In Extremis

by Tim Parks

  ‘Tom.’

  ‘Deborah.’

  I felt pleased, stupid, agitated.

  ‘I just saw you’d called. I’d turned the volume off.’

  As Deborah spoke, I went back through the bedroom to try the key on the window and saw, reflected in the black glass, that some seriously unpleasant stuff was under way on the television.

  ‘Is everything okay, Tom?’

  The key turned easily, the handle clicked down and a rush of cold, damp air completely changed the feeling in the room.

  ‘What time is it?’ I asked with a sleepiness I didn’t feel; I was pretending I needed to keep my voice low out of respect for someone else. Wasn’t I supposed to be on the recliner with Mother?

  ‘Sorry, were you sleeping? It’s, hang on, two twenty-five. I just saw you’d called. Is everything okay?’

  Explaining to Deborah that I had called her because I hadn’t been able to get rid of Charlie – he was sleeping, I said, on the sofa in the Commemoration Room – I turned away from the window and saw that the pretty adulteress had been stabbed to death. At once I felt a twinge of sadness for the girl, as if I had known her, as if this weren’t just the merest TV drama, as if her death were partly my fault, for having left the room at the crucial moment when the intruder burst in.

  ‘You mean he is still there?’ Deborah asked.

  ‘I think so.’

  ‘That’s odd. I was sure I heard him come upstairs just a short while ago.’

  ‘I’m in my mother’s room,’ I lied, keeping my voice low. It seemed the best way to avoid a long conversation.

  ‘Could you check?’ she asked. ‘I was sure I heard him come back.’

  Why didn’t she check? I fumed, but said I would. To keep things short. Thank God I hadn’t undressed. I took the keys and headed for the stairs. Hopefully, I could see whether Charlie was there from the end of the corridor. Or halfway down, at a pinch.

  ‘Did you get any more out of him?’ Deborah enquired. ‘I was thinking of seeing if I could get him on tranquillisers tomorrow.’

  ‘Only that he was furious about your marriage.’

  ‘But that’s silly,’ her voice squealed. ‘Charlie was thrilled by the marriage. He had a whale of a time at the wedding!’

  ‘Perhaps it was his boyfriend you heard coming back to the flat,’ I said. I was at the bottom of the stairs now.

  ‘His what?’

  ‘The guy he lives with. Is it Stephen? Charlie was saying how you’d given him the upstairs as a flat.’

  ‘But, Tom,’ Deborah sounded reproachful, ‘how on earth did you get the idea he was a boyfriend? Stephen’s just a room-mate.’

  I was walking down the corridor now. Either side, door after door, larval figures were lying on their beds in a tangle of drips and tubes. To the left, one door was pulled to, the nurses’ voices urgent behind. At the end of the corridor the Commemoration Room was dimmed. I would have to go all the way.

  ‘You didn’t really think Charlie was gay?’ Deborah asked.

  ‘I did, yes,’ I said. ‘In any event, he’s not here.’ I had reached the glass screen now and could see inside. ‘He’s gone.’

  ‘You really thought he was gay!’ Deborah was chuckling. ‘I must say, I have sometimes wondered if Stephen might be.’

  She seemed cheered by my mistake. Supposed mistake. I had the feeling she’d been drinking. I felt cheered that at least Charlie was gone. At least I could grieve on my own. Suddenly I wanted to grieve. I wanted to get my teeth into grieving. Like thick bread.

  ‘By the way, how is your face?’

  ‘My cheek’s puffed up.’

  ‘You poor thing.’

  ‘I told them I’d walked into a lamp post, texting.’

  ‘Told who?’

  ‘Whom,’ I corrected.

  ‘Tom!’ she squealed. ‘You never change!’

  ‘The nurses here. I mean, I went out of the building looking perfectly normal, and came back like I’d been through the mill. I had to say something.’

  ‘Hope you’re mum wasn’t upset.’

  ‘Mum is beyond upsetting. In fact you’ll have to let me get back to her now.’

  ‘Do give her my love, if you can,’ Deborah said. ‘Charlie must have got a cab. It was so sweet of you to talk to him. He has a kind of obsession about you, for some reason. I mean he’s always mentioning you. That’s why I thought you might be able to help. Perhaps you have. You never know.’

