The Grass Memorial

by Sarah Harrison

  ‘Have we told the boys when to come?’

  ‘Yes.’ Mary was firm. ‘Later.’

  ‘I want to be dressed when they get here.’

  ‘You will be, don’t worry.’

  ‘What am I wearing now?’ He pulled at his pyjama jacket between finger and thumb and gazed down at it. ‘What’s this?’

  ‘Your pyjamas.’

  ‘I don’t want to be wearing pyjamas when the boys arrive.’

  ‘Of course not.’ Mary lifted his hand and gave it a little encouraging tug. ‘Let’s go back to our room and then we can decide.’

  Stella said: ‘Can I help? What can I do?’ Andrew gave her a worried look. ‘Will you tell the boys when to come?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I don’t want them here till I’ve dressed.’

  ‘I understand.’

  Mary mouthed ‘thank you’ and led him away. The bedroom door closed after them. But that was only the beginning of a long night of alarms and excursions. Stella knew from her watch that she herself was getting some rest, however interrupted, but when the first birds twittered beyond the grey window her last thought before falling into a final few hours of dead sleep was that her mother must have been up for most of the night.

  And yet in the morning there was Mary in the kitchen, dressed, coiffed and made up, with bread standing to attention in the toaster and the cafetière ready by the kettle. Stella, still in her dressing gown, felt put to shame.

  ‘Mum – how on earth do you do it?’

  ‘With difficulty.’ Mary kissed her. ‘And practice.’

  ‘Where is Dad anyway?’

  ‘I give him breakfast in bed and then he has a bit of a zizz before we start again.’

  ‘You didn’t get up just for me?’

  ‘I’d like to say yes, but no.’ Mary put the cafetière on the table. ‘I really do have to make the effort, it’s the only thing that keeps me going.’ She smiled to show this was a joke when it was plainly true.

  Stella sat down at the table and pushed down the plunger in the coffee pot. ‘So do you get any rest at all?’

  ‘Not much, but then we don’t need much at our age. Not so much proper sleep anyway. I’ve perfected the art of the casual doze. Like a horse standing under a tree, an indeterminate state.’

  ‘Well, at least have a nap today at some point, and let me look after Dad.’

  ‘Let’s see.’

  ‘And let me take you both out to lunch.’

  ‘That would be absolutely lovely – but I warn you, it can be wearing.’

  ‘At least there’ll be the two of us.’

  The pub lunch was wearing, though perhaps not for Stella in quite the way her mother had meant. There were the misunderstandings and wanderings and spillings, the odd, unconnected questions and remarks addressed to complete strangers. No, it wasn’t coping with the practicalities that discomfited her so much as a kind of childish embarrassment. For the first time in years she caught herself asking what people would think, and realising that she minded. It wasn’t that people weren’t kind and tolerant – if anything that was the trouble. Once the situation had been resolved she found herself haunted by what she imagined to be their pity, their indulgence, their self-congratulation – their relief that the moment had passed, and it wasn’t they who had to deal with it. The remarks they would make to one another sotto voce.

  When Andrew wanted to go to the lavatory, she said she would take him and then realised there was a problem.

  ‘Which one?’ she asked her mother.

  ‘Oh, the Gents.’

  ‘Do I go in?’

  ‘No, he can manage. Post him in at the door and if he’s too long poke your head in. If some friendly male face is about you can deputise, it’s no time for pride.’

  ‘I can see that.’

  ‘And, Stella – darling, check his flies when he comes out.’ Thankfully her father emerged with another nice elderly gentleman who confided ‘All shipshape’ as he went past.

  Andrew frowned at her. ‘It’s not bath day.’

  She decided it was time to bat the ball back. ‘Isn’t it?’

  ‘Have I had a bath?’

  ‘No. Which day is bath day?’

  ‘I can’t have one like this.’

  She gave up.

  When they got back to the bungalow she was therefore rather taken aback when Mary took her up on her earlier offer.

  ‘Perhaps I will go and put my head down, for half an hour – are you sure that would be all right?’

  ‘Of course! Is there anything I should know?’

