Thomas and Mary

by Tim Parks

  ‘I loved a game of Scrabble,’ she sighed.

  ‘So I’ll go and get a board,’ I said, deadpan. ‘I’m sure they have board games here.’

  She looked disappointed. ‘Bored?’ Then she guessed she hadn’t heard correctly. ‘I’m too tired to be bored, love.’

  ‘I said, I’ll go and get a Scrabble board. Scrabble.’

  She saw I was laughing.

  ‘Perhaps I’ll have the beating of you, at last,’ I cried.

  She looked at me, melancholy and perplexed, and I realised she was too tired for banter. I always lost to Mrs P at Scrabble. Putting my hand through the railing, I took hers, which was whitely fleshy and worryingly cold. I squeezed and she squeezed faintly back and at once her eyes closed and the lower lip sank back into the mouth and she was asleep.

  I always lost at Scrabble to Mrs P because she had a sharp mind, was formidably competitive and played a great deal more than I did. The triple-letter and, above all, the triple-word scores were constantly present to her. But the pious person who wishes to compete has to choose her opponents carefully. I’m sure Mrs P enjoyed playing my brother far more than she enjoyed playing me, because he is more or less unbeatable at any board game and so she could compete with him to the very best of her ability without fearing the guilt she would always feel when she won with me. My brother would never grant to anybody a single point more than was necessary. By the same token Mrs P would never have felt the need to challenge my brother on his lack of faith since he made it scathingly clear that he was beyond such challenges. Conversely, with my sister, the eldest of the three, Mrs P would never play Scrabble at all, since it was generally understood – and indeed broadcast to the four winds, above all by my sister herself – that she was not ‘brainy’ (her word), hence to play her at something like Scrabble would have entailed a massacre. Likewise, there was no need to challenge my sister on her faith, since she had it in abundance. My sister was a pillar of faith; in proportion, my brother had sometimes cruelly suggested, as she was not ‘brainy’. There was always a great confusion surrounding piety and intellect in our family, to the point that no one was ever really sure if there wasn’t a touch of devilry in every intelligence and a touch of dumbness in every piety. All the same, you had to be one or the other, either smart or good. No member of the family could ever have contemplated being neither intelligent nor pious. Only the Reverend P had somehow contrived to be both but he had died shortly after his sixtieth birthday, leaving the field divided.

  In any event, whenever Mrs P started winning at Scrabble – and with me this would generally happen around moves five and six as the ramifying letters reached out towards the triple-word scores – whenever the points that separated us, which she diligently recorded with a system of pegs at the top of her letter holder, started to look decisive, Mrs P would step in on my side with generous suggestions: Did I have an S, she would ask, to build a word on the end of ‘altar’ over to the double-word score? Or did I have a K to create something on the top of ‘nave’? Then it was fascinating to watch her helping me out, or trying to, seeking to protect me from any possible feelings of embarrassment at my ineptitude, while at the same time never renouncing the idea of winning, because in the end, as I said, and however much against her better instincts, she couldn’t help competing, couldn’t help wanting to win, just as she hadn’t been able to help wanting to convince me, in extremis, to give my hard heart to Jesus. What a victory that would have been! Meantime, back with the Scrabble, I might have sunk half a bottle of wine or more, or the over-sweet sherry she liked, so that the letters I had pulled out of the bag began to seem a little soft at the edges, simply refusing to organise themselves into recognisable patterns, and anyway it was far more interesting following this back and forth of Mrs P’s, as she was torn between beating me and protecting me, than trying to follow the growing tangle of words on the board. The truth is Scrabble always bored me.

