by David Lodge
“Mister Walsh? Your auntie been expecting you all day.”
“You did give her my message?” Bernard asked anxiously.
“Sure thing.”
“How is she?”
“Not well. She don’t eat, your auntie. I cook good for her, but she don’t eat nutting.” The woman had a wheedling, slightly aggrieved tone. It was dark in the hallway, after the blinding sunlight outside, and Bernard lingered for a moment to let his eyes adjust. The figure of a small child aged two or three, wearing only a singlet, materialized in the gloom like a developing photograph. He sucked his thumb and stared up at Bernard with big white eyes. A trickle of snot ran from one nostril into the corner of his mouth.
“I don’t suppose she has much of an appetite, Mrs, er…?”
“Jones,” said the woman surprisingly. “My name is Mrs Jones. You tell the hospital I cook good for your auntie, OK?”
“I’m sure you do your best, Mrs Jones,” said Bernard. The phrase sounded stiff and mechanical to his own ears, but also familiar. If he closed his eyes he could have been back in his days of parish visiting, standing in the hallway of a terraced council house or semi-detached villa, waiting to be shown into the sickroom – except that the cooking smells were different here, sweet and spicy. “Can I see my aunt, please?”
“Sure thing.”
He followed Mrs Jones and her child along the hallway, their bare feet slapping the polished wooden floor, wondering whether he should have taken off his own shoes inside the house. The woman knocked on a door and opened it without waiting for a response.
“Missis Riddell, here’s your nephew from England come to see you.”
Ursula was lying on a low truckle bed, covered by a single cotton sheet. One arm, encased in plaster and held in a sling, was outside the sheet. She raised her head from the pillow as he came into the room, and stretched out her good arm in greeting. “Bernard,” she murmured hoarsely. “It’s great to see you.” He took her hand and kissed her on the cheek, and she sank back on to the pillow, still holding his hand tightly. “Thank you,” she said. “Thank you for coming.”
“Well, I’ll leave you folks alone,” said Mrs Jones, retiring and shutting the door behind her.
Bernard pulled a chair up to the side of the bed and sat down. He had ministered to several cancer patients in his time, but it was nevertheless a shock to see the pitifully thin limbs, the dull yellowish skin, the stark ridge of the collarbone under the thin cotton nightie. Only the eyes, bright blue like his father’s, gleamed with undiminished life deep in their bruised sockets. He could hardly connect this wasted, white-haired old lady with the vivacious, buxom blonde in her polka-dotted dress who had descended upon his home in Brickley all those years ago, scattering American candies and American vowels to an astonished and mildly scandalized household. But she was unmistakably his aunt. The Walsh head, high-browed, narrow, beaky, was all too recognizable – it was almost a skull. It was like a premonitory glimpse of what his father would look like on his deathbed – or he himself.
“Where’s Jack?” said Ursula.
“I’m afraid Daddy’s had an accident.” Bernard was surprised by the keenness of his own disappointment as he made this admission, and realized that for the past week he had been entertaining a kind of sentimental fantasy, in which he presided proudly over a moving reunion of brother and sister, all tears and smiles and violin music. It was his own vanity, as well as his father’s hip, that had been injured by the accident.
“Oh, God,” said Ursula, when he had given her an account of the day’s events. “This is terrible. He’ll blame me for this.”
“He’ll blame me,” said Bernard. “I blame myself.”
“It wasn’t your fault.”
“I should have kept a closer eye on him.”
“Jack always was a holy terror about crossing the road. Drove Mammy crazy when we were kids. You’re sure the insurance will cover everything?”
“Apparently. Including the fares home – it looks as if we shall overrun our fortnight.”
“That reminds me – did you get the money from my bank?”
“Yes.” He patted the bulging wallet in the breast pocket of his shirt.
“My God, Bernard, you don’t mean to say you’re walking around with two-and-a-half thousand dollars in cash?”
