by Patrick Gale
Then he poured another and rang Laura.
BATHTIME
As the last of the storm wind stirred about the house, rattling windows and insinuating draughts of humid garden air, Laura padded up the stairs in the wake of the stair-lift, Mummy riding before her, impassively stoical. The scent of the current favourite bubble bath reached them on clouds of steam. It was blue and smelt of water mint with surprising accuracy for something so cheap. She waited as usual for her mother to go in on her own and use the lavatory. The radio being turned on and the door opened would be the signal to join her. Without it being much discussed they had arrived at a routine.
When she first moved in, Laura had found the bathroom one of the most immediately charming rooms in the house: wood-panelled, painted cream, with a low, sloping ceiling and a deepset casement window that afforded one a view of trees from the lavatory but complete privacy. It looked out across the railway cutting so the pleasure of lying in the bath was enhanced by the roar of a passing train down below the trees and the thought of all those passengers still hours from such a soothing.
After the breaking of Mummy’s hip and ankle and the onset of her tendency to fall, the room had come to reveal its unsuitability. Ugly grab rails and handles had been fixed on every side by a man from the council’s disability support unit and a care worker had equipped the lavatory with a freestanding support frame, like a titanic metal clothes horse, and a plastic extension unit, which had raised its perching height by nearly a foot.
These ugly additions were part of the price of precious independence but they brought with them a grim whiff of the care home Laura had hoped to avoid and a no less lowering sense of entering a narrowing one-way street to debility. As did the commode.
The commode. The very word, with its lip-puckering French gentility, stood in opposition to everything her mother cherished, and its ugly design – it was a turquoise plastic throne with a wirehandled half-bucket in its middle, coyly concealed by what looked like a plastic dustbin lid – would have fitted in no better among their old Ripplevale Grove furniture than it did with the Jellicoe family treasures. The commode had been dropped off by their care worker after a couple of distressing incidents where Mummy had failed to hobble to the bathroom in time when she woke in the night. And, like all the handles in the bathroom and the electric lift which now ruled the stairs, it silently asserted itself as a fixture-unto-death.
At the moment Laura could manage bath times on her own but at some point they would have to rip out the bath and install a walk-in model or a shower. The room was far too small to allow for both a shower and a bath. She had already investigated, with the help of the inexhaustibly patient woman at Age Concern, and found a shower model with a sturdy slatted bench that folded down from the wall and not too high a pedestal edge to the base – so that even a bather barely able to lift their legs could step inside. The subject had been raised and swatted aside a few times. Mummy was not keen. She was convinced all showers soaked one’s hair unavoidably and she hated washing her hair more than twice a week. But at least Laura had the facts at her disposal and sometimes, she had discovered, the early raising of an unpalatable topic served as a kind of vaccination against the time when it would need to be raised in earnest.
While she waited for her summons, Laura carried the bundle of discarded clothes into her mother’s room, hung up the dress to dry and set aside the fortified underwear, which for once had seen almost a full day’s wear, for adding to the small load she would set to wash overnight.
She had not been so well acquainted with her mother’s wardrobe since childhood. Then, she had raided it to try on hats and shoes and to gaze in wonder at the complexities of bras and suspender belts. Perhaps precisely because she had lived as a naturist, Mummy had always dressed well on her tight budget, and precisely because her naked body held no mystery for Laura, the clothes she chose to dress it in and the mysteries of how they came together to good effect had a heightened fascination for her. When clothes were not a given, they counted more.
She turned on the bedside light – a very pretty wooden one she coveted, carved to resemble a segmented palm trunk – turned down the bed, pulled tight the sheet rumpled by her mother’s afternoon nap then turned off the overhead light. She might have raised no children of her own but she remembered her own girlhood strongly enough to know that these evening scenes carried echoes of a child’s bedtime. She couldn’t decide, however, if that was disturbing or a source of reassurance. To scrub a parent’s back for them and wash their hair without getting soap in their eyes, to furl them in a fluffy bath towel and see them safely into a warm and comfortable bed and still their fretting about the night and day to come was a chance to demonstrate love in circumstances where words did not come easily.
