Mother Can You Hear Me?

by Margaret Forster

  ‘Mother,’ Angela whispered, laying a cool hand on Mother’s even cooler arm. ‘Mother, can you hear me? I’ve brought you some tea.’ She put the rose-covered china tea cup and saucer to which Mother had taken a fancy down on the bedside table and crossed the room to open the curtains. The last leaves had fallen off the pear tree. She stood looking at it for a moment, wishing the leaves were golden and brown instead of a shrivelled, dried-out black. Pear trees were sad in autumn. Here and there underneath the tree she could see the odd wasp-eaten fruit, rotting in the soil, an ugly, slimy thing. The tree was still beautiful in spring, thick with white blossom, each flower upon it perfect in every detail, some as huge as roses, but the fruit always began to fall before it was ripe because the tree, old as the house, was stricken by some mysterious disease that made the fruit useless year after year. Ben said they ought to chop it down and plant another but she would not hear of it. The tree to her was lovely.

  ‘Mother,’ she said, louder, injecting a note of brisk authority into her voice, her teacher’s voice, ‘Mother, come on, wake up, you’re like Rip Van Winkle. Have this tea before it gets cold. It’s the most beautiful morning—look, slightly misty, but the sun is going to come through any minute. Sadie has gone off already—you should have seen her with that rucksack—I can’t imagine her walking more than a hundred yards from café to café.’ On and on she chattered, tidying the table with Mother’s things on it, picking out the dead flowers from the vase on the window sill, twitching the bed covers, straightening them, waiting for Mother to make some sign. She made none. Standing at the end of the bed Angela studied her. Her eyes were still closed, the eyelids heavily veined and the grey lashes at the end stubby and bedraggled. Under each of Mother’s nostrils there was a single blob of blood, thick and clotted, entirely blocking her nose. Making a small sound of annoyance at her own neglect, Angela moved to the head of the bed, handkerchief in hand, and wiped the spots of blood away. Through the thin fabric of the handkerchief they felt hard and obstinate. She wiped more firmly, stifling the repugnance that threatened to overwhelm her, and all at once a great stream of dark, thick blood poured out, soaking the handkerchief, running down into Mother’s half-open mouth, draining into it, draining ludicrously into the pink crevices where her teeth should have been and into the wrinkles round the corner of her mouth, and then like some poisonous brackish stream flowing onwards down her neck and onto the white coverlet where a stain, wide and long, spread rapidly across sheets and blankets.

  Mesmerized, her own hand holding the sodden handkerchief sticky and wet, Angela watched Mother’s blood soak the bed. Nervously, knowing it was no good, she dabbed and dabbed at Mother’s nose, looking to see if the bleeding had stopped, pulling at the stained sheets to take their appalling redness away from Mother, who did not like mess. Somewhere, a long way off, she heard the boys thundering about. There was no one to whom she could shout for help even if any sound would come from her dry mouth. A memory came to her of a diagram in a first-aid book—a person with a nose bleed ought to be flat on their back, their head only slightly raised, and a cold compress should be applied to their forehead. She pulled the three pillows from behind Mother’s head one by one and let Mother fall back, and then she grabbed a towel and managed to move her shaking legs in the direction of the little downstairs bathroom where she soaked the towel in cold water and squeezed it out and returned to lie it across Mother’s head. The bleeding stopped. Cautiously, afraid to be mistaken, she began wiping the blood away with the towel, stroking Mother’s face with the thick bulky material, watching drops of water slide across the sticky surface of her skin. It had stopped. Nothing more was coming from Mother’s nose. Relieved, Angela returned to the bathroom and filled a basin with warm water and took soap and a fresh towel and went back to Mother. She began to wash her tenderly. How had Mother come to have a nose bleed? It seemed so strange, and strange that all the fuss had not wakened her. Slowly, her hands still in the basin of warm water where bubbles of soap burst on the surface, Angela felt doubt. She turned the soap over and over with her hands until the water was cloudy. She dried her hands carefully. A pulse began to throb in her head as she forced herself to lift Mother’s eyelids. A hard, dull, creamy whiteness looked back at her. Lips bitten between her teeth she slid a hand down Mother’s side. Nothing seemed to be beating. She put her ear down on Mother’s chest, suffocated by the warm sweet smell of the blood, but there was no sound. ‘Milkman!’ Max shouted in the background. She heard the clatter of milk bottles. Stiffly, holding herself very erect, she walked to the end of the hall and took her purse off the shelf. ‘Cut yourself?’ the milkman said as she handed him the money. She tried to say no, but could not manage the simple word. She smiled and shook her head. ‘Max,’ she said, ‘take these into the kitchen.’ ‘Ugh,’ Max said, ‘they’re all over blood.’ She looked at the milk bottles, bloody fingerprints smearing the glass, matching the red tinfoil top, and carried them herself into the kitchen. ‘Max,’ she said, ‘ring Dad at the office. Tell him to come home quickly.’ She was sick into the sink where cereal bowls still floated, seeping left-over porridge into the water. ‘Dad,’ she heard Max say, ‘can you come home—Mum’s sick.’

