In Extremis

by Tim Parks

  The key turned. I was in luck. The door opened on a spare narrow room with single bed and en-suite, as they say, bathroom. You would never say en-suite toilet. A stale smell. The pink eiderdown had a dusty look. The room was too hot. It needed air. I went to the window, but it wouldn’t open. It must be locked. Not a mechanism I had seen before. Or was I just too stupid to understand, at two in the morning? Too tired to cotton on, as Mother would have said.

  In pain, I sat on the bed. There were emails to read, but not now, I thought. I needed to sleep. Though how I would sleep if I couldn’t open the window wasn’t clear. ‘When these moods are on you, Señor Sanders,’ the shrink had said, ‘just remember they will pass. However painful, they will pass.’ It is interesting how unhelpful this advice is, despite its evident wisdom. One knows perfectly well the mood will pass, yet when one is in the mood and under that black cloud, one is in it and under it. It was the same when one had wished one’s wife dead. One knew it was folly to wish one’s wife dead, one knew one would regret it, and yet one wished it. When you are in a dark place you really are in a dark place, that’s the truth of the matter, whatever a shrink may say. Dark places are dark. And even if I get out of this darkness, I thought, sitting on the bed, I will only fall back into it again. Even if I get back to Elsa from this trip, and already she seemed immeasurably further away than she had been that morning, or even this evening on the telephone, even if I get back to Elsa and we make love in my small apartment above the bus stop on Calle Abel and dance again and everything is wonderful, all the same I will fall back into this dark mood, if only because the very intensity of being happy with Elsa, happy around Elsa, reminds me of my failure to be happy with my wife, and above all reminds me that since my wife is not happy, I also am not supposed to be happy. If I wasn’t happy with Elsa, I wouldn’t feel this intense unhappiness of knowing that I’m not supposed to be happy. Happiness calls to unhappiness. For me. I had noticed that the twins in particular seemed uneasy when I had told them I was perfectly happy these days. For sure, putting ‘perfectly’ together with ‘happy’ has to be a provocation. All my children change the subject, if ever I suggest to them that I did the right thing striking out on my own (I don’t say, abandoning your mother), I did the right thing thinking of my own well-being. ‘How much time do you suppose you have left, Señor Sanders, at your age, for taking a major decision like this?’ That was a direct hit on the shrink’s part. The one that sank the Bismarck. ‘How much time do you think you have now?’ Pushing sixty, as you are. Lying down on the bed, it occurred to me for the first time that perhaps my mother had not started a relationship with someone else after my father’s death for fear of upsetting us children. For fear of upsetting me! Or for fear that such a move would alter the image we children had of her and hence, by reflection, the image she had of herself. Was that possible?

  This was a new thought, a new question. And though the idea itself was disturbing, its very newness encouraged me. With surprising energy I jumped to my feet and went round the bed back to the window, to see if I couldn’t figure out the opening mechanism. ‘Cotton on’, as I recall, is one of those expressions no one quite knows the origin of. Not only was the room stale and dusty, but the air was suffocatingly hot. I would never sleep in this situation. So my mother, I thought, studying the window, trapped in the identity she had projected for her children, the puritan evangelical identity she had constructed alongside my father, would not have been able to accept the Danish businessman’s proposal, even had she wanted to.

  Did she want to, though?

  The handle, I finally realised, had a small keyhole at its pivotal point. That was it. A lock. I looked along the window ledge for a key, but there was none, only one of those tags dry cleaners leave on your shirt. Complete with broken staple. It must be an extremely small key, I thought. I looked underneath the empty glass vase on the bedside table, which was where my mother would doubtless have left it. Mother always hid things under vases. Or in them. I turned the vase upside down and some flakes of potpourri drifted onto the carpet. The radiator was beneath the window, belting out heat, and this I did manage to turn off, forcing a miserably stiff valve to budge with burning fingers. Still, a hermetically sealed room was not going to cool in ten minutes. Charlie wanted to cause havoc, I thought, still looking around for the key, so as to nail everyone to their responsibilities; he wanted an end to all ambiguity. But why did his parents’ ambiguity bother him, if it didn’t bother his older brother and sister? Or his parents themselves, for that matter. Charlie had read his father’s emails – not just those to me, no doubt, but those to his various mistresses. That must have been upsetting. But that was a long time ago. Why react now? Because they had married? Unmarried for thirty years, Deborah and David had finally married. They had insisted they were precisely the people they had always said they were, to the world and to him. Why couldn’t Charlie run with that?