  ‘Goodnight, Deborah.’

  ‘Is that you, Edward?’

  I had stopped at my mother’s door. She was on her back, properly cleaned up again, the muscles on her face working away as before, lips muttering. Then she said very clearly, ‘Is that you, dearest?’

  I took a couple of steps into the room.

  ‘I sent Thomas away. I don’t want the boy to see me in this state.’

  I stood still.

  ‘Edwaaard?’ Her voice dragged the name into a moan. ‘I want to come to you tonight. Let me come to you, Edward. I have asked the Lord to take me tonight. Tonight.’

  My mother raised herself on her elbows and tried to shout.

  ‘Dear Lord, take me now! Please take me.’

  XII

  Even by my standards, it was a bad night I spent in the guest room of the Claygate Hospice. There were twitches, sudden visions, old voices, echoes, giddiness. At one point I know I caught myself humming the baptismal hymn. In token that thou shalt not flinch. Why was I humming the baptismal hymn, I wondered, the night of Mother’s agony? Why not Abide with me, fast falls the eventide? In some strange state between sleep and panic I saw turbulent seas frothing with sewage. I saw a cattle-ship foundering and animals sliding about the deck, bellowing to be free. I saw a grasshopper push its way out through the eyes of a toad. I heard drumming hooves and my own heart humming, We print the cross upon thee here, and stamp thee His alone. Until finally a voice woke me from my sleeplessness. An imperative cut the air of the Claygate Hospice. Get up, Tom Sanders. It’s time to get up.

  So I got up. Who knows why one wakes when one does, why one imagines a voice has spoken? Extraordinarily, I didn’t need to go to the bathroom. It was shortly before seven. Showering, I had no idea whether I had slept or not. Yet I felt good now. I felt that yesterday could be showered away, that my pains could only improve. Perhaps I had slept. The cattle-ship was a dream, it must have been, the animals bellowing as they thrashed in sewage. A nightmare. Perhaps the organism is simply kick-started by another day, regardless of whether or how you’ve slept.

  At once I was eager to get down to Mother. Her veto has lapsed now, I thought. Mother hadn’t wanted me to sit beside her through the night, to face the night’s demons with her, but she would be happy to see me now. She would be feeling better and we could talk a little. The morning was always a good time to talk to Mother. I would come downstairs to find her in her recliner, Bible or prayer book in hand. I’m speaking about that summer, of course. In Mother’s tiny Hounslow house the stairs were actually in the sitting room, so I would see her from above, over the banister, her grey hair bowed in prayer, or reading the Collect for the Day. One felt surrounded by prayerfulness in the early morning at Mother’s house, before she started humming. Before the cuckoo cuckooed eight.

  In the kitchen, breakfast was already laid. The cereal was on the table. The Brazil nuts. The milk in a china milk jug. The toast rack, the tea cosy. These were the kind of objects my mother surrounded herself with. Milk jugs, tea cosies, toast racks, serviette rings, cuckoo clocks. And in the morning one could talk easily of humdrum things. I would ask her if she had slept well and she would say, So-so, which meant she had hardly slept at all, and she would ask me how I had slept and I would say I had slept fine, thank you, and she would say, Oh, in a surprised voice, Oh, I was afraid you hadn’t, Thomas, meaning she had heard my trips to the bathroom in the night – how many? five, six? – but she would never push the point, and I would never explain that I was perfectly capable of goi
ng to the bathroom six times in the night and still sleeping fine, and all in all there was a feeling of truce in the air and prayerful calm. In that long summer we spent together four years ago.

  At the Claygate Hospice I hurried downstairs somehow convinced that we were going to have a pleasant chat, a cup of tea, even cereal. As in Hounslow. Perhaps I would ask for her thoughts about David and Deborah and Charlie. If Mother and I could never talk about our own woes, we were always good at talking about other people’s, about the legless man with his house packed with newspapers, and the helpless Mavis who staged her small domestic disasters so as to have people come and help. Mother was a woman of considerable experience and when she kept off religion she was perceptive and generous. Perhaps, I thought, pushing swing doors at the bottom of the stairs, she would offer some useful insight into Charlie’s mad behaviour.

