by Maggie Wadey
And he, with little snorts of derision, answered, ‘Well, m’dear, if you would have preferred to live in Hitler’s Nazi Empire…’
Those snorts of derision maddened her. They maddened me. I’d like to think this put me firmly in my mother’s camp, that no matter how much her obtuseness in argument irritated me, I was on her side, her passionate, untamed, recalcitrant Irish side. But my feelings in the matter were never quite so straightforward.
By the time of my fourth birthday I was already devoted to my father. Once recovered from the shock of his return, and from my agonised sense of exclusion, I trotted at his heels asking questions I had quickly realised only he could answer: What makes snow? Where does the sound on the radio come from? Before long he began making me things. As he made them, he whistled. He made a little cart out of an old fruit box. He gave it four cotton-reel wheels and a string to pull it by. Then he made me a stool. This was for me to stand on so I could reach the electric light switch myself. I had been given power over light and darkness. Intuitively I recognised it for what it was: not magic, but science. I saw my father held the key to the real world where everything had a name and where every name could be learned. I was not only devoted to my father, I identified with him. I was going to be like him and certainly not like my mother who walked loose-kneed and dreamy-eyed in a big, circular skirt, who couldn’t even name the wild flowers I snatched up in my fist.
Looking back, I wonder if she ever felt – as I began to flex my adolescent intellectual muscles – as if my father and I were ganging up on her. My mother never quite lost her capacity to become unpredictably, awe-inspiringly hectic with rage and, though my father never, ever criticised her to me when push came to shove, we did everything we could – we used sarcasm, logic, WORDS – to repress her female force and fury, the power of the old regime under which I was born. We made out that her insights weren’t insight but emotional bias, that her temper was a disgrace in the face of our own sweet reason, that her intuitions were inferior to our logic.
At one level, we were right. She changed her mind at the last minute and if you dared ask her why, she couldn’t say. She had a thoroughly reprehensible gift for spontaneity. She might refuse to go to a funeral – though she’d already bought a hat – and sometimes even dropped out of weddings at the last minute. Worse, dropped out of Christmas. As to her temper and her irrationality, they of course were put down to her being Irish as much as to her being a woman. I don’t mean that either of these points were ever made explicitly; they didn’t need to be.
It was only as I turned from neuter into woman, I saw the misogyny in my father’s scorn. Perhaps I’d instinctively recognised it earlier, but I’d been able to hide from myself the appalling fact that I was potentially its object as much as my mother. It became a matter of survival never to be scoffed at for my feminine – or ‘female’ as my father would say – lack of logic. I remember sometimes feeling a shiver of panic, as if I’d set out on the wrong road. But there was no going back. I’d made the decision long before I could construct an argument: never to be like my mother, never to vanish into that maelstrom of female blood and emotion. From my father’s shoulders I could see further. Up there the air was drier, cooler, clearer. And the rules made sense, didn’t they? They were fair, consistent, reliable. That was the point: I could rely on him.
Once I’d reached my teens, my father and I loved to ‘argue’. It was my mother who called it arguing. My father and I thought we were having a bracing discussion. I would scarcely have sat down at table before we’d be engaged in sparring, throwing down our thoughts on life after death, on drowning unwanted kittens, or new facts on the possibility of space travel. Though my mother sat dreamy-eyed at the foot of the table she rarely joined in. Intellectual discussion made her uneasy. In her eyes, we were like poor Monsieur Laurent who threw himself confidently off the Eiffel Tower wearing a pair of brown-paper wings and moments later crashed to his death on the Champ de Mars. So, though she professed routine admiration for our confident theorizing, her smile was qualified by a certain shrewd scepticism that got on our nerves. In my mother’s company we were more dogmatic than when talking alone together.
