With Stephen watching, his lips pouting in concentration, the girls gather around Katherine as she lies on the sofa and lay out the village on top of the gray woolen throw. They push Mrs. Dainty’s post office into a small dip in the blanket and rest Dr. Broom’s surgery on top of their mother’s knee. They place Mr. Fennel’s fishmonger shop near their mother’s abdomen, where the blanket flattens slightly, and put Willy Miller’s mill down near her toes. Soft channels in the blanket provide roads on which the villagers can travel. And all roads lead to Her. The villagers can bring Katherine anything she needs now. Micky Muffin, the baker, is on his way with fresh bread and scones, and Tommy Topper brings milk and cream. A road curves down from Katherine’s thigh, which, although too narrow for the motorcar or the truck, allows Mrs. Cinnamon’s width. The chemist’s wife glides toward Katherine, holding her baby at her breast, and brings cough mixture, some perfumed bath salts, and gossip from the village.
“Did you hear poor Mrs. Dainty has lost her puppy? Oh dear, isn’t it awful. And then there’s Private Dooley, whose mother bought him a different-colored glove for each hand so that finally he can tell his left from his right. How about that? And then of course Dr. Broom, who is away on an emergency call at the moment, said very clearly that you’re going to be as right as rain. All you need is some of Farmer Meadows’ lovely fresh eggs. And can you believe it—here comes Farmer Meadows right now.”
Farmer Meadows approaches, courtesy of Maureen, with his wonderfully fresh farm eggs and offers them to Katherine.
“Thank you very much, Farmer Meadows,” says Katherine.
“No eggs,” Stephen says with a frown on his face, pointing to the little plastic figure of Farmer Meadows.
“We’re just pretending,” explains Elsa patiently. “Here, you bring Willy Miller over to see Mummy.” Elsa hands Stephen the figure of Willy Miller.
“Wil-ly,” Stephen says with a huge smile, and immediately he wants to see what Willy Miller tastes like.
“No—don’t eat him! Bring him to Mummy!” Elizabeth laughs.
A humpback bridge suddenly appears on the road as Katherine shifts her position a little on the sofa.
“Let’s put a barricade on the bridge and a burning bus,” says Elsa. She lifts Micky Muffin’s bread van and turns it on its side. “That’ll have to do for the bus.”
“What are you doing, Elsa?” asks Elizabeth.
Elsa continues. “Now”—she stops Farmer Meadows with her finger—“do you have any identification, Farmer Meadows, in order to pass the barricade?”
“Don’t be stupid, Elsa,” says Maureen. “Why would you need to ask Farmer Meadows for identification if you know it’s Farmer Meadows.”
Elsa looks blankly at Maureen. Maureen promptly removes Micky Muffin’s bread van from the bridge and allows Farmer Meadows to continue. Farmer Meadows weathers the humpback bridge nicely.
Then Willy Miller arrives beside Katherine wet with saliva, as though he has just been caught in a shower of rain.
“For Mummy,” Stephen says, and smiles at her.
“Thank you, my love,” Katherine says. George comes over to the sofa and sits on its edge. Katherine looks at George. She looks at her children. To have all this.
Only once since that night on their honeymoon in the blue-stoned courtyard had they mentioned Tom. The day George was helping Katherine move out of her mother’s flat into their new home together, George had spotted Katherine packing a small statuette and had asked her where it had come from. When she told him, he had exploded in anger. “A fucking shrine—that’s what you’ve made for him, is it?” Startled, she had let the statuette slip from her hands. It had fallen onto the parquet floor and had broken into two pieces, the smooth bald head rolling off under the table as though the statuette had been guillotined. Outraged at the viciousness of George’s attack, Katherine had screamed back at him, “His name is Tom, for Christ sake! His name is Tom!” The sound of the name pitched in the air like that, so much in the present tense, shocked them both. His name, that name, transforming right in front of them into something rich and strange and terrifying.
