by Barrie Shore
And did either one of them think of his mother?
And if not, why not?
Because they were rapt with each other, wrapped up in each other.
Because Eva said to him…
And he said to her…
And the consequence was…
The consequence is that Eva’s been sick. And he’s dithering on the landing with a bibful of regurgitated porridge, feeling out of sorts with himself. Not because of the vomit: she’s often sick, he’s used to it, accepts it as a parent does his child’s accidental excretions. Out of sorts because of Oxford, because of promises so glibly made, so easily broken. And because of his mother. Did either one of them think of his mother? Of course they didn’t.
But he thinks of her now as he empties the bib down the lavatory pan in the cloakroom, flushes it away, and hovers outside the bathroom. His mother, her smell, pious smell, seems to seep out from under the door, drowning the sour stench of the bib. Surely Eva can wait for a little, while he goes downstairs to the kitchen to fetch a bowl of warm water, a flannel, a towel? But she’s whimpering in the living room and he tells himself sternly that his absurd imaginings must give way to the practical business of cleaning her up as soon as he can, by the nearest means to hand. The bathroom.
The door creaks as he pushes it open, an ominous sound that fills him with dread. He enters cautiously and stops, stops dead in the doorway. The blind at the window is drawn down, the room shadowy dark, with a darker darkness over the bath… a body hanging, heavy with death.
‘I saw a hanging once, a woman. It was a piteous sight, its memory has never left me.’
He fumbles for the light pull, little room flooding with light, lets go, breath letting go in a sigh, stupid sigh of relief. There’s nothing of his mother here. No body, no ghost of a body, no death. Only the hoist, fixed like a gibbet over the bath, with Eva’s sling swinging slowly in the small draught from the door.
He sets swiftly to work, rinsing the bib in the washbasin, hooking it onto the airer to dry; and as the smell of vomit fades away, closes his eyes, breathes deeply, trying to remember the smell of Eva. That particular shampoo she used to use, what was it called? The one that had honey in it, and spring and promises. But there’s nothing left of her either. No bottles and jars, no powders and creams, no lipstick and rouge, no silver-backed hairbrush and tortoiseshell comb, those mysterious, feminine, pufferies that she loved so much, that he used to touch, and smell and wonder about.
There’s only the paraphernalia of her care: the incontinence pads, the airer, the hoist; the smell of damp washing mixed with talcum powder and disinfectant, and something else that he can’t immediately identify and then does, with a small shock of resentment. Margaret. Margaret’s tart, semi-sweet smell of right, of possession. The bathroom is Margaret’s now.
He opens his eyes and catches sight of an old man in the mirror over the washbasin: an old man in need of a shave with deep pouches under his eyes that give him the mournful look of an elderly bloodhound.
‘Poor old fool, what a sight you look.’
The man in the mirror begs to differ. ‘Not so bad for a man of your age.’ He twirls the tip of his waxed moustache. ‘You tell her,’ he says, with a debonair leer, ‘you tell her from me, that Barkis is willing. Have you got that?’ The man in the mirror gives a roguish wink, and Jack winks solemnly back.
‘Ah, well, heigh-ho, what does it matter?’ He turns on the taps, the sensation of smell giving way to sound as water rattles through the pipes and gurgles away down the drain. And another sound… a plaintive call, seeming to emanate from the taps, warbling through water, like somebody drowning.
‘Jack… Jack…’
She’s behind him, as if by thought he has summoned her, her pale face in the mirror washed with melancholy.
‘Yes, Mother.’ Obedient to her call, ever, always.
‘Oh, Jack, my son, thine heart have been deceived by a woman.’
‘No, no…’
‘And this is an heinous crime. Yea, it is an iniquity to be punished by the judges.’
‘But I love her, you know I do…’
‘I know thy pride, and the naughtiness of thine heart.’
He knows she’s not there and yet he doesn’t turn round for fear of what he might see.
‘Oh, Jack, Jack…’
He drowns her out with a barrage of noise, bashing about with basin and bowl; drumming his feet; singing out loud at the top of his voice, tra-la, tra-lee and fiddle-de-dee.
But she’s still there.
