by Ian Mcewan
The traffic must be stalled somewhere else by the march. For almost half a mile he alone possesses this stretch of elevated road. For seconds on end he thinks he grasps the vision of its creators—a purer world that favours machines rather than people. A rectilinear curve sweeps him past recent office buildings of glass and steel where the lights are already on in the February early afternoon. He glimpses people as neat as architectural models, at their desks, before their screens, even on a Saturday. This is the tidy future of his childhood science fiction comics, of men and women with tight-fitting collarless jumpsuits—no pockets, trailing laces or untucked shirts—living a life beyond litter and confusion, free of clutter to fight evil.
But from a vantage point on the White City flyover, just before the road comes down to earth among rows of redbrick housing, he sees the tail lights massing ahead and begins to brake. His mother never minded traffic lights and long delays. Only a year ago she was still well enough—forgetful, vague, but not terrified—to enjoy being driven around the streets of west London. The lights gave her an opportunity to examine other drivers and their passengers. “Look at him. He's got a spotty face.” Or simply to say companionably, “Red again!”
She was a woman who gave her life to housework, to the kind of daily routines of polishing, dusting, vacuuming and tidying that were once common, and these days are only undertaken by patients with obsessive-compulsive disorders. Every day, while Henry was at school, she spring-cleaned her house. She drew her deepest satisfactions from a tray of well-roasted beef, the sheen on a nest of tables, a pile of ironed candy-striped sheets folded in smooth slabs, a larder of neat provisions; or from one more knitted matinée jacket for one more baby in the remoter reaches of the family. The invisible sides, the obverse, the underneath and the insides of everything were clean. The oven and its racks were scrubbed after every use. Order and cleanliness were the outward expression of an unspoken ideal of love. A book he was reading would be back on the hallway shelf upstairs as soon as he put it aside. The morning paper could be in the dustbin by lunchtime. The empty milk bottles she put out for collection were as clean as her cutlery. To every item its drawer or shelf or hook, including her various aprons, and her yellow rubber gloves held by a clothes peg, hanging near the egg-shaped egg-timer.
Surely it was because of her that Henry feels at home in an operating theatre. She too would have liked the waxed black floor, the instruments of surgical steel arrayed in parallel rows on a sterile tray, and the scrub room with its devotional routines—she would have admired the niceties, the clean headwear, the short fingernails. He should have had her in while she was still capable. It never crossed his mind. It never occurred to him that his work, his fifteen years' training, had anything to do with what she did.
Nor did it occur to her. He barely knew it at the time, but he grew up thinking her intelligence was limited. He used to think she was without curiosity. But that wasn't right. She liked a good exploratory heart-to-heart with her neighbours. The eight-year-old Henry liked to flop on the floor behind the furniture and listen in. Illness and operations were important subjects, especially those associated with childbirth. That was when he first heard the phrase “under the knife” as well as “under the doctor.” “What the doctor said” was a powerful invocation. This eavesdropping may have set Henry on his career. Then there were running accounts of infidelities, or rumours of them, and ungrateful children, and the unreasonableness of the old, and what someone's parent left in a will, and how a certain nice girl couldn't find a decent husband. Good people had to be sifted from the bad, and it wasn't always easy to tell at first which was which. Indifferently, illness struck the good as well as the bad. Later, when he made his dutiful attempts on Daisy's undergraduate course in the nineteenth-century novel, he recognised all his mother's themes. There was nothing small-minded about her interests. Jane Austen and George Eliot shared them too. Lilian Perowne wasn't stupid or trivial, her life wasn't unfortunate, and he had no business as a young man being condescending towards her. But it's too late for apologies now. Unlike in Daisy's novels, moments of precise reckoning are rare in real life; questions of misinterpretation are not often resolved. Nor do they remain pressingly unresolved. They simply fade. People don't remember clearly, or they die, or the questions die and new ones take their place.
Besides, Lily had another life that no one could have predicted, or remotely guess at now. She was a swimmer. On Sunday morning, September the third 1939, while Chamberlain was announcing in his radio broadcast from Downing Street that the country was at war with Germany, the fourteen-year-old Lily was at a municipal pool near Wembley, having her first lesson with a sixty-year-old international athlete who had swum for Britain in the Stockholm Olympics in 1912—the first ever women's swimming event. She had spotted Lily in the pool and offered to give her lessons for free, and coached her in the crawl, a most unladylike stroke. Lily went in for local matches in the late forties. In 1954 she swam for Middlesex in the county championships. She came second, and her tiny silver medal, set on a wooden shield made of oak, always stood on the mantelpiece while Henry was growing up. It's on a shelf in her room now. That silver was as far, or as high, as she got, but she always swam beautifully, fast enough to push out in front of her a deep and sinuous bow wave.
