Marian had imagined without thinking about it that in caring for her father in his extreme old age she was somehow filling her mother’s empty place. It was disconcerting to think of her mother absconding from that place herself, repeatedly delinquent.
— She only went back because he pleaded with her, said Francis. And the last time she was determined not to, but then of course she got too ill, she couldn’t look after herself, she gave up, it was too late.…
— I’m sure you’re exaggerating. I’d have remembered, if she’d ever been away for so long; don’t forget I was living a fifteen-minute walk away for some of that time. I know she used to come and stay with you sometimes.…
— You didn’t visit them for weeks on end. You had other things on your mind.
— Was it sex, do you think? she asked him warily.
— On your mind?
— No, be serious, on Mummy and Daddy’s.
— Christ, it doesn’t bear thinking about.
Marian tried to imagine Francis’s response when his mother turned up—”in a state,” he said — on his doorstep. He was a young bachelor then, teaching at University College, with a white-painted “pad” in Islington full of books and paintings by contemporary artists who had not gone on to be famous. (He had really once called it a pad; just as they had really once called him a bachelor, until he moved to the States and was suddenly and all-illuminatingly gay.)
— What did she say, Francis? Can’t you remember?
— It’s an age ago. I thought I told you all this before. I probably did: you’ve forgotten.
— But what did he do?
— Oh, not anything. Not any big thing. He used to turn records up to drown out what she was saying to him. That sort of thing. God knows. He called her a witch. He wouldn’t let her wear glasses, though she could hardly see to walk, said they made her look like a tribal fetish. They did, a bit. She said she didn’t have any fun. She was bored. He liked books. She liked parties and people.
There was a photograph of Jean in a silver frame on Euan’s bedside table. The next time Marian was at the flat, she picked it up and recovered instantaneously the late last images of her that should have belonged at the top of the successive layers of remembering. What had she been thinking of, imagining sex and all that young kind of desperation to explain her mother’s late attempts at escape? This was a funny old lady with a white helmet of permed hair and a bosom like a shapeless cushion stuffed into an inappropriate pink T-shirt with short sleeves tight around the fat of her arms. The skewy mouth that had in the prize-giving days been demurely suggestive was opened like a gash across a face sagged and jowly, not bothering to please, although she smiled — slyly or derisively — for the camera. A hand held flat for shade, like the peak of a cap, cast a dark ledge of shadow down over those terrible — surely deliberately and challengingly terrible — glasses. Whatever Euan had commanded, she was wearing the glasses. And wearing them, what’s more, in the one photograph that he had selected from among all the possible others to watch over him.
The photograph had been taken in her garden. It was hard to imagine that Jean had ever wanted to leave her husband enough to want to leave her garden, big, old, walled, with apple trees and vegetable plots and herbaceous borders where Jean reigned as the only half-benevolent Creator, nurturing plants with tender skilled fingers, deadheading and pruning, waging war on pests. She used to describe to Marian the remorse she felt, carrying a big slug wrapped in a leaf to her killing pot full of salt water in the shed.
— You can feel its weight in the leaf, a little animal, the weight of a mouse: a living thing.
Jean surely hadn’t been all that interested in parties, not in those last years. Marian couldn’t be certain that Francis wasn’t exaggerating the whole thing, hadn’t told her all of it really because he wanted to say “She came to me” to counterbalance Marian’s staked claim, now — staked out of the most quotidian necessity — of primacy with their father.
And strangely out of that thought came another, as Marian put the photograph back in its place on the bedside table.
I’m like him, she thought. Not like her. I was like him all the time. We don’t like parties. We’re neither of us any good at growing things. We’re better with people in books or classrooms. We’re too ashamed to be tender or merciful.
But then her mother had tipped the slug, in any case, into that dark plastic jug in the shadowy shed, which would develop an unholy smell if she forgot to empty it.
* * *
— THERE WAS something wrong with that madwoman yesterday, said Euan to Marian. More than usual. Her time of the month, I suspect. Or else she’s menopausal. Said something about Tamsin.
— About Tamsin?
— Complaining about her breaking the lid of the teapot. Ostensibly. But behind that little opening I detect a whole furtive hinterland of disapproval. Her disapprovals are the only extensive thing about her.
— Did Tamsin break the teapot lid? What a nuisance. She didn’t tell me.
— Of course it’s about the boy. You can imagine the sort of dreary petit bourgeois sequence of aspirations Elaine is nurturing on his behalf. I’m quite sure they don’t include Tamsin. He’ll have to kick free of his mother, if he genuinely wants to do something. He could soar. He’s got the intelligence, but it’s not just that.
— Kick free? That’s a horrible way of putting it, when Elaine’s worked so hard, bringing him up alone. And anyway Tamsin’s twenty-five years old, she couldn’t possibly be interested in Mark.
— My dear daughter, he said. Which one of us is blind?
Marian had her apron on, which somehow disadvantaged her. It was Saturday again, she was making him sandwiches to leave for his tea. He was in ebullient mood; there was another pile of manuscript ready to go to the woman who word-processed it for him. He had even asked for a glass of wine with his lunch. Marian concentrated on slicing a tomato.
— So did Elaine buy a new teapot?
— I have no idea, he said. Deliberately, I don’t ask. If I’m not careful, she fills every space in my mind with her trivial conversation, and I can’t think. She does it purposely, whether she knows it or not. Intrinsically, she’s opposed to intellectual work. It will be a triumph for her if I never finish the book. Which I won’t, anyway. I can feel death coming on — faster than I can keep ahead of it. It lives inside here. He pressed his fist against his chest.
— Don’t be silly, Marian said. When you’re doing so well.
— And even if I finish it, of course, no one will be interested. I’m writing in a lost language, outmoded, irrelevant, boring. Unforgivably, I will have omitted to make my obeisances to the new critical gods.
— There you are. Your sandwich is in the fridge, Daddy.
— Is she coming tonight?
— Elaine doesn’t come in the evenings.