But I didn’t need my father’s help: as a child I could infuriate my mother all on my own, though I often didn’t quite understand why. Of course I knew stamping my foot at her was wrong. But I couldn’t see why she had to pour scorn on my misery at having my hair lopped off: ‘Who do you think is going to notice YOU!’ she snapped as I sobbed on the bus home. When roused, she was quite capable of giving me a clip around the head. I remember once being chased around the house with the broom. But I was only ever beaten once, and that was by my father. This was for repeated and blatant disobedience, the kind of thing my mother would have ignored as childish attention-seeking – unless, of course, she’d lost her temper.
My father’s law couldn’t be applied in anger – nor could it be waived in sentimental change of heart. My usual punishment was to be sent to bed early without supper. Although my mother had sent me to bed countless times, because I could never be sure what would provoke her into it, it didn’t have much effect on my behaviour. Left to her own devices, she nearly always relented anyway, and sneaked up the stairs with an apple or a bowl of bread and milk. Then I was kissed before I went to sleep, one quick, shy kiss that stood in for the words she could never say.
By the time I was twenty I was already married and things had gone awry between my mother and me. I had been left feeling guilty – so, perhaps, had she – and as a young married woman I was seeking to be invulnerable to her, to be perfect. To demonstrate loud and clear that I had made the right choices in my life. If ever I did let down my guard sufficiently to approach my mother with a problem – moving sideways, needing her support but trying to make out things weren’t as bad as they were – her eyes went vacant and she’d shred the tissue that was always in her hands, not listening to a word, head cocked, picking up on what I didn’t say, what I knew she didn’t want to hear: ‘I’ve wasted my time working on something that’s come to nothing, I don’t know what I should do next, I’m worried about money.’ My attempts at manipulation were always resisted. Like a woman finding a ladder in a stocking, she held my offerings up to the light and found them wanting. But of course I didn’t find trust any easier than she did. I used a wide variety of techniques to keep people at arm’s length, including a kind of wit and a very credible insouciance. Pride. Silence.
When I became the mother of a baby daughter I was still at university, studying for an MA in Philosophy. Like my father, I believed the world was an intelligible place and I was setting out to understand it. The person who enabled me to do this, by taking care of my daughter twice a week, was, of course, my mother. In spite of the fact that she did not share my belief in the world as intelligible. On Monday and Thursday mornings she arrived – sometimes even a little early, since I had an appointment to keep in a world she could scarcely imagine, of lecture halls and fully grown adults sitting around arguing about the nature of Time – bringing with her flowers, home-cooked food and new dishcloths. Sometimes when I got back with my thesis on Kant under my arm I’d find her on her knees cleaning the kitchen floor. I was an only child, a ’60s feminist who didn’t identify with her mother (not so uncommon) and took all this rather for granted. I only hope I didn’t show it too much.
Once, fitting my daughter back like a piece of Lego on to her hip, she asked irritably what it was all about. I launched cheerfully into a description of the joys of epistemology, the virtues of logical positivism versus existentialism. Of why it matters to know that we know. And how much more difficult that is than it seems because of the intrinsic uncertainty of reality, which some philosophers believe is no more than a bundle of sensations. I told her the story of Bishop Berkeley walking with Samuel Johnson, the Bishop asserting that nothing is real outside our perception of things, that, in effect, the physical world is all inside our heads, and Johnson vehemently responding that
when he stubs his toe on a stone he knows it’s real because it HURTS, this being – as the Bishop should know – the moral role of reality: not to bend to our wishes but to be difficult and painful… In telling this, I concluded by kicking out and sending my daughter’s fallen drinking cup flying across the floor.
My mother’s eyes glazed over. She fell into that mood in which, for some perverse reason, I loved her most – no doubt I’d taken a leaf from that ancient book of the patriarchs and was feeling benignly superior. What I had adopted as simple and irresistibly persuasive arguments for the life of the intellect left her cold. While I droned on, my mother smiled that faint, dreamy smile of hers, like the smile of a woman riding a richly caparisoned camel whose big soft feet know the desert, and whose hump is so richly stocked with nourishment she doesn’t even have to bother herself with watering him.