“I came straight here from the bank.”
“You might have been mugged. Waikiki’s full of criminals these days. For heaven’s sake, convert it into travellers cheques, or hide it in the apartment. There’s a brown cookie jar in the kitchen cupboard that I use.”
“All right. But what about you, Ursula? How are you?”
“I’m OK. Well, not too good, to tell you the truth.”
“Are you in pain?”
“Not too bad. I have these pills.”
“Mrs Jones says you don’t eat much.”
“I don’t like the kind of food she cooks. She’s from Fiji or the Philippines or one of those places, they have a different kind of diet from us.”
“You must eat.”
“I don’t have any appetite. I’ve been constipated ever since I got here. I think it’s the painkillers. And it’s so darned hot.” She flapped the sheet to fan herself. “The trades don’t seem to find their way into this bit of Honolulu.”
Bernard looked around the small, bare room. The blind on the window was broken and hung down lopsidedly over a view of the back yard, which seemed to be full of abandoned domestic appliances, refrigerators and washing machines, rusting and overgrown. There was a stain on one wall, where rainwater had penetrated and then dried. The wooden floor was dusty. “Is this the best place the hospital could find to put you in?”
“It was the cheapest. My health plan only covers hospitalization, not nursing care afterwards. I’m not a wealthy woman, Bernard.”
“But doesn’t your husband, your ex-husband …”
“Alimony doesn’t go on for ever, you know. Anyway, Rick’s dead. He died some years ago.”
“I didn’t know that.”
“Nobody in the family knows it, because I didn’t tell them. I’ve been living mainly on social security and it isn’t easy. Honolulu has the highest cost of living in the States, you know. Nearly everything has to be imported. They call it the paradise tax.”
“But you have some savings?”
“A little. Not as much as I should have. I made some bad investments in the seventies, lost a lot. Now I only have blue-chips, but they took a tumble in eighty-seven.” She winced as if from a spasm of pain, and shifted her weight under the sheet.
“Does your specialist visit you here?” Bernard asked.
“The arrangement is that Mrs Jones calls him at the hospital if she thinks it is necessary. But they don’t encourage it.”
“Has he been here at all?”
“No.”
“I’ll get in touch with him. Mrs Knoepflmacher gave me his number.”
Ursula pulled a face. “So you’ve met Sophie?”
“She seems very nice.”
“She’s nosy as hell. Don’t tell her anything, or it’ll be all round the apartment block before you can blink.”
“She was very helpful when Daddy and I arrived. She met us at the airport.”
“Poor Jack!” Ursula moaned. “It doesn’t seem fair. You and Jack make all this effort, travelling halfway round the globe to see a poor sick old woman, and the first thing that happens is one of you gets run over. Why does God allow things like that to happen?”
Bernard was silent.
Ursula cocked a bright blue eye at him. “You do still believe in God, don’t you, Bernard?”
“Not exactly,” he said.
“Oh. I’m sorry to hear that.” Ursula closed her eyes and looked despondent.
“You knew I’d left the Church, didn’t you?”
“I knew you’d left the priesthood. I didn’t know you’d given up the Faith altogether.” She opened her eyes again. “There was a woman yo
u wanted to marry, wasn’t there?”
Bernard nodded.
“But it didn’t work out?”
“No.”
“And I guess they wouldn’t let you back after that, would they? As a priest, I mean.”
“I didn’t want to go back, Ursula. I hadn’t had any real faith for years. I’d just been going through the motions, too timid to do anything about it. Daphne was just … a catalyst.”
“What’s that? It sounds like something nasty they do to you in hospital when you can’t pass water.”
“That’s a catheter, I think,” Bernard said with a smile. “A catalyst is a chemical term. It’s –”
“Don’t tell me, Bernard. I can die not knowing what a catalyst is. We have more important things to talk about. I was hoping that you could answer some of my questions about the Faith. There are things I still find difficult to believe.”