‘Jack… Jack…’
‘I tried, Mother, I did my best.’
‘Oh, my son, my son…’
She disappears slowly like the Cheshire cat, till only the shadow of her smile remains. And he shouts out to the empty mirror, ‘Why could you never learn to be happy?’
Jack has developed a convenient habit over the years of editing memory, of rambling about in the past through well trodden paths whose every twist and turn, every verge and tussock of grass, are familiar and safe. These are paths where no danger lies, no unexpected corner that might send him into dangerous territory, confront him with remorse and guilt. He’s banished pain to the edges of his mind, learned long ago to sidestep the triggers that threaten to set it leaping into conscious thought. And although he’s saddened by thoughts of his father, it’s a pleasurable sadness that makes him linger over his skimpy remembrance of the parent he scarcely knew, and his death has long ago lost the power to hurt. It’s a memory of a memory, of something that might have happened to somebody else, or of a story told him a long time ago – not by his mother, a woman too cold for comfort, by Mrs Moxon, perhaps, so that his father’s death is mixed up in his mind with her consoling arms and stale lavender smell.
His mother is a different matter. She comes bearing a burden of guilt, offering it like an unwanted gift. He’s learned to avoid her, to hide from her memory in the way that he used as a child from her actuality. But she always ferreted him out in the end, and still does, forty-six years after her death.
He kneels at Eva’s feet, washing her face and hands with a flannel. She likes water and co-operates for a while, lifting her face for him, spreading her fingers, smiling. How thin her hands are, how bony the knuckles, how sad the little waist on her finger where the wedding ring used to be, the ring they can’t let her wear any more since the time she took a fancy to gold and tried to swallow it. But she soon tires of his ministrations, swipes the flannel and elbows him away.
‘All right, all right… enough, no more.’ He’s forgotten to bring a towel from the bathroom, rubs his hands dry on the sleeves of his dressing gown and sees how ugly they are: giant fists, blotchy and mottled with thick, blue veins. And he thinks of his mother’s hands, tiny hands like a child’s, innocent hands, that became rough and calloused from years of toil, and he’s filled with an old pity for her.
‘Poor Mother, she never stopped working. Doing, she called it, for the rector, the doctor and I don’t know who else. She used to sit up night after night with her mending, snipping and stitching till her fingers bled and she had to stop in case blood dripped on the shirts. Not silk shirts, either, or fine cotton for the gentry, only coarse linen and calico for the middle classes with wives too chary to mend for themselves.’
He presses a vein on the back of his hand, watches the slow rise as it fills again.
‘Tuppence a collar they paid her, a penny for cuffs, buttons a farthing a time. I used to watch her in the kitchen, peering and stitching under the lamplight, with her knuckles bent and her bony knees sticking up through her skirt. How sad they were, her knees, I wanted to stroke them but I never did, she didn’t like to be touched. She used to smile when she sewed… no, not smile exactly, her jaw relaxed and her mouth settled for a while. The needlework didn’t make her content, but it soothed her.’
Eva seems to
be soothed too, absorbed in the flannel, spreading it over her knee, folding it up, sniffing it, spreading it out again.
‘She was commissioned for a dress once, not to mend, to make. It was an evening gown for Mrs Hopcraft. You remember the Hopcrafts, don’t you? He was the boss in my father’s day and… oh, no, what am I talking about? I was thinking you knew them but of course you didn’t, I was only a child then, silly old fool. Anyway, they gave a ball at the Town Hall to celebrate something or other… was it something to do with the Great Man? Or the Coronation? Or, no, wait a minute… it was the centenary, the brewery’s hundred years. That’s right, I was ten, maybe eleven… and those numbers up on the archway over the gates, you remember, we saw them just now on the television… Hope & Hopcraft, 1827… I hadn’t the foggiest idea what they meant. So, eighteen twenty-seven to nineteen twenty-seven…’ He counts decades with his fingers just to make sure. ‘A hundred years, it was the Centenary Ball, I knew all along. See, not so daft after all.’
