by Jane Gardam
But not for Molly Fielding’s mother. Oh, dear me no. There she sits, her strong jaw raised, its tip pointing straight at the lens. Very watchful. She is examining the long hump of Mr. Settimo beneath the black cloth behind the tripod. Her eyes—small eyes—are saying, ‘Try—but you’ll not take me. I take.’
Her great face, like his small one, is covered in black cloth. Hers is covered by a fine veil of silk netting, tied tight round the back of her neck by a broad black velvet ribbon. It is stitched at the top round the hat brim—a tight hat, expensive and showy, glittering with jet beads like the head of a snake. Her own head is proudly up, her eyes are very cunning. Oho, how she despises Mr. Settimo, the tradesman. She is smiling a most self-satisfied smile. She is armed with a cuirass of necklaces across her beaded front, a palisade of brooches, great gauntlets of rings. She is fair-skinned beneath the veil. She must have been a pretty young girl, and her mouth, above the chin grown fierce, is still small and curly and sexy. No lady. Like somebody’s cook but in the way that duchesses can look like somebody’s cook. Not born rich, you can see—but now she is rich. At this moment, seated before foreign little Mr. Settimo, she is rich. I never saw a nastier piece of work than Molly Fielding’s mother. I swear it. I don’t know how I knew—but I swear it.
‘What an awful woman. Who is it?’
My mother said, ‘Oh, dear, that’s old Molly Fielding’s mother. I knew her. She was a character.’
‘You knew her! She looks before the Punic Wars.’
‘She was, just about. God knows. An authentic mid-Victorian. She had Molly very late. She was famous for some sort of reputation but I can’t remember what it was. She died about the time Molly married, and that would be all of sixty years ago.’
‘What was the husband like?’
‘Oh, long gone. Nobody knew him. Molly can’t remember him. Maybe there wasn’t a husband, but I think I’d have remembered if it was that. I think he was just dispensed with somehow. He was very weak—or silly. But rich.’
‘She doesn’t look as if she would have needed anyone, ever.’
‘Well, she certainly didn’t need poor old Molly. Her only child, you know, and she hated her. Molly—such a silent little thing at school. After that she was “at home with mother”.’
‘Didn’t she ever work?’
‘Are you mad, child? She had to gather up her mother’s shawls and go visiting with her and return the library books.’
‘Until she married?’
‘Yes. And she’d never have married if her mother could have stopped it. She was always very attractive, Molly. Not beautiful but attractive. She was never let out of her mother’s sight—and not let into anyone else’s. They lived in hotels, I think, up and down the country. Sometimes in boarding-house places abroad. There had been a big house somewhere but they left it!’
‘Were they poor?’
‘Rich, dear, rich. Just look some time at Molly’s rings.’
This conversation was years ago and since then I have often looked at Molly’s rings. I looked at them the other day when she came to lunch with me and they still shone wickedly, catching the light of the winter dining room, weighting down her little claws. Molly was a trim, spare, little woman and the claws were smaller now and even sharper-looking than when I’d seen her last, two years ago. Her nails were tiny and beautifully manicured and the prickly old clusters below them looked loose enough at any moment to go sliding off into the chicken supreme.
‘Looking at the rings?’ she asked. ‘You’re not getting them, dear. They’re for impeccable Alice. My albatrosses. She could have them now if she wanted. I hardly wear them. High days and holidays, like this. I keep them in—no, I’m not going to tell you. You never know. Careless talk . . . You think they’re vulgar, do you?’
‘No. I was just—well, remembering them. From way back. They looked smaller then. Your rings were you. Most things look bigger when you’re young.’
‘I’m smaller,’ she said, ‘that’s all it is. I keep getting them re-made but they can’t keep pace with me. I get them done over every year before the insurance runs out.
‘I tell the insurance people the stones rattle. They don’t, but you can get them cleaned free if you say that. A jeweller cleans them better than you can yourself. A good jeweller always cleans when he secures. Gin—that’s all you can do for yourself, soak them in gin. But it’s a waste. You feel you can’t drink it afterwards with all the gunge in it.’
The rings shone clear and sharp and there was not a trace of gunge and never had been, for Molly had a code of practice for the maintenance of goods that would have impressed a shipping company; and she had an eye for the free acquisition of necessities and schemes for the painless saving of money that many a government might envy. She also had a talent for the command of luxury. Stories of Molly sharing hotel rooms for which her friends and acquaintances had paid were in my childhood canon. She had slept on the floor of the Hyde Park, for instance, with her daughter’s old nanny who had struck it rich with a (now absent) South American lover.
‘Nanny had the bed of course—I insisted. Yes, she did fuss about me being on the floor, and we did change over about eleven o’clock, but I’d have been perfectly happy. Who minds sleeping on a floor if it saves two hundred pounds a night? They never notice, you know. I’d been Nanny’s dinner guest and we went up to her room after dinner as if to get my coat. No one notices if you don’t go home. And it was Harvey Nichols’ sale in the morning, just across the road. I felt since I’d saved two hundred pounds I could spend it.’
