In Extremis

by Tim Parks

  The curtains were open this morning and bright light was falling on puddles in the patio, showing the birdbath I had seen on my brother-in-law’s iPad. It was a beautiful day, a day to be walking in the country, gathering wild flowers perhaps, or inspecting ponds for newts and minnows, or just strolling along the river at Marble Hill. How often did we do that, Mother and I, that summer? Stroll along the Thames at Marble Hill. ‘This is so unlike you, Mum,’ I cried out loud, ‘to be in bed still at nine and gone! You’re getting lazy, love.’ I laughed and for a moment it did seem a smile might have stirred the greyness of her face.

  ‘Mum?’

  I was standing over her. Her breath rasped. We would never speak to each other again, I realised. Mum was on her way. Perhaps I need not call the conference organisers after all. Then I remembered something my father had said a few days before the end. ‘I am taking an earlier train, Tommy,’ he had said. ‘Think of it that way.’ My father liked to call me Tommy. Something my mother never did. ‘An earlier train.’ Now Mother was aboard too.

  I went to the bathroom, peed, freely and abundantly – apparently I was in great shape – and when I came back a clergyman was by her bed.

  He was a tall man, of athletic build, wearing all his robes. They were the same robes – the black cassock, the white surplice – my father had worn to church, though not, I think, to visit the sick. At once I knew this man was pleased with his robes, pleased with himself and his solemn role.

  ‘Good morning, Thomas.’

  The clergyman stretched out his hand. He knew my name. He was the vicar at my mother’s church, he said. My mother had been his finest lay preacher, for many years. He had learned so much from her. It was an extraordinary help, he said, for a young clergyman, to have a woman of my mother’s experience, my mother’s charisma, in the congregation. She was a very remarkable woman, he said. And he told me his name – Patrick perhaps it was, or Philip, or Peter – a name I at once and very deliberately forgot. I didn’t want to know his name. I felt angry. There was so little time left for me to be alone with my mother now – soon my sister would arrive, my children, my uncle – and this young clergyman was taking that time away, that precious last time alone with Mother. He imagined I would be pleased to hear my mother had been a great help to his ministry, pleased to know how highly he valued her. I didn’t give a damn. I refused his hand and sat down by the bed.

  How had the clergyman known, I wondered then, as he turned towards my mother, to hurry here this morning? To Claygate. Had my sister told him? Last night perhaps. Or the hospice staff? Or had my mother warned the hospice staff that they should call the clergyman on his mobile, when they felt the time had come. The Reverend had brought a little leather case with him, which no doubt held the communion cup, a case exactly like the case my father took to give bread and wine to the sick thirty and more years ago. This is happening now, I thought. Your mother’s death. This is the moment we all must pass.

  I was sitting on one side of the bed, holding my mother’s cold hand, and the clergyman stood on the other. The Reverend Peter or Philip or Patrick. First he stood in a kind of trance, head bowed, lips muttering prayers to himself, then he opened his eyes and stretched out a robed arm to place his hand on her forehead. He held it there for a while, a large pink healthy hand. Not as if he were checking for fever, but more as though he were transmitting something, some spirituality or otherworldliness, that came, as it were, with the job, with the freshly laundered robes. He was gazing at Mother intensely, his hand on her forehead, while her breathing rasped and her fingers were ice. Then, slowly shaking his well-groomed head, the clergyman whispered, ‘How beautiful!’

  I could have killed him.

  ‘How beautiful,’ he breathed again, as if in awe, over my dying mother.

  And a third time, ‘How beautiful!’

  I was furious, and my fingers closed very hard on my mother’s hand, which didn’t respond in any way. Had he said the words for my benefit? I felt he had. I felt it was pure exhibitionism. I can see your mother’s beauty, this clergyman was telling me, the beauty of a saintly soul at the gates of Paradise, while you, Thomas Sanders, the doubter, see only the gross corruption of the body. But I didn’t believe he saw anything of the kind. It was a script in his head, long before he reached the Claygate Hospice. It was what one says over the stalwart Christian on her deathbed. Mother looked awful. She was mottled and flabby and grey and swollen and sunken and veiny and waxy and she smelled. She smelled of cancer. My mother was not beautiful.

