by Patrick Gale
‘I visit her every day,’ Eustace told him quietly.
‘It can’t be easy for your father,’ Father Tony said. ‘I heard a little about—’
‘He manages. We have help.’
‘I should leave you in peace.’
‘Thank you.’
‘But shall we pray first?’
Eustace wanted to demur. He was not a Christian, not really, but neither was he bold or interested enough to be a professed atheist. He did feel, however, that prayer should be a silent, private activity. But Father Tony prayed anyway, loud enough for the nurses to hear, certainly loud enough for his mother to hear, and he used her first name, as though he knew her. It seemed to go on and on. It was deeply embarrassing, like spontaneously singing in a public place, and Eustace focused closely on his mother’s hand and the nearby laundry label on a hospital sheet until Father Tony was done. He was quite proud of himself for resisting the impulse to say ‘Amen’ at the end.
Father Tony finally stood up to go, coming round to lay a hand on Eustace’s shoulder as he did so.
‘Good boy, Eustace,’ he said. ‘God sees you.’
Then he padded away. He wore Hush Puppies. Granny would have hated him on sight. Unlike her daughter-in-law, she was impervious to charm and impressed only by principles.
‘It’s all right,’ he told his mother. ‘He’s gone now. That was awful!’ Then he continued his visit in his usual companionable silence. When he reached home that evening, he reported to his father as always, if only to say that there was no change, but he said nothing of the priest. He didn’t like to risk passing on Father Tony’s implied criticism of his father’s not visiting.
He had assumed it was a one-off thing, a chance meeting in a huge building where strangers came and went all the time. The next time he visited, however, Father Tony was there again, almost as though timing his arrival to coincide with Eustace’s. Eustace stopped far short, before the priest could spot him, and went instead to fetch a cup of strong tea and a soothingly bland iced bun from the canteen. He dawdled, making himself read a chapter from a geometry schoolbook before he returned, to give Father Tony time to leave.
When he touched his mother’s hand to greet her, he found the priest had tucked a simple wooden crucifix under it. He could see that this was meant in kindness but he was disturbed at how it emphasized her lack of choice in the matter. A doll, a book, a bar of chocolate, a bottle of beer, all could equally have been placed in such a way and each would equally have implied a choice she hadn’t made. Eustace pocketed the crucifix and, when he left, slipped into the hospital chapel, which lay on his route back to the bus stop. He left the ugly thing on a seat in there, where someone might pick it up, out of choice.
He caught a slightly later train and bus the next day and there was no sign of the priest. There was, however, a bouquet of very beautiful white flowers with a card propped up against it, which said, We’re all thinking of you. X .
‘There are some lovely flowers,’ he told his mother. ‘From people who are thinking of you and send a kiss. The picture is of . . .’ He turned the card over. ‘Oh. That’s nice. It’s a view of the suspension bridge.’
Because Vernon’s flowers were still looking good and the new bunch was still wrapped he decided to take it home in an effort to cheer his father. When he arrived he found a vase, filled it with water and arranged the flowers as best he could before setting them on a table in the sitting room window. They looked lovely and smelled even better than Vernon’s had. The houses in the magazines always had flower arrangements. He had looked at the gorgeous bucketfuls outside florists and been astonished at how much people were prepared to pay for such a fleeting pleasure. He imagined a future in which he regularly bought himself flowers with no thought of the cost.
‘Look,’ he told his father when he came in. ‘She already had Vernon’s by the bed so I brought these home for you.’
His father didn’t exclaim over their beauty or scent but merely asked whom they were from.
‘I don’t know,’ Eustace told him. ‘The card doesn’t give much away.’
‘Let me see.’
He took the little card from Eustace.
‘I don’t recognize the handwriting,’ Eustace said. ‘Do you?’
But his father only read the card with a frown, tossed it into the wastepaper basket and drifted from the room without further comment. It was unlike him to be so graceless. The next morning the beautiful flowers had vanished. Eustace spotted them later in the day room, where they were already wilting in the heat.
