TAMSIN AND MARK sat reading to Euan. Marian was dealing with letters and bills at Euan’s desk.
Marian paid Tamsin to read to her grandfather a couple of evenings a week, to save his eyes for his day work. Euan didn’t know she was paid. Marian’s older daughter, Clare, was supposed to help too, but she had young children and moods and didn’t regularly manage it; she was in that baffled lean wolfish phase of young motherhood Marian dimly remembered, when you feel you may have been cheated of too many pleasures in exchange for the burden of loved children you can’t unwish. When Clare read Herzen to Euan she pounced on a remark about “the summer lightning of personal happiness.”
— Don’t be such a glum, Tamsin had said. Herzen was sixty.
Tonight they were reading from a translation of some Russian book on Swedenborg. Tamsin read in a high flat skeptical voice, smothering yawns; she was more dressed up than she usually bothered to be for her grandfather, in a green silk top that showed her bra straps and stretch trousers cut off just below the knee: Marian presumed this was for Mark’s benefit, even though she had hardly spoken to him since they arrived. She was growing her dark hair, she had it pushed behind her ears, so fine it was like the fall of something liquid. When Mark took over reading she curled up with her head on a cushion on the sofa where they sat together, sucking her thumb, eyes closed.
— This stuff is completely cuckoo, Grandpa, she complained, muffledly. It was the most she ever said about any of the material she read for him; in the same way she never commented on the Bach or Handel or Janáček she rehearsed with the choral society for weeks on end, except to remark on the awful polo necks the conductor wore or the irritating overweight woman next to her whose elbows impinged on her space. (She determinedly got herself moved away from the woman with the elbows.)
Marian noticed that Tamsin’s bare feet with purple-painted toenails were curled only a fraction of an inch from Mark’s thigh, for all she treated him with such disdain. She couldn’t tell if Mark was aware of Tamsin’s toes so suggestively close. He read with his characteristic half-blush, half-frown, steadily. His blond hair was cut in a long fringe that hung across his eyes, fashionable with the boys at school (Tamsin had commented — her only comment on him — on its dreary “naffness”); his skin was reddened over the newly heavy cheekbones and on the jaw where the beard was coming in. The toes crept imperceptibly across the sofa until they were pushed up against where Mark sat. It could have been mere unconsciousness on Tamsin’s part; she could simply have been obliviously making herself comfortable in the space.
Marian felt a pang of regret for the limited, heartwarming, slightly sentimental relationship she had had with Mark, her best pupil, a sweet good nice-looking boy. But such relationships were only possible in school, where things were simpler.
Euan was slumped in his chair. He gave off complex wheezing noises.
He often lost concentration and dozed, seeming to wash in and out of awareness of the reading; if they stopped he woke up and complained. But this time the noises grew worse: a grunting whistling sound, seeming to come not from his mouth but his torso, shaking and tearing it. At the same time — over a period of, say, five minutes while Mark read and Marian wrote checks — something dreadful began to spread in the room, a smell, a foul stink. It was impossible to ignore, as substantial in the air as a pelt or a thick cloth. Suddenly it was at the forefront of all their attention. Mark stopped reading, Marian put down her pen, Tam-sin snapped upright, wide eyes on her grandfather.
— Mum! she commanded furiously.
Marian pushed back her chair. She thought the worst.
— Go and make tea, she told them. Grandpa’s gone to sleep.
They fled, Tamsin with a little involuntary whimper of release, pulling the door shut fumblingly behind her. Marian stood for a couple of moments listening, breathing; the stink was as strong as a wall across her path.
Distinctly she thought to herself, It’s now, it’s now.
She was swept under a glistening, prickling, exultant wave of shame, as if some new intimacy had been broached that could never be gone back on. She crossed to her father and bent down her face to the racked torso, the seamed purple chalky neck, and the old yellowed collar of his shirt. She supposed he had had a stroke or a seizure, and in a moment she would have to unleash the whole drama of doctors and emergency and last things; she breathed in deep to find what she was sure she would discover, that he had soiled himself and that they were delivered over to one another, through that ultimate lapse, at a new level of close bondage.
His warmth was against her face; all she breathed in was a sweet, old, felty smell, redolent of her childhood, reminding her of the inside of the gramophone cabinet. Whatever the stink was, it didn’t come from Euan.
And then he woke up; with a snort and start, finding her head nestled in his neck. Surprisingly, in that moment of confusion he wasn’t angry with her; for a second his big hand actually came up and pressed her head clumsily, affectionately, into his shoulder. She was never clear whether he had exactly meant the tenderness of that gesture for her; it was more like a reflex, as if he was not quite awake enough to be clear exactly which needy woman required his reassurance. But he didn’t repudiate it either, or query her waking him. While she began to search under bookshelves and in corners for the source of the terrible smell, he was uncharacteristically subdued and circumspect, making tentative grateful suggestions and remarks.
One of his beloved cats had been shut in that afternoon (Elaine remembered its making its getaway when she came in) and had left its little souvenir under a curtain. The smell must have developed as the central heating warmed it up. When Marian went to get newspaper and hot water and disinfectant from the kitchen, she rather relished Mark’s and Tamsin’s excruciated faces and Tamsin’s unconvincing preparations for a pot of tea she had thought would never be poured.
* * *
FRANCIS HAD RECENTLY told Marian over the telephone things about their mother that she hadn’t known: that in the years before her death Jean had left Euan on several occasions and gone twice to live with Francis in his flat in London for months on end, actually once even renting a flat of her own. This last time she was already sick, she had had the mastectomy; there were already signs of the secondary cancer she would die of.
— But she wasn’t off her head, said Francis. She knew what she wanted.
These were all stories from more than twenty years ago.
Marian’s first reaction was characteristic of her relationship with Francis: annoyance at his wrong-footing her, at his having saved up all this time the advantage of this information.
— So what’s new? She was always walking out on him. He was impossible. Tell me about it.
— But she never let you know the half of it. This was when you were going through the mill with Graham, remember? And then afterward you were doing your teacher training.… We didn’t want to add to all your problems.
Marian tried to recover a picture of her mother at that time; but all the pictures from the different ages had been shuffled together since she died, like a fan of cards closed onto itself. The ones that tended to come up when she summoned were of a woman in her early forties, rat-tatting commandingly on high heels the way women did then, blond hair pinned back in a French braid neat and glossy as a loaf, and manicured nails with the half-moon cuticles she had tried to show Marian how to do. This was the mother — public, charming — who had come to prize-givings at school; Marian in those days would willingly have exchanged all her distinctions and special prizes for adeptness at those more formidable feminine mysteries.
But afterward, after all, her life had fallen into patterns more like her mother’s; there were always babies to restore the common ground among women. It had been a relief to both of them that they could, eventually, talk with equal interest about decorating and washing and shopping: Marian remembered this, from when she had taken her little girls to visit at the old house. And she remembered how her father, if he was home from the University, would descend from his study to greet her, as if when he crossed the hall he crossed a frontier line between domains of life, between the one where women sat and gossiped in a kitchen and the one where he struggled with his books; she remembered how she was slightly disconcerted but not altogether displeased to find herself on the kitchen side of that frontier. Clare and Tamsin had had to be kept quiet so that he could work just as she and Francis had been kept quiet.