  ‘I don’t think so . . . He loves musicals if there’s one on.’

  ‘I’ll see.’

  Stella joined her father in the living room, chastising herself for her slight reluctance and anxiety. He was sitting with his hands on his knees tapping his fingers to some rhythm in his head, but gazing at his hands as though they belonged to someone else.

  ‘Dad . . .’ She leaned down to try and catch his eye. ‘Dad, can I get you anything?’

  Still tapping, he replied cheerfully: ‘I wouldn’t mind some chocolate.’

  ‘Good idea, me too. Where is it?’

  ‘On the sideboard, on the sideboard, by the shining big-sea water.’

  There was no sideboard, but out in the kitchen she found a large bar of Fruit and Nut in the cupboard, and took it through. She unwrapped it, broke off a strip of squares and held it out to him.

  ‘There you are.’

  ‘What’s this?’

  ‘Chocolate. Fruit and nut.’

  ‘I don’t care for it.’

  ‘All right.’ She laid the squares on the table next to him. ‘But it’s there if you change your mind.’ She broke off a chunk for herself and thought. If I had to do this every day I’d be a twenty-stone, chain-smoking, bullying alcoholic. Her admiration for her mother’s stamina and spirit was increasing by the minute.

  The fingers tapped away, then stopped. ‘How does it go, that one?’

  ‘Which one?’

  ‘This.’ He tapped again, this time humming tunelessly.

  ‘What are the words?’

  This was a long shot, but he didn’t seem to hear and continued to hum, more a series of sniffs and puffs in time with his fingers.

  Something occurred to her, and she laid her own fingers on the table top and tapped as she intoned the words: ‘ “By the shining big-sea water. Daughter of the moon Nacomis . . .” ’

  ‘Hang on, I’ll find it, you’ve got it somewhere.’

  Elated with this small success, fearful of losing the moment, she scanned the bookshelves and found Longfellow. Then she sat cross-legged on the floor in front of her father’s chair and began. He tapped, she read. He stared at whatever it was he could see, and smiled.

  When Mary came in, with many apologies, at four o’clock, they were still at it, except that Stella was lying down. Mary made no comment but withdrew to make tea, and her return with the tray provided Stella with an excuse to stop.

  ‘Good kip?’

  ‘Absolutely wonderful. Out like a light.’

  ‘I’m so pleased. And we’ve had a nice time too.’

  ‘I can see that.’ She looked a little wistful. ‘It makes me realise how selfish and unimaginative I’ve become.’

  ‘Mum,’ said Stella, ‘for goodness’ sake. This is a novelty to me. I don’t know how you manage half what you do.’

  Mary sighed. ‘Revelations apart, I do love him, you know . . .’

  ‘Of course you do!’

  ‘That’s the bugger of it.’ She leant across and stroked the ridged, veiny back of his hand. ‘And I almost wish I didn’t – love’s such a hard taskmaster.’

  The next day they all went to lunch with George and Brian at Bells. Over g and t and Kettle Chips in the kitchen George quizzed her sister.

  ‘How do you find them?’ ‘Amazing all things considered. I don’t know how Mum manages, she’s a bloody superwoman.’ ‘Awesome or what? But
our view is that the time is fast approaching when something will have to be done.’

  ‘What, you mean a home?’

  ‘It sounds so awful when you put it baldly like that, but I suppose that is what I’m getting at. Otherwise she’s going to burn herself out.’

  ‘But if she’d rather do it, that’s her prerogative surely?’

  ‘That’s a terribly grown-up thing to say.’

  ‘I mean, she has to decide, not us. And reach the point where she decides in her own time and her own way. And in the meantime she needs to feel that she’s doing the right and loving thing. She needs our support.’

  ‘Blimey, Stella.’ George sloshed vin du pays into the gravy pan and gave her sister a sidelong look. ‘First Italy, now this . . . If I didn’t know better I’d suspect you of becoming a good woman.’

  On the drive back into town Stella reflected that she was very far, thank God, from being a good woman – she was a loose one who had unexpectedly felt the tug of love. And was finding that love was, as her mother had said, a hard taskmaster.