  Now Mrs P slept. I held her left hand. The arm was swollen with lymph; it was heavy and fatty. Below her neck, above her nightdress, were traces of inflammation and patches of dressing. Removing the breasts, some years before, had not prevented the cancer from invading her chest. She had gone to the doctors too late. There were open and ‘weeping’ tumours, she once told me. ‘Ugly and smelly.’ Mrs P rarely spoke about such things, but when she did, she was blunt and to the point, so that now, thinking of her poor offended body, I remembered a conversation we had had about a year before, perhaps over one of those games of Scrabble, about the mind and the body. I had insisted, rather zealously, that mind and body were one, only existing as separate entities in the precarious system language is. ‘Quite simply we are our bodies,’ I had declared emphatically. ‘And our bodies are us.’ But Mrs P had objected that this just couldn’t be true. Her body aged and declined, she said, and the more it did so, the more she felt separate from it. She was not her cancer. And she felt sure the soul enjoyed eternal life and that her body would remain on this earth until the Resurrection Day, while her soul would be taken up to be with the Lord, in paradise.

  I looked at her body now on this hi-tech bed in Woking Hospice; there was an intermittent twitch in her left shoulder and her legs too twitched at the knee from time to time, and I asked myself if Mrs P was indeed to be entirely and absolutely identified with this suffering body. I started to think about this, but the more I did so – the more I tried to bring some lucid thinking to this ancient chestnut, the relationship between mind and body, self and flesh – the more the question seemed completely meaningless, merely part of a will to unhappiness on my part, or to mental troublemaking. Changing changing changing, at every moment Mrs P nevertheless remained Mrs P, my Mrs P, her recognisable self. Now a suffering woman dozing in a hospice bed. To what end pursue the matter further? What purpose would be served by leaning to this or that unverifiable hypothesis? The important thing was to be with Mrs P now in this brief space that remained to us.

  My eye moved over her with a kind of wonder at what she had become, what she was becoming; then it moved across the room to the chairs, the swing table the other side of the bed with its plastic baby bottles for drinking without spills, the rose-patterned curtains, a loudly ticking wall-clock, some official notices pinned on a board just a little too far away for me to read but nevertheless conveying a sense of restriction and institutional imperatives. They would be about things one must not do.

  Then my eye came back to the bedside table. A radio. A white water jug, the phone, and beside the phone a book: What To Do When Faith Seems Weak & Victory Lost, by Kenneth E Hagin. This troubled me. Why was she reading this book? Not out of need, surely? I did not want Mrs P to lose her faith at the end. She had wanted me to find faith, something that didn’t interest me in the slightest, the Christian story seems grotesque to me. But just the thought that she might doubt her faith, and doubt it now, at the end, bewildered me, horrified me. Registering the intensity of this reaction, I was obliged to acknowledge that I counted on her faith. I had faith in Mrs P’s faith. How odd, I thought, that I needed someone else to go on believing something I myself not only didn’t believe, but couldn’t even really rouse any interest in; in order, presumably, that things would remain the same, that the people around me all stay in their proper places. Which was perhaps why others needed me to stay with Mary.

  I picked up the book, which was not a slim volume, and turned it over in my hands. I read the title again. The words were printed over a photoshopped image of an iron shield with a sword lying across it. It was a battle, a competition, then. But, unlike Scrabble, a battle one couldn’t afford to lose. When faith seems weak, I noticed now. Not is weak. When victory seems lost, but in fact is still victory. It was a curious title, naming a crisis, but at the same time suggesting it wasn’t a real crisis. Only a seems. Defeat wasn’t really contemplated. Though of course something needed to be done. Otherwise why read the book? What, though? What did one do to bolster one’s faith? I had no intention of finding out.
The book wasn’t addressed to me, to someone who had no faith that might one day be, or merely seem, weak, to a man, in short, so faithless as to contemplate leaving his wife of thirty-two years. Anyway, whatever it was that needed doing, I thought, Mrs P, could be counted on to be doing it, or to have already done it. She would have read Kenneth E Hagin’s advice carefully. She would have taken all appropriate steps. No, the important thing for Mrs P was to take her faith along with her grey hairs to the grave. For my sake as much as for hers. Because it was impossible to imagine Mrs P without faith. She would become someone else and then I too would have to change. Even the erratic course I steered, perhaps, made a little sense in relation to her steadfastness. And as I was thinking these odd thoughts, my sister walked into the room and my privileged time with Mrs P was over.