And yet. Oh, and yet.
There was a frightening meekness in her mother sometimes now, something horrifying about the ease with which a woman so witheringly self-possessed in other areas had ceded her right to privacy in this. Summer clothes were easily shed but winter layers, especially tights and vests, needed assistance. One had only to say skin a rabbit for her arms to point up in childish eagerness for the drawing off of vest or jersey.
The bathroom door opened and through it, along with a renewed gust of scented steam, came the applause for the end of that evening’s Prom.
‘Coming,’ Laura called, drew the curtains to block out the glow of a streetlamp which Mummy said kept her awake and crossed the landing.
She needed help getting her legs over the side of the bath, that was all. They had an electric device called the Tritoness. It was a large, sea-green cushion of some rubbery material which, when fully inflated by a little motor, reached to the top of the bath. Mummy sat on the flat surface at the bath’s rear on a plastic carrier bag, Laura gently manoeuvred her legs up and swivelled her on the bag until her legs were in the bath. She then edged herself forwards onto the Tritoness, whose motor would release air from it until she was sitting on the bath’s bottom. Bathing done, the same motor pumped air back in and the Tritoness raised her, like Venus from the waves, as she felt prompted to murmur most nights.
Only Mummy had become convinced she couldn’t make the Tritoness work on her own. All she had to do was press a button. Perhaps she was scared of electrocution – although the control panel was designed to be safely used by wet fingers and was sealed behind a waterproof layer for extra security. Anyway, for whatever reason, she insisted that only Laura – Clever Laura she became at this moment – could make the device work. Having been lowered in, there was no reason she shouldn’t be left to enjoy the radio and the bath and Laura had tried leaving her to wash herself but she only became fretful if she had to call out to be helped with anything. And recently some childlike impulse of vulnerability, or loneliness even, always prompted her to keep Laura there with little bursts of conversation until she was ready to emerge.
Apart from her hair, which Laura washed because Mummy was apt to neglect it if she didn’t, and her back, which rheumatic shoulders no longer let her reach, she still washed herself, rubbing all the bits she could reach with a flannel. She couldn’t reach her feet any more but she wouldn’t let Laura touch them either as she claimed her fingernails tickled. Instead, on the recommendation of the chiropodist who called by every other Monday to file her heels and cut her toenails, she had acquired off the Internet a device like a giant plastic nail brush – she dubbed it the Pixy’s Doormat – which attached near the plughole with a series of suction pads. Laura had taken to using it too, dreamily rubbing her feet on it when it was her turn, as the sensation was unexpectedly delicious.
She could tell Mummy was using it now because she couldn’t seem to use it and talk at the same time. Her conversation dried up and she stared at the ceiling, wearing a thoughtful expression like a toddler’s while filling its nappy. Did one feel desire at eighty? Was her mother’s eye still snagged by male beauty, by this man’s meaty legs or the curls on that one’s nape, or was the
restless hunger finally switched off? Perhaps lust transmuted at last into easy pleasures like wiping one’s feet on the Pixy’s Doormat or having someone rub one’s scalp while washing one’s hair. For lust to continue when the body that housed it was giving out would be too unkind to be borne, but it was not a query one could put to one’s mother.
‘Would you mind doing the honours?’ Mummy asked, focused again, and Laura bent forward to pull out the plug then click the Tritoness into action. It began its chuntering sounds, air pipe vibrating, and the balloon slowly reinflated, lifting Mummy as Laura stood ready with a warm towel held before her.
‘Venus from the waves,’ sighed Mummy.
