The Northern Clemency

by Philip Hensher

  “Mum and Dad?” Toni said. “No, I don’t think so. I grew up in Canberra, you know—the last I heard, Dad had retired from the Civil Service and they went to live on the Gold Coast. I guess they play canasta with a lot of other retired civil servants all day long. I’ve got nothing in common with them. There wasn’t a row, we just lost touch.”

  It seemed wonderful to Alex that you could do such a thing, cut yourself off from the guilt and burden of family, and live entirely in the surface-skimming world of this city, reflected in the water. She knew she couldn’t do such a thing, and the letters and the Christmas cards continued without a break. What seemed strange to her at first was that Toni, for instance, was very hot on the idea of Australia’s ancient history, on Aboriginal heritage, on the Australian earth’s unbroken history over the millennia; she introduced Alex to people who told her, unblinkingly, that they were Aboriginal. She’d never say such a thing, but she couldn’t help observing that some were hardly darker than she was, and some actually had blue eyes. She rethought her ideas of the culture; she did her best and bought two Aboriginal paintings from a gallery on the harbour front. But Toni laughed at her when she saw them.

  “That’s stuff for tourists,” she said, when she saw them hanging, one on each side of Alex’s big picture window. “They’re done by Aborigines, sure, but it’s not their culture. They just sit in a big shed near Alice Springs with a cut-out potato and four jars of poster paints, and they get on with it, all day long. You want to see proper Aboriginal painting, you need to go to the museum, but they go for a fortune now, a really good Clifford Possum Tjapaljarra.”

  “A what?” Alex said.

  “Clifford Possum Tjapaljarra,” Toni said, without hesitation. “That stuff’s serious, but these, it’s just interior decoration, right? It’s not something you should have in your house if it’s not your culture.”

  “Well, I just liked them,” Alex said. “I don’t care if they’re worth anything or not.”

  “That’s not the point,” Toni said. It was as near as Alex had ever come to having an argument with anyone in Australia; even the men tended to come to an end with a brisk agreement, a chilly nod and a swift departure. And she did like the paintings and, most of all, she liked the feeling that she could get rid of them when they started to bore her. In any case, what was her culture? She couldn’t say more than “England” when people asked her where she came from; she didn’t belong where she was born, which was London; she didn’t belong where her parents lived, which was Sheffield. She just didn’t.

  Alex had been away for a long weekend in the mountains—she had been in Australia for twelve years—when she got home to find two messages on her answer-phone, one from her father, another from her brother. It was about her mother, and she had to sit down for ten minutes. They didn’t have her mobile-phone number—it had never occurred to her to give it to them. In a while the clarity of principle, of the shape of her life, made itself felt.

  “Are you all right, babe?” Stewart said.

  She felt sorry for him; they’d only been seeing each other for a few weeks, though they’d sort of known each other for longer. It had been his brother’s veranda on which she’d had that conversation with Toni, and it had all been pretty relaxed until now, neither of them making much movement towards taking anything very seriously.

  “Yeah,” she said. “I suppose it had to happen sooner or later. They’re getting on, my parents.” But was that true—her mother, she would be, what, only fifty-nine.

  “What are you going to do?” he said.

  “There’s nothing I can do,” she said. “I could dash over there, but I’d just be in the way.”

  “No, you wouldn’t,” Stewart said at once. “She’s your mother, they’d be glad to have you around.”

  “You don’t know what it’s like,” Alex said. “I’m going to see what happens first. They wouldn’t want me doing a mercy dash just because of this.”

  “You mean, you’re going to wait and see, and you’ll go back if your mother dies, eh?”

  “No,” Alex said. “I didn’t mean that at all. I’m going to see what happens. I’ll ask them if they want me to come, and if they say yes, course I’ll get on a plane. They’ll give me time off.”

  “Oh, well, that’s the important consideration,” Stewart said. She eyed him; she hadn’t thought that he—that anyone—was likely to take that point of view. “I’d better be off. You don’t want me around.”

  It was true, she didn’t, and especially she didn’t want him to listen to the conversation she then had with her father. Afterwards she worked out that it must have been seven in the morning over there. He sounded as if he hadn’t been to bed; he sounded broken.

  “They just don’t know,” he said. “In two or three weeks they’re going to be able to carry out some surgery, but it’s all too fragile now. She can’t be moved, even into a side ward—she’s in a main ward with a lot of geriatrics.”

  His voice, echoing under oceans, came at her twice, once feebly and then with its feebler underwater echo.

  “Why can’t they move her?” Alex said. “She needs peace and quiet, doesn’t she?”

  There was a pause; she couldn’t tell whether he was digesting what she’d said, or whether the transmission took a second or two, and he was speaking at an ordinary rate of response. Their conversation was filled with silences, like a too-meaningful play.

  “She’s in a dangerous state,” he said. “They’re just waiting. She might have another bleed from the same place, and it increases the risk of that if they move her at all.”

  “And that would be bad,” Alex said; she could hear herself, how Australian her voice had grown.

  “The doctor’s said—he said it quite plainly—that if she does have another haemorrhage at all, she’d definitely die. We’re just waiting.”

