The ambulance men were very kind. They put her into a folding chair and told Lewis to get dressed. In the ambulance he held her hand, although she did not seem to know that he was there. They sped through the desolate dawn streets, her moaning the only sound he could register. At one point she opened her eyes and whispered, ‘Look after my son.’ Then they were at the hospital, and she was taken away from him. He watched the trolley being sped along a silent corridor, shot through with brilliant lights.
After half an hour a middle-aged nurse found him and told him to come back in the afternoon with her night clothes and her sponge bag. ‘Will she be all right?’ he asked, reassured in spite of himself by the woman’s competence and the normality of the sounds of breakfast being served. The nurse patted him on the arm. ‘We’ll see that she’s comfortable,’ she said.
He walked home, shivering. He welcomed the sight of an early milk float with tears of gratitude. Inside the house he told himself to be practical. He would make a cup of tea, clean up the bathroom, strip her bed and remake it for her return, pack her suitcase, make things pleasant, cancel the previous night. When it was properly morning he would telephone his cousin Andrew and then return to the hospital. He was troubled that he had not thought to ask the name of the ward she was in. They had told him to come back in the afternoon, but he would not wait. He opened windows wide, threw the soiled linen into the linen basket. Then he sat down on her bed to telephone his cousin. On the night table he noticed a box of pills. On the box was written, ‘One to be placed under the tongue as required.’
His hand went out to the telephone. At that moment it rang. A voice said, ‘Mr Percy? Mr Lewis Percy? One moment, please.’ There was a sound of laughter in the background. Then footsteps. ‘Mr Percy? I’m sorry, dear. There was nothing we could do. She went quite peacefully. We’d like you to come in some time today and collect the form. Any time today. Are you all right? Mr Percy? Is there somebody with you?’
‘No,’ he said. ‘There’s nobody with me.’ He replaced the receiver carefully, and sat on the bed, looking down at his large cold trembling hands.
3
Lewis reflected that Andrew’s wife’s dim personality was entirely matched by her ineffective jewellery. Fixing Susan with a glittering eye, which they thought was occasioned by grief, he saw that today, for the funeral, she had secured the collar of her white blouse with a hand-painted miniature of flowers in a gold frame. On a previous occasion she had worn a brooch in the form of a tennis racquet, with a very small pearl as the ball. Her necklace, of even smaller pearls, was too modest to be anything but real. Her limp brown hair was held back by a velvet Alice band, and she sat, in the late Grace Percy’s chair, examining her nails.
Lewis’s rage sprang from Susan’s occupancy of his mother’s chair, and, by extension, spread to cover the whole of her existence. He not only found her annoying; he found her entirely and mysteriously offensive. On her brief and unsatisfactory visits to their house, made when Grace Percy was alive, she was always mute, although he suspected that she had plenty to say to his cousin when they were alone together. She appeared to think that visits to Andrew’s unspectacular relations derogated in some subtle way from her own position. She was the sort of woman who only bestowed her full attention when she was talking about herself, and this she had to be coaxed to do if others became too exasperated by her silence. When asked her opinion on any matter, her normal response was, ‘I really wouldn’t like to comment’, or, ‘I don’t think that’s a fair question’, thus bringing about a new silence. And yet the triumph of the will was there, Lewis thought; she was the type of wife who would collect her husband from the station, not out of her desire to see him, but so that he should not deviate on the way home to her. With that, joyless, vigilant. Lewis did not doubt that she was the stronger of the two. She had several bizarre and inflexible opinions which she passed on, like a spirit guide, to Andrew, who recounted them to the world at large. She thought there was something untrustworthy about people who lived in flats rather than houses. She doubted the virtue of countries other than England, and, at a pinch, and if she were feeling particularly broadminded, Scotland. She thought it beneath her dignity to enter another woman’s kitchen. When Andrew suggested a cup of tea after the miserable ceremony at the crematorium, she turned her attention, studiously, to the pleats of her skirt. Lewis got up furiously and went into the kitchen. Making as if to bang the door, and then securing it quietly, he heard her say, ‘Well, why not? It’ll give him something to do.’
