In Extremis

by Tim Parks

  Was he trying to help me, I wondered?

  ‘So all our sorrows are meaningless?’ I asked him. ‘Not to mention the joys.’

  ‘Well,’ he hesitated, ‘not to the person feeling those emotions, of course. They mean something, to you.’

  Five hours later, in the hotel on Görlitzerstrasse, I realised that because I had not sat beside my mother’s corpse for the hour or so after her death – or maybe just a few minutes would have been enough – I would have to go back to London as soon as my inaugural address was over. I could not stay for the rest of the conference. Of course I had been looking forward to getting back to Elsa, I needed Elsa, Elsa was the future, I was only happy, I only felt myself – my new self, that is – when I was with Elsa; instead I would have to go back to London, back to the past.

  Lying in bed in that four-star German hotel, I imagined myself already in London again and sitting beside my mother’s corpse, wherever it was, wherever they were keeping her, and saying sorry to her for not having sat beside her at the crucial moment when the body died and the soul must take flight to meet its Maker. And all this despite my rather brilliant – I say it myself – rewriting of the Berlin conference, my inaugural address, I mean, on the flight from Heathrow to Tegel, in the wake of all that had passed through my head that long day of my mother’s dying, above all my sudden understanding of the reasons why I had begun to hum the hymn, the baptismal hymn, In token that thou shalt not blush, to glory in His name.

  ‘We have it to do,’ my sister said when the odious Reverend Paddy was gone.

  I understood at once what my sister meant: dying was a job, a kind of test or exam even, and we had to get on with it. Mum had to get on with it. The ‘we’ included my mother. My sister did not seem unhappy with the prospect. It’s always good to roll up your sleeves and get a job done.

  ‘We’re here now, Mum,’ she told my mother, who showed no sign of response. Occasionally her forehead tensed, as if to suggest she too was doing her bit, or her breast lifted sharply with a deeper breath, as if the work were harder than she had imagined.

  ‘Do you like that clergyman?’ I asked my sister after a while.

  She was sitting on the other side of the bed, holding Mother’s other hand, and this positioning suddenly seemed to me emblematic of the relationship between my sister and myself. We only really met through my mother and, when we did so, my sister was invariably on one side and I invariably on the other. From the moment I had lost my faith, in my mid-teens, or rather the moment I openly declared, in my late teens, that I had no faith, my mother had not wanted my sister and me to meet much, had not wanted me, I think, to contaminate her, for my mother doubtless viewed my sister as the weaker of the two, the one most likely to give way.

  ‘The guy annoyed me,’ I told her. ‘He seemed fake.’

  ‘Oh,’ she said, ‘Patrick’ – or perhaps she said Peter, or Philip – ‘is okay. It’s just he’s high-church. You know what they’re like. They have to put on a show.’ She smiled as if at another’s forgivable foibles.

  I asked why on earth Mum had started going to a high-church place in her eighties, and my sister explained that this had happened around the time Mum had given up driving. It was her only church within walking distance.

  ‘He’s all right,’ my sister repeated. ‘Just a bit full of himself. He’s young.’

  Mid-forties, I thought. Mid-forties was young for my sister and myself now. We were forgiving people because they were in their mid-forties.

  Uncle Harry arrived. My mother’s brother. He walked with a stick. He had recently lost his wife. No sooner had he seen the state Mother was in than he began to cry. ‘Are you going too, Martha?’ he asked. He bent over her. His voice quavered softly. ‘Are you leaving me, my dear?’ He shook his head from side to side. ‘She was quite talkative yesterday,’ he protested. ‘We had a good talk yesterday, didn’t we, Martha?’

  The old man’s tears seemed to stiffen my sister’s resolve to do her quiet duty by my mother, to stay calm and see her through without a fuss. There was a remarkable steadfastness, I thought, on my sister’s face. Perhaps I had underestimated her. Somewhere between grimness and ecstasy. And it occurred to me I really had no idea what my mother meant, for my sister, or what Mother’s dying would mean for her. Perhaps I had no idea what it meant for me.

