The Other Half of My Heart (20 page)

Her mother had a kimono once, with humming-birds on it. She'd worn it until it wore out, and then put it away to make cushion covers with, although she never had, and Bettina hadn't come across it when she'd cleared what her parents euphemistically called their ‘retirement bungalow'. They'd gone, every week, to stand by Sam's grave. Bettina hadn't visited it again, after the first time, until or since her father died.

After Sam died she can't remember her mother willingly making anything, ever again. Toast, tea; that had been it, everything else they ate coming from a packet or a jar, once the casseroles and bakes brought by their neighbours and her mother's many drama-group friends had stopped coming.

The friends had stopped coming too, for no other reason, Bettina thinks, than that they knew they weren't wanted, and they couldn't be a friend to someone who did not so much reject friendship as ignore it, or fail to notice it.

Bettina, who had once been protected from having to see anyone by the nurses at the hospital then her parents – I'm afraid she's not seeing anyone, she would hear her father say, she's not really up to it, and then there'd be a little bit of hushed conversation, the clang of a gate and the sound of a car pulling away – had watched and learned and used this strategy herself when she had moved away. Run away.

‘Does she need anything?' Bettina asks, and the nurse shakes her head. ‘She's comfortable?' Bettina persists.

‘Yes,' the nurse says.

The manager asks, ‘Are you happy that we follow our agreed care plan? Some people change their minds. It's an important decision, and sometimes it looks different when we get to this point.'

Bettina thinks of the other option for Alice, which is a late dash to the hospital, then her mother being treated in a room she doesn't recognize, drip-fed and dragged back into a world that she hasn't known how to exist in for a long time. Of course not. All her instincts tell her that this would be the wrong thing to do for her mother, whose body is at last catching up with her threadbare mind.

She pushes away the temptation to save her mother for herself, for the sake of having a mother of sorts, still, of not being alone in the world just yet. But, she reminds herself, this moment, now, is exactly why she made the right decisions in advance. No resuscitations from heart attacks, no antibiotics for serious infections. No prolonging the agony.

‘Yes,' Bettina says, ‘I'm sure.' Her voice twitches, cracks, in the dry air. She holds her mother's hand and thinks of the quiet, dignified death that is all she can give Alice now.

The manager nods. ‘Do you want me to bring your friend along?'

‘No, no thank you.'

‘Shall I put him in the family bedroom?'

‘That would be lovely.' Although Bettina hasn't been thinking about Rufus, doomed to reading and re-reading his
Telegraph
and whatever magazines are in the reception hall, she's glad to have the problem solved. She can imagine her mother's horror at the thought of being introduced to someone when she is in bed. The mother Bettina once had, anyway.

The first part of getting dressed, for Alice, had always been her make-up. Bettina gently puts down her mother's hand and goes into her bathroom, where she finds a little pouch of cosmetics. There is foundation, powder, mascara, lipstick like a robin's breast, eyeshadow the teal of a pigeon's throat. She takes the lipstick back to the bedside and tries to apply it to her mother's mouth, but her lips are dry and slack so the lipstick drags the mouth with it. Bettina rubs her fingertip against the colour and smudges it on that way. Her mother looks at once both more ill, her lips too bright for her pale face, and more like herself.

Sitting in the quiet room, watching her mother sleep, Bettina loses all sense of time and place. The world is shrunk to the ascent and fall of Alice's ribcage, the occasional pauses in her breathing which have Bettina holding her breath, the nurse leaning forward, only to sit back again when Alice inhales.

Somewhere around three, the nurse checks her mother's pulse and nods to Bettina, saying, ‘It won't be long now. Her pulse is very faint.'

Bettina nods.

‘She can still hear you.'

Bettina nods again. She understands this is her chance to say a last thing, but cannot imagine how to choose such significant words. The last thing she'd said to Sam was, you should be so lucky. The last conversation with her father was about fougasse, a bread where the dough is cut and stretched into a leaf shape, and which she's never been able to look at, let alone bake, since.