  As the summer grew tired and crawled into August, Robert had still not been in touch, but she did write the songs. This was due mainly to the reliable, non-negotiable imperative of the deadline – their two weeks at the Parade on the Park ran for the second half of the month – but also because the pigheaded performer in her would not be beaten. It became a point of honour with her that this season should be a triumph. She wanted to wear her experiences lightly, dazzlingly, like jewellery, to mug her audience with high emotion and terrific tunes. To slay them where they sat.

  Derek was chuffed with her output. ‘You’re working well, girl, it was worth waiting for. This lot’ll make them choke on their dinners.’

  ‘Let’s hope so.’

  ‘You’re looking great, by the way.’

  ‘Thanks.’

  She wasn’t sure about this. When she looked at herself in the mirror these days she thought that she looked discernibly older. She had never had any pretensions to beauty, and had done precious little to take care of herself. She had not exercised, nor watched her diet, nor pampered herself at health farms; she had smoked, drunk and slept around. She had dyed her hair so often she had almost forgotten its natural colour; she dressed to please herself, she preferred glasses to contact lenses and only wore make-up on stage.

  What she saw in her reflection was not so much the physical signs of ageing, which anyway would not have bothered her. It was something much less palpable: a look in the eyes, a set of the lips. It was – and here she perceived the germ of a song – as though the iron had gone from her soul.

  One evening she went so far as to ring Robert’s home telephone number, the only time she had ever done so, taking care to enter the blocking code first. Her call was answered immediately, she guessed the phone might be on a desk.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘May I speak to Mr Vitelio, please?’

  ‘Who is that?’

  She was taken aback not so much by the question as the implication that Robert might be there. She plucked a name from the ether.

  ‘Sarah Jones, I’m a colleague.’

  ‘Just a moment.’

  A hand was placed over the receiver for what felt like an eternity but was perhaps thirty seconds. At one point the hand must have slipped, for she heard the woman’s voice say ‘. . . you only have to . . .’ before it was stifled again.

  Then: ‘Hang on, I’m passing you over.’

  She did hang on until she heard his voice. Then she hung up.

  Of course, she told herself, he would still be there. With her. Even if he had left he would have returned, and she would have taken him back. Whatever their difficulties and differences, that strong, calm wife of his was the person who had shared the vicissitudes of his life, she would be there for him when needed. As she, Stella, had not.

  ‘It was her, wasn’t it?’

  ‘I’ve no idea,’ he replied. ‘She hung up.’ Sian raised an eyebrow. ‘I really couldn’t say.’

  She was standing in the study doorway, fingers criss-crossed before her like a siege defence. ‘Got everything?’

  ‘I think so.’

  He picked up the box of books and nodded at the case full of folders and papers. ‘I’ll come back in for those.’

  ‘I’ll bring them.’

  ‘Don’t worry.’

  She picked them up. ‘Come on.’

  He had been in the house for perhaps half an hour, and she had not mentioned the enquiry. But as he took the case off her and stashed it in the boot, she said: ‘I’m sorry you’re having a bad time.’

  ‘My own damn-fool fault.’ What was he supposed to say? ‘This too shall pass.’

  She made no further comment. He closed the boot, and gave it a tap. ‘Well.’

  ‘Robert, would you sort out the calls? Put a diversion on or something? I don’t want any more.’

  ‘I’ll do my best.’

  ‘If you would. And the post.’ She raised a hand and turned away without looking at him again. ‘Good luck.’

  As he drove away he thought. Of course it was her. Of course it was Stella. That was the sort of impulsive, quixotic, death-wish kind of thing she would do. He felt the clamp of heartache around his chest. For the first time in his life he felt utterly disorientated, all at sea. The enquiry, the end of his marriage, his separation from Stella – most of all Stella – had presented him with a terrible freedom which he had no idea how to employ. Catching a glimpse of his own face in the rearview mirror it frightened the hell out of him: it was the stressed, scared, angry face of a middle-aged man who was his own worst enemy.