He knew that his mood was dangerously unstable, that he should not be wasting his emotional energy in this way, should be concentrating on the awful facts of his mother’s disappearance and his own impending solitude. But his mother’s death was not a matter he wished to share with these strangers – for all who had not witnessed her last hours were strangers to him for evermore – and he knew that he would need the rest of his life to comprehend the fact that she was gone. His mother’s death was too serious an event to be admitted to general conversation. He postponed even a consideration of the fact until he should be alone. In those long night hours, sleepless, he would think of her, usually with pain. On this day he failed to remember any episode in their past which could be called happy. And yet he knew that they had been happy, in their largely wordless but companionable lives together. He knew that they had always had undying love for each other, the small boy, then the youth, and the serious faintly smiling woman. Coming back from the funeral he had lowered his eyes so as not to see her absence at the window. His dreadful grief of the past two days had given way to a sort of numbness, as if everything that were to happen to him now were irrelevant, unimportant, unconvincing. Yet through the numbness came random, almost unwelcome flashes of feeling, flashes of dislike for Susan, of pity for Andrew, who managed to be – probably had to be – both pompous and humble, a great man at the office, Lewis suspected, but a poodle at home. Pouring the boiling water into the teapot, he found himself invaded by a rush of pure panic. How would he manage? What would he eat? Who would look after him?
In the two long days that it had taken Andrew to assume his position as head of the family – and he would be everlastingly grateful to his cousin for so doing – Lewis had sat, frozen with misery, on a footstool by the fire, trying to get warm. His lack of experience was terrible to him. He had never arranged a funeral before, had never even been to a funeral. He supposed that someone had kept him at home or taken care of him when his father had died. He could very faintly remember crying for his mother and being restrained by his grandmother from going after her. Even in the matter of building a fire he was ignorant, his experience having been limited to bringing in the coal for his mother. The labour of lighting it, on his first day alone in the house, had left him with smudges on his hands and wrists which he lacked the energy to remove. Higher and higher he had built the fire, piling on coal, unable to get warm, sitting endlessly, with the tears drying to a glaze on his cheeks, his face tightening with the heat which he could not feel. Not daring to go upstairs, past his mother’s open door, waiting until it was dark, and late, before forcing himself to bed, leaving the fire to smoulder and to burn the house down if necessary: he half wished that it might be so.
When hunger had finally driven him to the kitchen he had found only some biscuits and a tin of soup, yet he had not been aware that the household arrangements were breaking down. Clearly there had been moments when the weight of the future had been too much for his mother to contemplate. His cousin, coming upon him as he stood in the kitchen, the tin of soup in one hand, tears coursing down his face, had been kind but also severe. ‘Be thankful it was over quickly,’ he had said. ‘Be thankful she didn’t suffer like your father. She was never the same after Uncle Jack’s death; nursing him like that – for months – left a permanent mark on her.’ But Lewis, who did not remember his father, had not been aware that his mother was lonely. And if she had lived for him, Lewis, what was wrong with that? He would have l
ived for her if she had stayed with him a little longer.
So bereft was he in those two days that his eyes never left his cousin’s face, accepting his authority in everything, realizing that at thirty-seven Andrew was a man, likely to know how to pay bills, buy food, and even arrange funerals. He half heard his cousin explain that the house now belonged to him, and that he should get someone in to look at the wiring. Andrew had, after all, known Lewis’s father, John Percy, the quantity surveyor, had been all of nineteen when John Percy had died. They were both orphans. Now Andrew had only horrible Susan for company, with her virtuous full skirts, and her small incurving teeth, and her colourless nail polish. Not even a nice woman to cheer him up, thought Lewis, feeling a pang of sympathy for his cousin who had had to be a man perhaps before he was ready, and who had married the ungenerous Susan because that was what men did. He was probably too decent even to acknowledge his disappointment, and had had to get over his dismay at having no family, no context other than work, and only self-effacing Aunt Grace Percy as a relative, with her absent-minded and all but hidden affections. Only Lewis had had access to those affections; therefore he was able briefly to pity his cousin for being so disadvantaged.