He’s absurdly pleased at achieving this minor feat of memory and accounting. His greatest fear is that he will become seriously ill, or incapacitated to a degree that prevents him from looking after Eva, and he’s disproportionately upset by his frequent lapses of memory in case he too is descending the dark path into dementia. Although the idea is somehow beguiling: he’d be able, perhaps, to enter the mysterious world that Eva’s lived in for so long, to understand her at last, to make a marriage of true minds.
‘I say, old chap, how funny it would be, the two of us sitting here, chuntering on about this and that, and no one would have a clue what we were on about, except us two. I’d enjoy that, wouldn’t you? Like it was when we first got married, do you remember? We didn’t talk at all sometimes, we didn’t have to, I always knew what you were thinking. And you did me. You knew me better than I knew myself, didn’t you, old chap?’
She doesn’t gainsay him. She’s got no idea what he’s talking about, not even listening. She’s busy with something much more important: Eva versus Flannel. One corner clenched between her teeth, the other in her fist, tugging it this way and that in a battle of strength and will that she’s determined to win.
‘I say, steady on.’ He makes an attempt to retrieve the flannel, but she growls at him, not like a dog now, higher-pitched, like a cat with its prey; and he realises with a pang of remorse how hungry she must be. Should he go downstairs and make more porridge? Or some toast perhaps? And remembers the biscuits that Margaret’s provided in case of emergencies.
It takes him two goes to get up from his knees. ‘Come along, come along, Barkis is willing.’ He fetches the biscuit tin from the sideboard, and pauses a moment to look at the photograph, his father and Nell at the brewery gates. ‘There we are, Hope & Hopcraft, 1827. Poor Dadda, shame he never went to the ball, he liked a bit of a knees-up. I wonder if Mother went in the end? Probably not, she wasn’t much of a one for enjoying herself, and anyway, they’d probably have asked her to wait at table, she’d have hated that.’ He opens the tin. ‘Right, what do you fancy? Rich tea, ginger snap, chocolate digestive? Does that sound good?’
It most certainly does. Eva loses interest in the flannel at once, snatches the biscuit, as if she’s frightened that he’ll change his mind. He chooses one for himself, Bourbon, his favourite, settles back in his chair, cradling the tin on his lap.
‘Her father was senior clerk at the brewery, Mother’s father, that is, you know what I mean. She was proud of that, said it took two men to replace him. I never knew him. Well, I did, but I was only two when he died. Or three, was it? I don’t know, doesn’t matter. Mother always said I had a look of him, her father, but that was just wishful thinking, everyone said I was the spit of my dad.’
He takes a bite of his biscuit and although he always maintains that he hasn’t a sweet tooth, the satisfying crunch of that first bite, the melting of chocolate in his mouth, seem to sweeten his memory.
‘They must have felt sorry for her, the Hopcrafts, when Dad died. Not sorry enough to give her a pension, but they let her stay on in Temperance Terrace. Although that was a dubious blessing, it was reeking with damp, they all were. They sold them off in the end, after old Hopccraft died, pulled them down, the whole terrace. Pity, I was fond of that house in a funny sort of way, because of Dad, I suppose. Margaret says there are flats there now, retirement flats, with a warden, and meals on wheels, and sing-songs, I daresay, on a Sunday morning with somebody playing an electric organ, God, save us all.’
He finishes the biscuit and considers another. But would that be a sin? The sin of indulgence or gluttony? Of downright greed? Or might one consider a second biscuit a penance for the first? Especially for a person who pronounces, a trifle pompously some would say (Margaret would certainly say, during an argument about, for example, the filling in of the nutrition chart) that the not having of a sweet tooth somehow gives one a moral advantage. The sin of pride, making a second biscuit not a choice, an imperative. If only he knew what Eva would say.
Eva isn’t troubled in the least by the ethics of eating. She munches and hums and smacks her lips. ‘Oh, don’t be so silly, who cares about sin? Just have another biscuit.’
So he does.