‘But, Molly, you didn’t have to spend two hundred pounds. You didn’t have to go in to London the night before at all. You only live in Rickmansworth.’
‘Oh, but there’s nothing in Rickmansworth like the Hyde Park Hotel. Another thing, dear, did you know you can get a jolly good free bath on Paddington Station? There’s a very decent bathroom in the Great Western. You just go in there for a coffee and then trot upstairs to the ladies’ room and along the corridor and you’re in a very nice big bathroom with marble fittings and nice old brass chains to the plugs. Thundering hot water, dear. I take soap and a towel always when I’m in London. In a Harrods bag.’
‘You could be arrested.’
‘Rubbish. There’s not a hint of a sign saying “Private”. It says “Bathroom”. Nobody uses it but me because all the rooms are this ghastly thing En Suite now. Have you noticed on the motorway—the motels? ‘24 En Suites’. I’d never stay in a place like the Great Western now, of course. It’s only for commercial travellers. But the bathroom’s useful if you have to change for the evening. It saves that nonsense of belonging to a so-called Club. Deadly places—all full of old women. Victoria Station was very good, too, before the War, and at St Pancras, The Great Northern, you could always stay a night no questions asked if you knew the ropes and wore the right clothes. They used to leave the keys standing in the doors. So unwise.
‘And did you know you can spend such a pleasant hour or so in the London Library simply by ignoring the Members Only notice? You just walk in looking thoughtful and go upstairs to the Reading Room. It’s a pity they’ve moved the old leather armchairs. They were so comfortable and you could sleep in them before a matinée. I always picked up one of the learned journals from the racks—something like The John Evelyn Society Quarterly—so that they’d think I was an old don.’
‘They can see you’re no don, Molly, with those diamonds.’
‘I turn them round, dear. I’m not silly. They used to give you a tray of tea in the London Library once, you know, but all those nice things have stopped since the Conservatives got in. Look—an elastic band. It’s the Post Office. I keep these. The postmen drop them all over England—all up the drive of the Final Resting Place. I told the postman they’re worth money so now he drops them all through my letter box instead, great showers of them, like tagliatelle.’
I said we should turn back as it was going to rain and she didn’t want to be landed with a cold.
‘I never catch cold,’ she said. ‘It’s because I don’t use public transport. I like my car. It was quite unnecessary for you to fetch and carry me today, you know. Very nice of you—but I’d have enjoyed crossing London again.’
‘Do they let you drive still, Molly?’ She had one of the little houses on an estate for the elderly she called the Final Resting Place.
‘They can’t stop me. Not yet. It’s coming up of course—next driving test. Well, yes, they do fuss a bit. I can’t remember where I’m going sometimes after I’ve set off, and the other day I couldn’t remember where I’d been.’
‘That might be a warning sign, you know, Molly. That it’s time to stop.’
‘Oh, fish! Wait till I get properly lost, then I’ll stop. I’ve a card in my bag with my telephone number. I haven’t forgotten who I am yet.’
‘That does happen—’
‘Oh, that Alzheimer business. That must be a terrible thing. But it only happens to the old, doesn’t it?’ She roared with laughter and clipped the dog on the lead.
Molly’s dogs have always been wonderfully well-behaved and obedient—never smelled or chewed things or wet things or snapped or barked. Rather dispirited animals really. She never appeared to pay much attention to them. Years ago I remembered that she had said it was her mother who had taught her how to handle dogs.
‘Come on,’ she cried from the traffic island in the middle of the High Street. ‘You’ll get run over if you hang about. Make a dash.’
At tea—she’d done well at lunch with a couple of sherries and a glass of chablis with the chicken—she settled down to a crumpet and a long and interesting analysis of her investments. As usual I forgot altogether that Molly had been my grandmother’s friend. I forgot the great string of years she had known, the winters and winters and winters, the spring after spring, flowing back and back and back to the first mornings of the century. I forgot the huge number of times she had woken to another day.
When I was a girl, Molly would come breezing by to see us in a fast car, usually with a woman friend, never with a man or her husband who had been, like her father, a shadow. (She had married in ten minutes, my grandmother used to say, when her mother was upstairs in bed having measles of all things: absolutely furious, her mother was, too. In fact she died.) When I was a girl, I had always felt that Molly was empowered with an eternal youth, more formidable, much more effective, than my transient youth that seemed longer ago.
‘Well, I’m not clever,’ she often said. ‘I’m a fool, dear. I know my limitations. No education and not a brain in my head. That’s the secret. You’re all so clever now—and all so good. It does age people. And also of course I’m frightfully mean. I don’t eat or drink much unless I’m out.’
But she wasn’t mean. When she gave a present, having said she could afford nothing, it tended to be stupendous. Once she gave me a car. And she did leave me one of the rings. But, ‘I’m mean,’ she said. ‘And I’m not intellectual. I always wanted to be a racing driver after motor cars came in. Not allowed to, of course. D’you think I’m embittered?’ (She shrieked with laughter.) ‘I’ve struggled through. I’ve struggled through.’
