On Green Dolphin Street

by Sebastian Faulks

  Mary saw how her father’s spirits lifted if Elizabeth ate even half a bowl of soup; it was as though he thought this was the beginning of a full recovery. “There,” he would say, bringing down the tray, “now if we can just get her to eat some toast with it and then perhaps a bit of dinner tonight, then we’ll be on the right track.” His love was so instinctive that it could not adapt to reality; it overrode the facts.

  Food became important in the house, and the success of the days was measured by Elizabeth’s meager consumption. Mary saw the dreadful effort it cost her to force down the invalid food from its bright bottle, the little fillets of sole, the painstakingly reduced clear soup or the triangles of lemon-sprinkled smoked salmon with which they tried to tempt her. But it all revolted her and each dry swallow was a testament only to her desire to please her family; for herself she would clearly have preferred to die then and there than prize her throat open one more time.

  Downstairs, on the other hand, Mary found herself shamefully hungry; joints of beef and chicken came and went; her father ate pork pies, red cabbage and huge apple tarts from the bakery on the corner. They sat opposite one another at the family dining table, James in Mary’s old place, Mary in the seat occupied by David Oliver on his first visit to their house, and guiltily ate prawns with homemade mayonnaise, then pork chops with mashed potato dotted black with pepper, rhubarb with cream, ending with English cheddar and French bread to go with the remains of the wine.

  At night Mary retired to her childhood bedroom at the top of the house and took down from a shelf the books to which she had always returned at difficult times. She did not cry; she had not cried since her difficulties began and she felt it would be inauspicious to give way.

  She lay in bed and thought of Richard and Louisa in a cold dormitory, wrapped in the self-protective acceptance of childhood. She thought of Frank, five hours behind, or maybe more, as he trudged wearily behind the would-be president, and she thought of Charlie, back in Number 1064, walking his demonic tightrope, while downstairs her mother’s life receded, the unthinkable emerging into the numbered minutes that remained. Mary felt ripples of panic run through her as she stared at the dark ceiling.

  It was not just that, when her mother died, everything would be changed; the problem was that the death threw doubt over all the years before: to think that this meaningless termination was what all the time was lying in wait seemed to undermine the value of the happiness they had accumulated. The photographs in their frames and albums looked ridiculous: her mother in the picture in their bedroom was not a confident young woman in the flower of early motherhood, but a victim, ignorant of the casual annihilation that awaited her. They had thought that the albums with their pictures of holidays and celebrations represented something durable or worthwhile: Richard’s christening (that hat!), lasting happiness, Elizabeth’s fiftieth at Le Touquet, enduring satisfactions, silver wedding party, landmarks and stability. She could see now that they were self-deceptions because death was the ever-present figure that, only now could they see, had made them all along a family of four.

  —

  On the third day the doctor came. It was not the usual one, Macdonald, who was on leave, but a locum called Charvis, a pale, plump man with sweaty hands, keen to impress with his air of gravity.

  After a long consultation with his patient, he came down to the sitting room.

  “How is she?” they asked.

  “She’s fine, she’s doing well.”

  “How long is it going to take?” said Mary. This was a brutal question, but she wanted her father to hear the answer.

  “Well, she is getting weaker,” said Charvis, “but it’s impossible to say.” His grave but sympathetic voice made the whole thing sound open-ended.

  They discussed the various medicines in her room and their different properties; Charvis wrote a prescription for morphine and handed it to Mary.

  “There’s no shame, you know, in letting her go into hospital. They have some beds in the Twilight Room. The only thing that’s making her unhappy is the thought that she’s being a nuisance to you.”

  For the first time since she had been in London Mary felt a convulsion of grief, but she bit the inside of her cheek, determined not to weaken in front of her father. When, later, she went out of the house to fulfill the prescription, she felt lightened and relieved to have escaped from the still air and the density of good intentions, from the feelings that were stifled partly out of consideration for others and partly because they were too large to apprehend.

  Elliot’s the chemist was an old-fashioned shop with colored-glass dispensing jars in the window. Mary remembered scuffing her school shoes back and forth on the floorboards when she went shopping with her mother as a child. She recalled running errands here for her father, returning with bottles of shampoo and razor blades; then, when her mother had had a hysterectomy, handing over to the severe lady chemist with blue-gray hair a list of requirements it took her twenty minutes to collect from different shelves. For Mary, when a comedian began a story “A man goes into a chemist’s” or when a character in a novel went into a pharmacy, no matter in what country or period, it was always into Elliot’s fragrant premises that he came.

  She handed the morphine prescription to the man at the dispensary counter, someone new to her. He studied it and quickly glanced back at her over the top of his glasses with a look of transparent sympathy. Mary sensed that the two other people waiting for their prescriptions had also somehow guessed; she was grateful for their silent compassion, but was bound too tightly to the chain of her own events to feel any comfort from it.

  It was this visit for which they had all been waiting; the hundreds of toothpaste and soap calls had been, in the end, of no account: they had only postponed it. Mary could discern no significant difference between herself as a child and herself as she stood there now, and in that case the life between was lost: death had drained the years of purpose.

