by Anne Berry
‘Dropped in last weekend and that damned fellow was over again,’ Frank repined down the line, unable to see me smiling through my responses.
‘Is it such a bad thing, Frank? She’s an elderly woman who’d benefit from a bit of company. You can’t be there all the time.’
‘You haven’t met him, Lucilla. Tall, debonair, a slimy operator if you take my meaning. I’m telling you I know his type. A con man.’ Takes one to know one, I thought acerbically as he continued. ‘I don’t like the way he goes about fingering her knick-knacks and curios.’
I yelped with laughter. ‘There’s a sentence loaded with innuendo if ever I heard one.’
‘I’m being serious, Lucilla. This is not a matter to joke about. I suspect– Look, I don’t want to alarm you but I suspect him.’
‘You suspect him of what?’ I asked. Would my adoptive mother be murdered in her bed by a suave bridge player? The ideal set-up for an Agatha Christie whodunnit. I’d heard it was a serious game, but I had no notion it was that deadly.
‘She’s been talking about selling the house. Scaling down, that’s what she called it. She said that Alfred advised it was the sensible thing to do now that she’s on her own. She says she’s rattling around in the cottage.’
‘Well, perhaps she is. Perhaps it would be an intelligent move. She might be more at home in a smaller place. A new beginning for her.’
‘Lucilla, she’s in her seventies. It’s too late for new beginnings.’
‘I don’t know …’ I returned, playing the advocate for Mr Satan, and enjoying it immensely.
‘God, you don’t think that she’s going to marry him?’ he erupted down the line.
‘What if she did?’ I said, continuing in the same vein.
‘Don’t you get it? He’s a gold-digger. He’s after her money. You might as well know that I’m executor and trustee of her will. She did consider you, but … but when it came down to it she wanted a man at the helm.’
‘I know. Mother told me,’ I returned frigidly, thinking that even when we were children I had disliked Frank. He was born of an age when male heirs were the height of fashion, de rigueur. He had been blown up like a bullfrog with self-importance as far back as I could remember.
‘It’s my responsibility to keep an eye on her estate. For her beneficiaries.’ This discussion was becoming tiresome. Avarice has that effect on me. We live in a materialistic age. Frank was, and continues to be, the worst kind of glutton, estimating the worth of his aunt while she was still breathing. ‘Whatmore took her to see some dismal terraced box on the Pembroke Dock Road. I shall do all I can to dissuade her, of course. But I’d be grateful if you’d have a timely word to reinforce my message,’ Frank continued, his cadence doom laden.
‘Frank, you of all people ought to know my opinion carries no weight with my mother.’
‘Well, it can’t hurt,’ Frank nipped peevishly.
‘Very well,’ I sighed.
But as I had foretold my mother ignored my counsel. To Frank’s chagrin she sold the cottage, and did indeed buy the poky terrace on the Pembroke Dock Road.
‘God Almighty, she opens her front door onto the road, no less. Massive articulated lorries thundering past all hours of the day and the night. The noise and the stink! She says she doesn’t mind, but I don’t know how she puts up with it. That damn Alfred is still sniffing around her money. I’m doing what I can but she’s putty with him, I tell you, putty.’ It was hard to conceive of my adoptive mother as putty, light and malleable. I received this update of my cousin’s with detachment. I did not care unduly about the money, or money in general. I am not mercenary, and truthfully am bewildered by an age where people’s entire lives are spent in pursuit of the next best thing. Enough, enough matters to me. Food, shelter, walking my dog on a winter’s morning and making love with Henry while Miles Davis plays jazz on the radio. It is an elegant sufficient, as my grandmother used to say. I wallowed for a second in the vision of Frank being deposed by the opportunist, the wily Alfred Whatmore.
At the bottom of the hill now, I leaned on a gate and asked Henry to go on ahead, said that I’d catch him up. He obliged without demur, sensing I needed a moment alone. I let my eyes lap up the wonder of the bright winter’s morning. In her declining years, my adoptive mother’s phone calls and letters became ever more pathetic. The last time my parents came to visit me was gruesome. They stayed for a few days. My mother cast disparaging eyes about Pear Tree Cottage. She pounced on cobwebs, on dusty windowsills, on grease spots on the hob, on corners where a few dog hairs gathered with a grain or two of soil.
