Mother

by Nicholas Royle

  B-r-ring! It was early evening. My mother on the phone. She didn’t waste words. It’s the same thing. It took me a few moments to apprehend. My brother had got the results of his latest test. An all-clear would have moved him on to no further check-up for twelve months. But it was back. It’s the same thing. I was leaning against the dilapidated marble fireplace. With a few gentle parting words my mother hung up. I was hysterical. My girlfriend was in the room. The bedsit had no space for privacy even if I’d tried to seek it. My eyes were streaming head flowing fingers clinging to the battered mantelpiece of the defunct fireplace as I said the same thing. It’s the same thing I said over and over and over. My girlfriend was frightened. She didn’t know what was happening.

  My mother’s words have lasted longer than the building she telephoned. I remember years later revisiting Oxford and happening to walk along this road to see: nothing. The bedsit and steep gloomy staircase that led up to it and to other bedsits and the Beer Shop that had stood below it: demolished. But the wall with its marble fireplace was still visible. Exposed. Scorched and blackened. From another time. Like something out of the Blitz. Or out of the crazed scrap of fiction I wrote soon after the phone call. A circular horror story called ‘Telephoning Home’. There’s a character who is peering into a brown paper bag containing the cans of soup and vegetables and so on that he is in the process of purchasing from his local corner shop and the shop-owner also peering into the bag remarks: Uncanny how similar tins look innit? A displaced stammering of what my mother said. The entire story in my ear mere embellishment over and over of those four words: It’s the same thing.

  The specific clinical name was never spoken. Alveolar soft part sarcoma. According to one consultant it was a cancer so rare he knew of only one other documented case. Somewhere in Russia. Nowadays its existence seems to be acknowledged all over the place. It affects children and – less often – young adults. It continues to have a very poor prognosis. And it has come to be known by its acronym: ASPS. ‘Have I the aspic in my lips?’ Cleopatra asks. Then she applies an asp to her breast in order to become a nurse and mother for the last time: ‘With thy sharp teeth this knot intrinsicate / Of life at once untie… / … Peace, peace! / Dost thou not see my baby at my breast, / That sucks the nurse asleep?’ And then Applying another asp to her arm she drops. It’s the most beautiful death in Shakespeare. Gentle as a lover’s pinch. First the mouth then breast then arm. The course of my brother’s fate in reverse. First the arm then lungs chest back brain and at last the tongue. Tripping a death-rattle too awful my mother locked upstairs in the bathroom howling inconsolable for the rest of life the rest of us men of stones. Tripping the last thing my mother did in the care home. The fall and cut to the head that precipitated the least Cleopatra-like parting on earth. ASPS: what oncological clown thought this acronym fitting?

  When fitting it was my mother who took charge. Just before the onslaught of the final year a consultant at the hospital in Exeter laughed as he explained to my brother the reason for the fits: The cancer’s got to your brain. It was she who stepped in as nurse at home when my brother had his seizures and shifted him on to his side to make sure he didn’t swallow his tongue or his own vomit. As ever the one cleaning up. The one watching.

  Whatever happens you mustn’t end up bitter and twisted. This was a term of special force. At once half-humorous turn of everyday speech and classical rhetorical figure: hendiadys. Ancient Greek for ‘two-through-one’. A twofer. Like hearth and home or sound and fury or cheap and cheerful. Bitterness is twisted up. In a bitter twist. Few verdicts were more damning than when my mother called someone bitter and twisted. Even after her younger son’s excruciating years of suffering and godless exit she resisted any ‘bitter and twisted’. The eighteenth-century philosopher Immanuel Kant speaks of the moral law within us akin to the starry heavens above our heads. ‘Bitter and twisted’ was my mother’s phrase for those who recognised this law but ended up with their perspectives awry. Which is not to say she lived on in any simple quietism. She liked her kitchen to be spick and span (another hendiadys she was wont to use). Always clear. The little bone china ashtray in which she’d stubbed out a cigarette would be washed and in the drying rack before she lit up again. The simple white china cup washed up as soon as she’d drunk her coffee. An object remaining on the side in the kitchen for more than a few hours was exceptional. For instance the kaleidoscope. But at some moment she had written out the words of Dylan Thomas’s ‘Do not go gently into that good night’ and on occasion would bring it out. A slip of paper in her lovely simple rounded handwriting leaning against the radio or Formica upstand. Then it would go undercover again. Into a kitchen drawer with her little scissors and binoculars and painkillers and handkerchiefs. Never far away: do not go gently. Still I’ve sometimes wondered if my mother’s battle against ‘bitter and twisted’ (an aspect of her resistance to whatever fixes and freezes) wasn’t what sent her mad.

