by Tim Parks
The Indians were being unconscionably slow with the biryani.
‘I told her,’ my brother-in-law laughed, ‘to take him our greetings.’
‘But this vomiting blood …’ I started to ask. I raised my hand to get the waiter’s attention but he was focused on a point far outside the bounds of the restaurant. Uttar Pradesh, the place was called.
‘Horrible,’ my sister said. She had been on the phone – Mother, that is – to our brother, who had called from LA, when— ‘But before I forget,’ she interrupted herself. ‘Tomorrow morning.’
‘Right. You have to be tough on the doctors,’ my brother-in-law chipped in. He had found another picture of my mother, this time by the large window, a French window I saw now. She was leaning on a Zimmer frame, clinging onto it for dear life, you would have said, slumped, beaten, and yet the face had lifted towards the camera and bitten off a wan smile for posterity. As recently as a month ago Mum was still refusing to use a walking stick, because, she said, sticks made people look old.
‘Takes a good snap, doesn’t it?’ my brother-in-law said.
‘You have to make sure they don’t try to move her again,’ my sister said. It was her lower, conspiratorial voice now, something I remembered from adolescence. ‘She mustn’t be moved.’
‘Most of all, that they don’t try to send her back to us,’ her husband said.
‘Since his op he just can’t lift her any more,’ my sister explained.
I had forgotten for the moment exactly what op my brother-in-law had had, but I sympathised 100 per cent. I could never have picked up my mother.
‘She’s happy here and she desperately wants to stay, because the nurses are kind and they know how to deal with the pain. They have all the gizmos.’
But why, I asked – I hate the word ‘gizmo’ – would they want to move her, given the state she was in? ‘Didn’t you say she was near the end? Isn’t that what hospices are for?’
‘In theory.’ But my sister insisted that health professionals were like that; they kept thinking there was something that could be done, when clearly there wasn’t. ‘Although, heaven knows, she’s such a fighter, perhaps she could battle on for weeks and even months.’ She frowned. Anyway, they had moved her two days ago when she was in the other hospice, in Hounslow, and was finally getting relief after weeks of atrocious pain, and if they’d done it once, they were perfectly capable of doing it again. ‘Mum is terrified of being moved,’ my sister repeated. If she herself, she said, could be on hand 24/7 to prevent this from happening, she would. But she couldn’t. What with Suzy, and so on. Fortunately, since I was now here, this could be my job, at least for the next few days.
I wondered then, ungenerously, whether my sister hadn’t perhaps exaggerated the gravity of my mother’s condition so as to have me on hand to deal with the doctors and keep my mother in the hospice. It looked like I would have to cancel the conference in Berlin. Which was disappointing because for once I had the inaugural spot, the place of honour.
‘We’re really relying on you,’ my brother-in-law said, ‘to be firm. Give them some of your Queen’s English.’
I wasn’t sure if this was a reference to my job or my notorious swearing.
‘Just tell them you won’t let them, over your dead body,’ my sister said.
I smiled and made a mental note.
No pun intended, my brother-in-law joked.
At last the biryani arrived. But now I desperately needed to go to the bathroom again. How long was this going to go on? ‘Damn,’ I said, ‘I need to make a call. Give me a minute’, and I got up and went to the bathroom again – that made eight – where there was just sufficient elbow room to read a text message from Deborah. ‘Please,’ she had written, ‘for old times’ sake.’ Which meant, I supposed, the one time we had made love together and immediately wished we hadn’t. Was she threatening to tell Dave about that? Surely not.
Our beloved brother, my sister said when I returned to the table, had phoned Mother from LA. This was around the time when I had been peeing on South West Trains. Mother had made a huge effort, my sister said, to sound in good spirits on the phone. ‘You know how she is. It’s heroic.’ Our brother had explained that unfortunately he couldn’t get away in the next few days. There were important meetings lined up. Mother had said not to worry and put the phone down, sighed once or twice, then had suddenly thrown up a great gush of blood.
‘Black blood,’ my brother-in-law added.