‘Your light bulbs need a wash,’ she observed, with gimlet eyes. ‘They’re coated in dust.’ It was October and the late afternoons had an autumnal bluish edge to them.
‘Do they?’ I said, tension tying itself in a constrictor knot around my stomach. I had been in a frenzy trying to knock our shabby homely cottage into shape, to make it fit for her inspection. I had failed and I didn’t give a damn. In fact, I felt like whistling through the rooms like a tornado, restoring their lackadaisical air of dishevelled harmony. My father kept a low profile, making a fuss of Merlin, perhaps recalling Scamp, and the night of fireworks when he injured his paw. Did he want to atone for what he had done? But the responsibility of absolving him from blame was too much for me. I settled for suppression.
After their departure, I took six dinner plates out into the small cobbled courtyard. One by one I raised them high above my head and slammed them down. I watched them smash to smithereens, my scalp tingling with frustration. Staring at the shards among the cobblestones, the last thing I felt was remorse. Henry’s whiskery visage swam into view at our kitchen window. ‘I’ll buy some more,’ I placated when he came out with the dustpan and brush.
He shrugged. ‘Not overly fond of the design anyway. Prefer to eat off plates without patterns all over them. Gives me indigestion.’ I smiled and thought that some loves are like an onion, each year peeling back another pearly layer for you to gloat over.
In April 1992 my mother wrote us a letter in her shaky spidery hand. It was not very coherent because her thoughts were shaky and spidery as well, like dropped stitches.
Dear Lucilla and Henry,
I expect you are wondering what I am writing for. I will be 80 in – here a date that was illegible was scratched out – I would like you and Henry to celebrate with me. Frank is coming. Not Rachel though. Please excuse my writing. I am sorry but I can’t walk without my frame. Book to Pembrock, not Pembrock Dock. Hoping to see you both. Travel by coach.
I had to put dear old Pip to sleep. I have got a toffee-coloured poodle now. Dandy. He is dear. I have meals on wheels and home help. My home help will be at the party. She will be washing up. I have asked her and she is quite willing. She reminds me of Barbara. You remember Barbara.
Love to you all.
Mother
P.S. Go to Pembrock. Ask the driver and he will put you down at the bus stop.
My mother was lonely, growing steadily more confused in her isolation. The loan of her daughter had come to an end with interest owing. Her husband had died. Her previous dog, a black Scottie, had been put to sleep. Even Alfred Whatmore had deserted her, his wallet fatter. Nowadays, no one cared how clean her house was. There was no one to join her for her meals on wheels. And it didn’t really matter if the van was five or ten or fifteen minutes late. Her teeth were rotten, so she could no longer abandon herself to the lethal crunch of slab toffee. I was sorry for her, but we did not go. She rang me quite a few times in the handful of years she had left.
‘Why don’t you come and stay,’ she mumbled, her voice sounding gritty through lack of use. ‘Be my good girl and come.’ But I wasn’t her good girl.
‘Why don’t you sell up and move closer,’ I suggested. ‘If you were nearby I could help.’
‘Yes, yes, I’ll do that. I’ll put the house on the market. I’ll wait for the spring and then I’ll get in touch with an estate agent.’ But we both knew it wasn’
t to be. It was the poodle that was her downfall in the end. One morning, descending the stairs, she tripped up on it. She fell heavily and fractured her hip. No amount of rest improved her condition. She reported that walking had become unbearable. ‘It’s badly swollen and very tender,’ she informed me tightly. The day after this exchange her doctor rang me and told me that she had been admitted to a nursing home to recuperate. A neighbour, who had coveted the mischievous Dandy, took the culprit in. I was going to do my duty and visit, but then I had another call. She had been transferred to a hospital in Haverfordwest. I should go there, her doctor said, in the sepulchral tones I guessed he reserved for life and death situations. A day later and I stood by her bed. I plumped up pillows and assisted her when she felt up to sipping a cup of tea. I brushed the crumbs from her lips as she tried to nibble on a biscuit.