  “Do you want me to come over?” Alex said. “I don’t mind, if you think it would be helpful.”

  “I don’t know about helpful,” her father said—and there, surely, was a pause beyond the mechanics of telephone transmission. “It’s up to you.”

  It was clear to Alex what she would do. She told nobody, not feeling responsible for anything Stewart might say, and carried on. If you asked somebody directly, and particularly an English person, whether they needed your support—if you could put it in a way that reflected on their own selfish needs—then of course they would decline. If you let them think for a moment that they were being supportive of you, let them start offering options that would be good for your welfare, then before you knew it you would be doing their bidding, and all in the name of your own needs. She would go over for Christmas, she reassured herself, and that was months away; and if anything happened, she would certainly make the effort and go over for that. Alex reckoned she could probably get the time off for something like that.

  Quickly, Francis and Bernie settled into a regular routine. You could cope with almost anything like that. His father left home early in the morning, perhaps soon after seven, and sat with Alice until twelve or one. Francis went over at one, and Bernie went home. He returned at seven, and Francis either stayed or went home. Bernie came home at ten, and they had supper together before going to bed. The routine, over the first two weeks of Alice’s coma, seemed to sustain them, and each other’s presence kept them in a state of rationally expressed concern. Only sometimes, when either of them was alone, did they find themselves out of control and having to walk outside to nurse their tears.

  For the first three days, Alice was in a common ward, with five other women, on the ground floor of the hospital. Three of the other women were old, and senile. Two of these were silent and still, allowing themselves glumly to be fed or to stare into space, but the third, her toothless face a nutcracker, chin and long nose coming together in incomprehensible resolve, resented being asked to stay in bed, and could not understand that she was in a hospital. “What they all doing here in my room?” Vera—her name—would call, clam
bering out of bed; and the nurses would explain, sometimes for the fourth time in an hour, that she was not in her own bedroom but in a hospital ward. Worse, her resentment often seemed to focus on Alice and, getting out of her own bed, she would come over to Alice’s and start accusing her of having stolen her bed. She was a frail old lady, with bird-like wrist-bones and tendons, and could be led away before she attempted to upheave the mattress, to throw Alice on to the floor. The more sentient women in the ward noted that the nurses were bringing Bernie and Francis cups of tea, unrequested, and realized the seriousness of Alice’s case; they limited themselves to remarking, as if to nobody in particular, that it was a terrible shame. After a day of this, the nurses drew a curtain about Alice’s bed, and though Vera could be seen blundering about outside, her arms stretched out in front of her, like a terrible avenging sleepwalker, it seemed to take her a good deal longer to discover that her bed was within; they sat within a gauzy floral tent, and waited.

  The doctor had explained that the situation was grave, and that all that could be hoped for was no alteration; any alteration at the moment would signal Alice’s death. When the brain scans were returned, a different doctor showed them to Bernie and Francis, and explained the same thing. They looked extraordinarily like Rorschach tests and, like the mad, Bernie and Francis tried to find any kind of meaning or resemblance in these terrible black spills on the film. They were in a small yellow-brown room, overfilled with furniture, the approved images of bereavement cards—of flowers in mauve and pink, executed in pastels—on the wall. The doctor’s manner was clipped and practical; Francis was grateful for the lack of emotional concern. His face in that too-small room—the Relatives’ Room, it was called—was too close and unblinking to them. When the ward was being planned, this room had been designed for the purposes of breaking news to relations, and there was no need for it to be any particular size. The air was thick and warm; the clean smell of the doctor was apparent.

  “How will you know that any change has taken place?” Francis said.

  “That will become apparent from the equipment monitoring Alice,” the doctor said.

  “And if that happens, how soon—” Francis couldn’t continue.

  “Death would take place within a few hours,” the doctor said. “I’m sorry not to be able to put it in any more comforting way.”

  “That’s quite all right, Doctor,” Bernie said. His language had undergone a change of formality; it had always had this tendency when speaking to doctors and other professional people, but the respect he evinced was by now almost painful.

  “We can, however, move her now into a room of her own,” the doctor said. “I understand there’s been a problem with some of the other patients. I’m very sorry for that.”

  “We don’t blame the patients,” Bernie said. “I know you don’t have dedicated geriatric wards any more.”

  They moved her; it was an intricate, massive undertaking involving four nurses. It reminded Francis of those films of whole houses being lifted from their foundations and transported on giant wheels to somewhere entirely new, nothing within, not even a plate in the kitchen cupboard, shaken loose. The new room was bare and clean; like the rest of the hospital, it had the rounded brick sanitary feel of an Edwardian object painted cream and hosed down ten thousand times; the odour of philanthropy was deep-imbued in the walls. There was more privacy here, though the door was only shut when the nurses gave Alice a bed bath, or changed her mysterious tubes and attachments, Bernie or Francis waiting outside.

  “She’s not conscious of anything that’s going on,” the doctor had said. “I must warn you, too, that if she does survive this, it’s quite possible that her personality will be completely altered.”

