by Jonathan Lee
The first batch of conference-goers had been more or less well behaved. The occasional incident of major drunkenness had been tactfully dealt with by Marina. Most were there to applaud the minor speeches, the ones no one seemed to care about. Moose had watched some of the TV coverage. He saw how the cameras cut quickly from whatever weak joke had been delivered on the podium to the faces of the speaker’s wife or sworn enemy, an attempt he supposed to add some human drama. Even the keenest among the Tories milling in the lobby at breakfast time, little plastic badges swinging around their necks, admitted it was the Big One that mattered. Mrs. Thatcher had briefly been in Brighton yesterday but, despite a last-minute flurry of phone calls from her Private Secretary’s Assistant’s Assistant, she had decided to stick with the initial plan: sleep in London, return Thursday night. The wait would only add to the eventual satisfaction. What was that line Viv liked to use about his diving? Happiness makes up in height for what it lacks in length. Robert Frost or another of her favourites. Early on she used to read him poems late at night and he understood so little except the rhythm, and that was lovely.
Thatcher snoring and dreaming in a bed he had checked. And he’d be there. Not in the bed. Not in the room. No no no. But in the building, heart beating. They’d talk at the big drinks function and then again maybe over breakfast. For the sake of his health he tried to rein in his excitement. Tried also not to guess at the number of weeks it would take him to get promoted post-visit.
When he told Chef Harry his daughter had been making him delicious soups, Harry told him she’d been going through the hotel’s library of cookbooks, teaching herself new tricks, asking his advice when she couldn’t work something out, test-running different dinners for two. Was all this for him, for his return? Her mother, when she could be bothered, had been a good cook too. He longed for a chocolate fudge sundae but it was completely out of the question.
He tried now to remind himself of that first year back in Brighton, him and a motherless teenage daughter returning to the secondary school she’d left behind. But all he could really remember was the incredible amount of little jobs to do, the lifts to and from school and swimming practice and netball and friends’ houses at the weekend and the washing and cleaning, cleaning and washing. How, even when he started paying Sandra to help out occasionally, other tasks filled his few spare hours and at work he was always exhausted. For the first time in years sleep ushered in no dreams and there was a comfort in that, wasn’t there, in dreamlessness?
He’d decided he was going to buy his daughter a ticket to Spain. One of Marina’s sisters had a spare room in an apparently safe bit of Madrid.
Cutting down on salt. The careful moderation of sugar. Never would another cheese croissant pass his lips. Not outside Bastille Day, anyway. Cigarettes only on very special occasions. When the promotion came. When Freya graduated. His fiftieth birthday. He had a timeline in his mind. It was full of light exercise and lots of salad. After a while he’d come off the beta blockers and his lower body would be back in business. He’d find the love of a good woman, or at the very least an average one, and settle down. He was no Patrick Swayze; he’d been aiming way too high. Marina. The idea of it! He hoped the lady in question would have feet no bigger than size seven. He hoped she’d make him laugh. In every other respect he was open to ideas.
His last few hours in the hospital were vague now. The decor of the ward had already shrunk from view. As soon as you were told you were to be discharged, the place could hold you no more. You drifted free of the whole world of scrubbed-clean suffering. Amazing how quickly you could take on the mindset of a visitor: this place isn’t so bad; it holds a certain intrigue. When you know it only confines others, confinement doesn’t seem so troubling. Add that to the lessons. Suffering is in your face or two hundred miles away, nothing in between.
—
His mother arrived at the Grand at the worst possible moment, thirty-six hours before Mrs. Thatcher. She had a gift for perfectly atrocious timing. He was in the midst of dealing with the Close Protection Unit, and also the plain-clothes Sussex police officers. Politicians were cluttering the reception area, politicians were swapping rooms, politicians were complaining about overbookings. They didn’t understand that you had to overbook; had to assume one in ten wouldn’t turn up. The hospitality industry was founded on this fraction, but some people went crazy, didn’t care that you were going to cover their whole stay in the Metropole, didn’t care for the implication that they perhaps could have called to confirm. Staff frowning. Staff flirting. The twitch of temporary security cameras, the yapping of small ineffectual dogs. Men with thinning hair and full smooth faces and that combustible mix of fatigue and wealth that made people step out of the way.
“It’s me,” she said, standing under the chandelier on her outstandingly abbreviated legs. That hunched posture. That forward tilt. Countering, he supposed, the constant impulse to sink back.
“Mum!” He kissed her. “So great to see you.”
“Pipe down,” she said. “I’m not one of your guests to impress.”
“Mum.” He sighed. “Not really a great time, really.”
“You have five minutes.”
“Well—”
“You do. Everyone does. Most jobs can wait a thousand years.”
He took her into the restaurant, sat her down underneath a painting of a boat. He loved his old mother. Really he did. But he was busy, very busy, and she had a knack for distracting him from his goals. Her method was to tell him many sharp things he didn’t want to hear about himself. It was death not so much by dagger as by a million unfurled paper clips. In her old age she was a great dispenser of tips and wisdom, around 5 per cent of it excellent. She seemed to favour a throw-it-all-at-the-wall-and-see-what-sticks approach. Probably the tactic ran in the family.
