by Tim Parks
Eventually, fearing that a window of opportunity was narrowing and that someone it had once been all too easy to talk to had now become remote and was threatening to become infinitely more so, I booked a flight and made all necessary arrangements to reach Mrs P’s new place of residence. My ticket paid for, I tried again to phone to fix an appointment and, as always, was told by a young female voice that she would have to check whether Mrs P was able to take my call. What euphemisms! And of course it appeared she was not able. I was invited to call back in an hour’s time, which I did. And then in ten minutes. It was frustrating. But at my fourth or fifth attempt, Mrs P’s guardians finally told me she was now willing to take my call and so I spoke to her for the first time in quite a while.
‘Thomas,’ she said. Her voice sounded odd. Posher than I remembered it, more formal. Perhaps due to her changed circumstances, I thought, and the increased pressure on her agenda.
‘I’m coming to see you tomorrow,’ I informed her, perhaps presumptuously.
‘Oh, you are coming, are you?’ she said. ‘Tomorrow?’
It was difficult to judge her mood. On the one hand she seemed relieved, even pleased perhaps, but on the other perturbed, as if this information – my peremptory decision to come and see her after an absence of some six weeks – were rather ominous.
‘At what time?’ she asked, continuing with this curiously correct Queen’s English she was adopting.
I told her around two.
‘We shall see each other tomorrow, then,’ she said and ended the call abruptly.
The following day I boarded a morning flight, landed at Heathrow, found my bus stop and bus and alighted forty minutes later at a small railway station, whence on foot the half-mile or so to where Mrs P had recently moved her residence and was receiving the few visitors she was now willing to grant time to. Needless to say, I had to sign in and declare my intentions and relationship with Mrs P, which I duly did, feeling at once how powerfully defining that relationship was for me, and how the forthcoming meeting, whatever its tenor, could only reinforce the importance Mrs P had always had in my life.
I should go to room 3, I was told.
The door was on the left, a stained-wood double door in a corridor typical of certain institutions, neither attractive nor drab, but determinedly functional. Her name was posted on the door – a printed card in a nameplate holder – in very much the manner that my name is posted on the door of the office in the organisation where I work. This was a novelty, I thought, for Mrs P, and indicated she had moved into a different league. When had I ever seen her name on a nameplate before? I knocked on the door and after a brief, respectful pause, during which there was no perceptible response, pressed down the handle and entered.
Mrs P was much changed, and at once the reason why she had not reacted to my knocking was apparent. Half seated, half reclining, she was asleep. It seemed a troubled sleep of uneven breathing and sharp twitches, in particular of her naked left arm, which, mottled and flaccid, was looped about by a white wire, at the end of which a small plastic box with a red button presumably enabled her to call and command the administrative staff. What most, however, attracted my dismayed attention was her mouth, which had sunk drastically into her face. Wrinkled and bloodless, the lower lip appeared to have been sucked back over the gums and down into the trembling darkness of her deep drawn breath. She was not wearing her lower denture.
Dutifully, I sat beside her bed, which was clearly an expensive item complete with various gadgets of advanced technology. I stood, removed my coat, hung it on the back of the seat and sat again. Waiting for her to wake, I took in the room that her changed status had assigned her. There were three or four chairs, of which one was an elaborate recliner. There was a French window and beyond it a patch of patio complete with a modest fountain, whose soft splashing mingled with the sounds of Mrs P’s breathing. It was by no means an unpleasant place to be.
For a while, then, I sat still, absorbing all the transformations that had overcome Mrs P since our last, rather happy meeting, in her tiny terraced house. I should let her sleep, I thought. She looked in need of a long rest. Then I remembered that I would not be the only one with an appointment this afternoon. It was already 2.45. Very soon other people would appear on the scene and this privileged moment would be gone, perhaps never to return. I stood and leaned over her. I was intensely aware of a new whiteness, wanness rather, in her skin, and of how thickly pleated it had become at the corners of lips and eyes. I shook her shoulder through the white nightdress, noticing that the blanket covering her legs, waist and lower chest was a rather improbable fuchsia colour. Indeed, its intensity made everything else in the room seem colourless, as if it were drawing all life and warmth into itself to keep Mrs P cosy.
