The bus journey soon dissipated that happy mood.
It wasn’t the Devon countryside which, though damp, looked soft and welcoming. Rather it was my fellow passengers. The bus was filled with young mothers and their squalling children. The sound of screaming babies is blessedly absent at sea and, suddenly exposed to it, I felt as if I was listening to nails scratching on slate. I stared through a misted window at the cars slopping through puddles and wondered how Charlie endured being a father.
The bus dropped me a mile from the hospital. I could have waited for another bus which would have taken me up the hill, but the thought of more screaming infants persuaded me to walk. I was wearing my heavy oilskin jacket, so only my jeans got soaked with rain. The oily was smeared with grease and dirt, but it was the only coat or jacket I possessed so it had to serve as formal wear. I climbed through the pelting rain and cut across the hospital’s waterlogged lawns. The big entrance hall was loud with more squalling children. I ignored the lifts, climbed three flights of stairs, and wondered just why I had sailed for six weeks across three and a half thousand nautical miles.
I had been half expecting and half dreading that my sister Elizabeth would be visiting the hospital. She was not. Except for the patients, the Edith Cavell ward was empty. On the wall opposite the ward’s two beds a silent television was showing a frenetic children’s cartoon. An elderly woman lay in the nearest bed with a pair of earphones over her grey hair. She eyed my sodden jeans and sneakers with distaste, and her face betrayed relief that I had not come to visit her. “She’s asleep,” she said reprovingly, at the same time jerking her head towards the second bed which was still surrounded by drawn curtains.
I crossed the rubber-tiled floor and gently pulled back the pale curtains.
My mother was sleeping.
At first I did not recognise her. In the last four years her gold hair had turned a dirty grey. Even in sleep she looked exhausted. She lay, wan and emaciated, with her grey hair straggling untidily from her pale forehead. She had always been a woman of great pride, foully excessive pride, but now she was reduced to this drawn creature. Her great beauty was gone, vanished like a dream. Her breath rasped in her throat. Every heave of her lungs was an effort. Once she had worn a king’s ransom of diamonds, but now she struggled for life. She was only fifty-nine, but looked at least a decade older.
“She had a bad night,” the grey-haired woman volunteered.
I said nothing.
The woman took off her earphones. “She won’t have the oxygen tent, you see. Stupid, I call it. I’ve told her, I have. I told her she should listen to the doctors, but she won’t take a blind bit of notice. She says she’s got to smoke. Smoke! That’s what’s killing her, but she won’t listen. She says she can’t smoke if she’s in an oxygen tent. Stupid, I call it.”
I dropped the curtain behind me which had the happy effect of shutting the woman up. The sound of my mother’s breathing was horrid.
A cylinder of oxygen stood by her bed. A packet of cigarettes and her gold lighter lay close to an oxygen mask. I picked up the mask and heard the hiss of escaping gas. I turned off the tap, then lay the mask back on the thin blanket. I had moved very gently, but something must have disturbed my mother for her eyes opened and she stared up at me. At first there was no recognition in her face – the sun had bleached my pale hair almost white and turned my face the colour of old varnish – but then, with a palpable start, realisation came to her eyes. I was her living son, and I had come home.
“Hello, Mother,” I said.
She said nothing. Instead she groped for her cigarettes, but, before she could find them, a dreadful cough convulsed her body. It was a foul, grating and harsh cough, as rough as broken glass being crushed by stone. It came from deep in her chest and it would not stop. I turned on the oxygen and put the mask over her face. Somehow she fought the cough to draw a desperate breath and, as if she was fearful that I would take the mask away, she clamped her right hand over mine. Her crooked thin fingers were like claws. It was the first time she had touched me in fourteen years. I had been twenty that last time, and she had briefly embraced me beside the grave into which my father was being lowered. Since then we had never touched, not till now as she fought for life. She put her hand on mine and gripped so tight that it felt like a scaly bird’s claw clinging to refuge. Her eyes were closed again. Her palm was warm on the back of my hand, her fingers were contracting, and her nails were digging into my skin.
Then, very slowly, her breathing became easier. I could feel the relief course through her body as her grip relaxed. She had left two flecks of blood where her nails had driven into my fingers. She opened her eyes and stared at me, then, almost irritably, she twitched her hand as if to say that I should take the mask away.
Slowly, not certain if that was what she really wanted, I lifted the oxygen mask away. The paroxysm of coughing had left flecks of blood on my mother’s lips, while the plump rubber mask had printed a red mark on her white cheeks. Her eyes, against her skin’s chalky paleness, seemed very dark and glinting as she stared up at me.
“Hello, Mother,” I said again. She tried to say something in reply, but the effort threatened to turn into another racking cough. “It’s all right,” I said soothingly, “you don’t have to speak.” I moved the oxygen mask towards her mouth, but she shook her head, then closed her eyes as though she was concentrating on preventing another coughing fit. It took an immense effort of will, but she succeeded and, instead of coughing again, she opened her eyes and looked straight up into my face.
“You bastard,” she said.
Then she began to cough again, and no amount of oxygen could help this time and, though I pressed the emergency call button, and though nurses and doctors thrust me aside to bring her relief, there was nothing anyone could do. Within twenty minutes of my arrival at her bedside, my mother was dead.
When it was all over a young doctor joined me in the corridor. He wanted to know if I was a relative and, though I said I was, I did not say I was the dead woman’s son. “I’m just a distant relation,” I said instead.
“She smoked too much,” the doctor said hopelessly.
“I know.” I guiltily fingered the pipe in my oilskin pocket. I kept meaning to give up smoking. I’d succeeded once, but only because I’d run out of tobacco a thousand miles out of Auckland. After three weeks I’d been experimenting with sun-dried seaweed which tasted foul, but was better than abstinence. I dragged my attention back to the doctor.
“She was very keen to see her son.” The doctor peered dubiously at my gaudy oilskin jacket. “He’s supposed to be at sea, isn’t he?”
“I think so,” I said unhelpfully.
The doctor looked like a man who’d just sailed through a force twelve storm, but he was gallantly fighting the weariness in an effort to be kind. “She received the last rites yesterday,” he told me, “and it seemed to calm her.”
“I’m sure it did.”
The doctor stifled a yawn. “Would you like to meet the hospital chaplain? Sometimes, after a death, it can be helpful.”
“I wasn’t that close a relative,” I said defensively.
“So I suppose we should telephone the eldest daughter about the arrangements?”
“That would be best,” I said, “much the best.” Two men pushed a trolley into the ward. I didn’t want to see the shrouded body wheeled away, so I walked back to the Devon rain.
You’re supposed to feel something, I thought. You’re not supposed to see your mother die and feel nothing. At the very least you’re supposed to weep. My God, but a mother’s flawed love and a son’s reluctant duty should add up to one miserable tear, but I could find no appropriate response. I could feel neither joy nor sorrow nor surprise nor anything. All I felt was an irritation for a wasted trip, and an aggravation that I was forced to wait two hours in the rain for a bus back to Salcombe.