  I gave my chair to Uncle Harry and went out to get a coffee. In the Commemoration Room there was a tin with home-made cake. Free for everyone. How English. I turned the phone on and at once a message arrived from my wife, to say the twins couldn’t come because they had a bike race at the weekend; they’d been training for this bike race for months, and what if my mother didn’t actually die? What had they said in their email then, I wondered? I still hadn’t looked. There was another message from Deborah, to ask if Charlie was here at the hospice. He had got up and gone out, she wrote, without speaking to her. I didn’t reply.

  While I was drinking my coffee, my daughter arrived with her man. They were parked illegally, she said; they needed to know where they could park properly. For some reason, unexpectedly, I was absolutely overjoyed to see my daughter, whom I hadn’t seen for quite a while. I felt a sudden injection of energy, or as if I were briefly released from the duty of darker thoughts. I gave suggestions to her man for the car, though really I had no idea where he could park; I embraced her, took her by the shoulders, looked her in the eyes. I could feel her young body was full of emotion – ‘Poor Granny,’ she muttered – and at once I led her down the corridor to my mother’s room, feeling, for reasons I couldn’t explain, oddly proud: proud of my mother’s dying, proud of the work my sister was doing to see her on her way, proud above all of my daughter – our daughter, my wife’s and my own – who had appeared like this from her own distant life when drama called. We were a family.

  Towards midday my son arrived. My older son. He was tense from the long drive, but came directly to the sickroom. He stood over my mother, tall and blond, and took her hand and greeted her. He said he regretted not coming earlier. His voice was quiet and earnest and very adult. His wife had also come and she stood discreetly behind him. She looked very dark and beautiful. This discreet respectfulness suited her, I thought. I had never seen her like this. I felt proud of both of them. Then my brother-in-law also came in, my sister’s husband. He had taken the dogs for a long run in Richmond Park, he explained, so that they could then be left in the van for a while. Everybody in the room agreed how hard it was to park around here. But not impossible. If you were patient. My brother-in-law showed my daughter’s man photos of the dogs on his iPad. Photos taken in Richmond Park, he said, an hour before. He loved photographing the dogs and they loved being photographed, he said. They loved the attention. They even stayed still while you took the snap. They understood.

  My uncle’s son arrived – my cousin, that is – who had been staying with my uncle for a while to see him through his bereavement, the loss of his wife, who was my cousin’s mother of course, my aunt, and now the old man was facing a second bereavement, the loss of his sister, my mother. My cousin shook his head and said he had just picked up his second parking ticket in three days. My uncle spoke to my son and described himself as the last man standing. ‘The last of the Mohicans,’ he said. ‘Cheer up, Dad,’ my cousin told him.

  The brisk nurse brought more chairs. She asked me if we would appreciate a visit from the hospice chaplain. I said no. A clergyman had already been and prayed with Mother, I explained, as if every death required one, but one was enough. Then I took a bathroom break and couldn’t decide whether things down there were really getting better or I was just getting used to their awfulness. You need fresh underwear, I told myself.

  The hours passed. I had my place at Mother’s side again. I wanted everybody to be silent now, but I knew it would be pointless to make that request. Perhaps offensive. My sister and her husband told the others the story of my mother’s fall on the stairs and the harrowing weeks that followed, the impossibi
lity of looking after her in their house, her unwillingness to watch television, the difficulty getting her to the bathroom. I could see my sister was ready to feel guilty for not having kept Mother at home to the end and was fighting this guilt by reminding us all how impossible it had been, something none of us doubted for one moment. My son explained that a fall often dislodges a tumour, speeding up a cancer and precipitating events. My daughter remembered that Granny was the only person who had never forgotten her birthday. ‘She never missed sending a card and present. Never, never, never.’