‘Mum?’
For some reason I had assumed it would be difficult, perhaps impossible, to wake her; I am prone, I believe, to what psychologists have dubbed ‘catastrophic thinking’. But the eyes opened at once. And how blue they were and clear, an immediate reminder of the charisma that had always hung around Mrs P and made her, in her modest way, a rather formidable person. Her lids fluttered open and the eyes focused.
‘Thomas.’
Mrs P is the only person in the world to call me Thomas, rather than Tom, or Tommy, perhaps the only person who feels, without even being aware of it, that she has the right to call me what she likes, without negotiation.
‘Good heavens. What time is it?’ Her eyes went to the clock on the opposite wall. She squinted.
‘Two forty-five,’ I said. She seemed perplexed. Realising she wasn’t wearing her hearing aid, I repeated, ‘Two forty-five, Mum!’
‘But it can’t be. Did I fall asleep?’
She smiled, and the transformation was remarkable. What had seemed the face of a breathing corpse was now full of warmth and mobility. Clumsily, I bent down and embraced her white hair.
‘Thomas,’ she repeated. ‘Thomas.’
It was the missing denture that gave her the posher accent.
‘Mum,’ I told her.
‘Is Mary with you?’
‘She couldn’t make it,’ I said.
‘Ah,’ she frowned.
Sitting beside her, smiling, I demanded that she explain these drastically altered circumstances. What had happened? And she told, albeit with some effort and failures of memory, the same story I had already heard from other sources: namely, her fall on the stairs at home, the days of increasing pain and immobility that had ensued, her eventual removal to hospital, the doctors’ difficulty distinguishing between creeping cancer and immediate back injuries, a period staying at my sister’s house that, despite everyone’s goodwill, had been neither easy nor happy, then her eventual transferral to this charitable institution.
‘They are wonderful here,’ she told me with a sigh. ‘They are so kind.’
‘That’s great,’ I agreed.
‘And how is Mary?’ She spoke with a false brightness, on automatic pilot.
‘Mary’s fine,’ I said. ‘Just fine. The kids too.’
She looked hard at me, as if sensing something was wrong.
‘I’m living away from home now, remember? While we think about things.’
She hesitated. ‘Of course,’ she said, but still looked puzzled.
‘It’s all fine,’ I said. ‘Things will sort themselves out.’
Then she asked me how long would I be staying, and I replied that I had a return flight the following evening, since the morning after that – the day after tomorrow – I had to be at an important meeting with a new client. She seemed to reflect on this for some time, as if weighing up information of great import.
‘I see,’ she said at last, and I understood that what she had seen was that if I did in fact catch the plane tomorrow evening, this would almost certainly be our last meeting.
‘I’m glad to be here, Mum,’ I said hurriedly. ‘I’m so glad to be here with you.’
She smiled and again that unexpect
ed vitality rose to her face. Perhaps she would indeed go on for ever, I thought, as my brother had always maintained. I stood and leaned over her. I wanted to embrace her. But there was a railing along the side of the bed and though she struggled for a moment she was unable to sit up. In the end I bowed over the railing and bent down to her white head.
‘It’s so good to see you,’ I repeated. ‘You’re a fantastic mother, Mrs P.’
Speaking close to her ear, my chest almost smothering her face, I was struck by the size of the lobe, which seemed to have grown quite disproportionately, and by the quality of her grey hair, which had become finer, with a faint and rather mysterious yellow hue.
‘What is it? Are you in pain?’
She shook her head under my smothering breast – I was wearing a heavy woollen sweater – but it seemed she had begun to cry.
Rather clumsily I said, ‘Don’t worry about me and Mary, Mum. We’ll be okay.’
