it required, it seemed, no such difference of views, no theft or violence, no long-hidden secret—or if there should be such a hidden secret, it was hidden from Francis and, he believed, from his father too. All that was required was a plane fare to Australia and a slowly dwindling evidence of effort and commitment, until it had dwindled away altogether to the level, perhaps, that it had always occupied, concealed only by the requirement and effort that were asked of you when you were actually around. Probably that was unfair. But Francis knew that if his father’s memory was as good as his own, or had preserved the same moments, it would be with some pain that it returned to the back of a car driving up to Sheffield, to move house, twenty or more years before, and him saying to Francis in the back, “I wouldn’t give you two hundred quid for Sandra. Maybe if you gave her a wash first.” Francis hoped his father didn’t remember that; he hoped that, in some way you read about in the newspapers these days, he’d made it up himself. He knew his father had never meant it.

.   .   .

One of the things to like about Stewart was how full of crazy ideas he was, suggested and implemented on the spur of the moment. He was perfectly capable of saying to Alex, “Let’s go to Cairns for the weekend,” or turning up with tickets to a rock concert that same evening, or putting Alex into his jeep and taking her off somewhere she’d never thought of going before, or simply saying as they woke up, “We’re not going to get out of bed today.” Alex liked it; she didn’t always go along with it, but she liked it, and she much preferred it to the sort of man who planned outings weeks or months in advance, then seemed to blame her sourly when a weekend in the Blue Mountains lacked spontaneity. Of course, it helped that Stewart owned his own business, a historic-postcard emporium mostly run for him by his borderline-autistic assistant Gwilym. Gwilym, who had the fragile and blotchy pink skin, pale ginger hair and eyelashes and rained-out blue eyes of someone whose ancestors should never have left rainy North Wales, never minded being left alone in the shop, and Stewart never saw why he shouldn’t take off now and again. Some people thought those washed-out blue eyes of Gwilym’s gave him a misleadingly sly look that scared off customers, and that Stewart was a bit too relaxed about his priorities.

It was harder, though, for Alex, and she tried to channel Stewart’s spontaneity into weekends, and otherwise only very occasionally go along with it. She liked her job, though most people wouldn’t have thought there was much interesting in it. She liked the people she worked with, and she honestly didn’t enjoy coming back the day after one of these excursions and telling a pack of lies about how ill she’d felt, one of those twenty-four-hour things.

Stewart lived over his shop; it was better than that made it sound. It was an old Victorian provisions merchant’s, and the three storeys over the shop were solid, well-lit and spacious. He’d done it all himself, stripping it down and putting in industrial-style kitchen and bathroom. A woman from
Australian Interiors
had come to see if it would do for a photo-feature. Alex was standing at the raw-steel breakfast counter, with a wide bowl of milky coffee, chopping up a plate of papaya and mango and pineapple, one of Stewart’s old football shirts barely covering her arse, when she heard Stewart coming downstairs behind her. It was half past seven in the morning; the sunlight was already bright through the thin muslin drapes drawn across the window. She could hear from the way he was placing his big feet on the creaking treads that he didn’t want her to hear him, and she carried on
slicing, artificially slowly, until she actually felt his restrained breath behind, on the back of her neck, felt his big roughened calloused footballer’s hands sliding up her smooth thighs, up underneath the hem of the football shirt she was wearing, running up her sides. He was like Tigger, the way he bounced straight back; she sometimes wondered if he ever thought about anything else.