Breaking and Entering

by Wendy Perriam

  Perhaps this crisis was a warning to him, a salutary shock to bring him to his senses while he still had time to put things right. Once his mother was discharged, he’d devote his evenings and weekends to her – work at fostering a relationship he’d so culpably neglected. He began running through the things they’d do as soon as she was well enough: gentle strolls in her favourite park, visits to museums, meals together, even excursions to the countryside.

  The cab was speeding up, thank God, and they must be nearly there. He recognized that spiky modern sculpture they had passed a week ago, when he’d accompanied his mother on her first dash to the hospital. Could it only be a week ago? It seemed like another lifetime – his existence now divided into before and after Penny. Except he mustn’t think of Penny, must banish her from his mind, focus every shred of energy on his mother.

  He was already poised to leap out – a clutch of banknotes in one hand and the other on the door-handle. He didn’t wait for change or thanks, but sprinted towards the elegant grey building, resenting the opulence of its façade. Behind those marble columns, those carved swags of fruit and flowers, people’s mothers were fighting for their lives. It was like a mausoleum – grandeur shrouding bones.

  Inside, the twentieth century was more in evidence. Stark white corridors led off from a reception area, with glaring fluorescent lights and padded vinyl benches, and, to the right, a row of high-speed lifts. The middle lift stood open, though already crammed with bodies. Noiselessly, the doors began to close. He dived forward and squeezed in. He was pressed against a woman who smelt of cheap carnation scent; could see the fillings in her teeth as her red zipped mouth burst open in a laugh.

  The lift glided from floor to floor, people elbowing in and out, delaying him still further as they manoeuvred bulky pushchairs, or dithered over which button to press. Every time the doors closed, he jabbed number seven – seven floors, like the treacherous Hotel Manchester. They should be going down, not up: down to fear and darkness, the furthest pole from paradise.

  He pushed out first, unsure which way to go, then saw the name of his mother’s ward, with an arrow pointing to the right. He followed the directions, overtaking a porter wheeling a trolley; averted his eyes from the ashen-faced woman lying on it, swaddled in a sheet. ‘Let her be all right,’ he prayed, determinedly picturing the future: himself and his mother walking in the park together, or admiring the Veroneses in the Louvre.

  A young nurse touched his arm, pointed to a notice: Défense de fumer. He removed his cigarette, irrationally annoyed. He had to smoke – at least until he had seen his mother and knew that she was safe.

  His steps began to falter as he approached the wide swing-doors. Unthinkingly, he straightened his tie, smoothed his ruffled hair. Then he took a deep breath in, slipped through the doors and went straight up to the desk; identified himself as Madame Hughson’s son.

  This nurse was older, plainer, with a sallow coarse-grained skin. She asked him to come into the office and sit down. He sat stiffly, with his hands clasped, noticing tiny irrelevant details: a scuff-mark on the lino, the ridged sole of her shoe. A clock was ticking through the silence. He liked that safe white silence. So long as no one spoke, his mother was alive.

  The nurse cleared her throat, shifted on her chair. ‘Monsieur …’ she began. Her voice was all compassion and respect, the alabaster voice of death. ‘Je suis navrée de vous informer que votre mère est …’

  ‘Non! Non!’ He cut her short, excised the hideous word. ‘No,’ he repeated, breaking into English. ‘It isn’t true. You’re wrong!’

  He stumbled to the window, looked out at the skyline. The view was very fine from here. You could see the Eiffel Tower, and the graceful spire of the church of …’

  No, you could see nothing but the rain – rotting the grey stonework, weeping down the panes – and death, everywhere. A dead bird on the roof below, dead leaves on the trees, and that path down there was only a dead end. He pressed his forehead against the glass. Dead end.

  ‘Monsieur Hughson, je comprends bien votre émotion. Vous avez subi un grand choc, mats je vous assure …’

  The marble voice was dirging on behind him, but he was hearing different words – a child’s book, read aloud.