  My sister was also much changed, but then I hadn’t seen her for rather longer. Some years. She had lost weight, she had dyed her hair honey blonde and put in pink highlights. She looked well and, with discreetly applied makeup, much younger than her sixty-three years. Mrs P, I immediately thought, had never dyed her hair, or applied make-up. In fact it was even less imaginable that Mrs P dye her hair, than that she lose her faith. For some reason the two did not seem unconnected; although, as I said before, my sister is the most religious of the three children and has always dyed hers, or at least ever since the various calamities that overwhelmed her in her thirties and caused her to go prematurely grey. Now, after briefly but warmly greeting me, she went round to the other side of the bed, leaned over Mrs P and stroked her hair, and assured her in the voice of one speaking to a child that all was well, that the Lord Jesus was looking after her, that He would never let her down and that she mustn’t worry about needing to entertain us or look after us. She didn’t. We required nothing of her, there was nothing she need do but relax and lie there.

  I was a little surprised that my sister felt the need to say all this, since Mrs P had shown no signs of being anxious to entertain us, though it was true that this had been her constant, lifelong concern when visitors came to her tiny house. Mrs P had always been afraid of disappointing, and that fear easily turned into a need to control, to over-perform, to make you eat things you didn’t want to eat, to wash and clean things that didn’t need washing and cleaning, something my sister had no doubt found oppressive at times when she had urgently needed Mrs P’s help but not her smothering anxiousness. And in fact, however patronising my sister’s words might have seemed to me, I noticed that Mrs P’s face did actually smooth out as she spoke, as though in her sleep – if it was sleep rather than simply exhaustion – she were taking comfort from her daughter’s reminding her that God has everything under control, however much, to others of us, it may seem that nothing is ever really under control and that life, even when boring, is unspeakably precarious.

  It was 3.30 or thereabouts and thus began Mrs P’s last twenty-four hours, since she would expire – the word is appropriate – at 3.20 the following day, at exactly the moment I would need to leave her bedside to catch my bus to the airport, as if in her determination never to be the slightest bother to anyone Mrs P had been willing herself to depart in time for me to watch her go and still arrive punctually at Heathrow for my rather shorter journey, perhaps not appreciating that, having watched a parent die, it would not be easy even for a faithless son to grab his bag and head for the airport.

  In any event, the time for private exchanges was now definitely behind us. Already the visitors were flowing thick and fast. First my uncle came, Mrs P’s younger brother who had recently lost his wife, followed a few minutes later by his son, my cousin, who had returned to London from Cork to be beside his father in the difficult aftermath of his bereavement, only to find him facing a second bereavement. And indeed the poor man looked needier even than his sister, certainly more troubled, sitting heavily by the bed, wringing his heavy old hands. Now my brother-in-law arrived, my sister’s husband, and explained that first he had had trouble finding a parking space for the van, then had had to walk the dogs they had brought with them, since the animals couldn’t be left behind with the woman who was looking after their daughter, their seriously disabled daughter, and he fired up his iPad and began to show us photographs of these dogs – a handsome Irish Setter and a white Pomeranian – and when Mrs P could not raise her head to look at his iPad he told her with no change in his cheerful tone of voice that he could already see her dancing down the golden streets of paradise with the Reverend P, my father, deceased thirty-two years before. But my sister, I noticed, was more careful with the evangelical talk in the presence of my uncle and cousin. My uncle and his son, my cousin that is, I realised, were to be spared the religious rhetoric. They were not part of the inner circle. Then two nurses came for the bedpan and a change of sheets and we visitors were invited to retire and make ourselves instant coffee in the guest lounge.

  So it went on for the entire afternoon and early evening – long watches beside the bed interspersed with breaks drinking coffee in the lounge – until another nurse came into the room and said she had my brother on the phone and did Mrs P wish to take the call? Then Mrs P, whom I sometimes suspected was merely lying low so she would not have to waste energy discussing dogs and iPads, immediately perked up and said yes, yes, she would take it, and when, a few moments later, the phone on the bedside table rang, she actually raised herself, albeit with some effort, on to an elbow, reached out a shaking hand, lifted the receiver and brought it back to her large ear, as if she were her old self again; and even when she called my brother by the wrong name – by her brother’s name, that is – none of us considered this a sign of dementia since Mrs P had always mixed up the names of those she loved, though for all other names, and especially for biblical verses, she had a memory second to none.

