‘But she doesn’t have to die just because you do!’ I said, outraged. I was crying, he seemed impassive. Did he not love her enough to allow her her own existence, independent of his? Why didn’t he grieve that her life, too, was ending? All I could think was that he was revealed in that moment as horribly selfish.
But of course she was his wife. What he spoke was just a reflex thought, a measuring out of their lives, side by side. He was probably asking himself the question that is posed by all long marriages: who will grieve for whom? Who will be alone? He said, ‘We needn’t tell her yet.’
In me there was just a voice howling Mum, Mum. Whose wit and intelligence and strength had always been fatally compromised by her fearfulness. Who could not stand up for herself and so had put off every — thing she hardly dared to hope for into the future, when Dad would be dead. And now her future was shrivelling, vanishing, gone, like the food in the fridge she had saved too long for it ever to be eaten. All an illusion.
My own delusion, which became an obsession, was that I must at least make sure Mum knew how little time she had left. I thought then she could decide how to spend it, was determined she should not be cheated, by Dad and the doctors, of this last chance.
So I tried to tell her. I tried every way I could to tell her the cancer was not cured, there were spots on her liver, her time was short. She refused to hear me. She became, for her, uncharacteristically angry. ‘You could die before me, Margaret.’ To say this to her own daughter whom she loved, her anger must have been beyond bounds. I was wrong, as so often in my life, completely and utterly. If she had known how bad things were, she could not have recovered. To live she needed hope. And I, who loved her, who believed I loved her more than anyone else, so nearly, and wrongly, took that hope away. I saw it as my duty to everything I knew about her, to her dreams, to her secret individual self, to her clear, undeluded intelligence; I thought I owed it to the pact between us, two women in this family of men. I was desperate to be truthful even though every cell in my body was electric with the pain I must give her. But it was like beating a stick against resistant silence; her will not to hear had the invisible strength of rubber. In the end I had the sense to respect it. Sometimes all that you know counts for nothing, because the world has changed behind your back.
Slowly, she fought her way back to fitness. Through a long summer. She was cooking again. (I judged my father harshly for that. Now I think we should judge no one harshly; the facts of life and death are harsh enough. I dare say she wanted normality back.) She was walking to the village again, then cycling, then driving.
At first, in my mind, the sands of time were running like blinding white rain. A dementing curtain of silica, constantly in motion, distracted me from everything beyond it, crazed the real picture of my mother (who was thinner than usual, quieter than usual but herself, steadying herself, still there, still here. Who was reading again, laughing at the political sketches in the Guardian, out in her red puffa jacket, walking only a little slower than before.) For a while I couldn’t see her as she was, and enjoy her. That sibilant ‘six months’ had buried everything in dry, milling fear.
But for our own protection, fear is usually self-limiting. When for a brief period I suffered from panic attacks, it was comforting to read that the body is physically incapable of sustaining terror for more than about twenty minutes. You just have to put your head down and get through it.
The same held true on the bigger scale. After a few months of terror, I began to forget. Mum was putting on weight, looking better. Slowly and then faster, milestone followed milestone. Six months came and passed. Then a year. At some point she learned, not from me but a doctor, that there was some involvement of the liver, but I don’t know exactly how frank they were, and I don’t know how fully she accepted it. My mother was always an optimist; it was one of the lovable things about her, the many, many lovable things, for did she ever know how much I loved her? I think she did. I often told her.
Our visits relaxed into something like what they had been before, though Dad’s increasing blindness meant we could not stay in the house, since blind people need everything to be in its place, and Rosa was an active five-year-old.
A restored near-normality. Miraculous.
The balance of power between my parents reverted. As my mother grew stronger, my father grew weaker. Dad was again the ill one, baby and boss, Mum was the organising functionary, the strong one. Slowly but surely, month by month, Dad’s Parkinson’s began to move towards its endgame. His blindness, too, got worse; he saw light and dark shapes, but not much else; he would draw Rosa close to him, and gaze past her face. He still went for his morning walks, and refused a white stick, but a neighbour took my mother to one side and told her they were all afraid of running him over, aware he could no long see cars coming (but Vic’s hearing remained supernaturally acute, perhaps fine-tuned by listening out for subversion in the kitchen). He grew thinner and frailer, and needed more clothes, layering waistcoats and woollens under his tweed jacket, his red zipped tracksuit top now like a second skin as he tried to keep warm in his last summer. And then there was another winter to get through, with no hope, now, of escaping to Portugal, with daylight diminishing too early, and the raw bitter wind that comes howling from Siberia and harrows the low, flat East Anglian land. Every morning, though, Dad got up in the dark and did his exercises, standing on one leg to tie each shoe up, making the effort, the tremendous effort, until he could no longer tie his shoes. Dressed himself up, layer after layer, and fought his way out into the featureless cold, not long after the sun cleared the red-brick bungalows and neutered yew-trees, bent forward like a sprinter, though his step was now tiny, uncertain, delicate, as if a slight breeze might have blown him off course. Mum was cutting up his food and feeding him, now. She told me she had said to him once, knowing that he was getting weaker, and she had cancer, ‘Together we can still do anything.’
She showed love for him. She lived it out. And what do I know of the love between them, that existed when no one else was there, that somehow endured the rage and the fear?
I hope that at last my mother was not frightened, or at least no longer frightened of him. In a way, they both got their wish, at last, though getting their wish involved their death. Vic was looked after like a baby, with no rival sibling to push him away. Aileen had a mate who did not frighten her, as her father had once frightened her in drink, as the healthy Vic sometimes frightened her in temper.
I have not really said how bad things were, though in many other houses things were worse.
Once, in the car — it was an accident, although they were rowing — he pushed my mother hard against the door and ‘broke her teeth’, she said: perhaps it was one tooth. This was in the months before she left. The dentist repaired it, but she had had enough.
This incident is what sticks in my mind from all the scuffles and fights that were like something a child would do in a painful, unmanageable rage. I pity him for having to be violent: no one wants to be violent. When he threw a plateful of food across the table, how desperate must he have felt? How reduced to the rage of a thwarted infant. The fact remains, he was bigger than my mother, and when he was angry, out of control, so I cannot altogether pity him. I suffered from her fear; was afraid with her, and for her. Not so much for myself, once I reached adolescence, because I knew I would go away. I can’t even remember how old I was when he stopped hitting me (but isn’t there something odd about the way people say a child is ‘too old to be hit’? Does it mean ‘best only to hit children when they are too small to hit you back’?) I do remember him knocking off my glasses at the tea-table, when I was a sullen fourteen-year-old, and my brave elder brother standing up for me. We children did stand up for each other.