My mother’s mental state alarmed me. In this way I was able to overlook her physical state, which was not good. By living such a reduced life she was able to contain her condition, and never referred to it. In this she was like my father, who only confessed to illness when it had become too conspicuous to ignore. My mother rarely left the flat; I had no idea what she did all day. My own survival depended on my being absent. When I returned in the late afternoon or the early evening I found her buoyed up merely because the day would soon be at an end and she could retire to bed. I see now that she did battle all the time with her failing heart. She complained of the cold, although the weather was mild and the flat well heated. It did not occur to me that her brain was being slowly starved of oxygen. What I thought of as her increasing childishness had a physical cause, but because it made her so easy to please I did not question it. Her odd exaggerated excitement, which would collapse all at once into trembling fatigue, I put down to the change wrought by grief. I thought that she would eventually return to normal; in the meantime I joined her in her little distractions, which were harmless. It cost me a certain amount to do so; I was aware of something unusual in her behaviour. Yet I wanted her to be happy, and there was enough loving communion in our moods, however disparate, to satisfy us both. We loved each other. Neither of us wanted to disappoint or to give pain.
My mother prepared for me an elaborate meal in order to disguise the fact that she ate nothing herself. After a cup of tea and a biscuit with Miss Lawlor she thankfully renounced the task of eating until the following morning. This was not too serious; she had had lunch; she was therefore nourished. What was more worrying was the primacy of entertainment, with which eating dinner could only interfere. She would settle herself with anticipation in her corner of the sofa, sometimes having run a comb through her hair and put on a little lipstick in honour of the ceremony, while I sat in the kitchen, stolidly eating the heavy food which I no longer wanted. I would have thrown it away, were it not for the lightning visits my mother paid to see the gratifying look of appreciation on my face. For that was what she now required: appeasement, reassurance. She ardently desired to have no more serious preoccupations than the choice between one serial and another, although in reality she preferred programmes which made no demands on her at all. Thus through the kitchen wall I would hear a cacophony of pop music or the triumphant catch phrases of a compère or quiz master. Sometimes, most terrible of all, I would hear my mother laugh with delight and thus become one with the moronic audience. She might pay a further visit to the kitchen as I slowly washed up. ‘Aren’t you coming to watch?’ she would ask. ‘Aren’t you coming to watch the show?’ For the unbroken stream of programmes had become ‘the show’, and she had become infinitely younger, almost a girl again, and reacting as children do when taken to the pantomime at Christmas.
My heart broke for her, although she seemed oddly happy. Grimly I took up my position next to her on the sofa, until I saw that she was tired, although she protested that she was not. In this way she believed that she was neither tired nor hungry, even when her eyelids were drooping with fatigue and her thin hands were restless in her lap. ‘Come on,’ I would say. ‘I’m sleepy, even if you aren’t,’ and I would get up and switch off the set. This was the signal for her to come down to earth; a tired or painful smile would replace the factitious enthusiasm which had greeted me at my homecoming, and for a brief interval we looked into each other’s eyes with total understanding. ‘I’ll come and see you to say goodnight,’ I would assure her, and indeed those colloquies which took place in her bedroom, while she lay becalmed in the big double bed which my parents had always shared, constitute my most precious memories of that unhappy time, although in retrospect I see that I came to treasure even the memory of her eager face at the kitchen door, and her artless question, ‘Aren’t you coming to watch the show?’
In the morning she would once again be the woman who had been married to my father, neat and correct, as she always was, but now weary, as if beset with problems. In fact she was beset with memories, which did not appear to give her pleasure. ‘I shouldn’t have insisted on going to the Isle of Wight,’ she said. ‘Paul wanted to go back to Étretat, but I thought you were too small. I was frightened of the rocks.’ Another time she said, ‘That case of vintage champagne is for you. It is for when you get married. He put it down when you were born.’ Or again, and more worryingly, ‘That was a lovely concert at the Wigmore Hall, the one when I met your father. Such a pity you couldn’t have heard it.’ But when I got up to go, picking up some vague approximation to a briefcase, she got up with a smile on her face and kissed me, for all the world as if I were my father and she were seeing me off to work. I would wait until Miss Lawlor had taken off her hat and coat, and when I heard the comfortable murmur of what seemed like normal conversation, I would make my escape, striding out with gratitude into the increasingly misty mornings, away from the dread which afflicted me at home, and into the reassuring bustle of the working world.