  ‘I’m sorry to say that Peter was not very well. His mother put him to bed and made him some camomile tea.’

  He repeated the words to himself, still not moving from the window. ‘His mother put him to bed and …’

  ‘No,’ he said, shaking his head and watching in bewilderment as someone’s tears fell scalding on his hands. ‘You see, she never had the time.’

  Chapter Seven

  Daniel was bursting for a pee. But he could hardly stop the car and risk losing track of the vehicle ahead – the small white private ambulance which contained his mother’s coffin. He had tried as far as possible not to be parted from her body. He had taken leave from work, so as to devote every waking moment to her: sorting out her things; checking through her address-book for all the friends he should contact; arranging her funeral in England via a series of long-distance phone-calls. Then, just this morning, he had accompanied her on the plane from Paris, resentful that he’d had to sit beside a young canoodling couple who’d spent the entire journey exchanging kisses and sweet nothings, while she lay in the cargo-hold, alone.

  The English undertakers had met him at Heathrow – a pair of sombre-suited men with plaster-lily expressions and fulsome voices to match – and they were now on their way, in convoy, to the small decaying south coast town where his father was already buried. The grave would be opened and the second coffin laid on top, reuniting his parents in death after their forty years of life together. Secretly, he had balked at the instructions in the will – all that paraphernalia and unwarranted expense – but, as obedient son, he could do nothing but comply.

  He changed down for the bend, then accelerated up the hill, anxious to keep the ambulance in sight. It felt strange to be behind the wheel again after eight months without a car. He had sold his Renault 5 before he moved to Paris, and this Astra was a hire-car he had collected from the airport. He’d particularly asked for a black one when he’d originally made the booking, but the model which materialized was red. He hadn’t made a fuss. The flaunting scarlet seemed a fitting symbol of his guilt. A dozen different guilts were churning in his mind at present – the long delay perhaps the worst of all. It was nearly three weeks since his mother’s death, and the funeral was still four days away. He had all but foundered in red tape: footling regulations entrapping him on every side; officials to placate; endless documents to sign; to say nothing of the decisions about coffin, service, wording of the death notice. His mother never dithered or procrastinated; she would have abhorred the waste of time, the indignity of remaining so long unburied.

  He braked sharply to avoid running into the back of the ambulance. Unwittingly he had come up right behind, as if he couldn’t bear any distance between his mother and himself. Yet was it still his mother shut up in that monstrous box? They had shrouded it in hessian to disguise it on the plane. Businessmen and lovers couldn’t be expected to have their pleasant journey spoilt by any glimpse of death. He had learned already how everyone denied death. In fact, his mother hadn’t died at all: she’d passed over to the other side; gone to her eternal rest. And those dexterous French embalmers had contrived to restore her to the pink of health. Another source of guilt – the phoney titivation of a woman who preferred the natural look: rouge and powder larded on a face unused to any make-up; straight hair coiffed in curls. He had broken down and wept when he’d seen her primped like that; had been crying on and off since his first outburst at the hospital. Yet his parents and his school had both taught him the importance of concealing one’s emotions behind the traditional stiff upper lip. It was a wonder he wasn’t crying now, with that horrendous vehicle in front: its blacked-out windows signalling death, its raw red cross for danger. But the control he needed for his bladder seemed to have
extended to his eyes; both tightly held in check.

  He reached down for a cigarette, fumbled with the lighter on the dashboard. These last few weeks he had been smoking more than ever; felt so desolate some days he craved a stronger drug, something to numb his mind, drown the harsh regrets. He glanced out at the bare late-autumn countryside. It looked tired and apathetic: hedges battered, dowdy trees half-naked, the clouds lying very low, as if the sky had suffered an injury and was falling on the fields. The light was muted, a dingy sallow-grey; the sun too lethargic to break through.