For a few moments we ate in silence. The biryani was excellent.
‘I told her,’ he added, ‘soon you’ll be dancing with Dad in Paradise.’
My sister sent me a sad, knowing smile; she is dyeing her hair a light-violet colour these days. It suits her.
‘Poor Mum,’ she said softly. ‘She’s waited so long.’
VII
With the biryani finished, I had expected we would get up to go, but now my brother-in-law asked for the menu to order a sweet. Not an Indian sweet, though. The Indians were good at savoury, he thought, but not at sweet. He had never managed to finish an Indian sweet, my-brother-in-law said. ‘Which, coming from Mr Hunk, is pretty damning,’ my sister laughed, prodding her husband’s muscles to show how solid he was. And he really was. A giant of a man. In remarkable form too, given his age. With a psyche to match. It was impossible, in fact, to imagine my brother-in-law in any other manifestation than this huge and solid form, because he behaved in every way with the confidence of a huge and solid man. Perhaps I should have brought him into the body/soul debate with my mother. Try to imagine your son-in-law, I should have suggested, without his huge body. It’s impossible, isn’t it? Snapping the menu shut, the big man sighed and said, ‘Ice-cream.’ There was nothing else. Nothing substantial, he meant. He grinned. And some minutes later, while we both watched him tuck into his green, white and pink ice-cream, served by a minute Indian girl, it occurred to me to ask my sister had she told my mother that I was coming? I was on my way. My sister turned from admiring her husband’s appetite, frowned and said no. No, she hadn’t, actually.
‘So, she doesn’t know I’m coming?’
Again my sister frowned, as if she needed to think about this, then said, no, actually, she didn’t.
I stared at her, trying to take this in. Then I was suddenly beside myself with the thought that my mother must be assuming I had abandoned her. On her deathbed. My brother had at least phoned, hadn’t he? I hadn’t even done that. Why? Honestly, I hadn’t even thought of phoning. I had imagined, after my sister’s email, that Mother would be too ill to answer the phone. She’s sinking fast, my sister had written. Words to that effect. While my brother, still supposing Mother would live for ever, had phoned as a matter of course. It had never occurred to him not to phone. And my mother, or so it seemed from my sister’s account, despite her critical condition, had done everything to sound cheerful and reassure him. Was that why my sister had said Mum was all over the place? My mother’s determination to be above and other than her illness, and even her body, albeit only for the few moments of a phone call, and my brother’s stubbornness in denying that she was seriously ill at all, were in triumphant cahoots, I thought; they made a perfect team. My mother had performed well, protected by the dubious and fleeting intimacy of a transatlantic phone line, and my brother was relieved that things were not after all as bad as my sister’s email had suggested, and hence that he need not embark on the trip that I had undertaken so hastily without even phoning. I was always too hasty. Yet no sooner was the phone down than my mother had vomited blood. Black blood, my brother-in-law had specified. I didn’t think I had ever seen black blood. Nor did I understand what blackness in blood might mean. These things can be deceptive, my son had said. He was an ambitious young doctor. My brother meantime didn’t know about this development. He hadn’t been updated. I should tell him. And my mother didn’t know I was coming to visit her, even though it had never even crossed my mind not to come, when the end was near. I would have
dropped anything – absolutely anything – to go to my mother’s deathbed. Why did I realise this only now? That I had been waiting for this moment for years? All my life perhaps. Mother’s death.
‘Why didn’t you tell her?’ I demanded of my sister. I was a little aggressive now. Perhaps a note of alarm crept into my voice. My brother-in-law was savouring his pistachio. My sister seemed put on the spot. For the first time her face showed some confusion. ‘Because,’ she said, and still she hesitated. She was fingering her wedding ring. ‘Because when you arrive, Tom, she will know it’s the end.’ She sighed. ‘What other reason would you come for? Out of the blue.’