I was grateful that we had no visitors, or that when we did, as when John Pickering looked in once or twice a month, my mother behaved normally. Indeed I think she was normal, but was subject to the abnormal states which follow the loss of the one who has given one’s life its meaning. From being repressed and overlooked as a girl my mother had been awoken to life by my father: I truly think that my birth was of lesser importance to her than my father’s wellbeing, although they both loved me dearly. Fortunately, or unfortunately, I resembled my father, with his pale hair and aquiline face, so that my mother, in looking at me, was constantly reminded of him. At no time was my mother deluded or deranged, but she had the deep sadness and the childish gaiety that prefigure derangement. I trusted John Pickering to be discreet, to pick up only those signals which he alone could discern, without any corroboration from myself. When I saw him to the door after these visits we did not indulge in those whispered consultations which turn the one left in the other room into an unwitting patient. He did not even ask me if I could manage, for which I was grateful. For after all I could manage. I was managing. But all the time I was aware of the silence of the flat, a silence broken only by the witless jingles of television commercials, which my mother particularly appreciated. I was aware of the relief with which I left the flat every morning, and of my watchfulness when I returned to it in the evening. When I was particularly downhearted I even thought of invoking the help of Dolly, but when I got round to telephoning her, from a public call box, there was no reply, not even from Annie, and I was forced to assume that she had gone back to Brussels for a visit, perhaps to dear Adèle Rougier, with whom Dolly was once again on the best of terms.
At last, when I could no longer bear my own aimlessness, I confronted the possibility of finding work. Marigold had gone off to begin her training at St Thomas’s, and I only saw her on her odd weekend off. Her house seemed oddly silent after the departure of the great-aunts, who, according to custom, had lavished on their hosts a hospitality which they naturally assumed to be in their gift. I bought the local paper, sat down in a café in the King’s Road, and scanned the Personal Columns, looking for that oblique out of the way message that would cause me to rise from my seat and go blindly to where the message would lead me. There was no message that day; on the other hand a small office of an indeterminate nature in Holbein Place was looking for a trainee: good reading skills necessary. Holbein Place was off Sloane Square and therefore a short distance from where I was actually sitting. Moreover, whatever else I could not do I could certainly read. Rather than telephone I walked, not too unwillingly, to Holbein Place, where I mounted the stairs to the first floor of a dark brick building, and knocked on a door marked ‘ABC Enterprises’. ‘Come in,’ sang a female voice, and I went into a small office in which a rather distinguished looking woman was seated behind a desk and talking on the telephone. ‘Be with you in a moment,’ she said and went on with her conversation, which appeared to be with a son or daughter and was
to do with arrangements for the coming weekend.
‘Daddy can’t be expected to assume entire responsibility, you know,’ she said severely, tapping on the desk with a pencil. ‘I should think you could at least get yourselves to Winchester and do the shopping. If you don’t want to drive take the train.’
There were muted sounds of argument from the other end: a daughter, I decided.
‘There are taxis,’ said the woman. ‘I should have thought it not beyond the wit of man to have worked that out. Well, I can’t discuss it any further now; there’s someone waiting to see me. I’ll ring you tonight. Goodbye, darling. Now,’ she said, apparently refreshed by this exchange. ‘What can I do for you?’
‘I’ve come about the job,’ I said.
‘So soon? But this is marvellous, although we’ve paid for three days.’ I worked out that she meant the advertisement. ‘How old are you?’
‘Eighteen,’ I said, although I was not eighteen for another six weeks.
