So now Leonor lives in a place called The Willowes. It is on the outskirts of a village four miles away, with a large garden and views of the Downs, and Kate visits her three times a week, sometimes more. The accommodation is the best that could be found nearby; the staff are professional and pleasant, and the residents are treated with respect and delicacy. A wide range of activities is on offer. ‘We are here to make their lives not just comfortable but stimulating too,’ the director told Kate and Martin. A woman named Tamae gives a flower-arranging class every week, which Leonor enjoyed for a while. The rooms are spacious and the best ones are arranged around a sort of cloister, which has a carp pond in the middle, surrounded by benches. Every room has a beech-veneered chest of drawers and matching wardrobe. A table is set by the window, with two chairs; there is an armchair too. Not every room looks out on the garden, but Leonor’s does. A cherry tree stands ten yards away; in May the blossom gives a pale pink cast to the light in her room.
Residents are permitted to make some modifications to their private environment, by way of distraction from the reality of the situation. Leonor’s lampshade, for example, came with her; the grooves of the frosted glass bowl are darkened by the dust of the living room at home. Over the armchair is hung a quilt that she made before she married. Between the bed and the window lies a rug that had occupied the equivalent space in the bedroom she had shared with her husband, many years ago. The carpet underneath is dark blue, with a pattern of broad waves, slightly lighter in hue; these colours, patterned in this way, Kate was told, help to foster feelings of tranquillity and wellbeing; every bedroom in The Willowes has this carpet; the curtains are of the same design.
Relics of her life, selected for reasons that have now been forgotten, are arrayed on the chest of drawers. Two photographs taken in Coimbra – young Leonor with her parents, at the river; the parents in old age, with their daughter, on a stone bench in the Jardim Botânico – stand beside a small blue porcelain jar that had once belonged to her mother. The management has hung, in every room, a framed reproduction of a famous landscape painting. Leonor’s picture is a river scene by Alfred Sisley; there have been days on which Kate has arrived to find her mother gazing at it as if it were a second window. Above the bed hangs another picture, brought from home. It shows Saint Isabel, her head resplendent beneath halo and crown, with roses spilling from the scoop of her gown. Leonor’s faith, quiescent during the years of her marriage, had resurged in her widowhood. One day, a few years after her father’s death, Kate had suggested to her mother that she might visit her on the coming Sunday morning. Her mother told her that she would be at church, and that is how it was discovered that she had returned to the fold. It was ascertained that she had been attending Mass since the previous Easter. She had found a nice church and a priest she liked; this, more or less, was the extent of what Kate learned about her decision. It wasn’t even a decision, her mother told her: one doesn’t decide to become wiser with age, and this was the same thing. Perhaps life in England had buried some part of her spirit, she suggested. Her faith had not died – it had been in abeyance, weakened, deprived of the air and water of the Church. Her soul, she later proposed, was like one of those frogs that can live through long periods of drought by finding tiny pockets of moisture deep within the earth.
Today, on opening the door of her mother’s room, Kate sees her in the wheelchair, gazing at the image of Saint Isabel, the patron saint of her birthplace, and of all victims of infidelity; Isabel’s dissolute husband was the father of many illegitimate children.
‘I don’t like that thing,’ her mother announces; these are the first words she utters. The vehemence would once have been startling. Before this phase of her life, mildness had been a defining quality of her temperament.
‘What thing, Mum?’ asks Kate. ‘The picture?’
‘It’s horrible,’ says her mother.
‘Why do you say that, Mum?’ asks Kate. The image of Saint Isabel has been there since the day her mother moved in; it was brought from home.
‘Because it is,’ her mother answers.
Kate does as she’s told; she pretends to study the sentimental and clumsy portrait of Isabel. ‘Do you want me to take it down?’ she asks. ‘I can do that. It’ll take two seconds.’ She moves closer to the picture, raising a hand to it.
Leonor frowns; she mashes her lips together; it is as if this situation were a problem of insurmountable complexity.
