The English Daughter

by Maggie Wadey

  Two days later, my father and I returned to the hospital to collect her belongings. In the car, in the overheated hospital corridor, in the lift, he chattered constantly.

  ‘So many things to be done,’ he kept saying, ‘but I’m getting there. Telephone calls, letters, people to notify.’ Then, ‘Third floor, turn right into the corridor, second office on the left,’ he muttered anxiously under his breath, for the third or fourth time. ‘I phoned the Department for Work and Pensions this morning to cancel your mother’s old-age pension and spoke to a very pleasant female. She was grateful I was notifying them so promptly. She said some people take weeks and months. I’ve written to the Council to ask for my rating status to be reassessed. And then there’s your mother’s bank card, Bentalls card, her chequebook – I’ve destroyed those, of course. Should I cancel her passport? I don’t know. So many things to be done.’

  We weren’t coming to the hospital to see anyone who had cared for my mother, neither a nurse nor a doctor – and we never did do so, though I assume we could have done if we had asked. We could at least have asked Why? and How? We could even have questioned the treatment she had received, if only to put our minds at rest. The person we had come to see was a middle-aged woman in a windowless office who, with a professionally sweet, tired smile, recited a list of what we must do. She gave us directions to the register office. Then she handed us a small weekend case belonging to my mother, and a plastic bag which had her nightie, slippers and sponge bag in it. With a deferential nod, my father thanked her. Carrying my mother’s things we walked away down a pleasant road lined with safe, pretty houses to the register office on the corner of the main road. This was where, years earlier, my youthful wedding had taken place. At the top of the steps by the door is a sign: No confetti please.

  The registrar of births and deaths turned the greenish screen of his computer towards us.

  ‘The deceased’s maiden name was Kavanagh, Agnes Teresa,’ he told us in the flat voice of a man patenting some dubious industrial device. ‘Correct me if I’m wrong.’

  He went on to hazard a guess that Agnes Teresa’s official date of birth was ‘unknown’, and to state the stark fact that she was ‘female’. As to her place of birth, ‘the Irish Republic’ was sufficient, he suggested, since Nenagh was tricky to spell.

  On the computer screen my father and I read the cause of her death and this, in a sense was new to us, the official account of how that shocking metamorphosis had taken place:

  1: (a) Cardiac and Respiratory failure [stroke]

  (b) Pulmonary Embolism [clot],

  (c) Myocardial Infarction [heart muscle/tissue

  death], and

  2: Ischaemic Heart Disease.

  We watched in silence as these incomprehensible words came up on the screen – the registrar did not attempt to pronounce them. On to my father’s face came that twisted, wrinkled-up look again, as if he was sucking on a lemon. The registrar printed out a copy of my mother’s death certificate and handed it to my father, her widower of forty-eight hours, who thanked him.

  Now at last we began to talk about her, my father and I. We talked a great deal, offering memory after memory, mostly instigated by me, by my obsessive need to talk about her. Neither of us tidied her things away. But my father didn’t mind.

  ‘Why should I mind?’ he asked. ‘I have nothing but good memories.’

  Privately, my husband admitted to finding this ‘odd’. Surely, once someone had died it was intolerable to be constantly reminded of them. But in this instance I was on my father’s side. In fact, my husband’s point of view made me unreasonably, unfairly angry.

  ‘It isn’t a question of being reminded!’ I cried. ‘It’s a question of not being able to forget.’ Adding, unpleasantly and with a note of hysteria, that I hated the habit my husband had of scratching over the names of the dead in his address book. It brought to mind vile phrases like ‘rub out’, ‘waste’ and ‘snuff’. Criminal words. Nazi words. It wasn’t just that I couldn’t forget my mother, I didn’t want to.

