I left school when I was fifteen and got a job in a shop selling artists’ supplies. I went to night classes in painting and drawing, starting with still lifes of fruit and the more picturesque vegetables. All my attempts were misbegotten, deformed; not once did I not regret my despoliation of the white paper, not once did I prefer what I had done to its insensate purity before a mark had been laid upon it. Yet even as my efforts failed, images poured into my mind’s eye and I tried to catch them and set them down with watery brushstrokes or with wiry, silvered turns of my pencil. I filled sheets and sheets with seashells, feathers, bark, clouds, grasses. Some were painted from life, and others were either remembered or dreamed, I do not know; all were phantoms, lit by the gleam of white paper beneath. One tutor described my work as uncommitted and dismissive of basic tonal values, but I didn’t see those as faults. Another graded me poorly for putting both the observed and the imagined together in the same pictures, but I couldn’t see that there was a difference. Even if there was, was one more real than the other? Nor could I be persuaded to paint anything alive or moving.
So my mother and I continued for a time, living not together but side by side, doing all that we could, through some sort of kindness, to erase each other. By the time I was nineteen she was often drunk for days at a time, venturing no further than across the rolling seas of her own floors and negotiating her way with arms outstretched for the next anchor post of furniture. One day she fell against a small table, hit her head on the edge of the fireplace, and gashed her leg on a metal ashtray that was knocked off in the crash. I came back from the art shop to find her lying in her dressing gown on the yellow linoleum in the passageway. A ragged red trail of smears and drips reached behind her all the way back up the stairs. She had tried to drag herself as far as the street and given up, and when she’d thumped on the partition wall nobody in the betting shop had heard her above the television’s live relay of the afternoon’s racing from Sandown.
The ambulance took a long time. While we waited I cradled her in my lap and pressed my scarf, the only thing to hand, against the wound on her head. I wasn’t alarmed when she lost consciousness. I was too alert, all my attention taken by the sound of the racing commentary that floated on through the wall in an absurd, unvarying cycle, dignity ending in indignity, the man’s voice starting so measured, and then losing control and rising finally to that nervy, screaming finish. Was he not ashamed of his hysteria, did he not know that there was something ridiculous in such public, repetitive, and climactic excesses?
My mother’s hip and a number of ribs were broken and her bones were slow to heal. In the hospital her feet and hands turned blue and she stopped speaking. Bruises burst out in purple plumes all over her. She got a lung infection and then she died. Her absence joined my grandmother’s as a kind of added weight inside me that I was afraid I would carry for the rest of my life. My pictures grew paler and more ghostly still, and I got married.
Dear Ruth
I’m rather disturbed by the last bit of your story, I must say. How could you think up that kind of thing? I had no idea your mind worked that way. It’s not going to get any closer to the bone, is it? You weren’t going to publish it under your own name, were you?
There must have been many times before now, times in the old way I mean, when I heard you about the place, downstairs or in the next room, but it was different then. I could hear where you were, and usually I could tell what you were doing, but it meant nothing. Not then. Why is it so different now?
And there’s another thing about this new way of ours. In the old way I actually saw you, every day I actually saw you for real. Now in the new way I don’t, not actually-yet you are clearer and more real to me than ever you were.
Now I see you, Ruth. I do see you. In my way.
Fondly
Arthur
PS Ruth I remember you at Overdale Lodge, the first time, the first evening, the first year. How you looked then is how I see you now.
Did it really happen as neatly as that, my mother died and I got married? Of course not. Her dying was lurid and protracted. For those weeks in the hospital I was her only visitor, after the manager and a couple of the punters from the betting shop had dropped in, and day by day I sat studying her decline and hoping to get from her-exactly how I did not know, since she had given up on speech-some admission that it was unreasonable to expect me to bear so great a strain alone. I brought fruit she would not eat. I brought magazines to read aloud to her in which she took not the slightest interest. Soon, rather than just sit staring at her, I ate the grapes and read the magazines myself at the bedside while she lay with her eyes either blank and open, or closed, probably more to escape me than to invite sleep. After a few weeks of this my vigil began to feel like an effort that should be rewarded by her consenting to be dead by the next time I looked up. It wasn’t absolutely that I wanted her to die, I just felt that for both our sakes she ought to, before I could be found even more wanting.
It went on. Every day I agreed with the nurses that she was turning out to be “quite a fighter,” while privately I thought her remaining alive had nothing to do with tenacity or strength but was more a failure of skill and application. She hated life, so surely it was obtuse of her to be quite so lacking in ambition to get it over with? She deteriorated, but lingered. For another month, death loomed just beyond her reach like an accomplishment she had yet to acquire.
It was after she finally died that I met Jeremy-or, to be more accurate, that he noticed me. He was a houseman then. While she was alive he hadn’t taken any particular interest in either of us. We had met once over a brief assessment of her condition, conducted at the end of her bed, during which his eyes had been fixed either on her feet or on his notes. He spoke in my hearing, not to me, with no apparent concern about whether or not I was listening. I only came to his attention afterwards, when I was having trouble leaving the hospital.
On the day after my mother’s funeral I went back to the ward to give the nurses some of the flowers. The moment I walked back into its high white space and pungent smell, I realized how much I missed the routine of my daily visits: greeting the nurses, reporting to my mother on the weather, removing fruit too far gone, tidying her hair. I missed the sense of purpose I’d felt witnessing her descent, however starkly it had revealed my own shortcomings; what was I supposed to do now? I missed not so much my mother as the care that had been taken of her: the nurses’ firmly timetabled administrations of drugs and fluids, and towards the end, their optimistic, hour-by-hour regime for her comfort in the absence of any hope of her recovery. The ward was the only place I knew where kindness had not failed, and I did not belong there anymore.
Everyone said it was good of me to drop in with the flowers, everyone said they were lovely but they were a bit too busy to see to them straightaway. I volunteered to put them in water myself-goodness, didn’t I know where the vases were kept by this time!-and when I had done that I saw two or three patients without visitors whose flowers also needed freshening up. I stayed two hours. I had noticed how short of vases the ward was so the next day I took some in, along with a bottle of hand lotion that one of the patients had mentioned her sister had forgotten to get for her. I popped out on an errand for another, to buy a hair net, and then stayed to chat for a while. Over the next two or three weeks I found the nurses too busy to take much notice of me, but the patients seemed glad to see me. I listened to medical sagas of endurance and suffering, I listened to complaints about their visitors and those who failed to visit. I changed library books, peeled apples, wrote in crossword clues, posted letters; nothing was too much trouble. Next to the patients I appeared perfectly cheerful and somehow whole, and they didn’t seem to realize that I wasn’t really a kind person at all.