  I decided to look all round the room for the key to the window, where the rain was running down glossy black panes, promising a freshness that was becoming more and more tantalising. Like the rich man looking up from hell and asking Lazarus to dip a finger in cool water and wet his tongue. No, not like that at all. I looked in the bathroom cabinet, the dresser, the drawers to the bedside table, the cupboard under the TV. I turned on the TV and fumbled for the Mute command when the volume exploded. Where was it? Damn! Bodies writhing in a discotheque. Got it. The bodies fell silent. Surprisingly close to how I would conjure hell, I thought. Perhaps they dance in hell as well as heaven. No key anywhere. Charlie should have been delighted about that decision, delighted they were marrying. It was a sign their troubled period was over, wasn’t it? There were times when I had dreamed of some symbolic remarriage with my wife, some solemn ceremony of re-dedication, of the kind various friends of ours had staged with varying degrees of credibility. Charlie’s mother and father had accepted there was no reality outside their relationship, all the rest was the merest diversion, merest parenthesis, and so they had decided to make that relationship even more real and evident in the holy institution of marriage. What could the boy possibly object to? Deborah and David were marrying and declaring themselves settled and happy, declaring their relationship sacred. Those affairs you read about, Charlie, they were saying, may have seemed important, but actually they were meaningless. You needn’t bother yourself about them. That was the message their marrying sent out. The affairs were a sort of bizarre vagary, a temporary physical need. That’s what I should tell Charlie, when next we talked. You should be in seventh heaven your parents have married. Another of my mother’s expressions. No doubt Mother thought of yielding to the Danish businessman as the merest physical need, the crass need for physical comfort, physical presence. How important was that, beside a spiritual project carried forward for a lifetime, beside a voice that was always in her head, my father’s voice?

  He had been quite insistent though, I recalled now, this Danish businessman. Was his name Freddy? Something basic, coarse even. He had been a rather coarse, but cheerful man. Red-faced. Very Danish. As I imagine the Danish to be. And very insistent. He had bought flowers and wine and concert tickets. He had taken Mother to hear Ravel and Rimsky Korsakov at the Royal Festival Hall. Perhaps he just looked coarse and red-faced but was actually quite cultured. Certainly he had wooed in a traditional way. Had he asked Mother to dance, I wondered? Most likely he had. He was a Christian of the old school, stalwart and undoubting, but by no means a puritan. Was my mother hard-pressed by Freddy, I wondered? Did she toy with the idea? Or did she know from the start it was the merest vagary? She would never have exchanged future dancing in Paradise with some slow waltz in Golders Green or Swiss Cottage.

  So what was actually left for my mother after my father died, I suddenly asked myself now, giving up on the key hunt and lying down on the bed again to flick through the muted TV channels? She had been fifty-eight at the time. Only a year older than myself and my wife now. Only two years older than Dav
id was, when he married Deborah on her sixtieth birthday. Did David choose sixty because there is no life after that number? ‘Time is running out,’ the shrink observed. What was left for my mother when my father died, if the idea of a second partner was unthinkable, if Freddy had to be sent away because too assiduous, bearer of too many flowers, too much wine? Please dance with me, Martha? Please hold me. Mother showed him the door, in homage to a future dance beyond St Peter at the final gate. St Peter with the keys I couldn’t find.

  ‘I will never have any man but you,’ my wife had said on signing the separation papers.

  Damn.

