She remained wistful: there was nothing she could do about that. She tried to hide it, aware of Anna’s furious resistance to her plight. She could not see that Anna was the victim, for in her own mind she was inconsolable. She tried to placate her daughter, and sometimes succeeded. Anna remained good-humoured but now it was the good humour of the hospital nurse, and indeed as Mrs Durrant’s hopes vanished the flat began to take on the appearance of a hospital room. Anna marshalled her mother’s fading energies and strove for love and forgiveness. In this she was finally successful, but it was a success born of total renunciation. With what hope, with what avidity had her mother welcomed the doctor, Lawrence Halliday, seeing in him a last chance, an only chance for her daughter! And after each visit she urged Anna to lead him into the drawing-room and offer him a glass of sherry, taking good care to remain in her bedroom, and glad to do so, re-buttoning her blouse after the examination with shaking frightened fingers. And Halliday had seemed so well disposed, so polite to Anna, so concerned for her. By that time Anna could not easily leave home. That was her excuse. Her mother knew that her vigilance was part love, part revenge. Of such harsh truths does the emotional life consist.
At the end they were as one again. Death, and the prospect of life without one another reunited them as birth had once done. But who could feel pity for the poor unfledged creature left behind? She knew she was an object of concern and fought against it, took care to be well dressed, impeccably turned out, as if all depended on her appearance, kept a smile on her face, tried to think well of everyone, including those who were indifferent to her. The time passed slowly, that was all, but she was sure that it passed just as slowly for men and women imprisoned in offices and factories, and she was also sure that sooner or later she would find something to do, find someone to whom she could explain herself, and who would understand her, with all her diffidence and her complexity. Until then she took pleasure in small homely things, as if only these had the power to quell her enormous fear at being adrift in this cold world. Even now, she thought, as she was putting her key in the door, she would make a cup of tea, and write to Marie-France. They wrote frequently, elaborately, the journal of their respective lives. Over the years both came to see this correspondence as their main production. Yet as she put her purse back into her bag she once more encountered the stiff envelope, which she withdrew and held in her hand for a minute, debating with herself whether to throw it away. She already knew, or thought she knew, what it contained.
She made the tea and drank it greedily, cup after cup. She looked round the small room, willing herself to find it pleasant. In fact it was pleasant, and she usually took pleasure in it, but tonight she was too aware of the letter, which now lay on her desk. This would be the final confrontation with a mother whom in life she had never reproached but had refused to understand. She got up and pulled the red and white striped curtains, switched on the fire, creating an illusion of warmth and comfort. Finally, and with reluctance, she opened the stiff envelope, drew from it two sheets of paper, both of them creased and much folded. The first was her birth certificate: Anna Mary Pauline Durrant. This, she knew, was to confirm her status and her rightful place in the world. The second was a letter, written obviously with great difficulty, but, she saw as she read, as a last attempt at self-justification. Her hand reached once more for the teacup, as if to be put into last touch with her present reality. ‘My darling,’ she read, in her mother’s pretty, schoolgirl’s hand. Even the imprint of the words on the page seemed soft, tentative. ‘I am afraid that you will never forgive me, and also that you will never understand. Perhaps when you are married you will realize what a temptation love can be, or even the pretence of love if one is lonely enough. Of course you were all in all to me, but to a woman like myself, not very strong, not very brave, a second marriage seemed like a gift from Heaven. And it brought me to life again, Anna: never forget that. I never tried to explain this to you, thinking that in so doing I might offend your dignity, for we never discussed these matters, and indeed there would not have been much to be gained from such discussions between a mother and a daughter such as we were. I tried to protect you, because I knew that you were hurt and angry, but I told myself that you would forgive me once you were married and had a home of your own. I am sure you will understand what I mean by that. For my punishment—and I have been greatly punished and greatly humiliated—I felt that I was making you unhappy, and that something between us had undergone a change. I do not reproach you, since the whole thing was my fault, and indeed you have been a perfect daughter. It is only because I sense that little change in you that I want to reach out to you one last time.
‘My darling, it is my wish that when you marry you will understand even more than you do now, and when you reach my age you will reflect that even when one is old one may still want to commit a folly. Lawrence Halliday seems very fond of you and when I am gone I hope and pray that he will be there to look after you. This is the last letter I shall ever write, to you or to anyone else—indeed I hardly know anyone else—and it is only fitting that I should say my few last words to the daughter whom I have prized above everything else in this world. I hope that she will forgive me for a weakness which I cannot bring myself entirely to regret. I want her to know that I have had moments of great happiness in my life and I pray that she will have the same throughout hers. Mother.
‘P.S. I have had George traced. It seems that he is living in Louvain with the woman I must call his wife. It is possible that he might try to contact you, in which case it might be better for you to move. If he does come back on no account are you to give him any money.’
