Grace Percy, at sixty-two, looked older than her age. She was aware of having been relatively old when Lewis was born, and occasionally she thought that the event must have worn her out. She had to stop occasionally to catch her breath, did not care to be out too long, felt exhausted after cooking his evening meal. Her own she was usually too tired to eat. She was always thankful when it was time to go to bed, for by late evening she could feel the colour draining from her face. She was glad of Lewis’s arm when she wanted to change her books; without it, she thought, she might not have had the heart for such an excursion. Sometimes she wondered if she were up to the effort of having him in the house again. She loved him beyond measure, had endured the lonely nights purely in order that he might be free and might return to her because he wanted to, and for no other reason. She could not envisage what his life had been without her, was only thankful that he did not in any way seem damaged by absence from her care. All this, and her adoration of him, she kept hidden, knowing that she must not add to his burden. But sometimes, looking out of the window onto the wet street, she had grieved.
He noticed that she was more absent-minded than usual and thought that perhaps she needed cheering up. His resource in such matters was to buy her a present. He thought long and hard about this and finally settled on a radio. She could listen to it in the kitchen while she was cooking his dinner. He was out all day and began to long for a more lively atmosphere at home, where silence of one sort or another generally prevailed. Six weeks had passed since his return, and now that he had digested the fact that he was back he began to feel as if his unused energies might rise up and overwhelm him. The headaches he had associated with the Bibliothèque Nationale returned, and he went to have his eyes tested. His new glasses, bringing everything sharply into focus, also brought a certain dissatisfaction: what he had previously seen as a benign haze was now revealed as fatally lacking in animation. He bought the radio, but took it up to his bedroom, to dispel the quiet of his studious hours. When he went out in the morning he was careful to return it to its official position on the dresser in the kitchen.
His appearance now began to give him cause for concern. His new National Health glasses, with their pink rims, made him, he thought, look foolish. With the hair that obstinately raised itself in luxuriant waves and his rather large ears, he had an owlish and solemn air, very far removed from the dandyism that he thought desirable. He was not handsome, he knew, not one of those men who attract a woman’s glance. Now that he had his glasses he could see all this more clearly, and it made him edgy. He decided to put up with his appearance for as long as it took him to finish his thesis: after that it might prove to be a handicap. He began to think in terms of going abroad again, to a hot country: a tan was always an asset, much prized in this rainy climate. He thought he might teach English somewhere, perhaps take the examinations for the Foreign Service. Without telling his mother he wrote to the British Council. Anywhere would do. He saw himself representing England, coming back a larger, more impressive shape, with a piercing gaze and an aura of experience. His mother would miss him, but she had proved to him that she would survive. And maybe this country was better suited to her way of life than to his.
In due course, his inactive life, and the added weight of his glasses, made him uncharacteristically short-tempered. He was sometimes impatient with his mother: she merely looked away sadly. One evening, as he came into the kitchen, she turned with a start from a curiously crouched position over the table; in turning, her hand swept the radio to the floor. ‘Oh, really, Mother,’ he cried, exasperated. She looked at him, her face full of fear. ‘It’s all right,’ he said awkwardly, appalled at her expression. ‘It’s still going.’ The radio lay at their feet, emitting a minuscule metallic sound. He replaced it carefully on the dresser, turned a few knobs: it gave forth nothing but residual static. ‘I’ll have to get it repaired,’ he told her, but he was still annoyed. Foolishly, she kept it on. It was no further use to him and he went up to his bedroom without it. When he came down later for his supper it was still giving out its tiny scratchy sound. He switched it off, furiously, telling himself that she had never really appreciated it.