Feeling this pity he was glad to accept instructions from Andrew. He attended the funeral because he was told to; left to himself he would have stayed hidden in the house. His mind was vague, unfocused. It was as if Andrew had dispensed him from all initiative, even the initiative of thinking appropriate thoughts – his feelings he intended to keep to himself. And he was glad to see Andrew sitting in his chair, as if in so doing he were actively substituting for Lewis. It was only Susan to whom he objected.
‘You might as well stay in the house.’ said Andrew. ‘It is your home. But stop lighting these big fires, Lewis; you’ll burn the place down. Get yourself one of these new electric heaters. You only need it in the evening, after all.’
‘Have you asked Lewis how he’s to earn his living?’ asked Susan, not deigning or not managing to ask Lewis himself. Obliquity was another of her usages; direct engagement was not willingly conferred.
‘Yes, we must think about that,’ said Andrew, lighting his pipe. Again Lewis felt a pang of pity. The pipe went with the obstinately soft moustache, went with the office, went with Susan. ‘You’ve wasted enough time, Lewis. What are your plans?’
‘I haven’t any,’ he had been forced to reply. ‘I’ve got my grant until June. Then I thought I’d try the British Council.’
But when the letter had come from the British Council, on the morning after his mother’s death, he had thrown it on the fire.
‘You should think about the Civil Service,’ his cousin had said. ‘Your French is quite good, isn’t it? There’s a procedure to be gone through, exams and so on. But it’s a good steady career, and that is what you need. I’ve never looked back,’ he said wistfully, or did Lewis imagine it? ‘You’ll have to see the bank manager,’ he went on, ‘and close the account. I can’t do that for you. In fact, you’ll have to manage, Lewis. Call on me for advice. Don’t sell anything,’ he added. ‘Uncle Jack invested wisely. You should have enough to live on, if you’re careful. Of course, you must get a job – that goes without saying. Get that thesis out of the way and set yourself up properly. Work is the thing, Lewis. A man is lost without proper work.’
Susan stirred, uncharacteristically. ‘Time we were getting back,’ she said. ‘Get my coat, would you, dear?’ She was full of such requests, deeming her presence alone sufficient to dispense her from further activity. Andrew, still trying to explain to Lewis that he must keep all receipted bills, disappeared into the hall and came back with Susan’s coat. ‘Have you understood that, Lewis? What? What’s the matter, dear?’
‘I’m waiting for you to help me on with my coat,’ said Susan patiently. Lewis wondered if Andrew hated her as much as he, Lewis, did. But no, he thought, he is afraid of her. What he would really like would be for her to be more of a mother to him. At the thought of the word ‘mother’ he turned away, faint-hearted, willing them both to be gone.
‘Goodbye, Lewis,’ said Susan with a tiny smile. ‘Cheer up.’
‘If you need anything, get in touch,’ said his cousin, looking worried.
‘But do remember, won’t you, that we live rather a long way away,’ added Susan.
‘I know that,’ said Lewis, tired now, and uncomprehending. ‘I dare say I could get to you in just over an hour.’
‘I mean,’ said Susan, ‘we can’t be dashing up to London every five minutes.’
‘Andrew comes up every day,’ he pointed out. ‘To go to work.’
‘Well,’ she replied meditatively, pulling on her gloves. ‘That’s different, isn’t it?’
