The World Was All Before Them

by Matthew Reynolds

  What . . . ?

  ‘Have you seen Slansky? Have you looked at the pictures? Do you believe it?’

  . . . ?

  ‘Have you read’ – the voice was quieter now – ‘the confession?’

  OK this is probably delirium.

  ‘I am not’ – she shouted – ‘betraying anything. I am trying to work out the truth.’

  Though it’s not exactly wandering, her speech. He wouldn’t call it muddled. Her cold eyes were staring at him. Her voice was enraged but her body was completely still.

  ‘So, according to you, it is bourgeois to try to find the truth?’

  It was as if he, Philip, were a body-block or whatever it was called in a movie when they filmed people’s bodies and then a computer printed a different identity onto them, a monster or a ghost.

  ‘What I am saying is that if you read with your eyes, and think with your brain, you will find that it does not connect.’

  Though there is something a bit odd in the way she is speaking, a sort of sing-song.

  ‘Think of his life of struggle for the Party. Why would he throw all that away? Throw it away for what?’

  Still, probably better not interrupt, Philip thought. Better let it run its course.

  ‘Look at the attack on Otto Sling. Two years ago, they accused Sling of conspiring against Slansky. Now they say they are associates!’

  Philip became aware of Mr Hanworth filling the doorway.

  ‘Do you know what it puts me in mind of?’

  Philip looked up at Mr Hanworth and, with their eyes and facial expressions, the two men signalled helplessness, the need, for the moment, to do nothing, only listen.

  ‘It puts me in mind of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg.’

  Whom he had heard of, vaguely.

  ‘That too was a show trial. There too there was hysteria cultivated by the State and channelled for its own purposes.’

  That’s right they were Americans from, when was it – 60s? – 50s? Meant to be spies.

  ‘But now look at the differences. The Rosenbergs seemed so calm. They were unyielding. Why? Because they were guilty! Because they knew that what they were facing was justice, even if, I know’ – she barked the word – ‘even if it was the wrong justice of a Capitalist State.’

  Yes, and they were executed.

  ‘They had strength because of what they had done.’

  But didn’t it come out afterwards they were innocent?

  ‘And now recall what happened to us.’

  To her?

  ‘The fabricated suspicion. The assumption of guilt. We couldn’t do anything against it because they had no need of proof. Which meant they were not vulnerable to disproof. We were being used. We too were victims of a State neurosis.’

  It could be the morphine causing this. Or it could be dehydration. Or she could be hypoxic. Although again she did not seem restless nor confused. More concentrated on the wrong thing.

  ‘Now look at Slansky, Gordon. Really look at him.’

  Her morphine dose was still comparatively low.

  ‘I know it is the Party doing this to him. I know it is not the Americans, and not the imperialist British government. But that doesn’t mean it’s right.’

  Mr Hanworth was still standing there. Neither of them must speak because, as Mrs Hanworth saw it, they were not in the room. The room was dominated by her vision.

  ‘Gordon, when I look at Slansky’ – the voice was trembling with assertiveness – ‘I see us.’

  After a moment she pressed on rhythmically: ‘He is slumped. He leans, with his weight on the policeman next to him. He has shrunk. He is kinked. As though someone has kicked him in the side. And no doubt that is what they did. Again and again and again. And worse. Or else’ – now the voice slows somewhat – ‘he stands with his head bowed. Trying to recede into the distance. An array of microphones is pointing at him. They are like missiles. He says what they want him to say. Because the world has changed. Around him everything has altered, new colours and new shapes. What was up was down and what was down was up. More than anything else in the world, he wants to find a place in it. Even if that place is labelled: traitor.’

  That last word seemed to be an end. It cracked like a dropped plate. Mrs Hanworth stopped, her mouth part open, her eyes still looking towards Philip but no longer focused.

  ‘Mother?’

  Nothing.

  ‘Mother?’ – Mr Hanworth stepped towards her.

  Her head moved, and then her eyes moved, wandering through the room and then finding him, her son. She looked with shock, and then bewilderment, and then a terrible spreading disappointment. The energy went out of her body and she sank back a little into the pillows. Her face slackened. Her eyes were shut now. She must have not known, she must have been wholly in the moment she was remembering. And then suddenly she must have come to, suddenly leapt half a century forwards and found herself elderly, bed-bound, tired, in pain, remembered she was dying.

