by Jane Rogers
She had a hatred of light and fresh air, which Alice’s training had taught her were great aids to healing. When Alice walked in and pulled back the heavy curtains, threw open the window and allowed the clean spring air into the sick-room, Ellen retreated beneath her blankets in paroxysms of coughing, afterwards tearfully accusing Alice of trying to kill her. Eventually Alice was forced to give up, knowing quite clearly that her mother was wrong, and also that her mother knew she was wrong. She believed Ellen took satisfaction not only in behaviour which would increase her own ill health, but also in bullying Alice into abandoning a practice she thought important. Making Alice give things up pleased Ellen. She thrived on it. As she thrived on sickness, and sickness on her.
Alice, growing older, grew bitter. It came on her slowly, as the concertina pressure of years of waiting accumulated behind her to squeeze her forward into a shortened future that could be her own.
Her own life had lasted three years. Until she was eighteen she lived at home with her family. Then (after a battle, but Tom had already gone off to fight and Ellen was so busy being devastated over that, that she didn’t have much energy to spare for Alice) Alice joined a Voluntary Aid Detachment and went south. She went with six other girls volunteering from the neighbourhood, to nurse convalescent troops.
The three years had had to last; the first magical exhausting year in the military hospital, and then her two years at Newcastle General doing her nursing training – broken off by the homecoming of her wounded brother. She had never thought she would still be feeding off those memories, thirty and forty years later. That nothing else at all would have happened. The memories, like old and retouched film, became oddly coloured, unreally bright. She was losing the sense that they had been her own life. As if it has happened to someone else. Another girl with chubby cheeks and long fair hair and a giggly, dimpling laugh. The most important memory, Jacko, had been subjected to so many viewings, so many touchings up, that she hardly knew it now. He was handsome. Kind. Funny. American. A hero; he had joined the British Army before the other Americans came into the war. It didn’t last long – he was nearly better, and was going back to France. But they went for walks when she was off duty, and he kissed her in the fields. The afternoon before he left they lay down in the long grass; it was hot, he tried to – she was trembling, she nearly –
The poor film was so scratched and faded that she was no longer quite sure what had happened. What lingered like a smell was a nauseating sense of physical loss. Her fears had made her reject what her whole body craved.
She had been afraid of getting pregnant. Also afraid of seeming cheap, of losing Jacko. And perhaps she had been right there, because Jacko did care for her. He sent her five letters. And when the war was over he wrote to her from London, saying he was awaiting passage to the US. Could they meet? Tom was bedridden, the pain in his shattered leg still making him delirious from time to time. Alice braved her mother.
‘I have to go to London.’
‘To London? To London? What for?’
‘I want to see – I need to talk to an American friend of mine – before he goes home.’
‘An American?’ Ellen said quietly. ‘My God.’
‘What?’ cried Alice quickly. ‘What’s wrong with it?’
Ellen shook her head.
‘Why shouldn’t I go and see him? I love him. We might get married.’
Ellen snorted. ‘That’s what they all say.’
‘It’s true. Why shouldn’t I go? I’m an adult, aren’t I?’
‘Yes.’
‘Well?’
‘Go. Go on. Go.’
‘I – I was going to go and ask Mrs Munroe if she could give you a hand with Tom – while I’m away.’
‘You needn’t bother.’
‘Look – you can’t manage on your own, you know that.’
‘We’ll manage. If it’s more important to you to go gallivanting off with a Yank than to look after your own flesh and blood that’s nearly died fighting for your freedom, then we can manage, my girl. I’ve got some pride left, I hope. And I’ll tell you something else, madam. If you go, you go for good. I’m not having you back here, after you’ve been off whoring down in London. You go – go on and enjoy yourself – never mind about your brother lying here sweating in pain. Never mind us. I just hope you can sleep nights, in years to come.’
Alice in her innocence saw time as elastic, able to stretch to encompass all good things. She wrote and explained to Jacko. She would see him when her brother was better. Perhaps Tom would come with her and visit him in the States! She would see him soon, and sent him kisses.