  Again the Reverend Philip or Peter or Patrick breathed, ‘How beautiful’, and again my anger boiled, and now I wanted to challenge him and to demand where he saw beauty when I saw only lips I felt sorry for, eyes I felt sorry for, a grey nose that had lost all shape, a gaping mouth, great flabby ears, a flabby neck. I felt sorry for Mother’s nose and ears and mouth and neck, I felt sorry – terribly sorry – that she was reduced to this. It was a mockery to talk of beauty.

  I wanted to challenge the clergyman. But then I remembered that the Reverend Phil or Pat or Pete was there because my mother wanted him there. He was creating the atmosphere my mother had wanted him to create, sustaining the beliefs my mother had given her life for. My mother did not want me to be beside her while she vomited blood in the night, she was afraid I would catch some sign of desperation perhaps, she was afraid my scepticism would be confirmed by some weakness of hers, or might even corrupt her, my scepticism would actually bring about the weakness in her that it sought for its own confirmation; she had not wanted me, her son, but she very much did want this upright man in his freshly laundered robes to come and see the beauty of her soul on the brink of departure, to confirm the faith, to print the cross a last time on her brow. In token that thou shalt not flinch. At death’s door. One says ‘death’s door’. And only yesterday, seeing Kenneth E. Hagin’s book by her bed, hadn’t I myself very much hoped that Mother would not lose her faith, the faith I felt was folly? Hadn’t I hoped, almost prayed, that she would not flinch, would not fall at the final fence? I didn’t want that. Surely it was quite enough to die, without having to fear that one’s whole life had been lived in a foolish, self-denying, bigoted error. I should be delighted with this clergyman; I should be delighted with this theatre of salvation. The Reverend Pat played his part pretty well. He had it off pat.

  But I wasn’t delighted and couldn’t be. This posturing seemed grotesque. It inhibited the kind of tenderness I had hoped could be shared in these moments. I see things you do not see, the Reverend was telling me. There was something complacent, even triumphant about the man. He was younger than me, but he had the robes. He had the communion chalice. And I wondered if my mother had discussed her sons with him. Her unchristian sons. Very likely she had. She had worked as a lay preacher in this man’s parish for many years. She had told Philip or Peter or Patrick that her two sons had disappointed her. They had fallen away from the faith. She grieved over them. I see things it is not given to you to see, this clergyman was telling me. In your mother. I see her beauty. You are not one of the Lord’s chosen people. I am closer to your mother than you are, Thomas, because I share and confirm her faith. You are excluded. You are here because of kinship only. Because you are a son. You are not close to her in any other way. You are holding her hand, but her hand is cold and dead. Her hand is dead meat. I see the beautiful soul flutter in her face.

  ‘Dear Martha,’ the Reverend announced as if suddenly in touch with her. ‘Dear Sister in Christ.’ He raised his voice to pulpit volume, perhaps because she was hard of hearing these days, or as if saying things more loudly might make them more true. He was calling on a cloud of witnesses.

  ‘Martha, today you will be with our Lord in Paradise.’

  I had my head bent, at the bedside. I couldn’t look at him. And I wondered if he would interpret this bent head as my participating in his prayer, if he would think perhaps he had scored that small success, persuaded Martha’s recalcitrant son to bow his head i
n prayer? Over her dying body. And immediately I wanted to tell him that it wasn’t like that, that I had bowed my head because I couldn’t bear to look at him. I didn’t want any contact with him. Over my dead body.

  ‘I envy you, Martha, Sister in Christ,’ he repeated. ‘Today you will be with the angels in Paradise. Today you will see your beloved Edward once again.’

  I kept my head lowered. On what authority did Mr Pip Clergyman pronounce these words, I wondered? Wasn’t he jumping the gun? Wasn’t the decisive moment still ahead for my mother, the moment at the Great Divide when all is won or all is lost? Not far ahead, true, but still ahead, Reverend Pete. It isn’t given for us to know.

  All the same, we must have faith. I have never understood this conundrum. You are ordered to believe and told you cannot know and, what’s more, must never pretend to know, or even ask. But must believe.

  What kind of mindset is that?