She taught Henry, of course, but his treasured memory of her swimming was of when he was ten, on a school visit one morning to the local pool. He and his friends were changed and ready, had been through the shower and footbath, and had to wait on the tiles for the adult session to end. Two teachers stood by, shushing and fussing, trying to contain the children's excitement. Soon there was only one figure remaining in the pool, one in a white rubber cap with a frieze of petals he should have recognised earlier. His whole class was admiring her speed as she surged up the lane, the furrow in the water she left behind, just at the small of her back, and the way she turned her head to breathe without breaking her line in the water. When he knew it was her, he convinced himself he'd known from the beginning. To add to his exultation, he didn't even have to claim her out loud. Someone called out, “That's Mrs. Perowne!” In silence they watched as she reached the end of her lane right at their feet and performed a flashy underwater turn that was novel at the time. This was no mere duster of sideboards. He'd seen her swim often enough, but this was entirely different; all his friends were there to witness her superhuman nature, in which he shared. Surely she knew, and put on in the last half-length a show of demonic speed just for him. Her feet churned, her slender white arms rose and chopped at the water, her bow wave swelled, the furrow deepened. Her body shaped itself round her own wave in a shallow undulating S. You would have had to sprint along the pool to keep up with her. She stopped at the far end and stood, and put her hands on the edge and flipped herself out of the water. She would have been about forty then. She sat there, feet still immersed, pulled off her cap and, tilting her head, smiled shyly in their direction. One of the teachers led the kids into solemn applause. Though it was 1966—the boys' hair was growing thickly over their ears, the girls wore jeans to class—a degree of fifties formality still prevailed. Henry clapped with the rest, but when his friends gathered round, he was too choked with pride, too exhilarated to answer their questions, and was relieved to get in the pool where he could conceal his feelings.
In the twenties and thirties, great tracts of agricultural land to the west of London disappeared before an onslaught of high-speed housing development, and even now the streets of frowning, respectable two-storey houses haven't quite shaken off their air of suddenness. Each near-identical house has an uneasy, provisional look, as if it knows how readily the land would revert to cereal crops and grazing. Lily now lives only a few minutes away from the old Perivale family home. Henry likes to think that in the misty landscape of her dementia, a sense of familiarity breaks through occasionally and reassures her. By the standards of old people's homes, Suffolk Place is minute—three houses have been knocked through to make
one, and an annexe has been added. Out front, privet hedges still mark the old garden boundaries and two laburnum trees survive. One of the three front gardens has been cemented over to make parking space for two cars. The oversized dustbins behind a lattice fence are the only institutional clues.
Perowne parks and takes the potted plant from the back seat. He pauses a moment before ringing the bell—there's a taste in the air, sweet and vaguely antiseptic, that reminds him of his teenage years in these streets, and of a general state of longing, a hunger for life to begin that from this distance seems like happiness. As usual, Jenny opens the door. She's a large, cheerful Irish girl in a blue gingham tabard who's due to start nurse's training in September. Henry receives special consideration on account of his medical connection—an extra three tea bags in the brew she'll bring soon to his mother's room, and perhaps a plate of chocolate fingers. Without knowing much at all about each other, they've settled on teasing forms of address.
“If it isn't the good doctor!”
“How's my fair colleen?”
Off the narrow space of the suburban hallway, tinted yellow by the front door's leaded glass, is a kitchen of fluorescent light and stainless steel. From there comes a clammy aroma of the lunch the residents ate two hours earlier. After a lifetime's exposure, Perowne has a mild fondness, or at least a complete lack of disgust, for institutional food. On the other side of the entrance hall is a narrower door that leads through into the three interconnecting sitting rooms of three houses. He can hear the bottled sound of televisions in other rooms.
“She's waiting for you,” Jenny says. They both know this to be a neurological impossibility. Even boredom is beyond his mother's reach.
He pushes the door open and goes through. She is right in front of him, sitting on a wooden chair at a round table covered with a chenille cloth. There's a window at her back, and beyond it, a window of the house next door, ten feet away. There are other women ranged around the edges of the room sitting in high-backed chairs with curved wooden arms. Some are watching, or looking in the direction of, the television mounted on the wall, out of reach. Others are staring at the floor. They stir or seem to sway as he enters, as if gently buffeted by the air the door displaces. There's a general, cheery response to his “Good afternoon, ladies” and they watch him with interest. At this stage they can't be sure he isn't one of their own close relatives. To his right, in the farthest of the connecting sitting rooms, is Annie, a woman with wild grey hair which radiates from her head in fluffy spokes. She's shuffling unsupported towards him at speed. When she reaches the end of the third sitting room she'll turn back, and keep moving back and forwards all day until she's guided towards a meal, or bed.
His mother is watching him closely, pleased and anxious all at once. She thinks she knows his face—he might be the doctor, or the odd-job man. She's waiting for a cue. He kneels by her chair and takes her hand, which is smooth and dry and very light.
“Hello, Mum, Lily. It's Henry, your son Henry.”
“Hello, darling. Where are you going?”
“I've come to see you. We'll go and sit in your room.”
“I'm sorry dear. I don't have a room. I'm waiting to go home. I'm getting the bus.”
