Mother Can You Hear Me?

by Margaret Forster

  ‘You look lovely,’ Angela said to Mother, ‘very smart indeed. That frock is a perfect fit and the necklace just brings out the blue in it.’ Mother blinked and smiled and whatever she privately thought did not make a single self-deprecating remark. Down they all went into the bar, Mother accepting a fruit juice without making an issue of it and bravely watching Father accept a pint without flinching. Mother did not like alcohol, neither the taste nor the effect. She was afraid of it. Father never got drunk but after a few beers and chasers on a Saturday night he became truculent and unpleasant and she hated it. Any good that alcohol might do was hidden to her. When Father came into the house after his mild drinking sessions she wrinkled up her nose and shuddered and turned away. Angela and Ben confused her—they drank, she could see that they did, but it was different for them somehow. It was a different kind of drinking that fitted in with a different kind of life and Mother had a feeling it might be acceptable—just.

  ‘No first course for me,’ Mother announced when they were all seated at the big round table in the window. She seemed surprised when no one queried her decision.

  ‘What about you, Father?’ Angela said.

  ‘Shrimp cocktail,’ Father said, they’ll be local shrimps.’

  ‘You don’t want shrimp cocktail,’ Mother said, with a scathing little laugh. ‘Do you know what it is?’

  ‘It’s shrimps,’ Father said.

  ‘Yes, but shrimps in mayonnaise dressing,’ Mother said. ‘That wouldn’t suit you, would it? You don’t like things messed up, do you?’

  ‘He might like mayonnaise,’ Angela said.

  ‘He’s never touched it,’ Mother said, ‘one look and that’ll turn him off—I know him.’

  ‘Tell them to leave off the dressing,’ Father said, ‘I’ll just have them shrimps raw.’

  ‘You can’t do that,’ Mother said, ‘the very idea—messing people about.’

  ‘Certainly he can,’ Angela said, ‘he can have the shrimps however he likes. This is an hotel, Mother—you ask for what you want.’ And then, because she had spoken too sharply and had hurt Mother, she said, ‘What about main courses—there’s some lovely salmon trout on the menu, Mother—how about that?’

  ‘I can’t see the menu,’ Mother said.

  ‘Well, Sadie will read it out for everyone.’

  Sadie read through the menu slowly and clearly. She was very willing to do so—anything to do with food usually brought out the best in her. When she had finished, with frequent recaps, there was an animated five minutes of consultation. Mother and Father found it very annoying. Trewicks did not hesitate—they made instant decisions. They never, as all four grandchildren were doing, said one thing then changed to another. The waitress, who was used to cowed children overawed by the occasion, was clearly amazed by all the shouting and discussion. She had a full page of crossed-out orders before at last everyone had finally made up their mind. ‘Everyone happy now?’ she asked, grimly, and Mother and Father were embarrassed by her disapproval. ‘Sit nice and straight,’ Mother whispered to Tim, who was slouching across the table, ‘and don’t fiddle with the cutlery.’

  ‘Why not? I’m not harming it.’

  ‘You might cut yourself—and it’s just been polished—look, you’re taking the shine off.’

  ‘I don’t care,’ Tim said. ‘Mum, can I go and play in the corridor till the first course comes?’

  Angela said he could at the same time as Father said he certainly could not. The impasse was side-stepped by the immediate arrival of that first course which kept Tim firmly where Father wanted him. Ben ordered a bottle of wine but only he and Angela drank it. She realized, as she swallowed a second large glass before she had so much as tasted her smoked mackerel, that she was going to get dizzy before the meal had really begun. Already, her head swam and she did not seem to be able to hear what everyone was saying. She tried to put her hand over her glass but Ben knocked it aside firmly and looking her straight in the eye said, ‘Drink up. This is a celebration.’ She found herself giggling and felt Mother and Father’s eye upon her. ‘Grandad,’ Ben said, ‘how about a pint?’ ‘Oh no,’ Father said, ‘oh no, no, no,’ and he shook his head.