But she had not waited for those last instructions. She had moved as if she were taking flight, and even now did not feel quite safe. She did not fear George Ainsworth or his possible reappearance; she discounted him entirely. What she feared was the stain of her mother’s defeat, the contagion of her mother’s timid hopes, which she had seen confounded. The hurt she had sustained she had concealed from her mother, just as she had concealed the news that Lawrence Halliday had married Victoria Gibson, a pretty, silly, energetic woman with far more visible attractions than she herself possessed. The last conversation she had had with him, as they stood in the shadowy drawing-room (and she had not invited him to sit down) was dry, unemotional: she had asked him not to tell her mother of his marriage, to leave her that last illusion in her long decline. His fair handsome face had flushed, as if he were caught out, but that was the only allusion Anna ever made to his desertion, if desertion was what it was. They had both kept their promise, and Amy Durrant had cherished one faint last hope when she died. Since then Anna had maintained her ambiguous poise, although she knew that it was brittle. What mattered to her now, above all else, was to repair the imperfections in her own conduct, to obliterate the rancours of the past which had so nearly ruined her innocence. Now it was important to think well of everyone, to behave as if there had been no flaw in the fabric, even to visit the same doctor, who, after all, knew her well. And why should he not be reminded of her? She meant no harm, had never meant him harm. It was only her mother’s expectations that had done them a disservice.
Simply, now, she would like to be good, hopeful, humble, cheerful, as if the promise of her strange dream might yet be fulfilled, and as if good fortune, when it came, might find her worthy to receive it. Of her poor mother she thought with love, with regret, perhaps not entirely with sympathy, thinking her tactless to open her heart, as she had done in the letter as in life, yet longing for her none the less. She repressed the letter, shutting her mind against it. At the same time she knew a moment of stupor at being so far from home.
But all that mattered now was to live in the present, even on the surface, if that helped, to love with a different sort of love from that which she had been taught, to love Mrs Marsh, to love her neighbour (but that is not what I am looking for, she protested inwardly), and to live as the Bible told people—other people—to live. There wer
e good things in this world, after all. She was in her own flat, safe, if not quite warm enough; she was in good health. It had been a pleasant day, almost. Now she was tired, and no wonder. She put the letter away into the drawer of her desk, pulled back the curtains, stood at the window easing her back with both hands, the gesture of a much older woman. She would write to Marie-France tomorrow, not tonight. Tonight she would go to bed early. There was no need to eat anything, although the fruit looked appetizing in the blue bowl she had brought from Albert Hall Mansions. Mrs Marsh had observed that the pears were good this year. As she turned out the lights she took one last look at the blue bowl. It seemed important to observe, at this moment of small consolations, that it had been a fine year for apples too.
5
MRS MARSH WAS immersed in her daily exercise of scanning the Deaths column in The Times. The Births she brushed aside as no longer being of any relevance to her. The Deaths were a different matter. Not that she expected to see the names of anyone she knew on a daily basis: her life was too circumscribed for such surprises. Her few old friends were contacted at Christmas, and she would have heard directly if any one of them were ill, or more ill than usual. A daughter or a son would send a note, or perhaps telephone, just as she supposed that Philippa or Nick would do when she, in her turn, succumbed. What fascinated her was the tiny detail included in some of the announcements (‘Suddenly, whilst playing golf’) which set her thinking of the arbitrary nature of death, and its occasional playfulness, so infinitely more to be desired than the regrettably familiar ‘after a long illness, borne with her usual indomitable courage’. Sometimes the name of one of her husband’s colleagues cropped up, and these eminent persons were given obituaries heavy with honours and with occupational landmarks. In death as in life such people tended to occupy more space than others less fortunately endowed. She had known them once but had lost touch when her husband died. Their wives, those who had survived, sent a card at Christmas.
The second stage of Mrs Marsh’s morning activity was thus reached, and she lapsed into rather puzzled memories of her late husband, a man whom she always thought she did not know particularly well. They had had a perfectly sound marriage, she reflected: both were sensible healthy people; both had enjoyed their life together. But it seemed to her now that they had never had a serious conversation, and she wondered if that were wrong. On the whole she thought not. Their home life had been optimistic, fortunate, if not particularly or comfortingly familiar. She had seen him off in the mornings, thinking how handsome he looked in his City clothes, had handed him his briefcase, and had looked forward, with a mild and containable pleasure, to welcoming him home again in the evening. Their house in Pelham Street had been pretty—she had loved that house—but she had not wept at leaving it, after Bill’s death. She was too obsessed by that stage with the changed sound of his voice when he said to her, from his hospital bed, ‘I’m done for, old girl,’ and when they had trembled on the verge of a new intimacy, which, as he died, escaped them both. Cancer of the pancreas: no arguing with that. She had sat out her mourning in her first-floor drawing-room, filled with a new thoughtfulness: a spring sunlight had trembled on the walls and on a corner of the ceiling, and the bulbs she had planted earlier flourished on the window-sills. These signs of renewal seemed to her so inappropriate that she had immediately thought that she must relinquish the house, to Nick, who was then married, and go somewhere else. At sixty-two she was not too old to make new friends among her neighbours, and if she lived to a great age, as both her parents had done, she would be better off in a flat, where there might be a porter to look after her needs and to find her a daily woman.
