Beth paused for a moment. Alice seemed to have sighed, and her head had moved its position slightly. She leaned closer.
‘Alice? Can you hear me?’
Alice’s eyelids flickered, she moaned softly once and then settled again, her head resuming its former position.
Beth realized that she’d been holding her breath. Still staying close, she started to speak again, this time more softly.
‘What I really want, Mother, is for the two of us to have good memories of each other. I don’t want you to die thinking I’m angry at you, or that I hate you. These letters are the most precious things you’ve ever given me, because you’ve given me back yourself.’
Silence. Nothing. But it didn’t matter, not any more. This letter, and the others, had begun to form the most complete picture Beth had ever had of herself, as a daughter, a sister, part of a family. Warts and all, she’d begun to know herself, to understand what had made her into the woman she was. With a powerful sense of realization, Beth knew now that she’d spent most of her adult life missing her mother. Alice’s constant physical presence had made the emotional distance between them all the more immense. She had always felt remote, once she, Beth, had crossed the threshold of the childhood years. It was as though Alice had stayed behind, imprisoned by her longing for the little tendernesses she’d once shared with her baby daughter, dismayed that the ugly duckling had somehow managed to escape the nest, and had flown away with all the others. Her most dramatic flight, at eighteen, still hovered between them: neither of them had ever forgiven the other for that. Neither of them had ever even spoken of it to the other: Beth still felt it as a dead weight between them. She wished she could make that time all right again – for both of them – before it was too late.
She had missed her father too, of course, but in a different way – his presence had been so complete while he was alive that he’d left no shattered pieces for her to pick up after he died. Alice was right, she had found it hard to let her daughter go.
Leaving home the way she had had been inevitable, Beth reflected now, in the light of all that had gone before. But she had been too cruel, much too heartless. She could only hope that Laura would not make her suffer in the same way. Alice’s shocked face, the tight angry line of her mouth, the blaze of disappointment between them – she could feel it all still, could even see the little white china jug with the gold rim sitting on the kitchen table, full of cold water, while her mother made pastry for an apple tart.
‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ Alice was saying. ‘How do you plan to earn your living when you’ve no qualifications to do anything? I’ve never heard of anything so daft in all my life.’
She’d rolled the pastry emphatically, banging the rolling pin onto the wooden table-top as though to beat Beth’s words into submission. The whole kitchen was bright with anger.
‘I’ve made up my mind. I’m going to London for the summer. I can stay with friends until I find something. There’s lots of work in London.’
‘What friends?’
Alice cored an apple viciously.
‘Pete’s brother has a flat there; he’s said we can stay with him.’
Such naked defiance had stopped Alice’s knife in its tracks.
‘You’re going to London with him?’
‘Yes. Why not? I’m eighteen; you can’t stop me.’
‘Well.’
Alice placed the pie plate on the table and wiped her hands on her apron.
‘If you’ve no respect for yourself, then I suppose I can’t expect any better from him.’
‘What’s that supposed to mean?’
They were glaring at each other now, furious.
‘You know exactly what I mean. Go ahead, ruin your life. Throw it away, why don’t you, and never mind the sacrifices that were made for your education.’
‘I’ve no intention of throwing my life away. I’m talking about a summer, for God’s sake! And I don’t need reminding about all the sacrifices that were made for me – I’ve heard about them often enough already.’
Even then, Beth had known she was going too far, but she couldn’t help herself. The words were out, curling like blue smoke into the atmosphere around them, trailing devastation in their wake.
‘Go ahead, then!’ Alice had shouted after her. ‘I never thought I’d see any daughter of mine carry on like this! Don’t expect me to pick up the pieces when your precious friends let you down!’
There had been more, too, much more, although Beth was now hazy on the details. It was all so long ago – well over twenty-five years. But if she couldn’t remember the words, she could certainly recall the hurt; it had haunted her daily for months. That same scene in the kitchen had stayed with her all summer, and for many years afterwards, making it impossible for her to find any firm ground between herself and her mother. It had been quicksand, all the way.
