It was Ellen’s last illness that summoned Bessie home for the last time. Ellen had been failing for some time, as Dora had faithfully and fully reported. She had developed chest pains, first diagnosed as heart disease, then as lung cancer. This diagnosis was not considered very surprising by either of her daughters. True, Ellen had never smoked a cigarette in her life, as far as they knew, but in Breaseborough you didn’t have to be a smoker to inhale smoke. And you didn’t have to go down the pits to ruin your lungs. Just living, breathing and walking in the streets would do it. So Dora and Bessie were not indignant or astonished. This kind of death happened all the time. Ellen had well outlived her husband, as women did, and do. It was time for her to go.
The link between cigarettes and lung cancer was well known, even at this period, however much this pre-knowledge was to be disputed and denied. The links between lung cancer, passive smoking and other kinds of pollution were less well established. But Dora and Bessie were not interested in cause and effect. They were fatalistic about death. It came, and that was that. (As far as other people were concerned, that was that. It was always a bit different when it seemed to be coming for you.)
Dora, as was expected, had done all the hard work during Ellen’s illness. She had popped round to Slotton Road every morning and every evening, poaching eggs, frying up bacon, making Welsh rarebit, burning the occasional pork chop. From January to July she had been on the run, back and forth, changing the sheets, emptying the chamber pot, listening to the laboured breathing, the spitting in the handkerchief. There was pain, but Dr Marr’s successor gave her what he could to alleviate it. Ellen did not want to go into hospital. She wanted to die where she had given birth, in the Tudor-style bed from Leeds with its half-tester.
In July, Dora moved back into the house in Slotton Road. The time was near. She slept again in the bed of her childhood, from which she had so often been evicted by the health crises of delicate Bessie. She smelled the smell of the old house, and dreamed of her father. Was it her fancy, or did the smell of pear drops from the amyl acetate from his accumulator boxes linger yet? He had always liked to have a child around, when he messed about with his soldering and tinkering. Dora remembered sitting on a little wooden buffet by him and handing him screws and bolts and bits of wire. Those had been happy times.
Dora dreamed of Bert, and woke to tend to her mother. Her mother remained grim and unpleased and unpleasing. Time and old age had not improved her character. What Dora was doing for her was no more than her duty.
Ellen Bawtry had never taken Dora into her arms and cuddled her and rocked her and comforted her. She had not been a tender mother. And Dora was not a tender nurse. But she was conscientious. She did her best. She would have liked to be able to hug her mother, and to kiss her, and to hold her hand through the nightwatches. But when she tried, once, to touch that gnarled hand with its embedded wedding ring, Ellen had snatched it away angrily. Ellen didn’t like fuss.
Dora was hurt by this rejection. But she tried not to show it.
Ellen grew worse, and Dora knew she would have to summon Bessie, the First Daughter, the First Lady of Breaseborough. Dora did not look forward to this task. She did not like using the telephone. Although she was in other ways a competent person, who could even change a car tyre, to her the telephone remained a newfangled instrument, to be used with thrift and caution. She would become more familiar with it as the years passed, and had one of her own installed before the end of the decade (for emergencies only), but she always tended to shout down it and never learned the art of hanging up. Now she had to brace herself to go round to Auntie Florrie’s, and her armpits grew clammy as she yelled the bad news down the line at six o’clock on a Sunday evening.
Bessie did not receive the message well. Ellen had decided to die at a most inconvenient time. As Bessie loudly reminded Dora, she and Joe and the children were about to go off the next week to Lyme Regis for their annual seaside summer holiday. The cottage was already booked and paid for and could not be cancelled. She would come when they got back at the end of August. She’ll never last that long, said Dora. If you want to see her, you’ll have to come now, before you go to Lyme. Bessie, whose domestic life lacked all appointments and employment, conceded that she could come up on the Wednesday, in two days’ time. She couldn’t leave on a Monday, because that was the day the gardener came, nor on a Tuesday, for on Tuesday mornings she and Mrs Baker cleaned the silver, and on Tuesday afternoons the grocery order was delivered. She would come by train on Wednesday. Wednesday was library day, but she supposed she could send Chrissie, now term was over.