  Flowers

  After the First World War her father moved to Canada. In recognition of his contribution to the war effort (as a horse vet) William McAdam was given thirty acres to farm just outside Winnipeg. He and Emily said farewell to family they would in all likelihood never see again and voyaged off for a new life. After a few years the harvest failed. They lost everything. By now with two young daughters (Peggy and Nettie) they migrated south to Chicago looking for work. My grandfather got a job in the construction industry. Building skyscrapers. That was when he discovered he suffered from vertigo. The family gave up. They returned to Drymen. His brother Watty was working in the field as my grandfather came into view. Watty looked up and saw it was his brother returning. He looked down again and went on working. The emotions were too much.

  After my brother died that was how my mother worked in the green chasms of the garden. In the beds and on the banks. Hemmed in by her buddleias and hydrangeas. Amid roses orchids irises tiger lilies montbretia primroses daffodils narcissi pansies violets saxifrage lavender sunflowers begonias geraniums fuchsias and so many other flowers. All living. Thriving and other.

  They had to be living. She hated cut flowers. Whenever a guest brought a bunch to the house my mother exclaimed: How beautiful! And then as if already undertaking a dying vigil she raced to put them in the nearest conceivable container of water.

  Other Men’s Flowers: this was the title of one of my mother’s cherished books of poetry. A.P. Wavell’s anthology was first published in the year her mother died. The title is from Montaigne: ‘I have gathered a posie of other men’s flowers and nothing but the thread that binds them is my own.’ Other men’s and other women’s. The thread of the anthology (notes Wavell) is his own memory. So many hours and so many evenings passed in the quiet Devon cottage at the kitchen table reading poetry to my mother: Dante Wyatt Shakespeare Marlowe Donne Herbert Marvell Milton Cowper Gray Blake Wordsworth Coleridge Shelley Keats Byron Tennyson Brontë Whitman Dickinson Rimbaud the Rossettis the Brownings Fitzgerald Lear Baudelaire Rimbaud Hopkins Swinburne Dowson Owen Rosenberg Apollinaire Sorley Moore Eliot Lawrence H.D. Yeats Mayakovsky Brecht MacDiarmid Bunting Auden Neruda Douglas Stevens Bishop Mandelstam Plath Hughes Snyder Lowell Stevie Smith Patti Smith Larkin Heaney O’Hara Ashbery Allen Fisher Ponge Murray Prynne. Not to mention my own juvenile screed. She with her instant coffee. Me with my whisky. Others’ poems.

  She never wrote any herself – apart from the provoking little birthday poem for my uncle John. She listened to everything. Sitting with her milky coffee and smoking her low-tar cigarettes. Sometimes knitting at the same time. Getting up to empty the ashtray. Or to make herself another Nescafé. Or – much relished by my father – to remove from the oven a full-cream-milk rice pudding in its dark golden coat. Or (most months of the year) to fill or refill the hot-water bottle she loved to maintain in her lap.

  To me the meanest flower that blows can give

  Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears.

  These are the final lines of Wordsworth’
s ode about childhood memory and the loss of imaginative vitality that is already traumatic to him in his mid-twenties. He means ‘meanest’ in the sense of most lowly and inferior. Petty and insignificant. A flower not even worthy of being named. But also a flower that means most by not being named. The most meaning flower. It’s another man’s flower. Or floweret. In an unfinished ode published a few years earlier Thomas Gray speaks of ‘the meanest floweret of the vale’. All flowers are others’. Others’ others. Other to them. Them other. The mother. It has to do with something too deep for tears. A thinking of and through the otherness of the mother. A melancholy that is also a power. What gives of mourning.