  My body was like lead. Faint nausea was accompanied by a constant desire to eat, long hours of insomnia were interspersed with hours of heavy sleep and brief bursts of weeping. Dealing with shock and grief took all my energy. But one night when my husband took me in his arms, my fury surfaced. Fury that my father had expressed no grief, that he had failed to act soon enough, failed to assert himself, to make demands, to insist – against no matter what resistance on her part – that she needed immediate medical attention. To me, her grieving daughter, this epitomised a certain masculine inertia which finds it easier to do nothing rather than to act. It was something my mother must on occasion have needed all her strength to break through.

  In the weeks after her death one image played itself over and over in my mind: Agnes, aged about eleven and wearing a dark blue pinafore dress, is coming towards me with that dancing step she sometimes parodied in her old age, her head on one side, her dark eyes melting with some secret amusement, mischievous and charming. I’ve no source for this image – no old photographs, of course, no verbal description, even, of her as a girl to draw on – yet in my mind’s eye, there she is, like something vividly remembered, an eleven-year-old girl dancing closer, brimming with half-flirtatious amusement, teasing, giving nothing away.

  A month later, my father invited his sister Dorothy and her family to come up from Sussex for dinner, his first invitation since the funeral. Dorothy, like my mother, is an excellent cook, and has indeed cooked professionally for many years. The occasion involved hours of pleasurably nerve-wracking preparation for my father, promoted from kitchen skivvy to chef. When my mother was alive he used to prepare the vegetables, whip the cream, do the washing-up. For this evening he wrote himself the most precise instructions, scattered about on little bits of paper in the kitchen and dining room. He was eerily successful in reproducing what my mother would have done. There was a moment’s uncertainty before it was decided I should take my mother’s chair at the head of the table – a place I never accepted again.

  Everyone was in a skittish, almost ribald mood. There was a lot of sparring between my cousins and their spouses. Outside the uncurtained window, spring was in the dark blue air. My father, anxious in case silence fell – about as likely with his family as being struck by lightning – had the scene set to entertain us after dinner with a display from the foxes. Dorothy, meanwhile, was remembering the first new dress she bought after the war, having saved up two years’ worth of clothing coupons.

  ‘Blue velvet collar and cuffs,’ she told us, ‘with French pleats and a nipped-in waist.’

  Proudly, she’d put it on to show May – I’m never quite sure who May is, only that I associate her name with slowness, unreliability, and loneliness. Anyway, May it was who looked Dorothy’s dress over a moment, then said in her slow Sussex way, ‘It’s a bit tight across the dairies, Doffie.’

  My aunt Dorothy, once plump and red-haired, was by now rather charmingly fat. Sitting on the dining chair she filled it from side to side, her plump white legs crossed neatly at the ankles. Both her skin and her hair were like demerara icing: dry, crisp and ginger. Her mind was still rapier-sharp, her small brown eyes, quick as mice, missed nothing and her memory was fabulously encyclopedic. Now she patted her mouth with a napkin appliquéd with pale pink flowers, one of six I remember my mother buying in Singapore.

  ‘Delicious,’ said Dorothy, nodding at her brother. ‘Clever boy.’

  Everyone agreed. It was also agreed that David had had a good, strict teacher – ‘the sort who doesn’t allow you to lick the spoon.’ Always that tone of irony when my mother was mentioned: her over-fastidiousness, her demanding ways and, of course, her Irishness. ‘You know the one about the Irishman who plans to fly a rocket to the sun? “But Paddy,” his friend says, “the sun will burn you up.” “Don’t worry,” says Paddy, “I’ve thought of that. We’ll go at night.”’ Ho-ho, the Irish! An endless source of humour.

 
Dorothy licked the last of the cream from her lips and told me, ‘Agnes used to iron even the ribbons on your vest!’

  Vests which, my cousins reminded me, they had to ‘inherit’.

  ‘So?’ I said. ‘At least you didn’t inherit rubbish. Ribbons indeed!’

  Even my little boy-cousin John – metamorphosed into a soft-hearted fireman with a big pale face and arms the size of my thighs – he, too, had to wear my cast-off vests, ribbons or no. But in my cousins’ case, the vests weren’t ironed. Dorothy’s method of ironing, slapdash and creative like everything else she did, was to fold damp clothes, stick them under a cushion and sit on them. All through my childhood there were times when what I most passionately wanted was to lose myself in my aunt’s empire of chaos where the washing piled up in the bath and a mob of shrieking children clambered over the furniture with their shoes on.