Apparently, then, I was a sort of gravedigger, a bird of ill omen. Plummeting from a blue sky. Whereas my brother, calling to say he wasn’t planning to come, or not in the near future, was business as usual. Life would go on for ever while my brother didn’t come. His not coming would keep my mother alive. His transcontinental phone calls. What is life in the end, or marriage for that matter, if not a form of prolonged denial? Truth kills. Certainly, I thought, the truth had killed my marriage.
I stood up and hurried to the till at the back of the restaurant, where the proprietor invited me to return to my seat, promising he would bring the bill shortly. I refused. We were in a hurry, I said. My mother was in the hospice on Grange Road, I told him. She was dying. Tonight, very likely. I slapped my Visa on the counter and simultaneously my phone began to ring. I didn’t answer.
‘Grange Road?’ the man repeated. He seemed irritated that I was leaving my phone to ring in his restaurant. Had he understood about the hospice? Perhaps because I’d left the ringtone on loud. The noxious Nokia tone. When the payment terminal invited me to tip, I didn’t. Which more or less balanced out the five quid for the taxi driver.
‘Tom!’ my brother-in-law exclaimed, ‘thank you so much!’ He screwed up his napkin. He seemed genuinely surprised, even moved, that I had paid for our meal. It’s not the done thing in the Sanders family to throw money around. Settling into the front seat of the van, the dogs scratching and yelping in the back, he asked me how my wife was and whether she would be coming over.
‘We’ve separated,’ I said.
If silence is imaginable in a diesel van starting up, with three dogs barking in the back and heavy rain clattering on the roof, not to mention a windscreen wiper that squeaked dramatically, there was silence after I made this announcement – deep silence. All three of us were squeezed onto the van’s front seat.
‘I beg your pardon,’ my sister finally said. After a moment she added. ‘Well, that was a well-kept secret.’
You could actually feel my sister struggling to decide whether to be critical or not. People no more divorce in the Sanders family than they pay for other people’s meals. It’s just not us.
‘You really separated?’ my brother-in-law asked. ‘Legally?’ He seemed concerned. ‘Are you managing okay?’ He pulled the van out into the road.
‘Guilty on both counts,’ I told him.
‘But that’s amazing,’ my sister breathed, still absolutely uncertain how to react. Marriage was sacrosanct, but I was her brother. My wife had never been a big hit with the family. But then I had never wanted her to be. It was one of the things that made our relationship more solid. My wife and I had been a couple against the world; above all, against our families, mine and hers. We had always felt superior to both. My sister shook her head. ‘But when?’
‘You can always come to stay with us,’ my brother-in-law changed gear, ‘if you need a refuge from the storm.’
‘Two years ago,’ I said. ‘There is no storm.’
‘Your phone’s ringing,’ my brother-in-law said. He had to dive in between parked vehicles to let a similar van by, the other way. With the fall in the engine noise, the wipers squeaked louder.
‘But why didn’t you tell us?’ my sister said.
Why had I told them now, I wondered?
I pulled out the phone and rejected the call without checking to see who it was. My brother-in-law said the new bungalow they had, on the outskirts of Swanage, was near a beautiful coastal walk. We could go running, with the dogs.
Because I hadn’t wanted to upset Mother, I said. With her being ill and so on, and the kind of significance she gave to marriage. I hesitated. ‘Then you two have quite enough on your plates, with Suzy.’
How many times was I going to use that ugly idiom in one day? As if life was all about avoiding indigestion. The truth was that anything I had told my sister would automatically have been passed on to my mother. She knew this, of course. That’s why I hadn’t told her. Because of Mother. My brother, meantime, had been my email confidant throughout the whole sad story, but would never have dreamed of passing this information on to either of them.
‘Mum was always saying she was surprised you two hadn’t separated,’ my sister said quietly.
We were buckled into seats in the front of the van. My sister in the middle. Already my brother-in-law was looking for a parking space near the hospice. It was only half a mile. Not finding one, he simply pulled in the hospice driveway beside the gate with its No Parking sign. The van shuddered with the diesel ticking over and the wipers smearing rain across the windscreen.
‘Did she?’ I found this extremely hard to believe.