Then he was alone, and on the whole glad of it. He kicked the dying fire, perhaps the last he would ever light, for the coal was nearly gone, and he did not know how to order more. He sank down once again onto his footstool. He was alarmed at the abrasive feelings that Susan’s presence had aroused. Such withholding, such resistance as she had manifested signalled a suspicion which he could not begin to comprehend. Yet she was every inch a wife, he mused, every gesture, every inflection proprietorial. How did one avoid women like this? What skills must he develop in order to see through them? Thoughts such as these cast into further urgency the matter of his future life, for there would, he knew, have to be a female presence to comfort his loneliness. Not to replace his mother – the idea was unthinkable – but perhaps to console him for her absence. And he knew no-one. He dimly saw this as a disastrous fault. He had been too wrapped up in his work, in his unpromising idealism, to learn the way a man should behave with a woman. What was worse, he did not yet fully consider himself a man. The idealism he now saw as hopeless, doomed. He perceived with a kind of pity that his lonely evenings, writing up his notes, in careful ink, had precluded him from every other kind of activity. Yet what he would want to feel, with a woman, was something of the idealism he had felt for his work, a self-forgetful ardour that would cancel out his incompetence, his gracelessness, and bring forth a compensating mercy, and also the satisfaction that he had glimpsed when an argument or an explanation had composed itself while in his care. Something, too, of that transparency that meant doing without the argument altogether. Perfect understanding; all effort unnecessary. With that acquired he would be a citizen of the free world at last. That was how the gap would be closed and the circle made whole once more.
Finally, when it was very late, he went up to bed. He stood for a moment on the landing, then, slowly, quietly, he closed his mother’s door.
The next day, Saturday, was the day on which he was to begin his new life. He gazed at the heap of ash that had been the fire, then left it and went out. The weather was dull, misty, hazy, damp, as it had been on the day of the funeral, lending the whole procedure an air of unreality: this winter was unseasonably mild. Lewis almost wished for a frost, a snowfall, something that would bring people together, inspire comments between strangers. Yet the street stretched before him grey and featureless, and apart from the lorries in the background, there was no animation. Standing at deserted bus stops he felt a terrible bewilderment, and with it the beginnings of anger. Life should be better than this. It should be splendid, colourful, exciting, not this miserable affair of mortal illness and tinned soup and ashes in the grate. He abandoned the bus stop and began to walk, found himself eventually striding down the King’s Road, welcoming the crowds, the air of licence, the greater profusion in the shops, the promise of excess. He bought bread and milk, and, because he could think of nothing better, more soup. Cheese occurred to him, as something that required no cooking, and then, in a Proustian flash, he saw himself buying the camembert in Paris. But that was the solution: he must go back! He could rent his old room again and finish his thesis there, where he had begun it. The thought momentarily excited him. After all, he knew the routine in Paris, knew how to fill his day, and even looked forward to getting back (he did not quite think
‘home’) in the evenings. Those women, and their indifferent affection or affectionate indifference, would take him into their care, bind his wounds, make him fit once again for this cruel world. He could leave next week, for there was nothing to keep him here. So enabling did this decision seem that he went into a coffee bar and ate the nearest thing to a meal that he had eaten for some days. And now that he was in no hurry he strolled among the Saturday crowds, losing something of his heavy-heartedness, until fatigue came upon him suddenly, and he got on the bus and went home.
Standing at the window, as his mother had done, and feeling grief rising once more to the surface, he was surprised to see Professor Armitage, out of context, approaching him from the corner of the street. Thinking that the man looked diminished without his desk to protect him, and uncharacteristically encumbered as he was with a carrier bag and a bunch of flowers, Lewis realized with alarm that Armitage, knowing nothing of the events of the past week, had come to tea as arranged. This must be prevented at all costs. Lewis rushed to the door and opened it on to Professor Armitage’s modest and appreciative smile.
‘I’m awfully sorry, sir,’ he said precipitately. ‘I’m afraid it’s all off. I mean, my mother died on Monday.’ He found himself in an attitude of defence, almost barring access to the house.
It was Professor Armitage who quailed at this announcement, his smile slowly giving way to an expression of distress.
Lewis Percy Page 4