So she had lived for twenty years, stoically, as her situation demanded. She thought of her husband these days without grief, but with a sense of gratitude, and also of frustration. How he would hate the life she lived now, in the dark flat, without too many visits from the children, and hardly any from her two grandchildren. She was sadder now than she had ever been in the months following her husband’s death, a fact for which she reproached herself. What else could she expect at her age? She could even have married again, but had turned away from the suggestion, as if it had been tactless, inaesthetic, in any case not sufficiently compelling. And when there had been a further proposal she had rejected that as well, having decided that by now she was too awkward to combine either physically or mentally with a new partner. She had surveyed her gaunt face, her increasingly wiry hair, her large feet, and the body which now looked almost sexless, half-way, as she had thought, to extinction, and had decreed that enough was enough. The physical life, for which she had been grateful in the past, had left her with few memories. She supposed that she was a lucky woman, yet even in her heyday she had thought that too much fuss was made of sex, and too much nonsense talked. One outlived it, that was all: no amount of philosophical argument could overcome that fact. The young never believed it, of course. But then the young had many surprises waiting for them.
But there was too little to do when one was old, and feeling one’s age, reluctant to venture further than the shops and the library, and then faced with a long afternoon at home. If she was at all nostalgic it was for her earlier vigour, when she had thought nothing of being out all day. She did not mind the silence, for she had come to cherish it, but there was a certain lack of human nourishment about her days that distressed her. Not excessively, for she was not an excessive woman, and not at all given to unnecessary regrets. She simply wished for the occasional conversation, the occasional stimulus of another personality. She was careful not to brood on this deficiency, but rather to face it squarely. She was, she knew, fortunate: she was not in need, did not depend on her children, had suffered no serious illnesses. Nevertheless she felt she was preparing mentally for her own death, for surely this daily immersion in the deaths of others, complete strangers for the most part, was no accident. Mrs Marsh believed that nothing in this life was accidental, thereby allying herself with many great thinkers of the past: it was the feeling which drove her, an unbeliever, to church on a Sunday. Something was taking place, some kind of preparation being made. She derived a bleak intellectual pleasure from charting her downward progress, about which she was without illusions. There was no question of going to rejoin Bill in a better place, as some of the death notices so confidently proclaimed: Bill had been incinerated before her very eyes. It had seemed the cleanest thing to do with his poor body. She had no sense that anyone was waiting for her, or indeed that her children would mourn her for very long: she had always been too sensible to cherish such comforting notions. She supposed that she must put up with whatever was coming as bravely as she could. In the meantime her strong old body carried on in its own way, which was pretty well, considering the poor use to which she now put it.
She thought that on the whole she had had a charmed life, a good husband, healthy children. But sometimes, now, the days proved unexpectedly long, particularly in the winter when it never really got light. If she craved anything she craved light, a fierce light from a yellow sun, such as she had seen in certain paintings in the days when she went to the National Gallery, Turner’s sun, emerging from streaming vapours to conquer the waiting earth. And at the end she would like a vague blueness to descend, as in the painter’s Evening Star, where a solitary boy leaves the deserted beach for home. That would be acceptable, she thought. But hardly likely: such phenomena were part of the living imagination, and were not produced with the intuition of the dying, nor even for their benefit. The creative life is a law unto itself.
There was no pressing need for her to think of dying, yet all her thoughts tended in that direction. She had received no warning signs. She was simply more reclusive than she had ever been, was drawn to evidence of disappearance, extinction, and to wondering how it would be. ‘Peacefully, surrounded by her family’, she read, when the doorbell unexpectedly rang.
‘Mrs Marsh?’ enquired the smartly dressed woman, with the fashionable shawl draped over
her raincoat, and the air of a prospective Conservative candidate, or at least his agent.
‘I am Mrs Marsh,’ she said.
‘Mrs Duncan. Peggy Duncan. Anna said you might be wanting someone to help out.’
‘Mrs Duncan, how good of you to call! And how good of Anna to have remembered. I must thank her. Won’t you come in?’
On closer examination Mrs Duncan proved to be a small woman in the indeterminate range of late middle age, with a strikingly white skin and fine brown eyes. She appeared to be fairly heavily made up, although this impression was largely conveyed by the fine grain of her thickly powdered face. She had beautifully cut champagne-coloured hair, and her gaze was loyal, implying fidelity, even on so short an acquaintance, as if she had stepped from a photograph of servants in days long gone by. Not that she looked anything like a servant—she was too well turned out for that—but the brown eyes were trusting and unwavering, and the voice was soft. She must have been a pretty girl, thought Mrs Marsh, and been treated like one all her life.
‘I was just going to make a cup of coffee,’ she said. ‘Won’t you join me?’
She led the way into her kitchen, put on the kettle, and hunted out a new packet of biscuits, although she knew that her tin contained chocolate digestives, a relic of Nick’s last visit. ‘This is very fortunate,’ she said. ‘Do sit down. And won’t you take off your coat? Although I dare say it’s not very warm in here. I hardly notice it myself.’
‘I shan’t stop, Madam.’
‘Ah,’ she said, deflated. ‘Do help yourself to sugar.’
‘As I say, I thought I’d call for a chat, to see what you wanted. But I have to make one thing clear, before we start. I can only do the job for a few months, well, not more than a year. In a year I’ll be sixty. And I always promised myself I’d retire at sixty.’
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