by C. P. Snow
‘How are you feeling?’ I asked.
‘I’m not getting on as fast as I should like,’ said my mother.
As I said good night, she told me: ‘I’m angry with myself. I don’t like lying here. It’s time I made myself get well.’
She was undaunted enough to tell Aunt Milly, on each of the next two days, that I was on no account to spend any of the legacy in getting my father’s discharge. My mother stated haughtily that it was not to happen. She explained to Aunt Milly that it was only right and just for her son to possess ‘her money’, and that money must be used to give him a start. In a few years, Lewis would be able to settle Bertie’s affairs without thinking twice.
Aunt Milly had to restrain herself, and listen without protest. For by this time she, like all of us, realized that my mother might not live.
She seemed to have, Dr Francis explained to me, the kind of heart failure that comes to much older people. If she recovered, she would have to spend much of her time lying down, so as to rest the heart. At present it was only working strongly enough just to keep her going without any drain of energy whatever.
From our expressions, from the very air in the house, my mother knew that she was in danger. Her hope was still fierce and courageous. She insisted that she was ‘better in herself’. Impatiently she dismissed what she called ‘minor symptoms’, such as the swelling of her ankles; her ankles had swollen even though she lay in bed and had not set foot on the floor for three weeks.
One Sunday morning Dr Francis spent a long time upstairs. Aunt Milly, my father and I sat silently in the front room.
Dr Francis had come early that morning, so as not to miss the service. The church bell was already ringing when he joined us in the front room. He had left his hat on the table, the tall hat in which he always went to church, the only one in the congregation. I thought he had come to take it, and would not stay with us. Instead, he sat down by the table and ran his white, plump fingers over the cloth. The skin of his face was pink, and the pink flush seemed to shade up to the top of his bald dome. His expression was stern, resentful, and commanding.
‘Mr Eliot, I must tell you now,’ he said. His voice was hoarse as well as high.
‘Yes, doctor?’ said my father.
‘I’m afraid she isn’t going to get over it,’ said Dr Francis.
The church bell had just stopped and the room was so quiet that it seemed to have gone darker.
‘Isn’t she, doctor?’ said my father helplessly. Dr Francis shook his head with a heavy frown.
‘How long has she got?’ said Aunt Milly, in a tone subdued for her but still instinct with action.
‘I can’t tell you, Mrs Riddington,’ said Dr Francis. ‘She won’t let herself go easily. Yes, she’ll fight to the last.’
‘How long do you think?’ Aunt Milly insisted.
‘I don’t think it can be many weeks,’ said Dr Francis slowly. ‘I don’t think any of us ought to wish it to be long, for her sake.’
‘Does she know?’ I cried.
‘Yes, Lewis, she knows.’ He was gentler to me than to Aunt Milly; his resentment, his almost sulky sense of defeat, he put away.
‘You’ve told her this morning?’
‘Yes. She asked me to tell her the truth. She’s a brave soul. I don’t tell some people, but I thought I had to, with your mother.’
‘How did she take it?’ I said, trying to seem controlled.
‘I hope I do as well,’ said Dr Francis. ‘If it happens to me like this.’
Dr Francis had deposited his gloves within his tall hat, Now he took them out, and gradually pulled on the left-hand one, concentrating on each fold in the leather.
‘She asked me to give you a message,’ he said as though casually to my father. ‘She would like to see Lewis before anyone else.’
My father nodded, submissively.
‘I should give her a few minutes, if I were you,’ said Dr Francis to me. ‘I expect she’ll want to get ready for you. She doesn’t like being seen when she’s upset, does she?’
He was thinking of me too. I could not reply. He gazed at me sharply, and clicked his tongue against his teeth in baffled sympathy. He pulled on the other glove and said that, though it was late, he would run along to church. He would get in before the first lesson. He said good morning to Aunt Milly, good morning to my father, put his hand on my arm. We saw him pass the window in short, quick, precise steps, his top hat gleaming, his plump cushioned body braced and erect.