  Over the pudding my father told a joke I’d not heard before, one he certainly wouldn’t have told if my mother had been there. It involved a string of boys arriving late for school and, on being asked where they’ve been, replying ‘Up Sandy Lane, sir.’ The last boy to appear was Sandy Lane. I remembered my cousins telling me how, when they were children, they loved to get my father to tell his slightly blue jokes – but always out of Auntie Aggie’s hearing.

  Does that mean Agnes was a prude? She called herself that sometimes, but in a slightly surprised tone of voice, as if quoting someone else. Yet she wasn’t above laughing at rude noises and she was a flirt, in the mischievous, light-hearted way of a very young, inexperienced girl. A way that’s maybe particular to her generation. But she didn’t like dirty jokes and she didn’t like sex on television or film. Whilst my father was away during the war, my mother was famously icy towards the sex-starved Canadian soldiers billeted in town. When she firewatched she walked alone. She was by nature chaste, pure, uncompromising. Sometimes these qualities amounted to hardness.

  Driving home that evening, on the car radio I heard a jazz version of Purcell’s famous aria, ‘Dido’s Lament’, the first classical aria I fell in love with, and I remember Dido’s dying words: ‘When I am laid in earth, Remember me, remember me…’ In my mind’s eye I saw my mother’s eyes, her pale forehead, her hands – quite large hands, with clear nail varnish and a platinum wedding ring – her way of smoothing her skirt and, recently, a new, jaunty way of walking with an exaggerated swing of her shoulders that was both girlish and at the same time an old woman’s mocking comment on her own age and frailty.

  Grief thinned into depression. My work dried up. The simplest decisions were beyond me. Increasingly I spent my time walking, turning her image this way and that. I made notes. I jotted things down, my own memories, and hers.

  With my daughter, my husband and I chose March 17th, Saint Patrick’s Day, to scatter her ashes. During the ten days or so after my father collected them from the crematorium he kept them in their canister beside his armchair in the sitting room. At teatime they watched Countdown on the television together. The landscape at Shere was still wintery but awash with pale sunlight, the earth seamed with golden celandines. The canister, made of sturdy green plastic, was astonishingly heavy. My father took it out of the car and tucked it under his arm. As we went through the kissing gate into the meadow my mother whispered in my ear, ‘I bet they give you any old body’s ashes.’ We chose a spot under a beech tree. My father opened the canister and we scattered half of the ashes, several pounds – maybe as much as five – of coarse white ashes down amongst the roots of the tree. Then a moment of helplessness paralysed us. My daughter, with characteristic pluck, took the initiative. This is the stretch of the river where she and my mother used to paddle together searching for crayfish. Now she waded out into the water, upended the canister and poured the rest of her grandmother’s ashes into the stream. She did this slowly, with a controlled air of ceremony. Some of the ashes moved away downriver like smoke, the rest – the heavy granules – fell in a steady stream to lie on the bed, a silvery pool that glimmered palely through the water, like a featureless face upturned to the trees and sky above.

  In 1994 my parents went on a brief tour of Ireland. I joined them at Shannon. My mother made the usual remarks about the loveliness of the landscape and the charm of the people. But of course, it was all a good deal more complicated than that and most of the time we were in Ireland it was difficult to tell what my mother was thinking and feeling. It must often have been difficult for her to know herself. What she did know she wouldn’t have wanted to offer up to us, her husband and daughter, who must have seemed disconcertingly alien here. She would surely have needed a long, slow time, possibly on her own, to re-establish a relationship with her birthplace, even to recognise it.