That night there was a letter waiting for him at home, from Naomi. Her handwriting was very young for her age and he remembered how she almost boasted of neglecting all her schooling for the cello. It was a funny letter, full of silly jokes and catchphrases from their short week together. Did you do D minor? it began. Well, did you?
She had discovered the Italians made nicknames by shortening from the front.
So you can be Ace or Azio and I can be Omi, which is easier to spell than Na, which would need a Y not to be pronounced Nah.
She gave a full account of the last night’s concert and gratifyingly added that Jean had explained that she was taking the place of a fine young player we hope to have back with us as a permanent student before too long . So get you, Maestro.
After supper he felt he must write her a letter in reply. He had no paper and envelopes so went to his mother’s little desk. There, sure enough, he found a pad of the Basildon Bond she liked – the smaller one because it meant short letters could be made to look longer. She was not one of Nature’s letter-writers, tending to resort to paper only when she needed to say thank you to people for presents or hospitality, neither of which happened very often. And she had recently abandoned her proper fountain pen for a Parker biro his father had given her for a birthday present. It was very smart, made of shiny metal Eustace liked to think was silver but which was probably just stainless steel. It wrote far better than the leaky plastic ones he tended to use at school, which had a way of unpredictably releasing blotches of sticky ink, which his hand then smeared across the exercise books as he wrote. So he picked up her Parker biro now, thinking to use it for a more impressive effect in his letter to Naomi.
One old-fashioned concession his mother maintained was a heavy address embosser. It had belonged to Granny – it belonged to the house really – and as a small boy he had been allowed to use it for his mother on the rare occasions when she had a letter to send. You tucked the paper carefully into a slot, pulled down a handle that was decorated a bit like her old manual sewing machine, and there, very chastely, was a colourless imprint of their address and telephone number. Only the machine was so old that the number was now too short and his mother had to spoil the elegant effect by writing in the extra digits when it was a letter to someone who needed to know them.
He tore off the top sheet in the pad, slid it in and pressed, admiring, as always, the neatness of the imprint produced and lamenting in advance that the messiness of his handwriting could never match it. He picked up his mother’s biro but had written no more than the date and Dear when he saw quite clearly the ghostly imprint of his own name where he was about to write Naomi’s. There were more words. A whole letter in fact.
He turned on the desk light in an effort to read it better but his mother’s incisive, rounded script looked like so many Os and Ys. He could make out the greedily scooping loops on her Gs, which Vernon had once told him were an indicator of need for pleasure and depth of sexual desire .
All the pencils in her pen pot were HBs, so much too hard, but he remembered she had sticks of charcoal somewhere from a short-lived attendance at art classes. He opened a few little drawers, having broken off to intercept and redirect huge Mrs Knapton, who had lost her way yet again, and drifted up the wrong stairs into the private area. He held the charcoal stick flat against the writing pad and gently swept it from side to side until his mother’s handwriting stood out white against
the surrounding grey.
Eustace . (He took the Dear as read.) By the time you come back from your course, I will have left to begin a new life where I doubt very much your father will want you to join me. It is nothing you or he have done wrong. I am simply in love, deeply in love, in a happy way I realized I had never been before. And once you love someone, it is hard to unlove them. I love you. I am proud of you. You will do very well without me. Mother X
He read it twice to be absolutely certain of its sense then used her good paper scissors to cut the letter into the smallest pieces he could manage. Then he crumpled them into his pocket so that he could drop them safely in a public litter bin next time he went out. But where was the original? He went to search his room carefully, looking in all the places she might have left a letter she wanted only him to find but there was no trace of it. Perhaps she had posted it and it was somehow delayed, but that was hard to credit, even with strikes and so on. Perhaps she had changed her mind and destroyed the original, as he had just destroyed its ghost? More disturbing, of course, was that his father might have intercepted it and been worrying how to break the news to him less abruptly.