‘You can sleep in my house,’ said Dora. ‘It’s empty. I’m staying with Mother.’
No reproach entered Dora’s tone. Had she not been using her unnatural telephone pitch she would have sounded deferential and placatory.
Bessie greeted this offer with a temporary silence. Dora panicked. Had the instrument seized up? Had she pressed the wrong bit? She shook the heavy receiver, miserably. Had she been cut off?
She had not been cut off. When she put her ear back to the earpiece she heard Bessie say, ‘We’ll see about that.’
One cannot blame Bessie for hesitating as she flinched from the thought of spending a night under Dora’s roof at Breaseborough. Bessie, since her schooldays, had become more and more fastidious in her habits—obsessively so, in Chrissie’s opinion. She liked to wake in a room where sunlight streamed in through spotless windowpanes. Dora had travelled in the opposite direction. She had grown messier and messier as the years had gone by. She had a hatred of waste, and she could not bear to throw away anything that might come in handy in the next war. She collected paper bags, old jars, rubber bands, bits of string, old magazines, broken clothes-pegs. Her little house filled up rapidly. Dora did not like space and air. She liked a good fug.
Chrissie as a child had enjoyed this relaxed and unhygienic regime—the cosy teas of buttered toast, the puddings of tinned fruit and whipped evaporated milk, the fish and chips wrapped in newspaper, the jumble of pot plants and tea cosies and egg timers and biscuit tins that occupied the small, square wooden kitchen table. But even Chrissie was to register that the nature of the clutter grew more unattractive year by postwar year. The kitchen table, once a plain wood, was covered with an unappealing pink-check stick-on badly fitting plastic coating, which began to peel round the edges, but stuck there, barely wiped, for decades. Biscuit tins gave way to—or rather, alas, were joined by—plastic boxes, tupperware, melaware, polythene. Cancerous growths of polymer branched and spread. Drawers burst and shelves buckled with hoardings. The new postwar rubbish was more durable than the old. It did not perish. Dora picked, saved, purchased, built up her nest.
Bessie found Dora’s nest disgusting. She could hardly breathe its fetid air. Would she really be obliged to spend a night or two in it, in the good cause of paying her last respects to her mother? She had had her mother and Dora to stay with her in Surrey for a whole week over Christmas. Hadn’t that been enough?
No, it had not been enough. Duty was duty. Bessie Barron sat on the train from St Pancras to Northam in a state of subdued anxiety. She rarely went anywhere alone. She began to calm down as the train made its way through the unattractive northern suburbs of London, and settled back into her seat. She could cope with the confines of a railway carriage, and she smiled graciously at the ticket inspector. The rhythm of the train soothed her, and she opened a book. She had brought three books with her, for she was still a greedy and rapid reader: two were detective stories, a Dorothy Sayers and a Margery Allingham, for Bessie enjoyed detective fiction, particularly novels with well-educated, upper-class, but apparently gormless heroes. They made her feel quite safe and superior. And she knew that it was acceptable to read such works. Even professors of English Literature read such works. And wrote them too, come to that. The third book was from Farnleigh Library, selected for her by Miss Ashley, and collected for her by Chrissie. It was about travel and wildlife in India and
was somewhat luridly entitled Man-eaters of Kumaon. Perhaps Miss Ashley had slipped up this time, though her taste could usually be trusted. Bessie liked travel books. She always said that she wanted to travel, and that she hoped to do so when the children were off her hands, when Joe had more time, when Joe retired. She would like to see more of Abroad, which in those days meant Europe.
Bessie engrossed herself in a story of eccentric but charming Bohemians, village witchcraft, and murders masterminded from vested interests overseas. Bessie solved the ancient runic riddle engraved on the old wellhead in no time. She was good at crossword puzzles.
Up in Breaseborough, Ellen Cudworth Bawtry was gasping for breath. She was about to have what Dora called ‘a do’. Dora, watching helplessly, could only say, ‘Bessie’s coming, Mother. Bessie’s on her way. She’ll be here soon, Mother. Hang on for Bessie.’