‘You are a good girl after all,’ she muttered looking into the middle distance with her dead eyes. The nurse came and whispered in my ear that the consultant wanted to see me. I filed out of the ward after her, past other elderly women, who fixed me with rheumy vacant eyes, their jaws working on the cud of their yesterdays. I was ushered into a small room, where a trim middle-aged man who looked disconcertingly healthy and spry, shook my hand energetically. He introduced himself as Doctor Weddel.
‘I’m sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but your mother has very little time to live. She has cancer of the pancreas you see,’ he said without preamble, clearly having missed the training on acquiring a sympathetic bedside manner.
There was no desk in the room, only two easy chairs, the seats and backs upholstered in a synthetic lilac fabric. We both sat down. They were set ludicrously far apart at either end of the rectangular space. There were no windows, and it was unbearably hot and stuffy in there. I kept coughing and having to clear my throat. ‘But she only tripped over the dog?’ I said finally, disconcerted.
I was sitting upright, as if I was in school and the teacher had just walked in. The consultant, on the other hand, was reclining in his seat, as if he was resting after a relaxing swim. We eyeballed each other. It really was sweltering. The desert heat continued in the wards, to such a degree I was amazed the elderly patients did not expire from the roasting their poor sick bodies were subjected to.
‘Ah yes, the dog,’ the consultant murmured ruminatively. He steepled his fingers, his eyes behind their lenses lit with impersonal medical logic. ‘Well, I’m afraid that was a bit of a red herring.’
‘A red herring?’ I repeated, stumped. I thought she had tripped on a dog not a fish. This was surreal.
He opened his arms out and rippled his fingers on the wooden arms of the chair. ‘Yes. Oh, she’d hurt herself all right, though nothing that wouldn’t mend given time. But what we soon found was that she wasn’t eating and there were other, shall we say, more sinister signs pointing to cancer.’
‘I see … see,’ I faltered. I thought that I might faint, keel over in the chair and hit the carpet-tiled floor. Still, I supposed if I was going to collapse, here was where to do it.
At last his backbone seemed to prop him up. He adjusted his posture to accommodate it. ‘I thought that perhaps you would like to tell her.’
‘To tell her?’ I echoed.
‘To tell her how sick she really is.’
I felt weirdly protective over my adoptive mother. This shift was a stick of dynamite exploding in my reason. ‘Does she have to be told?’ I asked.
The consultant seemed taken aback. ‘These days we feel … we feel that honesty is the best approach.’
‘Do you?’ I remarked. ‘Who for?’
Now it was his turn to don feathers and squawk. ‘Who for?’
‘Yes, who for? I don’t believe my mother will benefit from the knowledge that she is dying. If I tell her, or you tell her, she will be frightened, horribly frightened. There’s no cause for that.’ My tone had become matter of fact, and I felt like the parent and not the child.
‘I wouldn’t want to mislead a patient,’ he returned, unsmilingly.
‘God forbid.’ There was a strain of sarcasm in my voice. The medical profession’s take on the world seemed unnecessarily harsh to me at that moment. ‘But,’ I suborned, ‘if you don’t say anything and she doesn’t ask, you wouldn’t be doing that.’
‘Granted,’ he conceded reluctantly.
‘So shall we just leave it? Make her … what is the word you physicians are so fond using? Oh yes, comfortable. Yes, make her comfortable. That will do.’
He nodded and began to rise. ‘But if she questions me directly, I won’t lie.’
‘Fair enough.’ We shook hands on the bargain.
And so my adoptive mother was ignorant that her moon was waning fast. I went four times in all. They called in the almoner. They said she needed new underwear and nightgowns and soap and talc. They said, Frank … did I know Frank? That Frank Pritchard, her nephew had power of attorney and control over her pension, that they did not know what to do. I contacted Frank and got her pension turned over to me. I purchased all that she required and a few luxuries besides, sweets mostly. She couldn’t eat but she could suck. And I could furnish this, let her sugar-coat the process of dying.
‘You’re a good girl, Lucilla,’ she whispered faintly, patting my hand. The pressure was light as a feather. ‘A good girl. Did I tell you that when you were small?’
‘No.’
‘Is it … too … too late?’