  Yet every night, exhausted by emotion and the battle to retain the value of the past, she slept deep and dreamlessly. In the morning her discovery that her mother was still alive was joyful, but touched by disappointment: she wanted Elizabeth’s ordeal, and her own, to be over.

  Her mother was in pain and Dr. Charvis came to give her an injection; he again advised that she could be taken into hospital, but the three of them had agreed that she should die at home. Mary thought that Charvis wanted to save her father and herself from anguish, but by bearing up they could honor her mother’s wish and spare her a small but final indignity.

  As the days wore on, Mary found herself hoping that this would be the end, that today would be the day of release, even though she knew it would liberate them only into an unknown world of grief. Yet every day her mother roused herself again. Her spoken wishes were to depart, to stop bothering them; but her consideration for them was powerless in the face of her body’s tenacious instinct to continue: she could not reach this animal stubbornness with her good manners and overrule it. She showed a spasm of her peculiar anger, as though the victim of her final loss of temper might be herself, for her inability to die.

  Mary and her father also continued living; for long periods of the day they had no alternative but to carry on with shopping, cooking or reading the newspaper. In the evening they would do the crossword together in front of the fire and several hours would pass without their talking about illness or death. Mary told her father about life in Washington and her anxiety about Charlie’s health, her worries about the children and her hopes for their future.

  One afternoon Mary went up to the bedroom to see if Elizabeth would like some company; there was little to say, and her mother was too weak to talk, but she felt she might enjoy the closeness. She took off her shoes and sat on the bed next to her, propped up on a spare pillow. They managed a few words about the newspaper and the progress of a man called Beeching, who had been appointed to investigate the rural railways, then Elizabeth fell into a sleep which, though helped by the
morphine Mary gave her, was troubled.

  Above the shadows thrown by their hair, Mary’s thick waves of almost-black, Elizabeth’s gray and squashed by sleep, was a small oil painting of a cyclamen. When as a child Mary had brought her Christmas stocking to the bed and sat shrieking gleefully among the torn wrappings on the eiderdown, while her prematurely woken parents gazed on fondly, the cyclamen had been in the same place. So much else in the room seemed immutable to Mary because it was older than she was: her mother’s silver hairbrushes, the glass-topped dressing table with its frilled skirt beside which she had waited impatiently while her mother powdered and dabbed; the chest of drawers with pictures of Elizabeth’s parents and of James as a young man in army uniform.

  Elizabeth had been a nurse in wartime, going to France in 1915, and then to Serbia; it was her experiences there that had made her determine on her return to become a doctor. As a girl, Mary had often been told of the wounded soldiers in the hospitals; her mother spoke candidly of what they had suffered and had herself been transformed by what she saw. Mary could not bear to think that all her experience, the friendships she had made in those extreme moments, then valued and cultivated in the years that followed, that all the wisdom, anecdote and sense of value her mother had so tactfully acquired would now be lost. There was a delicacy and decorum in her, a sense of how things ought to be done, which, when she was dead, would be lost to an impoverished world.

  Beside the bed were three pairs of glasses, two of them in their correct cases, the third neatly folded away, and it struck Mary that this might have been the first time that her mother had managed to have all her spectacles in the right place at the same time. Childhood astigmatism and short sight, discovered in her teens, had been complicated by middle-aged presbyopia that had meant reading at arm’s length with various combinations of single-lens and bifocal glasses halfway down her nose, lodged on her head or, more frequently, mislaid. The hunt for mother’s glasses had been one of the daily features of life in the Regent’s Park house, and their loss was one of the things that regularly caused Elizabeth to become short-tempered. As Mary saw the wandering glasses safely gathered in, she thought of everything they had transmitted to her mother’s toiling brain, the natural world, the severed limbs of soldiers, the rudiments of medicine, the faces of those she loved, works of art in France and Italy, the first sight of her only child, the billions of printed words by which she had taken her bearings in the world. The glasses were now folded shut.

  Mary looked round the room again. In addition to the various bottles there were a wheelchair and a commode provided by the local hospital: for all their determination that her mother should die at home, something institutional, the aura of the Twilight Room, had insinuated itself into the house, had stolen in like smoke beneath the door. That morning Mary had begged her father to go out for half a day, to do as she had done and breathe some air that was not compressed by altruism and throttled grief, but he had refused in case he should be absent when the moment came.

  She bent her head down to listen for her mother’s breath, as she had with Louisa when she was in her cot. She would feel obscurely guilty if she alone were present when the breathing ceased. She had never thought that her mother could die; death was for other people: God would make an exception for a woman so loving, so wonderful in her life. She had cradled the heads of the dying; she had dressed their wounds; she had studied long into the night to realize her vocation, wearing out her poor eyes in uncongenial scientific work so that she could help the sick in peacetime. It was true that she had sometimes lost her patience with her family or colleagues, but she had harbored no spiteful thoughts, she had maintained her sly humor and her love of friends. There was something wrong with a world or a god that would let this woman go, when outside in the streets were many people older than she was who should go first; or bitter, selfish people with no interest beyond themselves, who could far more easily be spared …

  Mary managed, with an effort, to check her petulance. She went outside and walked down to her mother’s rose garden, a semicircular area with a small, weathered brick wall around it and a path made from broken paving over which she had ridden her first bicycle. She wanted to cry, but could not make the tears come; they were locked up in her, packed down tight. Eventually she forced one out and then one more, but they were not really tears, they were like drops of bile, hauled out painfully, threatening to choke her. She watched the wet mark each made on the lichen-covered paving as the stone absorbed it.