  As I approached her room, a nurse came out. Not the same nurse as yesterday. This was a small woman in her early sixties, calmly deliberate, birdlike. Like a pecking bird.

  ‘How is she?’

  ‘You are Thomas?’ the nurse asked.

  I said I was. She had noticed my puffed-up cheek. ‘Your mother’s quiet now. She’s sleeping.’ Each thing she said seemed to be a little peck.

  ‘I’ll sit with her.’

  Then, because she didn’t move, didn’t peck, I asked, ‘Do you have any idea, well …’

  She cocked her head to one side, opened an eye.

  ‘I’m supposed to be at a conference tomorrow. I should tell them if I’m not coming.’

  Now the eye narrowed. She had an air of preserved youthfulness, curly hair set in a honey perm, smile lines hovering round her mouth. She was still, but very ready to move.

  ‘The doctors will be coming soon and you can ask them. But no one ever really knows, Mr Sanders.’

  ‘I realise that.’

  She watched me with unsettling intentness. Eventually she said, ‘I have only nursed your mother for two days, Mr Sanders, but I wanted to tell you, I feel I have been in the presence of someone extraordinary. Your mother is an extraordinary person.’

  I was taken aback. ‘Mum is definitely a special person,’ I said.

  ‘I never knew anyone radiate so much …’ the nurse hesitated, at a loss, ‘godliness.’ She smiled. ‘All the staff have felt it.’

  Again her eyes searched mine, but I couldn’t think what to say.

  Seconds later the nurse had moved away and I had already pushed open the door of Mother’s room when I heard my name again.

  ‘Thomas?’

  She had turned back.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘It’s always difficult for the nursing staff to know what to say to relatives.’

  ‘I can imagine.’

  ‘Your mother mentioned you are very successful in your line of work. She’s proud of you.’

  I found a wan smile.

  ‘But it’s also true that many people do regret not having made some time, at the end. You know.’

  We were a few feet apart in the corridor. Behind me the breakfast trolley was advancing. Two young Asian women were fussing with trays and drinks.

  ‘It is kind of you to say that,’ I told her. And I made up my mind. ‘I certainly won’t be leaving,’ I said, ‘while Mum is in a critical state.’

  Now I felt good. This was the right thing. I would inform the conference organisers mid-morning.

  ‘Of course you must do as you feel is best,’ she said, more cautiously. She frowned and turned away again. She had slim ankles, I noticed. There was a nice quickness to them as she hurried away.

  In her room, Mother was exactly as she had been the night before. The Lord had not taken her. On the other hand, she was hardly up for a cup of tea, either. What on earth had I been thinking of? All my life people have been telling me what a remarkable woman my mother is. More remarkable than her children. That was always the implication. And I remembered now, sitting down beside her again, and again taking her hand over the bed’s guardrail, that one of those people had been the Great Dane, Freddy, or perhaps it was Franz. ‘Your mother’s face shines,’ he had told me once. After twenty years in London he still had a slight accent. ‘With God’s goodness,’ he said. I think my sister was there too. I think he actually took my sister’s hand in his as he said this. That’s how I recall it. Certainly his ruddy face shone as he spoke the words. He really did want to marry her. Perhaps he had hoped we would speak well of him to her. Perhaps my sister did speak well of him. The marriage would have made us rich. Freddy had cash. Or Franz. Mother’s hand in mine was cold now, soggy somehow. It didn’t respond to squeezing. ‘Your mother is the personification of loving kindness,’ the lesbian army sergeant had told me. Later she was discharged for sexual harassment.

  Yet even this remarkable mother of mine did not have her prayers answered. The Lord had not taken her when she wanted to be taken. Kenneth E. Hagin would know the reason. She hadn’t checked perhaps whether this was one of the requests God has pledged to grant. ‘Let me die tonight!’ She hadn’t made sure there wasn’t some sin or imperfection in her life that inhibited God’s generosity. However saintly the world thought you were, you never really knew where you stood with God. Not until the threshold was crossed.