  Handbag

  There is a photograph of my mother and father some time in the early 1980s. By a weir somewhere around Oxford. I like its simplicity. The sun is shining. There are trees and water and a footbridge in the background. My parents are close to one another. They are together and smiling as I take the picture. They look happy even if this is during the great eerie interval.

  For me now the punctum of this photograph is my mother’s handbag. What a fabulous and bizarre object! She took it with her everywhere. From our youth my brother and I had a kind of veneration for our mother’s handbag. It wasn’t identical across the years. She would every so often acquire another one and we would have to adjust: now it was black with silver clasps and now it was brown with brass. It was where we weren’t allowed to go. But it was right in front of us. More than anything or anywhere else in our house this strange unliving creature was a site of secrecy and allure. It had something of the quality of the Tardis in Doctor Who. You could always be surprised by its capaciousness. It could always turn out to contain something you never thought could be in there. We would ask her to show us what was in her handbag and on occasion she would do so. Not in a comprehensive fashion. Emptying the contents out as if in a police search. But she would permit a brief gaze within. Or she would extract one item after another but always leave us with the distinct impression that there was more in reserve. Some further mystery concealed.

  Most or all of the following would be present at any one time:

  cigarettes

  cigarette lighter

  face make-up (a gold compact case with a swirl design)

  lipstick

  purse containing money and cards

  embroidered handkerchief

  comb or hairbrush

  scrap of paper with poetry on (anything from Shakespeare to Dylan Thomas)

  suckers (boiled sweets or mints)

  chocolate (Cadbury’s or Galaxy milk)

  Mother: A Memoir

  small pair of scissors

  Anadin or Dispirin (for headaches)

  hayfever tablets (seasonal)

  ballpoint pen

  shopping list

  In our later teenage years my brother and I would raid our mother’s handbag for a cigarette. Or for small sums of cash. But these thefts were open secrets. The fundamental mysteriousness of the handbag never went away. For me now it is like the car that Neil Young sings about in ‘Long May You Run’. It is here in the photograph but nowhere in the world. And nowhere in her handbag did my mother keep photographs. This seems more peculiar in the retrospect light of several decades. Our house was never decorated or blazoned with family photos. My mother did not keep any either in her handbag or in any albums. Photographs were consigned to a chest-of-drawers where they lay unlooked at. Often for months or years at a time.

  The instant of her death

  The instant of her death that was not her death. I was around ten and she and I were walking together hand in hand along the seafront at North Berwick. We’d gone past the ‘buddy’ beach and the open air saltwater swimming pool and were wandering along the promenade to the east of it and she had promised me a ’99 and the ice-cream van was just a hundred yards ahead and I became aware of someone shouting but only after the sound of glass breaking and my mother falling to the ground. The promenade was parallel to a road and the road to the edge of a golf course. The shout might be assembled after the event as a ‘Fore!’ At the time I had no knowledge of this word. It is like the warning questioned and mocked by twelve-year-old Maud in Elizabeth Bowen’s A World of Love: ‘Beware Low-flying Aircraft’. Someone shouts ‘Fore!’ and you are supposed to do what? Freeze? Dive sideways? Drop to the ground? Jump up in the air?

  At first I thought my mother had gone to ground by her own volition. In my unconscious I suppose I assumed that the beginning of any event emerged from her. It took me some moments to realise what had happened. People were crowding around us in gasps and shock. My mother had been hit in the head by a golfball.

  I don’t recall now whether I thought she was dead already or was overwhelmed just in the aftermath by the reality of the possibility. Helen McAdam’s ‘Who’s turned the lights out?’ in 1938 evokes the instant of one’s death as the abrupt and random ease of someone flicking a switch. Here was a man who had tried to turn my mother’s lights out now striding across the road red-faced blustering speaking in a crusty English accent of the sort affected by well-to-do Scottish and English gents alike not so much apologising as explaining blah blah he had given warning he had done all he could awfully sorry blah fluster blah bluster it was quite out of his hands.