“I’m afraid I’m the wrong person to ask, Ursula. I’m afraid I’m a great disappointment to you in every way.”
“No, no, it’s a great comfort to have you here.”
“Is there anything else you’d like to talk about?”
Ursula sighed. “Well, there are all kinds of decisions to be made. Such as whether to give up the apartment.”
“Perhaps that would be sensible,” said Bernard. “If …”
“If I’m never going back to it?” Ursula completed the thought for him. “But what will I do with all my stuff? Store it? Too expensive. Sell it? I hate the thought of the likes of Sophie Knoepflmacher picking over my belongings. And where do I go? I can’t stay here indefinitely.”
“A proper nursing home, perhaps.”
“Have you any idea what those places cost?”
“No, but I could find out.”
“They’re astronomical.”
“Look, Ursula,” said Bernard, “let’s be practical. You’ve got a certain number of realizable assets, on top of your pension. Let’s work out what it all amounts to.”
“You mean if I sold my stocks? And lived on the capital? Oh no, I wouldn’t want to do that,” said Ursula, shaking her head vehemently. “What would happen if the money ran out before I die?”
“We’d try and guard against that,” said Bernard.
“I tell you what would happen. I’d end up in a State home. I visited somebody in one of those places once. Way out in the country. Low class of people. Some of them were crazy. And it smelled like some of them were incontinent. All sitting in a great big room, round the walls.” She shuddered. “I’d die in a place like that.”
The word “die” hung mockingly in the humid air.
“Look at it from another point of view, Ursula,” Bernard said. “What’s the point in not spending your savings? Why not make the rest of your life as comfortable as possible?”
“I don’t want to die a pauper. I want to leave something to somebody. You, for instance.”
“Don’t be ridiculous. I don’t need your money.”
“That wasn’t the impression you gave me on the phone last week.”
“I don’t need it, and I don’t want it.” He added a fib: “Neither does anyone else.”
“If I don’t leave a will, I’ll be forgotten, I’ll leave no trace. I have no child. I’ve done nothing with my life. What could they put on my tombstone? ‘She played a mean game of bridge.’ ‘At 69 she could still swim a half a mile.’ ‘Her chocolate fudge was very popular.’ That’s about it.” Ursula fumbled in a box of paper tissues at her bedside, and wiped her eyes.
“I won’t forget you,” Bernard said gently. “I’ll never forget the time you visited us at home, in London, when I was a boy, in your red and white dress.”
“Hey, I remember that dress! It was white, with red polka dots, right? Fancy your remembering.” Ursula smiled reminiscently, pleased.
Bernard glanced at his watch. “I’d better go now. I have to call back at the hospital to see how Daddy’s getting on. I’ll come back tomorrow.” He kissed her bony cheek and left.
Mrs Jones ambushed him in the dark hallway. “Your auntie OK?”
“Well, she’s badly constipated.”
“That’s because she don’t eat.”
“I’m going to talk to her doctor.”
“You tell him I cook good for your auntie, OK?”
“Yes, Mrs Jones,” said Bernard patiently, and let himself out.
He had left the car parked in the sun, and the heat inside took his breath away. The plastic-covered seat seared the backs of his thighs through his trousers and the steering wheel was almost too hot to hold. But he was glad to be out of the dark airless house and Ursula’s bleak sick-room. He remembered the feeling well from parochial visiting – the selfish but irrepressible lift of the spirits as the front door of the afflicted house closed behind you, the animal satisfaction of being healthy and mobile rather than ill and bedridden.