‘Well, you know Mum. Marriage is sacred, and so on. But for a few years now she’s been saying she hoped you’d find the courage.’
‘The courage?’
My sister shrugged. ‘She thought you were sitting on the fence.’
‘She never said anything to me.’
One of the dogs began to paw the partition behind us.
‘Never come between a man and his wife,’ my sister said off pat, and at once I recognised something my father used to say when parishioners came to him with their marriage woes. It was a rule of my father’s never to advise troubled couples to separate, however much, afterwards, talking it over with my mother, he’d say separation seemed the only solution. Hearing the expression again after all these years – ‘Never come between’, etc. – I was struck by the order of the words and the use of the possessive pronoun in ‘a man and his wife’. One wouldn’t say, Never come between a woman and her husband.
‘How have the children reacted?’ my brother-in-law wanted to know.
I had unbuckled my seatbelt, but we were still sitting in the van in heavy rain. An hour ago they’d been in a hurry to get home.
‘The children are all grown-up,’ I said. ‘They’re fine with it.’
If this wasn’t altogether true, I very much hoped it was.
‘Do you have someone else?’ my sister asked. ‘Where are you living?’
It was getting on for eleven now.
‘Let’s talk about it another time,’ I said. ‘I really ought to get in to see Mum. I don’t want her to imagine I’m not coming.’
‘Where are you going to sleep?’ my brother-in-law asked.
My sister now informed me that there were two guest rooms in the hospice, but she didn’t know if they were already occupied or not. At a pinch, there was the armchair in my mother’s room, which was pretty comfortable, she said. A recliner. On the other hand, Mother had doubtless been cleaned up and prepared for the night now. They had a drug pump in her arm and gave her the maximum dose of morphine in the evenings. To get her off.
‘The last thing you want to do is wake her up,’ my sister said. Actually, if there was a hotel nearby, she thought, the thing would be to check in there and see Mum tomorrow. But it had to be near enough to be back at the hospice for the doctors at 8 a.m. or even earlier, to make absolutely sure Mother wasn’t moved.
‘I’ll check,’ my brother-in-law said and had already produced his iPad. It was a pleasure for the big man to find me a hotel on his iPad. But I said no. I was determined to see Mother tonight. Otherwise, why had I dropped everything in Holland and flown over directly? I was perfectly happy, I said, to spend the night in the armchair, if it came to that,
and of course I wouldn’t wake Mum up if she was already asleep, but I did want to be there when she woke.
‘Then she will know,’ my sister said.
We sat in silence. Despite my refusal to consider a hotel, my brother-in-law was nevertheless stroking information back and forth across his iPad, tongue between his lips, brow furrowed in the glow of the screen.
‘But surely she already knows,’ I said. ‘After all, she planned her funeral four years ago.’
‘Oh, she loves arranging her funeral,’ my sister laughed. ‘She must have changed it a dozen times. It’s different when the moment really comes.’
‘But weren’t you just telling her she’d soon be waltzing through the Pearly Gates?’
There are moments when it seems impossible not to sound unpleasant. My sister took the point in good spirits.
‘It was always her dream to be with Dad again,’ she said. There was almost a catch in her voice now, as if the person who really wanted to be with Dad again was her. My sister had been Daddy’s girl.
Still dragging things around his screen, my brother-in-law said, ‘She’ll be going home to glory very soon now.’
His voice was solemn. What was I to make of it, I wondered? My mother knew she was dying, in the dimension where one foresees a rosy afterlife with loved ones who passed on before, but she definitely didn’t know and didn’t want to know, in the dimension where a son arrives to say goodbye just before the final rattle. Instead of screaming, I asked, ‘Do you think I should tell her?’
‘What?’ my sister said. ‘That she’s dying?’
‘No,’ I almost laughed. ‘About separating.’
She frowned. In the odd light from the rainy street her violet hair was bathed in yellow. She looked a good ten years younger than her age.
‘Who actually left who?’ my brother-in-law cut in.
I had given a conference in Johannesburg the previous spring entitled ‘Whom? The Case of the Missing Pronoun.’