She wants to say that she's sorry. She wants to say thank you. But these are words that she uses every day as she gets in Angie's way or takes money or is too tired to stay up beyond nine or as a response to someone who says how much they like her focaccia: and they won't do. Perhaps she should choose a memory to talk about. But her memories too seem unsuitable, either too grim or too trite.

It's her mother who has the last word. Somewhere around the time that the dawn coughs and shufflings are starting in the rooms around them, Alice opens her eyes.

‘Bettina?'

‘I'm here, Mum.' Her voice sounds rusty, raw, as though unused for years.

‘Bettina. Is that you?'

‘Yes.' Please, please, don't ask about Sam, Bettina thinks. Because if you do, I will lie to you and say that he's just gone to get a cup of tea, and I don't want the last thing that you can hear to be a lie.

But Alice's mind, it seems, is wandering another world.

‘Roddy was here,' she says, ‘lovely boy, Roddy. You could do a lot worse than Roddy, Bettina.'

‘Yes,' Bettina says, ‘yes.' As the tears come the nurse touches her on the shoulder, but it's a comfort that means nothing against a pain that twists everything. There is almost no one left in the world who would understand exactly how much these words hurt Bettina, pointing as they do to a life that she might have had once, and, if she's honest with herself, must admit that she has never stopped wanting. She weeps in a ferocious near-silence as the day breaks.

At seven, the nurses change shift, the doctor comes in and goes out again, and still Alice's breath is here, tissue-thin, cotton-soft, as she fades the way a winter's day fades into a winter's night. Finally, shortly after nine, the last breath is breathed. Before she leaves the room, Bettina smudges the colour off her mother's lips: without life in her skin it looks horrible.

‘Are you all right?' the nurse asks. She has kind eyes, Bettina notices, and her words sound as though she means them, understanding that these moments immediately after a death will never be forgotten.

‘Yes,' Bettina says, automatically. But then she realizes that it's true, because she's been grieving for her mother for a long time. And since her father's death – maybe even since Sam's – Alice has been ticking off the remaining days of her own life without much care or interest. She goes to sit in the relatives' room while she waits for Rufus to collect her. He had left early to go home, shower and go to work: he'd left instructions that he would come to fetch her as soon as she sent word. Rebecca brings her a sandwich, and tea, and Bettina understands that she must be hungry and thirsty and so she eats and drinks: soft, spongy bread that she would normally rather starve than eat, ham that tastes of salt and water, just-too-strong tea.

‘Did she say anything?' Rebecca asks. ‘People sometimes do.'

‘No. Yes,' Bettina shakes her head, ‘well, nothing real. She woke up at about five and talked about Roddy coming to see her. We knew Roddy a long time ago. She was still wandering. But she knew who I was.' At this, Bettina's throat seizes.

‘Roddy?' Rebecca asks. ‘Roddy, the gentleman in the wheelchair?'

‘Yes—' Bettina can feel herself staring, the already tired muscles in the back of her eyes stretched with unbelief.

‘He was here yesterday. David mentioned it at our handover.'

‘I think you must be mistaken. Roddy wouldn't – Roddy didn't know she was here.'

‘One moment,' Rebecca says. Bettina, left alone, feels as though she has been pulled into the space her mother has left, a world where nothing makes sense, where time slides and folds, and things that should be separate are combined.

Rebecca is back, with the register. She sits down next to Bettina and puts the file on to her lap.

‘Yes, he was here, with his mother, I think. They both seemed to think a great deal of Alice.'

And there it is. Roddy's signature, the tall spines of the R and F, the tail of the final ‘d' stretching back to underline his surname. Beneath it, the letters of ‘F. Flood' curl as precisely as hair just released from the tongs. Just the sight of their writing is a shock, a hand coming out of a coffin and making everyone in the cinema jump.

‘They were here?' Bettina looks from the page to Rebecca and back to the page. She checks her watch, as though knowing what time it is will make a difference to the confusion. Her mother's last words were not a delusion, then, but an unexpected truth. Bettina starts from her chair, her first thought to go and ask Alice what she meant. Grief stronger than gravity pushes her to sitting again as she remembers that her mother has really gone. It feels as though someone is kneading her guts.