There was never time for her to go. And when she became old enough to realize that she should go even though there wasn’t time, it was too late. She looked grey and haggard. Jacko had probably forgotten her, married someone else. Besides, he never had, had he? Asked her to marry him. Only to see him. If she had gone then, she knew – she felt sure. But now it was too late.
Alice Clough was always busy. When she wasn’t looking after her mother, or cleaning, or cooking, or washing or ironing, she would sit by the kitchen window, sewing or knitting. In summer she worked in the garden. She looked up at every set of footsteps coming along the little lane, and when she was inside she waved at every passerby she knew – milkman, postman, farmworker, farmwife. She knitted squares for blankets for the local old people’s home. In season, she made pounds and pounds of jam to go to the church fete for charities overseas. Not that she was a churchgoer – she was needed at home too much for that sort of thing.
‘Where have you been?’ Ellen would call querulously, immediately, as Alice opened the front door.
‘Just to the shops, mother.’
‘I needed you and you weren’t there.’
‘What do you want, mother?’
‘I was scared when I called for you. You should tell me when you’re going out.’
‘You were asleep.’
‘I shouldn’t be left on my own.’
‘I can’t stay in all the time. What would we eat?’
‘You could have the delivery van.’
‘He costs more. Besides, am I to be a complete prisoner?’
‘I don’t know what you mean.’ Pause. ‘How long d’you think it is since I last went out?’
‘You can go out, mother – I’ll take you out, any day. I’ll set up a chair in the garden for you. It would do you good to breathe some fresh air.’
‘You don’t know how I feel – you’ve got no idea. You can’t have any notion of how I feel, or you wouldn’t be able to talk about fresh air.’
‘Well I’m sorry but I have to go out sometimes. You don’t want me to get ill as well do you?’
‘What a wicked thing to say. You should be ashamed of yourself. You go out – go out and enjoy yourself while you can. Don’t think about me lying here on my own.’
‘I don’t go out and enjoy myself. I go out on errands to keep your house running. I go out to collect your prescriptions and buy your food. You won’t be happy till I’m tied to the end of your bed, will you – till you’ve removed my last inch of freedom.’
Ellen starts to cry. ‘I wish I was dead. I wish to God I was dead and with your father. Then I wouldn’t have to endure this. What have I done to deserve this, God? Nothing but pain, whichever way I turn or look, nothing but pain waking or sleeping – and being told I’m a burden to my own flesh and blood. Dear God, haven’t I suffered enough?’
Alice (calmly, bringing her a drink): ‘Stop feeling sorry for yourself, it doesn’t help.’
‘I wish I was dead, I do. To think that I’m dependent on a selfish slip of a girl who resents every little thing she does for me and can think of nothing but blaming me for my sufferings . . .’
‘Mother, I am not a slip of a girl. I’m a middle-aged woman. I do not blame you. I try to look after you. Will you stop it now?’
Ellen crying with increased force. ‘Don’t leave me, will you, Alice? Don’t l
eave me. You’re not going to put me into that home, are you? You’re not going to leave me?’
The only way to cope was to be efficient. Do what needed doing – meticulously, everything. Be a machine. Alice woke in the mornings with lists of duties in her brain, and the list carried her from one task to the next, one hour to the next, day after day. The wheels went round, spoke after spoke. It was no use wanting anything else, or longing for it – she must go on steadily, day after day, boring on through time as patiently as a woodworm through a log.
In the winter of Alice’s fifty-first year, she became ill herself. She caught a virulent strain of flu and was forced to take to her bed for three weeks. Dr Carter arranged for a home help and the district nurse to visit them daily. When she recovered, Alice was scared. She had been ill. She was getting old. She might die.
She might die before her mother. All this time waiting, all these chances given up, one by one: friends, romance, marriage, children, work, a career – and soon it would be her life. Soon she would have wasted her whole precious life waiting for her mother to die. She had never thought of death before. The very fact that it had yet to happen to her mother removed the possibility of it happening to herself.