MINIBAR SNACKS
They had been allocated the room directly above the one they had always had before. At first it seemed almost identical: same floor plan, same bed, same furniture and curtains. Then he noticed the ceiling was lower, and the windows smaller and the pictures different and he saw there was only a shower where the other afforded a luxurious, claw footed bath. Of course it was only an accident but it felt to Ben like an insidious draining down of expectation.
He came there almost at once, even though he knew she could not possibly get away without notice like this until her mother was in bed, because simply sitting at home watching the clock would have been beyond him. But waiting in a hotel room proved little better. Everything about it suggested self-indulgence – albeit on a lesser scale than their old room – and could not have chimed less well with his mood. A soulless motel just off the M3 with a bar haunted by sales reps might have been more apt or a sordid room over a pub, the sort where one collected a key from an ask-no-questions landlord. He doubted Winchester offered either these days, if indeed it ever had.
At least it was dark at last so he felt he could draw the heavy curtains without it seeming odd. He kicked off his shoes and tried lying on the bed. Then he tried sitting up in the solitary, button-backed armchair but that proved toughly ornamental. Nerves had stopped him touching the casserole he had reheated but now that smells from the restaurant were reaching him he was seized with an inappropriate hunger. He ate the packet of crisps from the mini-bar. Then the nuts. Then he felt ashamed and hid the wrappers far under the bed in case she saw them and thought him insensitive.
Finally she rang him on his mobile to say she was on her way.
He bit his tongue to stop himself calling her darling in his nervousness. ‘It’s room eleven,’ he said. He knew she’d rather come straight up than face the fluster of dealing with a receptionist. But then he couldn’t bear to wait in the room a moment longer and he hurried downstairs to watch for her from the hotel steps.
The noise from the restaurant and bar’s open windows behind him, moneyed, Friday-nightish, made him feel peculiarly self-conscious and alone so he waved when he saw her emerge from the leafy short cut she liked to take across the old Green Jackets’ barracks.
She waved back and he was so happy to see her again so soon that he almost forgot why he was there. Every time he saw her was a kind of reminder. It wasn’t that he forgot how she looked in between meetings but that his thoughts of her were so intertwined now with his memories of her younger self. Her every reappearance before him was a reminder that she was self-assured now, purposeful and debonair. To see her was to remember how much of her adult life was still hidden from him. Tonight she had on an ethnic necklace he had admired on her before, outsized silver beads which jangled against her as she broke into a run to join him. She seized his hand and kissed it. He drew her to him and kissed her forehead. Her hair smelled of lavender. And fried onions. ‘You always smell so good,’ he said.
‘That’ll be the supper I cooked earlier. Someone was saying the other day how wearing scent to attract a man is a waste of time and what women should really do is fry bacon just before leaving the house.’
He kissed her again and playfully sniffed her hair. ‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘I couldn’t stand it in the room on my own.’
‘Let’s see if it’s better with two of us.’
‘Let’s.’
She drew him in after her and said a lively hello to the young man on reception duty.
‘We’ve already checked in,’ Ben told him and hurried up the stairs after her. She had changed out of the dress she had on earlier. She wore black trousers made of some kind of linen and a very simple, tailored white shirt, untucked, through which he could see the outline of her bra as she climbed ahead of him.
‘Room twelve, isn’t it?’ she called, starting to open the wrong door.
‘Eleven,’ he hissed. ‘Here!’ and she ran back to him, giggling.
They made love, of course. How could they not? Although it felt to him like a kind of treachery when he had planned to be gravely respectful. They both became wildly overheated, amidst all the bedding and drapes, and at one point she sprang panting away from him and dragged back all the curtains and threw up the little windows so that they ended with the noise and lights of Southgate Street all about them and it was almost like having the bed out on a balcony. Then they raided the mini-bar and started to kiss again.
‘I wrote to you,’ he admitted. ‘I wrote you several drafts and even made a fair copy in my very best doctor’s handwriting.’
‘Oh yes?’
He could hear she was smiling in anticipation but he realized he couldn’t possibly tell her where the letter had gone.