‘Well,’ said Aunt Milly, ‘when the time comes, you will have to leave this house.’
‘I suppose we shall, Milly,’ my father said.
‘You’ll have to come to me. I can manage the three of you.’
‘It’s very good of you, Milly, I’m sure.’
‘You two might have to share a room. I’ll set about moving things,’ said my aunt, satisfied that there was a practical step to take.
Then the clock struck the half-hour. My father did not repeat his ritual phrase. Instead he said: ‘Lena didn’t use to like the clock, did she? She used to say “Confound the clock. Confound the clock, Bertie.” That’s what she used to say. “Confound the clock.” I’ve always liked it myself, but she never did.’
9: At a Bedside
My mother’s head and shoulders had been propped up by pillows, in order to make her breathing easier – so that, asleep or awake, she was half-sitting, and when I drew up a chair that Sunday morning, her eyes looked down into mine.
They were very bright, her eyes, and the whites clear. The skin of her face was a waxy ochreous cream, and the small veins were visible upon her cheeks, as they sometimes are on the tough and weather-beaten. She gave me the haughty humorous smile which she used so often to pass off a remark which had upset her.
Outside, it was a windy April day, changing often from sunlight to shade. When I went in the room was dark; but, before my mother spoke, the houses opposite the window, the patch of ground between them, stood brilliant in the spring sunshine, and the light was reflected on to my mother’s face.
‘When it’s your time, it’s your time,’ said my mother. She was speaking with difficulty, as though she had to think hard about each word, and then could not trust her lips and tongue to frame it. I knew – with the tight, constrained, dreadful feeling that overcame me when she called out for my love, for in her presence I could not let the tears start, unbidden, spontaneously, as they did when Dr Francis spoke of her courage – that she had rehearsed the remark to greet me with.
‘When it’s your time, it’s your time,’ she repeated. But she could not maintain her resignation. Her real feeling was anger, grievance, and astonishment. ‘It’s all happened through a completely unexpected symptom,’ said my mother. ‘Completely unexpected. No one could have expected it. Dr Francis says he didn’t. It’s a completely unexpected symptom,’ she kept saying with amazement and anger. Then she said, heavily: ‘I don’t want to stay like this. Just like an old sack. It wouldn’t do for me, would it?’
For once, I found my tongue. I told her that she was looking handsome.
She was delighted. She preened herself like a girl, and said: ‘I’m glad of that, dear.’
She glanced round the bedroom, which was covered with photographs on all the walls – photographs of all the family, Martin, me, but most of all herself. She had always had a passion for photographic records: she had always been majestically vain.
‘But I shouldn’t like you to think of me like this,’ she said. ‘Think of me as I am in the garden photograph, will you, dear?’
‘If you want, Mother,’ I said. The ‘garden’ photograph was her favourite, taken when she was thirty, in the more prosperous days just after I was born. She was in one of the long dresses that I remembered from my earliest childhood. She had made the photographer pose her under the apple tree, and she was dressed for an Edwardian afternoon.
She saw herself as she had been that day. She rejected pity, she would have rejected it even if she had found w
hat she had sought in me, one to whose heart her heart could speak. She would have thrown pity back even now, even if I could have given it with spontaneous love. But she saw herself as she had been in her pride; and she wished me eternally to see her so.
We were silent; the room was dark, then sunny, then dark again.
‘I’ve been wondering what you’ll do with Za’s money,’ said my mother.
‘I’m not sure yet,’ I said.
‘If it had come to me as it ought to have done,’ she said, ‘you should have had it before this. Then I should have seen you started, anyway.’
‘Never mind,’ I replied. ‘I’ll do something with it.’
‘I know you will. You’ll do the things I hoped for you.’ She raised her voice. ‘ I shan’t be there to see.’
I gasped, said something without meaning.
‘I didn’t want just the pleasure of it,’ said my mother fiercely. ‘I didn’t want you to buy me presents. You know I didn’t want that.’