  He pulled over for a moment and sat with his arms braced on the wheel, breathing deeply. His breaths had a rasping quality, as though all the sharp edges and rough corners of his life were snagging at his lungs. Time, he thought, for an audit.

  Stella didn’t try again. A melancholy calm descended on her. Never had she been more grateful for the nature and demands of her work. As the date of the cabaret drew closer she did not allow herself to look beyond it. This must be wonderful – everything else must take care of itself.

  She bought a dress that was so different from anything else she’d ever worn that she asked George up to town for lunch at the flat.

  ‘You asked me all the way up here for my opinion on a dress?’

  ‘Not your opinion, I’ve already bought it.’

  ‘So what if I don’t like it?’

  ‘Lie.’

  ‘Seems clear enough to me. Put it on then.’

  ‘Okay, but you’ll have to imagine—’

  ‘Trust me.’

  Stella made an ‘as if’ face and went to put on the dress. It was a skinny black sheath with a high neck and cut-away shoulders, the back slashed from nape to waist. In amongst the black was the faintest dusting of silver which caught the light. Above its spare, uncompromising glamour Stella’s skin was parchment white, and her shock of electric-red hair surprising and exotic as a cactus flower.

  ‘Sorry,’ said George.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Call me old-fashioned, but I can’t lie.’

  Robert was suspended on full pay for the duration of the enquiry, which he found humiliating. Something Calvinist in him had prevented him from calling his work a vocation, but now he discovered that taking money for not doing it was distasteful to him. It seemed to demean the work itself to reduce it to the level of a product.

  At the same time he was able to rent a decent small service apartment near the British Museum in which to do cold turkey. Time for reflection, he found, was what he had spent most of his adult life avoiding. Realistically he knew the enquiry could go either way. On his side were his excellent clinical record, his experience, a career coloured by a certain maverick quality but hitherto unblemished by formal complaints. Ranged against him were – as he saw it – timidity, jobsworthism and political correctness. That he had been rude was a fact, but not in itself a hanging offence,
and his competence was not in question so far as he knew. His colleagues, when you got down to the wire, would support him; the nurses might be more ambivalent, there was nothing he could do about that. The patient’s mother would be feverishly excited about the whole thing, it would have taken on the nature of a crusade for her and her associates, it made him tired to think of it. All this, and for what? Could it possibly be worth it to anyone? Certainly not the patient himself who was continuing to receive treatment and for whom the long-term prognosis was pretty good. The trouble was that whatever he had called the awful Mrs Stuart at the time he had meant it then, and would still, given the chance, mean it now. He was not remorseful on that count.

  He forced himself to contemplate the worst-case scenario: losing his job. Setting aside the financial implications, which were dire, the idea of being prevented from doing what he was trained and suited for was outrageous to him. He was faster, better, a safer pair of hands than anyone else he knew in his field, and to be sidelined would be not just galling but a criminal waste of resources.

  He found himself wondering why Stella had called – to sympathise, to crow, to sound him out? To ask to see him? Or perhaps he was flattering himself and she didn’t know about any of it. She wasn’t the world’s most assiduous student of current affairs and could go for days without looking at a newspaper. And why would she be interested? She’d been freezing him out for months . . . It probably hadn’t been her on the phone at all, but some nosy junior reporter hoping to steal a march and getting cold feet at the last moment.

  In any event, the thought of seeing her in his present state of uncertainty was intolerable. Whatever else she thought of him she knew him as a success. He felt himself heavily identified by his profession, his ability to change lives. Without that he was a pretty standard failure. Whatever the outcome of the enquiry, he had to regroup, to recover his balance and his self-esteem.

  Jamie called. ‘Something of mine coming up on the show on Wednesday, might amuse you.’

  She watched, but it didn’t. The item, as trumpeted by the youthful presenters, was ‘How rude can you be and get away with it?’ The starting point was the story about the consultant who’d called his patient’s mother ‘a danger to shipping’. A great deal of crude fun was made out of this, including sending one of the wilder girl presenters on to the street to pick arguments with people, interviews with the foul-mouthed band Antichrist and a writer on modern etiquette, and the extending of an invitation to viewers to send in especially choice insults.