Chris handled the ladle Alice had put out with clinical care, lifting out meat and vegetables without splashing. She made sure to give her mother a bit more potato and lots of juice. She hummed to herself as she lowered the brimming plate on to the tray. She would come back for her own. She manoeuvred with care, concentrating on each step, keeping the gravy from slopping as she walked back through.
‘Mum, this looks delic…’
Chris staggered backwards as Alice shoved against her. The plate slithered across the tray. Chris tried to get her balance, but couldn’t stop gravy and bits of meat splashing to the floor. The room vibrated as Alice slammed the door behind her.
The settee was still warm where her Mum had been. Chris plonked the tray on the floor and sat motionless. At her feet the rug was a limp animal with gashes of gravy for open wounds. What had she done now?
After about ten minutes she went into the kitchen and filled the washing up bowl with soapy water. The gravy disappeared as she scrubbed. Then she took the tray with the rest of her mother’s supper back to the kitchen, tipped the food back in the pot and washed the plate. Her own plate had not been used. She put the lid back on the casserole dish and switched off the light. She had no appetite.
The Evening Standard was on the settee. She looked at the picture of a car hanging from a crane over a swimming pool of some posh country mansion. When she had scanned the paper earlier before getting off the tube, Chris had found the picture funny despite the story. It was a surreal sight. She considered whether her mother was going mad. She would not know how to check, for she was used to her odd ways. Alice would touch five things on entering a room and talk to her draught excluder dog as if he was real. The estate didn’t allow proper pets. On good days Chris even loved Alice more for these eccentricities. The doctor said her Mum was marvellous, coping so well in the circumstances. What would he have said about her tonight? Her Mum had ruined the evening for no reason.
She read the story properly. It put off doing anything about Alice.
An internationally acclaimed Parkinson’s Disease specialist was found drowned in his swimming pool on Saturday. Police can find no reason to explain why Professor Mark Ramsay drove his car into the swimming pool of his Sussex home. Despite brave efforts by his 66-year-old wife Isabel and son-in-law Jonathan Cross (46) they were unable to free him from the submerged car. Professor Ramsay, who would have been 74 in November, was pronounced dead at the scene. Lucian Ramsay (42), a pharmacist at Charing Cross Hospital in London, said his father had been looking forward to his birthday. ‘He categorically would not have taken his life. My mother said he fought to escape. He adored his family. He had every reason to live.’ Police are running checks on the 31-year-old Rover. Professor Darius Meeching, a colleague at the National Hospital in Queen Square where Professor Ramsay still worked, said the loss to the UK’s knowledge of Parkinson’s was immeasurable…
Chris didn’t know anyone with Parkinson’s Disease but swiftly concluded it was obviously suicide and that the son was kidding himself. Children knew less about their parents than anyone. Although she could be sure that Gary would never kill himself using a car.
Chris admitted that the professor was okay looking for an old man, with no grey hair and a dimple in his chin. She remembered her Mum saying newspapers always had pictures of dead people smiling to show they had been nice when they were alive and to make readers care that they were dead. Apparently the professor had everything, good looks, a successful career, children and a wife described as a ‘glamorous sixties socialite’. Chris reflected that, even dead, Mark Ramsay looked happier than she was at that moment. Wealth might not bring happiness, but it provided better places to kill yourself or be miserable in.
Whatever his son said, Chris guessed something must have upset the old professor. Parents were unpredictable. Not that she knew about fathers. Her father would be unlikely to ruin a perfectly good car in order to kill himself. She remembered the man in the subway and closing her eyes, she felt the warmth of his tense body against hers. Her body’s memory was better than her own. Chris could not remember what the man had looked like. Only then did she realise that she had not seen his face.
She left the paper on the glass coffee table. Her Mum might still read it. She would be better tomorrow.
Fourteen
Isabel climbed out of bed as soon as Gina had left the room. Her whole body was stiff after the business in the pool and when she stood up her temple throbbed. It was a relief to be alone as long as she knew it wouldn’t last. She had read somewhere that people felt closer to death after both their parents had died, when the buffers shielding them from mortality were removed. Her own parents had died when she was too young to remember them so she had never had that feeling. She felt it now. With Mark’s death Isabel had been shunted forward in the queue, suddenly old, a widow, a dowager.
Her turn next.
Isabel’s arms ached as she drew back the curtains and leaned out of the open window into the warm dusk. A pale square of light from the kitchen was like a sheet spread over the grass in the growing gloom. The ghostly outlines of the table and empty chairs under the willow tree were both emblems of the past and finger-posts to a bleak future. The thick bushes and the trees that were now grown as tall as the house rustled in the late evening breeze. She stared hard, but no amount of looking changed anything. Mark was not there now.
There were voices, distant enough for her to feel held in a private silence. Did other people have these thoughts, inconsequential, yet integral to one’s self? In a drunken conversation after making love before they were married she and Mark had once confided their most trivial experiences to each other. They discovered for instance that they touched the end of a biscuit with their tongues after biting, to stop crumbs dropping. Tiny expediencies they had seldom acknowledged since, yet she had believed those shared assumptions were always there. Now it was all over.
The intruders had gone for the day. All afternoon there had been a policeman posted at the gate. He was back there after thirty years. His presence should form a direct link to a lost time, as a blanket of snow can level changes to a landscape, and precipitate the recall of forgotten events. But Isabel felt only disintegration and heavy limbs. A hand clasped her waist. She opened her eyes and preparing her face, gave in to its pressure, turning round ready to speak; she must sound patient and try not to snap at him.
There was no one there except the half-drunk glass of water on Mark’s bedside table and his reading specs.
Now only the children were left in the house. She could hear them through the window, talking in hushed conspiracy downstairs, presumably the kitchen. They would have formed a committee around the table, drinking cocoa made by Lucian who had the sensible answer for everything. Lovely, dependable Lucian: boiling the milk to precisely the right temperature, lining up the cups like soldiers, dispensing the exact measurement of powder. He would leave enough milk for the morning in case the milkman failed to deliver. It had never happened yet. Lucian the Pharmacist spent his life working through a computerised list of instructions and descriptions. Isabel had always languidly assumed his work was limited to doling out pills and potions into receptacles; pouring powder into delicate sachets from larger packets, dripping from small bottles on to spoons, slipping syringes into plastic bags, coaxing blobs on to petri-dishes, and tweezering on to microscope slides. All day long, he transferred something to somewhere else, when he had wanted terribly to be a doctor. Isabel knew her son had grown up into a disappointed man. She despised him for his blinkered ambition, so inappropriate for a boy who might have been artistic and created works that changed the world. Isabel sometimes found the sight of her son, so imperturbably stoical in the face of his substituted life, quite unbearable.