  He slowed to check a signpost – only two and a half miles to go now. The journey had been swift and uneventful: little traffic on the roads; no hold-ups or diversions; the only log-jams those in his own head. He felt increasingly uneasy about this whole palaver, the unnecessary upheaval, the distances involved. His mother should have been buried in some gracious Parisian cemetery, where her son could visit every week and her friends attend the funeral. As it was, she’d be lucky if half a dozen mourners turned up in this backwater.

  A sprawl of stagnant shops and a garage strung with plastic flags heralded the outskirts of the town. The ambulance continued straight on, heading for the funeral directors’ office in the High Street. He dithered at the crossroads, unable to decide whether to accompany his mother on the last lap of the journey, or make a short detour to visit her old home – his dead and living mothers tugging him two ways.

  The living mother won. He swung left, then left again, surprised that he remembered the way when he had visited so rarely. His parents had returned to England after a lifetime spent in Africa, only a month before he himself left for Tanzania, so that they were making the same journey but in opposite directions. But then wasn’t that the story of his life?

  The pebble-dash semis were beginning to thin out, replaced by dumpy bungalows set decorously apart. He continued down a rutted road, pulled up outside ‘Seaview’. The new owners hadn’t changed its name, despite the blatant lie. (The coast was a good three miles away; the only water in sight a small ornamental pond in the rockery next door.) It was still a mystery to him why his parents should have retired here in the first place, when they had no connections with the area, no friends or contacts to provide a base for their new life. He suspected they had idealized the delights of rural England; let themselves be sold on the notion of a country cottage with roses round the door and an idyllic sandy beach just a stone’s throw from the garden.

  That garden had changed utterly, he noted with dismay as he got out of the car and walked towards the fence. His father’s well-staked dahlias and crazy-paving path had given place to muddy grass littered with broken toys. Three young children were playing in the front, muffled up in coats, while their scruffy dog raced round and round in circles. He watched the trio hungrily – a normal traditional family with brothers, sisters, pets; five people sitting round a table sharing boisterous meals, instead of a lone boy eating in the kitchen while his black nanny ironed the sheets. This house had never seemed like home to him on his three or four brief visits here, especially after his father died. The memories of that first death came suddenly choking back: the grim hearse at the door; the stilted funeral tea; his mother’s mask-like face as she played the stoical hostess, mouthed the correct urbanities.

  The role of full-time widow had proved even more constricting, so she had jumped at the chance of upping sticks to Paris with an old and trusted friend who had worked with her in Lusaka – a woman called, improbably, Marigold Ross-Pilkington. He had tried to share her pleasure at the move, hiding his disappointment that the nearest he had ever had to a proper English home was about to be abandoned. He doubted that his mother ever thought of the place again. The two women had enjoyed a brief but busy time together, involving themselves in a whole host of activities which, after Marigold’s early death, his mother then continued on her own. And today her final obligation was to rejoin her husband in the country of their birth.

  Though not his birth, he reflected, as he edged closer to the gate and tried to peer in through the windows. He half-expected to see his parents still sitting in the alcove reading some report, or earnestly discussing the problems of recruiting teachers in the poorer African countries. But he couldn’t see a thing through the grubby white net curtains, and the eldest child was watching him suspiciously, so he carried on along the road, now desperate to relieve himself.

  Once he’d turned the corner, he dived behind a bush, peering round him warily as he unzipped his flies. The steaming jet of piss seemed to belong to someone else – someone vigorous, dynamic, without his weight of grief. It shocked him, in a way, that his body should still function in such a crassly normal manner when his mother was lying dead. His stomach was even rumbling, reminding him he’d eaten nothing except a handful of peanuts on the plane.

