In Extremis

by Tim Parks

  My effusion was interrupted by applause. The syntactically correct lady in the maroon tailleur sat down with an archaic smile. The chair asked the audience for questions. There was a fidgety silence. People were getting hungry. Following a routine etiquette in these cases, the chair framed a question himself to be put to all of us. Most of the words we use, he said, are more or less old. Would any of us care to comment on why some remain current for hundreds of years while others become archaisms, and others again simply fall into disuse and do not have a second life of any kind, not even in Scrabble?

  He smiled and said, ‘Professor Sanders?’, throwing the ball to his inaugural speaker, as good manners demanded.

  ‘I can’t answer that question,’ I told him. My head was elsewhere. ‘There are a thousand reasons why one thing supplants another. Arguably, behind it all there is a dynamic that requires there be a constant process of death and renewal. Perhaps more interesting would be to wonder about the tensions that occur in people’s behaviour when those linguistic changes take place: why some people resist change and others lap it up; why someone is happy to say “bathroom” while another will stand firm by “toilet” till his dying day; why one person enthusiastically embraces the use of “impact” as a verb while another refuses and will never, ever form a sentence in which one thing impacts on another.’

  As I said this, the chairman smiled and raised a hand and said, ‘That’s me!’ and the audience laughed.

  ‘Perhaps the whole process of linguistic change,’ I wound up, ‘has the hidden function of allowing people to make clear their attitude to change in general.’

  We were still discussing this forty minutes later over lunch, when Elsa phoned me in response to my text message. I excused myself for answering the phone in their presence, assumed an alarmed expression, pushed my seat back and went between the tables towards the door of the canteen, as if seeking a quiet place to talk. In fact Elsa had already rung off. Back at the table, I said I would have to leave at once. My mother had just been taken to hospital. She had been seriously ill for some time, I explained. Quite likely this was the end.

  Andreas Leitner, bearded and affable, chewing pork, was upset. ‘Of course, you must go at once.’ He swallowed. ‘Let me get someone to check when your next flight is, while you finish your meal.’ But I said I preferred to go absolutely at once, rather than losing any precious time. I didn’t want to arrive and find my mother had already passed away. I would go and get my things from the hotel and take a taxi straight to Tegel, to be on the first flight available. Otherwise I might hate myself later.

  ‘But this is such a shame, Tom.’ He wiped his mouth and stood up, took my hand. ‘It’s been so good seeing you again. You’re always so full of ideas.’

  Walking back to the hotel, I felt that he was right and it really was rather a shame; it had been a genuine pleasure talking to Leitner, who was one of those cautious, politically astute academics who nevertheless appreciate the more maverick and kamikaze members of the fraternity when they come across them. The meat had been surprisingly good too, and I had left most of it on my plate. Fairly sure no one from the conference would be following, I stopped at a café and ordered a goulash and a glass of wine. Waiting for the food, I phoned Elsa.

  ‘Mission accomplished,’ I laughed.

  ‘I don’t suppose any of them will know, will they?’ Elsa worried.

  ‘Hardly,’ I said. ‘Mum isn’t the kind of person whose death gets into the papers.’

  I realised then that it had made me feel close to Mother again, using her as an excuse for one last time. And not just as an excuse, of course, since I really was going to see her. It was urgent.

  ‘Is she still at the hospice?’ Elsa asked.

  ‘I don’t know.’ My wine arrived. ‘Actually, I imagine not, since they’ll need the beds, I’m sure. I doubt they have a proper morgue there. She’ll have been taken to the undertaker’s.’

  ‘Are you sure you need to go, Tom?’

  Perhaps just a little sip of wine before the food arrived.

  ‘I just feel I left things unfinished, in the hurry to get to the conference. You know? It was stupid. I should have cancelled. In the end, I hate conferences. I can’t understand why I bothered.’

  ‘What matters is that you were there while she was alive.’

  ‘We didn’t really have a conversation, though. I arrived just too late. It seems she’d been having ordinary conversations right up to a couple of hours before. Even on the phone.’

  ‘But she knew you were there.’

  ‘Yes.’

  I deserved another sip. It felt like I hadn’t breathed for forty-eight hours.

  ‘I’m sure that was the important thing, Tom. For her to know you were there. That was a big comfort. When will the funeral be?’