  What was left for Mother? To be useful, of course! Useful to my sister with her handicapped child. My sister, whose childhood bedroom, I suddenly recalled, had had exactly the same flowery pink wallpaper as this room, exactly the same pink eiderdown. Pretty comfortable actually. My sister had done everything to keep her severely handicapped child alive, despite murmurings from the doctors that they might ‘let her go’; and hence, as the child grew larger and ever more unmanageable, physically unmanageable, because unable to walk and unable to control her sphincters front and back, my sister had been in need of exactly the kind of help my mother was able to offer on my father’s death. Physical support. Moral support. So that my mother’s decision not to remarry after my father’s death must have been, it occurred to me now, at least in purely practical terms, quite a boon for my sister and her husband, my brother-in-law, who was working all hours to keep a small business afloat; though at the same time, as I recall, my sister, the only child of the three who shared my parents’ religious fervour, was actually quite taken with Freddy, pronounced him charming – the Great Dane, I seem to remember her calling him – and had appeared quite happy at the prospect of a second marriage. My sister needed my mother, but found her Florence Nightingale visits, she told me, when the child was ill, or when my sister herself had put her back out, burdensome. ‘Mother takes over,’ she would say. ‘She helps of course, but she takes over too. It’s burdensome.’ Yet both sister and mother agreed it would have been an absolute disgrace to ‘let the child go’. A horrid euphemism for murder, my sister said. Did my sister really use the word ‘euphemism’? I can’t hear it in her mouth. Yet I remember her expressing this idea. ‘As if all that counted,’ she would say, and now I can hear her voice, ‘was our own personal happiness.’ She stressed personal, as if there were other kinds of impersonal happiness.

  My sister found my mother burdensome, but shared her Christian rhetoric. Inside, she said, the child was like any other child. Inside, she had a beautiful soul. She wasn’t just a twisted malfunctioning body. Or not even. She was the beautiful childlike soul inside the body. Nothing else. She deserved life as much as the next person. That child is my niece, I thought. We are talking about my niece. Though the thing one most needs in order to live like the next person – the thing that most makes life a pleasure, whoever you are – is, of course, a healthy, functional body. So why not let the young soul put on her dancing shoes and go skipping off to Paradise? Instead of trapping her down here in a wheelchair, as if there were no afterlife?

  ‘Why are Christians so damn inconsistent?’ I announced out loud in the suffocating guest room of the Claygate Hospice, my head turned to the dark panes of the window and the promise of rainy freshness on the other side? Christians talked so much about the afterlife, then made a virtue of clinging to this one. One hated to be out in the rain, but one yearned to open the window and let a little rain in. ‘Even the dogs can see,’ my sister said, and she had had any number of dogs over the years, ‘even the dogs can see Suzy is a child like any other, that’s why they play with her and lick her face.’ The child – my niece – was in her early thirties now. The dogs, I thought, didn’t have to lug Suzy’s twelve stone about the house, or clean her shit. What a chore! Every shit that girl had done for thirty years had had to be cleaned. By my sister. What a labour of love! How could someone like my sister, I saw this clearly now, ever condone a man who had let his handicapped marriage go, let his wife go, his family die, and had struck out on his own with a woman thirty years his junior – a woman actually younger, come to think of it, than my sister’s handicapped child, my niece, who was not her body, but normal inside like Elsa, perhaps more normal than Elsa, and who deserved to live as much as Elsa did. You are doing it for her body, my sister would say, will say tomorrow perhaps, meaning her young body of course. Doing things for a body is wrong, when even a dog can smell out a soul and try to lick it through the eyes. Even more wrong when the body is young and attractive. But did the child – I mean my niece – also deserve to die, I wondered, in the sense of deserve to be spared life? If one could deserve to live, surely one could also deserve to be spared living. How much fun was this life charade, twisting this way and that incontinent on the carpet as three big dogs, one of them similarly incontinent, licked your face?

  Suddenly I felt an intense yearning to have my sister meet Elsa. My mother too. To have my mother meet and know and like Elsa, to have her, them, acknowledge – this was never going to happen – that Elsa was a wonderful person, not just a beautiful body, though of course at first glance a lithe, beautiful body, a beautiful and beautifully mobile face, are exactly what people tend to notice of Elsa – bright eyes, dark curls, friendly smile; certainly that was what I first noticed. Speaking of which, I had now zapped my way through to a TV channel where two people were making love in generous, even lavish fashion. Bodies. Beautiful bodies. Moving lithely around and against each other in strenuous pleasure. But now they broke off – as, alas, they always must when it’s not pornography – because afraid, it seemed, of discovery.