Bad temper made him hungry. Going late at night, long after her bedtime, in search of a glass of milk, he opened the refrigerator and found inside it a plate of stewed steak and spinach. The knife and fork were still on the plate, crossed, as if this meal might be taken up later, when circumstances were more favourable. This must have been her lunch, he thought, since he himself had had the same thing for dinner. Then why had she not eaten it? The incident with the radio could not have upset her: at lunchtime it had not yet happened. He felt disquiet, then more anger, as if she were playing an unfair trick on him, binding him with chains of obligation and pity just when he had devised a programme for his future. He scraped the congealed food into the dustbin, washed the plate, and put it away. Slowly he argued himself into a more robust frame of mind. There was no cause for alarm: she had merely not felt hungry. This was practically incomprehensible to him but he supposed it might happen if one were old. He went miserably and angrily to bed, unable to distinguish between his misery and his anger, but careful to let the anger predominate.
Nevertheless a certain uneasiness remained and he resolved to spend more time with her. Perhaps she was still lonely without him, although his days at the British Museum were hardly a treat or a recreation. His attitude to his work these days was grim, as if it were forcing him into various uncomfortable or untenable positions. He longed for it to be over. Yet it was going well, and his tutor was pleased with him. Much to his surprise, the writing presented him with few problems. It was as if he were programmed to do this thing, in defiance of his natural biology. He came to dread that moment of altered concentration before he actually put pen to paper; he felt an anguish at the prospect of that moment endlessly repeating itself. But when he was writing he forgot himself entirely, raising his head in surprise when it was time for the library to close. At the beginning of the day he found himself longing for a humble job, any job, doing something manageable in the convivial surroundings of an office. By the end of the day he had succumbed once again to the mystery of what he was actually doing, the aligning of words in an apparently logical argument. His recent French interlude fell away from him as he tackled his English sentences. Yet writing, which came easily, also underlined his indeterminate status. Was he to continue to do this? His age had proved to be no handicap: rather the reverse. The life of action, which he could not quite visualize, remained out of reach. He had the disagreeable sensation of signing away his future. Having found that he could do this work he seemed to have sealed his fate. This idea unsettled him profoundly.
His unexpected ability, or so it seemed to him, and the gratification on his professor’s face, satisfied his pride but not his judgment. His judgment told him that such competence was at odds with his experience, or rather his lack of experience. He saw himself as an old man in a young man’s body. And the body remained very young, subject to the dissatisfactions of its unused state, subject also to the loneliness that had pervaded his adolescence. He thought, perhaps too frequently, of the years he had spent growing up at his mother’s side, with no father to take the weight of their survival off his hands. He thought of the unspoken consensus, largely emanating from his cousin Andrew, the civil servant, but present too in his mother’s mind, that he must be the man of the family, must ensure the continuity of their little household. This was not how heroes behaved. Heroes left home early, made good, fell in love and died, or, at a pinch, sent for their mothers later. He did not see why he should be denied this opportunity, although the details remained obstinately nebulous.
‘Have you thought of the future, Lewis?’ asked his tutor, a benevolent man on the verge of retirement. ‘I think you might consider some further work; you have managed very well, very well indeed. Of course, I shall be leaving in June. I shan’t be able to supervise you any longer. But I doubt if you w
ill need any more supervision; you should be able to see things through on your own. Feel free to consult me at any time.’
To Lewis, June was remote, a sunny upland almost out of sight of this winter landscape. And Professor Armitage, who had always been kind, and whose reference had secured him his scholarship, would, he thought, be there for as long as he needed him. After June, in the revivifying sunshine, he, Lewis, would be free to leave. He saw the whole enterprise reaching a natural conclusion, and this emboldened him. With this end in sight he resolved to be nicer to his mother.
But how to please her, this modest timorous woman who never went out, and from whom, despite his resolutions to the contrary, he had inherited just such a modest and timorous outlook? For as long as he could remember the high point of her day had been his return, from school, from university, from Paris, and now from the British Museum. His most persistent image of her was of a figure at the window, her hand holding aside the curtain, slightly gaunt and abstracted, but warming suddenly into animation as he came into view. Their two arms would lift simultaneously in greeting, as that brief joy of hers showed him the woman who must have existed in the early years of her marriage, before his father died, before he knew her. After the flash of her greeting she would subside into her natural or habitual mood, which was one of silent good nature, offering only lenient opinions, fearful of anything that disturbed the status quo. She was a good woman, he knew, although her fair-mindedness sometimes exasperated him. Of his cousin Andrew’s dreadful wife she would simply say, ‘Of course, Susan is rather dull. But she means well.’