And struggle it had sometimes looked to be—her freezing house, her empty hearth and fridge, her beautiful but ancient clothes all mended and pressed and hung in linen bags in the wardrobe. She had often sat wrapped in rugs to save coal. She had never had central heating. An ascetic pauper—until you looked at her investments, and they were wonderful. Whenever you saw her reading the financial columns she was smiling.
‘And,’ she said, ‘hand it to me. I’m rational. That’s what gets you through in the end, you know—being rational. I’ve no imagination, thank God. I give to charity but I’ve the sense not to watch the news. “Thank God” by the way is jargon. I don’t believe in God and I don’t believe that half the people I know who go to church and carry on at Christmas and go to the Messiah and that sort of thing—that they do either. All my Bridge lot, of course they don’t believe in God. Religion’s always seemed to me to be fairy stories. I go to church now and then, but it’s for keeping up friendships and the look of it. And I quite enjoy weddings and funerals, of course.’
She was awesome, Molly. Awful really. But she was so nice.
She was in the midst of one of these ‘I’m rational’ conversations, the refrain that had threaded all my association with her, and she was eating her crumpet, and I was wondering why she was still insisting on her—well, on her boringness, and why she didn’t bore me, why she never annoyed me; and I had decided it was because she never dissembled, that in my life her total truthfulness was unique. The truth Molly told showed her to be good. A good, straight being. Molly the unimaginative was unable to lie.
At which point she suddenly said, ‘By the way, my mother’s been seen around again.’
I looked at her.
‘Around the village. And the FRP. She’s looking for me, you know. But she won’t find me.’
I said, ‘Your mother?’
She said, ‘Yes. You didn’t know her. You were lucky. I hated her. Of course you know I did. You must have heard. She was very cruel to me. Well, she’s back. Darling, are you going to take me home to the house of the near-dead? It’s getting dark.’
‘Yes, of course. Are you ready?’
‘I’ll just run upstairs.’
This she did and I waited with her coat and gloves and walking shoes and the basket with the dog’s belongings and the dog.
‘Yes,’ she said coming down the stairs, twisting about at her knickers. ‘Yes, she’s been around for quite a time, a year or so. I don’t know where she was before. I’ve managed to keep out of her way up to now. I hope that she didn’t spot me leaving today, she’d have wanted to come, too.’
So, half an hour later I said, ‘Molly, do you mean your mother?’
‘Yes, dear. I’m afraid she was very unkind. I don’t often talk about it. I was very frightened of her. D’you know, dear, I don’t know when I’ve had such a wonderful day. Oh, how I’ve enjoyed it. Now if you turn left here and left again we can take the short cut and get straight to the bypass. You see I know exactly where I am. Now don’t come in with me—you must get back before the traffic.’
I said, ‘Molly—’
She kissed me, hesitated, and then got out. I saw her standing motionless before her mock-Georgian front door looking first at the lock, then at her key.
‘Shall I open it?’ I called to her.
‘No, no. Of course not. Don’t treat me as senile. Ninety-four is nothing. It won’t be thought anything of soon. When you’re ninety-four there’ll be hundreds of you, with all this marvellous new medicine that’s going on.’
‘Goodbye, dear Molly. I’ll wait till you’re safe inside.’
‘It’s just that the lights aren’t on.’ She said, ‘If you could just watch me in from the car. Just watch till I light everything up. It’s so silly but I don’t greatly like going into a dark house.’
I drove to the estate office and spoke to the lady superintendent who said that Molly was indeed still driving, though th
ey were getting worried about it. She said that Molly was utterly sensible, utterly rational and her eyes and mind were very good. In fact she upset the younger ones by doing her stocks and shares and phoning her broker in the public common room.
‘No aberrations? Does her mind wander?’
‘Never,’ she said. ‘She is our star turn.’
Yet on the way home I decided to ring up her daughter, Alice, and was walking towards the phone the next morning when it began to ring, and it was Alice calling me. There were the statutory empty screams about how long since we’d spoken and then she asked if it were true that Molly had been to lunch with me. I said yes, and that I’d fetched her and taken her back, of course.
‘Not “of course” at all, ducky. Do you know she’s still driving?’
I went on like the superintendent for a bit: about the beady eye that saw me look at the rings, the high-speed walk, the psychic hold over the dog, the fearlessness on the High Street, the splendid appetite. ‘There was just—’
‘Ha!’
‘Well, she says her mother is about. Alice, her mother’d be about a hundred and thirty years old.’
‘I know. Oh, heaven, don’t I know. Did she say her mother’s looking for her around the village?’
‘Yes.’
‘And making her clean her nails and polish her shoes and— She rings me up and asks me to bring a cake over because her mother’s coming to tea. About twice a week.’
‘But I’ve never heard her mention her mother before.’
‘The doctors say it’s the supply of oxygen to the brain. It’s running uneven, like a car with dirty plugs. There are vacuums or something, and it’s in the vacuums she really lives. Maybe it’s where we all really live.’
‘But all the bossy, sensible, happy years?’
‘All the years. It was all there underneath, always. The fear.’