On their honeymoon, she had offered George a confession, in the hope that it would set her free, and he had, in turn, handed a confession back to her. Their wedding gift to each other. A gift they had rewrapped and then carried silently throughout their married life. They had both been frightened that talking through their feelings about what had happened would have unraveled the hurt caused, would have demanded something of them that would have been too much for them to bear. Would have demanded that they look together at the frayed threads of their lives spreading out in front of them like an ancient tapestry. Each of them then having to discern exactly which one was the thread of guilt and where precisely it had twisted around the fibers of their love. Each of them asking how easy would it be to find the thread of infidelity? Its silken weave so difficult to trace and capture. And which the illusive thread of betrayal? Where did it follow the warp and where the weft? Which the thread of culpability? And where the threads that had unraveled from doing nothing until it was too late? But in the state of forever searching for the other’s forgiveness and never asking, they had both kept Tom alive. The way we continually keep the dead alive in an attempt to repair the past. The way we carry the dead through life and so forget to live.
However, losing each other they had never wanted. She sees this now.
Something within Katherine is softening—whether of her own volition or not is hard to tell—as though a veil or a skin is falling from her. And it seems perfectly obvious to her now, only she just hadn’t been able to see it. That holding on to her memories of Tom, burying them deep within her, detail after detail, in a vain effort to protect herself and George, had in itself been an endless infidelity. An infidelity to the here and now. Even though she had not been able to admit it to herself, she had held on to it all in her attempt to make sense of Tom’s death. Perhaps make sense of the loss of a baby, too—if there ever had been one. Most of all, to try to make sense of what George had done—or not done—out of love for her.
Then, since her cold encounter in the sea with the seal, since she had faced a kind of drowning of her own, all those memories of Tom had risen to the surface, risen in a bid to be released, risen in a bid to release her.
George had been tortured by his own ghosts, too, she had no doubt, interminably tortured, had turned pieces of memory over and over again in his mind, wondering how he could have made things different, or possibly, even secretly, grateful that he hadn’t. The pain of that keeping, she feels it now. Such a weight for him to carry. George waiting in the dusk of his life, like a child waiting for the big snow, so that it may ease the world with its white promise. Wasting himself with an ill-defined hope. Wondering how, in the eyes of the world, he could possibly justify his actions on the night of Tom’s death. Wondering how, in the eyes of his wife, he could possibly compete with the perfect dead.
After their play, George makes something to eat for the children, then goes upstairs to prepare Katherine’s bed. Katherine gathers up Applewood Green and all its inhabitants in the gray woolen throw to keep them safe, leaving them on the sofa, and then touching each child tenderly on the head as they sit at the kitchen table, she moves to the hallway and begins to climb the stairs. George comes down the stairs and meets her halfway. She looks up at him.
“It’s bad luck to cross on the stairs,” she hears herself say to George.
“Is it, now?” George replies with a smile. “I never knew that.”
Then he bends down and lifts her in his arms. “I’ll have to carry you, then,” he says.
He lifts her up and cradles her against his breast. Her frame is as light as a child’s. Her hair is soft against his cheek. He rubs his cheek against her hair. He breathes her in. He carries her up the stairs, still the groom he once was, still the man who loves her, the man who has always loved her more than anything in the world. This big, generous man, showing
pride in his carrying, as though he has just discovered his talent to win her back. She takes to him, allows herself to yield to his carrying, though she laughs and tells him she does not need to be carried, that she is strong enough. This is sweet, sweetness itself. This acceptance. She had imagined it as a melting, but instead it feels like a falling, a cascading. Now that it has all begun to surface, it is, ironically, an easy spilling, a welcome release. This acceptance of what they were together and what they are. He carries her into the bedroom and sits, still holding her, on the end of the bed, as though he sits on a large rock staring out to sea, her head still resting on his breast. Picture them together. She is a limpet on his body. He will not let her go. His arms encircle her. She has found strength she did not know she had. The arc of her bent body keeps them both weighted to the rocks.