  Six

  IT WAS THE last bit that rankled. ‘What time is it?’ Mother had asked as the dessert plates were cleared away. ‘Half-eight,’ Father had replied, holding his watch up to the light to be sure of absolute accuracy.

  ‘Is that all?’ Mother had said. The smile left her face, unsure that it had ever belonged there anyway. ‘It’s early. What do we do now, stuck here?’

  They were still at the big round table in the window, slightly apart from the other guests, who looked at them with interest and a certain envy. They seemed, Angela knew, such a wonderful example of family solidarity. There had been laughter throughout the meal and the children had behaved gratifyingly well, not just by eating up every morsel on their plates, but by talking intelligently and sensibly to their grandparents. Nobody had shouted, nobody had tried to show off, nobody had sulked. It was hard to remember any other recent family gathering which had been such a success. Yet there was Mother with the air of a petulant child clamouring for the next treat, and what, after all, was that going to be? Angela did not know. The pleasant effects of the wine left her in an instant as every pair of eyes looked to her for direction.

  ‘How about a walk round?’ Ben suggested.

  ‘Good idea,’ Angela said, gratefully.

  ‘I can’t walk around,’ Mother said, ‘I’ve walked enough today. Where to, anyway? There isn’t anywhere to walk, stuck here. It’s pitch black. There aren’t any pavements. And it’s cold too—there’s a wind getting up.’

  ‘Well,’ Ben said, ‘I’ll take the boys for a quick dash up to the beach and back.’

  ‘I’ll come,’ Father said.

  ‘You?’ Mother said, ‘you’ll get your death going out at this time, at your age, in this weather.’

  ‘I’ll wrap up warm,’ Father said. ‘Shan’t be long.’

  ‘The ladies will retire for coffee,’ Angela said, brightly. ‘We’ll have it in the sitting room and make ourselves comfortable before anyone else gets there—we’ll hog the fire and stuff ourselves with chocolates.’

  But there was no fire. The only sitting room was small and cheerless with no furnishings other than a two-seater sofa that had had considerable wear and a couple of new, ugly, graceless modern armchairs covered in a repellent lime green moquette. There was a centre light with a powerful bulb in it and no other lamp which could be put on in preference to the appalling and unnecessary glare. The heavily patterned curtains, when pulled together, hardly met. ‘Is this where we’re going to sit?’ Mother said. ‘God, what a dump,’ Sadie said. Angela pulled the two chairs together and dragged a black leather foot stool across the shabby carpet to join them. ‘I’ll sit in this one,’ she said, ‘and you sit here with your feet up, Mother.’ Sadie remained standing. ‘Does anyone mind if I go and watch television?’ she asked, looking at Angela. Angela returned the look steadily. Let Sadie interpret it how she liked. ‘Coming, Grandma?’ Sadie said. ‘No, dear,’ Mother said, ‘I haven’t come on holiday to watch television. Anyway, I get enough of that at home, can’t get away from it and most of it is rubbish.’

  Left alone together, Angela and her Mother sat motionless, waiting for the arrival of the promised coffee. Angela knew that the thought of a waitress appearing at any moment was the only thing that prevented Mother from expressing her keen disappointment with the room, the lack of entertainment, with life itself. She wanted the coffee to come, she wanted the distraction its arrival would bring, and yet she dreaded the moment the tray was brought through the door because it would signal the end of Mother’s forbearance. ‘Oh good,’ she said, far too loudly, when it at last arrived. ‘Oh lovely—and biscuits too—how nice—thank you so much. What pretty cups, Mother—do you see?—like those rose-covered ones Grandma had in her china cabinet—do you remember?—and the bowl and jug ma
tching.’ She poured the coffee, exclaiming at the heat of it, and fussed endlessly over the sugaring and milking of the suddenly precious liquid. She discussed the layout of the tray—such a sweet embroidered tray cloth, so rare these days didn’t Mother think—and the cost of coffee in general and her own preference for brown rather than white sugar. Mother made a stab at replying but Angela knew she was only biding her time. She was letting her babble on until such time as she chose to deliver her onslaught, and though she drank and drank Angela’s mouth grew dry with nervous anticipation. She prayed for the boys to burst into the room, but they did not. She longed for Sadie to drift back in, even to sit and bite her nails and look moody, but Sadie did not appear. It has to be gone through, Angela thought, and there are no shortcuts.