‘I can take it down and if you change your mind I can put it back before I go,’ suggests Kate.
After more consideration, Leonor decides: ‘Better leave it. She’d be annoyed.’
‘Who would be annoyed?’ Kate asks. Her mother’s gaze has meandered to the window. ‘Mum. Who would be annoyed?’
‘The Irish woman.’
‘What Irish woman?’
Her mother does not know the Irish woman’s name, but she knows she would be upset, because it was the Irish woman who had given her the picture and put it on the wall.
‘It’s your room,’ Kate tells her mother. ‘You can do what you like. We’re not going to throw it away, are we? We can put it in a drawer for a while. She’ll understand. Don’t worry.’
For a few seconds, her mother seems to be thinking about what Kate has said, but then the thinking can be seen to dissipate. Her eyes are still directed at the picture, but she seems to be seeing only an arrangement of colours on a rectangle of card. They agree to leave Saint Isabel where she is, for the time being.
Kate kneels beside the wheelchair and takes a hand; it is cold and as hard as a puppet’s. ‘Mum,’ she says, trying to get her mother’s gaze to latch onto hers. ‘Mum. Naomi is back. She’s staying with us.’ It appears that some elements of these statements do not make sense. ‘She went away for a while,’ Kate explains. ‘But she’s back now. Turns out she was in Scotland.’
‘Scotland?’ her mother repeats, as if Scotland were as extraordinary as Tasmania.
‘Apparently. Not sure where, exactly. Up in the north somewhere, I think. Miles from anywhere.’
Her mother considers this information. ‘When was she in Scotland?’ she asks.
‘In the summer. She came back a few days ago. She’s staying with us,’ says Kate, enclosing her mother’s hand. ‘She’ll come and see you tomorrow. You’d like that, wouldn’t you?’
For a minute her mother says nothing; her hand trembles within her daughter’s. ‘Naomi is living with you?’ she asks.
‘She’s staying for a day or two, that’s all. She’ll come to see you tomorrow.’
‘Why was she in Scotland?’
‘She went with some friends.’
‘A holiday?’
‘I think so. I don’t quite understand it. Naomi in hiking boots. I can’t picture it. But she seems happier. And she’s lost weight. A lot of weight. You’ll see. She looks different.’
Her mother looks down at the carpet and scowls, perhaps from the effort of trying to summon the image of her younger daughter. ‘What friends?’ she murmurs.
‘I don’t know them. They seem to have stayed at a place belonging to someone called Bernát.’
‘Bernard?’
‘Bernát. He’s Hungarian, but he grew up in England.’
‘Naomi’s been to Hungary?’
‘Not as far as I’m aware, but you never know. Bernát lives in London. That’s where she met him. He seems to be her new boyfriend. If that’s the word. He’s not a boy. Quite a bit older than Naomi.’
‘Bernát?’ her mother says again.
‘That’s right, Mum. Gabriel has been jettisoned.’
‘Who?’
‘Gabriel. The man in the bookshop.’
It appears that Gabriel’s name has little resonance, if any, for her mother; her gaze roams the sky; panic is beginning to rise in her eyes.
‘It’s possible she never mentioned him,’ says Kate. ‘You know what she’s like. Don’t worry,’ she says, pressing her mother’s hand; her tone, she ca
n hear, is patronising, but it is efficacious; the panic seems to have been halted.
‘No, she talked about him,’ says her mother, uncertainly. She is tracking the flight of a gull, as if it might lead to the meaning of Gabriel.
‘Well, they seem to have called it a day. Or Naomi has.’
‘Was he nice?’ asks her mother.
‘They went well together, I thought.’
The gull has flown out of sight. ‘Oh well,’ her mother sighs. ‘What about Bernard?’
‘I don’t know, Mum. I haven’t met him. He sounds unusual. A reformed banker, apparently. Knows a lot about music. More than Naomi, if you can imagine such a thing.’
‘He’s a musician?’