  Mother had died, around five that morning they said, peacefully they said. Mother had felt nothing, no pain, no strokes, her heart had simply packed up. The doctor was matter-of-fact. To all Angela’s tearful questions he replied either with a shrug or monosyllables. He seemed to think it was very good of him to have come at all, to a dead person who was not even his patient. She did not dare blame him. He said there had been nothing the matter with Mother’s heart when he listened to it three days ago. These things happened. He left after making out a death certificate and giving them instructions about what to do with the body as if it were a fallen tree.

  The body was a problem. Angela had a great dread of ever going near it again, of ever even seeing that body to which the doctor referred as though it were an inanimate object. She could not go into the room. The things that needed doing she could not do. It was Ben who went in with the doctor, Ben who later closed the curtains and found a clean nightdress and sheets for the undertaker who was soon to come. They waited two hours for the undertaker’s men to come and when they did Angela was embarrassed and ashamed. They were kind and solemn but they gave her no relief. She sat at the foot of the stairs, crouching, listening to their low voices, imagining what they were doing with their expert hands. She could not bear to watch Mother’s body leave the house and hid upstairs until the click of the front door and the sound of a car moving off told her they had gone. It seemed the worst of a series of betrayals. At home in St Erick bodies lay in the house until they were taken away for burial. The whole street came to pay their respects, tip-toeing into front bedrooms murky with drawn blinds, peering at the body and whispering over it and leaving the bereaved household to its tears. To send Mother to a parlour of repose was hideous. It ought not to have been allowed. Father would have a fit at the thought.

  Over everything hung the dark cloud of Father’s innocence. Mother had been dead for six hours and Father did not know. At eleven o’clock on a Friday morning he would be going for his weekend shopping, walking purposefully to the butcher’s with a string bag to buy half a pound of mince. The longer she waited to tell him, the worse the delay would seem, the more unforgivable and heinous her crime. She had tried, waiting for Ben to come home, to ring Father but her hand resisted moving towards the telephone and stayed limp and lifeless in her lap. She had tried again, waiting for the doctor—Ben had brought the telephone to her—but she shook and trembled and Ben had said she would feel better when the body was out of the house and that she would be able to do it then. But she felt no better. She was still horribly afraid. Speechless, she stared at Ben, willing him to make this awful call for her though she knew quite well he could not.

  ‘Come on,’ he said gently, ‘get it over. I’ll dial for you.’

  ‘I can’t, I can’t.’<
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  ‘You must. I’ll ring now.’

  ‘No—I don’t know what to say—how to say it—what shall I say?’

  ‘The words will come when you start to speak.’

  ‘They won’t—he’ll be so angry—he’ll shout—’

  ‘No, no, he won’t—of course he won’t—how can he be angry?—it wasn’t your fault.’

  ‘He’ll say I should have known how ill she was—he’ll think I neglected her, didn’t realize how serious it was, and I didn’t did I?’

  ‘Nobody did—the doctor said your Mother’s heart was perfectly sound three days ago—these things happen.’

  ‘Father doesn’t believe things happen. He’ll think I tricked him—he’ll feel so cheated that he wasn’t there.’

  ‘He couldn’t have done any good.’