But now she knew she could die. Why was there any reason to suppose Ellen wouldn’t last for ever? She went on and on always against the odds. Dr Carter had told Alice it was a miracle.
‘Still alive at seventy-nine, after all these years of illness? What a miracle! It’s all thanks to your nursing, Miss Clough. A pity you couldn’t have used those skills on a few more patients, eh?’
Staring fiercely out of the kitchen window, as the first of the spring hikers trudged up the lane to the Pennine Way at the top, Alice’s eyes filled with tears. She had waited for it. Hadn’t she earned it? Didn’t she deserve it? Just one year – that’s all – just one year to call her own, one year to live her own life in, before she must give it up. Hadn’t she paid for it, in all those years she’d lived for others?
How to take it, how to grab it before it slithered on out of her grasp, was the question. How to catch that time and make it wait for her. In the first days of blind panic, sensing death’s cold breath on her neck, she wanted to smash and run. Punch her fist through the smeary kitchen window and run screaming up the lane. Burst, like an overgrown chicken, out of the terrible confining shell of Ellen’s house, and fling herself on the world.
Gradually she thought of a better way, driven continually by a strong sense of panic. She wasn’t going to steal her time, or do anything wrong. She would save it. The time was hers and due to her; she would save it. She would do each day’s task more swiftly and efficiently. Not by skimping or not cleaning in corners, but by working harder and quicker. So she would finish the washing and the morning cleaning by 11.30 instead of 12.30. Then they could have lunch. In the afternoon she would do the cooking and bathe her mother and weed the garden or whatever other chores she had to do, quickly – so that instead of finishing for tea at 5.30 she could finish at 4.30. But having already saved an hour in the morning, that would be 3.30. After tea her mother could be given her medicines and put to bed. Alice would wash up, do some ironing, do the darning and bake some bread – then she could go to bed, at 7.30 p.m. instead of 10. That day would be over. The next day could begin at 5 a.m., and on that day they could have their lunch at 9. That day would be over by mid-afternoon. And so on. Soon she was overtaking days, hustling her mother and herself through time with such exhausting efficiency that she was saving not just days but weeks. She would do next week’s work this week, next month’s next week – slide up the back of time and grab a year – a whole year of her life – for herself.
Ellen was poorly now. She rarely spoke, and spent most of her time dozing. The doctor really was astonished that she had lasted the winter. The old woman clung to life like a barnacle. It was no surprise to him that she gradually became comatose over that spring, and when Miss Clough asked for a repeat prescription four weeks early he assumed she had either dropped or mislaid her mother’s tablets.
Alice, exhausted by her determination not to skimp on any of her self-appointed tasks, lived in trembling frenzy. There was a terrible underlining to the business of saving time, because it seemed to exhaust her (and so shorten her own possibility of surviving to enjoy it) more and more, each day she saved.
In April, the old lady died. Alice went in to turn her in the morning (it was in fact 2.30 a.m., and according to Alice’s reckoning, a date several weeks after the actual one) and switched on the bedside lamp, as she usually did. She stirred up the fire and added fresh coal, before turning to her mother. As her fingers touched the wrinkled skin of the old woman’s neck, she realized it was cold. Ice cold. Ellen must have been dead for hours. Her face was perfectly composed, as if she were still asleep; her hands rested neatly on the overturn of the sheet, like a doll in bed.
‘Mother?’
It sounded odd. She had not spoken to her mother for weeks. There was no point. ‘Mother.’ She sat on the edge of the bed. The dead woman was small, she did not take up much space in the bed. Alice sat and stared at her.
She sat there for a long time, because when she finally stirred and went to the window, the darkness outside was lifting. Carefully, not making a noise, Alice pulled back the heavy curtains. A chill grey light filled the room, expanding it to twice its normal size. Alice stood uncertainly by the window for a minute then carefully closed the curtains again. The room folded in on itself, dark and reassuring.
Alice went quietly to the kitchen, and, sitting at the table, began to make a list of things to do.
Doctor.
Tom.