  I said I had no idea. Probably in a few days. My brother-in-law was arranging it.

  ‘Do you have anything major to do before then?’

  ‘A couple of lessons. An article to write.’

  ‘You could get someone else to do the lessons, and stay in London till it’s over. You could work from there.’

  It was generous advice.

  ‘Tell me about your sister,’ I said.

  She chuckled. Her mother had reacted rather better than expected to the news of this baby, though she didn’t seem to want to hear about the father at all. ‘As if the business of there being a man involved was completely irrelevant.’

  Elsa’s mother had divorced three times. We talked about her family, until the goulash arrived and I rang off and ordered a second glass of wine. Eating with appetite, I felt immensely encouraged by the conversation with Elsa, almost back to where I’d been before the conference at Amersfoort, a happy man who’d had the good luck to meet the perfect woman rather late in life. I downed the second glass of wine, and now it occurred to me that perhaps the best thing would have been to stay at the conference, which wasn’t so dire as I had feared, and return to Madrid on my scheduled flight. I could have spent the night with Elsa, which always meant sleeping well, and the following lunchtime there was my weekly appointment with the shrink, who no doubt would have had much to say about my volatile state of mind these last forty-eight hours. Instead I had made this dramatic gesture of returning to my mother’s deathbed when she was already dead.

  The sun was bright in the broad Berlin streets. I enjoyed the walk back to Görlitzerstrasse. The wine had given me a buzz. The air felt chill and sharp. Perhaps it was going to snow. Life is good, I thought. On arrival at the hotel I went straight up to my room, without stopping in reception, and lay on the bed. The room was freshly clean and, with the sunshine through lace curtains, it looked nicer than I had thought yesterday evening. I had been tense and too busy with my PowerPoint. Now I noticed a comfortable armchair in blue leather and a competent painting of a frozen lake under leaden skies, with ducks flying low over the ice. Closing my eyes, I fell at once into a deep sleep and dreamed the phone was ringing. I mean, I dreamed a ringing phone had woken me up. But it was not a phone I knew. First, I had to find where it was in the room and then I had some trouble actually answering it. I didn’t know which button to press. In the end I missed the call and was just falling asleep again, in my dream of course, when it rang a second time. This time I picked it up at once, and at once the line was open. I didn’t need to press anything. Hello, I said. Tom Sanders here. There was an electronic silence of beeps and scratches, which I found threatening. I felt I had been caught out and was about to be accused of something terribly compromising. Then, very loudly, my mother said, ‘Hello, Thomas dear, it’s Mum!’ It was her brightest, most cheerful, let’s-all-be-jolly-together voice, and I woke with a start.

  It was five o’clock. I had slept two-and-a-half hours. Presumably the hotel hadn’t been warned I was cutting my stay short, otherwise someone would have come up to check the room. I felt groggy and surprised by the intensity of the dream. ‘Hello, Thomas!’ It was exactly Mum’s voice. She
had called me. There would be a crumble in the oven, farmhouse cream in the fridge. I took a shower, then wearing the white bathrobe they always give you in these places, I opened my computer and sat down to check my email and book a flight. It was already twenty-four hours since Mother died, I thought, waiting for the machine to boot up. I wondered what would have happened to her body in that period. How did it while away the time? I could have phoned my sister and asked her, but I didn’t. For some reason I didn’t want to speak to my sister. Checking my email, I found that with what had arrived today and what I hadn’t managed to look at yesterday, there were now twenty-nine messages demanding my attention.

  I wrote to Elsa at once, telling her how wonderful it had been to speak to her on the phone and how every time I heard her voice I felt more deeply in love with her. The problem, if I left for the airport now, I thought, would be that very likely I would run into one or another of the conference speakers in reception, since we were all staying in this same hotel. Then they would see I hadn’t departed in haste to my mother’s deathbed, as I’d said I would. Probably the best thing, then, would be to check out very early the following morning – say, six-thirtyish – when there was no danger of running into anyone. My brother had written saying he had heard from my sister that Mother had died peacefully in the afternoon. No doubt, he said, she felt she had struggled enough. He was glad, he wrote, that he had managed to speak to her while she was still compos mentis, only the evening before. On the phone. I replied asking him when he planned to arrive for the funeral? If he was already on his way, would he like to go and see the body with me?