  And wasn’t it amazing in the twenty-first century in Claygate, south-west London, that an athletic young man in fancy dress was pronouncing this nonsense over the broken body of my mother, her arm with its sophisticated drip and hi-tech drug pump, her head raised on the manoeuvrable hospice bed to prevent her drowning in vomit? And wasn’t it extraordinary that many people would find this performance less grotesque than the Dutch lady physiotherapists exploring each other’s anuses for therapeutic purposes?

  But Mother had wanted the Reverend Pat or Pete to be here. Or Phil. I had to keep telling myself that. He was invited. And now it occurred to me that she had foreseen I would witness this moment. She had known I would hear the Reverend’s blessing. And she had wanted that too. Mother had thought this scene might draw me to salvation, perhaps. This demonstration of confident Christianity on the brink of eternity. It wasn’t beyond my mother to have planned such a thing. Her death would be an example to me. This last blessing was a sermon.

  ‘Today, dear Martha, you will be among the angelic hosts.’

  Her breath caught in her throat. Her chest lifted an instant. I glanced up as the Reverend spoke. Pain flickered on her cheeks. He prayed on. And on. I felt trapped now. I would have liked to leave the room, to leave him to it. At the same time, I felt bound to stay and protect my mother from this man, from the man she had wanted to be here and who was absolutely on her side. The man she had brought along to show me what a Christian death should be like. I wanted to protect her from him.

  ‘Dearest Martha,’ the Reverend Paddy said in his pulpit voice. He imagined she was hearing him, I realised, the same way Christians imagine God is hearing them when they pray. He thought she had responded, she had moved her lips.

  ‘Remember not, Lord, our sister’s iniquities, nor the iniquities of our forefathers.’

  He was reading from a book now. His voice had that special drone of the clergyman reading the prayer book’s quaint syntax. Then it changed again. A brusque declaration.

  ‘O Lord, save Thy servant!’

  ‘Which putteth her trust in thee,’ came the response.

  It was my sister’s voice. My sister was right behind me. I hadn’t realised. Far from theatrical, she sounded perfectly calm and matter-of-fact.

  ‘O Lord, hear our prayers!’

  ‘And let our cry come unto thee,’ my sister answered softly. She had come into the room without my hearing.

  Head bowed, I was caught now between the two voices, the boom of the Reverend Pete’s voice and my sister’s faithful echo. I was trapped in their performance. Versicle and response. It was pure theatre. They are called versicles, I think. I felt so angry. With them, and with myself. With them, for taking over the stage like this; with myself, for my impotence, my not understanding how to be myself in this unexpected situation. And it seemed impossible to me that they shouldn’t be aware of this, the Reverend and my sister; if they could see the beauty of my mother’s soul preparing for Paradise, why couldn’t they see the anger boiling beneath her son’s bent head and knotted shoulders? Get up and leave them to it, I thought. But I knew I wouldn’t. I wouldn’t leave my mother alone with this preposterous Reverend. This ham actor. And my sister was obviously in tune with the man. No doubt he believed in his part. He believed his own hamming. I was afraid of the anger I felt now. It seemed to have escaped the immediate circumstances and blown up out of all proportion. Like Charlie’s anger yesterday. I would hit someone. I would make an exhibition of myself. ‘Don’t make an exhibition of yourself, Thomas.’ Mother speaking.

  ‘Almighty God,’ the Reverend droned, ‘with whom do live the spirits of just men made perfect, after they are delivered from their earthly prisons.’

  It was a long prayer, blowing over my head now, a rich rain of old words that teemed down on my seething mind. Mother is full of doubts, mate, I wanted to object to the Reverend Pippo. Did you know that? Look at the book on her bedside table, if you will. Why do you think she is reading that stuff?

  Behind me, my sister said, Amen, in exactly the voice she might have used to say, Pass the sugar. I loved her for that. And I wanted to grab When Faith Seems Weak and wave it under the clergyman’s nose and tell him my mother had doubted at the end; at the end she was plunged in doubt, like doubting Thomas, and the reason she doubted was that when it came down to it, this stuff was all nonsense, arrant nonsense. What’s more, it was stealing these last moments of my mother’s life away, this last chance for some kind of serene relationship, as it had stolen away – truth be told – almost all normal relationships in our family from as early as I could recall. It was sick.