“Can I order you something?”
“I brought my own food.”
“That’s not allowed, actually, but—”
She unzipped her handbag. Gave him, with her usual flawless intuition, a freezer bag full of nuts. “Unsalted,” she said, and removed a balled tissue from the sleeve of her cardigan. From a second freezer bag she began to feed herself splodges of dried apricot.
He asked her a couple of questions. She held up a finger to indicate that she was still eating. Robbed of conversation, he lifted the first nut to his lips. His saliva glands began gratefully welling, the tingling anticipation of a lovely savoury treat. The disappointment when the nut touched his tongue was huge. Without salt these things were pointless. To get through this exchange, what would he need? A better quality of snack, for sure. Also an enormous amount of alcohol combined with an enormous amount of caffeine. He waved at Shirley and ordered his first glass of wine since the infarction.
His mother’s chin, badly receded these last few years, bobbed and creased as she chewed. One or two little hairs poked out from furrows in the flesh. He longed to lean forward and pluck them. When she was seated her long neck gave a false impression of stature.
“Heart,” she said, taking a sip of water from a squat little bottle.
So then, she knew. Inevitable. The part of town she lived in was remote but rumours seemed to like the local soil.
“First thing to go when you run around all day.”
“Is that so?”
“It’s what I’ve read.”
“The Mail?”
“That and the liver,” she said. “Hits hotel workers in particular. What you need is to think less, and then do less. Simple. Get a couple of things right instead of this constant ridiculous—”
“Running around. Yes. I know.”
“Accept your fate, Philip.”
“Meaning?”
She chewed and inspected a further piece of soft fruit. “You’ll die just the same as me.”
“I’m pretty sure the running around hasn’t been as bad for me, Mum, as the cigarettes and fatty food.”
“Mr. Self-Aware,” she said.
&nbs
p; “I don’t know why you always say that.”
“Where’s that Marina lady? I like her.”
He coughed. It hurt.
Theatrically she sniffed. “How could you?” she said. “Not a word from my own son.”
“I didn’t want to worry you, Mum.”
“How could my granddaughter not tell me? This is a double betrayal, make no mistake.”
He sighed. “I told her not to. I didn’t want to worry you.”
“You always did make things up. If you scored two goals you’d say you’d scored three.”
“That never happened.”
“Terrible exaggerator.”
“Untrue. That’s you. How did you find out?”
“Freya.”
“Well then,” he said, feeling only a little let down. “It’s not a double betrayal, is it, if she told you?” He thought for a moment. “How long have you known, then?”
“Eh?”
“How long have you known about my—the infarction?”
“Few days,” she said.
“And you didn’t think to visit me earlier?”
She was squinting.
He said, “How did Freya seem, when you saw her?”
“We had tea. Her visits are so quick. A boy in a car was waiting for her outside.”
“A boy in a car?”
“I think so. Some kind of sail on top of the car. Like the car was a boat. She had a flushed look in her face.”
“Who?”
“Your daughter.”
“What do you mean?”
A sigh. “She was wearing a very short skirt, Philip.”
“She’s young, Mum. It’s what they do.”
“I know. I helped her take it up an extra inch.”
“Oh.”
She chewed on a dried apricot. “Yes, there’s no avoiding it, she was wearing very sexual knickers.”
“Mum, Jesus.”
“There’s a study in masculinity waiting to be written about you.”
“What does that even mean?”
He drank half his glass of wine and felt his brain begin to soften. He settled on the not unpleasant idea that the boy waiting outside the house for Freya had been a taxi driver—Stan the Taxi Driver, probably—and chose to ignore the fact that Stan was seventy-something years old, a little beyond being called a “boy,” and didn’t drive a car that looked like a boat.
He almost enjoyed the first five minutes of any given exchange with his mother, the dry asides and minor duels. It was only by, say, the thirtieth minute in each conversation that he tended to dream of stabbing her with a cheese knife and selling her body to medical science.
Twenty-nine minutes had passed. He could feel a tingle in his fingertips. She told him to stop looking at his watch.
“You’d have been better off staying at the College,” she said. She opened a piece of cling film, strips of dried mango within, another of her favoured snacks. He looked at all the bad luck in her eyes. It was there always between them, the fear it would pass on.
Chew chew.
Chew.
He’d finished his wine. It burned now in his chest. Watching her eat, listening to her eat—it killed all the hunger he had. The Listen to Your Mother Masticating Diet. Lose ten pounds in a month. He could hear policemen talking in the lobby. From the kitchen came the dim sound of Chef Harry shouting.
“I’m the happiest I’ve been,” she said, unprompted.
“Good for you, Mum.”
“It’s true.”
“I’m glad.”
They talked for a while about a favourite café of hers that was closing down in the Lanes. Then Gillian, one of Moose’s recent front-desk recruits, came up and said, “I’m sorry to interrupt.”