‘I wasn't on duty,' Rebecca says, ‘but I remember my colleague saying that they were very emotional. They said they had lost touch when your father died and they didn't know what had happened to your mother.'

Bettina nods. Or perhaps she shakes her head. It's hard to know quite what she's doing. She knows that she's shocked because her brain is telling her that she is; but shocked, calm, grieving are all just words to her at this point. A disconnected part of her is wondering why Roddy and Fran came to find her mother, rather than her, after hearing from Aurora, which they must have done. That same place is wondering what Roddy looks like now. She's remembering his round fingernails, straight nose, the hair at his navel, all things she hasn't thought of – she thinks – in years. Things that she should have forgotten. Things she will think about more, later.

But for now her heart is shocked, still, the heart of a motherless daughter that must feel nothing until it's ready to feel the first part of the something that's waiting. She looks out of the window. It's almost noon already on this lost day, measured out and marked by her mother's breathing and then the lack of it. Clouds dull the sky. A V of geese unskeins and Bettina watches them as they move across the rectangle of her view.

In the aftermath of Alice's death, Rufus finds that his new position in Bettina's affections is not as secure as he had hoped. The day he had driven her back home, she had said nothing, but had twisted her mother's wedding ring round and round the third finger of her left hand, looking out of the window rather than closing her eyes and holding her hands in her lap. Rufus had asked, music or not, and she'd said, not, if that's OK, and he'd said, of course it is, and that had been the extent of their conversation. Bettina twists, twists, twists the ring and looks, mostly, to the sky out of the passenger window. The hair on the right side of her head is mussed from where, he imagines, she must have slept a little, against the back of a chair, or with her head propped on her hand, although he'd like to think someone would have woken her, made her comfortable, offered her a pillow or the chance to lie down for half an hour, with a promise of being woken when she was needed. But it wasn't the time to ask for details.

When they had pulled up back at their homes – the restaurant starting to bustle, the bakery blank-eyed with the blinds down – Rufus had said, let me make you an omelette or order some food, and Bettina had put her hand on his for a second and said, I think I have to sleep. Of course, he'd said. He liked himself in this role of supporter and supplier of quiet, reliable strength. He is the man who, later, Bettina will come to see that she is unable to do without. He had helped her out of the car, stood next to her as she stood with her hands on the roof, steadying, a sailor returned to the shore.

She'd turned to look at him. ‘You hadn't booked anything for our weekend away, Rufus, had you?'

‘No, I hadn't.' He hadn't, though he had found a hotel, a restaurant, and an artisan bakery of considerable reputation that he'd thought Bettina wouldn't have been able to resist looking in on. He'd been planning to confirm the dates with her and book the hotel this week. Never mind. It would have to wait, for happier times.

‘Good,' she had said, and he'd waited for her to say more, but instead she'd stood on the pavement, one hand still on the roof of the car. He'd pushed the button to lock the car, and when the noise hadn't roused her, he'd put his hands on her shoulders and turned her so that she faced the alleyway that led to the door of her flat on one side and his on the other, and had walked her gently forward. She'd moved along with him.

When they reached their doors, Rufus had said, ‘Let me know if you need anything.'

‘I won't,' she'd said firmly, then: ‘I mean, I won't need anything, but thank you. Thank you for taking me. And bringing me back.' She'd looked him in the face, then, her eyes dull and her skin a wretched grey, and she'd nodded, and then she'd unlocked the door of her flat and gone in.

A week had passed and since then Rufus has spent only two nights with her, both at his own instigation. The sum total of conversations they have had, if compressed into one evening, would barely have filled a quarter of it. He goes into the shop, most days, on the pretext of sandwiches or with invitations. Bettina has always smiled; she's stopped, and talked a little – the home was being very helpful, the funeral was organized, her mother's possessions packed up and waiting to be collected; she thinks she will have them put into storage for a while, until she's ready; there wasn't really anything for her to do now except – except – and Rufus had put his hand on her arm and said, yes. Bettina had nodded, smiled, gone out to the kitchen and come back with a dozen tiny croissants. Daisy-sized, she'd explained, tell her hello. There had been dismissal on her face. I can drive you to the funeral, Rufus had said, just let me know when.