It pains him whenever she says that, even though he knows she's referring to her childhood home where she thinks her mother is waiting for her. He kisses her cheek and helps her out of her chair, feeling the tremors of effort or nervousness in her arms. As always, in the first dismaying moments of seeing her again, his eyes prick.
She protests feebly. “I don't know where we can go.”
He dislikes speaking with the forced cheerfulness nurses use on the wards, even on adult patients with no mental impairment. Just pop this in your mouth for me. But he does it anyway, partly to disguise his feelings. “You've got a lovely little room. As soon as you see it, you'll remember. This way now.”
Arm in arm, they walk slowly through the other sitting rooms, standing aside to let Annie pass. It's reassuring that Lily is decently dressed. The helpers knew he was coming. She wears a deep red skirt with a matching brushed-cotton blouse, black tights and black leather shoes. She always dressed well. Hers must have been the last generation to care as a matter of course about hats. There used to be dark rows of them, almost identical, on the top shelf of her wardrobe, cocooned in a whiff of mothball.
When they step out into a corridor, she turns away to her left and he has to put his hand on her narrow shoulder to guide her back. “Here it is. Do you recognise your door?”
“I've never been out this way before.”
He opens her door and hands her in. The room is about eight feet by ten, with a glazed door giving on to a small back garden. The single bed is covered by a floral eiderdown and various soft toys that were part of her life long before her illness. Some of her remaining ornaments—a robin on a log, two comically exaggerated glass squirrels—are in a glazed corner cupboard. Others are ranged about a sideboard close to the door. On the wall near the handbasin is a framed photograph of Lily and Jack, Henry's father, standing on a lawn. Just in shot is the handle of a pram, presumably in which lies the oblivious Henry. She's pretty in a white summer dress and has her head cocked in that shy, quizzical way he remembers well. The young man is smoking a cigarette and wears a blazer and open-necked white shirt. He's tall, with a stoop, and has big hands like his son. His grin is wide and untroubled. It's always useful to have solid proof that the old have had their go at being young. But there is also an element of derision in photography. The couple appear vulnerable, easily mocked for appearing not to know that their youth is merely an episode, or that the tasty smouldering item in Jack's right hand will contribute—Henry's theory—later that same year to his sudden death.
Having failed to remember its existence, Lily isn't surprised to find herself in her room. She instantly forgets that she didn't know about it. However, she dithers, uncertain of where she should sit. Henry shows her into her high-backed chair by the French window, and sits facing her on the edge of the bed. It's ferociously hot, even hotter than his own bedroom. Perhaps his blood is still stirred by the game, and the hot shower and the warmth of the car. He'd be content to stretch out on the oversprung bed and start to think about the day, and perhaps doze a little. How interesting his life suddenly appears from the confines of this room. At that moment, with the eiderdown beneath him, and the heat, he feels a heaviness in his eyes and can't stop them closing. And his visit has hardly begun. To revive himself, he pulls off his sweater, then he shows Lily the plant he has brought.
“Look,” he says. “It's an orchid for your room.”
As he holds it out towards her, and the frail white flower bobs between them, she recoils.
“Why have you got that?”
“It's yours. It'll keep flowering through the winter. Isn't it pretty? It's for you.”
“It's not mine,” Lily says firmly. “I've never seen it before.”
He had the same baffling conversation last time. The disease proceeds by tiny unnoticed strokes in small blood vessels in the brain. Cumulatively, the infarcts cause cognitive decline by disrupting the neural nets. She unravels in little steps. Now she's lost her grasp of the concept of a gift, and with it, the pleasure. Adopting again the tone of the cheerful nurse, he says, “I'll put it up here where you can see it.”
She's about to protest, but her attention wanders. She has seen some decorative china pieces on a display shelf above her bed, right behind her son. Her mood is suddenly conciliatory.
“I've got plenty of them cups and saucers. So I can always go out with one of them. But the thing is, the space between people is so tiny”—she brings up two wavering hands to show him a gap—“that there's hardly enough space to squeeze through. There's too much binding.”
“I agree,” Henry says as he settles back on the bed. “There's far too much binding.”
Damage from the small-vessel clotting tends to accumulate in the white matter and destroy th
e mind's connectivity. Along the way, well before the process is complete, Lily is able to deliver her rambling treatises, her nonsense monologues with touching seriousness. She doesn't doubt herself at all. Nor does she think that he's unable to follow her. The structure of her sentences is intact, and the moods which inflect her various descriptions make sense. It pleases her if he nods and smiles, and chimes in from time to time.
She isn't looking at him as she gathers her thoughts, but past him, concentrating on an elusive matter, staring as though through a window at an unbounded view. She goes to speak, but remains silent. Her pale green eyes, sunk deep in bowls of finely folded light brown skin, have a flat, dulled quality, like dusty stones under glass. They give an accurate impression of understanding nothing. He can't bring her news of the family—the mention of strange names, any names, can alarm her. So although she won't understand, he often talks to her about work. What she warms to is the sound, the emotional tone of a friendly conversation.