  ‘Oh I know, I know, but he’s watched over her all these years and seen her through all her illnesses and then not to be there when it actually happened—it will paralyse him—I just can’t bear the thought—’

  ‘Well,’ Ben said, a little grimly, pacing around the room, ‘you have to bear it. Nobody else can do it for you.’

  ‘Couldn’t you—?’ But her voice faltered and the question hung in the air. Ben came and sat beside her. He tried to put his arm round her but she pushed it away.

  ‘Look,’ he said, ‘you know it would be unforgivable that your Father heard your Mother had died from anyone else except you. When he’d got over the shock he would think back over it and hold it against you. I’ll ring if you like, but I don’t think I should.’

  He helped her to compose herself and brought her a cup of coffee so hot and strong she scalded her lip at the first mouthful. The small pain was pleasant—she touched and rubbed the tiny burn with pleasure as it helped her focus on what she must do. Ben closed the door so that none of the boys would come rushing in unexpectedly from the Bensons’ where they had been hastily dumped, and carried the telephone over to her. ‘Two minutes,’ he said encouragingly, ‘and then it will be all over. I’ll carry on when you’ve told him the actual news.’ He dialled the number and handed her the receiver and she sat in a daze listening to the ringing tone. She saw in her mind’s eye the cluttered living room and the green armchair with its back to the light where Mother would sit no more and at that mawkish thought tears came yet again from that inexhaustible source inside her. They felt cool on her hot cheeks as they spilled down her face. Thoughts like that must not come into her head—she could safely leave them to Valerie. As the telephone rang and rang she began to feel curiously hopeful—perhaps Father would never answer. ‘He must be out,’ she said to Ben, and began to put the receiver down but Ben said, ‘Keep ringing. He may be out in the garden.’

  ‘Hello,’ Father bellowed.

  Her heart raced but she managed to say ‘Hello, Father.’

  ‘What’s up?’ he said at once. ‘I was in the garden—got it all straight for the winter now. What’s the trouble then? How is she?’

  The words Ben had promised her would come had not materialized. She listened abstractedly to Father’s breathing—he always pressed the receiver far too close to his mouth—and to the noise in the background of a police siren wailing. She could have sat forever saying nothing, merely absorbing other sounds, as though waiting for them to form a sentence on her behalf.

  ‘Are you there, Angela?’ Father said, impatiently.

  ‘Well, come on then—I haven’t got all morning—I’ve got my pension to collect and there’s a gas bill to pay, just come in this morning but your Mother doesn’t like them to lie. Did she have a good night?’

  ‘Yes,’ Angela said, ‘she had a good night.’

  ‘Slept well, eh, that’s the ticket. How is she this morning then? Brighter?’

  ‘No,’ Angela said.

  ‘Damn,’ Father said, ‘that’s like her—up one minute, down the next. Always the same when she’s been ill—two steps forward, three steps back. What’s wrong this morning then?’

  ‘She had a nose bleed,’ Angela said. If only she could cry, if only the tears would tell the tale for her, but now, when she needed them, they deserted her.

  ‘A nose bleed?’ echoed Father, entranced by the novelty, ‘that’s queer—she’s never had a nose bleed before. What caused that then? She didn’t get up and fall did she—I told you to watch her—she’s that unsteady on her feet even when she’s only been in bed a day—did she fall and bang her face?’

  ‘No,’ Angela said. Ben had begun to walk restlessly up and down the room again.

  ‘Well, then,’ Father said, ‘how did she come to have one? That’s what I want to know. Have you had the doctor?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Good. What did he think of it then? What did he say?’

  ‘He said—’ Again, her voice trailed away. There was a sudden and complete cessation of any sound at all from her throat as though the vocal chords had been severed at one blow.

  ‘Come on lass—has she had a turn?’

  When the silence continued,

  ‘Well then? Eh?’

  ‘Father, there isn’t any way I can break this easily—’ and now Father was silent, just when she most wanted him to bluster and nag. He would be standing at the window, keeping an eye on the street in case so much as a dustbin was out of place, standing in his stocking feet with his massive Wellingtons left on the doormat. Most likely he would be wearing his old brown tweed sports jacket and underneath a grey Marks and Spencer’s cardigan that kept him particularly warm. He would be scowling, disliking the turn the conversation was taking. ‘Father,’ she said, closing her eyes but unable to shut the image of him out, ‘Mother is dead. She died in her sleep, peacefully. There was nothing anyone could have done. The doctor said her heart was sound three days ago. I’m sorry—Father?’