  ‘Not very well,’ Mrs P confessed to this son whose soul she had given up for lost.

  ‘Oh, very comfortable, thanks,’ she told the man who always beat her at Scrabble.

  ‘Yes, I know it’s a long way to come,’ she agreed. ‘Yes, of course, I understand, my dear, and at such short notice … No,’ she said. ‘I can imagine. Don’t you worry, love. I’m being well looked after.’

  She put the phone down, and perhaps twenty minutes later the vomiting began.

  So – and this I hadn’t foreseen – there was to be one last serious exchange between myself and Mrs P and a last decision for me to take that had intimately to do with our relationship. She had vomited three or four basins of black blood – curious disposable basins, made of that rough compressed cardboard they once used for egg boxes – then fallen into a deep sleep. Given this deterioration, I had decided to stay the night in the hospice rather than with my uncle. There was a well-upholstered recliner in the room. The head nurse seemed rather pleased about this, since it meant somebody would be constantly at hand if Mrs P had another crisis. And so it was. Shortly before midnight she had asked for water. I had given her the plastic cup with the easy-drinking lid, a cup in every way like those I had given my children in their playpens. However, when she tried to swallow, a river of black blood frothed out.

  I had not expected to have to show practical skills; all the same, grabbing basins and calling nurses was rather easier than being challenged on one’s faith. ‘I want to go tonight,’ Mrs P cried as the two young women cleaned her up. ‘Dear Jesus take me tonight.’ The nurses asked me to step into the corridor for five minutes while they changed her soaking sheets, and when I returned and again sat beside her and took her hands and called her Mum, she looked perplexed.

  ‘I thought you had gone to the hotel, dear.’

  ‘No, I’m staying.’

  She didn’t understand.

  ‘I’ll sleep on the chair.’

  ‘Well, goodnight,’ she said. ‘I hope it’s a nice hotel.’ Then she muttered, ‘I’m not worried about you splitting with Mary, Thomas. I’m worried about you dithering.’

  The nurse came in to check her blood pressure. While the pad
was pumping up, Mrs P said. ‘My son is just going to his hotel. Goodnight, Thomas.’

  The nurse raised an eyebrow in my direction.

  ‘I’m staying with you, Mum,’ I said. ‘I’m staying here. In case you’re sick again.’

  Then at last she understood and a look almost of panic tensed her drugged lips and cheeks.

  ‘I don’t want you to see me like this, Thomas.’

  I was holding one hand while the nurse pumped the blood pressure pad around the other wrist.

  ‘But I don’t mind, Mum. I’m glad to help.’

  ‘I don’t want you to see,’ she repeated.

  In the corridor I spoke to the nurse, the head nurse. They could prepare me a bed in a guest room, she told me. Obviously they would fetch me at once if there were ‘developments’. Or I could lie on the recliner. Mrs P was sleeping again. They had adjusted her medication in response to the new situation. She would probably not even be aware I was there. On the other hand, she had expressed a very clear preference.

  I sat in the guest lounge and drank coffee, watched some football highlights. Why did I want to stay in my mother’s room? Did I think I could help her, protect her, reassure her? Did I want to be a hero, want to tell people I had spent the night beside her, the night she died? She is not reassured by your presence, I told myself. On the contrary, she is perturbed to think that her son, her younger son, is seeing her in this state. Mrs P wants you to find faith and love for Jesus, she wants you to be decisive about your marriage, but she does not want you to show your love for her in this way. Perhaps she was afraid as much of what I might hear as see: some outcry perhaps, some doubt, some moment when faith seemed weak and victory lost. She wanted to protect me from that, protect me for one last night from death. All at once it was easy to see that I must respect her wish. I must protect her from realising she had lost her protecting role towards me.