I have foxes of my own here in the city. I don’t feed them but, like my mother, I’m fond of them. All those things people most dislike about them – their smell, their screaming on the street like murdered children – this juxtaposition of the wild with the domestic has always given me a pleasurable thrill. A sandy-coloured young dog fox used to curl up to sleep in the ivy on our garden fence, like a bird in a nest, like a verse by Ogden Nash. But recently the smell of their urine has begun to sicken me. It’s too constant, too strong, hanging like fumes in our front porch and needing to be explained away when people call. I try to get rid of it with bucket after bucket of hot soapy water, to little effect. Then, a couple of mornings ago there was fox shit on the doorstep: two little dollops of it, and the soft cement round the base of the step was all dug up and scattered over the path. This ignites a flare of disgust in me.
But speaking to my father later on the phone I don’t mention any of this. I don’t admit my new dislike of the foxes for fear it will encourage him to stop feeding his own feral visitors, the ones that freeze in his security light like flash-photos, like ghosts. I don’t want to release him from his nightly ritual, performed in memory of my mother. The idea brings me close to tears.
My mother’s death was sudden. Although she was eighty-four years old – possibly older – she’d not been ill, only exhausted, which at that age wasn’t so remarkable though it may already have been a symptom of the heart disease that would kill her. Her exact age was still a mystery because of the missing birth certificate and no doubt she was oversensitive about her age because my father was younger. Increasingly, she longed for quiet and stillness, for both of which she had a special gift. She may have given David the occasional shove earlier in their marriage to get him going places, but in later years – when he became habitually restless – she tried to insist he stay still at least some of the time. ‘Don’t keep jumping up!’ she would cry out in exasperation as he darted off for the nth time to ferret out a paper-cutting or to find his latest cup. In that enforced stillness, his love of music, opera especially, flourished.
Often, when my mother took herself off to bed early, my father sat downstairs wearing headphones and listening to Verdi: Rigoletto and Otello. He especially liked small, sweet, blonde heroines (his mother, Ella’s, type, not the tall, dark type he had married) and the not-so-small, sweet, blonde singers who sing them. The glorious Frederica von Stade singing Desdemona’s death scene – I should say, her murder scene – was a favourite, with its heartbreaking aria in which the girl reflects on being forsaken by her lover: ‘The sad girl wept, O Willow, Willow, Willow! singing in the lonely land, the willow will be my funeral garland.’ Sometimes, with a sheepish smile, he’d say, ‘I’m just a sucker for the ladies.’
Where it mattered to her, my mother made a brave effort to keep up. She was an adventurous cook, keen to try out all the latest fads in ingredients and styles. Like the little girl making butter pats and stamping them with her initial ‘A’, it was still her pleasure and her pride to do things well. ‘I’ve a reputation to keep up,’ she used to say with a grin. There was her other reputation, too, as a snazzy dresser, and right to the end, my father appreciated it. ‘Look at her!’ he used to say. ‘Doesn’t she look lovely?’
The day she was taken ill they’d had a young woman from Australia, a distant relation they’d not met before, to lunch – or ‘luncheon’ as my mother sometimes preferred to call it. A superb lunch of chicken with lemon grass, and French apple tart. The small Ercol dining table was laid immaculately in my mother’s characteristically pretty way with starched napkins, tiny bowls of flowers, and silver. Michelle, remarking gently that her Auntie Agnes looked tired, left them around four o’clock. My father said he would do the washing-up but my mother replied, ‘No, we’ll do it together as always.’ Having done so, she took herself off upstairs to rest. When my father went to see how she was he found her in bed, but unable to get comfortable. Not in pain, but uncomfortable. Tea, more pillows, no pillows, warm milk. Nothing seemed to help. They passed a restless night.