‘What were we saying? Oh, yes, the Centenary Ball. And the dress. It was made out of silk, some sort of silky material, yellow silk. Mother laid it out on the floor in the front room, it looked like a sea of gold. She was frightened of the first cut, made me not watch her, but once she’d got started… I remember waking up one night, I’d had a dream about my father, I thought he was there, standing by the bed, looking down at me. I was so happy for a minute, except that he wouldn’t speak to me and then I was frightened, so I crept downstairs. The light was on in the front room, strip of light under the door, I pushed it open and peeped in… and there was mother, wearing the dress. It was much too big, she looked absurd… no, not that, she was pathetic and sweet, like a child dressed up in its mother’s clothes. And yet there was something dignified about her, walking up and down, holding the skirt up behind her back, fanning herself with a table mat, the green ones with the gold rim, the ones she kept for best. I’ll never forget the way she looked that night, with her face lit up and her hair let down, it nearly reached to her waist… she tossed it this way and that, nodding and smiling to either side, as if she was a princess in one of my father’s stories, a beautiful princess with golden hair. Except hers was grey. She said it turned the night before she was married because she had sinned. I’d got no idea what she meant, not then, not for an age. Not till after she died and I found her marriage certificate and did some sums.’
The second biscuit doesn’t taste as good as the first, but he chews it manfully, like a punishment for sin. Serves him right for being so greedy.
‘Sin. What a funny little word. It sounds so friendly, so innocent somehow, you’d never guess how sinister it is. Sin, sinister. And how do you measure it? Deadly or venial. Greed’s one of the Deadlies, I know that, and what are the rest? Gluttony, Greed… what’s the difference between them? I’ve never understood. Then there’s Pride, Envy, Anger, Sloth… oh, yes and Lust. There we are, that’s seven. Lust, yes…’
He swallows the last bit of biscuit, almost with relief, brushes crumbs from his chest.
‘And what about Mother? Wearing a dress that wasn’t hers. That was a sin, all right, the sin of Vanity. No, wait a minute, that makes eight, that can’t be right. Oh, well, never mind. I thought she’d be angry when she saw me in the doorway, but she wasn’t. Do you know what she did? Curtseyed, dipped down and curtseyed to me, it was an extraordinary thing. And when she stood up, she said, “I could have been somebody if it wasn’t for…” She didn’t finish, she didn’t have to: she could have been somebody if it wasn’t for me. I was the sin that had turned her grey. She didn’t mean it, she loved me so much, too much, she just couldn’t show it, didn’t know how, or maybe she thought that was a sin too, the Sin of
Indulgence. Who knows? But at the time, I was ashamed. And she must have seen it, because you know what she did next? Kissed me. She almost never did that, hardly touched me at all. I didn’t realise till then how small she was; I was an inch taller even though I was only ten. And I knew then that I had to look after her, repay her, I suppose, atone for the sin. Make her somebody. It was a strange feeling, strange and grand. But I didn’t like it very much.’
Eva blows a raspberry, one of her favourite ploys to get his attention, knowing how much it annoys him.
‘All right, I know, you and Mother didn’t get on, but heavens above, she’s been dead for years, can’t you let it go at last?’
Another raspberry, becrumbed, revolting.
‘Oh, stop it, old chap. I mean, poor Mother, she had a terrible life, especially after Dad died. People avoided her, when they saw her in the street they crossed to the other side, even the church lot kept their distance. I overheard one of the neighbours, old Moxie I expect, she could be very tart, she said, “It’s a sorry sort of wife that cannot keep her man from dying.” I had no idea what she meant, but I was angry, I remember that. The funny thing is, Mother wouldn’t have minded. Well, she would, she’d have cut Moxie dead if she’d heard her, might even have slapped her. But in private she’d have agreed: it’s a sorry sort of wife that can’t keep her man from dying. She believed in guilt, you see, she thrived on it. Sin and guilt, guilt and punishment, forgiveness wasn’t an option, that was in God’s gift, not man’s and certainly not hers, she’d have thought that another indulgence.’
Like the biscuit, whose leftover sweetness cloys in his mouth and leaves crumbs stuck in his teeth. He picks at them with his thumbnail and thinks of his mother catching him out in small sins, venial sins, picking a scab, licking his knife, and hears her bathroom voice again, echoing in his head: ‘I know thy pride, and the naughtiness of thine heart…’ And the pettiness of his reply: ‘We could have been happy if it weren’t for you.’ Ah, but could they? Was it really her fault? Wasn’t it rather that…