Poor Alice! If only she’d known! If she’d been terrified about sexual shenanigans, she needn’t have worried. Pete and herself barely survived the mail boat to Holyhead. They fought for the entire journey, arriving at Euston station at six a.m., gritty-eyed and fractious. They fought, too, for the whole week they stayed in Brian’s flat, until he threatened to throw them both out, her and his brother.
In the end, it was Pete who moved out first, finding work for the summer on the building sites in Cricklewood, and entering with terrified bravado into the hard-working, hard-drinking Irish navvy community there – always knowing he was going home in September to the safety of university.
‘What are you going to do?’ Brian had asked her, shortly after Pete left.
‘I don’t know,’ she’d said, thoroughly miserable and broke.
‘Can you type?’
‘Yeah, we did a course in school, in fifth year. But I’m a bit rusty.’
‘That doesn’t matter. There’s lots of work for temps. That’s what Annie, my girlfriend, did for the first year. You’ll get your speeds up with a bit of practice.’
‘Do you think so?’ Beth had brightened immediately, seeing the prospect of having to go home with her tail between her legs slowly beginning to recede.
‘Get yourself dressed up and go round all the agencies tomorrow. You can stay here for a couple of weeks, until Annie comes back. After that, I’m sorry, but you’ll have to go.’
A couple of weeks was just what she wanted, just enough to prove to Alice, and to herself, that she knew what she was doing. She’d walked everywhere, saving Tube fares whenever she could. The agency windows had been full of ads, and she’d been prepared to lie. As a result, she got work straight away as a dictaphone typist in an engineering firm. Clutching her A to Z, she’d found her way, terrified, to her first placement. She’d been supposed to stay for a fortnight, and ended up there for five months. The money was good, the work was dull but easy, and her confidence grew daily. These people treated her like a grown-up. She remembered writing stiff little postcards home, ostensibly to James, but knowing that Alice would see them and be hurt.
She stroked her mother’s forehead, still leaning close to her.
‘Do you know, I was so homesick in London that it was like a physical pain? But I was too stubborn to come home, and you were too stubborn to write to me. Do you remember the postcard I sent James with my new address on it? It was just before Christmas, and I’d got my own place, sharing with Angela. You remember Angela, the girl I’d met in the hostel? I really wanted you to write to me then and invite me home for Christmas. I willed you to send me a letter, a card, anything. I’d have been home in a flash.’
The shine had gone off London for her by that stage, Beth reflected now. All her wages seemed to be eaten up by the astoundingly high ransom demanded by landlords and London Transport. And she was getting sick of typing. There had to be more to life. Three years at university in Dublin was beginning to feel like a much more attractive option. The only problem was having to go home, having to admit defeat. She’d have to sit it out with her mother, who wou
ld claim to have known this would happen, would insist that she’d been right all along.
‘But you sent James to get me, didn’t you?’
Beth smiled at the memory. Twenty-three years old, already looking as grave and responsible as a man well into his forties, James had sat on the floor outside her flat, waiting for her, late one wet December evening. There was just one week to go before Christmas.
By then, she’d had no pride left. She’d burst into tears, hugging James as though there were no tomorrow.
‘It’s all right, Sis. I’m here to take you home. Don’t cry.’
And it could have worked. She’d been so lonely that any welcome from Alice would have been enough.
‘But you couldn’t forgive me, and I couldn’t forgive you. Even now, we can barely talk about it. You’ve said nothing at all in your letters about London, and here am I, feeling that it’s already too late. That Christmas was a disaster. We kept flaring up at each other: I took everything you said as a criticism, you took everything I said as an insolence.’
Poor James had been stuck in the middle. He’d tried to act as the diplomat, tried to fix things between them. But nothing had worked. She and Alice had made their way around each other warily, when they were not fighting, like reluctant partners in some slow and circular dance, locked into repeating the same steps over and over again, standing on each other’s toes, going nowhere.
He’d come into her room on St Stephen’s day to find her packing her rucksack.