Bessie was miles away, her eyes on the page, her drugged imagination in a Suffolk village drinking vintage port with a satanic vicar, as the dull Midlands flowed past her streaked window.
Ellen hung on for Bessie.
Bessie put away her book, and got off the train at Northam Station, and changed for the branch line. She began to feel worse as she drew nearer home. The familiar ugliness which she had tried so hard to forget closed in again upon her—the dark weeping slabs of railway cuttings, the pitheads, the cooling stations, the terraced houses marching in formation up the hillsides, the dirty washing hanging on dirty lines. It was dangerous to come back. Bad things awaited her. Bessie Barron got out at Breaseborough and looked for a taxi. There was no taxi. She decided to walk. It was not far to Slotton Road, and her overnight case was not heavy.
She walked carefully, upon the uneven pavements, up the hill, to Slotton Road. She too was now breathing heavily, from emotion and unaccustomed exertion. The hill was longer than it had been when she was a girl. She wished not to be here. She felt that at any moment a hand could rise from the cracks in the paving stones and grab her by the ankle and pull her under, into the hollowness beneath. It had waited for her to come back. It had been futile to try to get away.
She tried to walk quicker, but her ankles were swelling under her own weight. She was no longer the willowy blond girl who had trodden lightly on the asphalt. She was a Surrey matron, and the mother of two. They could not force her to come back, they could not entomb her here. But if they did get her now, she’d be too slow to run away.
Bessie made it to Slotton Road, and rang the bell. Dora, long-suffering Dora, shook her head, looking solid and grim. It couldn’t be much longer now, whispered Dora, with glum importance. It was clear that she was willing to yield authority to Bessie at once. Bessie would know what to do.
Slowly Bessie mounted the mean and narrow staircase. It seemed shorter but steeper than it used to be. She paused for breath on the seventh step. The walk from the station had knocked her out. Joe was always trying to persuade her to take more exercise, but she paid no attention to his advice, and made no connection with it now as she puffed, waited, then lugged herself onwards and upwards.
Ellen lay in the bed in which Bessie had been born, in which Bessie had nearly died of influenza. Now Ellen was dying in it. She had never had a good complexion, and had turned a sullen yellow. She had lost much of her considerable weight, and her heavy jowls sagged loosely. She was wearing a bedjacket over her nightdress. At least it looked clean. Bessie noted that Dora had made an effort.
Bessie did not kiss her mother in greeting, The Bawtrys did not hold with kissing. She sat down, heavily, on the chair by the bed, and said, ‘Well, I’ve come, Mother.’
Ellen ceded nothing. ‘Yes,’ was all she said.
And there they sat, mother and daughter, looking at one another. There was nothing to be said. The silence was stiff and solid. Thousands of years of silence lay banked up behind them, lay coldly between them. There were no words. It was as though language had not been invented. Neither would cede, neither would give. What would happen? Ellen did the one thing left to her. She began to cough.
Dora, listening from the bottom of the stairs, was relieved to hear this familiar, ghastly, wrenching sound. At least Bessie would know now she hadn’t wasted her journey. And Bessie, staring at her mother, was thinking the same thing. At least she hadn’t wasted her train fare. This was the end.
Mother and daughters found nothing to say to one another, but sisters Bessie and Dora on that portentous evening recovered some of the old intimacy of childhood. Bessie decided to stay the night with Dora in the old twin room. Slotton Road was slightly to be preferred to Swinton Road. And they both thought Ellen would die in the night.
They sat up late, the pair of them, listening for sounds from upstairs, listening to the ticking of the grandfather clock. Ellen’s thin old tortoiseshell cat, Tibby, sat on Bessie’s knee and purred. Tibby was the last of a dynasty of Bawtry cats. Her great-great-grandmother’s grandmother had been rescued from the Destructor long ago, and cat after cat had slept on the couch, and eaten scraps from the same earthenware dish, and kept the mice away. Tibby would find a good home in Swinton Road with Dora. Tibby, like her mistress, would not live long. Bessie stroked Tibby, and Dora worked at her crochet, and in low voices the sisters spoke of their childhood, of earlier cats, of the motorbike and sidecar, of their pet rabbits Nancy and Peter who had ended up in a pie. Bert and Ellen had not been forgiven for that treachery. Childish grievances were rehearsed. No, she had not been very gentle with them, that old woman upstairs. She had not been a motherly mother.