In the morning my father got up to make tea and Agnes followed him downstairs, saying she might be more comfortable in the armchair. She asked my father to go to the chemist, tell the pharmacist her chest hurt, ask him to prescribe some medicine. This was a Sunday morning. My father at last found a chemist that was open. He described my mother’s symptoms, and the pharmacist said he couldn’t possibly prescribe anything, that a doctor should be called. This was done. The hours ticked by. Finally, at four thirty in the afternoon, a doctor examined my mother and diagnosed a heart attack. He told her she should be taken into hospital immediately.
My mother mistrusted doctors and had a horror of hospitals. She seemed unable to believe she had had a heart attack. The doctor said, well, he couldn’t force her into hospital, but she must at least see her own doctor the following morning. Meanwhile she must not climb the stairs. ‘Your husband can make you up a bed on the floor down here,’ he instructed. My father returned to the chemist with the doctor’s prescription. When he got home, my mother had taken herself back upstairs to bed.
That night my father dozed in the bedroom chair and my mother continued in great discomfort. She also continued to say, no, she would not go into hospital. It wasn’t until six o’clock on Monday morning my father finally called for the ambulance, and the first thing they said at Kingston Hospital was, ‘A pity she didn’t come to us earlier.’
The medicines that would have been given immediately after the heart attack to disperse the clot were no longer considered appropriate. She wasn’t in pain any more but very, very weak. On the phone to me, my father stressed that she was so very exhausted and must have rest, sleep. He thought it best if I didn’t visit until the following day. She was in good hands. Let her sleep.
For an hour or two I was an obedient daughter. In a distraction of anxiety I even prepared to go out to dinner that night. But after speaking to a dear friend who urged me to ‘Go, visit, in these circumstances always visit,’ I drove like a madwoman the five miles or so to Kingston Hospital.
I found my mother drugged and serene, propped up on pillows in a single room in intensive care. The hospital gown had slipped off one shoulder – her white skin with a violet tinge at her throat, the white curve and blue veins of her breast partially revealed. She smelt of L’Air du Temps, my last earthly impression of her warm and alive. I sat beside her, holding her hand as she smiled and talked, the words all garbled: ‘Something lovely,’ she said. ‘Gladness your coming tomorrow.’
It was only for two or three minutes but the moment I left her, as I stepped out into the corridor, I could see she was already drifting asleep again, with that look of surprise, euphoria almost, on her face. She was in good hands. Let her sleep.
On Tuesday morning she rallied. My father and daughter visited briefly. She was sitting up in bed joking and demanding her favourite nail varnish. By three o’clock that afternoon she was dead.
‘I’m so very sorry,’ said the soft-voiced Chinese nurse who was with her as she died. ‘I’m so very sorry.’
My mother’s heart and lungs ha
d failed in a dramatic and final double act.
It had happened whilst she was having a catheter inserted. We were told that everything possible had been done to resuscitate her. She’d died so quickly, she would scarcely have been aware of anything. That’s what we were told but we hadn’t been there. We’d only just arrived – and been asked politely to wait a few moments – with flowers and talcum powder and, as ordered, her favourite nail varnish.
My father’s face screwed up in shock and incredulity. Thrown into this too fast to disown it, he twisted sideways as if looking for some safe place, but there was no safe place to be had. We’d been ambushed. Robbed. I wept instantly, uncontrollably, as if a layer of my skin had been stripped away. When my arms went round my father he felt very frail. Someone brought us tea – a dark blue teapot and thick china cups. Sugar. Then, too soon, we were allowed in to see her.
There was no difficulty now in believing her dead: her head was thrown back, her mouth open, her face and neck streaked with dark violet, violet pools surrounded her eyes, deep violet-coloured streaks like claw-marks scoured her cheeks and neck, as if some wild animal had been interrupted in the act of devouring her and this was where its maw had torn at her pale flesh. The upper half of her face was untouched: austere, beautiful, white, the same – yet totally metamorphosed by death. What had been tender, tremulous, surprised, was rigid and vandalised. A bolt of terror went through me. Horror, grief, and pure animal terror.