  That afternoon there were signs that her mother was beginning to win the struggle to be free of life. Low murmurings came from her room and James hurried upstairs to be with her. Mary lingered in the sitting room, glancing through the window at the normal world outside. She had felt the thrilled glances of the neighbors, who had seen the taxi and the suitcase with its BOAC tag and knew that she was there until the end; she knew that they had watched the increasing frequency of the doctor’s calls, seen him shuttling fatly up the path with his leather bag. Mary longed to be back in that outside world, but wondered if she could ever reconnect with it in the same way.

  She heard her father call and she ran upstairs. She looked interrogatively across at him, but he shook his head. Mary sat down on the bed and looked at her mother’s face, now stiff with strain; it was as though she were thrashing against invisible restraints, the webs and roots of the clinging life instinct that bound her. She sighed and Mary went to the shelf to pour out morphine, which she tried to force through her mother’s clenched mouth. It made a pink mess down her chin and on the front of her nightdress.

  James, never a devotedly religious man, knelt on one side of the bed in prayer, asking God to take away his wife. Mary knelt on the other, thinking: she will never hold me in her arms once more; all I want now is to feel one last time her loving arm around me, but I will never, never feel it again.

  The light of the afternoon drained away outside. Mary looked across at her father and she bled for him, seeing the strange calm that had come over him, because she knew it was still, even at this stage, based on hope. Each pretended to the other with silent eyes that they could manage and were unperturbed by what was coming. As the hours went on, Mary began to fear that they would have to give in and call for the hospital to take her mother away; neither she nor her father would be able to watch any longer. But when she faltered, he would hold out his hand to her across the counterpane, and clasp her fingers; when he weakened, Mary would be in a state of numbness in which she could encourage him in return.

  The evening turned to night, and as Mary gazed out through the uncurtained window to the distant lights of Primrose Hill, wondering what further agonies they had yet to cross, she noticed that her mother was lying still.

  She lowered her head and pressed her ear against her face. There was no sound of breathing. Feeling unqualified, she pressed her fingers into the veins of the wrist to feel for a pulse. There was nothing. She tried both wrists, but when she let the second arm go, it fell onto the bed, and she did not wish to abuse her mother’s vulnerable dignity any further. She had never seen a dead person before. About the quiet body there was a sense of absence: she lay like a queen; she gave the impression that she had left them for some place unimaginably rarefied and serene.

  Shocked, Mary looked at her father, rose and left the room. She walked downstairs and stood alone in the hall, then went through the French doors into the garden, breathing deeply. She knelt down on the grass and rocked with her hands behind her head. She had been prepared for the protracted anguish and the final shock, but the one thing she had not foreseen was the exact tenor of the end, the grandeur.

  As she knelt in the darkness, with the dim sound of London beating on the wind, she felt chastened by what she had seen. She remembered how her heart had lifted when the midwife held up before her eyes the bloodied, squalling figure of her firstborn child, the sense of something elemental, of which she was an instrument. The moments of birth and death had been unimagin
ably similar, and to have been there until the end of her mother’s life seemed at the final instant not so much an agony as a momentous privilege. She lowered her head to the ground, tore out small pieces of grass and let them fall onto the back of her neck.

  When she thought that her father had had long enough alone, she stood up and returned to the house. She saw James gazing dry-eyed out of the sitting-room window, his hands in his trouser pockets. She went up the stairs and into the bedroom where her mother was lying. She touched her cheek with the back of her hand and kissed her forehead; she was frightened of how it might feel, but the skin was cool and reassuring. Then she laid her head on her mother’s chest, lifted her limp arm and wrapped it round her own shoulders, embraced at last.

  Mary went to her father in the sitting room. He seemed incredulous, as though something quite unforeseen had taken place. With his head on his daughter’s shoulder, he stared ahead like a man in a trance. She made him sit down on the sofa while she went to make a pot of tea.

  When she returned with a tray, she found him poking at the embers of the fire; a small flame curled up and he threw on a dry and splintered log, which at once began to burn, filling the room with a sweet smell of wood. It was not a cold night, but the flames were living and warm. They suggested also funeral pyres, and Mary thought momentarily of Dido, Iphigeneia, rituals of mourning and dispatch. The points of reference were bleak but somehow just; she felt herself to be part of a primitive experience. There was even a tremor of comfort in feeling that she was at one with people who had lived with stones and fire.

  She thought also of the log fire in the Renshaws’ cabin, how she had smelled it from the bathroom above and allowed herself to be happy, refusing to admit what was about to happen. She drew the curtains and handed James his cup.

  “I can’t quite believe it,” he said.

  Mary bit her lip. She thought her duty was still to be calm.