It is not forgiveness. Forgiveness seems irrelevant now, too haughty a thing, too opinionated, too sure of its own step. Too dependent on negotiation. This is something other. This is a recognition, a reclaiming. A much more delicate thing. It has the kind of cleansing purity that weeping can sometimes bring, although they are not weeping. They are sitting together on the end of the bed. In each other’s arms. Trembling with tenderness.
12
March 1970
ELSA SLIDES HER HAND PENSIVELY along the dim silver bar at the end of the hospital bed. She is in a bad mood. All three girls have come up to visit Katherine this time. George has left Stephen with Nanny Anna, who will already be teaching him how to play rummy and soak salted peas for the next day’s soup.
After Christmas, Katherine had taken a turn for the worse. Although George had followed the instructions that the medical team had given him to increase the amount of morphine for her should he need to, he rapidly lost confidence, phoned the hospital and had been advised to bring Katherine back in.
Six weeks later, and she is now in a different hospital closer to home. This hospital caters to cancer patients with different needs. Their care is palliative, they say. They are past offering any promises now.
The sun seems inappropriate in its brightness as it shines in through the hospital window, painting all their faces in a creamy orange light. It makes them all look like their faces have been buttered. It makes the little ridges on Elsa’s frowning brow stand out in relief.
Elsa is in a bad mood today because her mother has forgotten her name. Her mother is not like an old drunk woman anymore. She is propped up in the bed by firm pillows, the green candlewick bedspread covering the two bony sticks that are her legs. She is quiet and she is staring at Elsa, her eyes like deep brown pools, as though Elsa is reminding her of someone she once knew. But Katherine has not remembered any of their names, Maureen’s, Elizabeth’s, Elsa’s, or George’s. Her large eyes suggest a confused tolerance of the strangers in her room. They have brought her flowers and homemade birthday cards, each letter of “Mummy” written in a different color. The cards have been decorated with glitter, which has rubbed off onto their fingers. Little pieces of glitter can be seen, here and there, on their faces where they have scratched themselves absentmindedly or anxiously and on Katherine’s face where the girls have kissed her, spreading the glitter like a love infection. They all twinkle now in the cream-filling buttery sunlight, a microscopic firmament watching the mother star grow dimmer.
Elsa turns to give her mother a look, but it is a timid challenge. She wants her mother to know she is annoyed. She ping-pangs her fingers against the steel bar at the bottom of the hospital bed. Her mother is staring at Elsa, her lips a tight, thin line and she is saying nothing, her eyes like two saucers of submission, like the eyes of a Biafran child, Elsa thinks. It is now difficult to tell which is the greater enemy, the cancer or the medication, as both are eroding her mother piece by piece.
No one talks. The strange figure in the bed has put a stop to all that. The birthday wishes have been given. The flowers have been arranged in the bulbous-shaped vase that sits on the bedside locker. The vase too squat to hold the full length of the long, elegant stems, the flowers have immediately outgrown their welcome.
George has filled in for all the things Katherine might have said to the children, about the cards, about school. He is father and mother now, an interpreter of sorrow and a guide to the stranger in the bed. These sights before you are the daughters you love, he might have said to Katherine. Don’t let their bad mood bother you. They are unable to change the story of their lives, which is unfolding before them.
The door opens and a nurse steps in, smiling and apologizing for interrupting them. She talks loudly to Katherine and checks the drip that feeds into the cannula on Katherine’s hand. She talks softly to George, telling him that the consultant will be on his rounds very shortly, if he’d like to talk to him. She lifts the sputum bowl from beside Katherine’s bed and leaves the room. Her shoes squeak against the hospital floor, making a rude noise.
A new silence and then ping pang against the bar.
George speaks.
“Let’s go out for some orange juice. Would you like that?” Elizabeth lifts her head quickly from the magazine she has been reading, startled in the belief that her father has said this to her mother. However, George is not looking at Katherine as he speaks. He is looking at his three daughters. Maureen, who has been sitting nearest to her father, utters a simple “Yes.” Elsa turns to them with a scowl.