  Holding my mother’s hand, shortly after seven o’clock – I shook my head when the breakfast ladies offered cereals and scrambled eggs – it came home to me that this had been the focus of all my parents’ teaching and all my childhood education: death is the supreme moment of truth. All life looks forward to death, and only death gives meaning to life. In a way there is no life, or has been no life, until death confirms it. So you live in expectation of the decisive moment, the great and final selection; everything you do is done in view of that, in view of death. That is the Christian life. Everything is good or evil; everything tenses to this or that verdict, at death, when every past action is weighed in the balance. Isn’t that madness? And before the irrevocable judgement, before that single split-second dividing past and future, time and eternity, you can never really be sure where you stand, whether you are among the saved or the damned. Yet this one thing that you cannot know is the very thing you need to know if you are to have any peace of mind. You cannot have peace of mind. That was the vision of life our parents taught us. Mother was now inches from the great divide.

  ‘Good morning, sir.’

  I turned to find two young women at the door. Both tall, both handsome. One in particular, slightly ahead of the other – blonde fringe, pale lipstick, bright eyes – was extremely pretty. The other was darker, frowning at something on her phone.

  Who were these women so early in the morning? They did not look like the girls in need that Mother was always helping. Fellow members of her church congregation, perhaps? Fellow helpers of Mavis and the legless collector of newspapers? Coming into the room, the blonde woman, who I now saw had a ponytail, walked quickly round me, took the patient’s medical reports from the folder at the foot of the bed and asked me if I would mind leaving the room for a few minutes.

  Responding to my surprise, the other woman smiled and said, ‘Doctors don’t wear white coats at the hospice, Mr Sanders. We try to keep things homely.’

  After their rounds, they granted me an interview at a table in the Commemoration Room. They really were two very handsome women. Unsettled, I put my hands on the table and tried to stick to the script I had prepared. My sister and I were extremely worried, I told them, that there would be some attempt to move my mother. This had happened before, as they probably knew. Last week, in fact. Perhaps to a hospital for further treatment, I said, or for diagnostic tests, perhaps even to my sister’s house. The whole family, I told the two women, was very much against this. I tried to sound firm, emphatic. I did not want to let my sister down, or my brother-in-law, or indeed poor Mother herself. And I began to list all the reasons why such a move really would not be a good idea: Mother was incontinent and bedridden; she couldn’t stand, let alone walk; she
was in pain; then she was very happy with the nursing here. She felt well looked after and cared for.

  As I spoke, the doctors watched me patiently, while in some distant part of my consciousness I was aware that ten years ago I would have been tempted to throw my cap at one of them.

  ‘Mr Sanders, if I may.’ The darker of the two women raised a hand as if to call a halt to an audition that had become embarrassing. ‘Mr Sanders, there is no question of moving your mother.’ She stretched her lips, sighed, looked straight into my eyes: ‘Martha is … on her way,’ she said.

  I stared at her.

  ‘Your mother is on her way, Mr Sanders.’

  ‘She has been bringing up blood all night,’ the blonde doctor put in. ‘There has been a major haemorrhage.’

  For some reason I didn’t believe what I was hearing.

  ‘There is nothing we can do now but try to make her comfortable.’

  ‘Ah,’ I said.

  ‘A doctor has to be wary about making predictions,’ the darker woman took over. She hesitated. ‘However, I am sure you will want to take this last opportunity to be with her.’

  As I stood too, the blonde said, ‘You have hurt your cheek. Perhaps you should ask one of the nurses for some medication.’

  ‘Thank you,’ I said curtly. ‘You have been extremely helpful.’

  *

  I hadn’t been in my mother’s room half an hour when the clergyman arrived. I had texted my sister and told her to email my brother. I had texted my son, my daughter, the twins. I had texted Elsa and suddenly felt anxious because she was far away. Perhaps she was slipping away from me. There would be a family gathering around my mother’s deathbed and Elsa would not be part of it. Elsa could never really be part, I found myself thinking, of what suddenly seemed to me the core of my life. My mother’s death. That was the truth. David had done absolutely the right thing at the end of the day, I decided, in marrying Deborah. Why wasn’t Charlie happy with the arrangement? What if, even now, I went back to my wife? My children would be delighted. Why not please them? It would be better for Elsa too, when all was said and done. What was the future for Elsa with a man pushing sixty? The best thing I could do for Elsa, I thought, was go back to my wife.