Yes, it was, far too late. But I said, no, and the flicker of a smile crossed her cracked lips. The hospital rang me on a Sunday night. My mother’s condition was fast deteriorating and could I come. It was June. A lovely June day, the sky looking as if it had been swept clean, the blue floor of it floodlit by a bronze sun. I had packed an overnight bag. I was unsure what to expect. Henry said that he could make arrangements, take the day off, accompany me. But I wanted to go by myself. This goodbye was private. I took the train from Reading to Swansea, and then another train to Haverfordwest. I had been given the name of a kindly lady who lived adjacent to the hospital and put visitors up for the night. The taxi took me there. I rushed to the hospital. At reception, I said that I’d come to see Harriet Pritchard, that I was her daughter. A nurse materialised and took me to one side.
‘Is she in the same ward?’ I said.
‘No, no. I am so sorry, Mrs Ryan. Your mother has passed. But … but if it’s any comfort her going was peaceful. She’s been moved. Moved to the mortuary.’
‘Oh,’ I said quietly. ‘She’s dead then?’
‘Yes, I’m afraid so.’ She clasped her hands under her neat bosom and assembled her face in an expression of commiseration. She looked oriental, and had attractive eyes actually, almond-shaped and very dark. ‘Would you like … like to see her?’
‘Yes, yes, I think that I would. I’ve come such long way you see.’
She nodded and led me down a seemingly endless corridor. Her shoes tapped smartly on the floor. The further we went the fewer doctors and nurses we saw, as if … as if we were walking purposefully out of life and into the domain of death, as if the hospital was layered. On the top floor were the beds of those who were making a full recovery, and who would be leaping about like Mexican jumping beans the second they were discharged. A few floors down and there were the in-betweens, the patients who fetched up somewhere in the middle of life and death, the crossroads. They might go up or alternatively they might go down. And then on the bottom floor was a tunnel that took you into the impenetrable blackness of death, into the ward where the patients lay down, never to get up again.
We went through flapping doors that gaped open as she pushed, exhaling an icy breath on us. They swung shut behind us, the jaws of death clamping closed on two warm-blooded mortals. It was dingy, the fluorescent ceiling lighting oppressive, the way it could be in some supermarkets. It made you long for natural light. More footsteps and then we came upon her, lying on a trolley, her eyes shut. I expected them to blink open, the greyish-blue mouth to
poke apart in speech. Who is that? Come closer. Lucilla? Ah, Lucilla. You’re a good girl, Lucilla, coming to see me when I’m dead. Have you brought Barbara with you? She was covered in a sheet up to her shoulders. She’d lost so much weight that her shoulder blades were like twin peaks.
‘Would you like me to leave you for a while?’ asked the nurse gently.
‘Yes, if you could.’
‘Take your time.’ She tapped off, her heels sounding like a firing squad dispatching the condemned in the clinical vault.
I didn’t cry. I didn’t shed a single tear for the mother life had lent me. Instead a red-hot fist punched through me. From my mouth poured a lifetime’s repressed anger. There was no gating this torrent of words. ‘Well, Mum,’ I spat out when I was almost spent, ‘you’ve gone now and left me, finally left me with everything that’s wrong! What a waste of life, of years! You were cruel to me! It could have been so different! You never gave me a chance!’ I was dimly aware that I was shouting. ‘And you haven’t told me about my real self! You’ve held me back, held me back all my life!’ Trembling all over, I reached a hand towards her face. ‘Goodbye! Goodbye! Goodbye!’ And with that jittery hand, I touched the mask that had haunted all my days and nights. I wanted to feel how cold she was. Coldish. Getting colder by the minute. Becoming more dead.
Head held high, I turned away and walked as sedately as I could to the swinging doors. I sidled out apologetically. It was just as well that I did not charge through them. I would have sent several nurses who were huddled there, eavesdropping on my farewell to my dead adoptive mother, flying like skittles. I must have looked the way I felt – whey faced and wrung out with emotions deep and wide as oceans.
‘Mrs Ryan, are you all right?’ It was the Chinese nurse who addressed me, peering anxiously into my face. ‘Would you like to sit down, have a cup of tea?’ I stared directly at her, saw my image in the twin mirrors of her dark almond-shaped eyes. Smothering a laugh, I decided that the apparition that gazed back at me was in worse condition than the corpse lying only feet from us. ‘Mrs Ryan?’