  I then opened Dr Sharp’s message. He had been concerned, he said, about the state of mind he had left me in at Schiphol. Had I made my plane? How was my mother? It had been generous of me, he said, in the circumstances, to go ahead with the talk to the physiotherapists. If I used the wand, he warned, I should be careful. ‘Read the attachments I’m sending with this email, which will explain the correct amount of pressure to apply,’ he finished, ‘and feel free to call me any time.’ There was a number in California. But now I saw a new message had arrived; it was a reply from my brother already. He had no plans to come to the funeral, he said. He couldn’t really see the point of making long transcontinental trips for funerals. But even if he did come, he said, he certainly wouldn’t be going to see Mum’s body, thank you very much. The coffin would be quite enough.

  I felt rather shocked by this – brought up in my tracks, as Mother would have said. Perhaps language constantly renews itself, I thought then, so that we can identify a whole series of sayings that were special to our parents’ generation, then feel nostalgic using them ourselves from time to time. Whoopsy-daisy. Feet of clay. Almost like seeing old photographs. And I wondered if someone would take a photograph of the body. Of Mother dead. Should I do that perhaps, when I went to visit her? What struck me was not just my brother’s not wishing to see the body, but his absolute certainty that he didn’t want to see it. I really should leave for Tegel as early as possible tomorrow morning, I decided. I should look for a flight now.

  ‘I’m surprised you don’t want to come to the funeral,’ I wrote to my brother. ‘I mean, I know it’s a long haul, but it’s Mum’s funeral, for heaven’s sake. I think you should come.’

  I didn’t usually write in these urgent tones to my brother. He was an older brother. I wasn’t in the habit of telling him what I thought he should do. He would reply at once, I thought, and I got up to make myself a coffee to clear my head. There was a tartan mini-pack of Scottish shortbreads. How strange to be reminded of Scotland, and hence of my Scottish wife. How was I going to have dinner, I wondered, if I didn’t want to risk going out through reception? And if I ordered food in my room and it came out that I had done that, what would they think of me? But why did I care what they thought of me?

  My brother hadn’t replied. I logged into my bank account and paid the insurance premium that was pending, then opened the message from the old girlfriend that had so intrigued me yesterday, but had somehow lost all interest today. ‘Was in Camden Market, this afternoon,’ she wrote, ‘and had to pop into the pub for a pee. Suddenly remembered we had had lunch there once. The Lock Tavern. It was a lovely memory.’

  How nice. How nice it was to get friendly messages from old lovers. Should I reply? This was very likely the girl I had been with when Charlie read my email correspondence with David. Maybe. Hard to remember the chronology of those who were never part of your official life. Like dreams. David and I always exchanged jokey, sexually explicit remarks in our emails. No doubt it had been disturbing for Charlie to read them, to think of his father, who lived and slept with his mother, talking so flippantly about the way this or that woman did or did not do oral sex. Why had we insisted on that infantile correspondence, I wondered now, over three or four long years? I could go back in my email account, presumably, and find those emails, if I wanted to. I had no desire to. Why would I do that? We were trying, I suppose, to find some way of making light of those impulses that were pushing us to abandon our partners. We were trying to pretend that the absolute necessity of some new relationship was merely a sexual drive, merely a fleshly impulse. We weren’t suppressing the flesh, but we were pretending it was only flesh, not important, while continuing with the old relationship, which was the spiritual thing, the inward thing, hence the superior thing. Plus, of course, the old relationship was above all the practical thing, the thing that made social and economic sense, the thing that didn’t hurt anyone but ourselves. That was why our emails had to be so sexual, so scornful of love, so pornographic. So infantile. I had explained all this some time ago to the shrink. Or rather, while I had talked about the past, the shrink had encouraged me to see it all in this light: a wilful denial of the need for love. ‘What is all this about?’ my wife demanded when the twins told her about the text messages. Pornography is a denial of the need for love. That seems obvious now. ‘Nothing,’ I told her. ‘A stupid erotic game. Nothing else.’ So I betrayed my girlfriend of the time, not unlike St Peter, perhaps, when they put him under pressure and he denied Our Lord three times. What an analogy! But of course this was exactly what my wife wanted to hear. It was nothing. It was an erotic game. Her husband had feet of clay. And what Deborah had wanted to believe, no doubt, if anyone had ever told her anything about David. Her man was caving in to some meaningless cravings of the flesh. Carnal affections. Pornography is not the enemy of respectability, I thought. Rather its secret ally. ‘You had your Mexican poncho,’ I wrote to this girlfriend of some years ago. ‘And England won the Ashes while we drained our beers.’ A world of respectable ordered lives could hardly exist without pornography, without affairs.