Mrs Fowler summoned them to eat their supper shortly afterwards. They ate together in strenuously polite near-silence. Eustace realized it was completely out of the question either to tell his father what he had just discovered or to ask him even indirect questions about where his mother had been going when she had the accident.
He wrote the letter to Naomi after supper. He kept his tone light, said only that his mother was still in hospital and that he hoped to begin cello lessons again soon but that Carla Gold was out of action for a bit. He signed himself Azio because Ace looks like bragging.
He thought back repeatedly through the rest of the evening, while companionably watching television with his father and lying awake until sleep claimed him, and over and over again through his classes the next day, thought of her increasing absences and naked cheerfulness in recent months. And he saw that she was right: even had he not been so distracted by his music or by Vernon or whatever, there was nothing that could have been done, short of his father imprisoning her. Love had infected her as inevitably as any virus. He could no more have stopped her falling in love than he could have prevented her accident. This did not diminish a creeping feeling of desolation; whatever the fragility of her bond with his father, her maternal love had not been strong enough to hold her to them. Neither did it stop him idly speculating on what the man was like who had so inflamed her or feeling a curious envy of the passion she had tasted, poisonous fruit so seductive it had made her prepared to abandon them all, assuming their disgusted rejection of her in turn.
And, of course, she had left them nonetheless, vanishing into her medically managed unconsciousness as completely as she had planned to do into her mysterious lover’s house.
For two days he could not bear to visit her, although he loitered in the public library after school to let his father assume he had been to the hospital rather than risk raising the question of why he suddenly hadn’t gone. When guilt, love and curiosity overcame him on the third day and he returned, two things struck him as he entered the intensive care unit. Father Tony was there again, at her bedside, holding her hand, and her eyes were open, looking directly at Eustace as he approached.
The uncomplicated joy that burst up in him on seeing her restored to life made him break down in tears for the first time since early childhood. As he approached the bed, his knees buckled, and he found himself gasping and sobbing into her blanketed lap like a five-year-old. He felt her hand spasmodically grasping the back of his head and heard her voice, croaky from dehydration and underuse, saying hush , and there, there and Eustace .
And the priest, alarmed perhaps at this unexpected upwelling of raw emotion, was saying, ‘It’s perfectly natural. It’s to be expected.’ And also, ‘Thank you, Lord Jesus!’
At last embarrassment overcame relief and Eustace composed himself sufficiently to sit up and look at her. ‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘I . . . I thought you were dying.’
‘Blow your nose,’ she said wearily and slowly nudged the tissue box towards him.
She looked at once herself and much older, and slightly mad with her tufty hair. And her face had lost its symmetry; one side hung back from expression now, like the other half’s shyly reluctant twin. Perhaps it was just the trauma or residual sleepiness at work, but her voice appeared to have lost entirely the edge of irony that since childhood had made him brace himself slightly for each encounter with her, just as adults and painful experience taught one always to handle knives with care.
‘I did die,’ she told him slowly and there were tears in her eyes suddenly. ‘I left my body. I was up there in the corner of the room and it felt so good to be free! No more aches and pains. No more body. And I looked down and saw you at the bedside.’
‘Who? Me?’ Eustace asked. Had he stopped her dying?
‘No,’ she said flatly. ‘Him.’ And she gave Father Tony a mad, lopsided smile as though she had known and loved him all her life. ‘I saw light. A long, long tunnel with light at the end, where I longed to be, but there was a voice saying: Not yet. Go back . And then I was back and I heard him praying. Who are you again?’
‘I’m Father Tony.’ The priest seemed to grow an inch. ‘Shall we all pray?’
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Oh yes.’
‘I’ll phone home,’ Eustace said and hurried out to the payphone in the hall, passing two nurses and a doctor who were running towards the intensive care unit, alerted to the drama playing out in there.
Mrs Fowler answered and cried when he told her, which made him nearly cry again and realize she had been cooking in the house for his entire life.
