‘When it’s your time, it’s your time,’ she repeated. But she could not maintain her resignation. Her real feeling was anger, grievance, and astonishment. ‘It’s all happened through a completely unexpected symptom,’ said my mother. ‘Completely unexpected. No one could have expected it. Dr Francis says he didn’t. It’s a completely unexpected symptom,’ she kept saying with amazement and anger. Then she said, heavily: ‘I don’t want to stay like this. Just like an old sack. It wouldn’t do for me, would it?’
For once, I found my tongue. I told her that she was looking handsome.
She was delighted. She preened herself like a girl, and said: ‘I’m glad of that, dear.’
She glanced round the bedroom, which was covered with photographs on all the walls — photographs of all the family, Martin, me, but most of all herself. She had always had a passion for photographic records: she had always been majestically vain.
‘But I shouldn’t like you to think of me like this,’ she said. ‘Think of me as I am in the garden photograph, will you, dear?’
‘If you want, Mother,’ I said. The ‘garden’ photograph was her favourite, taken when she was thirty, in the more prosperous days just after I was born. She was in one of the long dresses that I remembered from my earliest childhood. She had made the photographer pose her under the apple tree, and she was dressed for an Edwardian afternoon.
She saw herself as she had been that day. She rejected pity, she would have rejected it even if she had found what she had sought in me, one to whose heart her heart could speak. She would have thrown pity back even now, even if I could have given it with spontaneous love. But she saw herself as she had been in her pride; and she wished me eternally to see her so.
We were silent; the room was dark, then sunny, then dark again.
‘I’ve been wondering what you’ll do with Za’s money,’ said my mother.
‘I’m not sure yet,’ I said.
‘If it had come to me as it ought to have done,’ she said, ‘you should have had it before this. Then I should have seen you started, anyway.’
‘Never mind,’ I replied. ‘I’ll do something with it.’
‘I know you will. You’ll do the things I hoped for you.’ She raised her voice. ‘ I shan’t be there to see.’
I gasped, said something without meaning.
‘I didn’t want just the pleasure of it,’ said my mother fiercely. ‘I didn’t want you to buy me presents. You know I didn’t want that.’
‘I know,’ I said, but she did not hear me.
‘I wanted to go along with you,’ she cried, ‘I wanted to be part of you. That’s all I wanted.’
I tried to console her. I told her that, whatever I did, I should carry my childhood with me: always I should hear her speaking, I should remember the evenings by the front-room fire, when she urged me on as a little boy. Yet afterwards I never believed that I brought her comfort. She was the proudest of women, and she was vain, but in the end she had an eye for truth. She knew as well as I, that if one’s heart is invaded by another, one will either assist the invasion or repel it — and if one repels it, even though one may long, as I did with my mother, that one might do otherwise, even though one admires and cherishes and assumes the attitude of love, yet still, if one repels it, no words or acting can for long disguise the lie. The states of love are very many — some of them steal upon one unawares; but one thing one always knows, whether one welcomes an intrusion into one’s heart or whether, against all other wishes and feelings, one has to evade it, turn it aside.
My mother was exhausted by her outburst. She found it harder to keep her speech clear; and once or twice her attention did not stay steady, she began talking of something else. She was acutely ashamed to be ‘muddle-headed’, as she called it; she screwed up all her will.
‘Don’t forget’, she said, sounding stern with her effort of will, ‘that Za’s money ought to have been mine. I should like to have given it to you. It was Wigmore money to start with. Don’t forget that.’
Her lips took on the grand smile which I used to see when she told me of her girlhood. She lay there, the room in a bright phase of light, with her grand haughty smile.
I noticed that a Sunday paper rested on the bed, unopened. It was strange to see, for she had always had the greatest zest for printed news. After a time, I said: ‘Are you going to read it later on today?’
‘I don’t think so, dear,’ she said, and the anger and astonishment had returned to her voice. ‘What’s the use of me reading the paper? I shall give it up now. What’s the use? I shall never know what happens.’
For her, more than for most people, everything in the future had been interesting. Now it could interest her no longer. She would never know the answers.
‘Perhaps I shall learn about what’s going on here,’ she said, but in a formal, hesitating tone, ‘in another place.’
That morning, such was the only flicker of comfort from her faith.
We were quiet; I could hear her breathing; it was not laboured, but just heavy enough to hear.
‘Look!’ said my mother suddenly, with a genuine, happy laugh. ‘Look at the ducks, dear!’
For a second I thought it was an hallucination. But I followed her glance; her long-sighted eyes had seen something real, and she was enjoying what she saw. I went to the window, for at a distance her sight was still much better than mine.
Between the houses opposite, there was a space not yet built over. It had been left as rough hillocky grass, with a couple of small ponds; on it one of our neighbours kept a few chickens and ducks. It was a duck and her brood of seven or eight ducklings that had made my mother laugh. They had been paddling in the fringe of one pond. All of a sudden they fled, as though in panic, to the other, in precise Indian file, the duck in the lead. Then, as though they had met an invisible obstacle, they wheeled round, and, again in file, raced back to their starting point.
‘Oh dear,’ said my mother, wiping her eyes. ‘They are silly. I’ve always got something to watch.’
She was calmed, invigorated, made joyful by the sight. She had been so ambitious, she had hoped so fiercely, she had never found what she needed to make her happy — yet she had had abounding capacity for happiness. Now, when her days were numbered, when her vision was foreshortened, she showed it still. Perhaps it was purer, now her hopes were gone. She was simple with laughter, just as I remembered her when I was five years old, when she took me for a walk and a squirrel came quarrelling down a tree.
I came back to the bedside and took her hand. It occurred to her at that moment to tell me not to underestimate my brother Martin. She insisted on his merits. In fact, it was an exhortation I did not need, for I was extremely fond of him. My mother was arguing with her own injustice, for she had never forgiven his birth, she had never wanted to find her match and fulfilment in him, as she had in me.
There was a flash of irony here — for he was less at ease with others than I was, but more so with her.
Then she got tired. She tried to hide it, she did not choose to admit it. Her thoughts rambled; her speech was thicker and hard to follow; Martin Francis (my brother’s names) took her by free association to Dr Francis, and how he had come specially to see her that morning, which he would not do for his ordinary patients. She was tired to death. With perfect lucidity, she broke out once: ‘I should like to go in my sleep.’