‘No, he just knows a lot about it. And maths. Music, money and maths. His brother knows everything there is to know about catfish. Quite a family.’
‘Naomi isn’t interested in money,’ says her mother, as if to correct an error and thereby make the story collapse.
‘Neither is Bernát nowadays, it seems. He improved himself.’
‘Is he staying with you?’
‘No, Mum. We haven’t met him yet.’
‘Oh.’
‘And I’m not sure when we’ll get to meet him. It seems they’re going back to Scotland together.’
Her mother purses her lips and looks at Kate; she seems lost in perplexity.
‘To tell you the truth, Mum, I don’t really understand what’s going on,’ Kate says, giving her mother a smile of unconcerned puzzlement. ‘But we’ll find out more, in good time.’
Leonor looks again at the picture of Saint Isabel, purely, it appears, as somewhere to anchor her gaze; there is no telling what is in her mind. After half a minute she announces that she wants to go into the garden.
‘It’s not terribly warm out,’ says Kate; her dissuasion is ignored. She folds the quilt and smoothes it over her mother’s lap, tucking it into the sides of the wheelchair.
The garden has a pond, with a small concrete island at its centre, on which sits a little stone boy, on a stone tree stump, inspecting the sole of one foot. Her mother wants to stop by the pond. The stone boy is frequently remarked upon. ‘I hate that thing,’ she often declares, as if this antipathy were newly conceived. Before she moved to this place, she never used that word, even of Janice Wilson; now she hates so many things, or so she says. Today, however, the stone boy seems not to offend. On the far side of the water, another wheelchair is parked. Its occupant is the oldest of the residents, a man named Cyril, who is ninety-eight years old and speaks in two-second gasps; few of the staff can comprehend much of what Cyril says, but a Trinidadian nurse named Vernita seems to hear every word, and it is she who is sitting beside Cyril, on a bench. She speaks to him, but he might be asleep; he usually is.
Kate positions the chair at a spot from which their view of the old man is obstructed by the stone boy, but no sooner has Kate applied the brakes than her mother starts to fidget. Grimacing, she leans to the left and to the right, then back to the left, stretching her neck as much as she can; she flaps a hand as if ordering the little statue to move. ‘There,’ she says, pointing a yard to the side. ‘Put me there.’ Kate moves the chair. Her mother sighs, like a busy woman who, having been delayed by the inefficiencies of fools, can at last get on with her business. One hand clasps the other in her lap; she aims her gaze at Cyril and Vernita, as if in the expectation of learning something.
In the distance, three paragliders are swerving above the scarp of the Downs. ‘I could never do that,’ Kate remarks; her mother, watching the old man and his nurse, does not respond. An observation about the weather likewise fails. The old man stirs; his eyelids quiver; his head comes up, as though by a process of slow inflation. As Vernita takes a tissue from a pocket and wipes his mouth with it, Leonor’s face softens into anguish.
‘Mum—’ says Kate.
Still looking across the pond, her mother states: ‘I want to go home.’
This has been said before; it is a frequent ordeal, to have to explain that there is no longer a home to go to, that there has been no home for years. ‘If you’re not happy here, I can look for somewhere else,’ says Kate, not for the first time; her dishonesty is nauseating.
Her mother glances at her: there is judgement in the glance, and perhaps dislike. ‘I want to see John,’ she says.
‘Which John is that, Mum?’ asks Kate. There is a nurse at The Willowes named John; the family’s solicitor is a John as well.
‘I want to see John,’ her mother repeats, with emphasis, and she glances at her daughter again, to impart more force to the repetition.