‘So what did you write?’ she asked. She had taken off her heavy Moroccan beads finally because they were bothering her but was amusing herself by rubbing their silvery ridges along his thigh. In the flickering lights from outside she looked thirty or younger, her eyes dark and glistening. He reached out to turn the bedside lamp on but she stayed his hand. ‘Please,’ she said. ‘Not yet.’
‘I wrote that I loved you,’ he said. ‘I said I realized I always had. That I hoped you could forgive me for having been such an idiot and hurt you so.’
‘Ssh,’ she said. ‘How can you ask? It’s the past now.’
‘It matters.’
He saw her smile, or rather, he heard the little outrush of breath and saw the glisten of her teeth. ‘You’re such a boy sometimes,’ she said. ‘This is all that matters. Us. Here and now.’
‘You never told me who your mother was.’
‘Why should I have? She was just my mother.’
‘Yes, but…’ He wondered how to continue. The temptation to break off was intense. ‘I had met her before, you know. Years ago. At Oxford. In our last year. She knew the warden or someone there.’
‘Did you really meet her? We led very separate lives then. She came up for work things quite often but I didn’t encourage her to contact me. I was too wrapped up in the selfish pleasures of being a student to want her ticking me off or cutting me down to size in front of my friends. She won’t remember. She met hundreds of students a year, probably.’
‘Why didn’t you boast about her?’
‘She wasn’t exactly cool, even then. Especially then.’
And he saw that it would be monstrous to tell her of her mother’s entirely innocent role in the unlacing of their love. That particular vial of poison was to be his alone.
‘I’m afraid,’ Laura went on, mockingly, ‘you probably made a much smaller impression on her than she did on you. She liked you as a grown-up, though. The other day. You must have pressed the virology button when I wasn’t listening.’
‘Really?’
‘Her G spot, socially. A man could have all the charm of Goebbels but if he murmured Porcine Circovirus or Lymphocytic Choriomeningitis, she’d bat her eyelashes and move a little closer. It’s amazing, really, that my dad even got as far as a first date.’ She laughed to herself. ‘Poor Dad. He was such a saint, really.’
He took the hand that was holding the beads and clutched it to his lips to draw her attention back. ‘Laura?’ he told her. ‘I’ve got to go home.’
‘Bobby?’
‘No. Battersea home. Back to the fucking flat and…b
ack to Chloë. I’ve got to deal with her and stop being such a coward. It’s not fair to either of you.’
‘So it isn’t all over.’
‘It is.’ And maybe it was, he told himself. ‘It is in my head but I’ve got to bring it home to her. You saw her the other day.’
‘She still loves you.’
‘God. Maybe. I suppose. She’s…She’s not very bright and she’s extremely…She’s used to being loved. Her father…’
She cut him off. ‘You’ll be back soon, though. Next week. The hospital.’
‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘I expect so. Hope so. If I don’t handle it right she’ll make our lives hell, though. I might grab a few days’ leave so I can do it right.’
‘Oh.’
She pulled the sheet up and withdrew slightly, watching him. Now he turned the bedside light on.
‘Please, no,’ she said.
‘I’ve got to,’ he said. ‘Just for a second or two. Here. I’ll dim it.’
He extricated himself from the tangle of sheets and went over to where his trousers had ended up, deep in the slithery mound of tossed aside damask cushions and quilted bedspread. He reached into the pocket for the little jeweller’s box and climbed back on the bed. ‘Here,’ he said.
He took her hand, slipped the box into her palm and pressed them both against his heart because he couldn’t speak and was afraid of crying. She had never seen him weep.
‘What is it?’ she said, frowning slightly. ‘God, Ben, what?’ She withdrew her hand and looked at the box and opened it. ‘Ben?’
‘It probably doesn’t fit.’
‘It’s lovely.’
‘And it’s probably fifty years’ bad luck because he walked out on her.’