‘I know,’ I said, but she did not hear me.
‘I wanted to go along with you,’ she cried, ‘I wanted to be part of you. That’s all I wanted.’
I tried to console her. I told her that, whatever I did, I should carry my childhood with me: always I should hear her speaking, I should remember the evenings by the front-room fire, when she urged me on as a little boy. Yet afterwards I never believed that I brought her comfort. She was the proudest of women, and she was vain, but in the end she had an eye for truth. She knew as well as I, that if one’s heart is invaded by another, one will either assist the invasion or repel it – and if one repels it, even though one may long, as I did with my mother, that one might do otherwise, even though one admires and cherishes and assumes the attitude of love, yet still, if one repels it, no words or acting can for long disguise the lie. The states of love are very many – some of them steal upon one unawares; but one thing one always knows, whether one welcomes an intrusion into one’s heart or whether, against all other wishes and feelings, one has to evade it, turn it aside.
My mother was exhausted by her outburst. She found it harder to keep her speech clear; and once or twice her attention did not stay steady, she began talking of something else. She was acutely ashamed to be ‘muddle-headed’, as she called it; she screwed up all her will.
‘Don’t forget’, she said, sounding stern with her effort of will, ‘that Za’s money ought to have been mine. I should like to have given it to you. It was Wigmore money to start with. Don’t forget that.’
Her lips took on the grand smile which I used to see when she told me of her girlhood. She lay there, the room in a bright phase of light, with her grand haughty smile.
I noticed that a Sunday paper rested on the bed, unopened. It was strange to see, for she had always had the greatest zest for printed news. After a time, I said: ‘Are you going to read it later on today?’
‘I don’t think so, dear,’ she said, and the anger and astonishment had returned to her voice. ‘What’s the use of me reading the paper? I shall give it up now. What’s the use? I shall never know what happens.’
For her, more than for most people, everything in the future had been interesting. Now it could interest her no longer. She would never know the answers.
‘Perhaps I shall learn about what’s going on here,’ she said, but in a formal, hesitating tone, ‘in another place.’
That morning, such was the only flicker of comfort from her faith.
We were quiet; I could hear her breathing; it was not laboured, but just heavy enough to hear.
‘Look!’ said my mother suddenly, with a genuine, happy laugh. ‘Look at the ducks, dear!’
For a second I thought it was an hallucination. But I followed her glance; her long-sighted eyes had seen something real, and she was enjoying what she saw. I went to the window, for at a distance her sight was still much better than mine.
Between the houses opposite, there was a space not yet built over. It had been left as rough hillocky grass, with a couple of small ponds; on it one of our neighbours kept a few chickens and ducks. It was a duck and her brood of seven or eight ducklings that had made my mother laugh. They had been paddling in the fringe of one pond. All of a sudden they fled, as though in panic, to the other, in precise Indian file, the duck in the lead. Then, as though they had met an invisible obstacle, they wheeled round, and, again in file, raced back to their starting point.
‘Oh dear,’ said my mother, wiping her eyes. ‘They are silly. I’ve always got something to watch.’
She was calmed, invigorated, made joyful by the sight. She had been so ambitious, she had hoped so fiercely, she had never found what she needed to make her happy – yet she had had abounding capacity for happiness. Now, when her days were numbered, when her vision was foreshortened, she showed it still. Perhaps it was purer, now her hopes were gone. She was simple with laughter, just as I remembered her when I was five years old, when she took me for a walk and a squirrel came quarrelling down a tree.
I came back to the bedside and took her hand. It occurred to her at that moment to tell me not to underestimate my brother Martin. She insisted on his merits. In fact, it was an exhortation I did not need, for I was extremely fond of him. My mother was arguing with her own injustice, for she had never forgiven his birth, she had never wanted to find her match and fulfilment in him, as she had in me.
There was a flash of irony here – for he was less at ease with others than I was, but more so with her.