  The first thing to do would be assess how she was now, how she would be in a few minutes. If she was compos mentis it would mean she wasn’t hypoxic.

  Her eyes were closed still and her breathing was audible again. The long breath out, the pause, the quick breath in.

  ‘Mother, are you alright?’ Mr Hanworth had sat on the side of the bed, tipping the end of the mattress towards him. Mrs Hanworth’s feet beneath the covers were at an angle.

  ‘Do you remember where you are?’

  From where he was sitting, useless, Philip could not see Mrs Hanworth’s face.

  ‘It’s me, Friedrich.’

  Philip didn’t catch the words with which Mrs Hanworth replied, but he heard the impatient tone.

  ‘Good, good,’ said Friedrich or was it Frederick placatingly. Philip looked at the yellow jersey stretched across his pillowed shoulders.

  ‘The doctor’s here.’ Then Friedrich or Frederick Hanworth stood and turned, backing towards the door.

  ‘I’ll leave you to it.’

  Now Philip stood, took two steps slowly towards the bed. Mrs Hanworth was looking at him with wary, weary eyes.

  ‘Sit,’ she said, in a whispering voice, glancing at the flattened patch Mr Hanworth had vacated.

  ‘So,’ said Philip gently, perched side-saddle on the bed, ‘how are things?’

  ‘I thought,’ she whispered, puzzling it over: ‘I thought I was talking to Gordon, my husband’ – now the voice was blurring – ‘ex-husband.’

  ‘Mmm.’

  ‘That was really’ – she was gulping, or trying to gulp: her mouth was dry. Philip looked to the bedside table for a glass of water, yes there was one, and a jug. He lifted the glass towards her, made a platform under the base of it with his fingers as she drank. ‘Really a bit of a surprise.’ Her eyes were fixed on his face. Her eyes were trembling, watering. ‘I mean the coming to. The coming back to here. Horrible.’ Her eyelids lowered. Her head shook a little from side to side.

  Her eyes were still down. He watched the little greyish wisps of lashes.

  ‘Have you been . . .’ he started to enquire, but she was saying quietly, raspingly:

  ‘I am not going to do it any more.’

  ‘Has it happened before?’

  ‘I don’t mean that.’ He was about to speak but she pushed on: ‘The pain is worse.’

  ‘I can increase . . .’

  ‘I could tell you it is so very bad. I could say, doctor, doctor, the agony! I could make my mind wander more, much more, pretend it was wandering. I could howl. I could have hallucinations, more hallucinations. I could be restless, never settle, be at risk of falling out of bed. And you’ – now she was looking up at him with direct eyes, appealingly – ‘you would set up a contraption to administer the morphine automatically by syringe and I would get you to increase the dose. Or maybe’ – she was still looking at him and the eyes went cold, went stony – ‘I could do it myself.’

  So this was . . . So she was . . . His heart was jumping and th
ere was a panic reaction in his throat but he tried to look back calmly, tried to fill his face with friendliness. He put on his gentlest voice. ‘I cannot set up, or authorise, a syringe driver for pain control unless’ – he was using official words to show that, for all his human sympathy, he had no choice but to go by the book – ‘I’m satisfied you need it. For instance, if you’re not able to take the medication in another form, or if you have breakthrough pain the oramorph can’t stop, or if you are in the very last stages of life and in distress.’

  ‘I am in distress,’ she said. She was looking past him, at the window. There was harshness in her voice, weariness. ‘What I wanted to happen has come to an end. Now it is eating away at me. Not just eating my body. Eating away at me. What will happen . . .’ – she was tiring, it was getting harder for her to speak – ‘is I know where I am less and less. I will know who I am’ – the eyes came back from the window: now she was looking along the thin line of herself towards her feet – ‘less and less. I will be at everybody’s mercy. I can’t’ – her neck was tensed, her lips drawn back from her yellow teeth – ‘bear it.

