So at least that side of the story seems to be working out happily enough. After just a few weeks on her own, Mother is already in better form than I can remember and since Shirley is out day and night at the hospital and seems likely to be so for some time to come, I accept her offer to come over to Hendon and cook for me. Thus when I get home of an evening she will more often than not be in the kitchen arguing with Charles about unilateral disarmament or euthanasia or privatisation, since Charles seems to be treating us almost as a home from home now (I really can’t understand this). He will be sitting at table eating biscuits while she fusses with the oven or over the sink. Sometimes she brings a Filipino girl along to help, one of the walking wounded, a battered wife I think. She’s a slip of a girl, dark, with a kind of furtive, injured beauty about her which I find rather attractive, though she never lets me get beyond the merest pleasantries before scuttling off to wherever her sad existence is based.
Despite the desperate situation at the hospital, this turns out to be really quite a pleasant time for me. A sort of hiatus. I’m waited on hand and foot. The house is calmer than when Shirley is around. There are even flowers Mother has picked from the garden, inexpertly arranged, but soothing all the same. Flowers are so alive and fresh in their stillness. Indeed, I can’t remember when I last felt so free of tension. And after Charles has finally pushed off with his politics and endless advice, and Shirley has called with the evening’s last bulletin on Hilary’s condition, Mother and I will have the most amicable mother-and-son conversations.
‘Hasn’t got over the fits yet?’ she enquires. Her knitting needles click along the edge of a tiny sky-blue cardigan. Cardigans will be easier she thinks if the child has difficulty bending her arms. How easily she thinks these thoughts! Knitting she hums softly. Hymns. I recognise: ‘Oh God our help’, ‘Lo, He comes’, ‘Immortal, invisible’. Quite.
I’ve got the TV controls in my hand and, flicking back and forth through channels from the sofa, surprise myself by reflecting that had I married my mother, or rather someone like her, all would have been well. Wouldn’t it? I would have prevented her from spreading her generosity about too carelessly and she would have looked after me and generally agreed to do what I suggested, without the constant friction one has with Shirley.
Channel 4, I see, is illustrating the progress of the Spanish Armada with animated cartoons.
I say no. The girl has been at death’s door all day. Severe spasticity. I dropped in on the way back from work and she was in an awful state. Shirley is barely sleeping. A consultant friend of her father’s says that all the anaesthetic involved in such a long operation could cause brain damage in a child suffering from nervous disorders. Even cerebral palsy.
One says these things so calmly. And as I speak I do feel peculiarly calm. BBC2 is ‘examining’ safety in the air in the eager way journalists will. Should we be allowed to buy duty-free drinks? This is a burning issue. I fix myself a short.
Mother counts her stitches. She says: ‘Perhaps it was wrong of us to agree to the operation. But I’d prayed about it so much.’
I have less trouble these days accepting the non sequiturs in my mother’s conversation. One waits a moment as if to let a smell disperse.
On EastEnders some money has been stolen and race prejudice is polluting the investigation. As well it might, frankly.
‘It’s so difficult to know what to do for the best,’ she sighs. She begins to hum, ‘Oh worship the Lord in the beauty of holiness,’ reminding me of odd smells in choir stalls and paper pellets chewed from the corners of hymn books. Perhaps she finds the language on EastEnders hard to take.
‘The doctors should have warned us. Charles was saying we should take them to court.’
‘I can’t quite see what that would solve.’
‘We might get some money.’
It is her turn to let a non sequitur pass. Fair enough.
ITV are showing a couple of hippos in the incongruous process of copulating. A regular evening’s viewing. I try:
‘He also said it might be better if she died.’
‘That kind of thing,’ she frowns at her pattern, ‘makes me very angry. You start with remarks like that and you finish up with Hitler and death camps. The little girl deserves to live as much as anybody else.’
It’s curious. I am simultaneously thinking that Charles is right, but that Mother is also right. Yet surely they can’t both be? Does the key lie in that word, ‘deserves’? And why is everybody else so sure of themselves, so well defined? While I flounder. The press have been going through a phase of admiring people who have the courage to help their old sick relatives over the great divide. Selection of pills. The right mix. Contact the Euthanasia Society.
Upset by this kind of talk, Mother goes to the kitchen and five minutes later brings me some tea and fruitcake. Her light, flowery dress is hung with careful looseness about her bulk, her shoes are flat and sensible. One knee is visibly swollen.
Snapping off the TV, I find myself saying: ‘How do you feel about your life, Mum?’
‘How do you mean, love?’ With a knitting needle she is scratching at the instep of a foot where veins bulge fiercely.
‘You grew up looking after Grandad and Mavis. Dad gets killed after you’ve been married just a few years. Then you spend the rest of your life slaving for Peggy and me and Mavis and Grandad and none of us were ever particularly grateful.’
‘What a grim way to look at it,’ she laughs. She seems not in the least perturbed by this, as she clearly was by the notion of mercy killing. ‘No, I’ve had a very rich life. God has been good to me. He gave me a small ministry. I’ve been able to pray and have fellowship with all kinds of people and there has always been just enough of this world’s goods. If you knew the number of times people have slipped things through the letterbox without leaving their names. It’s been a very fulfilling life.’
Getting excited, I say: ‘Yes, but Peggy and I didn’t exactly turn out how you wanted, did we?’
‘Oh, I don’t know. Peggy has this nice boy Barry. You’re happily married. I’m a grandmother twice over. What more could I want?’
Of course we both know very well what more. A great deal more. And yet I realise that this obstinately optimistic attitude is what I want to hear this evening. I want to hear my life described like this. And with tears suddenly in my eyes I find myself saying: ‘You know, if it hadn’t been for this awful business with Hilary, I would have loved to have had another child, more than one. What’s one earning money for after all?’
Have I ever articulated this view before? Even with myself. It’s perfectly obvious what one is earning money for: there’s so much still to buy.
Her knitting needles click along the edge of a silence now welling with unexplained emotion; evenly and determinedly: clickety click, click and click, clickety click, click and click. Then she stops. She looks up from a face that age has rather bloated. She says very calmly: ‘If you must know, dear, the one thing I regret in my life is the words they made me speak before they killed your father. I often wonder if they aren’t somehow to blame.’
We stare at each other, in some amazement that this has come out. As if a ghost (my father’s?) had crossed the room.
‘You what? To blame for what?’
She sighs over the crumpled knitting in her lap, not tearful as sometimes in the past, but with a weary ravaged softness about her roughly-shaped features under their helmet of grey hair.