‘Splendid. There’s not a lot of money, you see, although the work is pleasant. You know what we do, I suppose?’
‘Not really, no.’
‘How could you? We are a press cutting agency. Do you know what that is? We have a list of subscribers and a lot of newspapers and journals and we extract the pieces that refer to the names on our list and send them out. Do you think you would be able to do that?’
I said that I thought it sounded very interesting.
‘In that case,’ she said, rising from her desk and smoothing down her tight check skirt, ‘shall we agree on a trial period? I am Barbara Hemmings, by the way. This is my little concern. I run the business, although I’m not here every day. Shall we say a fortnight on trial?’
I said, quite sincerely, that I should like that, and that if agreeable to her I could start right away.
‘In that case,’ she said, leading the way into an inner office, ‘I shall introduce you to Mrs Swarbrick and Mrs Cassidy. They will tell you what to do.’
After a few initial moments of shyness and panic I settled down at a small desk of my own with a list of names and a pile of trade papers such as the Draper’s Record and the Hairdresser’s Journal which apparently nobody else wanted, preferring to stick to something a little more newsworthy or glamorous. When I had marked up the relevant passages I asked Mrs Swarbrick or Mrs Cassidy—I did not yet distinguish between them—what I had to do next.
‘Call me Margaret,’ said the comfortable blonde woman, who might have been either but who was henceforth to be indelibly Margaret. ‘And I’m Wendy,’ said the other, no less comfortably.
‘I’m Jane,’ I said.
‘Well, Jane, we usually have a cup of tea about now. Do you think you could make us a cup? Kettle and teapot in the bathroom, stove and fridge on the landing. Not that way, dear, that’s Mrs Hemmings’s office. Out the back. You’ll find all you need there.’
The cup of tea was my rite of passage. When it was found to be sufficiently strong I was accepted. After that the morning became very convivial. I was shown how to cut out the relevant articles (Cutting out! Shades of the nursery!) and how to fix the identifying tabs. This was a job I was prepared to do beautifully, expertly, rapidly, but this apparently was not what was required.
‘Slow down, dear,’ said Margaret. ‘Slow and steady wins the race. Mark out in the morning and cut out in the afternoon, that’s the way. You’ll find you concentrate better in the morning, and the afternoon always seems more peaceful, doesn’t it? Now, tell us something about yourself. You’ve got lovely hair, for a start.’
‘Unusual,’ agreed Wendy, who reached into a cupboard and brought out a tin of biscuits.
So I told them how my father had died and I had given up the idea of going to university, and how I lived with my mother, about whom I was rather worried. All this came tumbling out, and I realised that I had not previously spoken of such matters.
‘Well, you poor girl,’ said Margaret, and Wendy added, ‘Hard on a young person, that.’ After which I willed the tears to stay in my eyes, while Wendy got up and put her arm round me. And after that we were friends for life.
They were the dearest women, although my contemporaries would not have immediately identified them as the efficient and loyal workers they turned out to be. They were not fashionably slim, did not wear tight suits with big shoulders, did not arrive and depart with briefcases. We are talking here, rather, of the Liberty printed oilcloth shopping bag, of the viscose dress from John Lewis, and of the modest heel on the spacious court shoe, wide fitting for extra comfort. They were both in their late fifties and had long said goodbye to the illusions of youth, but as they said, they liked to look nice, and on Saturday afternoons they would go to Oxford Street and treat themselves to something new to wear. To my eyes they looked splendid in their royal blue or dusty pink patterned dresses, with the neat bow at the neck and the self-covered belt. These dresses were invariably the same, with the smallest possible variation. ‘Well, you’ve got to look nice for work, haven’t you?’ they assured one another, and to this end sported finely groomed heads of hair, silver blonde and chestnut brown respectively, silk scarves, and inexpensive though not unpleasant scent. To these modest women going out to work was an adventure; after years at home bringing up a family a job like ours was an invitation to enter the world once more. The job was not demanding, but they did it thoroughly, as I did, and we took a pride in our work, simple though it was. The day was agreeably broken up by snacks and cups of strong tea, but the work got done, and as the afternoon wore on and the light faded the pleasant sound of scissors cutting paper replaced our normal friendly exchanges, with full complement of the news of Margaret’s husband’s back and of Wendy’s grandchild (Fiona Kylie). I can hear that sound now. At five-thirty Mrs Hemmings would fling open the door between her office and ours, and say, ‘All right, ladies? You can get off now.’ I learned that she did very little, having inherited the business from her father, and was out for most of the day, but she seemed well-disposed, and soon accepted me as the others did, completely.
