‘What is she talking about? Give them to me!’ The old lady clawed at the woman’s hand and then, having got her teeth, concentrated carefully on the two plates before slowly deciding where uppers and lowers should go. The nurse was chattering; I suppose it is an enormous relief to have some company other than that of a senile old lady. ‘She always get a fright when somebody come to the door. I don’t know why she’s so scared, you know … since this last lot of angina attacks. I don’t know what it is, she seem to think someone’s going to come and get her … I always say,’ and now she turned to my grandmother, playful, soothing, ‘nobody going to hurt you, grannie, nobody can do you any harm here, isn’t it? I tell her.’
A slight, distracted dent between the bald eyebrows showed that the old lady was aware of some habitually bothersome background noise. With her big, regular false teeth in her mouth she speaks in a high, controlled voice behind them, to avoid their distortion, but even then there is thickness and sibilance, as though she were speaking through a medium. ‘And the husband? With you, or away again at the moment? And Bobo? How is that sweet boy?’
She forgets that I was divorced from Max, and if I were to tell her he is dead, she would forget that, too. In her room with the signed photographs of famous artists on the walls (she has her own things around her) it always seems that nothing has happened. Or that everything has already happened. I sat under Jascha Heifetz facing Noel Coward and the framed menu of the lunch where she had met him in 1928, and told her that I had seen Bobo in the morning; he wished her a happy birthday.
‘It’s my birthday?’ she said. And repeated it at intervals so that I had to explain again and again. ‘How old is it this time?’
‘Eighty-seven.’ I wasn’t sure.
She pulled a little-girl face, relic of the sham simplicity of her sophistication. ‘Horrible. Too long.’
‘… It’s my birthday? I didn’t know … I don’t know anything.’
I patted her hand, in which the pulse throbbed everywhere. They keep her nails painted red, as she used to, but the effect, like the pearls round her neck, is recognizable not as a familiar adornment but as something done to her.
I said, ‘Have you seen the flowers I sent?’ and the nurse chipped in, ‘She won’t have it in the room. I arrange it nicely but she don’t want it near her.’
‘Why? But why don’t you want your flowers in here?’
The old lady’s face went empty.
‘Do they smell too strong? Don’t you like the scent? I’m afraid it’s not the time of year for roses.’ She used to talk about how much she loved roses — perhaps because she had very little interest in natural things, and roses were a safe choice.
‘Yes, I think it’s the smell she find too strong. It must be. I brought it in and show it to her, but she won’t have it!’
My grandmother looked from the nurse to me. ‘Who is that?’ she asked me, pointing at her. Her face drew together in accusation. The nurse began to bustle, smiling, cajoling, ‘Ag, grannie, it’s me, Sister Grobler —’ but my grandmother dismissed the explanation with an impatient flicker of the facial muscles and said to me, ‘Who is she? What is she doing here?’
I told her, and she seemed satisfied and then said, ‘Is she good to me?’
I said yes, yes of course she was good to her. The nurse was cataloguing in a sing-song lullaby voice, ‘I make your bed … I bath you … I make your hair nice … I make you your cocoa …’ but for my grandmother, again, she did not exist. The hands with the sunken hollows between the knuckles twitched now and then; they have never done any work, and my grandmother used to lavish pride and creams on them. She has lived on dividends all her life (her father was an engineer associated with Rhodes and Beit) but — my mother says — she won’t leave any behind her, the expenses of her senility are eating up the last of her capital. My grandmother’s capital has been a source of bitterness at home as long as I can remember; my mother’s father left no specific provision for his children, and her marriage to a penniless young man happened to coincide with my grandmother’s own second marriage to a man not much older than her daughter’s, on whom she spent the greater part of this capital and certainly all that she might have been expected to provide for the advancement of her daughter. It would have been useful if she could have left some money to Bobo, but there it is. Oddly, she never shared my parents’ attitude to the way Max and I lived, and, vague about the nature of Max’s shortcomings as a husband and provider as related by my mother, seemed to assume that he was merely rather a high-spirited and headstrong boy, some sort of charming adventurer (she had known a few) translated into present-day terms; some fashion she hadn’t caught up with yet.
My mother and father were extremely gratified to have me ‘marry into’ the Van Den Sandts, although I’d spoiled the dignity of the alliance somewhat by being pregnant before the wedding. Yet even if people in our small town were able to say meaningfully that he’d had to marry me, the son of a wealthy MP was a son-in-law most of them would have liked for a daughter of their own. My parents will be equally gratified, now, to know that he is dead. Is that too hard a thing to say? The son of a wealthy MP — that was what they expected of Max, and they didn’t get it. But didn’t I, in my way, expect something of him that he wasn’t? The summer I was seventeen, the summer I met Max, I was helping out, for Christmas, in my father’s shop. The fancy goods counter, with painted ‘coasters’ for glasses, cheap cuckoo clocks and watches, maroon vases with gilt fluted tops, Japanese bridge pencils with tassels, German cork-screws with dogs’ heads, china figurines of ballet dancers. Shop girls came in and bought these things with the money that they earned in other shops, selling similar stuff. Black men lingered a long time over the choice of a watch that, paid for out of notes folded small for saving, would be back within a week, I knew, because those watches didn’t work properly. I had seen nothing of the product of human skills except what was before me in my father’s drapery shop-cum-department store, but I knew there must be things more worth having than these, and an object in life less shameful than palming them off on people who knew nothing better to desire. The shoddy was my sickening secret. And then I found that Max knew all about it; that the house he lived in, and what went on there, his surroundings, though richer and less obviously unattractive, were part of it, too, and that this quality of life was apparently what our fathers and grandfathers had fought two wars abroad and killed black men in ‘native’ wars of conquest here at home, to secure for us. Truth and beauty — good God, that’s what I thought he would find, that’s what I expected of Max.
When my grandmother dies, Bobo will get her father’s gold hunter and chain, that Beit gave him.
After the first five minutes with her, as usual, I didn’t know what to say. Searching the deep vacancy of her face for what lies lost there, I drew up from the trance of age her old pleasure in streets and cities, and described an imaginary shopping trip I had taken in the morning. ‘I was looking for something for the evening — you know, soon the weather will be getting warmer, and I want something light, but with sleeves …’
Slowly her attention surfaced and steadied. ‘What are they wearing this year? Will it be black?’
‘Well, no. I thought I’d like white, as a matter of fact, not dead white …’
She was leaning forward confidentially: ‘Hard on the face,’ she said.
‘Yes … But off-white, something soft and simple.’
‘Always at the cleaners, my darling. You can only wear it once. And did you see what you wanted?’