‘It’s hopeless, James. She won’t even try to see my point of view. There’s just no talking to her.’
He’d looked at her, helplessly.
‘Maybe if I . . .’
Beth remembered that she’d cut him off, rudely.
‘No – we’ve tried all that. Forget it. I’m going back. I don’t know why she sent you to bring me home in the first place.’
That first Christmas had set the pattern for many years to come, until Laura.
Suddenly, Beth felt that there was something different about the room. The quality of the air had changed, something imperceptible had shifted. She glanced around her, quickly. All the night-lights were burning, the door was still closed, there was no sense of a chill in the air – but something had altered. Quickly, she stuffed the letter back into her pocket. Terrified, she looked down into Alice’s face. Her skin suddenly looked smoother, somehow, more stretched across her cheekbones. There was no longer such an obvious pull on the left-hand side of her mouth: it was as though all of Alice’s features were suddenly merging into anonymity, the last traces of personality rapidly disappearing. The slight rustle of old breathing had stilled. Her chest no longer rose and fell.
Beth shook her, almost roughly, panic rising from the pit of her stomach.
‘Alice? Alice? Can you hear me?’
At that moment, Alice’s head turned towards her. Her mouth opened and she breathed one long, guttural breath. Then there was silence.
Frantically, Beth reached for her pulse. Nothing. She laid her head down on the thin chest. Silence.
‘Oh God, oh God, oh God – James! Come quickly! James!’
She flung open the bedroom door, screaming for her brother, turning back to Alice again, running from one part of the room to another, like someone demented. After everything they’d been through, was this it? No balm of resolution, no kind ending?
He was there instantly, his eyes wide and shocked, vulnerable without his glasses.
‘I think she’s gone, I think she’s gone!’
Beth was now weeping uncontrollably, great gasping sobs that rose up on tides of anguish from somewhere deep inside her.
James stepped over to the bed and took his mother’s hand in his.
‘Ah, Jesus,’ he said softly.
The compassion in his voice told Beth that it was all over.
Tenderly, he held Alice’s mouth closed for a few moments and folded her hands carefully across her chest. After what seemed like a very long while, he leaned over to Beth.
‘Here,’ he said gently, ‘this is for you.’
Beth wiped her eyes and took the wedding ring he handed her, sobbing once more as she put the ring onto her own finger, rocking back and forwards in her grief, trying to dull the pain with constant movement. The choking voice she heard somewhere in the room bore no resemblance to her own. James came and put his arms around her then, his warm hands pressing against her back once more.
She leaned against him, gratefully, remembering the sudden sting of her mother’s hand against her kneecaps and the bright, painful vision of a greying head bent low over the black and gold Singer sewing-machine.
*
‘What should we do now?’
Beth wiped her eyes and looked up at her brother, who still had his arms wound tightly around her. They had stayed like that for several minutes, neither wanting to move away from the warmth of the other. Time stood all around them, still and silent.
‘What time is it?’
She looked at her watch.
‘Ten to four.’
James touched Alice’s forehead and was surprised at the coldness there.
‘There’s no point in calling anyone at this hour. Let’s wait until the morning. I’d like to sit with her for a while.’
Beth nodded.
‘I can’t believe she’s gone. So quickly! All over in what – nine, ten days?’
James didn’t answer her at once.
‘I feel very guilty that I didn’t tell you sooner, Beth – Alice didn’t want me to let you know. She had a mild stroke a few weeks ago – a sort of dress-rehearsal for the real thing, I suppose. I only found out recently myself that she’d seen this coming since July.’
Beth looked at him blankly. Why was he telling her this? Of course, he didn’t know that she already knew all that from the letters.
‘She made me promise to keep it a secret. She said something about telling you one, too, and that we could both swap secrets once she was dead.’
He shrugged.
‘I don’t know if she was raving, or what. She’d just had the first stroke, the mild one, at that stage. I didn’t pay too much attention. But I am sorry for not telling you. She had this awful bloody knack of making me do exactly as she wanted.’