  ‘I’ll never sleep,’ Mother said eventually when she had finished her second half cup of extremely milky coffee, ‘not after coffee in the evening.’

  ‘You can hardly call that coffee,’ Angela said.

  ‘But it was coffee,’ Mother said, ‘and it is a stimulant, I’ve read it is. It will keep me awake, not that I ever sleep anyway. Your Father says I do, but I don’t—I lie awake hour after hour, all night sometimes.’

  ‘Well, you don’t need so much sleep now,’ Angela said, comfortingly. ‘You don’t use up so much energy as you get older. And you can snooze any time you want during the day, can’t you?’

  She had meant to console Mother but saw at once that she had only infuriated her, and that all the pent-up emotion kept at bay by the ceremony of drinking the coffee she did not want would now be released.

  ‘But I don’t want to snooze,’ Mother said, thumping the chair arm with her bad hand, ‘that’s all I do—all day—sit and doze and that’s all. What’s the point, that’s what I want to know—I’m no good to anyone—I’m just an old nuisance—I can’t do anything at all—isn’t it terrible—don’t you think it’s terrible?’

  The room was very quiet. Faintly, Angela could hear the wind in the trees outside. ‘You were right,’ she said to Mother, who was leaning forward waiting for a reply, scarlet in the face, ‘there is a wind getting up. I can hear it.’ But Mother would not be deflected. She struggled up, and began shuffling backwards and forwards between door and window, nursing her left arm, body stiff with rage. ‘I’m sick of it,’ she said, ‘day in, day out. I’ve tried to think of those less well off, I’ve tried to think of all the young folk who are invalids, and all those people who do things even though they are crippled—but it doesn’t make any difference to me. I’m just a lump in a chair.’

  ‘Don’t,’ Angela said, ‘you’re upsetting yourself.’

  ‘Of course I’m upsetting myself,’ Mother shouted. ‘You’re worse than your Father—keeping me wrapped in cotton wool.’

  ‘I just meant,’ Angela said, ‘you have to face facts. It’s no good complaining about them.’

  She was shocked herself by the coldness of her tone. Mother stopped, abruptly. She stared at Angela, and then sat down. All that was necessary was to go over and hug her and weep together for a little while. ‘You could be lying in bed unable to move,’ Angela said, her voice clear and level, ‘you could be blind and deaf and in a home. You’re surrounded by a family who love you and you want for nothing in the way of material comfort. You can’t have what you really want—you can’t have a new body and a new life. There’s nothing I can do to help.’

  ‘I was always useless,’ Mother said, ‘never had any fight.’

  ‘It’s no good looking back,’ Angela said harshly, ‘or forward. You just have to live in the present. You have to live from day to day and, if things are very bad, from hour to hour.’

  She was sweating—sweat ran down the back of her neck and along the inside of her dress. She looked down at herself and was surprised not to find deep stains visible. Her heart pounded and her head throbbed and yet out came those clipped, unfeeling words from which Mother recoiled. She shrank back into her chair and hunched her shoulders and her face took on a wary expression which was new. ‘You’re very philosophical,’ was all she said, but she seemed to have lost interest in any conversation. She closed her eyes. Angela closed hers. The tears forced their way through but she let them drip unheeded. Mother was beyond paying any attention. The time for tears had passed.