  She had never, in all her dreadful imaginings, thought he might hang up. The shock made her tremble. Prepared for the violence of his anger and grief she did not know how to cope with his abrupt withdrawal.

  ‘He’s hung up,’ she said, staring stupidly into the receiver as though it might at any moment spring into life again.

  ‘What shall I do?’

  ‘Wait a while, and then I’ll ring back,’ Ben said. ‘You’ve done very well—it’s all over.’

  ‘All over? Done well? He’s all on his own in that house—’

  ‘As he would want to be.’

  ‘There’s nobody for him to talk to—’

  ‘He wouldn’t want anyone.’

  ‘He may have collapsed—he might be lying on the floor—’

  ‘Your Father? Never. And if he had, he couldn’t have rung off. He just doesn’t want to talk. I’ll ring Valerie now and get her to go straight there. That’s the best thing.’

  She went to the glass doors that opened into the garden and stood flattened against the cold glass staring out at the table they ate from in the summer, still faintly covered with frost. She could hear Ben’s soothing tones and could tell from what he said that Valerie must be crying. Why should Valerie cry—why should she cry herself—only Father, who had loved Mother unreservedly to the very end, had any need to cry, as she was sure he would not. He would have gone into the garden. He would be stalking up and down the rigidly straight paths made from cinders taken from the fire—up and down, patrolling, arms folded across his chest, frowning at the last of the cabbages. Mother always said Father’s face told no one anything whereas she, she wore her heart on her sleeve. Angela spread her hands against the glass, steadying herself. There was no escape from the dreadfulness of the immediate future but she must be brave this one last time. For Mother’s sake, she must do it.

  Angela had always been afraid of cats—any cat, all cats. She could not bear to be touched by them and if one jumped onto her lap she would scream with fright however public the place where it happened. The house she and Ben bought a little while before Sadie was born had belonged to an old couple who loved cats—not just their own three but everyon
e else’s. The first month of living in this house was spent chasing away cat after cat—they came jumping over the garden walls all day long and if the kitchen door was open they ran in, expecting their former welcome, Angela chased them away and did not leave the door open unless she was in that room. Gradually, the cats stopped coming. But one day Angela went up to her bedroom to rest after lunch and as she walked into the room, closing the door behind her, she turned round to take off her shoes and saw on her bed a large black tom cat with blazing green eyes. It was vast. It stood there, on the quilt, back arched, tail stiff, claws digging into the material, and Angela clutched at her throat in an exaggerated gesture of terror. But she did not scream. She backed towards the door, slowly, not wanting to make the hideous cat jump, and felt for the knob, watching it all the time. She told herself to be brave. She said to herself be calm, be calm, think of the baby. And she found, because of that need, the courage to open the door and turn her back on the cat and make a gesture of dismissal. The cat was out in a flash. She followed it downstairs and watched it run into the garden and returned triumphant to bed. She had managed to overcome her fear for the sake of the baby. Was there anything, she wondered, that could make her quail now she was to be a mother and had a duty to someone else?

  When the last arrangement had been made, the last exhausting timetable gone over, they remembered Sadie. ‘I don’t even know where exactly she has gone,’ Angela said, ‘just somewhere in the New Forest.’ There would be nobody at home when she returned the following night. Angela and Ben were travelling on the train with the coffin and the boys had been scattered among long-suffering friends. ‘Father will want Sadie at the funeral,’ Angela said.

  ‘Oh, I don’t think so.’

  ‘Of course he will,’ Angela said, shouting, contemptuous, ‘he will expect it.’

  They had not spoken again to Father. Ben rang repeatedly but there was no reply. They had to wait until Valerie got there to hear that he was all right but did not want to talk to anyone. He was, said Valerie, anxious to have Mother home—that was what was upsetting him most, the thought of her body among strangers. Once told the coffin would arrive the next day he was mollified. The funeral arrangements were of no interest to him. He had said they were to do what they liked—to do what Mother would have wanted.