I spoke very close to her ear and very clearly. I didn’t want her to have to struggle to understand. And I asked: ‘Aren’t you happy to see me? It’s good to be with you again.’
Her weeping intensified. Perhaps it was the fact that my embrace was covering her face that allowed this to happen, since in the normal way of things Mrs P did not cry in front of others, and certainly never sobbed. It had always been important for Mrs P not to impose – for this is doubtless how she saw it – her weeping, her suffering, on others; not to stoop, or perhaps simply give way, to this form of manipulation. Which I suppose suggests that she did feel tempted so to stoop, tempted to weep. But perhaps this was all my interpretation, recalling the moment forty and more years ago when through tears – one of the very few times I had seen Mrs P cry – she had said to me, ‘If you go on like this, Thomas, you will bring me down with grey hairs to my grave.’ That is how I remember her words, though years later, checking in Cruden’s Concordance, I discovered that the biblical text she was quoting actually reads ‘bring down my gray hairs with sorrow to the grave’, and it is hard, honestly, to imagine that Mrs P would ever quote a biblical verse wrongly. No doubt my memory is at fault. Certainly I have no idea now what it was exactly I had done, aged seventeen, to deserve this remonstration, though vaguely I sense it must have had to do with my brother, whose rebellious and unchristian behaviour, as they saw it, had caused my parents much grief, and in fact when I checked the quotation in Cruden’s, tracking it down through the unusual plural ‘hairs’, it was to find that the words were spoken by Jacob when he feared he would lose his youngest son Benjamin as well as his next youngest, Joseph. In fact the verse begins, ‘And if ye take this [Benjamin] also from me … ye shall bring down my gray hairs’ … etc. So in echoing those words Mrs P, consciously or otherwise, was accepting as given the loss of one son, my brother, and expressing the anguished fear that another, her youngest, would go the same way.
This will seem a long digression, but now here I was embracing Mrs P’s grey hairs that had indeed been brought down, if not to the grave, then to a hospice bed, which is the closest thing. And she was in tears.
Voices came into the room from the corridor now. Two nurses hurried by the open door and further away a vacuum cleaner was whining.
‘Are you happy to see me?’ I asked again, and in asking that I knew I was betraying anxiety. I spoke close to her ear.
‘Of course,’ Mrs P whispered. ‘Only …’
I held the embrace. I felt very self-conscious; all this had been foreseen.
‘Only’ – her head was shaking under my chest – ‘you don’t love the Lord Jesus, Thomas. I keep thinking that, and it grieves me. More than anything else in the world.’
So this was it. Here we were. This was the hurdle that had to be negotiated before Mrs P and I could part. I had agonised for weeks before telling her my marriage had fallen apart, but what really mattered was my not being Christian, my not loving, or even acknowledging, the Lord Jesus, unless perhaps the two problems were the same, since only someone who did not love the Lord Jesus, or only a man who had no faith in God, would end up in this way. A son of Mrs P’s should know that.
In any event, this was the problem and the fact that we were confronting it, or she was – since for me there was nothing to confront but her need to confront me with it – indicated that she at least felt sure that this really was our last meeting. Suddenly overwhelmed by emotion, I too began to cry, though in a different way from Mrs P. Tears ran freely down my cheeks; it seemed mad that it wasn’t enough for her to suffer the pains and humiliation of her sickness; she also had to worry about my marriage and my soul.
‘It grieves me, Thomas,’ she repeated. ‘It makes everything more difficult.’