  Should I unmute the volume, I wondered, to find out what was going on in this TV drama? I started to watch more carefully. Sometimes it’s fun trying to guess what’s going on from a silent screen, rather than hearing the actors actually say it. The lovers were in a room upstairs and someone had entered the house downstairs. Unexpectedly. An intruder. It was a rather luxurious house. Or somebody had been in the house, which they had supposed empty, all along. It hardly matters if you guess wrong. The two seemed frightened now, frantic even. They’d gone from ecstasy to terror in a matter of seconds. I knew the feeling. Footsteps were approaching. How I could be sure, with the volume off, I don’t know, but I was. Footsteps were approaching and discovery was imminent for the lovers. Discovery of their illicit love, presumably.

  Why on earth was I watching TV, I wondered, while my mother was dying downstairs? Why on earth was I enjoying the sight of this young woman’s body, in particular a charming flurry of nipples as she pulled a protective sheet around her? Madness. The man was older, I thought. Not as old as Thomas Sanders, though. Was this his son approaching, perhaps? Up the thickly carpeted stairs. His footsteps were right outside the door now – mute or no mute. It was Charlie come to discover David with a young mistress. What on earth was I doing watching this stuff while my mother was vomiting blood? If they showed more of the lovemaking, I might even masturbate, I thought. She seemed a nice woman. Though I doubted they would. Show more, I mean. And hadn’t I stopped masturbating since Elsa came into my life? Hadn’t I simply stopped, from one day to the next, even glancing at pornography? If Charlie really had read through my emails to his father, he would know that we had occasionally exchanged links to pleasurable items of pornography, invariably heterosexual, invariably involving beautiful women, taking pleasure in love, in sex. In their bodies, no less. At least they seemed to be taking pleasure. There was a period when videos like that had been an obsession. Charlie would know. A mental obsession about beautiful loving bodies, showing affection and taking pleasure. Appearing to. Pornography has to be condemned, of course, and it wasn’t really me, it wasn’t like me, Thomas Sanders, to be looking at it. I had always felt it wasn’t. And yet …

  On the TV the girl was now hiding under the bedclothes, her lover was behind the door. Waiting. They felt threatened. Volume or no volume, this wasn�
��t a bedroom comedy. Horror, more like. The handle of the door began to move. Or was it possible that on the contrary it was exactly me, precisely me, to be thinking of pornography and masturbation while my mother lay dying in a room below? Though if she had permitted her son to spend the night beside her, to look after her, such things would never have crossed my mind. I would have been sitting beside her bed thinking of her, trying to meet her every need. If I had been allowed to be beside Mother – on the TV the handle of the bedroom door was fully depressed now – allowed to feel sorry for her rough hands and sorry for her cancerous breasts and sorry for her sunken, toothless mouth and furrowed brow, deeply furrowed, then I would have done so. I would not have been whiling away my time watching a pretty woman’s body as she committed adultery on TV; I wouldn’t be admiring the curve in her back and relishing her shy smile, though now there was a close-up of her frightened eyes gleaming in the dark beneath the bedclothes as the door at last, and very slowly, swung open and in the bathroom of the Claygate Hospice guest room my mobile began to trill.

  Immediately forgetting the TV drama, I jumped off the bed and dashed to the bathroom, which was painted in the same pink almost as the bedroom wallpaper, the same pink as my sister’s bedroom wallpaper in adolescence. I had left my mobile on the glass shelf above the sink and, since I always keep the vibration option activated, not only was the phone trilling, but the shelf was buzzing and rattling and all the more so because, as I realised now, switching on the bathroom light in its pink shade, I had left the room keys beside the phone on the glass surface. I picked up the phone before it got to the third trill, and saw, as I did so, that the third key on the key ring, tiny as it was, must be the key for opening the bedroom window, the key I had spent a good fifteen minutes hunting for.