  As she spoke, the tears began to roll, but she was smiling too. My son laughed and said it was true, ‘Gran never forgot’, and my cousin, Uncle Harry’s son, agreed. Auntie Martha had never forgotten his birthday. ‘She really was a stickler for detail,’ my uncle said. ‘Though the presents she sent,’ my son observed, ‘were often things like illustrated Bible stories.’ ‘All in a good cause,’ my sister’s husband said robustly. ‘Remember that holiday when she made us go to Sunday school,’ my daughter smiled now. ‘The twins went crazy.’ It was at that moment that I suddenly understood why I had In token on the brain.

  There were nine of us, then my sister’s elder daughter arrived, and so we were ten. The nurses helped us to arrange more and more chairs around my mother’s bed. At a squeeze, there was just room. Everyone greeted my mother on arrival and touched her hand perhaps and shivered at its coldness, and shook their heads at her complexion, if complexion it could be called. There was a sense of occasion. Then they talked softly among themselves, as if there were any danger of waking her up. In particular, my uncle recalled how when their mother, my grandmother, had died very young, Martha, in her early teens, had taken over the care of her two younger brothers. ‘So that she was almost like a second mother to me,’ my uncle said, his voice breaking up again. And he started saying that their mother, my grandmother, who had died of a burst appendix, was a wonderfully lively woman, a great dancer and dresser, a great hostess, and what a loss it had been to the family, and to Martha in particular perhaps, when she died. A great dancer, I thought. Why had no one ever told me this before? My grandmother danced and my mother did not. Why? Because Mother had had to mother her mother’s younger sons perhaps? She didn’t have an adolescence. I had never thought of this.

  There were ten of us seated round the bed, all turned towards the dying woman, but talking sideways among ourselves, or face to face across the bed, talking – though I wasn’t talking at all – about the person on the bed, mother sister grandmother aunt, who was now excluded, yet still the centre of everything. Occasionally the nurse came in and checked her drips and drug pump and felt her pulse and went out again, and I realised that the reason I was humming the baptismal hymn, silently now, was that this had been Mother’s supreme gesture in my regard. My parents’ supreme gesture towards each of their children had been exactly this: to print the cross upon our brows. To stamp us for His own.

  Rather bizarrely, as the minutes passed and my mother went on with her dying, I began to imagine my own baptism service. Babies should be baptised at the earliest possible age, my father always insisted. They should be brought to church, Father said, to receive the sign of the cross absolutely the first Sunday of their lives, or if not the first, the second; and if not the second, then very definitely the third, which was a kind of last-ditch. How extraordinary that these conversations should be so present now, beside my dying mother. This would have been in Manchester, 1956, in a church soon to be demolished, when they discovered dry rot had eaten up the foundations. The structure was unsafe. Baptism was an outward manifestation of inward grace, my father would say in his baptismal sermon. Father loved these vaguely intellectual, vaguely mysterious formulations. It seemed the church might fall down on us all at any minute. And he loved to take tiny babies in his robed arms in the midst of his congregation – his folk, he called them – gathered around the font. Years later, as a choirboy, I would watch him as he reached out to anxious mothers to take their babies and welcome them into the Church. The more a baby yelled and squirmed, the more my father enjoyed it. The sacrament, he said in his baptismal sermon, redeems the child from his original sin; God grants his ordained clergymen the power to transmit this grace. And the grace is transmitted, my father said, even if the clergyman himself is not in a state of grace. My father would always emphasise this, as if to suggest that no one need enquire into his character to check the efficacy of the ceremony; as an ordained Anglican clergyman, all he need do was take the child in his arms, speak the formula, make the sign with the holy water and the original sin would be washed away. One hundred per cent guaranteed. The automatic nature of the transaction seemed to be part of my father’s pleasure in it. It was a trick that could not fail.