  In hospital, after Tim’s terrible birth, Angela longed to see her other children and yet she was afraid. She did not want them to see her weak and pale-faced, barely able to lift herself off the pillows. She thought it would be too frightening for them. And so she controlled her urge to tell Ben to bring them in now, this very minute, the first moment she opened her eyes after the long anaesthetic. She waited three whole days. She waited until she was strong enough to brush her hair and put some lipstick on. She arranged herself carefully in the bed, her hands clasped lightly on the smooth covers and her legs flat underneath. She was smiling in the direction of the doorway through which Ben would bring the children long before they appeared. She imagined Sadie rushing over and hugging her and exclaiming with delight and her brothers hanging back, embarrassed and bashful. But Max and Saul came straight to her. They beamed and sparkled and kissed her and began straight away to tell her what they had been doing. It was Sadie who hung back, Sadie who looked frozen and distant. Sadie plucked at the blanket and spoke in monosyllables and avoided Angela’s glance. ‘Sorry it wasn’t a sister, Sadie,’ Angela said, ‘we did try.’ ‘Oh, I don’t care,’ Sadie said. ‘When are you coming home?’ ‘Not yet.’ ‘Why not?’ ‘I’m not better yet.’ ‘You look perfectly all right to me.’ And how it had stung, however easily explained away. All that evening Angela lay remembering Sadie’s indifference to her suffering. No tenderness, no concern, only that hostile little face and the foot tapping with impatience. A sick Mother was no part of Sadie’s expectations. Angela confessed her distress to Ben. ‘She didn’t even ask how I was feeling,’ she said. ‘Even Saul asked that.’ But Ben said Sadie had been silent throughout the entire week. He said he had found her lying on her bed in the middle of the day with the curtains drawn and no light on and he had asked her what was wrong. ‘Nothing,’ she had said, ‘I’m just thinking about Mummy.’ That was all. It made Angela feel much worse than she had felt before.

  Angela woke long before she needed to and lay listening, as if for a baby. Faint shuffling sounds came from next door where Mother and Father had spent their first hotel night in their lives. She knew from the light that it was not yet dawn but she felt alert and ready, as though waiting to go on duty. She had told them to knock if they needed anything, knowing Trewicks always managed whether they needed anything or not, but she had tried to anticipate their every want. She had procured extra pillows, checked the bedside light worked, and as a final stroke of genius had gone to the kitchen and got them to fill a flask with tea so that if Mother woke in the night she could still have the soothing drink she was used to. A cup and saucer, milk, sugar and a sweet biscuit were all laid out on a tray within easy reach.

  She heard a muffled crash and at once got up, snatching her dressing gown from the end of the bed. Trying quietly to push open the door of Mother and Father’s bedroom she discovered it was locked. She tapped gently but there was no reply. Slowly she swivelled the door handle backwards and forwards hoping to attract attention, but suddenly there was the same deathly hush that there had been when she first woke—that pre-dawn quiet, that still hour in which it was so easy to imagine souls departing. No lights were on. Ear to the keyhole, she could hear nothing at all. She went on standing there for a while, shivering slightly with imagined cold, and then she went back to bed. As she pulled the sheet up over her shoulders, the first bird sang.

  ‘Damn window,’ Father said next morning when Angela went in, ‘got stuck—no way to close the thing. Nearly went through the pane trying.’

  ‘Why did you want it closed?’ Angela said. ‘This room is stifling—the central heating was on all night, you know, not like home.’

  ‘Your Mother
was in a draught.’

  ‘I was not,’ said Mother from her bed, ‘it was you.’

  ‘All right, Mary,’ Father said, ‘another thing I’ve done wrong. All right, lass.’

  He looked tired and depressed whereas Mother glowed.

  ‘Why did you lock the door?’ Angela said. ‘I could have come and helped—and you shouldn’t lock doors.’

  ‘Never know who’s about,’ Father said. He went to the mirror and began putting on his tie to complete his dressing. From the dressing table he could see the sea and it seemed to give him new heart. ‘Grand day,’ he said.