  Well, he’d better stop his mooning around and make his way to the undertakers’ office. They’d probably give him a cup of tea, and, with any luck, a biscuit. He set off towards the car again, his loping stride gradually slowing down. Could he really face another dose of euphemism, another pile of that infernal paperwork? They would be heaving out the coffin now, stripping off the hessian wraps and giving it a last spit and polish, before depositing it in the Chapel of Rest. And if this English chapel was anything like the French one, it would be oppressively theatrical: spotlights on the body, heavy velvet curtains shutting out all natural light, bogus religious trappings like candles on an altar, even a solemn churchy smell. Anyway, a Chapel of Rest was really quite incongruous, since his mother had never believed in rest (nor even in retirement), and would certainly not be happy lying idle there when there were problems left to solve in the world, or injustices to right.

  He got back in the car, turned the key in the ignition. He’d phone the funeral office from a call-box; say he’d changed his mind and had decided to check in to his hotel first, and would it be convenient if he called round later on? What he needed was not a cup of unctuous tea, sweetened with obsequiousness, but a straight Scotch on the rocks.

  He drained his whisky, slunk out of the empty bar and trailed upstairs to his room. The whole place seemed deserted, the barman taciturn, apparently resentful at having to serve this solitary lunchtime customer. There were no sandwiches available, nothing but more peanuts and a few bags of staling crisps. Yet the hotel was neat and clean, the essence of gentility, and they’d given him a pleasant room overlooking the garden at the back.

  He unlocked his door, the sight of the twin beds instantly conjuring up fiercely painful memories of another small hotel. The night after his mother had died he had lain awake for hours, but when at last sleep came, he had dreamed of Penny, naked, beckoning him to join her in that narrow lumpy bed. He had woken with a hard on, forgetting for one glorious second the horror of the day before.

  He was still torn between the two of them: missing Penny, aching for her, yet feeling in some irrational way that his mother’s death was a punishment for that ecstatic magical week. Their final night together he had lasted a whole hour – shy and prudish Daniel who usually came in seconds. Penny had transformed him, worked such wonders on him that he could scarcely recognize himself.

  Christ! He mustn’t think of sex – not now, not here – with his mother’s corpse lying half a mile away. He should be sitting with her, or at least signing funeral papers, choosing funeral flowers.

  He paced across the room. For the last eighteen days it had been incessant and relentless death, which had left him completely drained. He was crying out for a respite – one longer than the time it took to down a double Scotch. He’d unpack his things and run a bath, ease his stiff shoulder muscles with a long relaxing soak. He hauled the case up on the bed, tossed his sponge-bag in the basin, put away his socks and shirts in the dressing-table drawers. At the bottom of the case was his mother’s old brown purse, mended in neat cross-stitch where it had split along one side. She would never dream of buying a new one; had always considered it wrong to spend mo
ney on herself when two-thirds of the world was starving. He had found it in her handbag and now took it with him everywhere – that ancient battered plastic purse with less than thirty francs inside and a few steamed-off African stamps.

  As a boy, he had never touched her handbag. It was something intimate and sacrosanct, almost like a body-part, which was out of bounds to any child, particularly a male one. After her death, he’d had to embolden himself (with another double Scotch) before he’d dared to open it, perhaps scared of what he’d find. But all it contained were a few pathetic relics: metro tickets, plastic comb, a tube of indigestion tablets, and some bright misshapen conkers she must have picked up in the street. No letters, photos, trinkets – nothing personal at all. He had stowed it in his flat, along with her clothes. Impossible to dump them, yet equally impossible to keep them there for ever, reminding him, reminding him …

  He tucked the purse in his pocket, mooched over to the window. A woman was working in the garden, raking fallen leaves. She glanced up at him a moment with a blank unsmiling face, as if looking right through him. He had a sudden frightening feeling that he didn’t actually exist, or that he’d been transported to a different world, where he was essentially an exile. Since he’d been on leave, he seemed to have been dealing only with strangers: strangers at the hospital, strangers in the coroner’s office, strangers at the undertakers’ (first in Paris, then in England), strangers in this strange hotel. The word ‘orphan’ drifted through his mind – a self-pitying, Dickensian word, but one which now applied to him. If only he had family: sisters or brothers to share his grief, or some kindly cosy auntie who could have shouldered some of the burden, invited him to stay.