  But I did not jump up and object, and I did not grab Kenneth E. Hagin’s book and wave it under the clergyman’s nose. Mother would not have wanted me to. And deep down I did not want to think she had doubted in any serious way. Far better, then, to act as if she hadn’t doubted at all. Better to hide the truth. That was the conclusion one always seemed to arrive at in our family. Better to keep quiet. I wanted to scream, and did not.

  ‘Wash her soul, we pray thee, in the blood of that immaculate lamb.’

  The voice harped on. My mind fastened on this paradox I had heard so often. Washing things in blood. My mother and father loved this nutty idea. The idea of washing in the very liquid that stains worst. The bodily fluid. But Mother wanted this mumbo-jumbo of immaculate lambs, I thought. There was no point in protesting. Wash her soul, we pray thee, in the urine of that immaculate lamb. Can you imagine? The dung of that immaculate lamb. If the blood is sacred, why not the piss, why not the shit? Not only did I not object to this nonsense, but I actually kept my head bowed, as if in prayer, as if in assent. How many times, I remembered as the Reverend’s voice droned on, how many times had I pretended to pray as a child? Worse still as an adolescent. How many times had I hidden in prayer, taken refuge in the theatre of prayer, refuge from their coercive prayers in the posturing of my fake prayer? But your praying was always fake, I suddenly realised. And at the same time I remembered how once, playing Scrabble, in a stroke of luck and genius, Mother had added ‘immacul’ – all her seven letters – to ‘ate’, reaching out in the process to the Triple Word Score on the left-hand side of the board. And I remembered how, seeing that, and congratulating her, I had known the game was lost, and I wanted to burst out laughing now and cover Mother’s poor face with kisses and tell her how much I loved the way she had really, really wanted to win at Scrabble, the same way little children really want to win at games, she was so competitive, while I, in the end, could never care tuppence about Scrabble, even though it was a game of words, and words were supposed to be my thing. I never gave a damn about a Triple Letter Score.

  Then the clergyman was gone and I was exhausted. I hadn’t even raised my head to say goodbye to him; he was outside in the corridor speaking in low tones to my sister. Tears were running down my cheeks; the whole affair, the clergyman’s visit, had shattered me – why hadn’t he given Mother the communion; was she beyond it already, or were the last rites a high-church thing he had thought better of, in my sister’s low-ch
urch presence? – and as soon as he was really gone and my sister came back into the room, I stood and embraced her and held her tight, and I was trembling, as if I hadn’t seen her for years.

  Pulling away, my sister said, ‘Well, this is it, Bro. We have it to do.’

  XIII

  The notice on the wall opposite Mother’s bed said, ‘Visitors are warned that all doors, including patio doors, will be closed and locked before 10 p.m. in order that the security system can be turned on for the night.’ In the event, I was out of the Claygate Hospice well before that hour. My son drove me to Heathrow, where at airport Security they again questioned me over Dr Sharp’s anal-massage tool. At the boarding gate I spoke on the phone to David. During the flight I rewrote the presentation I was to give in Berlin, a task I then completed in poor light at the hotel in Görlitzerstrasse. So it was only towards midnight, laying my head on the pillow after a sweet exchange of messages with Elsa, that I began to sense the enormity of the mistake I had made: I should have sat a while with Mother, after she had gone.

  Absurd ideas passed through my mind in my Berlin hotel room that night – the night after the night in the hospice: the duty to protect the soul in the moment it leaves the body, the duty of a son towards his dead mother and her departing spirit. I knew these ideas were mad; nevertheless they carried enormous weight as I lay in my German hotel bed covered by a quilt I feared would soon become oppressively hot. ‘All our emotions are an accident of evolution,’ my son had explained, as we drove through heavy traffic to Heathrow. An unforeseen consequence, he thought, of the opposable thumb and the growing human ability to manipulate the world. On becoming able to shape things, primitive man had been faced with the need to make pondered decisions: whether to shape something, how to shape it. I said I was sorry, but I had lost him. I didn’t understand. The need for decision-making early on in modern man’s evolution had fostered thought, he said, and speculation: if I shape a thing this way, that result will follow. And this habit of speculation had got mixed up with man’s animal instincts, to produce complex emotions of a kind animals didn’t experience. ‘But in evolutionary terms,’ he concluded, ‘we actually have no need for all these mixed-up feelings. They’re really no use to anyone, Dad.’