  My mother who might very well have been stone dead returned to an upright position. Dazed and disorientated but unharmed. The golf ball had struck full pelt on the side of her head. Smashing the glass in the right eye of her spectacles and sending them clean off her head but leaving her without physical injury. I’m not sure she even requested compensation for the cost of the shattered lens. Everyone just reeled away from this scene of everyday miracle speechless.

  Book

  What is a book? On a shelf at home I find ‘a bundle of tales’ by G.A. Henty entitled Yarns on the Beach. On the inside cover a presentation slip has been pasted in: ‘Drymen School Board. Drymen Public School. Third Prize. Awarded to: William Macadam. For: Excellence in Attendance. During Session 1897–98.’ Appended below this are the signatures of the chairman and headmaster.

  A book is not like any other object in the world. But when it is supplemented with some striking inscription or annotation it becomes something different altogether. What might it have meant to my mother’s father to have received this book at the age of seven? What kind of village school was it that made a ‘third prize’ for ‘attendance’ appropriate or necessary? No doubt having to walk three miles in all Scottish weathers to the school in question had some bearing on the matter. It is the only book I have that has any direct connection with Gugga. I treasure it because I loved him and because my mother treasured it. The poignancy of the inscription survives in a world of memory over which there is no dominie.

  I take down my mother’s copy of The Poetical Works of William Blake. It’s an Oxford University Press book edited by John Sampson. On the inside cover up in the left corner she has written ‘K.B. MacAdam. June 1948.’ I am puzzled and delighted by her apparent misspelling of the name. Her cousin Ian changed the spelling of his name by deed poll in 1939 from ‘McAdam’ to ‘Macadam’. It is probable that the earlier family name was Macadam and shifted later to McAdam. (But every one of them was deep down – beneath the palimpsest – a MacGregor. As is evident from the old MacGregor tartan trousers that my mother and her sister imposed on me and my cousin Mike – captured in a photograph taken in October 1960. I recall in the late 1980s visiting Balquhidder churchyard with my mother and her impish amusement at reading the inscription on Rob Roy’s gravestone: ‘MACGREGOR DESPITE THEM’.) Her ‘K.B. MacAdam’ is a further variant. The only one of her kind. She doesn’t specify a day in June but it’s hard not to suppose a birthday connection: she turned twenty-one that month. I am struck not just by the bareness of the inscription but also by the more or less pristine pages of her Blake – a poet in whose work she was a great mental traveller. She kept this volume unblemished. As if unread. She was the same with certain items of chi
na. The finest plates or jugs or decanters were never used. They were stowed in safety in the display cabinet in the dining room.

  Then I pick up a pamphlet called Beethoven’s Op. 18 Quartets by W.H. Hadow. It’s one in a series called The Musical Pilgrim. The fly-leaf bears the inscription: ‘For Kathleen with best wishes for Xmas 1952 from Percy’. It also bears the stamp and address of where Percy purchased it: W. and G. Foyle Ltd. Booksellers (119–126 Charing Cross Road). Who was Percy? I recall my mother mentioning the name. Was he a family friend? An admirer? A lover-to-be? Or a lover lost? As in the Romeo and Juliet darkness of the second quartet. Percy’s pamphlet comes closest to my sense of a book as musical abyss. Hadow concludes his account of Beethoven’s works:

  Though we learn the notes until we are letter-perfect, we shall never master their secret: every time that we come back to it we shall meet it with fuller comprehension, like the face of a familiar friend which grows more beloved with every day of added experience and converse.

  One could listen to the six quartets and read what Hadow has to say about them over and over and never get a heartbeat closer to what this music or this pamphlet or Percy meant to my mother. I imagine a memoir of musical precipices. Through a filament a-spin. Beyond and before meaning. A thread to read. Impossible strand of sound in the solitary gray hair at the end of my 1967 india-paper Bible.