Towards midnight, Bessie asked Dora if she knew what kind of contraception their parents might have used. Dora was shocked and flattered by this question. She didn’t know the answer. It was hard to associate Ellen Bawtry with Marie Stopes. They must have used something, said Bessie.
At one in the morning, the fat middle-aged daughters took themselves to bed. Bessie settled herself in first, and was reading her Margery Allingham when Dora, in her pyjamas, came to join her. They lay there, companionably. Bessie read for a while, then turned off her light and grunted good night. Dora lay awake for a long time, listening.
Ellen did not die that night, or the next night. On Thursday she seemed, if anything, slightly better, and had managed to have a brief conversation with Bessie about her family and the inferiority of Bessie’s fishmonger’s cod. Surrey cod was not as good as Yorkshire cod, and the price was shocking.
Ellen gave no sign that she knew her end was approaching, or that Bessie’s presence was unusual.
On Friday, Ellen was still, stubbornly, alive, and over her morning toast Bessie announced to Dora that she would go home that afternoon. Her family needed her. On Saturday they were to drive westward from Surrey to Lyme Regis. Everything was settled. It could not be altered now. Everything was planned. They had an AA route map. Joe, Robert and Chrissie must not be disappointed. They could not go without her. They would not understand about towels and bed linen.
(Robert and Chrissie, now nineteen and sixteen, had mixed feelings about this family holiday. But tradition was tradition, and it was still the 1950s.)
Dora accepted Bessie’s decision meekly. Of course Bessie’s plans must have priority. Family life took precedence over single-daughter life, middle-class Surrey life over Breaseborough life. If Dora had hoped to have company to see her through the last spasm of death, she did not show it. It was good of Bessie to have come all this way. It wasn’t anyone’s fault that Ellen had missed her cue. It couldn’t be helped.
We must not give the impression that Bessie valued a family holiday above her mother’s life. She did not prefer the seaside to a deathbed, or pleasure to pain. That was not the kind of person she was. But she had made plans, and she would stick to them. Rigidity, not selfishness, by now ruled her life. Dora understood this, and knew she could not argue with it. Ellen, had she been in a fit condition, would have understood it too. Ellen would have approved of Bessie’s decision. She would have done the same herself. Maybe she had done the same he
rself.
So Bessie said good-bye to her mother, and promised to come again soon. Her mother glared at her from rheumy bloodshot eyes. She was heard by both daughters to mutter, ‘That’s a likely story,’ though neither of them ever admitted that they had heard these words, so they lack confirmation. Maybe they misheard? But those were what Ellen’s last words to her elder daughter were thought to have been.
On the train on the way down, Bessie could not settle to her novels, or to the stories of the man-eating tigers of Kumaon. The binding of the tiger book was in very poor condition: it looked as though somebody had dropped it in the bath. She must get Chrissie to make it clear, when she took it back, that it hadn’t been her.
Bessie gazed out of the window and felt a slurry of misery rising in her. The self-pity of childhood possessed her. It had all been too difficult, the odds against her had been too high, she had been defeated.
She couldn’t afford to think like this. She started to count her assets as the train approached Derby. One husband, a loyal, successful, patient professional man. Two children, one of either sex, and in the right order. A large detached house with grounds. A good summer coat, in one of the new cotton blends, a decent pair of well-polished shoes and a tidy hat. She wasn’t sure about the hat, but she was even less sure about her short-cropped, unpermed hair, although Monsieur Claude assured her each month that the cut suited her and that she looked delightful. The hat had a good label, so it couldn’t be very wrong, could it? A decent handbag, neither new nor old. And back at the big house in Surrey, at the house called Woodlawn, she had a fine pedigree cat called Smollett, a much finer cat than poor plebeian old Tibby.
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