Then she got tired. She tried to hide it, she did not choose to admit it. Her thoughts rambled; her speech was thicker and hard to follow; Martin Francis (my brother’s names) took her by free association to Dr Francis, and how he had come specially to see her that morning, which he would not do for his ordinary patients. She was tired to death. With perfect lucidity, she broke out once: ‘I should like to go in my sleep.’
Her thoughts rambled again. With a last effort of will, she said in a clear, dignified manner: ‘I didn’t have a very good night. That’s what it is. Perhaps I’d better have a nap now. Please to come and see me after tea, dear. I shan’t be a bother to you then. I like to talk to you properly, you know.’
10: The View Over the Roofs
My mother died in May. From the cemetery, my father and I returned to the empty house. I drew up the blind, in the front room; after three days of darkness, the pictures, the china on the sideboard, leaped out, desolatingly bright.
‘Milly keeps on at me about living with her,’ said my father.
‘I know,’ I said.
‘I suppose we shall have to,’ said my father.
‘I’m not sure what I shall do,’ I said.
My father looked taken aback, mournfully dazed, with his black tie and the armlet round his sleeve.
I had been thinking what I should do, when I sat in the house and my mother lay dying. I had been making up my mind while in the familiar bedroom her body rested dead. I was too near her dying and her death to acknowledge my own bereavement. I did not know the wound of my own loss. I did not know that I should feel remorse, because I had not given her what she asked of me. I was utterly ignorant of the flaw within, which crept to the open in the way I failed my mother.
At the time of my mother’s death I was as absorbed in the future, as bent upon my plans, as she might have been. My first decision, in fact, was more in my mother’s line than my own of later years. For it was a bit of a gesture. I had decided that I would not go to live with Aunt Milly.
When I told my father that I was ‘not sure’ of my intentions, that was not true. The decision was already made, embedded in a core of obstinacy. What I said about it, however much I prevaricated or delayed, did not matter. On this occasion, I had already, in the days between my mother’s death and the funeral, been looking for lodgings. I had found a room in Lower Hastings Street, and told the landlady that I would let her know definitely by the end of the week.
I should have to pay twelve and six a we
ek for that room and breakfast. I was getting twenty-five shillings from the education office. I calculated that I could just live, though it would mean one sandwich at lunchtime and not much of a meal at night. Clothes would have to come out of Za’s money; that was my standby, that made this manoeuvre possible; but I resolved not to take more than ten pounds out of the pool within the next year. In due time I should have made another choice – and then that money meant my way out.
I knew clearly why I was making the gesture. I had suffered some shame through my father’s bankruptcy. This was an atonement, a device for setting myself free. It meant I was not counting every penny – and to smile off the last winces of shame, I had to throw away a little money too. I had to act as though I did not care too much about money. And this gesture meant also that I was defying Aunt Milly, the voice of conscience from my childhood, the voice that had driven the shame into me and had, at moments since, trumpeted it awake. If it had been anyone else but Aunt Milly who had offered to take us in, I believed that I should have said yes gratefully and saved my money.
I was fairly adroit, however, in explaining myself to her – more adroit, I thought later with remorse, than I had often been with my mother, and then I thought once more that adroitness would have been no good, neither adroitness nor the tenderest consideration. With Aunt Milly, it was not so difficult. I did not want to hurt her; I had become fond enough of her to be considerate. It would hurt her a little, I knew. For, in her staring blank-faced dynamic fashion, Aunt Milly had always been starved of children. She had felt maternally towards me and my brother, though it sometimes struck me that she used a curious method for expressing it. And she could not understand that she put people off, most of all young children, whom she desired most for her own.
She left my father alone with me after we came back from the cemetery; Martin had stayed at her house since before my mother’s death. Aunt Milly did not let us alone all day, however; she came in that night, and discovered us in the kitchen eating bread and cheese. She examined the shelves, notebook in hand. She was marking down the crockery which was to be transferred. It was then that I put in a word.