“I don’t like the orange juice here. It tastes soapy,” she says.
The strange woman in the bed still stares at them.
“We’ll see what they have.” George beckons to them to move. They kiss the strange woman in the bed briefly, not really wanting to touch her skin, but that’s all she has to offer them. That’s all she is now. Elsa looks at her mother’s hand, the fingers of which are still holding one of the homemade birthday cards. Her mother’s fingers are the glittery twigs of a tree, with fingernails like large spoons.
Has she woken up or is she now falling asleep? It is difficult to find the one detail that can confirm for her which it is. Like sometimes on waking up in the morning it is, momentarily, impossible to remember what day it is or what important things have to be done. The struggle, on these occasions, is a mere glitch. Now ill, now sedated with morphine, Katherine’s consciousness does not have the same ability, nor the same interest, to discriminate anymore between what is real, what is memory, and what is simply wishful thinking, and the glitch is almost all there is. She exists in that space now as though on an ocean swell that might never end, where the horizon offers her glimpses of other worlds, which vanish as quickly as they appear.
Sometimes, though less and less now, she experiences a moment of searing clarity on the rising arc of this ocean, knowing who she is and where she is and why she is connected to tubes and monitors. Everything comes into focus. Definite, precise, sensual. These moments can stay with her for minutes at a time. And then slowly the clarity fades. She hears words in her brain that confuse her but might carry with them the sense of home, or of a doctor’s face, or of the taste of chocolate, or all of these at the same time. She takes the downward sweep, or it takes her, and once again, she cannot tell whether she is awake or asleep.
Now she turns her head slowly on the hospital pillow and sees George beside her. He sits on the chair next to her bed. His eyes are closed. The room is full of oyster light as the sun is dipping in the sky. And she knows what the sun is and where it is and how soon it is to its setting. All is clear to her. She looks at George. She looks how the light from the sun falls on the black hue of his hair, intensifying it, and illuminating the streaks of gray at his temples until they appear almost blond. She looks at how his brow furrows deeply even while he sleeps. The shadows of worry on his lids. His broad shoulders hunched against the back of the small chair in which he sits. His arms folded around his chest as though he is giving himself a gentle hug.
Katherine sees it clearly as the sun slips farther down in the sky. She sees it as she looks at George sleeping in the chair beside
her bed. How her love for George and George’s love for her has held everything together. How the threads of their love for each other are deeper and more entwined than any dream or any nightmare. A love lived, not imagined.
George stirs for a moment from his sleep. He slowly raises his head and rubs the back of his neck with his hand. Then he turns to look at Katherine. He smiles when he sees that she is awake. In her eyes he can see that she is with him.
“I love you,” he says, and he takes her hand.
It could never be more real than this.
“I love you, too.” Katherine’s medication brings her suddenly on a downward sweep. Her eyes close. She is hearing her father’s voice now. He is talking to her of summer, as though he is the sun that warms it. His voice is the light of summer. He is there on the horizon, lighting up the world.
And her beautiful children. Beautiful. Never did a word carry so much. The very essence of them. So many horizons now as Katherine moves on the swollen sea.
She sees them, her beautiful children. She sees them living their lives like emotional detectives, far away on the blue horizon, searching for and assimilating signs and symbols and using every shred of evidence to compile their own individual dossier of affection. They are tirelessly and privately obsessive in their foraging for clues, measuring, recording, interpreting the temperature, the gradient, the circumference, the unconditionality of their mother’s love for them. And, like points of light luring ghost moths in the dusk, they even set themselves as traps to try to capture her, to keep any bit or piece of her that might be hovering loose in the night air. All signs, no matter how trivial or inconsequential—the residue of a dream, the accidental hearing of her namesake in a supermarket, the catching of a familiar song on the radio—is given weight and importance beyond the norm. Love that is not lived but only constantly sought. Becoming something of and in itself. A narcotic that numbs them against the world that is, and fills them with the delicious and continuous surge of expectation as they surrender to the fantasy of her return. She sees them.
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