Good, Moose thought. Gill sent from heaven. Little red-headed Gill who had ambitions, big dreams for herself. Show my mother how busy I am. Show her I actually add value. “What is it, Gill?”
“A party member…He wants a king bed, but there’s only rooms with queens left, single or twin, unless we move someone.”
“This is my mother.”
“Oh, wow. Hi.” Gill did a half-wave half-bow.
His mother smiled her shockingly sweet smile—the one she reserved for total strangers—and dispensed a perfect compliment about Gill’s bracelet.
“Gill,” Moose said, “is he on the list?”
“He’s got a reservation, yeah.”
“No, the Key VIP list.”
“Oh, no. That’s what I’m saying. He’s not one of them.”
He nodded and told her what she needed to do. Tell him you can get a king bed brought in for him. It’s no trouble. We can get a removals company to bring one from a partner hotel. Tell him an alternative, though, is a room with two queens. Mention the room with two queens has more square footage and better bathtubs and there would be the second bed on which to spread out his clothes and conference papers—just a thought.
Gill said a wide-eyed “Fab” and ran off. Moose’s mother scowled and shook her head. “Charlatan business,” she said. “You’ll be going to hell in a handbasket.”
He watched her eating fruit and struggled with the idea that she might have once been young.
For most of her adult life his mother had seemed to prize plausibility and security above all else. “Don’t get your hopes up.” “Let me play devil’s advocate.” “What’s not healthy is all your ideas.” Her credo seemed to be “Don’t set yourself up for disappointment.” In those days, she’d frowned at any mention of religion. She saw through plot twists in television series. People who took newspaper articles at face value were fools. Kidnapped children whose innocent faces filled the news would inevitably already be dead. She believed in an illusionless life of achievable objectives in which, if a person was lucky, they’d get 1 per cent of what they wanted. She liked to claim that obtaining the Maths teaching job at Varndean—which for some reason she insisted on calling the College, the College, as if there was only one—was an achievement Moose should never have tried to better.
These days she still held him to account for giving up on teaching and tutoring, for having made the wrong life and picked the wrong woman, but in most other respects she was different to the mother he’d grown up scared of. Her sharp dark hair had turned silver and her standard small-heeled shoes had been replaced with soft flat items she referred to as pumps. It seemed to him that the arrival of these pumps on her feet a few years ago had brought with it a corresponding shrinkage in bone mass and a new interest in going to St. Andrew’s on Sundays.
God. Something had changed four or five years ago in her relationship with God, namely that He had started to exist for her. The conversion had at first appeared to be purely a practical matter. A means of installing herself more seriously into the local community. Meeting new people, telling them her stories, explaining that if you marry a red-faced English postman he’ll die and leave you lonely and if you marry a Greek-restaurant manager he’ll run off and leave you lonely. (A great hobby of hers was extracting universal rules from her own particular experiences.) Also, religion offered a harmless enough chance to get free tea and cake on Tuesdays. But somewhere along the line, belief had seeped into her. More than once in the last few months she’d expressed the idea that good people went to heaven and the bad ended up in hell. What he didn’t know was how much of this was a tease, a show of false faith to rile him up. Underneath those thin cardigans a bony sense of humour lurked. He couldn’t say with any accuracy where this humour ended and her earnestness began, and at times he thought that maybe, just maybe, there was something courageously gung-ho about faith, something wonderful that he himself should sample. Walking to the outer limits of knowledge and finding only a big wide wall, most people shrugged and traipsed back to safe ground. Only a few souls stuck around, climbed, threw themselves over the top. He didn’t imagine they found much on the other side, but their hunger for perspective was humbling.
“How’s the house?” he said.
“Perfect. Not that you’d know.”
“I’ve been a little tied up with not dying.”
“Join”—she swallowed—“the club.”
“I’d rather not.”
She began to look a little sheepish, was scratching at her ear. “Now. Speaking of the house…this month’s payment, Philip.”
“Ah,” he said.
“There’s more to life, but it all helps, you know.” She extended her neck. “It gives me no pleasure to have been ruined by a Greek.”
“I’ll put the money into your account.”
“I appreciate it. Does Vivienne know about your health?”
“No.”
“Your wife doesn’t know?”
“Ex.”
“What are you saying? My ears.”
“She’s my ex-wife.”
“And I’m your mother. Get used to it.”
He felt the special heat of her censure. There was a certain look she could produce under pressure. It could tie a man to a rove of wild donkeys, drag him across several miles of mauled stone, and leave his bloodied body tangled on torn cacti, whining like the teenager he was when she was here.
“That Vivienne,” she said. “She used to let you live in filth.”
“Come on.”
“Well, she did.”
“I’ve been thinking a bit, Mum…Recently I’ve been thinking. I meant to ask”—here he paused for effect—“if you think about Dad much, these days.”
She hesitated. “Do I think of your father? Well. I do. But only in the mornings.” She chewed. “The evenings sometimes too. You do too, I suppose.”