Vicar.
Undertaker.
Mother, wash and dress.
She was cold; she shivered and picked up the cup of tea on the table. But that was cold too. She’d made it when she got up at 2 a.m. Mechanically she put on her coat and set off for the phone box, shutting the front door silently behind her so as not to disturb the sleeper.
When she returned an hour later she went straight into Ellen’s room. Her mother lay still. She was dead. Alice went back to the kitchen. It was cold. The fire had gone out. Moving slowly she boiled the kettle, filled a bowl with warm water and carried it to her mother’s room. Carefully she stripped her mother’s stiffening bird-boned body and rolled her on to a towel. She washed the familiar wrinkled flesh and dried her carefully. The skin was hard to dry. It wouldn’t stop feeling cold and wet. Then she dressed her in her underclothes and a dress which Ellen hadn’t worn for years. She rolled her over on to her back, and combed her hair. Then she spread a clean sheet over her. Ellen was ready. Ellen was dead.
Alice sat on the sofa opposite the bed. She would empty the dirty water in a minute.
She was sitting there still when Dr Carter arrived that afternoon. He greeted her kindly, offered her some sleeping pills, and enquired when her brother was coming. For the funeral, she replied, on Friday. Another doctor came in from the car to sign the certificate, then they both left. Alice went back to the kitchen and sat at the table. It was very cold. She would have got up to make a cup of tea, but it hardly seemed worth the bother.
In the night she roused herself from her chair, and hobbled into her mother’s bedroom. The cold had sent her feet to sleep. Ellen was still there. She hadn’t moved. She didn’t need anything. There was nothing to do.
Alice returned to the kitchen. She switched on the light, but the curtains had not been drawn and anyone could have seen in, from that blackness outside. She switched off the light again, steadying herself against the cold wall in the dark. Perhaps she should go to bed? But she couldn’t remember what hours today was running to. And if she went to bed – when should she get up? And what do then? Ellen would not want changing, or giving a drink. The fire would not need making up. Nappies would not want soaking, nor sheets washing, nor food buying. There was nothing that needed doing. There was nothing for her to do.
When Tom arrived o
n Thursday night the house was in darkness. Alice must be in bed, but it was thoughtless of her not to leave a light on for him. The door was not locked but he tripped and hurt his gammy leg because he forgot the way the door sill stuck up out of the floor. The house was chilly. Rubbing his ankle irritably he switched on the light and called her. There was no reply. He went though the house room by room, switching on all the lights. His mother lay dead in her bed. In the kitchen he paced up and down, swinging his arms together for warmth, waiting for Alice to return. He’d had a four-hour journey, for God’s sake. The grate was full of cold white ash. Angrily he riddled it, sending choking clouds of dust into the air, then laid and lit the kindling stacked in the fireside basket. The flames were reluctant and he spread a sheet of newspaper over the fire to draw it up. A fine bloody mess. Maddy might have come with him, instead of leaving him to sort it out all on his own; his mother dead, this filthy old ruin of a house, and Alice playing at silly buggers.
The roaring fire sucked in the paper and it blackened and burst into flames before he could let go of it. Shaking his hands in pain he stumbled back. A car drew up outside. Tom opened the door as Dr Carter came up the path.
‘Mr Clough! Glad to see you. Is your sister here?’
‘No. I don’t know where the devil she is.’
Carter followed him into the kitchen. The fire had gone out again and the charred wood smoked sullenly.
‘She phoned me,’ the doctor said. ‘About an hour ago. She sounded upset. I thought I’d come and see if she was all right. She’s not on the way up from the phone.’
‘I haven’t even seen her.’
Carter nodded. ‘She was saying that she’d killed Mrs Clough. Overdosed her with painkillers.’
Tom stared.
‘There’s no truth in it, of course,’ the doctor said sharply. ‘Your sister kept Mrs Clough alive for many years longer than she would have survived in hospital. She was an excellent nurse. Her reaction to your mother’s death is one I should have predicted.’ He paused. ‘I blame myself.’