Meaning well was the paramount consideration. Evidence of malice made her ill, although she rarely noticed it. He sometimes thought that she had chosen so immobile a life in order to protect her innocence. She seemed entirely fulfilled in looking after him, devising his meals, ensuring his comfort. He knew that she would be perfectly happy to act as his handmaiden for the rest of her life.
But he began to wish for her the kind of independence he wished now for himself. He began to see his task – one of his tasks – to be the fashioning of his mother into a different woman, bold, enterprising, viable, able to exist without him, or at least to forget about him from time to time. He wanted her to be smartly dressed: he wanted to take years off her age and to send her away on holiday. The humbly smiling acolyte in the print blouse and the navy blue skirt and cardigan, who spent her afternoons resting in her dark silent bedroom, and who was always at the window to greet him, touched his heart with a mixture of pity and rage. Her sad but merciful smile when he made an unconsidered or harsh remark always covered him with remorse. Through her he had learned a kind of tentative benevolence from which he was trying to break away. And he had learned from fiction that boldness was the thing. Men had to be enterprising. How could he teach her this without wounding her?
He was aware that he loved women in general too much to hurt them, and that his mother’s stricture – ‘I don’t think we want to be unkind, do we, Lewis?’ – would always inhibit him from the measure of decisiveness that might be conclusive. And he was also aware that to offer a woman sympathy was not always an heroic tactic. Yet what he felt for women was precisely a kind of yearning sympathy, rather than anything bolder or more straightforward. Unconsciously, he identified with his mother’s humility, although he wished that her attention could be deflected away from himself. After all, if he were to marry – and he saw marriage as the sort of alternative to heroic action that he might eventually choose – he owed it to himself to do something manly while he had the chance. A man’s education, he thought, was necessarily a rather crude affair; proving one’s manhood usually involved some act of destruction. He supposed that innocence would have to go, and even began to square up to the task. But he could not quite bear the thought that his mother’s innocence might also have to go. The eternal problem of how to maintain female innocence while accumulating male experience presented itself to him in this novel and startling form. His mother, he saw, was no different from other women, and what he felt for his mother he might eventually feel for the woman he chose as his wife. By the same token, however, he wanted freedom from the strictures that women put upon his conscience. For this reason it was absolutely necessary that he and his mother should part company for a while.
A crucial factor was the money his father had left in trust. He knew nothing of the amount or of its disposition. From time to time his mother saw her bank manager, and between them they had devised a very conservative portfolio which seemed to have seen them through. Lewis and his mother had been living on dividends for as long as he could remember, for ever, in fact. He knew that they lived modestly, although his mother was scrupulous about making him an adequate allowance. What he now required was a statement of accounts. What he wanted was his birthright.
Giving his mother his arm as they walked to the bus stop by the Common, he attempted to extract from her the information which he thought he should now possess.
‘I simply think I ought to know,’ he said. ‘After all, I want to plan my future. I can’t do that without knowing how much we’ve got to live on.’
She merely pressed his arm. ‘It will all be yours,’ she said.