  But what did any of this have to do with Mother, or the business in hand, my getting back to London to see her body? Nobody was more respectable than Mother, I thought, no one more willing to hear a respectable lie rather than a painful truth. I opened the two emails from the twins, sent almost simultaneously. No doubt their mother had told them to write to me and they had. ‘Dad, how’s Granny? We have a big race tomorrow. We’ve been training for it for months. Give us some news. Tell us if we should come right afterwards.’ ‘Dad, sorry we can’t come right now because of this race, but tell Granny we love her and we’ll come soon.’ ‘Kids,’ I wrote to both in one email, ‘I’m afraid your gran passed away yesterday afternoon. You shouldn’t worry about not coming, because I don’t think you could have made it in time, and anyway she wasn’t conscious at the end. Your brother and sister were there. She died very peacefully. Let me know if you will be able to come to the funeral. It would be good if we were all together.’

  Of course this news, I thought, would now go straight to my wife. When I communicated with the twins, it often felt as if in fact I were communicating with my wife, but at a remove. I wondered sometimes if both of us didn’t find some consolation in this communication, as if it testified to an old affection between us. But I also wondered whether it was ri
ght to put this burden on the twins. And, in this particular instance, whether it was right to exclude my wife from an event like this, my mother’s death, when she had been part of the family for so long. So without having planned to write to my wife at all – on the contrary, I had supposed I would already be in England and heading for the undertaker’s, or a morgue somewhere – I now found myself writing quite a long email to my wife, possibly the longest email I had written to her since the day we signed the separation papers. ‘It was great the children came,’ I wrote. ‘They both behaved wonderfully, I felt proud of them. Mother died peacefully surrounded by the people she loved. Not a bad way to go.’

  Rereading this, I was struck by the fact that I had again used the word my brother said my sister had used, when describing the death: ‘peacefully’. Peaceful is the word that collocates with dying when you want to express reassurance. Or to reassure yourself, perhaps. But reassure yourself of what? That dying is not so bad? That the dead person didn’t suffer too much? What is too much? Did Mother really feel peaceful? Certainly she hadn’t the night before. ‘If only,’ she had shouted. When faith seems weak and victory lost. ‘Take me tonight, Lord.’ Mother was only peaceful the following day because the battle was already over. ‘She is on her way, Mr Sanders.’ She was already gone, was what they meant. She had lost so much blood, and was so full of drugs, that the wildest, most tormented, cocaine-snorting fanatic would have been peaceful. Mother had been a fanatic of course, in her respectable way. She was certainly tormented. So should I change what I had written to my wife, I wondered? Should I tell my wife that my mother had died doubting her Christianity? This would lead me back to the long complicity between myself and my wife against my family’s faith. My wife and I had always felt superior to my mother, my father, my sister and my brother-in-law because they were born-again Christians, ingenuous and evangelical. Barbarians really. Should I tell my wife about my mother’s need at the end for props, in the form of Kenneth E. Hagin’s book about why God doesn’t always answer your prayers? My wife would feel gratified by this reminder of our old complicity. A couple is a couple in part because of the enemies they share. Certainly this was the case with my mother and father, who were a couple against the World, the Flesh and the Devil. In token that thou too shalt strive. My wife would feel gratified and say, If you’re over for the funeral, Tom, why not come up to Edinburgh for a day? Yes, writing that my mother’s death had not been a peaceful one would almost certainly lead to an invitation to go up to Edinburgh to see my wife. Would that be such a bad thing? Travelling back with the twins, perhaps, after the funeral, on the fast train from King’s Cross, always assuming they actually came to the funeral. I looked at the word ‘peaceful’ on the screen – she died peacefully – and thought how unflaggingly and shamelessly we yearn for the reassuring narrative. The narrative that allows us to bury the whole damn thing and get on with life. It can only make sense. And in the end, after the tormented night, there had been an extraordinary atmosphere of peace around Mother’s deathbed those last two hours when she was breathing her last.