He looked towards the bed, shaking his head, his eyes full.
Beth stood up immediately.
‘Don’t be sorry. She made me do exactly the same thing.’
He looked at her, startled.
‘What do you mean?’
She walked over towards the bedside locker.
‘First time in my life I ever did as she asked me, without question. You’ve no idea how many times I was tempted, how many hints I tried to leave you.’
James just looked at her, his mouth slightly open, eyes blue and confused.
Beth pulled open the locker door, dug her hand into the silky depths of the cosmetic bag, and handed him his bundle of letters.
‘I found these the night I arrived. I’m sorry, too, James, I probably should have told you. But it was really important to me that I didn’t let her down, just this once.’
His face had paled.
Beth hunched beside him, uncertainly. God, she hoped he wouldn’t be angry with her over this. She couldn’t bear it if he punished her now with one of his silences. He turned the letters over and over, as though he couldn’t quite believe in them.
Finally, he looked at her.
‘She’d have been proud of you,’ he said quietly.
Beth straightened up, tearful.
‘I don’t know about that – all I know is that I had to do as she asked for once in my life, without question or qualification, even if it was too late to make any difference.’
She paused for a moment, looking at the still figure in the bed. It helped that she no longer looked like Alice. That’s not my mother, Beth thought suddenly. Not really. She’s everywhere else in this house, but that’s not her lying there. Suddenly, she remembe
red something from way back, something that Alice had said that had struck her forcibly at the time.
‘Alice had one superstition that I know of,’ she said to James. ‘Do you remember when Granny McKinney died?’
He nodded.
‘And we all went down to Sally’s?’
‘Yes.’
‘I asked Alice why the bedroom window was wide open. She looked at me, all surprised. “That’s to let her spirit free,” she said. “You must always do that when someone dies.” ’
James looked at Alice, then nodded to Beth.
‘Go ahead, then.’
Beth pulled the curtains back and opened the window wide. James stood, his hands in his pockets. Both of them waited until the room grew cold. Beth shut the window again, feeling slightly foolish.
He had sat down by the bed again, back to his usual place.
‘I’m going to stay here until morning. Why don’t you get some rest?’
Beth hesitated. Then she saw the way he was holding on to his letters. He wanted her to go.
‘Will you call me if you change your mind?’
He nodded.
‘I will. Try and sleep. We’ve a busy few days ahead.’
‘Good night then – I’ll see you in a couple of hours.’
He waited until she had almost left the room.
‘Beth?’
‘Yes?’
‘We did everything we could, didn’t we?’
It was half-question, half-statement.
‘Yes,’ she said, really believing it. No guilt, no ‘if onlys’. They had done everything they could. ‘We did.’
*
Beth tried to cry quietly. She didn’t want to disturb James: God alone knew what he was having to read, right now. She hoped he’d tell her; she’d like to sit up all night with him soon, and pool her memories with his. She had the sense that Alice hadn’t quite finished with her, that there would have been more letters, had she had the time. But it was enough: her mother had left her with more than enough.
And Laura’s birth had made a difference between them: Beth knew that she had still remained hostile, long after Laura’s arrival, always on the lookout for any slip-up on Alice’s part. She had brought her baby home for the first time proudly, defensively, waiting for a sign, any sign, that she was not a good enough mother. Even at the time, she had had to admit that Alice had behaved impeccably. Struggling to breastfeed Laura, Beth had watched her mother button her lip, over and over again. Not once did she voice what Beth could see her thinking: That child’s hungry, give her a bottle. Like all her generation, she had believed in science rather than nature. It was a comfortable belief: baring the breast was at best distasteful, at worst – well – somehow, indefinably, immoral. Almost defiantly, Beth had fed her baby in front of Alice in the most public place she could find: Bewley’s café in Grafton Street. She could still remember the look on Alice’s face as she had unbuttoned her blouse. Seated in the discreet, red velvet booth, she had been conscious of a desire to shock, to provoke a reaction of some kind, to continue the fight that had begun between them when she was twelve or thirteen.
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