  And perhaps my father’s happiness in administering the sacrament did transmit itself to the squalling child, for as my mother never failed to observe over the lunch table afterwards, passing the Yorkshire pud perhaps, or the Brussels sprouts, to one of the lonely spinsters or bereaved unfortunates who were always invited to the Sanders’ Sunday lunches, no sooner had my father dipped his finger in the water of the font and made the sign of the cross upon the infant’s downy brow than the child would fall silent, would cease to squall and squirm, apparently awed by the echo of Father’s voice in the musty church and the cool splash of the water from the old stone font. But my father said this was the redemptive inward grace that automatically followed the outward sign. The child subsided in beatitude.

  So very likely, that is how it was for me: the congregation gathered themselves together round the font in the back corner of a damp neo-Gothic nave, my mother handed me over, wrapped in a white blanket, and my father fervently intoned the prayer-book prayers he knew by heart:

  ‘Grant, O merciful God, that all carnal affections may die in him and that all things belonging to the spirit may live and grow in him.’

  All carnal affections were to die! In a child of ten days old. All spiritual things were to flourish. Outward and inward, inward and outward. My father loved that opposition. The inward was always superior. The outward never more than a sign, or husk.

  ‘Grant, O Lord, that he may have power and strength to triumph against the devil and the world and the flesh.’

  So from the earliest age, I thought, sitting by my mother’s bed while my uncle was now explaining how his wife had passed away quite suddenly, while watching Come Dancing, my sister, my brother and I had been introduced into a world of ferocious opposites where the inward must always triumph over the outward, the spirit over the flesh, God over the devil. And while for other babies these prayers were the merest formal mumblings, no sooner heard than forgotten, or perhaps never even really heard – the watery cross washed off in the bathtub that same evening, to the tune maybe of ‘Baa Baa Black Sheep’ or ‘Old MacDonald’, while a happy mother lathered her child under the armpits and between the legs, and the child wriggled in delight for the sheer pleasure of mummy’s soapy hand on those delicate parts – in our house this wasn’t the case. In our house baptismal words and water sank into infant skin like acid. We blazon, we print, we stamp, we seal. All the long morning of my mother’s dying I was silently humming the baptismal hymn, repeatedly imagining my mother passing my tiny body to my father, and my father dipping me down towards the font, as I would later see him doing with scores of other babies, and signing my forehead with the sign of the cross, grafting the Old Adam – Father loved these mysterious formulas – into the body of Christ’s Church, introducing me, in short, into a world where desire and will would always be in conflict.

  My parents had generated their children, I reflected, watching Mother’s chest rise very slightly, and very slightly fall, not out of carnal desire, not for their own benefit and certainly not for our ours, but to be soldiers for Christ, Christ’s quarrel to maintain; to be servants of the project that had united them ever since they met in missionary college. They were a couple with a mission. In a way, the mission was the re
lationship. My sister – I was exchanging glances with her across my mother’s body – was unequivocally a soldier for Christ. Beneath his banner manfully. My sister loved the soldierly rhetoric. She saw no problem with a woman being manful. Firm at thy post remain. My sister was happy with the militant Christian life my parents prospected for her. She had remained firm beside her handicapped child. My brother and I were deserters. The men of the family were not manful. We had not fought the good fight. We had not stayed at our posts. The baptismal hymn, I thought, whose tune I had always loved to sing – even as a choirboy I relished the fricatives of thou shalt not flinch – was a grotesque prison of rhyme and rhythm, a grotesque appropriation of minds too young to understand the spell they were falling under. And as midday passed and my mother drew each breath with a little more labour than the one before, it occurred to me I now had the subject for a much better conference in Berlin: archaism as entrapment. Mother’s dying had given me a much better idea for the conference that she was preventing me from going to.

  A nurse tapped my shoulder. ‘Mr Sanders, there is somebody in the foyer to see you.’

  We ate lunch in the Green Man in two shifts. First my sister, her husband and daughter, together with Uncle Harry, then, when they came back, myself, the two children with their two partners, and my cousin. Needless to say, the person in the foyer was Charlie. He was fretting in a dark duffel coat, hands thrust in his pockets, and even before I got close he was telling me not to worry, he would not keep me.