  Francis did not believe any of that. He felt very strongly that she could be kept where she was—and that was the aim of the medical staff—by being made to listen to the familiar voices of her husband and son. He asked a nurse about it. “Well, I don’t think it can do the slightest bit of harm,” she said. It was clear that she might have added, but for long practice in consoling relations in this way, that anything which made Francis feel he was doing something would make him feel better. Francis overcame his embarrassment—he had never said anything so fiercely personal to his father before—and told Bernie that he was going to sit and talk to Alice for as long as it took. Bernie seemed incapable of taking anything in; all that was keeping him going was the possibility of thanking the doctors, of saying, “I understand,” to them in the most formal and well-behaved manner. But he seemed to understand, and didn’t say, “If you find it a comfort,” as he might have done. Whether it was for his own comfort or not, he took to doing the same thing, and often when Francis arrived to take over the afternoon shift, as it were, he found Bernie murmuring in quite his old humorous style at Alice’s side.

  At first Francis’s talk took the form of assurances of love, of telling Alice what sort of admirable person she was, with the sense that nobody had ever got round to boosting her self-worth by explaining this to her. It was all true, but he got to the end of it very quickly, and it was exhausting, embarrassing and unnatural to go on telling his mother how excellent a person she was, even if she hadn’t known it. He went over the same ground four or five times in succession, but it sounded absurd to put something into words she would never listen to in—in real life, he found himself thinking. Alice’s flushed and unkempt surfaces, her hair greying and spread over the pillow, her hands reaching up constantly to scratch her reddened neck—there was some side-effect, perhaps of some of the blood-pressure drugs, that made her itch and itch—or to try, out of consciousness, to pull out the cannula in the back of her hand. These movements seemed to emerge from some profound irritation of Alice’s, which might have been caused by the shameful sincerity of Francis’s expressions of love and worth, things nobody had ever thought themselves capable of saying out loud.

  “That’s right,” the nurse said, interrupting one of Francis’s murmured paragraphs. “She seems better today.” It was difficult to know how they could tell. She paused at the door, having taken down the readings, and surprisingly added her own comment: “You’re a good lad,” she said, as if she had known him for ever. Though Francis and Bernie both became quickly expert in the significance of the blood-pressure figures, constantly maintained, and of the pace of the pulse monitor, Alice only seemed at all better when, after a bed bath and a clean-up, the nurses let them back to see a more smoothed and groomed Alice, her hair brushed in an approximation of how she usually wore it, the dirt under her fingernails, which accumulated so quickly from her scratching, cleaned gently away. And all, really, that was better then was her hair, which had never been ill in the first place. For the rest of it, she looked and sounded, in the periodic small noises she made, very ill; ill in quite an ordinary way, ill with the blush of flu, her lips dry and flaking with lack of liquid. She looked as if she had a temperature, and had managed to fall asleep, that was all.

  Francis went on talking, and now he talked his way through any kind of memory he could dredge up, anything in which Alice took a part. He went through their last meeting, when he had brought the cat; and then he tried to do last Christmas, but that was more difficult, every Christmas that had ever been melting into the same one. He worked backwards; he reminded her of the time when they had gone with Sandra to the airport with her bags of luggage, and her saying goodbye, she’d be back soon, she had no doubt about it. Then, as if explaining how they had reached that point, he talked about the long period when Sandra had been living at home, and them driving him to Leeds, boxes of books, a stereo, two cheese plants obscuring the view from the back window. He talked, too, about the long series of driving lessons he’d taken, and them leading to nothing; he tried to make that a funny story. And then he remembered he’d forgotten something, and he talked about Bernie’s retirement party, all the people who’d come, listing as many as he could think of, just saying the names. To fill up the long beeping hours with
familiar knowledge, he went back over them, saying everything he could remember about Mrs. Arbuthnot, the Warners, the Glovers, everyone he could remember.

  “You’re all right,” Bernie said. He was standing in the door of Alice’s room, with two cups of tea, one in each hand. They were in china cups, so the nurses must have made them. It was the measure of their concern, and Francis looked forward to the day when they were thrown back on getting them out of the vending machine, like ordinary visitors.

  “I was just talking to Mum,” Francis said, feeling as if he had been caught out.

  “It’s a good idea,” Bernie said. “I talk to her too. You don’t know what’s getting through to her.”

  “A familiar voice,” Francis said.

  “That’s it,” Bernie said. For the first time since his retirement, Bernie had taken to wearing a jacket and tie, and his shirts were ironed, his chin was shaven. He was keeping up appearances, just as he did when, at home, he took one of Daniel Glover’s prepared dishes from the oven and put it on a table as scrupulously laid as any Alice had ever set out. “I don’t mind taking over now.”

  “I’ll call for a taxi,” Francis said.

  He liked to be in bed by the time Bernie was home. It was best not to face each other. He knew that for his father, the night, the end of the day’s visiting when all possibility of being practical had gone and there was nothing to do but sleep as best he could, was the worst time, and he had trained himself not to listen to the noises that came from his parents’ bedroom. If he listened, Francis could not sleep, and the noises of his father’s terror and grief went on into the small hours.