The pips went before she could fetch his father.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
His mother had to stay in hospital for another month. She was moved twice in the next four weeks, once to a post-operative ward, where everyone had undergone head injuries or brain surgery and then to a rehabilitation unit. She had suffered a brain-stem injury through whiplash and, with it, a debilitating stroke. Her speech was slow and often slurred. Her right side was not quite paralysed but severely impaired, so that she had difficulty walking and grasping, though the nurses assured them all that most of these effects would pass with daily exercise and regular visits to a rehabilitation or physiotherapy centre. More disturbing was that her powers of reasoning were damaged. She regularly came out with the wrong words for things, just like Granny, and when she picked up a biro and tried to write a postcard, her writing was that of an infant, broad and uncontrolled.
She knew who they all were, though she sometimes stumbled saying Eustace and took to calling him angel, which might have been heartwarming were it not so entirely unlike her old self. She had become tactile in a way she never used to be, either. The old her had been controlled, even niggardly in her expressions of affection, but the returned her, as Eustace found he was thinking of her, was a toucher of cheeks and holder of hands. He might have welcomed this had it been more discriminating, had he felt occasionally singled out, but he soon saw that she called doctors angel as well, and touched the nurses’ cheeks with the same childlike wonder with which she touched his.
He tried in vain now to make his father visit. He lied. ‘She’s asking for you,’ he said. ‘She keeps asking where you are.’
But his father closed down at any mention of her or shrugged or left the room on some mumbled pretext. Thinking of the letter he had uncovered, Eustace could only imagine that his father had received something similar and was upset and angry and needed to punish her by withholding himself. Certainly Mrs Fowler made no attempt to urge him to go and just shook her head and wiped bleachy cloths over surfaces. Eustace could understand his father’s anger and withdrawal. His pleasure at his mother’s stumbling return to a kind of normality was tempered with the knowledge that she had reached the point of leaving them both for ever and with gladness.
&
nbsp; He mentioned his father to her whenever he could, continued to lie to her as well about how often he spoke of her and how much he wanted her home.
‘He doesn’t visit because he hates hospitals,’ he told her. ‘And because he’s so sad. He’s very sad all the time.’
But she just said things like, ‘Poor man. Poor, poor man.’ And sometimes she cried a little, as though his father were a wounded pet or dying bird whose suffering she was powerless to assuage. Just once, when she was on the rehabilitation ward and he was keeping her company on one of the shuffling walks she was now encouraged to make the length of a long corridor supported on two sticks, he ambushed her. He had the change ready in his pocket and as they slowly approached an unoccupied telephone booth, he darted from her side, rang home and stuffed in coins when Mrs Fowler answered.
‘I’ve got Mother here,’ he told her. ‘Dad said I should get her to ring him.’
And while she duly hurried to bring his father to speak, he held out the receiver to his mother. ‘Dad’s coming to the phone for you.’ She took the receiver carefully with both hands, still not trusting her right one to work on its own, and held it to her ear, long fingers splayed out along it in a way that would have looked elegant had it not been strange.
‘Hello?’ she said uncertainly. ‘Hello?’ Then she looked confused and terribly sad and held the receiver out to him again. ‘No one there,’ she said and he could hear the deep purr of the dialling tone that meant his father had hung up.
The longer his father held himself apart, the more Jesus and his handsome friend Father Tony were filling the vacancy he left. The priest visited every day. He quickly intuited that his presence made her son uncomfortable and would take his leave of her soon after Eustace’s arrival at her bedside, touching his shoulder with a big, muscular hand the way he always did and saying,
‘I’ll let you have Mum to yourself.’
But still Eustace was aware of the territory Tony and Jesus were stealthily annexing in her heart. He often watched from the far end of the ward and saw their heads bowed together in oddly intimate prayer or in confidential conversation. He saw how Father Tony’s manner began subtly to alter around her, the way an interloping friend’s did when increased confidences and shared private knowledge let them assume new assurance in a circle of old intimates.