He put the gear lever into Drive and turned the ignition key. Nothing happened, and several anxious and perspiring moments passed before he discovered that the engine would only start in the Park position. It had been running when he took over the vehicle that morning outside the car-hire firm’s premises. He had never driven an automatic car before, and his journey to Mrs Jones’s house had been a somewhat nervewracking experience. When accelerating, his left foot had a tendency to depress the brake pedal as if it were a clutch, in preparation for the next gear change, causing the car to screech to an emergency stop, and provoking indignant hornblasts from drivers following close behind. The best way to avoid this, he worked out, was to tuck his left foot under the driver’s seat, even though it required him to adopt a rather crippled sitting posture. He adopted it now, as he transferred his right foot from the brake to the accelerator, and the car glided away from the kerb. His lips twitched with an irrepressible grin of childish glee. He had always enjoyed driving, and the magical effortlessness of the automatic gearbox enhanced the pleasure. He wound the window down to let the breeze cool the car’s interior.
At St Joseph’s, Sonia Mee took Bernard’s insurance policy and seemed satisfied with what she read in it. She told Bernard that his father had been transferred to the main hospital, and he found him behind a screen in a two-bed room, asleep, under sedation. The saline drip had been removed from his arm, and he was breathing peacefully. He was wearing a hospital nightshirt. The sister in charge told Bernard what he should bring in the next day by way of clothing and toilet requisites. Recalling the aged pyjamas his father had worn to bed the previous night, faded and clumsily darned, with two buttons missing, Bernard privately resolved to buy him a couple of new pairs on the way home.
The receptionist in the lobby recommended a department store called Penney’s and gave him directions to the Ala Moana Shopping Center, a vast complex built over an even vaster car-park, where he wandered, quite lost, for some thirty minutes, among fountains and foliage and glittering musical boutiques that sold everything except men’s pyjamas, until he stumbled upon Penney’s at the top of an escalator, and made his purchases. He bought himself some lightweight clothing while he was about it: a couple of short-sleeved shirts, khaki shorts, and a pair of cotton trousers. The sales assistant stared as he peeled two hundred-dollar bills off the wad inside his wallet. As soon as he got back to the apartment, he hid most of the money in the cookie jar described by Ursula. He telephoned the Geyser Hospital and made an appointment to speak to Ursula’s specialist the next morning. He sat down in an armchair and started to make a list of other things that he had to do – calculate the value of Ursula’s assets, inquire about nursing homes – but was suddenly overcome with fatigue. He closed his eyes for a moment and fell instantly asleep.
He was woken by the sound of the telephone ringing. It was eight o’clock, and nearly dark outside: he had been asleep for over an hour.
“Hallo, this is Yolande Miller,” said a female voice.
“Who?”
“The accident this morning? I was the driver of the car.”
“I just wanted to know how your father’s doing.”
Bernard gave a her brief résumé.
“Well, I’m glad it’s no worse,” said Yolande Miller, “but I guess it’s ruined your vacation,”
“We’re not here on vacation.” said Bernard, and explained why they had come to Hawaii.
“That’s too bad. So your father hasn’t even seen his sister yet?”
“No, they’re both confined to bed. Only a few miles apart, but it might as well be a thousand. I suppose they’ll manage to meet eventually, but it’s a bit of a mess.”
“You musn’t blame yourself,” said Yolande Miller.
“What?” Bernard wasn’t sure that he had heard correctly.
“I get the impression that you’re blaming yourself for what happened.”
“Well, of course I blame myself,” he burst out. “This whole expedition was my idea. Well, not exactly my idea, but I arranged it, I encouraged my father to come. He would never have had the accident if I hadn’t brought him here. Instead of being in pain, in hospital, in a foreign country, he would be safe and sound in his own home. Of course I blame myself.”
“I could do that. I could say to myself, ‘Yolande, you should have guessed the old man was going to step off the pavment, you should never have gone into Waikiki to shop anyway’ – hardly ever do, actually, but I saw an ad in the paper about a sportswear sale … I could say all that. But it wouldn’t make any difference. These things happen. You have to put them behind you and carry on. You’re probably thinking this is none of my business.”
“No, no,” said Bernard, though the thought had not been far from his mind.
“But I’m a personal counsellor, you see. It’s a reflex response.”