Now Kate understands. This John is a man called John Jeavons, the only male companion of her mother’s widowhood, or the only one known to Kate, which is tantamount to the same thing, she is sure. Twice in the past year her mother has spoken of him; this is twice more than she has made mention of her husband. More than fifteen years have passed since the end of that friendship, or whatever it was. He was a widower; they had met through the church; he was a civil servant of some kind, Kate seems to remember. On Sunday afternoons they went for walks together, or a drive. Her mother, as she recalls, used to speak of him as someone who had great responsibilities and many worries; there was a son who was the cause of concern, for reasons that cannot now be recalled and perhaps were never disclosed; the problematic offspring might have been the basis, or the source, of the relationship. Kate has not even seen a picture of John Jeavons. There had come a point at which she realised that it had been a while since her mother had made any reference to a Sunday walk. Mr Jeavons was no longer in London, she learned. Her mother had not appeared to be upset, as Kate remembers, yet now she is struck with guilt for her failure to ask the questions she should have asked, though she is not entirely certain that she had in fact failed to ask them. She knows so little of her mother, and now it is too late.
‘Mr Jeavons?’ she says.
‘John,’ her mother replies. ‘I’d like to see him.’ It is clear that she thinks this is something that her daughter has the power to make happen.
It is probable that John Jeavons is no longer alive; he was older than her mother, Kate is sure. She says: ‘I don’t know where he lives.’
‘You can phone him,’ her mother points out.
‘I don’t have his number.’
‘Yes you do. I gave it to you. I remember writing it down.’
‘I don’t think you did, Mum.’
‘I did. I know I did.’
‘I don’t have Mr Jeavons’ number, I’m afraid.’
‘Look it up then,’ says her mother, exasperated. ‘Use the directory.’
‘Mum, I have no idea where he lives.’
‘In London, of course.’
‘I thought he went somewhere else.’
‘Why would he do that?’
‘For work?’ Kate suggests.
‘What work?’
‘I don’t know, Mum.’
‘Why would he leave for work? That doesn’t make sense,’ her mother says. ‘People come to London to work. They don’t leave it,’ she pronounces.
‘That’s usually the case,’ Kate concedes.
‘It doesn’t make any sense,’ her mother mutters. She examines the sky; there is nobody on whom she can depend, her eyes say.
‘I’ll look him up in the directory,’ Kate promises, knowing that tomorrow, or in an hour, this conversation will have been forgotten.
The old man is mumbling into Vernita’s ear. Her mother’s gaze returns to him. In a voice that is suddenly clear and strong, she says: ‘This is horrible. Take me back to my room. I’m tired.’
Kate helps her mother onto the bed; she curves a hand behind her head to ease her onto the pillows; the hair is as insubstantial as a veil of muslin. She is draping the quilt when her mother looks directly at her, and says: ‘Bless you.’
That said, her mother closes her eyes, decisively. She smiles, perhaps in relief, now that the ordeal of convers
ation is over. ‘Thank you,’ she whispers, and within a minute she is asleep.
For a while Kate watches over her. Her mother’s mouth makes a shape like a gasp of surprise, then does not move; her breath makes the sound of air being drawn through a wooden pipe. Kate looks at the face on the pillow, in its nimbus of white hair, and then she looks at the face of Leonor in the later Coimbra photo, in which she stands beside the old woman whom she has come to resemble more closely than she resembles her younger self. Is it possible, Kate wonders, that in her sleep her mother goes back to Coimbra, or some version of Coimbra, and sees it clearly, as it was?
13.
The sisters meet for lunch at the café-delicatessen by the bridge. Naomi arrives late, of course, but within ten minutes of the agreed time. ‘I’m so sorry,’ she gasps. ‘Another five rounds with Gabriel. Sorry. Sorry sorry.’ The beaker of water is drained in five seconds. With a napkin she dabs sweat from her temples and neck; she fans her face with a coaster. This performance is noted by a small boy at an adjacent table; she smiles at him, but the smile is not reciprocated.
‘So,’ says Naomi, having composed herself, ‘how’s Mum?’
‘Been better; been worse,’ Kate answers. She gives Naomi a report. ‘She’s looking forward to seeing you,’ she tells her, and Naomi nods, but says nothing. A good-looking young man puts menus on the table, and directs their attention to the blackboard.
The river is the river Page 8