  She chose not to go back to Knigh – neither to her old home nor to the graveyard at Knigh Cross. We did visit Puckaun and we went into the church. I suspect my mother was often fearful that the places she was returning to would be dirty, mean and poor. Or that she would be brought down by emotion. But the Ireland she’d come back to was a very different place from the Ireland she’d left in the thirties, different not just in reality but in the way it was perceived. The tourist industry was thriving and a generation of successful Americans, Australians and even English – anyone who boasted that fabled creature, an ‘Irish grandmother’ – was keen to buy a second home back in the old country. Ireland wasn’t a joke any more. It had become fashionable.

  As we rubbed up against the more obvious signs of Ireland’s trendy new status, my mother’s confusion was at times tangible. For sixty years her memories had been private, precious as a handful of coins kept in your pocket for the comfort of turning them over occasionally, hearing them jingle, knowing they’re there, yours, safe and secret. Now the coins had been yanked from her hand, buffed up and made into common currency.

  At Gurtalougha House in Tipperary there was an exquisite air of privilege and exclusion. The enclosed garden was open on one side only, on to the water of Lough Derg, a pale-blue shifting silk screen that gave the illusion of being within touching distance of my parents’ window. It so happened that the owners of the hotel were friends of my brother- and sister-in-law, and I’d made this booking supposing it would be a happy experience for my mother to be back, within a ten-minute drive of her old home, staying in style. I made sure my parents had the best room, with a balcony overlooking the lough, a room that was all green shadows and shifting light like a tree house.

  As we were shown into the room, my mother – wonderingly fingering the fine material of the curtains – suffered a dizzy fit. Without a sound, she fell and banged her forehead on the radiator. It seemed to happen very slowly, as if the solid floor were far, far away. She lay on the rug in a foetal position. I soaked a flannel in cold water and held it to her forehead until she stirred. She was unharmed, but very shaken. We sat her in the soft movement of air by the open window and she turned her face away from us towards the lough.

  On the ferry back home to England, as we came into Holyhead, I asked my mother if she’d been excited all those years ago when she left Ireland.

  ‘Of course I wasn’t excited,’ she said, her voice unexpectedly snappy. ‘Why should I be excited?’

  ‘You were starting a new life,’ I suggested.

  ‘I was terrified. I got on the train and sat alone in the compartment with just one man and we didn’t speak a word to one another all the way.’

  I tried to picture this.

  ‘A compartment without a corridor?’

  ‘No. It had a corridor.’

  The ferry slid between the turrets that marked the harbour and the quay appeared, grey and damp. Crumpling a tissue in her fingers my mother added, ‘My feelings about leaving Ireland were mixed.’ She shot me a look. ‘You know what mixed feelings are, don’t you?’

  2

  About ten years before my mother died, I entered an unhappy time in my life. All the usual reasons: work, a difficult period in my marriage, the loss of youth. I was in my lat
e forties, full of self-doubt and dissatisfaction. My two inheritances, the feminine and the masculine, the Irish and the English, were at war. I’d come to feel it was my own desire to assimilate into the masculine, the rational and the English – as much as my mother’s reserve – that had kept half my inheritance from me. I went through a period of incandescent rage with everything masculine before arriving at a new sense of solidarity with everything feminine. I gave up struggling to be always rational. Drawing closer to my mother was all part of a slow process. Not long after, the Monday nights spent with my mother began. The old rift between us was neither resolved nor exactly forgotten, but it was out of sight. Here I was, ‘at my mother’s knee’ looking for clues not just to her but, of course, to myself.

  As it happened, this was a difficult time for my mother, too. The difference in my parents’ age and sociability was part of it – at the time I’m describing, my mother was in her late seventies. My father not only was younger but, as time passed, he seemed to lose a year for every year she gained. His new bridge partnership had turned out very successfully and, now that he was retired, he would have liked to play more often than just one evening a week. My mother may have felt she was holding him back. Or maybe not. Superficially, however, nothing much had changed. My father still made a fuss of her, and Agnes Teresa Kavanagh still had something queenly, patrician, even, in her manner. My father still liked to tell the old joke: ‘I will be master in my own house! I WON’T get out from under the table!’ And it still made my mother laugh.