And with that he had to be content, although it was not what he wanted. At least she would be taken care of, he reasoned. While I am away, he added. The money, he gathered, was still there, and as he would soon be earning his own he would not be a charge on her. He would not ask her to make sacrifices; he would even send money home. And she would be standing at the window, a little older, perhaps, but not much changed, when he returned once more. That way, he reasoned, he could look after her at what he vaguely thought of as the end, when he was mature and experienced and had got rid of his occasional fears for her. These fears came to him unbidden when he noticed a stiffness in her movements, or when he looked up from a book to see her with her hand to her breast. Normally he was able to think these fears out of the way. Everybody got old: he himself would. That was why it was so important to make the most of the time allotted to being young. With this in mind his plan held good. He wondered if he might invite Professor Armitage to the house to meet his mother. Professor Armitage could tell her how well his work was going, might even stand as a surrogate father. As they walked slowly back from the library one day he mentioned this to her: she seemed delighted. They decided to ask Professor Armitage to tea on the following Saturday. Saturday seemed less formal than Sunday, and could be combined with shopping and other activities.
‘Will you make your lemon cake?’ he asked.
‘Of course,’ she said. She seemed charmed at this evidence of being admitted to his working life. There was even a little colour in her cheeks.
He studied late in his room that night. As his eyelids grew weary from reading he heard her light step in the corridor, on the way to the bathroom, but, too tired to stay awake another minute, he got into bed and fell instantly asleep. All at once he had an unpleasant and hallucinatory dream, in which his mother was showing him an expensive carpet, woven of many colours, with a long silky fringe. When he had admired it he asked her where it was to go. Was it for the drawing-room, to replace the prayer rug that lay before the fire? With a sly smile his mother refused to tell him. He understood her to mean that she had another house, somewhere else, in a place unknown to him, to which she refused him access. He awoke with a beating heart and a feeling of terror. He could not remember the last time he had had a dream. And what did it mean? He lay in the pulsing darkness, throwing off sheet and blanket in a sudden flush of heat. He could not calculate what time it was, or how long he had been asleep. Waiting for his body to cool down he stirred uneasily, aware of a malaise. He waited to see if he were ill, but nothing seemed to be amiss. Turning over in bed, resolving to sleep again, he heard a sound. A sound at night – particularly one he could not recognize – was unusual in this quiet house. He put his ear to the wall dividing his room from his mother’s, but could hear nothing. She was all r
ight, then: the sound must be coming from next door. He wondered if the neighbours were unwell and he were only just becoming aware of the fact. But what he had heard was more like a sigh, lifting to a murmur; it did not appear to be the sort of thing he associated with illness, of which he had little experience. He pushed back the covers again, sat irresolutely on the side of the bed. In the darkness the sound came again, bringing with it a dreadful fear. The hairs on the back of his neck lifted as he got to his feet and felt his way blindly down the corridor. It did not occur to him to switch on the light.
His mother was on the floor of the bathroom. She had managed to prop herself against the wall. She was wearing the dressing-gown, which was soiled now; the sound was coming from her mouth. She must have been calling for him for a long time, hours, perhaps, and he had not heard her; he knew that he would never forget this fact. In the overhead light, which was still on, must have been on since before he fell asleep, he saw her dishevelled hair, grey wisps stuck to her face by her tears. There was a foul smell, and he realized that she had vomited. He sank down beside her and put his arms round her. They wept together, his mother with relief at his arrival, Lewis himself at the prescience of his dream.
He did not know how long they stayed on the floor. He tried to move her but she was an awkward shape and weight. It seemed to him that she dozed a little, and he held her until the coldness of the night told him that he must get her back to bed. He tried to wake her, but she was not asleep. She even smiled at him and took his hand. He pulled the soiled dressing-gown round her, lifted her in his arms, and carried her back to bed.
Instinctively he went back to bed himself: he turned on his side and willed himself to sleep. To remain awake, with the image of her sickness in his mind’s eye, was more than he could bear: he thought he might die of it. He heard no sound from her room, and told himself that it was all over, whatever it was, that she was sleeping normally, and would wake in the morning to another normal day. But an inner trembling kept him awake, and when the window between the curtains turned grey he heard the sound again. By the time he reached her it had changed into a high-pitched and uncensored moan. In a panic he made for the telephone beside her bed and dialled for an ambulance. ‘No,’ she said. ‘No,’ and then vomited again.
Lewis Percy Page 3