  ‘So,’ she carried on, turning to him with a strange sudden jauntiness, a sudden ease: ‘Let’s do it now. Why don’t you set up the syringe driver. Fill it full. And when you are far away I will have a miraculous surge of manic energy and plunge the plunger home.’

  He sat there. It was easier now she had said that. Clearer. The request was simply there in the room between them and they could look at it. He kept on projecting gentleness and warmth. Because when they looked at it, when she looked at it, she would see it was impossible. He had stated the rules he had to follow and anyway she knew the arguments. They both knew the arguments both ways. What he should do is simply, calmly try to be a firm and caring presence, try to help her like that, hope that that would help.

  The energy seemed to fade from the air as the moments passed. Her face was slackening again, sinking back into the pillow. Her eyes were closed. A twitch went across the lids. Pain.

  ‘I wasn’t,’ she said blurrily, ‘ a very good mother to Friedrich.’ She opened her eyes slowly to see that he was there still, and closed them again slowly, lizard-like. ‘Or the girls. They have hardly been to see me. But Friedrich stays. He has taken’ – there was restlessness in her now, impatience – ‘all this time off.’

  ‘Well that shows he’s a good son. He doesn’t want to lose you. Not before he has to.’

  She seemed not to hear. She was very still. Her head was lying atop the pillows at an odd, acute angle. Like the head of an artist’s wooden dummy that had been posed to seem to ask a question. But her eyes were shut and her attention seemed to have turned away from everything outside her.

  Then her mouth opened slightly and breath was coming out. Then it seemed impeded; the breath rasped. There was a gurgle at the back of the throat. The eyes opened and she lifted her head, trying to lean forward. Philip reached his arm around her, slid his flat hand down between her spine and the pillow, eased her further upright. She coughed a weak, congested cough. Then calm again. She was balanced upright, resting with the tiniest pressure against Philip’s arm.

  ‘Shall I help turn you onto one side?’

  She wobbled her head in assent. Still with one hand at her back, Philip reached his other hand across and tugged a pillow down at an angle towards the edge of the bed. He threw another to the floor, leaving a pile of two at the bed’s head. Slowly he let her lie back and tip over as her shoulder abutted on the angled pillow. Now her head was on its side, her cheek on the other pillows; but her torso was twisted, her hips and legs still lying flat.

  ‘Can you turn your hips and legs?’

  She didn’t respond. So strange after her alertness a moment ago.

  ‘Shall I?’ Again the mild assent.

  He walked around to the other side of the bed. He knelt beside it. He reached under the covers with his right arm, his hand flat. His fingertip touched the side of one of her buttocks and he pressed the back of his hand down into the warm mattress to slide it under. Now his hand and wrist were all the way through and his fingertips curled up to touch the edge of her hip bone. Really there should be a draw sheet but he would leave that to Mr Hanworth and the nurse to arrange later when Mrs Hanworth had had a rest. He reached down with his left arm so that its wrist and hand lay across her lower legs. Then, gently gently, he raised his right forearm-and-wrist-and-hand like a single rigid lever, and simultaneously pulled the lower legs backwards with his hooked left hand and wrist. She went over beautifully.

  ‘I think you might be more comfortable with a pillow under your ankles. Shall we try?’

  No movement but a feeling of consent.

  So he reached along for the pillow that had been cast to the floor, and, raising the bird-like, bird-light ankles with his left hand, slid it under. Then he stood and went around the bed to where he had been before.

  She lay quiet with perhaps a hint of a smile around her mouth.

  An eye opened and she looked up at him.

  ‘I had wanted,’ she said, moving the part of her mouth that was not hindered by the pillow, ‘to see the blossom.’

  She watched him a bit longer with the one eye that he could see. Then the one eye closed.

  She spoke again: ‘It bursts out amazingly.’ A moment’s pause. ‘But it only lasts about a week.’

  ‘Maybe when it comes out,’ he said, ‘we can lift you so you can see it.’

  ‘It is,’ she said, ‘such profligacy.’

  Then she settled into quietness again. He listened. The long breath out; the quick breath in.

  ‘Try to keep drinking,’ he said. ‘Just a little bit. Don’t let yourself dry out.’