My days in the office, and the constant snacks I was offered, prepared me better for a return to the flat, although not the meals which continued to await me. In time, and rather to my relief, these dwindled, first to a slice of meat and some vegetables keeping hot between two plates on top of a saucepan of simmering water, and eventually to a rather sad assemblage of ham and salad which I ate while my mother communed with the television. As time went on she appeared less excited, less anticipatory, as if sense were returning, and with sense pain. Often I found her in a dream, while the succession of images unrolled unnoticed before her eyes. I tried to tell her about the work, about Margaret and Wendy, but she did not seem to want to know, as if these late additions could be of no interest to a life now lived mainly in the past. She was still neatly dressed, but her hair had turned quite grey. Finally she would let me lead her to bed, and we would sit for a while hand in hand. Once she said, ‘I love you, Jane,’ but I found myself too sad to reply that I loved her too, and in any case at such moments reassurance of my love for her was unnecessary.
‘Poor soul,’ commented Margaret, to whom I was something of a godsend, since her own daughters were married and far away. ‘If there’s anything we can do, you only have to say, dear. Is there anyone else in the family?’ It was then that I thought of Dolly, although only as a last resort. I dreaded her comments, but I thought she should know of my mother’s condition. Perhaps I remembered her vigour and enthusiasm, perhaps I placed some faith in her survivor’s common sense. I telephoned her from the office and she promised to come over at the weekend, ‘if I can fit it in’. I thought that cavalier of her, but was relieved that she did not appear to be taking the matter seriously.
On the Saturday I put some biscuits on a plate and cut some brown bread and butter, all of which proved to be superfluous as the bag of slightly broken delicacies was handed over. She arrived out of the greyness of a foggy afternoon, a positive e
mbodiment of health and durability, in one of her exquisite short-sleeved dresses, now decidedly tight. I thought I detected a change in her, although I had not seen her for some weeks. In comparison, my mother looked weak, faded, although this Dolly appeared not to notice. Dolly, by contrast, was resplendent, with an eager alert look which nevertheless seemed to see nothing. I noted that certain modifications had taken place in her appearance. Her fingernails were now red, as were her lips, and there was a flush, either of excitement or of rouge, on her cheeks. She seemed to gaze towards the window rather a lot, and once or twice went over to see if her car was still there. Apparently she had told the driver that she would not be long. ‘Never keep a man waiting, Jane.’ Once or twice she referred, rather offhandedly, to ‘a friend of mine’. When I told her that I had telephoned and got no reply, she said that Annie had gone to Ostend on a visit and that she had been out rather a lot. After which she twisted the rings on her left hand and assumed an unconvincing look of insouciance. Then I realised that what had formerly been a vague and ludic suspicion on my part had become reality. Dolly had a man friend. Quite possibly, although this seemed grotesque to me, Dolly was in love. And the object of her affections was the man in the car downstairs, although as far as I knew she still used the same car-hire firm in the Edgware Road. All became clear when she said, in response to my mother’s question as to how she had managed the journey to our flat—always a hazardous undertaking, as they both professed to believe—‘My friend drove me over. Actually, he owns the firm. You could say he was combining business with pleasure. Harry,’ she added, with deep satisfaction. ‘Harry Dean. A dear friend.’
Dolly Page 12