My embracing her, I’m sure, hiding her face as I bent over her hair to speak in her far ear, had made this outburst possible; opened, as they say, the floodgates. And the drama had come so much sooner than I expected. After all, I was barely through the door. We had barely said anything to each other. Apparently she felt she had to act immediately. Any waiting would be folly. ‘It grieves me,’ she said again. And the challenge for me now was to avoid the mistake that I had made when the same scene had presented itself – almost the same scene – with the Reverend P, my father, thirty-two years before and just a few months after he had pronounced myself and Mary man and wife. But his cancer had been more aggressive, more rapid, and he had not enjoyed the same level of care. In fact it was in the vicarage bedroom where he and Mrs P slept together that he had begged me to convert before he died and I had told him, petulantly, that it was unfair of him to use his suffering to sway my mind, thus adding unkindness to the many pains, physical and psychological, he was already dealing with.
Fortunately, I had had more time to rehearse for this appointment. I was older. So now, to Mrs P, I said, ‘Life is long, Mum, who knows what I will believe or become in the future. Or even whether Mary and I will get together again. You rest now. You need to rest.’
Mrs P went on weeping, but wordlessly. I was at a loss, reflecting that rather than being shorter than I had feared, this appointment was already beginning to feel longer than I could be easy with. Still speaking close to this strangely large ear, I muttered, ‘We each have our own journey, Mum.’
This was false. It was a platitude. It was not the kind of thing Mrs P’s son would normally say. And the very falseness prompted me to add, ‘Forgive me for being unkind.’
Perhaps Mrs P realised I was floundering, for she rather abruptly stopped crying and somehow communicated to me that the moment was over and that my embrace, hiding her face, was no longer necessary or appropriate.
Stepping back, it occurred to me that Mrs P now felt a little guilty for having pushed me into producing first a platitude then this half-hearted request for forgiveness. The truth is that Mrs P harbours unlimited reservoirs of guilt just waiting to find a breach and gush out. She felt guilty for having invited me to contemplate my ‘guilt’, my responsibility, as she saw it, for her unhappiness, thus making me guilty of prevarication. I couldn’t help smiling through my own drying tears. The sheer conflictedness, if that is a word, of Mrs P’s behaviour has often been a cause of endearment. I sat down.
‘I’m so glad to be here,’ I said more frankly. This was true, I was glad. ‘Glad to be with you, Mum.’
It took her a moment to return to herself. She was aware I was now seeing her tears. But her face was unclouding, the unhappy contortion of her weeping was smoothing out, so it seemed to me she too was glad now, glad, as it were, to have got it over with, to have said her piece, her very last piece about my lack of faith. However much grief it brought her, no more need be said on the matter. The business of our appointment was done. She had felt duty-bound to make that play, to reopen negotiations one more time, one last time, in the hope that something in me might finally give; yet no sooner had she made the play than she felt it had been wrong to make it. So now she was relieved that, having done what she had, she was free to stop doing it. This is the sort
of sick, messed-up atmosphere you grew up in, I thought, and simultaneously I also thought what a long way Mrs P and I had come from the days of my adolescence when she had talked so melodramatically of grey hair and graves; how civilised we now were, like two countries who still dispute a crucial stretch of border territory and will never renounce their claims – on the contrary: at every crisis those claims will be aired and pressed – yet deep down both have accepted that nothing will ever shift in this dispute, no armies will march or missiles fly, so they might as well get on with the normal trade that makes life pleasurable and profitable, if nothing else because they are neighbours. And we were mother and son.
‘It’s lovely to see you, Thomas,’ Mrs P said.
‘Mum,’ I cried, delighted.
‘No Scrabble, though, alas.’
Here she did something with her face that beggars description. The truth is that Mrs P has always been a good girl. Mrs P has never knowingly broken any rule or law or misbehaved in any way. Yet now she sought to put on a mischievous expression, half wink, half smirk, as of complicity between malefactors, an expression that was meant to amuse: here we are on the brink of eternity, Thomas, lamenting the absence of Scrabble. Aren’t we naughty!
I knew the look, of course, knew it of old and the emotions it aroused, though I had never seen it on this new and changed face of hers, this mask of suffering and death, which gave it an unreal quality; all the more so for the intense transparency of her blue eyes, something, I was aware, that had much to do with the operations to remove her cataracts of three and four years before.