  They sat together in the quietness of her breathing.

  And then: ‘I’ll leave you now,’ he said. ‘I’ll see you next week.’

  ‘Mmm.’ As he stood, her head stirred. ‘Oh Dr Newell,’ she called out, in a voice that was suddenly clearer. ‘Do you see Lenin in the window?’

  He looked, bewildered.

  ‘Could you bring him nearer, here.’ With her eyes she indicated the bedside cabinet.

  Oh, she meant the little bust on the table. He went over, picked it up between fingers and thumb. Surprisingly heavy. He put it on the bedside cabinet, a bit above the level of her face.

  ‘Thank you,’ she said. ‘I’ll wake up and see him looking down at me.’ Eyes shut again, she smiled. ‘So stern.’

  ‘Have a good rest Mrs Hanworth.’ Philip was standing by the door now. ‘See you next week.’ Over the creaking floorboards of the little landing he made his way out, and down the creaking stairs.

  The door was open on the left into the sitting room. Philip put his head through to look: there was Mr Hanworth in an upright chair by the empty fireplace. His knees made right angles and his arms were laid along the arms of the chair and he was looking straight ahead.

  ‘Mr Hanworth,’ said Philip, moving into the room.

  The head turned and Mr Hanworth was looking up at him. The worried eyes looked out from above the flabby red cheeks.

  ‘I didn’t get to talk to her as much as I would have liked. She’s sleeping again now.’

  No response from Friedrich Hanworth.

  ‘That . . . episode. It may just have been a very vivid memory. Or it may have been what we call a confusional state, or delirium. In a way the definition doesn’t really matter. What matters,’ he continued, ‘is how your mother feels, that she should not be in distress.’

  He simply sat there listening.

  ‘It’s important to help her to keep taking liquids. Not force her, but make sure she’s never left thirsty.’

  Still no response.

  ‘If she is in pain or seems distressed, you must ring the practice number.’

  ‘She thought she was talking to my father.’ There were streaks on Mr Hanworth’s mottled cheeks. ‘That was the argument, I’m almost sure that was one of the arguments’ – his head was n
odding, he was piecing the thing out – ‘that made them break up. I was only very young then. I didn’t know what it was about. I remember the tones of voice. I was in bed and I remember the arguing voices coming from below, and not being able to make out what was said. So it was strange to hear the actual words just now.’

  ‘Can I ask,’ Philip said, ‘what was it, I mean who was, was it Slansky?’

  ‘He was a communist. He was one of the accused in the show trials of the 1950s. In Czechoslovakia. My mother saw through it all, at the time, unlike my father. Unlike pretty much everyone else on the left. It ended with her splitting from the Party – you know she was in the British Communist Party? And splitting from my dad.’

  Friedrich Hanworth had been talking to the air but now he turned again to Philip.

  ‘I held it against her. We all did. It was quite a hard life. She went out to work. She had been in the civil service before I was born, they both were, but they had left, or had to leave, because of belonging to the Party. So she worked as a teacher. It was lonely for us kids. Now, looking back, I think she recognised that, and was sorry for it, and sort of insulated herself against it. That was why she was so, well, not cold exactly, but . . . stern. Oh I know I shouldn’t be talking to you like this, Dr Newell, it’s not your job to listen . . .’

  ‘No that’s alright, I don’t mind.’

  ‘I did react against it. I went and got a good capitalist job, and became well-off, and had a bourgeois family, lived comfortably. Enjoyed everything she so much disapproved of and had fought against. That created some estrangement, as you can imagine. But now, when I look back. Well, Dr Newell, you get to my stage of life, and you can look back more calmly and understand. And now I do that, well: I very much admire her.’

  ‘And you are wanting to show that now in your care for her.’

  ‘Yes,’ Mr Hanworth said solidly, accepting that he had been understood.

  ‘Are you feeling that your mother isn’t allowing you to do that as much as you would like?’

  ‘Perhaps. Yes. It is that, yes.’

  ‘She’ – gosh it was strange to be saying what he was about to, to this blustery, jovial, elderly man – ‘knows. She knows you love her. You are showing it. And she does love you back. Of course she does.’